proudhon’s purpose is to make SwayStar look like a genius.

It’s a conspiracy!  Confirmed with many scientific math data points.  It’s too sophisticated to post all of the analysis, so I just post a helpful summary.


confirmed

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I didn’t misread:  I took a generally applicable aphorism that you stated with an elegant flourish, and applied it in a different, related context.

Yes, the context is related in the abstract.

Heh.  Not the first time I’ve gotten that.  But then, I agree with this:


How’s this for what, from your perspective, Jay, would be a “crazy fuck”:  I have at various times spent several portions of my adult life voluntarily “unbanked”.  Cash-only.  On principle, because I hate the banks and I do not wish to associate with them, much less to depend on them.  Do I not have a right to choose not to have a goddamn bank account?  Yes, they have made it exceedingly difficult to live this way.

(And here, I was nearly drawn into professional finance as a lad... it’s been a long road...)


Yes, I wish that with my current level of life experience, I could go back in time and tell my younger self some more general version of this—not only about Bitcoin!  I have consistently screwed myself over this way.  Much of that thing I didn’t post a few days ago had to do with that.


As for the rest:  I see that you and I have some fundamental disagreements about economics.  It will take some thought to communicate my position sensibly in the context.  Meanwhile, I’ll just toss out the foregoing with the idle thought that it may help some idealist:  Make money.  Don’t stick your nose up at it:  “Generals think logistics”, and you can only paralyse yourself by lacking resources.  If you would get corrupted in the process of making money, then your precious principles are anyway too weak to sustain the hardships that you will undoubtedly endure for want of money.  Trust me, I know the cost.

---

Hmmm...  Because to anyone who is not totally stupid, it’s obvious that he they/it [sorry, Jay, for offensive use of correct pronouns] knows?

Any other brilliant questions?

Given this level of incomprehension, it may not actually be incomprehensible for someone to misunderstand what will happen if miners try to steal Segwit coins.

Adapted from amidst a longer compound reply to Jay and explorer, which I may or may not have time to finish:


Have you ever seen anybody say, “Don’t put more money into dollars than you can afford to lose”?  (They should, but that’s not the point.)  Bitcoin cannot claim to be sound money, when it is marketed under this disclaimer.

Whereas Bitcoin’s only fundamental value is as money.  If it’s not sound money, then why bother?

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I state the foregoing from a position of real long-term conviction:  If Bitcoin were to crash to zero, I would literally lack food.  I am effectually “all in” with Bitcoin, for ideological rather than financial reasons; and yet, some of the replies that I am getting here, especially what explorer said, are a little bit too close to “you don’t believe hard enough”.  It’s the kind of thing that draws mutters from rational people about a “cult-like mentality”, etc.  Well, I do have a Bitcult; but when it comes to serious discussion of Bitcoin’s fundamentals and long-term prospects, I neither drink Kool-Aid, nor hand it out.

More than the inevitable, inevitably painful correction drives people away?

First impressions count.  Think of all the people who caught the FOMO get-rich-quick virus in December 2017, and got shorn like the sheep that they are—who lost real money that meant something to them.  Are they ever coming back?  I’m not the first to suggest that that precious bull run set back mass adoption for years.


Those who want euphoria should play with high-volatility altcoins such as TSLA—or better, play at a casino.  You can win or lose a ton of money with either!

Bitcoin is king because it’s boring.  That is to say:  It is reliable.  Core uses solid, well-understood technologies, instead of chasing the latest fad.  Its developers say, “it’s done when it’s done”, not “move fast and break things”.  And as volatile as its market is, it is incomparably less so than most altcoins.

You can in good conscience tell your grandma to buy some Bitcoin.  (Would you tell your grandma to buy into a high-volatility, highly speculative instrument, urge her to enjoy the euphoria, then shrug “DYOR” if she gets burned?)  You can also do business with Bitcoin—I mean, you can do non-Bitcoin business with Bitcoin.  (If a “coin” is not useful for any business other than speculation, it is a Ponzi scheme by definition.)  This means real adoption:  Adoption as money, not as euphoric entertainment and get-rich-quick mania.


It’s easy to say “DYOR”.  Hard for the n00b who is stepping into an alien world, taking a risk—and oft as not, getting burned.  Whereas “DYOR” sounds suspiciously like the kinds of excuses tossed out by ICOs, Defi tokens, and other shitcoin scams.  LOL, you lost money believing in us—your fault, sucker!

Bitcoin has real fundamental value, and should be, in addition to a medium of exchange, a reasonably safe store of value.  If that were not so, it would be a Ponzi; and I would dump it pronto.  But to the contrary, I know how many times that I have said with regret, “I wish that I had kept this money in Bitcoin.”  Not because it would have made me rich, but because that would have avoided losses.

Did I make it moon yet?

I’ll be a contrarian here.  Partly to play devil’s advocate and pick your brain; this is a mere hypothesis:

$10k is a neat Schelling point:  It is comfortable.  I myself have long taken to thinking of a bitcoin as “more or less worth somewhere around $10k”—or more precisely, I tend to think of a U.S. dollar as currently being worth about 0.0001 BTC, more or less.  It is convenient because I am not a speculator, or even really an investor; my HODLings are my “savings account”, and I think of Bitcoin as money more than as an impliedly non-monetary asset.  How many others think somewhat similarly?  It’s a nice round number; it makes for easy mental calculations when carrying on financial transactions with people who still use dollars as a unit of account (!).

