:-(


Your conclusion (“nobody knows this”) is correct, but your line of reasoning is not.  Satoshi inserted into the coinbase of Block 0 the famous newspaper headline, “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”—a real headline about real-world events, from a real-world newspaper of which there are extant original hardcopies.  In the overall circumstance, this is strong evidence that Satoshi did not premine anything before 3 January 2009.



Furthermore, Hal attested that he did some mining starting around “block 70-something”.  Thus, there were multiple known miners almost straight from the beginning—and the software was published and announced in well-known cryptography venues (starting with a mailing list that I myself used to subscribe to and read regularly), so anyone could have been mining anonymously.

But that is beside the point here.

The user who claimed that “we all know he has close to 1 Million of bitcoins” is spreading an urban legend.  I could excuse a newbie who just heard something dumb in the mass-media; but there is no excuse for a 2014-registered account to be spreading this trash.  Nobody but Satoshi knows how many coins Satoshi mined.  There is a very large quantity of 2009-era coins apparently/probably from a unique source, the so-called “Patoshi” coins; the technical evidence suggests that they are probably not Satoshi’s, although nobody can prove that, either.

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Unfortunately, that is probably a popular belief.  People often project onto others their own desires to be a celebrity, like a movie star.  And this type of fallacious thinking opens the way for imposters like CSW:  Imposters exploit the widespread assumption that of course, if Satoshi is alive, he will reveal himself!  


Good point, but...

So, why did you include the type of contact information that these types of scammers seek to advertise—which they often advertise by slipping into other discussions, while pretending it’s not theirs?

That was naïve at best.  I suggest that you edit OP to redact the e-mail address.

An excellent question.  Dr. Back alluded to identity management in the above-quoted post, where he essentially referred to Zerocoin as how things would work in an “ideal world”.  I suggest reading that old 2013 discussion at length, to avoid retreading talk about problems that remain unsolved after nine years.  People just keep rediscovering the same old problems, while forgetting what has already been long known about potential solutions.

Looking far beyond that old discussion:  It terrifies me that as an ultimate form of whitelisting, it is entirely possible to design an all-KYC, fully permissioned blockchain system that uses zero-knowledge proofs to avoid ever publicly revealing any transactional information whatsoever.  Worse:  Such a system could use zero-knowledge proofs to enforce identity-based permissions in transactions that are fully anonymous between counterparties.  That sounds like a contradiction only to those who don’t understand what zero-knowledge proofs can achieve.  Worst:  There are projects already working on building such systems.

From the perspective of blockchain analytics, such a system would have privacy superior to any Bitcoin mixer system, superior to Monero, and infinitely superior to Wasabi:  The blockchain is totally opaque, with theoretically optimal privacy.  But it would obviously be terrible for privacy in a meaningful sense—and it would be terrible for freedom.  Thinking aloud here, I know that it is possible with today’s technology to construct such a system so that among other interesting features, governments (or banks) could switch off a dissident’s ability to use money.  Now, try obtaining food and shelter when you cannot use money!  The way that he has embraced taint tracing and coin blacklisting, I presume that nopara73 would find this system acceptable.

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I am pessimistic about the future.  Such things cannot be fought by “educating the public”:  The majority of people in any society are always stupid, apathetic, and myopic.  And please make no mistake about what I said:  People problems cannot be solved solely by technological solutions.  “Cypherpunks write code” is, in my own opinion, a call to create accomplished facts:  Fait accompli is the most persuasive political argument in the world.

Once upon a time, the sudden existence of PGP derailed then-Senator Joe Biden’s anti-encryption bill.  By the same token (so to speak), Satoshi Nakamoto created something that no modern government would have allowed to exist:  A totally permissionless, uncontrollable, unfreezable, irrevocable, unstoppable new form of money.  “Cypherpunks write code.”  Out of nowhere, this new thing just suddenly existed.  Thirteen years later, those who wish for a cashless dystopia are struggling to put the genie back in the bottle.  Such is the power of accomplished facts!

