What if I were Chinese?  I have never said what I am.  Though I let it slip somewhere that I’m not white.  I do have some very racist ideas about white people’s apparently genetic stupidity in wrecking their own cultures and countries.  I think that their brains are flawed.  Anyway, I have not said what I am.

It is difficult to tell.  For example, I am perhaps one of the only people in the world who has been accused of being both a Mossad agent and a neo-Nazi.  Simultaneously.  For the same writings.  People get confused.

For all you know, I’m a Chinese Nazi.  LOL.


Thus having given you something to suck on, I am now done being amused by this little discussion.  No, I do not intend to subject other people (or myself) to endless flamewars with you.

Functional illiterate whining about words.

As I always say:  If you’re not reading it, it’s not for you.  And indeed, that was not written for you.  Don’t flatter yourself.  I found thereby a salutary moment to express to other readers a point that I’ve had on my mind for awhile now.


That is quite deceptive on your part.  N.b. that none of the official government sources uses the word “panic”, either.  It is ironic how you implicitly suggest that somebody is only peddling panic if he says, “Everybody panic now!”

Whereas I will not waste words explaining point by point why your post is panic-mongering.  It is sufficiently obvious for others.

I’m not buying that.  More panic-mongering.  It seems that, against an “idiotic Orwellian over-reaction”, you’re agitating to push for the opposite wrong reaction.

That is how the Marxist dialectic works:  Wrong thesis, wrong antithesis, synthesized to the desired wrong conclusion.  Panic thesis:  Lock down the world into a giant prison!  Panic antithesis:  —What, exactly?  Nuke China?  Just guessing...  Anyway, seeing as how you do not have any nukes, what practical objective are you seeking?


Oh, I get it:  Go hide in a corner where you will be irrelevant.  If you can.  Regardless, be very afraid.  Everybody needs to panic—even the opponents of the primary panickers, the dumb masses who are demanding the “idiotic Orwellian over-reaction”.

Synthesis:  Everybody panics.  Global tyrants do whatever they want.  Even the few people who dislike that are too scared to think straight.

What we need is for people to stop panicking, as I have been saying for more than six months.

This is not some kind of an anti-woman “eww, girls, go away” rant; I dislike those.  Rather, it is an observation that I again find myself in the wrong century.

For a nutshell historical illustration of what I mean, consider that the American Prohibition of alcohol was in large part an attack by women’s clubs on de facto men’s clubs.

Whereas if married women (and today we must consider, single mothers) are ordinarily present in pubs, then you cannot reasonably expect to disallow children.  Children come with the women.  It is a part of a package deal; anyone who doesn’t understand that, does not know the first thing about women.  Have cake—no eat, too.  And if non-professional single, childless women go to pubs, then you cannot reasonably expect for them to suddenly stop doing that when they get married and/or have kids.  Life doesn’t work that way.  Eat cake—no have, too.

It seems that what you really want is an exclusive men’s space.  Perhaps modulo the general licence customarily exercised by practitionresses of the oldest profession.

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It is personally bizarre that I find myself being the one to point this out.  I am by nature too much of a lone wolf to have ever much sought the company of other men.  If I seek the social company of human creatures, more oft than not, it is with the female species.  For various reasons.  I am too pathologically individualistic to do clubs—note the lack of a hat.  And it has been over ten years since I even set foot in a pub—I’ve got beer at home, where I can drink it naked when so desired, with or without company as so desired.

Sight is sometimes granted by distance...  What?  It’s a social gathering-place for women?  Interesting.  How can you not expect for kids to be there, too?

Aside, I am indeed in the wrong century if #nohomo tags are needed on discussion of men’s sometimes desire to socialize exclusively with other men.

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That doesn’t look efficacious to me.  Does it have adequately close and comprehensive coverage of the mouth?  This seems safer:



Seriously, I wear the biggest, meanest N95 mask that I can find.  It covers the whole lower portion of my face (and has a respirator port so that I can breathe).  With sunglasses and a hat, my face is protected from the global pandemic of ubiquitous “security” cameras, Amazon Ring, cameraphone snapshots...  Fork off, facial recognition robots!

Thanks.  As a public service, I have improved your photo with an important message.  Safety first!

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Too bad that most of the people are on the side of “their” governments, or at best passively accepting thereof.  It is the usual state of affairs.  At least the tacit consent of the governed is required for a government to be stable—and they have it.

Lightly edited:

800m, eh?  I guess he really does not want to risk catching or spreading Covid.  Better safe than sorry!

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People may suppose that I be joking.  I am not.

