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I’ve read through this whole thread, and I still haven’t really come to any solid conclusions on it. I’m skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that’s also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they’re both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I’ve heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.

Is “the blockchain” just like some nerd shit that’s for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it’s all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.

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Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
One is the tech, the other is an example of a type of the tech. A square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.

For most applications, this isn’t necessary:

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There are some examples like in biotech/finance that I personally believe will require a blockchain to be truly “fair” at the end

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- FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I like this flowchart but honestly most third party data handling solutions are just asking for a major breach: stoking vulnerable people over the coals.
  
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  - Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ignore the FBI hack, and the SEC hack, and the DoD hack, and the FINRA hack, and the…
    
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- Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Diagram is missing a “do records need to interact” control box.
  
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- Dnn@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Now add that trustlessness is impossible and you can scratch the blockchain box for good.
  
  You cannot get rid of trust in some form. You need entry to the system, so you need to trust its gateway. You need to trust the network to not have some vulnerability like a 50% attack. And eventually you need to trust the developers not to add critical bugs (that alone is virtually impossible) or pull off some scam.
  
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  - HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The solution to the requirement of minimal trust is not to just give up on and trust few peopme with everything. 50% attacks in large networks are next to impossible.
    
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- PropaGandalf@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Well in decentralized, autonomous (user run) systems you have actually 0 trust.
  
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- daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m stupid, can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain? Cause I get the sense that a good amount of this conflict, going off that flowchart, is going to be due to the evaluation of these situations as like, not needing to arise in the first place, or maybe like, a philosophical objection to the necessity of the technology, maybe. But I think a clearer example could help with this.
  
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  - Dnn@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain?
    
    Do you see how all the answers are generic, tend to be long and read like a sales pitch? That’s because the actual answer is: no, there is no practical legal application that isn’t better solved with conventional tech.
    
    The only application that is successfully used in practice is paying for organized crime: buying goods and services on the dark web and paying for extortion like ransomware attacks.
    
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    Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    blockworks.co/…/nft-airline-tickets-revolutionize…
    
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  - Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    *Blockchain technology can improve health care services in a decentralized, tamper-proof, transparent, and secure manner. *
    
    This can also be used for research institutes to be able to research with each others’ findings.
    
    Here is a paper on the topic: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8555946/
    
    Image
    
    Blockchains are also great for the verification of digital goods as tangible assets. While I’m not sure we reach this level of meme ^, people could 100% mint their own house’s deed and trade that as a legit way to buy/sell their house.
    
    I am very carefully avoiding the words “NFT” because they are another horrible use-case of a blockchain (and a prime example of how capitalists turn a good tech into something stupid for a quick buck), but this would theoretically be a tokenized-security with a 1:1 to the actual deed to the house.
    
    Is that more secure than the normal process of buying a house? Do you really need it to be external to a 3rd party when the transfer of homes already exists? No not really lol, hence why we probably see it the most in highly regulated industries like biotech and finance first.
    
    HIPPA/Securities-laws (or lack-thereof) will require a tough regulatory framework that “could” realistically be done via a 3rd party, but you have to ask yourself if you trust big-pharma and wallstreet enough to regulate themselves like that.
    
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    daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I just wrote out another comment, and I think I kinda figured out my core question, but, is there a way to save my medical information without doxxing myself, if this is supposed to be like, a public database, you know, if that’s kinda the point, is that everyone can look at everyone else’s stuff? I got the impression that a lot of the current blockchain stuff wasn’t capable of the necessary levels of storage that would be required for like, health records, on their own.
    
    I dunno, maybe you could have some situation where you have a key, that opens up some cryptography on the blockchain, and that blockchain piece when unlocked gives you another key that lets you access your medical records, or something like that, and that might be able to fit. But, then, I don’t really see how that’s any different from just having like, the key to the person’s medical records be contingent on person. Like biometric security, or government ID, or something.
    
