People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.

I would say it is very enjoyable 30 minutes every time I do it. I don't think anyone would describe that kind of experience as hard to do?

Correctness testing is important but the way SQLLite is used, potential performance drops in specific code paths or specific type of queries could be really bad for apps that use it in critical paths.

Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.

Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.

Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.

It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.

Repeatable read type of setups also make it much easier to accidentally create much longer running transactions, and long running transactions/too many concurrent open transactions/etc can create really unexpected, very hard to resolve performance issues in the long run for any database.

So assuming you are looking at reading "consistent snapshot" in the context of a real time transaction. If the data that you want to read as a "consistent snapshot" is small, locking + reading is good enough in most cases.

If the data to read is too large (i.e. query takes long time to execute, and pulls a lot of data), you are going to have ton of scaling issues if you are depending on something like "repeatable read". Long running transactions, long running queries, etc are bane of all the database scaling and performance.

So you really want to avoid that anyways, you would almost always be much better of changing your application logic to make sure you can have much shorter, time bounded transactions and queries and setup better application level consistency scheme. Otherwise you will at some point hit scaling/performance problems and they will be an absolute nightmare to fix.

I think two isolation levels that make sense are either:

* read committed

* serializable

You either go all the way to have a serializable setup, where there are no surprises. OR, you go in read committed direction where it is obvious that if you want have a consistent view of the data within a transaction, you have to lock the rows before you start reading them.

Read committed is very similar to just regular multi-threaded code and its memory management, so most engineers can get a decent intuitive sense for it.

Serializable is so strict that it is pretty hard to make very unexpected mistakes.

Anything in-between is a no man's land. And anything less consistent than Read Committed is no longer really a database.

There aren’t just 10 or 100x engineers , there are even infinityX engineers when you work on actual hard problems because some of those can only be solved by handful of people.

Also, industry is now transitioning where even small business might need geo distribution , not just for compute but also for data. That is going to make distributed systems even more complex even for the small guys.

Cloud services have made a lot of this stuff easier for average Joe but you can’t really avoid dealing with at least some fundamental concepts of distributed systems

It has now been at least two decades that it has had close to zero credibility, but somehow in general population it is maintaining its brand as a legit publication

Ethereum was dominating TRON until very recently and this does have to do with huge increases in Gas prices on Ethereum

I do consider to know what I am talking about, considering my systems make hefty profits and have no real exposure to volatile crypto assets (or even long term exposure to crypto in general, my profits are in real world dollars). This is why I know that USDT has actual real utility and it is currently best instrument in its category. USDT is indeed somewhat shady but it’s premise and utility are all sensible and it is hugely profitable for its founders. They have zero reasons or incentives to do suspect things that could risk its peg.

If something goes horribly wrong for USDT it is going to be due to incompetence and not because of some long term planned con.

So all arbitrageurs, market makers, etc, transfer USDT between different entities through TRC20 network. USDT on TRC20 started to increase only after Ethereum gas fees got ridiculously high and it became too expensive to use even for pretty high volume market makers.

More USDT got issued because there was opportunity to make 0.1-0.2% on each new USDT since demand for it was that high (i.e. people were paying real USD to buy USDT at a premium, imagine that).

USDT (and USDC) demand spikes during crypto crashes because people actually cash out to these instruments because they are so widely used and trusted by actual market players. People aren't cashing out of crypto ecosystem during most crashes, money actually stays in crypto networks.

" Another concern the report outlines is that the U.S. anti-money laundering regime is focused on residential purchases, when a significant portion of the cases GFI reviewed involve commercial real estate transactions. "

Or another:

“When you talk about residential real estate, the heart of it is identifying who is the beneficial owner, [because] if you find out who the beneficial owner is, it also tells you who the criminal is,” Kumar told ICIJ. “In a commercial real estate investment, you don’t have to own the majority stake to be a criminal. You can own 2% of a $500 million property, and you are [still] laundering millions through it.”

More advanced human rights just simply means more fair human rights, it has nothing to do with chronology or recency. There are plenty of examples of countries that had more advanced human rights in the past and regressed and made things worse over time.

Easy example: Russia had much better human rights for LGBT community not so long ago, however, it has regressed and gotten much worse over last 10-15 years.

It is not super crazy to think that there would be plenty of people who would have rather see him die vs get extradited to US.