etherael

I am no longer under the illusion that any significant fraction of the global population of which the market consists will eventually figure this out and migrate away. There is every possibility that they won't and will remain a captive audience providing a steady revenue stream regardless of how they are exploited.

They do this for every other industry in the world, why not software? Humans simply aren't, at scale, what the mythology would prefer we believe. They probably really are closer to livestock.

One can accept this and work with reality or lie to oneself and deny it and continue to insist otherwise in the face of endless evidence to the contrary. After decades, I have given up and go with the former. Especially in the face of the most egregious examples of livestock like behaviour from the vast majority of humanity in the immediate past.

For this reason I don't think the core argument is really sound, because in almost all corporate environments windows is the daily driver and the regular maintenance doesn't come in massive temporally divided chunks of work that make up the large cited overhead in this instance but instead trickles in on a mostly daily basis.

If windows is going to die it's probably just because Microsoft continues to abuse it and try to turn it into a spyware and marketing platform rather than a workhorse and the equilibrium between a hands off linux install and windows slowly tips to favour linux.

And then if that still doesn't dissuade you, you want to think again even from a position of pure self interest, because you are very likely technically a criminal yourself. (https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...)

Be very, very careful about handing power to the state, there's a reason they're the largest cause of non natural death in the past century, and it's not their innate benevolence.

If a person can't do that though, then they're not even trying to parse the truth, they're just engaging in tribal in-group signalling with their peers, which as far as I can see is the vast majority of what humans do to the exclusion of all else. The supermajority of humanity waving red or blue flags and shouting their slogans hasn't sat down and actually analysed any of the underlying issues, that's not what their displays are about.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's always the way its seemed to me, I've never witnessed that tribal in-group signaling being subject to any kind of critical analysis whatsoever, and any attempt to engage in such isn't seen as an attempt to find out what's true, but an attack on their tribe.

This isn't even limited to the more popular tribal in-groups. I am certain that you could find an Alex Jones infowars type who, if you sat down and earnestly attempted to engage in a dialogue with them about some belief they held that you could prove outright empirically was false, they would not view that dialogue as a mechanism for finding the truth, but once again, an attack on their tribe. This just seems to be the way the vast majority of humans work, and it kind of makes sense in a context of collectives engaged in constant struggle against each other for dominance in brutal and messy ways.

Nuanced views are a luxury few can afford, and a neat way to end up outcast and subject to the depredations of any of the aforementioned dominant aggressive collectives. Before you know it, they're forcing you to drink Hemlock.

Sure, but that's not what I mean by the status quo. Almost all humans support the status quo as defined by what they believe their tribal ingroup supports, they believe that those other people who are aligned with themselves are the only ones privy to "the real story" and the people in the other tribe are evil and/or stupid. They both support the status quo as "why can't everyone just be reasonable like me and my people", and "the government" or "the media" as expeditionary forces against them are viewed as enemies to their status quo.

By contrast, it is extremely rare you will find people who acknowledge the bounds of their certainty about what's actually going on, that they aren't so sure that what they think about how things should be done is the right way to go, that they're willing to subject their prescriptions to empirical analysis, that they think maybe there are things they don't know and indeed things nobody knows that significantly impact all of the above factors, and if on reflection and analysis the status quo can be shown to be deficient in a concrete way, they accept that it should be overhauled.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think there's enough of these people in the world that they actually could be a tribe, and when I see them musing to themselves in the obscure fringes in which they operate, they frequently make reference to the fact that they often feel like clowns that don't fit anywhere at all. It's true these people do tend to view government and media with suspicion, but the difference between them and their tribal counterparts is that they've always viewed government and media that way, and government and media have in turn always been opposed to them, as the glue that holds together the tribal factions that otherwise tend to dominate society and whose favor those entities are constantly trying to curry, frequently by casting aspersions on those outsiders.

