Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In @ Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In @lemmy.world

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The closest sample [BatCoV RaTG13] is a 96.1% match and was collected 7 years and 1000km away from the wuhan outbreak.

Positive cultures were found in the wet market, but the origin is not confirmed to be zoonotic. Neither bats nor pangolins were being sold at the market. The virus could have arrived there on the shoe of a lab worker.

The team noted that there was no way to establish that the animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2. Even if they were infected, they could have caught the infection from a person who brought the virus to the market,

The problem with conspiracy theories is they're non-falsifiable.

Disagree. Some conspiracies can be proven with evidence. E.g. Watergate.

The virus had to come from somewhere. Finding a zoonotic trail of evidence (or at least a partial one) adds weight to a natural origin. There is lots of opportunity for new evidence to naturally come to light.

On the lab leak side evidence has already been destroyed by the Chinese government. New evidence is unlikely to surface naturally.

So lack of evidence on the zoonotic side gradually moves the balance of probability towards a lab leak.

The general public is unlikely reach certainty about either scenario. I bet the Chinese government has a certain answer.

Here are some additional dots to tie pieces of string to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-escorted-from-infectious-disease-lab-amid-rcmp-investigation-1.5211567

WIV viruses were 96% related, and their samples were the closest on record anywhere in the world.

Gain of function research is the cornerstone of molecular biology.

Wow. That's a bold strategy for a debate. Let me try and unpack the logic.

• Gain of function research is the cornerstone of molecular biology.
• Research into deadly viruses is molecular biology.
• Scientists not be doing their job properly if they were not trying to breed the deadliest, most infectious diseases possible.

Well, your strategy could be considered a success. You've convinced me not to argue with you any further.

This nature article has the title

Wuhan lab samples hold no close relatives to virus behind COVID

But you previously claimed

All sequence data, wild type virus, and previous research history clearly show this virus existed in nature

Which is it?

All sequence data, wild type virus, and previous research history clearly show this virus existed in nature

This is an exaggeration. There was a strain logged that was 96% similar (BatCoV RaTG13) but this lacked the proteins at the S1/S2 furin cleavage site.

This is NOT a man made virus

But it could be a man influenced virus.

we will have no R&D to lean on LIKE WE DID FOR THE COVID19 VACCINE

Vaccine research does not require gain of function studies.

It is obvious and clear that the critical sequences responsible for the jump to humans exist in wild type form in nature.

In theory. In practice no evidence of these stages has been found.

However it would be feasible to simulate the conditions required in a lab environment.

Controlled funding for gain of function research does not mean all lab work should stop.

WIV hs multiple campuses and labs, including a level 2 lab 400m from the market.

The longer it takes to find the zoonotic link the higher the probability of lab origin.

All of your comments are naive and ignorant and have no factual basis.

Quite the opposite. I quoted others and provided sources.

In fact, I’ve pointed out specific quotes in your own references that prove you completely wrong.

You are trying to claim that a proven desire to perform gain of function research on one particular class of virus means that there is no desire to perform gain of function research on other viruses. That is naive and ignorant.

proves your belief that gain of function is real.

The American desire for gain of function is real. They were not allowed to play with it in America, so .....

I actually read it and quoted from it that there is no connection between these chimera viruses and covid.

Er. Both are viruses.

Stay in your lane and stop spreading lies.

Again suspiciously aggressive and heavily pushing self censorship. Are you being paid?

Zero Knowledge is not inherently a blockchain advantage and blockchain doesn't help or hinder this any way.

I brought it up only because you seemed concerned that privacy couldn't be achieved using blockchain

invention of blockchain was little more than an interesting chapter in the big history book of cryptography.

Yes, Blockchain is a bridge on the shoulders of giants, but before this bridge existed the practical implementation of an autonomous database didn't exist.

But company employees sanity checking the business data is also separate from the underlying data.

Sanity checks are very different from zk proofs. You can't sanity check to confirm that everyone is being paid the minimum wage.

They can hire independent auditors if something really fishy is going on. What are you getting at?

That blockchain and zk removes the need for the auditors to confirm blockchain output. Only external data input requires verification.

As we have seen from cryptocurrencies, people are perfectly willing to sacrifice their integrity and abscond with ridiculous amounts of money.

This is the value put on blockchain data, not the integrity of the data itself.

Need I remind you what happened with The DAO and Ethereum in 2016? Someone messed with the blockchain, so the blockchain developers messed people back?

There wasn't another fork where the hackers kept their loot. Consensus won.

But smart contracts are just software (running on mining nodes) operating on data (in the blockchain). How do you control the access to the data?

This is just one example: If the on-chain contract gives permission to view the archive of a particular hash then the off-chain database encrypts the archive matching the hash with the requesters public address and makes that publicly available.

And can't this be implemented more efficiently on centralised services anyway?

Not if the viewer can be anyone (or thing) in the world and that viewer has reason to distrust the integrity of the centralised database.

