Auction ended, final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 0.06 ChipMixer
1 0.06 SlavaVendo
2 0.06 SwC_Poker
2 0.06 lightlord

I'm not planning on doing that here. People have enough trouble figuring out the sort-of-similarly-designed Trust system. That was just an idea that I wanted to share in case anyone was making a decentralized forum and wanted to have a merit-like system.

No, several people looked into it, but nobody was able to make contact with anyone who knew anything about what he did with the BTC or who might've stolen it after his death. The 25% reward still stands on any returned amount.

That sounds pretty interesting and on the right track, though their website is incomplete, and it sounds like it might be fractional reserve:

I'd really love it if it's not fractional reserve and the "bank" is actually a multisig of several independent entities. But as long as it works well and actually uses blind signing, it'll be good to see.

This is our very own Elwar. I very much hope he makes it out of there safely...

It's depressing for the whole seasteading movement. The dream is/was to be able to have many tiny sovereign seasteads ("let a thousand nations bloom"), but this makes me think that we may in practice need larger, more defensible seasteads along with guaranteed-autonomy agreements with governments. Or maybe someone needs to create a large private military that is a credible threat against countries like Thailand, and sell "invasion insurance" to seasteads.


I remember that Blue Frontiers had some sort of an agreement with French Polynesia; I don't know about Thailand.

Trust ratings are not moderated, and their value/accuracy is dependent on the viewer's trust network being reasonable. So they definitely shouldn't be indexed by search engines, at least: exclude it from robots.txt or use <meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive,nosnippet" />

I can't currently think of any other issues resulting from mirroring them if they're excluded from search engines.

If that's the case, then that's nice (for us; sad for him), but I haven't been reading him that way. Admittedly, I only started paying him much attention recently.


OMG that's terrible. Hopefully they're able to get out of there safely.

Ayre has reportedly been involved with CSW since at least Feb 2016. See this lengthy article, though note that it uses info from several highly unreliable sources, so you have to second-guess everything. Apparently, Wright worked in Antigua on gambling websites a long time ago, which is Ayre's residence and line of business, so they probably met directly or indirectly through this.

Wright first publicly made his appearance in the Bitcoin scene in Dec 2015, and apparently he was engaging in the "I'm Satoshi but down on my luck, plz give me a small loan of a million dollars" shtick from at least around mid 2015. The fact that Ayre was involved so early makes me a bit suspicious that he could be in on the con, but it's also possible that he's just fallen for it real deep.

I find Ayre's actions inexplicable. He appeared in this space suddenly, with a thin recent history. He's fixated on statist arguments, but his history makes me think that he should be biased against the state. (CSW has also been talking about this: which one is influencing the other?) He's stuck steadfastly by CSW for 3+ years with nothing obvious to show for it, and probably significant losses. (But is there something we don't know about? Does he somehow stand to profit from the current course of events, where SV & CSW fail in a loud and dragged-out way?)

If anyone has some connection to Ayre through a friend-of-a-friend or something, I'd really like to know what's actually going through his mind.

There was a period where both Sirius and I were active administrators. For convenience, I reckon Jan 1, 2012 as when I became head administrator, though it was actually a gradual transition starting before and ending after that.

The EU (and its member states) is an authoritarian regime which is steadily marching in the same direction as the USSR. Every year they reduce individual freedoms. If I was in the EU, I'd be trying to leave ASAP.

Lightning is not like a bank at all. Mostly it works like a 2-of-2 multisig, where nobody can just steal your BTC, and the Bitcoin network itself guarantees security. The opportunity for theft only comes into existence in some edge cases which the LN software is supposed to prevent.

I am a bit skeptical of LN, especially in the short-term: it's currently very clunky and complex, and it seems likely to always have some notable inherent limits. I'm concerned that in order to easily smooth over these issues, a lot of people might end up using hosted LN wallets/payment-handlers, which are banks. But if people use LN directly, then it's not like a bank whatsoever.

There are various ways that Bitcoin could be made into an effective payments system aside from LN. I'm a fan of blinded bearer certificates and federated sidechains, which would be semi-centralized, but you could also do something like having a high-volume miner-security-only sidechain that expires and is replaced every couple of years. Store-of-value is the most important thing, but it's definitely also possible for Bitcoin to support high-volume payments.

