Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 March 26

= March 26 =

Kill share of drones in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
According to a Washington Post article, "Azerbaijan... used Bayraktar TB2 drones and Israeli kamikaze drones to overwhelm Armenia’s defenses. One estimate tallied Armenian losses of nearly 200 tanks, 90 armored vehicles and 182 artillery pieces." The "Israeli kamikaze drones" apparently mean the IAI Harop type. Is there any estimate possible of the respective share of Bayraktar and Harop in inflicting those casualties? --KnightMove (talk) 06:41, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Freespeech and american Law
Is there actually a distinction between opinion and factual claim in U.S. law? Or what about the case law on freedom of speech?--2A02:908:426:D280:7141:C65C:6555:85AD (talk) 16:39, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
 * It sounds like your question is not so much about free speech in general as how it interacts with defamation law. We have an article on United States defamation law, which points to several other articles you might be interested in -- opinion privilege (unreferenced), Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co.. --Trovatore (talk) 17:16, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Our article on Defamation states (without given a source or indicating a jurisdictional scope, so caveat lector): "Statements of opinion or pure opinion are not actionable." This is immediately followed by the statement, "Some jurisdictions decline to recognize any legal distinction between fact and opinion", which is a contradiction unless statements of fact are equally inactionable in these jurisdictions, thus voiding the whole legal concept of defamation. The distinction between "opinion" and "pure opinion" is not explained. --Lambiam 23:50, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Losses on the Pacific front
Is the Pacific Front the bloodiest in WWII for the United States. If so, then the ratio of American and Japanese losses is also of interest. Judging by Wikipedia, out of 405k killed in WWII (3k died in the African-Middle Eastern theater and in the Caribbean, 198k died on all fronts in the war with Germany, 40k in the US continental territory from diseases and injuries and 160k in the war with Japan) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.145.61.199 (talk) 19:10, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Bitcoin death spiral
What forces would theoretically prevent the value of Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency relying on proof of work, from asymptotically approaching zero while the time per block increased without bound, in the following positive-feedback scenario?
 * 1) A wide-ranging extreme weather event, made more likely by climate change, increases the demand for electricity for heating and/or cooling in most of the world.
 * 2) The market price of electricity in most of the world rises.
 * 3) Most Bitcoin miners turn off their equipment, because the revenue from running it is less than the cost of electricity.
 * 4) The time per block increases.
 * 5) The next difficulty adjustment (meant to restore the incentive to miners when step 1 happens) appears further away, because its timing is measured in blocks and not in hours.
 * 6) The increasing time per block means that transactions take longer to confirm, so Bitcoin becomes less attractive as a medium of exchange.
 * 7) Demand for Bitcoin decreases from people who want to spend it.
 * 8) This decrease in demand causes the price of Bitcoin to fall.
 * 9) Lower price and reduced hash rate make a 51% attack easier and thus more likely.
 * 10) This increased risk, combined with step 8, makes Bitcoin less attractive as a store of value.
 * 11) Demand for Bitcoin from buy-and-hodl investors decreases. True Believers in cryptocurrency continue to exist, but they diversify into proof of stake coins. Everyone else diversifies into stocks, bonds, real estate, precious minerals, and energy futures.
 * 12) This decrease in demand lowers the price further.
 * 13) Lower prices mean less mining revenue.
 * 14) Repeat steps 3 through 14.

The only counteracting forces I can think of are time lags in information and people's response to it in steps 6 and 10. However, wouldn't one expect these lags to decrease as more people obtain broadband or 5G Internet connections, and as anomaly detection -- and other AI/ML tools that assist in market timing -- become more accessible? Granted, the maintainers may be able to temporarily solve the problem with a hard fork; but if they have to do so repeatedly, how is that any more laissez-faire than what a central bank does? Neon Merlin  22:10, 26 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Nothing. --Lambiam 23:36, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
 * It should also be noted that omitting the odd numbered events above (or even; your choice) might also lead to the same results. There is no proven causal link. DOR (HK) (talk) 23:51, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Maybe somebody might want to move this to the Computing desk. This sounds more like a computing question than a humanities question. Eliyohub (talk) 09:44, 27 March 2022 (UTC)
 * This appears to me more as a question about what forces can keep a speculative bubble in the air in the face of the vicissitudes of history, such as may come to happen. Inventing cleverer ways of flipping bits while expending enormous amounts of energy may be of limited relevance. If the Reference desk had been active already in the 17th century and the question had been about the Dutch tulip mania, it should not be moved to the Science section of the desk as being of a botanical nature. --Lambiam 14:10, 27 March 2022 (UTC)