Alas, Bitcoin also created a transparent global ledger as an accomplished fact.  In the essential sense of permissionlessness, Bitcoin gave us new freedom—but ever since then, anyone who wants privacy has been struggling against accomplished facts.  And I must emphasize this:  Bitcoin has a transparent global ledger, only because Satoshi did not know any other way to create a decentralized system.  He was caught on the horns of a dilemma between DigiCash, a centralized system with theoretically optimal privacy (statistical hiding), and the decentralized, un-private system that he actually made.  He tried to find another way.

OP of a thread in 2010:
Satoshi’s reply:

The existence of Bitcoin thereafter motivated a new flurry of cryptographic research.  The initial breakthroughs came in 2013–2014; that generated a brief flurry of interest in the Bitcoin community, including from several prominent Bitcoin Core developers.  Thereafter, the state of the art has rapidly advanced.  Most Bitcoiners today are unfamiliar with this field; but I have followed it closely since 2013.  Only now, as of 2022, I am ready to declare the technology mature for general usage.  Among other criteria:  We now have zero-knowledge privacy systems with no trusted setup—the big breakthrough for that came in 2019, and needed another few years of research and development to reach production quality.

Upon the foregoing, tadamichi, I may properly answer your question:  In Bitcoin, we currently have a system where, as a practical matter, exchanges and other services cannot use whitelists to enforce the purpose of taint tracing.  It would hurt their businesses too much.  That is an accomplished fact.  We have the advantage, but we must defend it.

If Bitcoin were overthrown in the market by a system that is designed from scratch with built-in KYC whitelisting, and which advertises better “privacy” due to an opaque blockchain, then all coins would be under such controls, and a service would suffer no disadvantages by simply going along with the system.  To fight such a possibility, Bitcoin needs to get ahead of events and become permissioness, decentralized money with strong privacy and perfect fungibility.

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Bitcoin is freedom.  There is an old proverb that free speech belongs to those who own a printing press.  How much worse is a system in which the financial system can be used to starve anyone deemed undesirable, simply by denying the use of money?  That’s the system that we have today with banks, payment cards, Paypal, and other entities that are notorious for enforcing financial censorship even to prohibit legal expressions—anything from expressions deemed too sexy, to expressions deemed politically incorrect.  Now, I shudder when I learn about how China already has a totally cashless financial system—and some European countries are moving fast in the same direction.  It is a part of a design for the most inescapable tyranny that has ever been conceived to the human mind.

In this aspect, Bitcoin partially, imperfectly restores the default status of the majority of financial transactions throughout all history, until very recently:  Permissionless.  Old-fashioned cash transactions were permissionless—and they were also untraceable.  A Bitcoin upgrade with theoretically optimal zero-knowledge privacy and fungibility, i.e. a new Zerocoin, would restore what we had for millennia until, starting less than a half-century ago, new technologies began to allow for the permissioning and tracing of financial transactions en masse.

Answer to the titular question:  No.


Not everyone is so susceptible to groupthink and simplistic labels as a decision-making process.  Moreover, anyone who thinks that 1 BTC is “more precious” than 32,151 XAU is just plain bonkers.

If you disagree, then I invite you to sell me gold for BTC right now, at an exchange rate of 32,151 XAU (1 metric ton of gold) per 1 BTC.  If you can’t come up with 32,151 XAU, then I will be happy to buy 32.151 XAU for 0.001 BTC.  To avoid delivery overhead, we can complete the transaction in cypherspace by trading Tether Gold for BTC or some form of wrapped BTC.  This is a serious offer, although I may need to apply some limitations to large orders based on how much BTC I can come up with, how fast.

Oh, no deal?  Why not?  90+% of people here should take the deal, yes?

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Bitcoin is an asset that by its nature will appeal to a certain subset of goldbugs:  Technologically sophisticated goldbugs with a background in cryptography.  Likewise, gold is an asset that will appeal to a certain subset of Bitcoiners:  Historically and economically educated Bitcoiners.  In my opinion, the two assets are complementary.  A Venn diagram of their respective desirable characteristics would have overlap in the middle, on “sound money” and “freedom-preserving” characteristics; but it would be disjoint elsewhere.