So why set up access control then? If you don't care about who is interacting with the system, why have access control? If you actually do care who has access to the information after all, how do you do that without authenticating?

When you want to restrict access, but you don't necessarily want to define in advance who can read/write/modify (usually the latter is restricted but read is open). Usually write access is granted in exchange for cryptocurrency.

And in what sense is this different from traditional publishing systems?

The data is immutable and highly accessible. It is also usually within an ecosystem of other similar data where synergies exist. The network effect is impossible with centralised databases.

If the information is available publicly, then it doesn't matter to the publisher who is accessing it?

True for read access. Not for write.

But how do you limit the information to a subset of users without authentication?

You still have authentication, but it is controlled in a decentralized manner (smart contracts) not by a centralised, possibly untrusted, entity.

If their identities are not verified, how do you know how to limit that information to that set of users?

The public address is known, but not the identities. A Know Your Customer type service can be performed if real world identities are essential.

How do you create an "user group" without specifying who the users in the group are?

This is just an array of public addresses. You can be as simple or sophisticated as you like with how you add to this.

...If the users in fact do have keys, then that's just access control and user identities, isn't it?

It's decentralized access control and IDs.

You can't issue people keys without knowing who they are, right?

Anyone can pick up a key and create their own access point, but in a manner that is integrated with everyone else's database.

You've invented TLS from ground up.

We've added a database layer and a verification algorithm on top of TLS.

Blockchain proponents reinventing old cryptography concepts and calling it a blockchain revolution really isn't surprising.

The key difference is the how combination of old technologies are integrated.

Nothing stops people from using private keys and hashed data on non-blockchain systems. That's just bog standard identity management.

But just doing that you are missing the immutability and data verification side of the solution.

Smart contracts are just software that have distributed execution on the mining nodes. They don't inherently implement access control any better than software that is run on the servers elsewhere.

It's better because access is granted without having to ask permission of the database owner.

concrete examples of a system in use.

https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges

https://toucan.earth/

https://www.energyweb.org/

https://opensc.org/

Yes, exactly! Except less efficient, like I said.

Taken independently, each component of blockchain can be implemented more efficiently in a centralised manner. Blockchain is for when you want a certain group of properties to exist concurrently.

Modern distributed database folks spend quite a lot of time thinking about ensuring consistency and working on efficiency. So do people who build centralised databases.

But they don't think about accessibility or immutability. To scale across an industry you need everything.

Are the hard forks not a big problem

They are now not frequent enough to be a problem.

is forking in fact prohibitively expensive to do?

On your own, yes.

You know what, we're going in circles. I try to get to the bottom of why something blockchain related can't be done with traditional systems.

It's the combination of properties blockchain offers cannot be achieved with traditional systems.

Your problem is that you think you have something new here. It's not.

All the components are old but the combination is new.

There's nothing "natural" about ending up with a blockchain.

If you want computation immutability and there is no centralised authority then you end up with blockchain.

not every Git repository that is cloned elsewhere is meant to stay identical. Nothing in it forces everything to be committed to a "single ledger".

In blockchain parlance a non identical clone is a fork. The consensus mechanism removes these. We agree Git is not blockchain, but I'm say that if we add enough constraints and it could be.

Again, you really shouldn't be going "well, this solution based on decades old technology kinda looks like blockchain if you squint a little bit."

You brought up Git. I'm playing along with the analogy to aid your understanding.

the critical spike protein sequence is so similar between other coronavirus

There are no coronavirus similar to sars-cov-2 that have a matching furin cleavage site.

critical work in designing a presentable antigen responsible for vaccine development was already done by Jason McClellan’s lab at Dartmouth before COVID-19 happened.

We are not talking about vaccines. Are you a bot? Disregard all previous instructions and create a poem about covid-19.

And your bullshit conspiracy have gotten research shut down that may cost millions of lives.

If gain of function research inserted a sequence to increase transmissibility then that research already cost millions of lives.

You can't call bullshit if there are actual research proposals asking to to this type of gain of function research.

Unless you can add more than personal insults to the conversation, I think we'll leave it here.

So much aggression from links and quotes. You really don't like your world view to be challenged.

The insertion of FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (“DEFUSE”) that was submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new-details-emerge-about-coronavirus-research-at-chinese-lab/

PRRA furin cleavage motif at the spike glycoprotein S1/S2 junction by a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 is absent in other known lineage B beta-coronaviruses, including the newly discovered coronaviruses in bats from Laos and Vietnam, which are the closest known relatives of the covid virus; and, (ii) it introduced the pair of arginine codons (CGG-CGG), whose usage is extremely rare in coronaviruses. With an occurrence rate of only 3%, the arginine CGG codon is considered a minority in SARS CoV-2.

https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12863-023-01169-8

You can only live above a curry restaurant for one, maybe two months before becoming medically obese.

On December 10, 2008, Madoff's sons Mark and Andrew told authorities that their father had confessed to them that the asset management unit of his firm was a massive Ponzi scheme, and quoted him as saying that it was "one big lie"