etherael

We and a group of partners run a restaurant together. One day you decide to turn it into an apothecary for the dispensation of poisons, and keep the name and pretend that it's still a restaurant.

Any mechanism which rubber stamps the above process as legitimate and collects a fee for doing so is corrupt, letalone over the objections of an enormous fragment of both customers and partners in the restaurant in question. Lack of objection or approval from those whom the change is in the interests of, or who are simply too ignorant to understand what is going on, don't change that.

That is effectively what happened with BTC.

The way that it was supposed to work would be that the hashpower would choose the canonical tip of the chain if there were two conflicting ideas about what the chain should actually be. BCH stuck to that ideal and through two contentious and many more peaceable forks proceeded according to it. BTC did not.

It would be easier even than that, observe what happened in 2017. Bitfinex said they would allocate the BTC ticker to the present BTC chain no matter what the hash power indicated was the actual canonical chain and that was the end of it.

Contrary to popular belief, miners aren't choosing anything when it comes to BTC. They're rubber stamping the decisions of the BTC core developers, who are blessed by the exchanges such as Bitfinex, and they are collecting fees on that rubber stamp.

There are very good reasons to be fervently anti-BTC given its history since 2017.

Are you now or have you ever been an adherent of "Leave me the hell alone" libertarianism? I'm sympathetic to it presently and I have been in the past, but I must admit that I struggle mightily to view any segment of the past 40 years in meatspace as anything approaching a shrine to that philosophy. I'd actually find it much easier to say the exact opposite in fact, and I do believe that what's happening in crypto is in large part a backlash to that.

The entire point of it being in crypto of course is that the same people and forces that push back so hard against it in meatspace are relatively powerless to do so in the cyptosphere.

For better or worse, I can't see that changing any time soon. I was in a meeting at a very large crypto exchange recently and their branded coffee cups all had a very simple message; "freedom is here". That's basically at the core of everything happening in the space, and I don't think arguing against it is going to work in any way shape or form given the polarised attitude toward the philosophy on either side of the cyptosphere border.

Like it or not, it's not going away, and it's swinging more towards extreme individualism by the day, not less.

> So where are the successful use cases that utilize Lighting Network?

It's been pretty successful as a sword to destroy the original value proposition of bitcoin.

This is exactly what lbry/odysee is.

I have been saying this for over five years and never had even an attempt at a rebuttal. Most people in crypto with a clue simply accept it as a fact. USDT needs to die for the market to have any sensibility at all.

Six years ago daily usdt volumes would not break 3 percent of bitcoin trade volume. Now they routinely break three hundred percent. It is an indisputable scam and needs the flush it so richly deserves. And I say this as somebody pro crypto who honestly wants to see legitimate crypto do what it can for the world. Transparently manipulating this market the way it has for so long now is not doing that. We need real prices.

The reasons laid out in the article have nothing to do with vanity, so which is it?

Market discipline does not exist on state actors.

> Citation needed. This institutionalized protection system is actually exactly how we got government in the first place.

I'm not even sure I understand your hypothesis here. In the absence of the organisational units that engage in the mass killing of their citizenry in order to sculpt their polities to the ideology which holds sway within their murderous structure, those people will still die because "reasons". Please expand on "reasons" here.

> But also, in the last 50 years

Nobody ever did anything wrong if you can arbitrarily timeslice it in order to make your case. And even there, if you look at the things done under colour of political authority in the past 50 years, you'd still be hard pressed to find a bigger villain on the planet. It just looks good in comparison to the preceding 50 years.

> Again you only speak in terms of costs and refuse to speak to or quantify benefits.

Because once again, no benefit provided under the banner of political authority has ever failed to be provided absent the banner of political authority. When the apparatus in question reduces to an entity that has a monopoly on force in order to compel people to engage in transactions that they otherwise would not of their own free will, it is hardly surprising that all of the good things that apparatus has ever provided might in fact be easily done by the free will of the participants in question.

> I reject the former premise and the latter isn't a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system.

You can reject it all you like, but you're wrong based on the mean economic output per capita vs their debt calculated at birth plus their lifetime cost. And that is indeed a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system, the former basically guarantees collapse, it is only a matter of time, therefore moving to a system not so afflicted of your own free will is access to an easy yield in the meantime.

> Respectfully disagree. The overwhelming majority of participants are just speculators.

The participants in question is not the reason I say it's clearly what a whole lot of people want, it's because of the amount of times the exact conversation we're having about destroying the state being the exact reason any given participant in the cryptosphere is there, including myself. There is indisputably a great degree of desire to do away with political authority.

It's not that bizarre. It's called lying.

> My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits

There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits.

> Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it.

Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.

> That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.

Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.

> Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things.

This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true.

> I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.

Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics.

> I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.

You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.

> There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.

It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.

Citation originally provided. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

> How many do not die each year because of government?