    Point out wherever I’ve made wrong assumptions here, I’m just kind of talking out my ass, and hoping that I’m correct inso that the conversation can continue and I can scrape more out of it, I don’t really expect to be right.
    
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    OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No no, thank you for this.
    
    I understand blockchain as a concept, and kind of hownit plays into cryptocurrency, but understanding a true example of blockchain use outside of finances is something I needed more info on, thank you
    
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  - dtjones@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The blockchain is essentially a ledger that tracks transactions (including the creation of currency). One thing that is not always clear is how important it is for a blockchain to be decentralized. When I say “decentralized,” I mean that many different people are operating a server that performs transactions on a larger network. These people are rewarded in currency for their efforts, and are sometimes referred to as “miners,” though this term is changing somewhat.
    
    There are thousands of these servers in a network that are operating on and tracking the ledger for blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any updates to the ledger are verified by all of these nodes. As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
    
    I think this paves the way for a lot of the practical examples you’re looking for. For example, there’s no way for the network to decide to just give tons of money to a single entity for some “economic policy” like Too Big to Fail (i.e., corporate bailouts). This means you don’t have to wake up one morning worrying about whether or not your currency will rapidly inflate because of things like corruption. Another example is the true ownership of digital assets. NFTs have (rightly) gotten a lot of flack for being overpriced JPEGs, but there are real use cases here. A random middleman can’t just decide to price gouge because they own all the tickets first (Ticketmaster). Instead, artists can mint tickets on the blockchain (very important: this ensures authenticity) and then fans can buy them on the blockchain - no middle man required. You still show a QR code at the door for verification like you would now.
    
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    daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    As long as 51% of nodes can verify a transaction, it will be added to the ledger. This means that as long as someone doesn’t own 51% of the network, they can’t just inject whatever transactions they want (i.e., fraudulent activity). In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.
    
    Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud? I mean it sounds like an inherently democratic system, but from what I’ve understood of, say, miners, right (dunno how this works for proof of stake, but I imagine it has similar problems), those rigs are gonna be bought by people who disproportionately have higher earnings and can afford more GPUs in finland or wherever, and then that’s going to just kinda recreate the same power dynamic that we see in the real world already. Which ends up in the same kind of speculative market garbage we have with stock ownership in companies already.
    
    I also don’t really understand how a ticketing system would really work on the blockchain. I probably don’t know enough about cryptography to know how it might work, but I got the sense that nfts weren’t even overpriced jpegs, they were overpriced links with pseudo-legal contracts, that were still prone to link rot, and didn’t really indicate any IP ownership. If you had a code on the ticket instead that could only be verified as real, rather than fake, by a ticketing person, instead of like, a link, that would probably be the use case, right? am I getting that correct, is that something cryptography can do? probably, right?
    
    Also, can someone just like, steal your ticket still? Or like impersonate you as the ticket guy, or what? Like from the others have told me and also just from what I know already, you can’t really change the chain unless, like you said, you have 51% of the owners, so how would you be able to like, put something in the chain that identifies the owner as being the owner? Wouldn’t it be more secure to have just like, a verifiable code or something, that you can delete, that isn’t public, between the artist and the buyer? Then you could ensure anonymity between the buyer and the venue and stuff, you could work in establishing characteristics like oh here’s my driver’s license, here’s my government ID, without putting that stuff on the blockchain, which seems like a bad idea.
    
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  - profdc9@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A blockchain can provide an irrevocable record, and it can provide a mechanism for uncooperating parties to agree that the record should be created. This is usually used for financial transactions involving coins of dubious value, but it can also be used for recording transactions of real world assets as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain. Therefore the blockchain doesn’t really prove that a transaction is fraudulent or not, all it proves is that a sufficient number of parties believe it is not.
    
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    daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    as long as those transactions can be faithfully linked to the event on the blockchain.
    