Goldbugs who don’t understand Bitcoin will assume it’s a fad.  Bitcoiners who don’t understand gold will trash-talk it, as I see sometimes in the speculation threads.  But a Venn diagram of Bitcoiners and goldbugs should have significant overlap.

Knock off the condescension from your state of ignorance.  I am pretty sure that most people calling out a scam here are perfectly well aware of that.  Are you aware that that only happened because after an intensive, expensive, years-long investigation, the U.S. Federal police found that the persons holding the coins had a massive failure of basic opsec?  Their private keys were floating around in the clouds, LOL.  That is tantamount to observing that if a hacker steals coins, the hacker can also get hacked to steal the coins back.  N.b. that the police did not and could not undo any Bitcoin transactions.

The fact remains:  Bitcoin transactions are irrevocable.  Stolen coins cannot be recovered.  Without exception, anyone offering a service to “recover” stolen bitcoins is a scammer.

Satoshi dumped Bitcoin right after Gavin announced he was going to the CIA.

There are also some leaked e-mails between various other parties that were passed around on pastebin awhile back, which seemed to be relevant in various ways.  Sorry, no link handy.

I am almost beginning to pity Taleb.  Doesn’t he realize that giving a keynote for a swindler who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto makes him look like either a fool, a lunatic, or a liar?  What’s next?  Will Taleb endorse a psychic medium who claims to be channelling the ghost of Grand Duchess Anastasia?  Will Taleb announce that Uri Geller really can bend spoons with the power of his mind?

It is a good analogy, and it will probably be the subject of an Anastasia-style thread after I gather sufficient information on this.  A few decades ago, some credentialed “scientists” suffered severe embarrassment after they endorsed some of Geller’s claims.  A quotable new nullianism:  Bitcoin needs a James Randi moment!  If and when the public, and especially the intellectual press realize how ridiculous Taleb made himself here, Taleb will be a laughingstock.

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Thanks for the information, bitmover.  I will need to look into this more, a bit later.  (Lulz, Youtube videos are inconvenient for me to watch in my high-security setup.)


I don’t want to base an argument on one slide here; but pending whenever I get around to watching the video, I must make a general remark:

A philosopher examines the unexamined assumptions that form the premises and the framing of arguments.

Satoshi invented Bitcoin as a decentralized system, for reasons that can be best understood and interpreted objectively by knowing the history of Cypherpunks, and of prior cryptographic money projects.  (Subjectively, the people who most intuitively understand this tend to be those who have been personally harmed by banks and by the “mainstream” financial system.)  Now that it’s here, people tend to apply to Bitcoin whatever interpretation they desire.  The result is often an intellectual sleight-of-hand.

For instance, I was recently disturbed at an argument amongst some security professionals and academic cryptographers which reframes Bitcoin in terms of building a better payment system.  Thesis:  Cryptocurrency is evil, and it is useless as a payment system, because Bitcoin transactions are irrevocable, and there is no lawful override to freeze money.  Rebuttal in “defense” of cryptocurrency:  Cryptocurrency transactions can be made revocable, and can even be designed to give governments lawful access to freeze transactions.  See, we can have all the benefits of cryptocurrency as a payment system without Bitcoin’s flaw of irrevocable, unstoppable transactions!  Oh, and by the way, POS is great.

Palm, meet forehead.

In the above-depicted slide, Taleb is obviously seeking some objective, “transactional flexibility”, which was not the principal purpose of Bitcoin’s decentralization.  (That is putting it charitably; the slide makes it look like Taleb just doesn’t know what he is talking about.)  Whatever argument he thereupon raises is irrelevant:  He is standing on premises that disagree with Bitcoin’s premises, seeking ends that are not Bitcoin’s ends.


If someone chooses willingly to associate with Coingeek, then I will accept as authoritative Coingeek’s quotes of whatever that person said.  So—Taleb really is promoting BSV, in the sense of at least tacitly endorsing BSV.  The gravamen here is unmistakable:  In that quote, in substantial essence, Taleb claims that BSV has the potential to replace BTC.