Believing that the greater social structure of your society is controlled by conspiring entities who tend to work in their mutual self interest and to support the status quo will almost necessarily be seen negatively by those who merely support the status quo, which is basically everybody. So yes, there are negative social cohesion consequences for being aware of that, just as there are negative social cohesion consequences of being aware the religious structure of theocracy is also the same kind of thing, or any other broadly accepted popular fiction, your government exists to serve you, your priest is a conduit to god, whatever.

Most humans just don't care and aren't capable of parsing the truth value of the questions raised, they're just interested in their status within those structures rather than the nature of them. They'll trade n percent of the total time in their lives for n million kudos bucks without spending a ten thousandth thereof pondering the nature of how kudos bucks enter into circulation or exit therefrom, nor who has their hands on the scales, and in what manner.

If you are not one of them though and you genuinely find the pursuit of truth and investigation into the actual state of reality behind the socially constructed fiction, then once again almost necessarily you're going to be the kind of person who finds meaning and a sense of purpose in that pursuit, if it's true, all the better because you will have fewer doubts about that sense of purpose and mission.

Had me thinking long and hard about if the appropriate thing to do was throw a complete 180. But after that thinking, I came to the conclusion that people like that already exist and pursue the exact same abhorrent and adversarial outcomes as this discovery led me to understand were not isolated to the realms of states and large amoral multinational corporations, and attacking nebulous means to promote specific ends will just change the means that are used for the promotion of those ends all the same. It is the ends one has to be very careful of, fully cogniscent of the fact that those pursuing the most abhorrent ends rarely come out and actually earnestly mark themselves as the monsters that they are.

And yet it will still be possible to ponder pink elephants.

Why is obeying idiotic unenforceable laws any different to this when it comes to technology, aside from the obvious of the stakes being much lower? Although the way the world is going, that may not be a given in the future.

I'd argue it may even be worse when it comes to cases of governments who are nominally democracies making idiotic laws for their populaces, because at least theoretically, those populaces could have voted in such a way that said idiotic laws would never come to be, and thus their misery, the stupid laws that they're subject to, etc, are somewhat self inflicted, and for those that do dissent it makes even more sense to feel zero obligation to the greater populace given that. I personally don't really buy this because in my experience, what people want in a democracy has very little with what they end up getting, and the same people that will scream blue murder about the right to self rule when it comes to a national group, will scream just as loud when it comes to an individual in the exact opposite direction.

This too will remain constant.

I am trying to point out that if you start from that premise you prejudice the kinds of diagnoses and solutions to any potential problem you come up with. Which is of course the exact reason that the parties who stand to gain so much wealth and power from the exercise are so desperate that this should be the default, and why to the extent there is a problem that might be solved, quick, easy and relatively cheap direct voluntary action solutions need to be hit with SWAT raids lest the power and wealth that might be attained from nebulous, slow, difficult and extremely expensive solutions which are by contrast pushed by force upon the entire planet.

Stop sending SWAT teams at people already trying to do this? (https://youtu.be/i4Hnv_ZJSQY?t=250)

Everybody who looks hard enough knows that neither of these things will happen and we know why. That people ignore it or pretend otherwise is the real problem at the root of this whole situation.

Special notice to "The incumbent implementation (based on the existing Bitcoin consensus protocol) will continue to trade as BTC even if the B2X chain has more hashing power."

This is exactly the opposite of the way it is supposed to work according to the white paper. Before this announcement the majority of exchange volume was firmly in the camp of allocating the BTC ticker to whichever chain ended up having the most hashing power after the fork. If you work through the game theory afterwards, this means that;

1) if you want to be able to liquidate tokens to cover mining costs as what had heretofore been recognised as bitcoin, you will need to mine what is being rubber-stamped by the bitcoin core node client software as bitcoin, regardless of what the majority of hashpower is mining. What you rationally believe is the correct path is absolutely irrelevant. Want to pay your bills? Rubber-stamp BTC.

2) This is completely the opposite of what was outlined in the white paper and had been the status quo until this point.

