How do goldbacks fit into this? They contain gold (up to 3 grams, a non-trivial amount), they are accepted by a (small) number of businesses, and they are supposed to be reused for further transactions.

If you were prosecuted under 18 USC §486 for manufacturing or spending goldbacks, you'd presumably be relying on the argument that, while they are gold intended for use as current money, they aren't "coins".

But why is silver with export restrictions (Shanghai) trading above silver without said restrictions?

Market manipulation? Why else would paper silver be much cheaper than buying the commodity for real?

Yes but no. The looks are also important. They want 80-99% to stroke their ego and nice pictures to claim legitimacy. The latter seemingly being useful both internally and externally.

Clearly, you haven’t lived behind the iron curtain. Checking up on what people do, and how they vote, would factor in promotions, school access for kids etc. this is by no means hypothetical.

I encourage everyone to look up the relevant sources, easy to find.

Are there mechanisms in place that will prevent them from delaying this decision until, say, 2029?

Not really. They can say "we shouldn't have taken this"[0], they can decide the case in a way that doesn't really offer any precedent (eg: these are the wrong plaintiffs to have brought the case), or they can remand it back to a lower court for more info. Prediction markets seem to think there's a 70% chance they'll strike down the tariffs though.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissed_as_improvidently_gra...

Ah, it is all Mercator's fault

Feels like the exception to the rule that Mercator has no impact. Probably not coincidence it involves the head of state whose arguments that Northern California could water Southern California appears to stem from belief that water flowing from north to south is going downhill all the way :)

Mercator projection aside, Greenland is not tiny. The ice-free area is about as big as California. If you include the icy areas, it's bigger than any U.S. state.

There must be a reason only 50K people live there. It is not a fun place to live. The only purpose that would be achieved by acquiring Greenland is making the US look bigger on a map.

Time traveler here. Eventually there would be DPI blackboxes. You do not have to be 100% successful there, blocking 99% and playing cat and mouse with the remaining 1% might be enough.

A government may introduce a list of identifiers of devices allowed to operate in their territory. With relatively frequent verification to prevent the use of captured devices.

Not a bad idea, but I doubt they know how many they have or their citizens have. Let alone serial numbers

IIUC the critical use is by military units, so a process to list all the serial numbers shall be quite straightforward

> They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless.

One may collect/archive now (when the data is, well, "available"), and publish later, when copyright expires and the material will likely be harder to obtain.

Both are illegal, if you just hoard you will never know if what you have is useful. Only way to judge that is by letting people use it.

the attitude of at least checking the code before running it, I suppose? Or is the curl | sudo bash approach more preferred nowadays?

So you are saying there would be a limited resource becoming exponentialy more expensive over time? I guess there might occur a demand for such a resource? And mayhaps in that case the holders might decide to exchange it for some other assets they desire?

(ofc thats not the 100% correct description of bitcoin which depreciated against most other assets ytd but the idea still stands)

> So you are saying there would be a limited resource becoming exponentialy more expensive over time?

I'm not saying it. It is literally what Bitcoin is, and other deflationary "currencies".

> And mayhaps in that case the holders might decide to exchange it for some other assets they desire?

Keyword is "some".

In 2010 when bitcoin was novelty and had no value at all, someone paid 10 000 (yes, that's ten thousand) bitcoins for two pizzas. Now imagine bitcoin becomes a currency, as some cryptobros still prophesize. You have a constant pool of money for all "assets", and no way to get more money.