I agree. Maduro still would have screwed Venezuela up, Chavez set up the nutty politcal culture over there, it's not like Maduro changed it all overnight. Maduro (and Chavez equally) were just lazy in their thinking; when you're in control of so much oil, it's too tempting to think you can do just about anything, because the oil exports are always there to keep the country afloat, it's the curse of mineral rich nations.


But pretending that US sanctions didn't accelerate a bad situation into something many times worse is just wilful ignorance. Once the easy option (exporting oil) was gone, the crazy policies had nothing to help prop the up anymore. You can't make a reasonable claim that the crazy policies were ultimately responsible, it was killing the safety net (oil exports) that put Venezuela in this situation. They have enough oil to carry on with the craziest government on earth (just look at the Saudis), so long as the oil can be openly sold.

Agreed. You do now have an opportunity to change Brazil. And I said "you" have an opportunity, not "Bolsonaro", the people need to be capitalists whatever he does or says



Ask Europeans how that worked out. They'd tell you they ended up with capitalist-socialism (France, Scandinavia etc), or state capitalism (everywhere else).

Yep, I agree.

But maybe you should listen to some people from those rich capitalist countries; you're not going to get real capitalism in South America. People with political friends will get given great deals on former state assets, and anyone who creates a successful business will need to let in the establishment's influence before they can become the next corporate giant. The power dynamics are very similar to socialism, except the poverty is less extreme and it's less likely to collapse.

You swap hard-totalitarianism for soft-totalitarianism. Capitalism is what you will not get.

I broadly agree. But it's not easy to see at exactly which level this is true.

Take Kim Jong Un, just one of many cardboard cutout dictators scaring all the children into going along with the international soap opera (with main characters including USA, Britain, France. Germany, Russia & China, that's a familiar list...). Kim Jong Un spent most of his life at an expensive Swiss international school, hanging out with those type of kids (who you would assume he is still friends with). I have a hard time accepting that Kim really believes in what he's doing as North Korean president, so what's really going on?

But then you only have to check out that video of Gaddafi getting stabbed in the sphincter to realise that independent dictator assholes is a real phenomenon. There's alot of fakery going on, but precisely what is difficult to pin down. We can safely say that the US (or Russia/UK/China etc) give zero fucks about asshole dictators, but there's good reasons to believe that some of these Doctor Evils are actually working with the big powers (certainly true in the case of China and North Korea, that's publicly accepted).


So you maybe see what I'm trying to say: how do we know that Maduro is for real, and not playing a clandestine role? One thing's for sure, Venezuela is losing population fast, one way or another. Could that be the real goal, and is Maduro going to be left in charge to facilitate that (and to what end?)? Or is it more a Castro situation, where Maduro is wanted as a permanent boogeyman to scare the American public into accepting even more oppressive treatment from the US federal agencies? All of that and more?

One thing that makes increasingly less sense to me is that Russia and the US are mortal enemies, after all, the only one to benefit from all these stories is US and Russian state power. It's one big game of good cop/bad cop, but mutually inverted. "We'll save you from those nasty scary Americans/Russians!!!" is what they're both effectively saying. Great racket fellas.

I didn't. Don't excuse the US dictatorship either.

You're wrong.

The human rights violations started when the US placed Venezuela under economic sanctions in 2004, after Chavez defended himself against a US sponsored coup. Chavez and Maduro have no reason to starve everyone half to death, but the US state department does.


Chavez was a bit of an asshole. Maduro also. I don't like totalitarians, period.

But the US state department does like human rights abusing totalitarian dictators; so long as they do what they're told to by the US state dept. That's why Saddam, Gadaffi, Chavez and Maduro have been targetted; the fact that they're assholes is not the problem (they all apparently threatened or even began to trade oil outside SWIFT/dollar system before their demise). They're independent assholes, and the US (and also China and Russia) don't tolerate independent despots.

right, SSE4 (or is it 4.1/2 ?). Bitcoin's been using those instructions for SHA256 on x86 since 0.15.0

SHA256 is already accelerated on x86 platforms using SSE4 instructions (since Bitcoin 0.15.0)

Signature verification performance can be improved with batch validation (part of the proposed Schnorr sigs soft fork, hopefully coming this year)

It would still add a centralised point of failure; there'd have to be a website domain to serve the new version numbers from, keep the servers very secure (time and effort) and choose admins carefully for the long term (and on a technical note, Bitcoin would need to keep OpenSSL to authenticate the website's certificate, while the core devs are actually quite close to removing OpenSSL becaue they see that library as a bug-prone security risk that isn't worth taking long term). That's adding alot of resources for not much gain, because...

