With respect to Seattle's 'urban fires', it is worth remembering that in King county they sprung a '65-10' plan on property owners which effectively kept them from so much as building a treehouse on 65% of their property.  As I remember it.  I'm hardly surprised that there is enough fuel to burn everyone out now.  I know I've a conspiratorial mind, but I have wondered for some time whether 'burning people out' in order to consolidate them to more eco-friendly 'human habitats' is one of the strategies.  Inducing or at least leveraging disasters in order to clear areas of human pests is nothing new.  In my state we had the Vanport floods which cleared certain areas of people who, after the major production associated with WW-II was done, were no longer needed or desired.

It continues to be the strongest hypothesis in my mind that 'man made global warming' is exactly that.  Primarily a figment of imagination with some very useful elements which help achieve some wide reaching goals.  Cramming people into stack-n-pack 'habitats' would be one.  Here's a vid I found which is almost certainly much closer to what life will be like when those who manage the greenies and have them brainwashed about climate change achieve their goal:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY18xJl1WhU  I would love to know what movie the clip starting at around 2:45 is from, BTW, if anyone knows.

What I find most ominous is the recent surge in interest in having the state take over pretty much full control of 'herd immunity'.  There is an unmistakable push toward mandatory vaccines of late.  That is just flat scary.  The idea is clearly to have 'urban islands' surrounded by controlled green space and what transport does happen is primarily via public transportation.  Just as it is only really possible to keep livestock in a feed-lot alive by use of massive amounts of medicine, so would it be densely packed human populations.  Any population which got restive could be very easily controlled simply be witholding the medications needed for them to sustain with their weakened immune systems.

Adios Amigo

'cuz everything one reads after looking for 30 seconds on the internet is totally 100% true, right?


My hypothesis are based on things which are very factual indeed.  It takes contortions like yours and Zwhatever's to come up with alternatives to the hypothesis that cypherdoc best fits the description of 'predatory scammer'.  Observations apart from his Hashfast shilling only lend strength.


I'm not complaining about being victimized in the least.  Cypherdoc has impacted my own financial actions not at all over the years but I feel bad for those who have listened to his bullshit.  And I already knew that investing in mining gear was a loser just from simple basic analysis.  Investing in pie-in-the-sky hypothetical gear at some point in the future is so retarded that I can hardly believe anyone fell for it.  Especially gmax (although he did make some poor decisions related to Mt. Gox IIRC, so it seems that he doesn't exactly have the best judgement in investments/bets at all times.)  Perhaps gmax wanted some sha256 ASIC tech for other purposes than making money mining Bitcoin.  That is the only reason I've ever bought any ASIC gear.

Oh, I'm sorry.

 - Is there any question that cypherdoc accepted money to shill for Hashfast?

 - Is there any question that people who sent money to Hashfast didn't get what they expected in return?

 - Is there any question that some of that money which victims used to control is now controlled by cypherdoc?

No?  Didn't think so. 

Is there any question that Zarathursa is a slimy little fuck?  Let me check the magic 8-ball.  Magic 8-ball says "It's highly likely."  So the jury is still out on that one.

Could you save me the time of looking and provide a link to where you described how and why your analysis was woefully wrong and lots of people lost money a fair bit of which you now control?  I didn't notice such a thing when I skimmed that thread.

Also, how much longer do you think we'll need to wait before you figure out how to 'pay people back' who took your advice and got a shaft up the ass for it?  I mean, surely that wallet with 3000 BTC is sitting there in waiting for you to do so (voluntarily), right?

I was doing something else besides screwing around on bitcointalk.org yesterday.  I formally apologize.  I've no trouble doing so.

I apologize for not realizing that Hashfast actually did eventually get something delivered (apparently.)  I've not researched things enough to figure out whether Hashfast just bought a few of obsolete chips left over from the old days for a few cents and shipped them to fulfill some obligation and help them get by in court.  Doesn't matter since nobody can make a dime one way or another.

As is the case since I got involved, it just makes sense to either buy Bitcoin or sit on cash waiting to do so.  By the laws of economics few if any people are going to make any money mining except in temporary and corner-case scenarios.  Any semi-competent analyst could tell you that (and I have a number of times.)

