SI_Rob

Careful, there's only one story for Bitcoin: "the price goes up" (I hear the kids today have shortened that to "NgU"). This story is very sustainable when Bitcoin's 1% ("decentralized") have been holding coins since $1.

You can always count on the market cap being inflated any time this story is endangered, both to make life difficult for critics and trigger a flood of free advertising in the form of low-effort stories by the fintech blogosphere.

An unregulated global lotto game camouflaged in slippery futurist memery, with zero accountability by its puppet masters as a primary design feature, may well turn out to be a safer play than, say, TSLA or anything starting with a dollar sign. What this implies for us as a species is probably best left unexamined.

Sure, I mean it is increasingly apparent that Bitcoin has, as they say these days, "said the quiet part out loud" with respect to what kinds of motives really drive the stock market, and what signals its participants actually respond to. "Gainz" are swallowing "value" everywhere. Doesn't hurt that the crypto casino is open 24/7 as well.

The difference with stocks, however, is that stocks don't make a big show of pretending to be decentralized. Everyone knows and acknowledges that a relative handful of well-connected actors have enough leverage to wash everyone else out of TSLA if they so chose, but for the Bitcoin cultists it's anathema to even suggest the same inexorably centralizing forces are at work. A lot of collective effort is spent on propping up the "decentralization" meme (and its accomplice, the "anonymity" meme), effort which ironically makes the proponents value their Bitcoin all the more; they want to realize a return on that work.

The entire point of Bitcoin is that you irreversibly give up something you value in exchange for creating a Bitcoin in return.

The Bitcoin now stands for that lost value, and there is now a corresponding psychological motive to replace the valuable thing that was lost (electricity, and all that goes with it including environmental impact) by mentally investing that loss in the Bitcoin token. So you protect it, you support the network that it exists within, you talk it up to your social circle, you do everything you can to make it as valuable to others as it is to you. All of these activities also take time and resources, aggravating the impact of the original loss commitment. You do this because someday you want to give it to someone else, whom you've convinced of its worth, in order for them give you back the value you lost by creating it.

There is no "environmental mitigation" for Bitcoin's energy use, this behavior (or a permutation of it in term of other forms of irreversibly burned value, like time* ) is an essential property of cryptocurrency, without which it would cease to exist.

Disclaimer I hold Bitcoin, not because I think it is a new form of money or "decentralized" in any way that matters (quite the opposite in fact), but because it is possibly the most clever and subtle ruse to access the gambling instinct in a demographic whose constituents commonly believe themselves to be "above" playing the lottery or falling for Ponzi schemes. Yes, the irony is not lost on me. Still, this is a huge untapped market.

* also a bit of a dodge as IIRC POS still requires keeping a machine running even if it's not dedicating all cycles to the staking algo. Anything that "recovers value" from the process of "burning value" defeats the entire purpose of burning value to create psychological motivation to mentally allocate it to the token it replaces.

Which, incidentally, is why you won't see much growth from cryptos that try to do something "useful" (like fold proteins) while also standing as a counter for burned value. If running the algo is more useful for A, because A is in a position to monetize the work outside the currency being created, than it is for B, who can't use the data or results from the work algo, why would B prefer to support that crypto over another whose work algo is equally useless for all?

This issue reminds me of the IQ testing and measurement problem of regression bias, which likewise arises from statistical artifacts from decades past (when tests were administered to much more narrow and self-selecting groups of subjects than today).

The means calculated using much less diverse series of historical cohorts are still being fed back in to present IQ calculations, which thus retain a persistent corresponding "echo" of the biases in favor of those early test results.

The echo is gradually fading, but some say a clean reboot of the baselines is the right way to resolve historical sample biases which still skew IQ testing away from an accurate modeling of the diversity in present test populations.

> we [..] could have more federated and decentralized platforms, or at least more client-side filtering inside of centralization curation

We should start a center to discuss and curate these ideas, a place where we could get together and define what it means to achieve decentralization.

We could call it something snappy and semantic like, say, the Center for Decentralization.

How about, polarization is highly compressive and humans have limited time and mental resources to devote to the many competing concerns they encounter.