....the sort of people targeted by this kind of hand-holding are the same type of people who will just click on anything to stop it getting in their way. Including update notifications, however important the update may be.

Decentralisation in part means personal responsibility. Better we stick with that, IMO

Is anyone anywhere going in that direction? I'd be happy to be wrong, but it seems like economic liberalism is being slowly and carefully crushed everywhere



Be watchful for the careful crushing I'm warning about. Liberal/libertarian political parties are always infested with politicians using the most cleverly crafted lies of everyone else in the political spectrum. It should be obvious why: political power is anathema to liberal ideals, true liberal/libertarian politicians would be essentially turkeys voting for christmas. They will tell you lies, or make themselves look stupid. In Venezuela, you'll probably get the lies, whereas in the established "liberal" countries the "look stupid" variety are more the norm.

lightningd is the c-lightning executable file



Takes a few hours on a properly configured desktop machine (with +10 Mbit/s internet). Do that first on an external disk, then plug that external disk into your RasPi, saves alot of time

You're talkin about the way it is now as if that's all that's possible. I'm just saying I think someone will figure out that they can cut out most or all of the middlemen. It's easy to argue your perspective, because you're just retelling what's happening outside your window. I'm saying that if you look at the direction these industries have been going in on a long timescale, eventually someone will take the final step to complete independence and also be a massive success. In the 1930s, everyone was completely dependent on Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley, or Broadway. That total dependence has been slowly disintegrating ever since.

Sure, and if people can find new artists on Soundcloud, then artists who get alot of plays can use their Soundcloud page to promote short clips of tracks they think audiences will like. Then they can take 100% profit by using file sharing networks to distribute the full length track/film.



Yes they can, artists don't need publishers, labels or studios, they can do it all themselves. The only thing they couldn't do before was accept money over the internet. They can now.

Remember when you said this:


What's wrong with content producers charging people to download their stuff directly from a file sharing network?


I'll tell you what's right with it:

• No more distributors to pay (i.e. itunes or spotify)
• No more labels (so no more exploitative contracts)
• No more publishing fees (because no more copyright)
• No more lawyers to pay (because no labels or publishing)
• Keep 100% of the profits (instead of between 5% and 0%)

File sharing networks are never going to get shut down, it's not possible, it's been tried and it's failed. The secret is stop trying to pretend there are multiple copies to sell, because there is only one copy. Once you've sold just 1 copy, then everyone in effect has it. Or people could try to continue to fight reality.

It's frustrating, because the way you're thinking about it, you're almost there. What's the difference between people using bittorrent and cryptocurrencies to distribute their own work (with other people doing the same to help keep the distribution going), and getting paid for copyright piracy? Not much, when you think about it

That's not really true. Bittorrent relies on tracker servers so that nodes can find each other. Trackerless bittorrent is possible, but most people probably still use the piratebay or mininova etc. So for the entire history of bittorrent, the network has been a hybrid of decentralisation and semi-centralisation, not dissimilar to the stratification of regular nodes and mining pools in Bitcoin.

This was always a terrible example The phrase "shouting 'fire' in a theater" was dreamt up by a judge in a 1919 US court case, it has never been a real concern in itself. The charge was that of distributing leaflets convincing people to refuse the draft during WW1. The "fire in a theater" comment was a comparison used by the judge to demonstrate that the leaflets were dangerous free speech, that refusing to fight in WW1 was placing the whole US in danger. No such danger existed, but distorting the truth was needed to convince the largely non-interventionist US people that they needed to fight in Europe to defend the US (which began the continuing"Team America: World Police" propaganda).

So people reacting to war propaganda had this "fire in a theater" nonsense used against them in a situation where they were trying to undermine someone powerful abusing free speech. They were found guilty. And the US was transformed into a covert dominant empire.

Lauda has it right


The idea is to put the chainstate folder on a fast disk (SSD flash), and the blocks folder on a cheap/slow/large disk (HDD mechanical).

• chainstate changes all the time, and very rapidly while the blockchain is downloading first time. So it benefits from a fast disk
• blocks do not change; Bitcoin writes a new block, then it's permanent. This only needs a slow disk, so you can use the cheap mechanical sort too

re: word seeds for wallets... don't know

....in other breaking blockchain news....

I swear these stories are pure trolling. What next? "BURGLAR CHAIN: THIEVES PLAN BLOCKCHAIN TO KEEP TRACK OF LOOT"