Senator Posts Cryptocurrency Bill On GitHub, Chaos Ensues - Slashdot

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• Re:

  What's the point of a coin backed by and pegged to a government issued fiat currency in the first place? Wasn't the whole point of BitCoin (or cryptocurrency in a general sense) to get away from the possibility of a currency that can be devalued by the whim of whoever controls the printing press?

  • Re:

    Devaluing fiat currency is generally more difficult than that. Certainly more difficult than a cryptocurrency fluctuating because of a tweet. Google crypto value musk tweet [google.com]:

    - When Elon Musk tweets, crypto prices move [vox.com]
    - Bitcoin falls after Elon Musk tweets breakup meme [cnbc.com]
    - Bitcoin price rises after Elon Musk tweet on energy use [cnbc.com]

  • Re:

    It makes the coin system less of a speculative investment and more of a monetary system. Most people that buy coins aren't using them to buy goods and services. They are holding them hoping they will appreciate.

    Govt currencies are generally more stable. Because of tanks of missiles and F35 stealth fighters and the CIA and things like that. Stability in a monetary systems is a good thing. Some might say it's a requirement.

    If you trust the government less than the low lives that run coin exchanges, the algor

  • It's how you get real money

    into the crypto markets. You buy "stablecoin" with real money and exchange it for phony crypto money. It's how they get real money into the system in the first place, and how money gets laundered out of it.

• Re:

  Most currencies aren't backed by anything other than (faith in) the government that issued it -- Fiat [investopedia.com] Money [wikipedia.org]. But I agree that pegging a cryptocurrency to an algorithm, rather than simply to one of those, isn't what I'd consider "stable". Otherwise, it may seem like crypto is pegging you...

• Re:

  Using a publicly-accessible git repository should be mandatory for legislative purposes. Tracking all the changes to bills and laws is a huge undertaking. Git would make the process trivial.

  • Re:

    I assume git doesn't understand whatever document format this things normally get written in (98% chance it's Microsoft Word). So you wouldn't be able to easily see diffs. Git would just see it as a binary file.

    I see in this case they posted it in text, but I guarantee they didn't write it in a text editor. No reason why it needs to be anything other than text. But trying telling that to 100 aging senators that learned exactly one software application namely Microsoft Word.

    • Re:

      docx/odt and are actually zipped xml, you can versionize them in git. Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      However I don't really understand the original problem. I hope to god you already had that implemented. A way to check all enacted laws up to date and past versions, also all drafts produced during legislation process, names of those who proposed changes and the fate of the change proposals, all speech transcripts... I can find that easily for my country. I needed it few weeks ago when looking in

      • Re:

        Well, he says in the limitations "loss of rich text". You might be able to see the diffs of a giant scary XML document, but it wouldn't be pretty. XML isn't meant to be human readable.

        They obviously have a versioning system they use for such documents already. I think what happened is her intern told her she'd get nerd votes if she dumped it into github.

• Re:

  I though of the opposite. It's a great way to include only software engineers into the legislation. You need to learn git and command-line, this is out of reach for most regular citizen. it's like you are open to all suggestions as long as presented in the form of a 1:200 scale copy of the Statue of LIberty with your proposal engraved into the book in her hands. I would say it's super easy to sculpt for anyone with minimal knowledge of art willing to learn.

  I can only compare with a few countries I know, as

  • Re:

    "I though of the opposite. It's a great way to include only software engineers into the legislation. You need to learn git and command-line, this is out of reach for most regular citizen."

    I think your point is undercut by the fact that there are links to the repository in the summary. Anyone can view documents in question and submit changes from their web browser or phone, you don't need any command lines or any specific knowledge of git.

    • Re:

      Alright, thanks for noting it's about posting comments on the web interface. Then it's not much about a git repository then, it's about an issue tracker. Same could have been obtained on a personal blog or social media page where, very importantly, many of his fellow citizen already have an account and a application running. I still think there is a sort of elitism in choosing the network that is exclusively used by professional engineers.

      • Re:

        I meant "Alright, thanks for giving me the the information I missed". I meant to thank you, not to be sarcastic.

  • Re:

    Git is the underlying technology. You can slap whatever interface you want on top of it. You don't need to learn git to use github to browse things.

    Anyway, clicking on the "commits" link isn't too hard.

  • Re:

    I'm rather curious why you think you need a command-line tool to access this web page: https://github.com/responsible... [github.com]

    • Re:

      What mislead me is that the original sentence puts emphasis on underlying technology git, not that the senator put it on some page on the web (that happens to be github and happens to use git as a storage layer) for people to post comments.

      It's not the right choice of tool. The web interface to create pull requests is not really trivial, it's a complicated presentation for technical people to do a technical task. And it needs an account. One of the many existing Wiki solutions would be much more apt to incl