I don’t use KYC exchanges, so my objection to FTX is mainly that they are effectually anti-Bitcoin.  Its founder wants to shove the POS scam down all our throats.

Mine is not a typical “Bitcoin maxi” position.  I used to respect Sam Bankman-Fried.  I disagreed with him about many issues, but I tend to respect highly intelligent people.  Moreover, I actually appreciated his promotion of defi—that will shock some of my friends; yes, really:  More permissionless!  No KYC!  More DEXes!  As a C coder who hates EthVM, I’ve had some fun writing on-chain programs on Solana, the SBF/FTX favoured chain.  Overall, I regarded SBF as a formidable financial shark who just might do something for the greater good—maybe.

Then, I saw this:

https://archive.ph/RN7Jo (Archival link to avoid paywall for https:// www. ft. com /content/02cad9b8-e2eb-43d4-8c18-2e9d34b443fe.)


(Why is it that they are all suddenly pushing in the same direction?)

A few  years ago, I believed that POS was just a flawed consensus system that would obviously be favoured by whales.  But it is shaping up to be an attack on Bitcoin—an attack on Bitcoin’s freedom.  As I studied it and gained some experience with it, I also came better to understand how deep and deceptive the financial manipulation of POS really is.  It is intrinsically corrupt.  POS is plutocracy, a sham of fake-decentralization that centralizes everything under the control of the whales.

All in all, although I will not categorically condemn all POS projects in absolute terms, anyone who tries to push POS into Bitcoin is attacking Bitcoin:  I will respond accordingly.

SBF is also bringing to cryptocurrency bailouts and moral hazard, a concept implicitly deprecated by the message in Bitcoin’s genesis block.  Well, I guess that getting rekt in liquidation is only for the little people:  Corrupt whales who undermined the BTC market with giant scams get bailed out, so that they can do it again.

If FTX is so incompetent with security that they offer SMS 2FA and then screw it up, maybe that’s an additional reason to avoid them.

No.


Is OP intentionally spamming for a scam here, or just terrifically naïve in a way that accidentally promotes a scam?

Would a newbie inquiring in good faith so smoothly slip in this breathless testimonial in the middle of an ostensible question, and conveniently just so happen to include a bad link plus a scammer’s contact address where desperate newbies can get scammed? 🤔

Local rules:  I will delete anything that I dislike.  But unlike in most of my thread, sigspammers are welcome to bump this so that the Satoshi quote can compete with the spam megathread with a factually incorrect ahistorical claim in OP.  Muahahaha!  :-)

It’s sad when people who don’t understand Bitcoin try to explain it to those who have been in it for much longer.  It is repulsive to see one of Bitcoin’s founding principles smeared as “an idea built by influencers and speculators in the last years”.


I am not citing Satoshi as an authority, but rather, to rebut the ridiculous misinformation that Bitcoin’s anti-inflationary policy was “an idea built by influencers and speculators in the last years.”  That is wrong in fact.  Not a matter of opinion.

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Correct information now gets its own thread, to avoid being buried in a spam megathread.  This issue is too important to let correct information be buried by the low-value posts of sigspammers.  If you want to complain about something, complain about paid signature advertising; and lobby the Bitcoin Forum administration to ban paid signatures.  Are those the purpose of Bitcoin, or a later idea by something tantamount to “influencers and speculators”?

Wrong.  It’s sad when people who don’t understand Bitcoin try to explain it to those who have been in it for much longer.  It is repulsive to see one of Bitcoin’s founding principles smeared as “an idea built by influencers and speculators in the last years”.


I am not citing Satoshi as an authority, but rather, to rebut the ridiculous misinformation that Bitcoin’s anti-inflationary quality was “an idea built by influencers and speculators in the last years.”  That is wrong in fact.  Not a matter of opinion.

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That, too.  So...?

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Why am I wasting my time tossing out correct information to be buried in a spam megathread?  Sigh...

Edit:  Problem fixed:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5408084.0

None of our business.