    That kind of seems like the big glaring video game boss style weak point, to me. I feel like you’d still need some external third party to verify that everything is properly linked up to the blockchain, or like, someone could just impersonate someone else through whatever things are used to link something to the blockchain, and then it’s just kinda back to square one, I would think. I dunno, I think also maybe I just don’t really quite get it.
    
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  - far_university1990@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    git-scm.com
    
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    __dev@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Git is not a blockchain. There is no distributed ledger; no consensus algorithm.
    
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excitingburp@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The cryptography has much simpler algebraic analogues - what we are looking for is a “one-way function”. This means a mathematical symbol that only works on the left side of the equals. The simplest one is the remainder of a division. For example if I told you that I had a remainder of 5 after dividing by 20, you wouldn’t know if the original numerator was 25, 45, 65, 85, and so on. This operator is called mod (modulus). Even if you don’t know what value I started with, It’s not hard to guess what possible numerators could be with modulus. That’s where the cryptography comes into play: a cryptographic hash is designed so that it’s practically impossible to guess the original numerator. We’ll stick with the modulus for explanatory purposes, but imagine that you can’t list off possible numerators like I did.

Now we can invent a puzzle for a computer to solve. We’ll start off with the same values as before, but - again - we are disallowing easy guesses. This forces us to check 1 mod 20, 2 mod 20, 3 mod 20, 4 mod 20, 5 mod 20 and so on. Eventually we’ll hit 25 mod 20 giving us the solution to X mod 20 = 25. Now you can go back to the person that gave you the puzzle and prove that you’ve done 25 steps of work to arrive at a solution (or have made a lucky 1/25 guess). This is called “proof of work”. A cryptographic has consists of a certain number of bits, such as 256 bits - this means a series of 1’ s and 0’s 256 long. The puzzle presented to the computer is “find the numerator that results in the first 50 bits being zero” (the more bits are required to be zero, the longer it will take to find the answer). Because of the incredibly slim chance of guessing the correct numerator, it doesn’t really matter if the computer counts up (like we did with modulus) or guesses. So, in practice, everybody trying to find the solution starts at a random number and starts counting, or trying other random numbers, until someone wins the jackpot. It’s basically a lottery, but the correct numbers have to be discovered instead of being dropped out of a glass ball at the end of the week. Once a computer finds a solution, everybody else playing the game can check their numerator.

Now we can use this lottery to create a blockchain. We start with 5 things: a globally agreed on solution we are looking for (789), an initial block (which is just a number - lets say 12345), Bob’s account #5 of $100, and Sally’s account #6 of $200, and a huge amount of players of the above game. Sally wants to transfer $20 to Bob, so she says to all the players: “I’m #6 and want to give #5 $20. There’s a $1 prize for finding a new block for me.” All the players make a new denominator, by placing the numbers next to eachother - so 12345 6 200 5 100 20 1 - or just 1234562005100201. All the players start trying to find the number that will result in 789. Eventually someone finds 1234562005100990 after a lot of work/guesses. Everybody checks their work 1234562005100990 mod 1234562005100201 = 789. The winning player receives their prize, and now everybody has a new block to start from: 1234562005100201 1234562005100990. Next time someone wants to send some money they will use 12345620051002011234562005100990 as the initial block instead of 12345. Hence, we have set up a chain starting with:

12345 -> 12345620051002011234562005100990 -> …

There’s your block…chain.

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- Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  PoW is destructive. Blockchain doesn’t have to be PoW.
  
  Hash linked list part was good.
  
  You missed out public key cryptography which is also key to blockchain.
  
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- daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Good explanation. I am extremely bad at math, I never made it past kind of, high school algebra, and I still can’t do basic math very well, but this explained it pretty well, thank you. So, someone has to start a transaction before mining can start, if that’s how it works?
  
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  - excitingburp@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m Bitcoin there is a built-in reward to keep things moving forward even if there are no transactions. Different coins do different things.
    
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magic_lobster_party@kbin.run ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Blockchain is often described as a solution in search for a problem. It’s a clever technology, but people don’t really know what it can be used for besides storing cryptocurrency transactions.

