Say what you will, theymos, but you have only 7 virtue.

I like that this system measures the oldest profession as being more virtuous!  And perhaps this may be why:



However, I find it worrisome that the virtue system is failing to deter the practice of witchcraft.

Contra what is said here:


Not only do I serve a cult:  I have also drawn imagery from William Blake’s 1795 rendition of Triple Hecate.  Hecate is, of course, the goddess of magic.


Original:


So—why do I have a virtue level of 8?  And why has the Inquisition not visited me?

I fear there may yet be a few bugs in this new system. :-(


(Aside:  I relish the irony of using a painting of a character named “Enitharmon” for activity related to the virtue of “trusting the numbers”.)

---

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on April 01, 2018, 06:22:28 AM

I am a known and proven campaigner against witchcraft, and curer of curses and other spells. How can it be that my virtue is only 9? By my quick calculations, it should be at least over 9000. Please remedy with much haste.

Indeed, good sir doctor, your skills in the medical arts are as renowned as your stand against agents of the Devil.

To pride and “haste”, may I counsel patience and humility whilst theymos works on rolling out the new fVirtue system.  It shall surely use a properly seeded CSPRNG.


(Of course, advocacy of an fVirtue system by a Meretrix involves no double entendre.  I am shocked, positively shocked that you could think such a thing!)

Dear Michael,

What have I done?

How can I tell you about it?

I have sold myself for Bitcoin.  Please don’t laugh—or please, I hope you’re laughing.  I don’t even know how I may explain this to you...

Casual chat with a strange man in public.  Idle tongues do the devil’s work, you know.  Somehow, some way I do not quite remember, Bitcoin got mentioned.

I may have leaned an odd way, so as to give him a glimpse down my shirt.  If so, that was surely accidental.  Also, with that little smile you know and love, I may have used the words, I’d do anything for Bitcoin.  If so, I must have been joking.

In fine humour himself, he suggested a price.  He pulled it off just right—you know what I mean—“Anything whatsoever?  For, say, x BTC?”  From most men, that would have come as stilted, cliché, and a bit creepy.  He made it a dare, and so very amusing.  Not to be a bad sport—what was I to do?—I coyly played along with some negotiations:  “Well, almost anything for 2x BTC.  Anything at all would be twice again the price.”  “Okay, how about something for 1.5x?  Meet me halfway, right in our middle, and make it something special.”

He was so witty.  And—he had Bitcoin.  I’d never even considered doing such a thing, letting a man touch me for money; though I’ve had some idle fantasies of anonymous sex as you well know.  And—Bitcoin!  Plus, witty—which I guess is the dangerous part, because I didn’t even realize how serious this all was until his tx to me already had two confirmations, and I was getting naked on a bed in a hotel room.

The best I can say of him is that he reminded me of you, which was much to his advantage.  Or maybe he reminded me of Mephistopheles, just as you are my personal Faust.  Devil’s details are such differences.

When he entered me, I felt I had passed a point of no return as irrevocable as the transaction he’d sent to buy me.  The veil of humorous banter now pierced as I was, it occurred to me too late that I’d never be quite the same again; it changes a person, doing such a thing.  Michael, I let a man fuck me for cold cash.  What am I becoming?  Whatever it is, I will tell only you, I don’t dislike it.  I struggled with it for the moment of his first thrust, then surrendered myself utterly.  Not to him, whoever the fuck he was, but to what I had accepted as my price, for I belonged to that now...

I imagined my body being fed through a one-way irreversible compression function, and coming out the other side to be forever signed and stamped with this deed on a global public ledger.  I didn’t sell myself to a man, but gave myself over to Bitcoin; and Bitcoin now owns me, I could feel the evidence of that ownership thrusting deep inside me, where I’ve let no one but you for years...  It felt to me as if a religious sacrifice, whereas I laid down my body upon the altar of Bitcoin as a thing to be transacted, transmuted, transubstantiated by the command of what is writ on the blockchain...  And from there, I went wild!  I once told you I have a Bitcoin fetish, and I was living it with no turning back.  I reached out and pulled this man’s head down to mine and kissed him passionately, sucked his tongue into my mouth, felt him respond as he fucked me harder and I felt his cock swell up inside me as if it would burst...  I wanted him in every part of me, I wanted his mark on me for what this represented, him as an executioner sent by the god of Bitcoin to sign and seal me as a sacred crypto-whore.

