sennight

Ah, yeah I'm familiar with it - a PoW scheme, where the work is memory cell wear. I feel for anyone who missed the incredibly short period of time where bitcoin gpu mining pools were anything but distributed space heaters... but I don't see a future in trying to chase that dragon. At least it isn't a mindless hardfork cash grab, or an unintentional joke like that time that communist redditors came out with a coin that would randomly delete balances at rest.

There are proof systems that are not truly Proof of Work and are also not Proof of Stake.

Got any examples in mind? Because the only stuff that I can think of besides the two are convoluted Rube Goldberg methods of concealing what is actually PoS. Take any one of the goofy token based protein folding style coins as an example. Unless you are thinking of some kind of premined fedcoin, which is closer to a giftcard than a cryptocurrency.

It has been a long time since I last debated this stuff, so it is funny to see the same talking points from 10 years ago.

1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon, because you'd need some way of representing stake that is just impossible. As far as the whole "waste" complaint: relative to what? I've never seen a comparative study that included the entirety of the existing financial system. The academic papers I have seen complaining about bitcoin were full of comically bad errors: using geolocation to try and pin mining operations to nearest power plants, estimating hashes per watt based on FPGA or first gen ASIC miners, etc.

2) Bitcoin volatility has been going down every year, which makes sense given wider participation. Volatility is obviously different from price.

3) Bitcoin has had the capability for offchain transactions a long time now - using smart contracts with onchain settlement, so this really isn't a real concern any longer.

Well you definitely have a very abnormal way of coming to it. I've encountered people who came to it for the pure love of technology - but they usually gravitate towards one of the shitcoins because they actually harbor a bit of greed and feel they "missed the boat".

What's dumb as shit is the idea of basing the future of finance on it.

As I said, I burned through my convert zeal a long time ago... but your situation does have me curious. Do you have any formal experience with the backends making up the global financial system? Because I do, and it blows my mind that anyone trusts it at all. The US has, in recent years, proven itself to be such an awful steward of the global reserve currency that it is at the point now where multiple militarily weak states are openly discussing replacing the petrodollar with something else. A few years ago that would have resulted in a coincidental horrific end for them, but after the naked weaponization of the international financial system against Iran and then Russia... well the end is very near. All that is to say that it is now clear that everyone now knows a fiat currency controlled by a single interest makes a poor global reserve. Combine that with the likely future in which software agents need to directly handle money in order to pay their own bills... and meatspace money won't work, because humans are thieves with access to fraudulent chargebacks. What alternative could there be besides a crypto currency? I'm not saying it will be bitcoin, because there have already been several fedcoin lead balloons floated, but bitcoin has thrived in an incredibly non-permissive environment (economic, technological and political) for a long time now.

Is the Mozilla Foundation still a politically active sideshow? That is what made me switch, I could put up with the performance gap - I couldn't put up with their plugin moderation and activities in the whole "combating disinformation" sphere.

Huh, everything about what you said seems off to me.

How did you anonymously fund your account at Mt Gox? Because I only remember them taking bank wires. I don't remember them ever having any kind of payment provider that would have accepted anything like pre-paid Visa cards, and in any case: by the time btc was at $15 - there was only one money transmitter (that wasn't a bank) allowing btc related transactions. I know this because I was debanked by two banks and had my paypal account suspended around that time.

How did you come to learn about bitcoin, this "dumb as shit" concept? Buying drugs on Silk Road? Because most of the early people came to it from reading the white paper after seeing it posted on the cipherpunk mailing list, or on a board discussing Austrian-economics/anarcho-capitalism... for those people it was a political act - not an investment (as you seem to view it).

Crypto has become a very polarizing topic with people...

Certain people. I was involved from the beginning, and most of the OGs just shrug at the present day noise - the convert zeal being long exhausted by all the complaints about how PoW makes Mother Gaia cry. The people who have a crazy level of investment are the tech journalists that took very public positions badmouthing bitcoin. That is probably also true of anyone else who can't resist calculating how much their mistake cost them when they compared bitcoin to beanie babies at $150.

...which certainly needs to happen for it to have a future too, but governments...

Firing first in a duel, global economy style - that is why the foot dragging has been so protracted.