3) This allocates absolute power to define the canonical chain tip to the people who have merge access to the official bitcoin core repo, a group no larger than seven people. Disagree with these people about what bitcoin is? You're wrong. It doesn't matter how many nodes you operate nor how much hashpower you have. They choose. You follow or gtfo.

4) A large part of these people had a direct fiscal interest in keeping Bitcoin uselessly crippled in order to promote their own commercial products which relied on that crippling to maintain competitive advantage.

5) Leaked emails from others highlighted the role intelligence agencies played in the campaign to keep bitcoin uselessly crippled. These emails contained unsubtle threats.

6) the power to define what BTC canonically is according to the supermajority of exchange volume was from this point on allocated by fiat to the core devs. Futures in the competitive chain were shorted into the ground on bitfinex and in the sabotaged chain pumped enormously using USDT.

7) Tether who is responsible for the issuance of USDT is just corporate dress for bitfinex. They're the same party.

8) USDT is acknowledged as fake fiat, official court documents highlight that it has nowhere near full backing in actual USD. Prior to the sabotage of 2017 daily exchange volumes of USDT were nearly irrelevant to even just BTC volume letalone the total, roughly five percent was regular. These days it is approaching three hundred percent of BTC trade volume on a regular basis. Just blatant outright wash trading to control the price of BTC using indisputably counterfeit USD.

9) Even with all the above, when BCH forked away from the sabotaged chain it pumped to 0.5 BTC. Plenty of people knew what was going on and how badly broken BTC had been. But in the face of widespread and constant market manipulation, BTC presently maintains a relatively dominant position. Nothing like the 95 percent plus it used to have before the sabotage, but still frequently 45 percent plus. Given it is utterly broken and sabotaged, this is completely ridiculous.

And last but not least bitfinex the party responsible for the above situation across the supermajority of centralised exchange volume is invested in blockstream the party responsible for the sabotage and hijack of the bitcoin core codebase and the forcible implementation upon it of the pants on head retarded idea that the chain ought to be permanently limited to roughly the throughput of a fax machine when the original plan was always for it to be competitive with large traditional payment providers like Visa and Mastercard and the exact mathematics for how this could be accomplished were published in 2009 and unsurprisingly check out just fine and these methods are now active on practically every other non sabotaged and broken blockchain in production usage.

The above isn't even a close to complete record of just how crooked the BTC situation is or its impact on the broader cryptosphere, but it highlights the core problem of fiat allocation of the title to whoever spits out the most counterfeit at the rotten heart of this horrid little saga that most people either aren't aware of or desperately try to ignore.

Look up the historical record. By what metric was the BTC chain allocated to the present by bitfinex? I'll give you a hint, hash power not only had nothing to do with it, it was explicitly said that it would be ignored in the announcement.

And reality flies in the face of what you just claimed, node operators had nothing to do with the metric. It's all just outright rigged.

But yeah, sure, whatever. Definitely don't throw Brer rabbit in that there briar patch. Stick it to the man, use the obviously captured and sabotaged trojan horse.

What could possibly go wrong? Laser eye me up.

I cannot believe how far bitcoin has fallen. Utter clown world madness.

So there's that.

BTC has no mining. Only rubberstamping.

SEC and similar are likely granting BTC "commodity" status purely because it is so utterly controlled and unthreatening, completely divorced from its original intent of addressing the central banking charade, that any energy they can push into it is energy they won't have to deal with being directed to a legitimate decentralised cryptocurrency that actually works and over which no such control exists.

But if we believe and behave that way without understanding the distinction between "my world" and "the world" that is indeed a problem, and we have a word for this old problem that is fairly used as a constant criticism of this increasingly prevalent modern affliction; Solipsism.