Those issues that they sense are important in some broad abstract game of value creation and control, but that don't have an obvious impact on their immediate sense of agency or leverage, get heavily and "lossily" compressed into extreme min-max caricatures or silhouettes as a heuristic compromise between the infinite nuance/complexity rabbit-hole of rigorous intellectual honesty and very finite human capacity for attention.

the deep problem, to me, is that nuance and complexity are self-censoring.

any position that doesn't losslessly compress into a chant or a rally cry or 240 characters is effectively censored by its own unfitness for the infrastructure of mass propagation.

this ultimately favors certain corners of the anti-censorship crowd, for you can be vocally against censorship while knowing full well that it is the most overbroad, reductionist and populist strains of messaging that prevail under such conditions.

nuance and complexity are self-censoring.

any position that doesn't losslessly compress into a chant or a rally cry or 240 characters is effectively censored by its own unfitness for the infrastructure of mass propagation.

like the demotivation poster quip, none of us is as dumb as all of us.

it does not matter that there is structural promotion of epistemic shallowness on both/all sides of hot-button issues, because there is, and it's getting worse as the noise floor steadily rises. swing a dead cat and hit a dozen informal fallacies in all directions.

what does matter is that, in most cases, only one side is openly indulging and channeling our most degenerate impulses of cruel-mindedness and domination. eventually the other side may be forced to do the same.

All the clubs, bars, and schools have been shuttered for months. That buildup of stifled young adult socialization energy had to be dumped somewhere.

True, but that's more of a current snapshot than a categorical determination. It's more like the social sciences started breaking away from the humanities many decades ago, and have been increasingly pulled in the general direction of hard science ever since. Though necessarily relying much more on modeling and statistical approaches than on formal analysis.

Due to the inherent impossibility of repeating experimental conditions exactly (or in some fields, at all), the social sciences will never join the hard sciences, but instead occupy terrain adjacent to both humanities (where their data is sourced from), and hard sciences (where techniques are sourced from, increasingly for the "computational"- prefixed subfields).

> More usefully, I'd ask, "Why the Moon?"

Just a guess, but maybe it's because this president seems obsessed with editing himself into the narrative of numerous political and national news events that were historically significant during the early adulthood-middle age years of boomer-era folks like himself. Thus the effort to bring about personally-styled reduxes of the moon landing, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iran crisis, the cold war, SDI, etc. All of these make up the notion of the "again" referred to in his slogan. Compare the focus on "American" story points of this period to how little he seems interested in events of similar significance that came into prominence after around 1990, other than opportunistically channeling the outrage of his base over anything connected to Clinton.

probably not related except by irony, but Wired's original print format used a large tabloid-like page dimension.

> and profit.

I see what you didn't do there :D

It sounds rather like the coordination friction that constrained social usage of the internet before "always on" (and its exponent, the drool-proof smartphone) became the default; perhaps VR is still in an ergonomic analogue to the dialup era.

Wouldn't any such apps used for anything beyond toy experimentation quickly re-centralize around maximal cliques? At scale, the demand for responsiveness tends to drive out the demand for everything else.

These structures are dotted all around central Mesoamerica and forms of them exist even in regions inhabited by peoples who are not otherwise associated (linguistically, ethnically, material culture, etc) with Mesoamerica at all, like Puerto Rico.

It seems that even in ancient times, the one thing you could count on to get the party started at any local watering hole from the caribbean to Acapulco (with the notable apparent exception of Teotihuacán) was a cry of "GÓL!!!!"

IIRC the term for this is "sympathetic magic"

nitpick because the slant of your argument is correct, but in a self-hosted system you don't necessarily need a single machine to encode 10 video feeds, each client (assuming this is a P2P approach) only needs to encode one - the user's. It does need to transcode that to 9 outbound streams, which is asking quite a lot of even current high end laptop hardware, and basically impossible on a smartphone.

Add in the unrealistic upstream bandwidth needs and, yeah, your point still stands.

> Tone-policing, cancel culture, and identity politics are a real problem though

The tyranny of structurelessness[0] strikes again.

All of the above are symptomatic (though sometimes known by different names) of movements whose members disclaim official, understood hierarchies of governance. Members who seem to repeatedly forget, century after century, that power abhors a vacuum, and end up forming increasingly concentric, cryptic, personality-driven, and paranoid structures of influence because whatever the movement's stated objectives may be, someone still has to do the often mundane networking chores necessary to maintain group cohesion.

These individuals then become natural nucleation sites for forms of power that have no direct relationship with the acknowledged objectives of the group.

Such power expressed through the arbitrary control of prevailing group narrative language (tone policing), gatekeeping of influence (cancel culture), and authority over defining the many subjective unspoken rules by which status is acquired and asserted within or with respect to the group (identity politics being an instance of this class that that is inherited by all groups with a degree of internal diversity sufficient to build multiple coalitions behind).

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

While waiting in a temp apartment to move into a new home in a hinterland satellite of LA (a fairly large one, ~350k pop or so), I was delighted (and somewhat skeptical) to learn that AT&T had a U-verse package with 1GB/1GB fiber for like $90 a month - uncapped no less. For 90 glorious days I sat there incredulously running speedtests of all stripes, trying to get the bandwidth to back off at various times of the day. But it was not a tease; steady 800-900 mbps real throughput night and day.