I'd take malice over stupidity - because at least it can be anticipated. If you were being charged with a crime you didn't commit, would you prefer that half the jury believe in ghosts and flying saucers - or a smaller fraction just be plotting on you?

... and this is why it is disconcerting that anyone else has any amount of influence in your life under a democracy. Half of everyone has a below average IQ, and many of those on the other side of the curve are just awful.

Delusion on whose part? That was an explicitly stated objective. It has been a long known and well documented fact that Ukraine has an abundance of neo-nazis, a magnitude like nowhere else. So much so that the ADL had to run interference with the goofiest defense: "All those pictures of captured Ukrainian soldiers with swastikas? Ironic race-hate... they're just trolling guyz!"

...Russians planned a few weeks to take.

According to who? Are you intentionally demonstrating how silly pro-Ukrainian propaganda is? Russia made the objectives very clear from the beginning: demilitarization and denazification. I don't think anyone aware of that could come away thinking "Yeah, so obviously they expect to accomplish that in a few weeks."

You think it would be profitable to source a spec similar screen, market it, backdoor it, exfiltrate in a detection evasive manner what started out as a 3.5MB wide data stream... and build out the infrastructure to receive hundreds of thousands of backchannel connections? Really?

I would also love for you to bring to market a price competitive replacement screen that is somehow backdoored. I don't know why you think that would be profitable at all, but I welcome the price pressure.

You are forgetting about the phased nulling. Military GPS has been including jammer detection in the firmware for a long time. I remember my handheld unit constantly annoying me anytime the IED jammer (which was waaaay more than 1 watt of rf) went active... 2005ish - it would simply mask the signal coming from that direction and continue to provide positioning data.

This has been a solved problem for a very long time. The nice thing about GPS satellites is that you know where they should be, and where they shouldn't, so long as your RTC is properly set and you've got a compass.

A GPS Digital Phased Array Antenna and Receiver (2000): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA452307.pdf

Continuing that analogy, in the case where a sky facing directional antenna is being used: the pilot is crouched under a sewer grate, shining a light at the soles of your feet, as you stare up into the night sky. If you are pumping enough power to overcome a directional antenna, than you are more in the realm of a directed energy weapon - which requires an insane amount of power (see inverse-square law).

As I said, it is only a putdown if you presuppose that everyone is expected to already know the thing. So I'd agree with you if I was responding to someone like Phil Zimmermann - but that isn't the case here (I'm pretty sure). Citing a specific discussion in the mailing list in order to circumvent this interesting definition of a slight presents a problem, first: the entire raison d'etre of the list was to put into action the concept of technical solutions for political problems - so it would be like eating an elephant. Second: the one quintessential thread that immediately comes to mind would severely strain your moderation instincts - considering these flaggings. But since you expressed an interest, I'll provide a hint: one proposed solution, prior to the satoshi white paper, centered around the game theory of a trustless market for assassination.

It is ironic that a discussion about solving political/social problems with technological solutions, on a news aggregator like this one, has taken this turn: self censorship and moderation in the furtherance of discourse quality control.

That isn't a "swipe", that is an opinion earnestly stated - the only way it could be considered a swipe is if you take for granted people being well versed in the goings on of the early cipherpunk mailing list. I make no such assumption. I also strongly disagree with the other guy getting flagged, such hypersensitive moderation is far more poisonous to the discussion than anything yet said.

No, your comment is pretty easy to understand, I just categorically disagree with it - as your prescribed fix hasn't shown any success in living memory. Now compare that to the tangible hardening of the 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments thanks to technological fixes. If all goes well we might even end up fixing the infinite pain train of the monetary policy. Subversive technology has done this, not angry letters.

I'm not so sure about that, you don't seem to be aware of the fact that there is an incredibly long list of examples demonstrating that governments and corporations will regularly violate the law if they have the technical means to do so. The only way to prevent abuse from these bad actors is to make such abuse either technically impossible, or immediately detrimental to their own interests (keep in mind that these are amoral actors that are historically never held to account). So what is more likely to succeed: an upstart technology, or a fundamental rework of the incentives undergirding all social constructs? You really should be suspicious of anyone proposing such performative busywork with no hope of success, because they are worse than defeatists - they are actively protecting the status quo. If you are dissatisfied with the present situation, by all means - write your congressman... but if that is the extent of your corrective action, because you've deluded yourself into thinking "I'm really helping with this political act!", then you and everyone else are actually worse off for it.

