US police should be more professional & respectful - New York Times

Videos of two fatal shootings of African-American men have again documented what appear to be almost casual killing by the police. They prompt the deepest shock at what the nation has witnessed over and over again: a chance encounter with the police and an innocent black life ended.
In the first killing, videos showed Alton Sterling on Tuesday pinned to the ground outside a store in Baton Rouge, La., when he was shot in the chest and back at close range by police officers.
The second death came on Wednesday in Minnesota when Philando Castile was stopped for an alleged traffic infraction in a St. Paul suburb and was shot several times by a police officer. The video starts seconds after, taken by a woman next to the wounded man. “He was just getting his license and registration, sir,” she calmly tells the officer. She says to the camera that he was not reaching for the gun he was licensed to carry.
“Would this have happened if the passengers, the drivers were white? I don’t think it would have,” Gov. Mark Dayton said at a news conference on Thursday. “All of us in Minnesota are forced to confront that this kind of racism exists.”
Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said she told her son: “If you get stopped by the police, comply. Comply, comply, comply.” She added, “I think he was just black in the wrong place.”
The Justice Department has been called on to investigate the two shootings. It speaks volumes that local law enforcement is not to be trusted to carry out investigations, as communities take to the streets to demand justice.
The shootings seem part of some gruesome loop of episodes of law enforcement gone amok. For African-Americans, the threat of police abuse — in the form of random stops, assaults and violations of civil rights — has long been part of life. Yet this grievous reality became a national issue only with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in an encounter with a white officer in Ferguson, Mo.

After a year and a half of racial upheaval in Ferguson, the local government there agreed to reforms of a law enforcement system that Department of Justice investigators found regularly violated constitutional rights. Minority citizens were routinely harassed by police officers and shuttled through a court system that further exploited and victimized local residents.
Unfortunately, after Ferguson, police shootings of black citizens have continued, with the police too often maintaining their wall of resistance with the help of local prosecutors. Until ordered to do so by a judge, Chicago officials fought release of a dashboard video of the 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. He was shot 16 times by a police officer later indicted on charges of first-degree murder.
The killing in Minnesota on Wednesday was the 123rd killing of a black person by law enforcement in America so far this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Fortunately, the rise of social media and smartphones in the hands of witnesses has delivered video evidence to much of the nation of what black communities have known all too well.

The latest killings are grim reminders that far more reforms are needed to make law enforcement officers more professional and respectful of the citizens they have a duty to protect. Intensive training, stricter use-of-force standards and prosecutions of officers who kill innocent people are necessary to begin to repair systems that have tolerated this bloodshed.
And beyond that, with killings happening in cities, suburbs and rural communities, there needs to be leadership in every police department in the country that insists on cultural and attitudinal change. Credible civilian oversight of the police has to be a factor if community trust is ever to be restored. The latest ghastly images show how much has not been done, two years after Ferguson.

Bitcoin value depends on China miners - Bloomberg

China is home to 90% of bitcoin trades and 70% of mining
Key meeting this month as network gets closer to max capacity

Wu Jihan still remembers the exhilaration he felt after learning about bitcoin in 2011.

A self-described computer geek fresh out of China’s top university, Wu soaked up everything he could about the digital currency’s mysterious founder and its users’ ambitions to transform the global financial system. Within a year, he quit his job at a private equity firm to launch a bitcoin startup. Today, his company is one of the world’s biggest players in bitcoin mining, a computing process that makes transactions with the cryptocurrency possible.

Yet for Wu, and the rest of bitcoin’s online community, feelings of exhilaration have been replaced by apprehension over what could be the biggest hurdle to the cryptocurrency’s growth since its emergence in 2009. Because of a pre-programmed cap on the amount of data bitcoin’s network is allowed to process, the current system for verifying payments needs to boost its capacity, or transaction times will balloon and undermine bitcoin’s 4,475 percent advance over the past five years.
In theory, there’s a simple fix: With some coding tweaks, transactions could continue apace. But the problem is that any change to bitcoin’s architecture will inevitably create losers, and the motley crew of miners, software developers, libertarians and entrepreneurs who comprise the bitcoin universe have yet to form a consensus. After at least five attempts in the past year, enthusiasts will try once again at a conference in Silicon Valley this month. Any solution will almost certainly need the support of attendees from China, now home to 70 percent of the world’s bitcoin mining power and 90 percent of trades.
"This truly is one of the biggest tests to global collaboration," said Wu, who runs AntPool, the world’s second-largest mining collective, and is also one of the largest manufacturers of mining hardware. "There’s a lot of money and emotions involved, and people have very different ideas on what they want bitcoin to be."
For a QuickTake explainer on bitcoin, click here.
It could be the opinions of Wu and his compatriots that matter most. Chinese miners have leveraged their access to cheap labor, inexpensive electricity and local chipmaking factories to outmaneuver their global peers in performing the complex calculations needed to verify bitcoin transactions -- a service for which they’re compensated in newly-minted bitcoin. When the cryptocurrency’s price tumbled from about $1,000 in late 2013 to below $200 in early 2015, lower costs in China allowed them to stay afloat even as many Western operators folded.