Sadly it was only available in a small strip adjacent to a highway, and once the house was ready (out in a farther suburb) I had to relinquish this moment to sweet reverie and go back to my Charter life as a humble 100/20 megabit peasant.

Or, "How William The Bastard became William The Conqueror"

This is the one tic that makes it grating for me to listen to anything spoken by Noam Chomsky (interviews, discussions, monologues etc. - his written material not so much), regardless of how persuasive I may find his arguments.

Add "you can look it up" to the list, a frequent Chomskyism which sounds like a casual declaration of confidence in his sources but in effect functions as a rhetorical control device, in that it passively asserts the listener is uninformed about the data being referred to, and that Chomsky presumes not just the authority of an expert, but arrogates the prerogative to assign homework to his listeners/interlocutors as well.

Self-reinforcing arms race to sit up high and see over the top of traffic. If people could be trusted to reliably signal, merge, etc. the perceived need to see 300 feet ahead to predict behavior of immediately adjacent drivers would diminish.

> it wasn't possible to buy ETH direct until ~2017

not even with paper wallets? I realize this would be uncommon given the late start of, ahem, intheoreum, but this should have still been common at meetups and such. Also, mining is essentially paying for ETH with only one layer of indirection, but without passing through Bitcoin.

> There should be punishment, but basing it on the losses from peak is very strange and not realistic.

Isn't this the usual protocol for damage suits in general?

As I understand it, plaintiffs should plan for a 10x or even 100x reduction in damages awarded even under ideal suit outcomes, so you put as big a number on the table as possible (as big as can plausibly be derived from discovered metrics), as it is likely to be decimated anyway.

It's even more insidious than that. An astonishingly high fraction of people in both the news media (and particularly in the financial news media) as well as in variously leveraged positions of power in government and quasi-governmental bodies, were primed to talk up Bitcoin wherever possible due to having taken some position in it (or in one of its boutique gateway drugs alts) "just to see how it works."

This position being facilitated either by direct action or, more frequently, by enthusiastic prompting from a "blockchain consultant" acquaintance who offered to walk them through setting up a wallet (or even a miner / mining contract) and show them how to use it. You know, "just to see how it works."

Now that their curiosity has been elevated to, as Bitcoiners love to quip, actual "skin in the game" (both in terms of time/material investment and reputational commitment), they are biased to repeat the pro-bitcoin messaging points they've been spoonfed by what they believe to be a helpful, fashionably libertarian insider geek contact, but is in effect merely this generation's reboot of the garden variety penny stock shill.

A guy who advocates blockchain solutions yet dismisses cryptocurrency surely misunderstands both.

Also whatever main "fallacy" (to use author's word) is at work in both of these is ultimately rooted in confused and ambiguous notions of decentralization.

It's really not the tech that's the problem, it's the assumptions and premises it is derived from, which is why every year blockchain tech spirals into greater and more layered complications in the hopeless pursuit of resolving this impossible conflict; very much a modern day geocentrism-epicycles disciplinary failure mode.

A bitcoin miner is in essence a kind of inside-out electrical meter: It measures, with remarkable precision, how many electrons (bundled as SHA256 operations) you burn to support the network finding a block, rather than how many you bought, assuming you even bought them at all.

The question is not how many you burned, which is what the mining algo answers with such precision, but how much you paid for them in the first place, which it can offer no insight into.

Some possible shortcuts to paying retail prices for electron mining fuel:

1. You're a large business power customer and pay vastly discounted rates on a contract basis.

2. You're stealing some or all of your power, either by pirate wiring or by paying some official to look the other way, or a little of both.

3. Your mining operation is a pork barrel project with funding secured from your local government's (either clueless or remarkably pragmatic) business development office. Sometimes there may be a legitimate exit plan for this, like repurposing the new datacenter facility you built, after wringing every mining penny from it possible, to host cloud services or as the core of some government-sponsored technology park.

4. You may have been mining quite along time and now have enough early coin held back from the $100 days to slowly sell off into the retail market at 80x profit, or borrow against. It may even be that this reserve of held back coin is partly responsible for the thin liquidity in the market, and consequent bubbled-up price.

5. You publicly, or covertly own or have an interest in one or more of the mining pools and public exchanges, and retain a share some of the Tx and conversion fees which helps subsidize the mining costs.

6. Same as above but for mining rig manufacturers and fabs. Mine on newly manufactured chips for a few days or a week before shipping (for 'testing' purposes ofc) and you get to stay ahead of the difficulty curve as well as get free subsidy from your own customers.

I like to think of exchanges as an unacknowledged patch to the Bitcoin protocol as it stands in 2019. Or even as it stood in 2012 or 2011.

No, they're not in the source code itself, but without them the project would still be sputtering along in almost total obscurity, if not abandoned altogether by now.

so the anonymity is pseudo, whereas the pedophilia is real?