I've got no beef with anyone who wants to fruitlessly attempt to convince governments and corporations to act against their own interests, just don't frame it in such a way as to preclude actually productive solutions. Also, don't make it any worse than it already is - which will certainly be the case when bargaining with politicians.

It isn't in the government's interest, or the interest of corporate leadership, to undo the present state. The government relies on the centralized and all too obliging collection of non-government interests in order to circumvent existing legal protections. So looking to them for help is comically stupid. Technology is the only solution. Do you remember the events surrounding the creation of PGP? You'd be well served by doing a little research into the early writings on the cypherpunk mailing list.

"Its smart home energy management platform integrates a cloud-based battery management system..."

Yeah... no thanks.

And the answer remains the same: a redefinition of what constitutes the standard of living is far more likely than "economic collapse"... it is already happening.

"Well, here we are in Australia, 115+ years on and this is still yet to happen.

Any ideas on when your predicted outcomes will kick in?"

Spoiler alert, true.

>> ...shift the consensus position for an acceptable standard of living...

> Well, here we are in Australia, 115+ years on and this is still yet to happen.

...recently have COVID concentration camps?

I pointed to a shifting consensus position, he denied it, I pointed to an outrageous example of the warping of normalcy in his own backyard. That clear it up for you?

Well, here we are in Australia, 115+ years on and this is still yet to happen.

Didn't you guys recently have COVID concentration camps? You might wanna rethink that position.

Any ideas on when your predicted outcomes will kick in?

Ask Klaus Schwab, he and Bill Gates seem to have their fingers on the pulse of awful things going down in the world.

...ultimately workers that set that standard, as they are doing now, by fighting for it.

Until it becomes a union shop, then it is the union organizers setting the standard - sitting between those in a position to pay and those seeking pay. These union bosses are surely paragons of incorruptibility with the workers' best interest driving their actions.

I can't take "forced to eat bugs/sleep in pods" seriously...

Then you haven't been paying attention for the last 30 years. These are things that have been seriously discussed in the opinion molding class quite publicly for a long time now. Remember the push for "rewilding"? That didn't go away, it just got rebadged as "15-minute cities". The WEF now openly promotes a "Great Reset" where-in everything is effectively rented. Businesses that have been trying to get people to eat their bug food have complained about packaging requirements, as nobody wants their accurately labeled products. Not to worry though, "climate change" driven legislation seems to be attacking all the alternative sources of protein. These aren't conspiracy theories, it is a plain reading of publicly available documents put out by these people for years.

If a company still has to hire a warm body to do that job, those employees are automatically not useless.

If a company doesn't hire that warm body to breakdown cardboard boxes or drag around dust mops, then it is useless. Remember the donut hole welfare talking point in the 90s? That is what this is.

Every person who puts in 40 hours, no matter what their purpose, is entitled to a living wage.

Says you, about an arrangement that doesn't involve you. You should be careful what you wish for, because you could easily get exactly what you are demanding - and be very unhappy for it. Here is how that could happen: massive coordinated campaign to shift the consensus position for an acceptable standard of living, with a catchy hook - "You'll own nothing, and be happy"; resulting in people eating bugs, sleeping in concrete tube "pods", getting paid a dollar an hour, and dying alone.

...but cannot afford to pay them a living wage then that business should close.

There is actually a solution for that not involving burdensome regulation: capitalism. Crap business models get outcompeted.

They're just exploiting workers...

Slavery is illegal, so these poor coffee slaves have bigger fish to fry.

There was a time, not very long ago...

Before the US offshored all its heavy industry and proudly declared itself a "service based economy".

...even someone in an entry level position, still absolutely deserves a living wage for their time.

lol. There do exist people so useless that their labor doesn't even rate minimum wage. Now the bottom rungs of the ladder are gone for them, and they can't even get on the job training. The military figured this out a long time ago, which is what brought about the creation of IQ tests. Anyone below 80ish couldn't be trusted to do anything without constant direction.