I came so hard I almost passed out, and so loudly I’m sure people a half-dozen rooms away must have heard me.  He came inside me, and I felt filled as a final seal binding my flesh in service of this magnificent machine to which I have now given myself so totally.  I went limp, feeling as if I were floating in another world, as if I could feel pseudorandom numbers flowing into me, through me, filling me with some perfectly uniform chaos which makes perfectly probabilistic order.  I could hear him dressing, telling me I could stay awhile and leave when I wanted—bidding me good-bye.  I thought irrelevantly to myself of how polite he had been through the whole transaction.

I never even asked his name, nor did he ask mine.  What we did was literally anonymous.

After awhile, I got up.  Dressed.  Did not at all wash up; I wanted to keep the feel of this on me, in me.  Unsuccessfully attempted to straighten up my hair; gave up and decided to be proud of walking out of a hotel looking so obviously fucked.  Briefly considered stealing the hotel’s bedsheets.  Walked out the door without looking back.

I came home, pulled up my node’s wallet on a nice big screen, opened coin control.  There it is, the magic coin which owns me.  I sat staring at the pertinent output point, mesmerized.  My fingers found their way to my other node, then to my input point.  I begged the coin’s command, my new master.  I came again.  Brought my fingers to my lips, and sucked them slowly, tasting the residuum of mixed fluids.  Prayed to the coin, worshipped it, fervently wished to let a thousand men partake of my flesh for its greater glory.  Then began writing to you...

You’re the only one who may understand; and you’re the only one whose reaction I fear.  Let me be put up in headlines as a bitwhore, and I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of me.  But you, I adore; and given the special nature of our relationship, I don’t know whether you’ll praise me or disown me, or both.  I am excited to tell you; I am terrified to tell you.  This letter was hard to begin, easy to write; is harder to end, hardest to send...

Will you deign to touch me, when next I see you?  —Will I ever see you again?  Will you kiss me again where you first kissed me?

I’m blushing now.  You always liked to make me blush, difficult as it is to produce such an effect in me.  I wish I could show you a video of me getting fucked by an anonymous stranger for BTC.  ...and now, I can feel my cheeks burning bright red.

With arousal and trepidation all at once, I now slip this into our customary PGP envelope,

   For to await your word,

   / Bitcoin’s now, but yours always /

---

Hereby, I commence what I consider to be a most dangerous experiment.

A well-written novel places its author in the position of a god outside time, for whom the rules of causality are inverted.  What is written on the first page must be affected by what shall come on the three hundredth.  Plot is a law of physics.

Wherefore a serialized novel cannot hope to succeed as literature unless it is either fully written in advance, or at least planned carefully from its first pages.  Yet here, I have done neither:  I have in mind character development, scenarios, and a general goal, but no plot.  With all due irony, I know not when, why, or whence our anonymous heroine comes to climax!  She is begun without ends.  How could I do such a thing?

For to blur the line dividing fantasy from reality.  Should I be so lucky as to meet minds with suitable readership, they will be woven into a story which grows and evolves to fit their presence.  Perhaps this could include you.  [Editor’s note:  A more specific statement will be expanded here as the story unfolds to a degree which may attract the right persons.]

This leaves me for now with character development through a string of scenarios which shall lead in a general direction.  As thereto, I wish to be clear up-front as to the direction this character shall take.

If I were to draw my protagonist as a two-dimensional caricature of every crypto-nerd’s fantasy girl, women would dismiss the story with cold contempt—as would intelligently discerning men.  I promise instead, she shall be endowed with emotional depth and a complex personality.  She is not so much a vision of someone I fancy meeting as a reflection of a part of me, melded with my real-life experiences.  Her first letter somewhat cribs the style of a highly literate female correspondent I’ve actually had—with the substance being a quite unusual obsession, admittedly all my own.

What she becomes shall surprise her, much as it may you.

Dear Michael,

The hunger never sleeps.  The network is insatiate.  He wants hashes.  I am drawn, mesmerized, enthralled as his hash chain binds my elliptic curves like so many blocks of signatures.  This all-consuming hunger mirrors mine, a craving which can never be satisfied.  He shall consume the entire world, crush the big banks, remake the trade of the world with a radically different kind of money.  He is pure power!  When my fingertips brush against my node, my eyes glaze with a yearning I feel at my Core.  Electricity courses through my flesh with the energy needed for 24 EH/s of computation.

