Brief Ukraine Post: China is selling semiconductors to Russia, and it's not a bad thing

They're selling duds. Chinese manufacturers are dumping chip wafers that aren't passing quality control, and there's really nothing the Russians can do: what, they're going to complain to the World Trade Organization that the black market chips they're buying against trade sanctions are no good?

ROFL!

The failure rate of semiconductors shipped from China to Russia has increased by 1,900 percent in recent months, according to Russian national business daily Коммерсантъ (Kommersant).

Quoting an anonymous source, Kommersant states that before Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine the defect rate in imported silicon was two percent. Since that war commenced, Russian manufacturers have apparently faced 40 percent failure rates.

Even a two percent defect rate is sub-optimal, because products made of many components can therefore experience considerable quality problems. Forty percent failure rates mean supplies are perilously close to being unfit for purpose.

So the next time Putin says the sanctions are not affecting life in Russia, just smile and nod and remember this.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/russia_china_semiconductro_failure_rates/

On Monday, Bitcoin failed to confirm the transaction log for over 85 minutes!

This is kind of esoteric, but bear with me.

Bitcoin transactions (buying/selling items or transferring "money" between people) are tied to the transaction ledger. To spend Bitcoin (BTC), you transfer an amount - usually a fractional amount of a BTC to another person's wallet. That transaction has to be written to the blockchain to prove BTC moving from Wallet A to Wallet B. At any given time, hundreds or thousands of transactions are waiting to be committed to the blockchain. Until they're written, the funds are in a pending state.

Writing to the blockchain is a competition, it is the mining process. It's an insane computational nightmare that gets progressively more complex. Keep in mind that the BTC algorithm will only allow X number of BTC To be mined, and we're now at a significant percentage of X: once we hit 100%, no new BTC will ever again be produced - EVER. Lots of computer(s)/clusters are mining, competing to be the ones that get to commit the current batch of transactions to the blockchain for a given transaction cycle because there's a reward: they will have produced a batch of BTC! Obviously with the current value of BTC, even though it's taken a beating this year, it's pretty valuable. If you can sell it. Just like saying my comic book collection is really valuable according to the Overstreet Guide - if people will pay that amount. Good luck there!

Normally the transaction cycle commits approximately every ten minutes. Something happened and it took about 85 minutes at one point on Monday! That's one heck of a snafu! I'm curious if a delay of 8.5 times the norm results in a reward of 8.5 times the normal number of BTC.

Now here's the bad part. Apparently the new difficulty level means that a delay like this may happen every 34 days! So about once a month there's going to be a major hiccup in the transaction system and a nasty little delay creeping in.

And there are people who buy coffee and sandwiches with BTC? I think even a delay of 10 minutes to get the confirmation back is unacceptable. With a credit/debit card, the transaction is almost as fast as paying cash, or can be even faster.

While this was specific to Bitcoin, all cryptocurrencies have some form of blockchain system, though the details of their mining operation vary.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/17/bitcoin-fails-to-produce-1-block-for-over-an-hour/

https://slashdot.org/story/22/10/17/2059211/bitcoin-fails-to-produce-1-block-for-over-an-hour