For years, I have watched in horror as privacy has been destroyed in all public spaces by the potent combination of ubiquitous security cameras, “smartphone” cameras, and facial recognition technology.

For years, I have struggled to solve the seemingly insurmountable problem of daily concealing one’s face in public—without counterproductively inviting suspicions.

Mandatory face masks?  Crowds of people in which one more masked non-face just blends in?  Amidst a nightmare, it is a dream come true!

On account of my safety-consciousness, my mask is just a tiny bit more... comprehensive than the wimpy masks that I see some careless folks wearing.  The most comprehensive mask that I can find of a type that looks like a Covid mask—sized just a bit too big—well, I’ve got to protect as many facial features as possible from The Virus!

Perhaps now is a good time to raise awareness that concealing one’s face in public is a wise idea.  There is something very wrong with a world in which that’s true.  What can we do about that, besides trying to hide our faces?

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Hmmm...  As if on cue:


It’s funny how as soon as I point out that masks have privacy benefits, somebody pops up to express fear about bogeys.

No, I am not implying that it is necessarily some type of purposeful operative.  To the contrary:  It is probably just some garden-variety exercise of Everybody’s Right To An Opinion.

People are so brainwashed nowadays that they express this preprogrammed narrative almost without conscious thought, as if by conditioned reflexes.  On this forum, I frequently see the same phenomenon in discussions of Bitcoin and “KYC”.  Examples abound.

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The scariest part:

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Hey, you said to “wear a mask”.  OK.

The deeper truth of this statement inspired me to do something that is always a mistake:  Start a P&S thread.  Whipped out in a hurry, too.

Covid masks are dual-use for privacy:

reserved

This is something that I don’t get:  In a global panopticon where a mouse can’t sneeze without potentially being AI-robot facially-recognized via a nearby camera, why the fuck are people protesting about a sudden leap from anti-mask laws to mandatory mask laws?

It is strictly a lesser evil.  Perhaps the architects of instant global tyranny didn’t quite think this part through.  Enjoy it while you can—before TPTB suddenly realize that they are on the horns of a dilemma, and they need somehow to ban the masks that they are forcing you to wear.

For my part, regardless of Covid, I am happy to wear a surgical mask, preferably with sunglasses and a hat, when entering shops, or going down the street, or using a bank ATM, or coming anywhere within the shooting range of idiots toting terrorist weapons of mass privacy destruction cameraphones with social media apps.

Indeed, the new normal before Covid was that it was insane to step outside your home without a mask—but in many places, illegal to wear one.  Worse, wearing a mask in public tended to attract suspicions; if privacy is the goal, extra attention is undesirable.


As important as the sudden changes of laws is that wearing a mask in public is now socially acceptable.  Nobody wonders what you “have to hide”—hell, nobody even notices if you wear a medical mask that just so happens to obscure substantially your facial features.  Bonus:  Nobody looks at me funny if I wear gloves.  Thanks, Covid!

Username checks out:

Puritans will also love this secondary or tertiary effect of Covid-panic:  Now, we must restrict pubs to serve only non-alcoholic “beer”!

I will leave for another time some reflections on the production of heirs, and familial standards for marriage, etc.  It’s time to birth a meme.  Which I simply found too amusing to resist.  It is not directed at any particular gentleman present.  Unless his daughter is hot—and she does Bitcoin, and vice versa.

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Sound investment and risk management advice.  I would add to avoid the proudhon strategy of shorting your daughter(s) with high leverage.

Good ones.  Though I have been rethinking that symbolism—I think much too much about symbols, alphabets, cryptic things.  No conclusions, as yet.

Meanwhile, in lieu of my usual thousand words...

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What market?

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Always timely.

It is indeed a no-win dilemma, because “money laundering” is a made-up non-crime with premises so impossibly absurd that they would be comical, if the implications were not deadly serious.

Somebody needs to call out the emperor’s unclothes here.

Human societies existed for thousands of years before the very recent invention of the concepts underlying modern “anti money laundering” statutes and regulations.  Some of those societies were more stable, and had less crime, than any society in the world today.  They were not “libertarian” societies, either.  They simply had not invented the ridiculous notion that it is a crime to avoid having all money watched for “suspicious activity” at all times—just in case somebody may potentially use money to commit another crime.

What “money laundering” boils down to is a frightful bogey to herd human livestock into an un-unbanked pen of perpetual surveillance, Kafkaesque rules, and most importantly, the ability to extract confiscatory taxes oft exceeding the proportion of real value extracted from the labours of old-fashioned slaves.

The “money laundering” discussion has been framed in such a way that most people never pause to question the underlying assumptions.  Don’t be brainwashed brainlaundered.