People have thought about storing other kinds of data in the blockchain, like health records, but no one can really point out to why this would be better than other solutions.

To achieve something similar with health records without blockchain, all that is needed is just a cryptographic signature. The hospital cryptographically signs a digital health document and email it to you. The hospital in turn stores it in some shared database accessible by other hospitals. Done.

If the health record is somehow lost from the shared database, then you got your own copy of it as backup. They can’t modify the health record either, because then it would diverge from your own copy.

The worst thing they can do is to add falsified health records without your approval, but that’s a problem with blockchain as well. Blockchain cannot verify that the input data is truthful (garbage in, garbage out).

The cryptographic signature step is a part of blockchain either way, so there’s no extra technical overhead in the non-blockchain way.

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dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A blockchain is just an verifiable chain of transactions using cryptography and some agreed upon protocol. Each “block” in the chain is a block of data that follows a format specified by the protocol. The protocol also decides who can push blocks and how to verify a block is valid. The advantages it has comes from the fact the protocol can describe a method of giving authority across a pool of untrusted third parties, while still making sure none of them can cheat. Currently the most popular forms are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).

Bitcoin for example is just an outgoing transaction to a specific crypto key (which is similar to a checking account) as a reward for “mining” the block, followed by a list of transactions going from a specific account to another account. These are verified by needing a special chunk of data that turns the overall hash of the entire block to a binary chunk containing a number of 0 bits in front, which makes it hard to compute and a race to get the right input data. This way of establishing an authority is called Proof of Work, and whoever is first and gets their block across the network faster wins. Other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum use Proof of Stake where you “stake” currency you’ve already acquired as a promise that you won’t cheat, and if someone can prove you cheated your stake is lost.

The problem it solves is not needing a trusted third party to handle this process, such as a government agency or an organization. Everyone can verify the integrity of a blockchain by using the protocol and going over each block, making sure the data follows the rules. This blockchain is distributed so everyone can make sure they are on the same chain, else it’s considered a “forked” chain and will migrate back to the point of consensus. This can be useful for situations where the incentive to cheat the system for monetary or political gain outweigh the cost of running a distributed ledger. It can also be useful when you don’t want anyone selectively removing past data as the chain of verifiability will be broken. The only issue with this is you need some way to reach a consensus of who gets to make each block in the chain, as someone need to be the authority for that instant in time. This is where the requirement of Proof of Work (PoS) or Proof of Stake (PoS) come in. Without these or another system that distributes the authority to create blocks, you lose the power of the blockchain.

Examples I’ve heard of are tracking shipments or parts (similar to how the FAA already mandates part traceability) and medical records. This way lots of organizations can publish records relating to these to a central system that isn’t under any single entities control, and can’t change their records to suit their needs.

These systems are not fool proof though, PoW has the ability to be abused using a 51% attack and PoS requires some form of punishment for trying to cheat the system (in cryptocurrency you “stake” currency and lose it if you try to cheat the system). Both of these run into issues when there is no incentive to invest resources into the system, a lack of distribution across independent parties, or one party has sufficient power to gain a majority control of the network.

Overall you are right to be skeptical of cryptocurrency, it’s been a long time since I participated due to the waves of scam coins and general focus on illegal activities such as gambling. The lack of central authorities also perpetuates the problem of cryptoscams, as anyone can start one and there are limited controls over stopping such scams. This is not dissimilar to previous investment scams though, it’s just the modern iteration of such scams. The real question is does it solve a real problem, as Bitcoin did in the sense it helps facilitate transactions outside of government controls. You might not agree with that but it does give it an intrinsic value to a large number of people looking to move currency without as much paperwork. Now if it makes it worth $68.5k USD (at current prices) is a different story, different people have different use cases and I only highlighted one of those.