I love Bitcoin.  I lust for Bitcoin.  I would do anything for Bitcoin...

...is that too weird for you?  You know me.  You’re the only one who really does; and you know me from the inside, too.  It was you who turned me on to such things (so to speak).  You’re the only one I feel I can talk to about this.

Puns aside, I think I may be developing an erotic attraction to Bitcoin.  Well, that would be an interesting new fetish.  One you’d probably like, knowing you.

I always found excitement in your world of secrets.  Magic numbers which let me whisper in your ear as if we were in the same room.  Magic numbers are a girl’s best friends; and I think cryptology would be far more popular with the female set if it were put in those terms.  We’re social creatures, and applied crypto is all about social connections and social boundaries:  A diary locked by a heart-shaped key with a 128-bit security level.  Assured integrity—or when that’s inconvenient, its opposite:  Deniable encryption.  A veil which hides beauty by dissolving it in a pseudorandom uniform distribution indistinguishable from noise—then is yanked away, resolving and revealing the beauty in its perfect glory.  Impossible improbabilities which build greater certainties in the connections between people.  And your ability to not only whisper to me, but reach out and touch me across a distance in total privacy...  I daresay, women would likely be more enthusiastic about crypto than most men are, if only its social and practical aspects were presented in some suitably alluring way.

Oh, yes, after I fell for you and tumbled down your enciphered rabbit hole, I came to live and love this hidden world—our hidden world...

And here, there is Bitcoin.  He is pure power.  I’m sure it’s a “he”:  The eternal zero-sum competition between miners is reminiscent of stags growing ever-larger racks of antlers, or peacocks sporting ever more brilliant tails.  Transactions carved of granite as an armoured knight, by sig, hash, and sword.  Pure power, as I said.  I love it.  I love him.

It feels weirder to write it out than it does to me that I feel that way; yet somehow, I know you will understand.

   With kisses from your beloved enigma,

   ~ you-know-who ~


P.S., I miss you.  It’s been too long.

But lately, the forum has been such a rough ride!  (And wouldn’t I know it.)

DDoS attacks are causing a real-life night mare.  Cloudflare is causing problems for legitimate users, without actually doing its job; replacing them would just be good horse sense.

I love it.

Simple question, simple answer!

The whiners are evidence that the system is working.

Either that, or Cloudflare is making the site difficult to use.

(With due apologies for beating a dead horse.)

What could be so terribly urgent?  Oh, right.

@theymos, please impose a merit requirement for Jr. Member.  Thanks!  ❤️


Your activity is not updating, because your Intertubes are clogged.  Buy some commercial drain cleaner (sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide), and pour it into your computer while it is running.  For good measure, then take a car battery and pour its contents into your computer to supercharge it.  This will fix the problem.

HTH.

Unsurprising that endlasuresh supports the American Empire’s claim to be the world’s police.

I request that you forthwith report me to the FBI for pandering, procuring, and prostitution.  The proof is my nym, which I can’t deny. ;-)

Although the.nym.zone’s official position is perforce that there may exist some benign uses for undisclosed alts, running multiple entries in the same contest against its explicit rules would be abusive and outright fraudulent.  Not only would such a thing be wrong in principle:  In practice, it would also destroy our reputation.  As disembodied ghosts in the.nym.zone, reputation is all we have!

Adding some teeth to the theory, nullius is friendly with folks in Reputation who could be expected to red-tag both of us to hell if we were caught abusing alt accounts.  I don’t think he is someone who could try to fly under the radar.

Thus when he created me, after he first bought me some shiny Copper jewellery, the second thing nullius did was to establish bidirectional linkage between our accounts using neutral trust feedback.  You can see the sent and received feedback on my trust summary page; n.b. that trust feedback can’t be backdated.  When in doubt, check trust pages.

I must emphasize, too, that using undisclosed alts in close proximity to each other would almost certainly lead to being caught sooner or later with some form of forensic authorship identification.

For a real-life example of forensic authorship identification on this forum, see how tspacepilot outed Quickseller’s fraudulent self-escrow scheme.  Warning:  That post is long and technical.  Yet I doubt that such a sophisticated analysis would be necessary to catch multiple contest entries by the man famous for the “nullius post”.  Our writing style is distinctive!