False-dilemma evasion.  Also a “crime”, in the current year.

Indeed (perhaps I must thank you?).  And I have become unaccountably fond of that boat-scene song from “TPhOTO”.  (Not a typo.  The ph in phantom is a digraph and should be abbreviated accordingly, as also seen in “Ph.D.”)

Beyond that, I illegally thumbed my nose at RIAA lawyers and obtained some of Sarah Brightman’s so-called “classical crossover” albums.  I am not much of an opera aficionado, and ’twould be ghastly gauche for me to pretend; but I pulled up some handy recordings of a famous primadonna whom I like, and did a voice-to-voice shootout on transparent speakers with a flat frequency response from 20Hz–22kHz.  I matched levels as closely as I could.

My first thought was that Miss Brightman’s recording engineer should be shot.  Dynamic range compression produces for me an effect as irritating as the proverbial fingernails on the chalkboard!  The sound is just lifelessly blaring, numb, monotonic—flatly loud and nothing else—a big block of audible assault on the senses.

Fortunately, it is a problem that does not exist in classical recordings:  Discriminating listeners would form a violent lynch party, not only complain about DRC on the Internet.  But it seems to be accepted in “classical crossover”.

After I adjusted myself to the artistic disorientation inflicted by abject lack of dynamic range, my second thought was that Miss Brightman’s recording engineer should be impaled, then burnt at the stake.  Her voice is drowned in the instrumentals, and this is clearly done at the mix.  I had to skip around a bit, and search for parts where I could actually hear her.  Unfortunately, this did not salvage her voice from the horribly artificial-sounding effects of a recording engineer who apparently fancied himself to be some kind of an artist.  What a delusion.  But at least I could hear her—sort of.

Thereupon I concluded that Miss Brightman’s voice is as alluring as she is generally, but it lacks power.  It sounds good on its own.  Stacked up against the voice of a real primadonna, it suddenly seems thin and weak.

Obviously, for a fair comparison, I selected climactic fortissimo passages of the primadonna:  Thanks to her idiotic recording engineer, poor Miss Brightman just sounds loud all the time.

Miss Brightman does have an extraordinary pitch range.  For that reason, I made sure that my primadonna, albeit technically a soprano, is one who, when desired, can drop all the way down pretty much to contralto.

Alas, this comparison is terribly unfair to Miss Brightman.  I suspect that she could have done much better, if her vocal artistry had not been scammed by her recording engineer.  He is an acoustical liar!

It is sad.  Though that said...


Miss Brightman wins for cover art.

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Perhaps—if he forswears Faketoshi, bigblockerism, and dynamic range compression!  Moreover, although blockchain transparency is a bad thing, audio reproduction transparency is good.  As a production professional, he must “go the extra mile” to ensure that artists and listeners don’t get scammed with overprocessed, artificial, gimmicky blocks of big noise.

Satoshi’s actual vision:


I dislike quoting Satoshi in this context, as if for argument from authority.  The explanation below was drafted in my own words, off the top of my head, before I went back to refresh my memory on what the Bitcoin whitepaper says.  It is a document now primarily of historical interest, although some of its astonishing technical insights are still quite relevant.

Whereas that is the sacred design of Bitcoin v0.1.  Just sayin’.

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My, my, Mr Bear.  Something must have rankled.

So, anyway, you may be an audio engineer (hereby stated upon information and belief).  In that case, you should easily understand this analogy:  Your knowledge of Bitcoin security and of Segwit is on the same level as the audio knowledge of people who believe that in PCM digital audio, the number of samples per second determines the sizes of the tiny little stair-steps in the output waveform.

You may not need a lecture about Nyquist, but you certainly have much to learn about Bitcoin.

For others reading this thread, PSA:  There are no tiny little stair-steps.  In accord with the Nyquist Theorem, the discrete samples mathematically reproduce a perfectly smooth waveform.  And no, a miner “ANYONECANSPEND” attack on Segwit could not steal coins.  This is basic stuff...

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Yes, indeed.  To help you understand why, let me fix this for you:


My claim is only and exactly that in accord with Bitcoin’s security model, the violation of Segwit rules is the same as the violation of any other consensus rules.

For miners to “revert” Segwit would be no different in practice than for malicious miners to activate new rules implementing demurrage that eats up your coins in cold storage, or creating 21 trillion new bitcoins, or letting them spend any coin they want without checking signatures.

Which they are “literally unable to do”.

Because the code for nodes to accept such things does not exist.  Code to “revert to a pre-Segwit protocol” literally does not exist in Core.  If it did, that would be a hell of a CVE.

