Day: December 29, 2020

Posted on

India Weighs 18% Tax on Bitcoin After Legalization of Cryptocurrencies

https://gizmodo.com/india-weighs-18-tax-on-bitcoin-after-legalization-of-c-1845960924


India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks in New Delhi on November 11, 2020.
Photo: Prakash Singh (Getty Images)

The government of India is considering an 18% tax on all bitcoin transactions, according to a new report from the Times of India. It’s not clear whether the proposed goods and services tax (GST) would apply to other cryptocurrencies like ether, the second largest after bitcoin.

The new proposal to tax all bitcoin transactions reportedly comes from the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau (CEIB), an arm of India’s version of the Treasury Department, according to the Times of India. The country’s Supreme Court lifted a ban on the trade of cryptocurrencies just this past March after a prolonged legal battle, but digital money backed by nothing still exists in a gray area.

The new proposal would categorize bitcoin as an “intangible asset” rather than how most cryptocurrency proponents would like to categorize it: as a proper currency. But there are still plenty of skeptics who see cryptocurrencies as nothing more than a convenient way for illegal businesses and money laundering to flourish.

The new tax on bitcoin would bring in an estimated $1 billion per year, according to Finance Magnates. It’s not clear how the GST would be enforced if the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narenda Modi, decided to go ahead with the proposal.

All of this gets to the heart of how governments are struggling to regulate and tax cryptocurrencies around the world. Is bitcoin a currency or is it a digital asset?

G/O Media may get a commission

Or, perhaps, is bitcoin just an elaborate Ponzi scheme destined to crash in price as soon as enough suckers take the bait? With bitcoin at record highs, it’s really anyone’s guess.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

December 29, 2020 at 06:00AM

Posted on

A Redditor is squeezing entire movies onto a single floppy disk

https://www.engadget.com/reddit-movie-floppy-disk-vcr-180230744.html

Sure, you can have an 8K TV displaying incredible visuals and a top-of-the-line sound system pumping out crystal-clear 22.2 channel audio. But why bother when you can fit an entire movie onto a floppy disk and use a custom VCR to play it?

A Redditor named u/GreedyPaint is doing just that. They wrote a custom x265 video codec that compresses video to a resolution of 120 x 96 pixels at a silky smooth four frames per second. As such, they were able to cram Shrek onto a medium with a storage size of 1.44 MB, or around 0.03 percent of a DVD’s 4.7 GB capacity. In fact, u/GreedyPaint pulverized Shrek down to 1.37 MB, so there was room to spare.

To play that ultra-janky version of the movie, u/GreedyPaint hooked up a floppy disk drive to a Raspberry Pi as part of a custom VCR system they call the LimaTek Diskmaster. When the device powers up, it displays a homemade animation which asks the Redditor to insert a disk. When they do, the movie plays automatically. 

You can check out a video of u/GreedyPaint’s contraption in action on Reddit. Given the immense compression at work, the sound and audio quality takes a major hit. Some might argue that it’s the best Smash Mouth’s “All Star” has ever sounded, however.

This version of Shrek looks even worse than it did on the Game Boy Advance Video version, even though that had a resolution of 112p. Meanwhile, for their next trick, u/GreedyPaint is looking into ways of stuffing a movie onto another vintage medium: a vinyl record.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

December 29, 2020 at 12:12PM