Bitcoin’s volatility, meanwhile, has attracted China’s horde of speculative individual investors, who are keener than ever to diversify out of yuan-denominated assets after a shock devaluation in the nation’s currency last year.
Mining Power
The concentration of bitcoin activity in China has some worried that the system could become vulnerable to meddling by the ruling Communist Party, which restricts cross-border capital flows and has tight control over the Internet. It’s of particular concern to libertarians who value the cryptocurrency’s decentralized nature above all else. Unlike most major units of exchange, bitcoin has no single authority, such as a central bank, with control over the money supply. The maximum number of bitcoins is capped at 21 million.
Having so much mining power in China “is a very negative thing,” Peter Todd, an active bitcoin code contributor based in Toronto, wrote in an e-mail interview. “It’d be all too easy for the Chinese government to do a lot of harm.”
While China’s central bank has said bitcoin isn’t a “real” currency and has taken steps to prevent it from becoming entrenched in the domestic financial system, there’s little evidence that policy makers are trying to gain control over its global development.
Instead, the influence lies with privately-run Chinese miners. Because the current system is dominated by the software miners use most, any proposal to update bitcoin’s architecture will need their validation.
Block Sizes
“The miners control the real voting power,” said Wang Chun, co-owner and chief administrator of F2Pool, the world’s largest mining collective.
The debate over how to resolve the digital currency’s capacity problem is split primarily into two camps. One group, known as Bitcoin Classic, says the size of digital “blocks” that contain bitcoin transactions should be increased as soon as possible to ensure that processing times don’t jump.
The other, Bitcoin Core, argues that it’s too soon to make major changes because it will take time to ensure that the new software is secure. They’re also worried that a major boost to block sizes will give too much power to the handful of miners with the processing capacity to handle the lengthy calculations associated with larger blocks.
Core supporters have been primarily focused on introducing features to increase transaction efficiency, while some have agreed to a capped increase in block sizes. They place a priority on widespread adoption before big changes are made, fearing a split in the bitcoin community that could send prices tumbling. The cryptocurrency dropped 4.4 percent to $645.33 on Thursday, paring this year’s gain to 49 percent.
Waiting Game
Major Chinese miners and a group of Core developers agreed on a proposed fix at a meeting in Hong Kong in February. The new code is due to become available this month, and could be activated by July 2017 if it gains broad support.
HaoBTC’s mining data center in Sichuan, China.
HaoBTC’s mining data center in Sichuan, China. Source: HaoBTC
"If the consensus is implemented successfully, it will set an example for future collaborations between all parties," said Wu Gang, chief executive officer of HaoBTC, which accounts for about five percent of the computing power used to verify bitcoin transactions.
If no agreement is reached, processing times could potentially climb to hours or even days, making the digital currency inconvenient for many users who can get almost instant confirmations on payments through their credit-card providers or online money-transfer services like PayPal. In its current iteration, the bitcoin network can handle about seven transactions per second. Visa Inc., the world’s largest payment processor, is capable of more than 24,000 per second.
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A surge in processing times would give credence to the views of bitcoin skeptics including JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, who says a digital currency without any central authority has no chance of survival in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. Even after its surge over the past five years, the total market value of outstanding bitcoin is less than $11 billion, with a network that handles about $120 million of transactions daily.
Despite the challenges, AntPool’s Wu is optimistic. He’s planning to attend the meeting of bitcoin enthusiasts in California this month and says miners from China are set to play a bigger role in driving the global community toward consensus.
"There’s no way we will be at this impasse forever," Wu said. "You have got to believe that with so many smart people in the industry, they will make the right decisions."