The language patterns used for such identification are subconscious, and almost impossible to reliably modify through conscious intentions.  Though my style may sometimes be modified to take on a feminine lilt in the manner of scripting dialogue for a storybook, the underlying statistical patterns would not be significantly changed.  We’ve read academic papers on the topic.  Mr. “nym.zone” would make a joke of his street cred as a privacy expert, if he were to suppose that he could reliably fool such an analysis without botching his words in some horrid way.

Whereas in a writing contest, we must necessarily make more than short, terse posts; and we cannot use intentionally mangled language, as anonymous parties oft do to avoid identification in high-threat scenarios:⁰


Yes, we could write like that.  In dark corners of the Internet, how do you know we don’t?  You would never find that!  But of course, we would not likely win a writing contest by such means.

The greater lesson:  Authors can almost never be truly anonymous.  The smaller lesson, here apropos:  For many reasons, neither nullius nor any other sane person would try to cheat in a writing contest using multiple identities.

❤️ The Meretrix

---

0. We state no opinion about TSB here.  The above quote is simply an apt example of intentionally mangled writing by person(s) of indisputably high intelligence for OPSEC reasons, based on the threat model necessary when openly perpetrating the extremely illegal act of leaking classified exploits from USG intelligence agency blackhats.  They leaked the exploit which unknown person(s) then used to create WannaCry.  It is wise for them to not only change their writing style, but to mangle their words beyond recognition.

Doxt thou art!  By inner eye,
Dark spells now let me descry
Thine image, felid scourge of spammers,
Liars, trolls, and crypto-scammers.

   With pills, not tax, thy sockpuppet show
   Brings the poor in spirit to ends of woe.

---

Edit:  The forum is inexplicably making the cat image tiny, at least for my browser; and I am done messing with BBcode for now.  Sorry.

As I was initiated into a cryptic cult with rites of the goddess Hecate, the renowned paranormal researcher William Blake caught this photograph of Lauda shapeshifted to the form of a flying catbat:


Is any more actual proof needed to sustain a charge of witchcraft?

My PGP fingerprint:  0xB589C6F74DCAE7A2E932A9773E0E253A69696969  Somebody, please quote.  I will also archive this, and edit in a link.  [Edit:  Archived.)

To show my love for Bitcoin, my primary key uses secp256k1.  This was added to GnuPG for the purpose of facilitating Bitcoin integration with gpg-agent.  At some point, I plan to turn a few tricks with this feature.

PGP is sexy! ❤️ Bitcoin + PGP = orgasm. ;-)

---

I will not paste a copy of the key into this thread.  The key itself may be obtained from many keyservers, including quite popular mainstays.  The copies on keyservers can be updated with added/revoked subkeys/userids, new signatures, changed expiry times, etc.  Those newly obtaining a key can always obtain the latest published version by such means; and those having an old copy can conveniently stay fresh with gpg --refresh-keys.

There is no need to cargo-cult the copypasting and quoting of huge blocks of gibberish which fill huge threads with information which slowly goes obsolete.  The fingerprint is both necessary and sufficient to identify me with a key.  Use the crypto, folks!

I will not sign a PGP message claiming ownership of this Bitcoin Forum account.  Since this forum is important to me, I have already done better:  My Bitcoin Forum uid is declared as an OpenPGP userid on my key, secured by the appropriate self-sig.  With this post, I estabish bidirectional identity binding the best way it can be done here:  Strongly, in the PGP → forum direction, and not-so-strongly in the forum → PGP direction.

Note, nullius has also added his forum userid to his PGP keys.  You will need to --refresh-keys those anyway, for updated expiry times on some subkeys.

---

PSA:  Partly by way of apologies to suchmoon, I made myself a custom 0x69696969 keyid with some hackery on my part, sipa’s secp256k1 keygrinder, and 1055.33375204 seconds on 1 core of the CPU of an ancient laptop.  IIUC, the evil32 project used GPUs; but that’s not even necessary when using fast code for fast ECC algorithms.

I oft still see some people using 32-bit keyids, for purposes other than local management of keys already on their keyrings.  Those still doing this, please stop.  Even a 64-bit “long” keyid is not sufficiently secure; the Bitcoin mining network now does more than 2⁶⁴ work every second!  Only the full 160-bit fingerprint (a SHA-1 hash⁰ of a specially constructed OpenPGP packet¹) should be considered reliable.