Naturally it is very possible to make a ton of money scamming people who are not bright enough to see why mining economically futile.  Lots of people have made a ton doing so.  If cypherdoc had publicly informed people of this opportunity to put other people's money into their own pockets I would have some respect for him as a human being.  That he kept it to himself and put ton of other people's money into is own pocket by this means makes it so that I have to respect his ability to correctly read the ecosystem.  It only makes him more of a Lowelife in my book though.

Cypherdoc displays the worst aspects of Libertarianism and none of the good ones.  Big fish scam little fish in a cold hard world and any attempts for the little fish to form schools to mitigate the threat are bad.  At the same time he fully adopts the Socialist line that everyone should be subsidized in order to enjoy the benefits of Bitcoin without paying for them.  Just like most real Socialists he is likely just wishing to fatten up the small fish to they are a more fulfilling mouthful at some point in the future and much easier to catch.

I'm pretty happy to be a little dog if the alternative would entail ripping people off by participating in a mining gear scam involving none-existent and never-to-be-existent hardware.  At least you could have been original and teamed up with Josh and Sonny at BFL.  You probably would have done much better.

I have no more regrets about appropriately balancing my risk according to my analysis over the last 4 years than I would have about choosing tails when the coin came up heads.  Obviously I would have made more money if I had sunk everything into Bitcoin at the time I got involved, but the same could be said in retrospect about any bet.  IIRC, you were pumping money in at $30-ish when waiting 6 months could have gotten you Bitcoin at closer to $2.00, right?  Smooth move Ex Lax.  

As for your 'effectiveness' at getting people to dump gold and run to Bitcoin, I'd say it was marginal at best just looking at the price at present and over the last year and a half.  If you had been even marginally effective, Bitcoin should be in 5-figures by this time.  The only thing more pathetic than someone constantly tooting his own horn is someone who does so in the face of obvious failure which he alone seems blind to.

The only one I can think of who nailed it was ~nagle, and he only mentioned his buying once that I can remember (and then only vaguely.)  It matched perfectly with the point in time when he stopped talking Bitcoin down.

I've long felt that cypherdoc's stance on gold was almost exclusively to shift a small fraction of stacker's hoards into Bitcoin which could make us hodlers a bundle.  It never did and does not now make much sense to risk it all on Bitcoin unless one is pretty hand-to-mouth and doesn't have much to risk anyway.  This makes cypherdoc's advice against a balanced risk strategy shitty and self-serving (though it pales to pimping Hashfast for big shill bucks) and thus I never felt to bad about giving him shit.

I could see gold going significantly lower in dollar terms under a severe deflation where the USD held together (an unlikely combo but possible.)  The catch is that at that point there is a strong likelyhood of 'bail-ins'.  Only then would Bitcoin make sense, but so would physical (which is the only thing I've ever had any interest in.)

Both phyz and BTC, being resistant to counter-party risk, would have obvious advantages in a bail-in scenario.  The trouble with both is that one would find oneself on the wrong end of the pitchforks and 'homogenized' with people who were insider scumbags before 'the event'.  I'll expect that then, just as now, these insider scumbag types will enjoy flexibility and protections denied to simple paranoids like yours truly.

I drew down my BTC supply instead of my PM supply at or near the point when it was at 4-figures.  I've don't believe I've said anything about gold for a long time now, but someone who 'listened to me' over the last few years now could be forgiven based on my history.  That is, informing people that I was buying BTC at the end of 2011 and selling at the end of 2013.  And would think about buying BTC again about 6 months ago IIRC.

Dunno what ever became of ~goat, but he and I seemed to have achieved the same strategy wrt gold and bitcoin in terms of buying and selling.  This contrasts sharply with, say, you (cypherdoc) who always only says to buy BTC and sell gold.  As I say, 'one trick pony'.  You've got a 50% chance of being right which doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to figure out.

I might add that your call to 'buy Hashfast' did work out extraordinarily well...for you and a few other insiders.  Nicely done...so far...we'll have to see how the lawsuits progress before cementing in that conclusion I guess.

Checkpoint.  People are waking up and we crossed the 30/70 threshold...even here on on the defective wording of cypherdoc (Generalissimo, Free Shit Army.)

On the contrary, that is about the only thing I can think of where I agree with Hearn nearly 100%.