While it's hard to argue that solipsism is not a massive problem with the world today and something that is in dire need of being addressed, it's kind of a neat trick if you can convince people that merely optimising their own personal experience of the world by focusing on that experience and acting on their wants with personal autonomy is that exact kind of solipsism, and they should instead constantly defer to everybody else. If one person could do that for the entirety of the rest of humanity, they'd effectively be a permanent ruler by being the only agent in play with actual personal autonomy.

Not that this kind of thing happens, or anything, mind you.

Definitely for those with particular medical requirements, these should be factored into your logistics planning for your destination. Information is typically abundant.

It really drives home just how fundamentally broken certain healthcare structures actually are.

Nobody knows you as well as you know yourself and after many years travelling and seeing what the world is actually like in practical day to day life this becomes even more true and you know even moreso what is important to you.

When I left Australia well over a decade ago I had no idea that I would value the things I learned to love only by having access to them on a regular basis and realising that they were readily available as options. If I'd gone only to where my idea of what I wanted would lead me to believe at the time, I'd have missed out immeasurably.

Figure out the logistics for a quick recon of practically every locale that isn't a hard no, and while figuring out those logistics expect to add liberally to the hard no list, and build from those experiences.

The value in innovations like cryptocurrency are about making a particular class of the above idiotic laws unenforceable, to the extent they are successful. Other similar products exist which make other forms of law similarly unenforceable, for example Tor for dissidents in totalitarian regimes looking to smuggle information into or out of their open air prison camps, etc.

The harder agencies try that produce and attempt to enforce these fundamentally unenforceable laws, over time, the less able they will be to do so, because the nature of cryptography is that the mathematics massively favours the defender to such an extent that even the lumbering behemoths we have in nation states are inadequate to breach it if done correctly. The best they can do is breach supporting infrastructure around it, which just ends up as an evolutionary fitness function for the removal of such vulnerable supporting infrastructure, until they end up creating the monster they simply can't kill.

Which is fortunate, because I dread to imagine a world they actually had the absolute power they so desperately covet.

Legal and ethical are not the same thing. If a law is any of the above things plus unenforceable I would argue it makes zero sense to obey it.

The only problem to solve is insulating yourself from the demonstrably awful global political process. And ledgers which that political process can't change are arguably an essential part of that solution.

If states and the political process didn't exist and you had to actually pitch it as a business model to modern venture capitalists, it would be a near impossible task.

So your customers are just some group of people inside the borders of some contiguous territory over which you exert direct military control?

And you claim no duty to that group and despite a demonstrable failure in basically everything you do relative to the traditional form of execution, you demand a pricing model that amounts to some permutation of "tell us how much you made and spent this year, great now we want a cut of x out of it".

And all your customers have to do to evade your business model is leave?

And you only transact in tokens you continuously create out of thin air with the thinnest imaginable pretexts?

And last century when this was tried it was the largest non natural cause of death?

And your failure mode may provoke an extinction level event?

Why would anybody actually participate in any of this for any reason other than they have no viable alternative whatsoever and thus you end up with a self selecting group of participants who consume more economic resources than they produce? Apple pie and baseball is not an acceptable answer. Isn't economic collapse basically inevitable?

Oh that's where we are now back in the real world? Well that's inconvenient. Better get to building alternatives asap.

Satoshi said in 2009: "The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size."

Some latecoming BTC core devs cancelled that plan, with zero justification, changed the consensus mechanism for the chain from hashpower to fiat declaration by fraudulent centralised exchange running a pump and dump scam with fake money, and sabotaged the entire project in the process into complete uselessness, and to this day we're stuck with people who believe a fundamental financial revolution is going to take place on a chain that was forced to 4tx/second and get very angry, confused or surprised when you point out that such a change is clear and obvious sabotage.

If you're claiming otherwise, then I'm done here and I wish you the best of luck.

Simple fact of the matter is that the whole justification for the permanent 1mb limit was an outright indefensible lie, pushed on idiots, and supported by censorship. Nothing more, and nothing less.

That's exactly what happened with BTC. And yet almost everybody calls it Bitcoin.