Why is this so hard for some people to understand?  Is it a matter of confusion over “ANYONECANSPEND”?  That is only a cute trick to add new rules without confusing non-upgraded nodes.  It is otherwise irrelevant.  Segwit nodes do not have a codepath that lets miners make them switch off Segwit validation logic and treat Segwit transactions as spendable by anyone.  Segwit nodes will neither accept nor propagate blocks that violate the totality of their hardcoded consensus rules—a set of rules which, following the August 2017 activation, includes all Segwit rules (thus both permitting and enforcing Segwit transactions).  So, good luck carrying off an “attack” with blocks that will be ignored as if completely nonexistent by every node that has upgraded since October 2016, i.e. pretty much everybody.  It’s the dumbest attack idea that I have ever heard of.

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A colluding malicious majority of hashpower could indeed wreck Bitcoin.  Or BCH.  Or BSV.  Or any other coin based on any similar design.

To do so, violating consensus rules is neither necessary, nor sufficient, nor profitable:  They could instead just rewrite blockchain history with a plain-old 51% attack that will fool validating nodes (but can only achieve double-spends).

N.b. that a 51% attack is by its nature an attack on “any competing chain” (i.e., the other 49%’s chain).  Again:  This does not even require violating consensus rules; and non-mining nodes are totally powerless against it!

For that reason, a malicious majority of hashpower is a threat explicitly beyond the scope of Bitcoin’s security model.  That is n00b-level knowledge.  Is it news to you?

But even a malicious majority of miners cannot steal coins that they never owned—Segwit or otherwise.

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You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.  The rules for spending coins sent to an address starting with a “1” are enforced by exactly the same security model as protects coins sent to addresses starting with “bc1”.  Whereas you are trying artifically to construct some notion of a hashpower majority attack which can violate some consensus rules, whilst remaining bound by others.  You don’t know how to ask the right question, viz.:  What stops miners from just spending any coins they want?  Answer:  Consensus rules.  Enforced by validating nodes.  Just as Satoshi said in the Bitcoin whitepaper.  That was his vision.

I have said before, and I will say again:

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More than half of this post was cut on preview, to avoid waste.  The rest can be summed up as (a) jbreher continues to do his usual Faketoshi apologia whilst denying it, (b) he lacks reading comprehension skills, and (c) he is correct on one point:  I have no experience whatsoever with popular music.  I do not produce it.  I do not even listen to it!  Not all music is pop.

You are rude, combative, and argumentative toward anyone who disagrees with your predictions crystal-ball certainty of the future.  And you started that before anyone even replied to you.  Indeed, I only bothered replying to you after some other people seemed intimidated and dismayed by your arrogant hogwash.  I did that for them, and for other readers, not for you.

Want an “asshat”?  Reread your own posts, and look in the mirror.


I never said that you said so.  You have consistently acted like you relish the idea:  You posts drip contempt of anybody who doesn’t join the “big boys” so they can afford “$1000+” transaction costs—logically including people who are now children, or not yet born; how, praytell, are they supposed to rush to “fill [their] bags now while BTC is still dirt cheap” now, as you put it, such that they can use Bitcoin to avoid financial enslavement?  Or what about people who actually, sincerely cannot afford right now to acquire (whatever you believe to be) “big boy” amounts of Bitcoin?  They (admittedly, we) deserve to be forever locked out of “Be Your Own Bank” financial freedom?

I have repeatedly quoted you at length.  I see no reason to add yet another collection of quotes, now redundant.  Those who question my analysis and interpretation of your posts may go reread upthread.

And don’t you dare say that anybody who really wants to, can.  Not so many years ago, I literally took money intended for food and used it instead to make my very first BTC buy.  If I do say so myself, that bespeaks commitment and skin in the game.  I have more now, but I am obviously not filling any “bags”.  Whereas I am only in this position, at this point in my life, due to being principled and suffering some bad events caused by big-bank chicanery!  On behalf of everybody who is neither rich, nor a bank-loving natural born slave:  Fuck you for consistently, undeniably acting like everybody who doesn’t grab a big BTC stash at today’s mouth-wateringly low prices is just a chump to be herded into Paypal 2.0, Blockchain Edition.

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A standard propaganda ploy:  Repeatedly assert something without explaining just why it is so inevitable, peremptorily make conclusory statements and condescend toward anybody who even questions what you say, and then, when you are called out for it, switch to what you just said.

Whereas you have not even begun to explain why you think that your future vision is inevitable, instead of a future in which on-chain scaling improvements combined with trustless, permissionless off-chain protocols such as Lightning make management of one’s own private keys still available to anybody who wants it.