Bitcoin is much bigger than this forum nowadays.  In particular, most development work happens off-forum; there are some leading Bitcoin Core developers who don’t even have forum accounts, insofar as I am aware.  Satoshi could follow Bitcoin’s progress just fine, without ever even viewing this forum—unless, of course, he desires to read my posts.  :-)


To the contrary:  Satoshi Nakamoto is culturally forbidden from ever again using his own forum.

Second mistake, pointed out by others here:  Using SMS for 2FA.

First mistake:  Using FTX.

To be clear, I have more questions than answers here.  I raised this thread primarily as a question.  What happened?  Why?  What is the real story with Taleb and Faketoshi?  And why is nobody talking about this, in most of the discussions about Taleb’s attacks on Bitcoin?  (Skimming and searching through multiple threads about Taleb, I found only two brief mentions of this—both quoted in OP.)

Without spending time I cannot not spare, I can’t seem to find much information on what Taleb was doing there, or why.  What is excruciatingly clear:  Taleb gave away his own credibility to a cryptocurrency scam—to the worst cryptocurrency scam!  And he did it in a way that clearly shows that his anti-Bitcoin arguments are intellectually dishonest.

I do not know if or what BSV paid him, or if he is “promoting BSV” in the sense of recommending it as an investment.  Please don’t read too much into OP.  Of course, I would be interested in information about such questions.

I do know that his appearing at the Coingeek conference and hobnobbing with Faketoshi shows Taleb’s credibility, his character, and the nature of his wild smear-attacks against Bitcoin.

Taleb appeared at a conference run by a known cryptocurrency scammer, alongside an imposter who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto.  And nobody is talking about this.  WTF!?


So did I.  I agreed with some of his propositions, and disagreed with others.  I didn’t so closely follow his work; he is only one public intellectual competing in a crowded space.  But I thought that he had some interesting ideas—and yes, he was respectable.  I never even imagined that he would be the type to lend his credibility to an imposter running a cryptocurrency scam.  It is shocking.

1 BTC = 1 BTC.

Why are you disappointed?  What, did you expect that 1 BTC would somehow become worth >1 BTC?

Coin taint and blacklisting are what break Bitcoin’s fungibility.  BTC is an NFT:  A non-fungible token, due to coin taint and blacklisting.  The subset of Bitcoiners who refuse to acknowledge this are either living in a Reality Distortion Field, or still under the influence of the blockchain transparency fetishization with which Mike Hearn, et al. poisoned Bitcoin early on.  I identify a lack of fungibility as the biggest long-term economic threat to Bitcoin.

Fungibility is both necessary and sufficient for privacy—and vice versa.  Attaining one gives the other; neither can be attained without the other.  Some people get this; e.g., in a post from 2013 titled, “Re: Coin Validation misunderstands fungibility and could destroy bitcoin”:


Dr. Back, an authentic Cypherpunk, has also given speeches on why fungibility needs to be assured cryptographically.^*  (Transcript of Adam Back on fungibility and privacy.)

Maths, not law.  When coins are anonymous and indistinguishable, then Bitcoin is no longer an NFT.

(* Notable:  Under the heading, “Fungibility? Why would I care?”, ChipMixer’s FAQ quotes from and links to the above-linked transcript.  Their understanding of these issues speaks well of them.)

Wasabi has embraced coin taint and coin blacklisting based on anti-privacy surveillance:  The exact things which destroy BTC fungibility, which thus threaten Bitcoin’s long-term economic viability.  And now, nopara73 claims that Wasabi restores Bitcoin’s fungibility?  That is so audacious a lie, I am mulling whether it’s time to start with the scam tags.

Wasabi also uses inferior technology.  CoinJoin was clever when it was invented; but CJ and any type of coin-mixing scheme have since been made obsolete by advances in the field of cryptography.  I wish not hereby to diverge into a tangent about that; I am intending to raise it elsewhere, as I prepare for my own campaign to get Bitcoin some fungibility.  Suffice it must for now benevolently to scare BTC holders where it hurts:  Vitalik understands fungibility.  While you all aren’t looking, while you are playing nonsense games with coin-mixing schemes, Ethereum has more or less quietly been building up the infrastructure for optimal fungibility (= privacy).  And so has Solana—a prospect which should properly frighten both BTC holders and ETH holders!