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- daltotron@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I read all the replies in kind of, an order going from simplest to what looked to be like the more complicated ones, and this seems like the least charged and best explanation of the sort of, externalities, and it seems like a pretty good overview of it. The other guy did a good summary of how the technology works for a dumbass like me but I’m still not sure I got all of it.
  
  So, like, you could kind of conceive of a use for these technologies generally, right, but it would seem like, even from your explanation and also from what I kind of passively know already, this is kind of, reliant on a libertarian conception of society, which isn’t necessarily bad. I think more concerningly it also seems like both of the basic technologies, there, PoW and PoS, are vulnerable to abuse from the powerful, or from those who have more resources, with maybe PoS being less so, I dunno, still don’t really get how that one works specifically which might change it. Which is sort of, antithetical to a libertarian conception of society. I mean unless you’re an ancap but those guys are dumbasses.
  
  So I dunno. It seems like a kind of inherently conflicted technology to me, like, paradoxical. I kinda hope someone can conceivably work out the problems of power abuse, but that would seem to be what I define as a “whole enchilada” style of issue, there.
  
  Still, I do like the ability to freely buy drugs and circumvent the government, that’s kind of epic. Well, most of the time, anyways. Maybe not when the CIA does it, or when narcos and cartels do it, but I dunno how much either of them have tied up in crypto, it’d probably make more sense for both of them just to deal in fiat currency or trade resources or something.
  
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intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
So data stores tend to present interfaces which allow the CRUD operations on each record: Create, Read, Update, and Destroy.

Create: You hit submit on a comment form Read: Your client app shows the content of the comment Update: You hit submit on the comment editing form Destroy: You delete the comment

Well, in some cases it’s very handy to make a data store with only two operations: Create, and Read.

This is called a “log”. A log is an append-only data structure.

One of the benefits of using a log is that two different processes can operate on the data, at different times, and can be confident they’re operating on the same context despite not being in communication with each other.

This “log” structure could be useful for instance in recording the moves of a chess game. Then, a hundred years later, someone can read each move out of a book and deterministically re-create the board state.

Now they know that they are looking at the same chess game that Ben Franklin was in 1775, despite not being in touch with Ben at all.

Really big, distributed systems benefit from this “synchronization without communication” feature of logs.

Excellent article on this data structure and its benefits here: …linkedin.com/…/log-what-every-software-engineer-…

Blockchain is a log.

Relying on a log requires you to trust that nobody else has Update or Destroy access. For it to work correctly and everyone be on the same page, Updates and Destroys need to never happen.

With a coordinated system like people trying to understand historical chess games, or a corporation like LinkedIn seeking its own self interest, there’s no trust issue.

But with other things, like “who’s got how much money”, people don’t want to have to trust that some centralized log owner is modifying the data on the sly.

That’s where blockchain goes beyond a regular log. It’s a log designed to resist tampering, because each “block” in the chain goes through a distributed checking process where many copies of the log are used, and everyone checks each other’s copies to ensure nobody is cheating.

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linearchaos@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s the whole web 3 concept of the community powers the infrastructure to run the community. It’s an enticing concept, The people using the service pay with their CPU and internet connection to use the service. It makes what would be a rather expensive infrastructure almost free.

With blockchain they’re doing some smart things, you can wrap code around the ledgers, in the end it’s just varying fancy levels of receipts verified and secured by the community. It’s verifiable but anonymous.

But then you’ve got cryptocurrency doing complex math burning through tons of electricity looking for unicorns to add to the ledger, in a massive pyramid scheme. Okay, it’s not exactly a pyramid scheme. Whoever starts a given currency makes the vast majority of the money off of it when the coins are easy to find, but at some point it is pretty close to any other given financial system, with the benefits of being anonymous and verifiable.

The bitcoins are just entries on the ledgers. But then s*** like NFTs are on ledgers. Someone sells you a receipt for a JPEG on a URL. It’s all only worth what someone will pay you for it. And without a whole bunch of regulation, it’s not exactly a safe market.

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