Logically, this means one or the other of two things:

• Bitcoin will make everybody rich!  Everybody!  Forever!  Let’s all go to the moon!
• Only a very limited subset of people now living (or their heirs) deserve the benefits of Bitcoin, in terms of permissionless control of one’s own money.  Fuck everybody else.

Either-or.

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Reply to jbreher is in the pipeline.

LOL.  Bragging about a legal warchest on a cypherpunk forum founded by a Tor user who invented a new form of permissionless money.

Few affronts are as frustrating to a man as demonstrating to him the limits of his own power.

I suspect that in large part, this is why Faketoshi and his clique tend to froth at the mouth against anonymity:  Their litigious lawyers are powerless to terrorize people who cannot be located.

Mr Bear, I can’t speak for anybody else, but I have some news for my own part:  Your legal “war chest” is a contemptible joke, insofar as I am concerned.  I am above your corrupt laws, and untouchable to your corrupt courts.


Rankles a bit, does it not.  The rattling of blunt sabres doth not impress.

Well, which of those orders of magnitude do you think is a possibility?  $100?  $1000?  Unbounded “even more”?  And what are the implications?

What you are missing in this discussion is a sense of proportion of future feerates—and of the real-world practical implications of what various persons are saying.  Don’t get caught up in the minutae:  Look at the big picture.

rolling explicitly alleged that in the future, ordinary people will be completely priced out of on-chain transactions.  That is bog standard bigblocker nonsense, except with the twist that rolling relishes his fantasy of the blockchain being only the for the “big boys”.  Quote-unquote.  His words.


jbreher probably agrees with rolling, except for the relished fantasy part.  Of course, his solution will be to increase the blocksize to the point that ordinary people cannot run nodes.  He is on record as alleging that non-mining validators are useless, anyway.

For example; boldface is his:

Thus arises a false dichotomy and thereupon, false synthesis:

• Thesis, rolling, explicit and admitted:  Only “big boys” will be able to pay fees to transact on-chain.
• Antithesis, jbreher, implicit and evaded:  Only “big boys” will be able to run nodes.
• Synthesis:  Bitcoin under total control.  Big banker sigh of relief.

For my part, I think that most transactions will and should be off-chain.  It is ridiculously inefficient and horrible for privacy to keep a permanent record of every financial transaction in the world replicated on every node.  From a technical standpoint, the POW Nakamoto Consensus blockchain is actually the worst database ever invented—except if you need Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed consensus in a hostile network environment, with no central authority.  It should be used thus as a global synchronizer and enforcer for trustless, permissionless off-chain protocols.

An absolute prerequisite for that last:  On-chain transactions must remain accessible to ordinary people.  They may become moderately expensive, but not prohibitively expensive as rolling has proclaimed.  rolling sees the blockchain as a bank and billionaire settlement layer, not a “Be Your Own Bank” settlement layer.

A frequently made analogy, which I think is apt, is that the blockchain of the future will be the “wire transfer” mechanism for Your Own Bank.

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This needs to be highlighted:


Speaking as someone who has painful real-world experience running Bitcoin on ancient, underpowered hardware, thank you.

I was thinking it, but you said it.

Anybody who does not understand this should try, just try running Bitcoin and syncing mainnet on old and/or very cheap hardware.  You will soon wish for smaller blocks.  If you have a bit of vision, thereupon contemplate network effects and the resistance to centralization brought by keeping full nodes within the reach of people who are not rich.

Edit:  If you agree with the following appreciate the alluring redhead, +1 aesma.


Why the need for saccharine moralizing?  That nonsensical blue-checkmark sermon about “love” is the smug “liberal” equivalent of a stern “thou shalt not have lustful thoughts”.  Posting it in reply to that photo is sanctimonious preaching.

Man has always sought beauty.^*  And that’s a good thing.




P.S., protip:  Modern notions of so-called “love” are the wrong basis for relationships.  What you really mean is an emotional codependency of narcissists who have mutually duped each other into sexual congress.  It is more shallow than simple lust, but with the added benefit of an opportunity for hypocritical platitudes.  Confirmed science:  Vide divorce rates.

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* Although some of the pics posted to WO are really not beautiful, that is only an argument for better quality.  By that, I don’t mean statues.  A major reason why I typically avoid posting... desirable photos of flesh-and-blood female humans is that this forum has “no-NSFW” rules.  I don’t like to play that game, or to wonder if something is too borderline, or to Bowdlerize things.  Whereas nobody who is not fucking insane could make a fuss about my beloved statues and paintings.

Savour the irony.






Nobody saw that coming.