Wasabi’s attempt to abuse the fungibility issue for their marketing of a coin-taint service is a bald-faced swindle.


Privacy = fungibility.  Fungibility = privacy.  See above.  Dr. Back explained it well in his 2014 talk on the subject.


The reality is that Bitcoin isn’t fungible.  It is not fungible, because exchanges and other services (including Wasabi!) can do this.  Although I applaud your efforts to encourage a boycott of these anti-fungibility exchanges and services, ultimately, the only way to stop them is to assure that they cannot do what they are doing.


Strongly agreed.  But the problem cannot be fixed, if people can say that one coin is not like another.

Cypherpunks write code.  Trust the maths.  Preaching against coin taint will ultimately be as effective as preaching that big banks should be honest and decent.  Bitcoin was invented on the cypherpunk principle that you don’t change the world just by talking:  You change the world by creating something that fixes the problem, as an accomplished fact.

Your topic title, “Hiring and firing in the Bitcoin space: Why?”, is incorrect.  I have fixed it appropriately.

Most of these are purely shitcoin companies:


(LOL, layoffs at Coinbase, Opensea, Blockfi, Crypto.com... Why is this posted in Bitcoin Discussion?)

So are some of these (and others are more or less Bitcoiny), so I guess that shitcoins aren’t yet dead:


Solana, FTX, and Circle are competently managed shitcoin businesses.  Solana even has some merits, and some good projects in its ecosystem; it is not entirely a cesspool of worthless shitcoinery.  Bitcoiners beware.  Solana’s and FTX’s founders both recently dropped their masks to reveal an actively anti-Bitcoin agenda.  And they are not stupid.  Writing them off as irrelevant shitcoiners would be stupid.  (Similarly as with Vitalik.)  Circle is a USG-approved proxy for the worst shitcoin Ponzi scam ever invented, so of course it is doing fine.

This is so anti-Bitcoiny that it is pretty much off-topic in Bitcoin Discussion, unless the topic is retitled as a warning to Bitcoin newbies:


So, scam sites designed to swindle people for BTC got into financial trouble?  Who cares?

Local rules:  Extreme authoritarian censorship, at my whim.  :-)

Pre-edit archive:  web.archive.org.

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Original text of OP, from 2022-07-29:

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Transplanted from a reply that I was writing on an old thread elsewhere:

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on July 25, 2021, 04:19:44 PM

This will be the same Taleb who gave credibility to the known scammer and fraudster CSW by appearing on stage with him? I would maybe take his opinions on bitcoin with a grain mountain of salt.

I found this thread by searching for information on Taleb—specifically, information about Taleb and Coingeek.  The only two posts on this forum’s (ridiculously unreliable) search connecting those two keywords are [0] a post in the BSV thread by hv_—a known BSV shill, and evidently a Taleb fan; and, [1] this exchange from the Wall Observer:

Quote from: cAPSLOCK on May 27, 2021, 03:14:38 PM

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on May 27, 2021, 02:16:17 PM

Coingeek Conference...

Calvin Ayre owns this shit. Isn't it obvious who the speakers would be?

It's a non-event. The party afterwards could be interesting though. Must be lots of pretty girls there, probably of the barely-legal variety, given Ayre's preference for young things.

Yeah.  It's just sad to see how far Taleb has fallen from reality.

What actually happened?  Why are people talking about Taleb on many threads, and not about Taleb’s association with a blatant scam operation run by Calvin Ayre?

Elsewhere on the Web, I find:

• A 2021-07-03 article in Forbes.  (Archive.org link for your convenience, because Forbes is blocking Tor.)
• A 2021-08-14 tweet by Saifedean.com.  Although I cannot opine either way on his allegations in that thread, this is quotable:  “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad at bitcoin.”  The following graphic is thereby provided, inter alia:
  
  

Enough time spent searching.  Someone who knows more about this, please provide details!