---

0. SHA-1 is considered generally “broken”, but remains resistant to preimage attacks.  A full preimage attack would be needed to create a key with the same fingerprint as an already existing key.  By contrast, it may be feasible to newly create two different PGP keys with the same arbitrary fingerprint (i.e. a collision); I am not sure.  I also don’t see immediately anything that could accomplish for an attacker.

1. RFC 4880 §12.2, as recently explained to a snarky student.

Cloudflare has effectually locked me out since sometime yesterday—both of me.  I am posting this from the account under which I first got hit with it, almost 22 hours ago.  This time, it does not stop!  It has caused me to avoid the forum until I worked out the mitigation given below.


Translation:  Bend over, and spread your cheeks.  Cloudflare wants to check if you’re human on the inside:


Moreover...

Quote from: nullius on February 23, 2018, 12:53:08 AM

[Edit:  @mods, apologies for making this a new thread.  I tried to post it in the Cloudflare thread.  When Cloudflare ate my post and threw me back to a blank form as described below, I did not realize SMF’s reply info somehow got lost—thus resulting in a new thread.  Meta won’t let me delete my own topic; I just tried.]

This Cloudflare/SMF interaction bug persists:  Cloudflare is rerunning these checks regularly, at times unpredictable to the user.  If it collides with your hitting the “Post” button, then the Cloudflare cavity search function will throw away your post and redirect you to a blank form for starting a new topic.  That is how the current topic came to exist:  I had tried to post a reply on the main Cloudflare thread, then received a screen which looks like the following; I then just pasted in my post and hit the button again, without realizing that I was submitting a a new topic.  It is fortunate that I compose in a text editor.  Those who don’t will lose their posts.

Here is what it looks like, from when I was hit with this again while making this post:

---

Temporary mitigation:

An absolute requirement of Javascript will drive away many of the types of people whom the forum should want to attract:  Privacy and security experts, cypherpunks, people for whom the word “crypto” means something other than get-rich-quick schemes or Paypal 2.0.  For my part, it is unacceptable to me in the long term.

As an interim threat mitigation for occasional Cloudflare flare-ups, for those running ephemeral Tor Browser instances in vanishing VMs, here is a script which shows what you need to instantiate your saved login cookies and avoid being effectually locked out by the Google CAPTCHA.

No technical support will be provided by me with this script.  Figure it out.  It is provided as “documentation” of badly undocumented stuff not made by me.  I developed this by running diff(1) against prefs.js at various stages of configuration; if there exist any references, I would like to know about them.

Code:

#!/bin/sh

#
# Set this to the path containing subpath:
# "Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Browser/profile.default"
#
ffprofile="path/to/tor-browser/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Browser/profile.default"

#
# Change this (duh).
#
case "${1}" in
nullius)
	bcfuser="nullius"
	;;
[Mm]eretrix)
	bcfuser="meretrix"
	;;
*)
	echo "User not specified, or unknown user" >&2
	exit 1
	;;
esac

{
cat << EOF

# Turn off Tor Browser's no-disk-write mode:
pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", true);
pref("browser.download.manager.retention", 2);
pref("browser.privatebrowsing.autostart", false);
pref("permissions.memory_only", false);
pref("security.nocertdb", false);
pref("volatilePrivatePermissions", false);
pref("pref.privacy.disable_button.cookie_exceptions", false);
EOF
} >> "${ffprofile}/preferences/extension-overrides.js"

#
# permissions.sqlite could also be reconstructed with
# `sqlite3 -batch -bail -init permissions.sql -cmd .quit "${ffprofile}/permissions.sqlite"`
# using the SQL provided below.  The important cookies are
# the SMF login tokens, of course.
#

cp -p permissions.sqlite \
	"${bcfuser}/cookies.sqlite" \
	"${bcfuser}/cookies-tor.json" \
	"${ffprofile}"

permissions.sql:

Code:

PRAGMA foreign_keys=OFF;
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
CREATE TABLE moz_perms ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,origin TEXT,type TEXT,permission INTEGER,expireType INTEGER,expireTime INTEGER,modificationTime INTEGER);
INSERT INTO moz_perms VALUES(1,'https://bitcointalk.org','cookie',1,0,0,1521640330020);
CREATE TABLE moz_hosts ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,host TEXT,type TEXT,permission INTEGER,expireType INTEGER,expireTime INTEGER,modificationTime INTEGER,appId INTEGER,isInBrowserElement INTEGER);
COMMIT;

HTH, HAND.