I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul of the point that the government was responsible for promoting leaded fuel to begin with, right up to the point of suppressing alternatives. Which in turn begs the question, what will the government actually do generally speaking? And as far as I can tell the answer is work in its own interests and accrue benefits to those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, and that's all. If hundreds of millions die in the process, that's totally fine.

That almost everybody accepts that entity should have a monopoly on violence and basically unlimited power strikes me as increasingly crazy as every year goes by and it does progressively more insane stuff and we slide closer and closer to the possibility of an extinction level event war.

> Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing.

I'm not interested in defending BTC generally speaking, as I despise it. I should however point out that proof of work has no intrinsic "thirst for coal". Merely the lowest possible cost of energy, right up to the point of subsidising alternative renewable low cost energy projects, which many POW miners have done and why hydroelectric power is such an oft-constituted part of their energy supplies.

If the point is to reduce speed or accidents and their externalities, sure.

If the point is to raise revenue from those penalties, not so much.

Same thing happened to Australia where I'm from originally, and it doesn't seemed to have changed a thing anecdotally except of course the aforementioned escape velocity equation, and still not nearly enough to be competitive with the leaving option.

Would be interested to see any studies that indicate conclusively that any of this stuff does any good, rather than just making those who are politically aligned with it feel good, for anybody reading this that knows, not necessarily just the respondent.

If it's admitting the truth, then it should be at risk. Anything else is just delaying the inevitable and not planning adequately for its arrival in the meantime.

Do the elites really get to choose the degree of social mobility in their societies? Do you have any comparative figures to back this up or further data? All I have is anecdote having grown up in poverty in what would likely be considered a relatively left wing first world economic environment, and to the best of my knowledge, none of the kids I grew up with except me ever escaped poverty.

Maybe it's wrong and I'd love to know if that's the case but from personal experience the only way I've seen out of poverty is interest in an in demand field leading to the building and maintenance of marketable skills that allow you to earn a living sufficient to attain economic escape velocity. That seems to me to be a whole lot do with luck at the ground floor. And fiscal and social policy can be as much of a burden as it is a boon all the way along the pipeline.

That said, that escape velocity was directly mediated by both the tax burden of the jurisdiction coupled with the economic opportunities of the jurisdiction and at the end of the day it meant the correct choice was to leave for greener pastures, both lowering the necessary target for escape velocity as well as reducing economic drag getting there.

In the meantime all those kids I knew back in the old neighbourhood are still there, mostly on subsistence handouts, firmly in poverty, and show no signs of that changing.

Monarchy was an improvement on despotism, maybe constitutional republics were an improvement on democracy, etc etc etc. The organisational units could be considered destroyed, or they could be considered reconstituted, the point is that the functions handled by the OUs in question went to another ostensibly more efficient instance thereof. This is much easier if the new OU does not rely on its underlying infrastructure from the old OU.

Things should improve somewhat is a pretty hard ask for something that doesn't sound like a good idea, letalone in theory. Of course, it's an open question as to what the end result of all of this will actually be, and maybe it will indeed be the worst catastrophic case of making the largest cause of non natural death in the past century even worse, but you'll excuse me if I find that hard to believe and think clearing that particular hurdle ought to be pretty easy, especially because this would be a non violent form of revolution, and the only competition is war. In a world of weapons of mass destruction that's a horrendous problem space to be working with.

No matter where FAANG host their infrastructure, if a particular set of states want to tamper with, censor, or surveil that infrastructure, they will be able to do it.

The legal structures and the ability to identify ultimate beneficiaries guarantees this for pretty much any legal corporate structure organised under a state. The only chance this has of not being true is a blockchain, the ultimate beneficiaries can't be identified, the infrastructure is not linked to a particular legal structure. There is no guarantee the state can identify the appropriate necks to apply the appropriate boots to.

If an organisational unit is to exist that will destroy the state, at the moment the only candidate for its infrastructure is blockchain.

Nothing that is the largest cause of unnatural death in the last century should be considered as "working".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Aut....

Blockchain based systems over the duration of their existence by contrast have killed nowhere near as many no matter how you scale it, and although I believe the system to be rife with fraud and inefficiency, the amount of capital growth that has taken place is breathtaking pretty much any way you look at it.

I believe the state as a structure needs to die and blockchains so far look like the obvious sword. Nothing else has even come close.

Probably much the same way you can see that crypto in its old generic sense could do these things, with the additional security of the applications running on a blockchain, and the assurances about transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability etc.

You can have a cryptographically secure platform for whatever governance platform you like, but if it's running on a traditional centralised server infrastructure within a political jurisdiction, it's completely vulnerable to tampering of government agencies within that political jurisdiction. This is a well acknowledged issue referred to as "data sovereignty" with the limitation that the way to ensure it's handled is to pick a reliable jurisdiction.

If we acknowledge that no jurisdiction is reliable, however, blockchains are the only choice.

> So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work?

Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary.

> Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government

I didn't say I found them worse than government at all, I said the first hand experience was very useful for seeing directly why government is as broken as it is, because all the same "incentive of last resort" mechanisms are typically in play in blockchains. It still turns out to be much better so far if measured by deadweight economic loss for economic coordination between a given transaction volume.

This is also why I said I would not be too surprised if it just becomes the next iteration of government. People who think that the government is desirable and its political structures are useful, parliamentary democracy, voting, departments that run projects and are accountable to elected officials, all of that kind of thing. You could clone it with a blockchain much more reliably and with much more auditability than you have with the multi-century old variations thereof running on some variant of "trust me" that we have currently.

Thus you could at least say "Yeah sure this is bad, but at least we can prove that everybody is following the rules on all elections, transactions, etc, and we have all the signed blocks to prove that from genesis" rather than the current trust-free alternative of an endless propaganda machine spinning whatever it wants people to believe at any given point in time with zero proof whatsoever.

I was convinced government doesn't work and indeed that is the only reason I am interested in blockchain applications. Watching first hand how badly the entire affair has gone has been very useful into getting insight into why government doesn't work, which I still firmly believe. However I am no longer under the illusion doing away with it and replacing it with a blockchain based substitute is either cheap or easy, and if we skipped a hundred years into the future and it turned out that the end result looked almost indistinguishable from what is presently described as government I would not be altogether shocked. I would however consider that amongst the worst possible outcomes.

It may well be that there is a necessary deadweight economic loss to pay based on the nature of human social interaction at scale and this loss cannot be avoided entirely, only minimised to a certain extent.

Loathe to wade into a political fray on that subject but will just point out that the author was an adherent of the political ideology responsible for the most deaths in the last century. It's hard to believe that the world would not have been better off if a significant number of those ideological adherents were indifferent, even if just as a moderating influence.

> The effects of both can be seen from Russia this week. Their massive disinformation campaigns and combined with effective near-total suppression of free speech has 60% to 80%

So your first example that springs to mind to prove the simplistic and facile nature of free speech absolutism is a disinformation campaign that expressly rests on the extensive control of free speech within a certain information venue in order to promote that disinformation? How does this make any sense whatsoever?

> It already converted Hungary to an authoritarian state, and France is now very close to falling to an authoritarian party...

And what, exactly, is the information which is not being censored which has resulted in what you claim are objectionable and dangerous results in Hungary and France?

> The ability to deliberately manipulate the public conversation with tens of thousands of fake accounts is not free speech, it is freely amplified lies [2].

So why equate it with free speech aside from to assemble a strawman which you then proceed to knockdown to make your case after just emphasizing yourself they're two different things.

What?

> requiring a private platform to amplify any particular speech is just as un-free.

Is that actually being proposed? Because I haven't seen anything like that?

> you are FREE to make your own competing platform.

This is observably false based on what happened to Parler and Gab. The truth of the matter is that big tech is very hostile to competition and will to the extent they are able outright forbid it. The only way to actually build competitive platforms that do not push their ideological agenda and circumvent their attempts to stop you is to do what Odysee has done, and even there, they're fighting a case against the SEC as we speak, so it's not like they're being left to simply go about their business.

If you had the ability to relatively risk free assist an NK defector and knew doing so would give you access to large economic reward, why would you choose not to?

Which is another way of saying that trade that might be either can't even be effectively policed by the dystopian state if they want to use it for evading sanctions to the extent they're able without simultaneously shooting themselves in the foot.

If they can't police it effectively all the more reason for more people to do it.

You can store crypto in your head, and you can certainly use it to put together funds which would be helpful to escape.

As I clarified above, I am not promoting state to state white market economic activity. I am promoting peer to peer countereconomic black market activity which cripples the control and power of the closed economy with the express goal of destroying the control and parasitism enabled by the closed economy.

I didn't claim anything about stronger economic ties between the organisational units of the States in question. I was making the exact opposite claim, that you weaken a closed state proportional to the degree of its closure by using countereconomics to erode the control it can directly exert upon its citizenry.

I absolutely agree with you that trade with dystopian hellholes that provide economic resources the rulers of those dystopian hellholes can use to continue with their strategies is counter-productive and that all trade of that kind should to the maximum degree possible, be stopped.

The kind of trade however that is enabled by peer to peer participants all over the world being directly able to trade with each other for goods and services to the extent the rulers of those dystopian hellholes cannot profit from is another thing entirely, and that is the kind of trade that blockchains can enable. That black market trade sets up competitive and progressively independent organisational units not beholden to the dystopian rulers they would otherwise be and directly compromises their economic power.

Ask a soldier in the Venezuelan army what he thinks of the regime, and then ask a Venezuelan software engineer with the skills and experience in demand that would enable him to work remotely for dozens of well paid jobs transacting in crypto all over the world the same question. I guarantee the responses you get will illustrate my point very clearly.