That said, it does seem to me that in terms of overall design (which is all I am even vaguely informed enough to critique) 'old school' in the way Hearn seems to have meant it and to me that is a very good thing.  Back in the day, resources of many types were scarce and people had to, by necessity, expend a lot of energy thinking about how to make things efficient.  From what I can tell Satoshi thought a fair bit about some of these things.  In some cases it seems like he had some ideas which were abandoned half way through though.  For instance, the idea of spending all your money and having change returned opens the door for some significant preening but the actually leveraging it to it's potential was something which really never happened.

It is worth note that when the dimension of time is introduced, modern resource availability is not nearly as much of a panacea as it is for someone just trying to get the next release out to a customer or deployment.  Tight and well considered 'old school' designs have a place even in the 'modern' world in some corner-case efforts.  Bitcoin is a classic example of one of these.

s/blast from the past/old school/g

A pool once got around 50% of the mining and fritzed everyone out.  The most obvious and common sense thing large miners could have done was to break apart their 'empire' at least on paper so they could mitigate concerns along these lines going forward.  It's almost inconceivable that this would not have happened.  Cypherdoc and other blatant propagandists studiously ignore this possibility.  What sets cypherdoc (Generalissimo, Free Shit Army) apart is that he continues to rely heavily on charts and graphics which are supposed to somehow prove that mining consolidation is not a threat and is not likely to every be because .

Cypherdoc's work when he now known to be shilling (using the term formally) was pretty basic and obvious.  Even had I discovered the work in real-time rather than after the fact I would have characterized it as so.  He is not known to be shilling for those who seek to bloat Bitcoin at present but his methods are similarly simplistic to the point of being laughable.

I agree that 'bitcoin should be good for coffee' with the caveat that it should be done (in cup-sized quantities) by use of a proxy.  Exactly the type of thing that Blockstream seems to be working on in fact.

Today is worse for me today than the last several.

Distributed crypto-currency solutions have the potential to support 'the masses' no matter what their position in life by taking over certain functions of government when and organized and 'standard' government fails to serve the people.

Bitcoin will hopefully end up being a part of this process, but will fail and will in fact become part of the problem if it is subverted.  The most likely way this subversion would happen would be that it is induced to outgrow itself and centralize.  That concept is the source of my desire to see things 'go slow and with caution' with respect to the blocksize (and other things.)

In other words, it is absolutely the lesser of two evils to reserve the use of Bitcoin itself to those who are positioned to support it in a net-positive manner and plan on Bitcoin being a key element in a foundation upon which solutions which can realistically support disadvantaged people can be built.

To me, and I suspect many others, the 'restriction' in native used of Bitcoin via fees or anything else is pretty much exactly the opposite of 'screw the masses'.  It's just that there is an added layer of complexity which might make it look that way to the casual observer.

Finally got around to listening to it while having my morning coffee (which tends to last until afternoon and was not bought with BTC.)

I'd say your suspicion is likely correct.  The part I was listening to when I pecked out this note was the guy explaining away the 'privatized gains/socialized losses' in the mainstream system as being associated with spreading the cost of theft and fraud around.  The guy completely neglected what I suspect to be the major cost in mainstream-land which would be the cost of spying on and regulating individual users at the behest of the govt.  There are good reasons to ignore this cost from these guys perspective because they expect to channel Bitcoin into an evolutionary path where it does this only better.  Whenever I hear someone make a big deal about standard Libertarian principles but subtly leave out large and important blocks I get suspicious.

Sometimes.

The guy comes back and we drop down into the $270's.  Go figure.

Each of these is neutral reality to deal with, or great things that we should be thankful for.  Mostly the latter.  I'll defer on enumerating a reason for each at the moment.

What I will say is that when a toilet is getting clogged one can usually tell that something is up before the problem finally comes to a head and water threatens to overflow with turds and toilet paper and the like floating inches away from the rim.  At that point one breaks out the plunger and gives the the thing a few good plunges.  The obstruction cleared, the water, shit, soggy shit-stained toilet paper, vanishes never to be seen again.

This happy solution works when the pipes are in good shape but the system was simply not designed for certain kinds of abuse.  A more significant (but still solvable) problem exists when there are infrastructure failures.  Happily Bitcoin has very clear pipes (complements of the simplicity and 1MB setting) and simply needs a quick fix to a problem brought about by kids playing around and not using the system appropriately.  The solution is to give the kids a slap on the ass, a talking to, and something else to play with.  The distributed crypto-currency ecosystem has evolved to where both of these remedial activities are easily accomplished.