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Quote from: OROBTC on July 25, 2021, 05:07:29 PM

Still it is important to remember that Taleb is very respected in quantitative finance, probability and related fields.  He popularized the term "Black Swan".  He wrote four respected books on these subjects.

I would, and do, respect and keep up (to the extent I can) with Taleb and his thinking.  He may be very wrong on BTC, but he is worth listening to...

I have an intolerant personality—a quality that Taleb himself would appreciate.  However, for a proudly intolerant person, I have an almost unlimited tolerance on two interrelated fronts:  Intellectual tolerance, and tolerance of the personal foibles of competent software developers.

The former is necessitated by my being a freethinker:  Unless it’s waste-of-time trash, I will read anything by anybody!  It is also required by my free-speech activism:  I really will defend people’s practical ability to say things I disagree with, even things that I hate.  (Let’s not talk about “rights”.  A theoretical, legalistic “right” is useless, if Big Tech, big banks, or other “private, non-government” parties can silence you or starve you; on the flipside, a lack of legal rights is irrelevant in a cypherpunk world, where the law is a dead letter!)  The latter is merely a matter of being a meritocratic technologist:  I generally don’t care who you are, or what your irrelevant opinions may be, if you write the best code.  In the context of software development, especially the open-source world, best code equals respect.

Now, by analogy, consider this:  Should I tolerate a cryptographic software developer who openly supports the authors of maliciously backdoored cryptographic code?  And isn’t his own code now worse than worthless—a negative-value level of distrusted?

He is materially advancing a fraud.  It is wetware malicious meme-coding.  For Taleb to appear at a Coingeek conference run by Ayre and to help burnish Faketoshi’s reputation by association is exactly analogous to a cryptographic software developer boosting a known purveyor of backdoored crypto code.  Henceforth, his product shall be consigned to /dev/null.

Taleb is an accessory to identity theft.  Either that is intentional, or he is wantonly and willfully reckless.  Either way, this is so grossly dishonest of him that if he were a university student, he should be expelled for academic dishonour.  Food for thought.

Taleb’s effectual promotion of a fraud even raises a suspicion of what else he may have done in his long career.  I note that Taleb has suffered prior accusations of dishonesty, which were hotly disputed.  A more searching review may be warranted.

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Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on July 25, 2021, 04:19:44 PM

I will also publicly commit to buying every bitcoin anyone ever wants to sell at a price of 0.01 cents each. Therefore, bitcoin can now never reach $0, since there the minimum price anyone can ever sell bitcoin for is 0.01 cents. There. I have refuted his "irrefutable" claim.

You may have competition.  I heard somewhere that Dr. Adam Back, an authentic Cypherpunk, has a buy order for 21,000,000 BTC @ $0.01 on the books on an exchange somewhere.  Sorry, no link handy; and I didn’t confirm it.  But I would be surprised if it weren’t true.  It requires only $210,000, and the dollars are not actually spent unless some or all of the order is hit.  That is a lot of money to me, but a relatively small amount for any successful businessman.

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on July 25, 2021, 04:19:44 PM

If you think that everything which could potentially be worth zero in the future is worth zero now, then I invite you to wire all your fiat to my bank account immediately.

BSV theoretically has negative value; but if someone wants to give me some freebie BSV, I will happily accept it so that I can sell it and buy Bitcoin.

Taleb’s career as a public intellectual and ephemeral scribbler may have a future value of zero, but it is apparently worth non-negligible money in the present.

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P.S., there is one Taleb essay that I can hereby heartily recommend despite a few little flaws:  The one to which I linked above, “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority”.  (Archive.org link, because Taleb is a childish brat who sometimes deletes his writings, suddenly makes all of his tweets private, etc.)  Read “The Most Intolerant Wins”, ponder it, and apply it here!

Always verify digital signatures!  I said “signed,” so I signed my words.  To extract the PGP-signed statement:


Please feel free to copy and share—although unfortunately, many services will strip the signed statement from the image metadata.

The original text of OP is now moved to Post #2, with my apologies to those whose quote-links are now slightly off.