It always stuns me how relatively few people are able to spot frauds (although it explains a lot about our current political situation). I'm guessing 40-50% of the population is susceptible to this kind of trickery.
Healthy communities are comprised of people who are trusting and permissive by default. The cost is that on occasion these communities will be exploited.
Personally I think it's a very low price to pay for all its benefits.
It's entirely possible to find a happy medium. You can be trusting without being totally naive about individuals with bad intentions.
In hindsight it’s always easy to say what the right outcome should have been, but, in Wright’s case, he has enough legitimate credentials that it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t at least hear him out.
his credentials are lacking and also completely irrelevant.
The goal really is to let everyone be safe in trusting others to the point of naivete, because trust is that huge of an efficiency hack.
(I mean, think of the ridiculous amounts of energy Bitcoin wastes with its proof-of-work scheme, precisely because it tries to replace trust with computation. This energy is what trust saves you.)
I went to a three storey old factory turned into an antiques store. 150 000 square feet. Three floors of booths of all kinds of stuff. Coins, cards, collectibles, toys, furniture, everything. The whole place had maybe five visible employees. It was all consignment. You'd pick up $300 worth of nicknacks from the top floor and walk it down to the first floor to buy. It's incredibly easy to steal from if you wanted.
So what I see are hundreds of individual vendors that don't need to be at their booth because of the trust between vendors, the managers, and the public.
If we were part of a culture where theft was all but guaranteed, that store just wouldn't be able to exist.
Do you think they have cameras?
Best state Gini coefficient [0]. Great income mobility (also best in US [1]).
It also has a rampant fraud/ponzi/mlm issue [3]. They come from the same source- There is a general level of trust that is much higher than anywhere else I've lived or experienced. Mostly rooted in a trust in others is part and parcel of the culture and dominant religion. I don't think the upsides would be achievable without the downsides that seem endemic to it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co... [1] https://business.utah.gov/news/utah-at-top-in-nation-for-upw... [3] https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900068203/does-utah-dese...
Are we doing that, though? It feels like we're generally very trusting and, organized in society, very forgiving. Hell, in lots of business cases, cheating makes money, getting caught and paying a fine is just the cost of doing business - and it pays.
I understand the theory, and I agree. I don't see it being applied however.
In the dream/goal I presented I was hoping for swift, indiscriminate and - yes - severe justice. The lack of all three wrt. crimes against public or even individual trust is a problem for contemporary societies.
But that doesn't work if the justice is "apparently random".
If that is how it's perceived, then trust violators will have no incentive to avoid violation. They, and everyone else, will believe that it doesn't matter whether they violate trust or not, since justice is a lottery ticket given to everyone, where the prize is punishment, and it doesn't matter what you do.
I strongly disagree. This would make sense if humans were all rational actors who only took an action after performing the risk calculus of expected reward vs. potential punishment. But that's not how humans work, and thinking this way only results in a justice system that is unnecessarily cruel, ignores rehabilitation, and doesn't actually work that well at preventing crime.
Relevant sources:
Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis "Most reviews conclude that there is little or no consistent evidence that harsher sanctions reduce crime rates in Western populations[1]."
Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? "Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime.[2]"
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/652230
> This would make sense if humans were all rational actors who only took an action after performing the risk calculus of expected reward vs. potential punishment. But that's not how humans work
This is indeed how humans work sometimes. Not in the heat of the moment, but when coldly calculating how to make more money with less effort. Fraud is not a crime of passion, it's premeditated, evaluated in advance. More certainty of consequences, and perhaps the severity of them, may be what's needed to further reduce it.
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It takes about 20 minutes or so to go through, but I highly, highly recommend it for anyone that hasn't already seen it.
It seems very likely to me that frauds and those who can detect them are locked in an evolutionary arms race. If that is the case, it would have to be true that there is a substantial number of people who can't detect frauds.
Some of the people who hated those weasels decided that Craig Wright must be great since he says he is against the same people. Instead of everyone rolling their eyes and fighting an OBVIOUS con man interested in VC funding and patents some people thought everyone calling him a con man must be on the 'other side'.
Edit: If you think something is off, use your words. I can back up everything I've said here.
That's an interesting summary of the situation, with parallels again to our current political situation.
"Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there’s a Blue or Green position on an issue."
From: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i....
It does seem to follow Open Source best practice: but I'm not even sure what "decentralized" development would look like?
The confusion stems from the fact that it was renamed at one point to make it clear that "Bitcoin Core" refers to this specific software whereas "Bitcoin" refers to the protocol and blockchain more generally. This distinction wasn't originally needed, as there were no other clients.
There are solid technical reasons to keep the block size low. The current developers were active almost from the beginning, you should take a look. And while Blockstream was founded by Bitcoin developers and sponsors development, it's a small part of the total development effort.
As an early Blockstream employee, I'd love to see some source to your claim that we "get VC funding for their company that they would market by saying it was the 'people that were in charge of bitcoin'"
Being sued for libel in the UK is no joke.
I remember my first encounter with a group of really dishonest people. It was deeply shocking. When I grasped just how much lying was happening and the magnitude of it it took me a while to wrap my mind around it. The folks I encountered had built entire webs of massive lies. I now realize they were small time hucksters compared with some of the cons that are out there.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-f...
He was raided because he is a tax cheat who has been under investigation for years for multiple unrelated tax compliance events.
* edit. Typo/grammar.