Not surprising, but sad. Assange is one of the original cypherpunks.

Probably, but it may still be the best option for minimizing harm/risk. If the child strongly, actively wants sex reassignment even after people try to reason them out of it, I don't think that it'd be right to outright prohibit them from pursuing it, and delaying puberty is a way to give them time to mentally mature and consider it before anything too irreversible happens. (This particular case is different because the child's desire is in dispute.)


This is a good point. If someone is experiencing depression due to physiological issues, then this should be treated before doing anything drastic. And non-physiological depression is ~always an internal problem, not an external problem. If someone is utterly depressed about not being the "correct" gender, then this indicates an outlook on life which will probably cause them to be utterly depressed about not having the correct job, or not having the correct amount of money, or being unattractive, etc. Happiness comes primarily from within, not from without.

I'm sure that some people are able to calmly examine reality and decide that they'd be better off after sex reassignment, without unrealistically thinking that this will solve all of their problems. And while I don't think that this is a great idea, it's not my decision to make, and in the end I'm happy that human technology can today sort of deliver on this desire. But some people who end up at this point may be desperately chasing happiness via external factors, which never works and in this case is likely to be particularly counterproductive.

In these cases they'll often give them a hormone mixture that merely delays puberty for some years, giving them extra time to come to a final decision. 6-8 is too young to really decide. (Maybe this is what they're actually doing, and it's just being spun as "chemical castration".)

IMO it's unwise with current technology and culture to substantially modify your body in this way, but I also believe in individual sovereignty, so if you want to do it, that should be up to you. There are obvious problems when dealing with children, though, since children tend to be highly ignorant, and pre-puberty children are biologically programmed to believe what authority figures tell them to believe. In this case, he probably agrees with his mother when he's with his mother, and with his father when he's with his father.

That's actually a pretty interesting-sounding use-case which makes me want to fix action=.xml, but I'm not sure when I'll get around to it. Probably not in the next week or two, at least. (I can't just enable it, since it's too slow; I have to rewrite at least some of it.)

AFAICT it's not, the public blockchain aspect is just the lino coin's ledger. It's a bog-standard centralized service, but with a (also-centralized) cryptocoin to go along with it.

A sort of halfway-reasonable design would be putting a minimal amount of content metadata in their chain and then storing the data on IPFS, but even that would be inferior in most ways to just using Freenet, which was released over a decade ago. It's annoying to see these "blockchain!!!" people poorly reinventing the wheel.

(BTW, I wrote a while ago about an idea for censorship-resistant datastore which would be suitable for this sort of thing.)

I tried polyphasic sleep a few times many years ago, but after a few days the sleep deprivation would become utterly crippling to the point where I could barely form complete thoughts, and eventually I'd reach the point where I'd invariably drift off within seconds of sitting down anywhere. It's possible that only some people can do it, or that it's totally fake like the "breatharian" thing. If it is possible, then from my experience I think that you'd need a helper 24/7 during the "induction phase" in order to ensure that your mind is kept active, you don't drift off, and you wake up from your naps on time. (If you could figure out a way to reliably induct people into polyphasic sleep, you could make a business out of it...)

The existence of a competing centralized service is a "watershed event for decentralized social media"?

Dlive, like most of this garbage, is a centralized company which has brainlessly shoe-horned "blockchain" into what they're doing. Their infrastructure is centralized, they have rules which among other things prohibit "hate speech", and their lino coin is 100% centralized in both operation and distribution.

A proper decentralized social network or streaming site is possible, but it should either not have any blockchain stuff at all, or this should be a sort of side feature. It'd look like Freenet or I2P, not like Bitcoin.

The forum was opened to the public on Nov 22.


Yeah, apparently bitcointalk.org links are banned, which is ridiculous.

Correct.

I haven't put much thought into it, but something that might at least be acceptable would be to let anyone register as an "accreditor", and give them the ability to have their "seal of approval" or whatever added to threads. Different accreditors could have different standards, fees, etc., and good ones would build a good reputation. There are still many problems with that, though, and I'm not sure that it's worth the trouble.