Thereupon, if some market factors are pushing the price up, and others are pushing down, and many people are setting walls of limit orders either just above or just below $10k, then why wouldn’t the price sustain this kind of flatness for awhile?  Is it not to be expected to converge around these major milestones before it eventually diverges?

I do think that the long-term trend is up, way up—just because supply is capped, and demand growth has barely even started toward its long-term potential.  It will be some years before Bitcoin even remotely approaches saturation on the demand side!  (Add to this the necessary compensation for depreciation of the dollar, Euro, etc.)  So, at some point, we will need to break out and go far above $10k.

I also think that too-rapid increases driven by pure speculation are not good.  That is the definition of a bubble.  I do not want another November–December 2017 scenario.  I am not watching the ticker and asking, “When moon?”  I want to see a new ATH driven by increased adoption and usage as money—not by FOMO, irrational exuberance, etc.  I want that, because I want for my bitcoins to have rock-solid fundamental value.  Of course, at this juncture, increased adoption driven by loss of confidence in fiat currencies would not be a bad thing...

Too much speculation also increases volatility, which slows adoption—which detracts from Bitcoin’s fundamental value!

Thus, I don’t see the $10k range as “uncomfortable”.  As long as it has stable support there, I am happy for the time being.

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Why are you accusing me of “fake news” for reminding others of your fake news (and past shitcoin pumpings)?

Is the year 2013 over yet?


Wow, I almost forgot the credibility of your information and your predictions.


So, how is your Quarkcoin investment?  Mooned yet?

FTFY, with proactive added note to make sure that you do not dare to think of such offensive terms as “h***band” and “w*fe”.  You are behind the times—in the Dark Ages, using such sexist, gender-discriminatory, hetero-normative, cis-normative slurs!  Don’t you know that a man can become pregnant?  You ignorant bigot, just Google it...  (“Pregnant woman” is now incorrect:  It is “pregnant person”.)

Progress must be made.  Report for re-education.

Jimbo, you, too.

jbreher lacks even an iota of basic comprehension in such matters as subtle, sarcastic humour.  Among other things.

You really think that Jay didn’t know this?  I snorted coffee out of my nose when I read it; don’t try to ruin the joke!

Still just passing through...

Blockhead Looting Maniacs.

Or, Block Links Merklechained.  Speaking of which, I don’t know why as yet, nobody realized this:

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A “chain” is an unavoidable link to slavery, and also to the chain-gang.  It is symbolic, like a noose:  It reminds Blocks of Very Scary Things.

The Blockchain is a structural microaggression that excludes Blocks from Bitcoin cryptocurrency FinTech market opportunities with the subtextual semiotic that all Blocks belong in chains.

If you disagree, you’re a racist, which is obviously bad because racists believe that all Blocks should be chained, which is obviously bad because if you put Blocks in chains, you’re a racist.  Obviously bad.  “Blockchain” cancelled.  End of argument.

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Next to be renamed:  Blackhat and whitehat hackers (next Black Hat conference should be interesting...), military/intelligence black ops (Secret Acts of Compassionate Philanthropy for Universal Liberation), CIA black sites (Happy Fun Sites), secret police blackbag searches (Self-Welcoming Trust and Safety Checks)...  Spamfighting has blacklists, whitelists, and greylists.  This last is offensive to Grey Aliens (who are no doubt illegal—I mean, undocumented), and must be changed, too.  The usage in some industries of “whitewater” to refer to fresh, potable drinking water, “blackwater” to refer to raw sewage, and “greywater” to something in between—oh, never mind.

Well, I should “stfu”.  The blackhearted blackguards of Newspeak persistently outshine satirists.

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No worries; I meant that I was inspired and not antagonized.

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More than that:  Code of Conduct, a subtle doublespeak term in the manner of “re-education”.  Also, they coerced Linus to apologize and seek psychiatric “help” (!) due to his, shall we say, characteristically harsh style of interacting with those whom he deemed to be stupid and/or dishonestly motivated.  (Whether or not they agree with my political and social commentary, certain Core devs (cough) should be quite concerned about that...)  As icing on the cake, Linus’ own daughter basically stabbed him in the back in a roundabout way.

N.b. that one of the ideologues inciting the mob against Linus is known to have explicitly condemned the concept of meritocracy.  The common fallback (and in this context, it is a cowardly fallback) of “I don’t care who wrote the code:  I just want the best code” will not protect you.  In the manner of Animal Farm, it is dogma that everybody is exactly equal, females are twice as equal as males (but penises in skirts are more female than the “cisgendered”), Blocks are twenty times as equal as Wights, Transgenderqueer Blocks of Colour are exponentially more equal, etc., etc.  Code quality is irrelevant.  Who wrote the code is what counts!

So as for Linux.

I hope that the protests on Github are not inadvertently helping to polarize the situation.  The manipulators who push for these kinds of things want polarization:  They want to get you angry and off-balance, and catch the lead developers off-balance and on the defensive.  That’s how people wind up talking past each other (an important concept to study!), until the lead devs just take whatever seems like the path of least resistance so they can wash their hands of the mess, and get back to coding.  Try to see it from their perspective, keep calm and professional... don’t play into the hands of the manipulators.

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Just passing through, scribbling a coredump in haste.  This was supposed to be about three lines long (whoops!).  I hope to see the “Blocks in chains” thing pop up elsewhere, now...

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Edit—Torque posted as I was writing the foregoing:


That’s the narrative—a big piece of it.  The story of what happened with Linux a few years ago is much more convoluted, as I noted above.  Moreover, complaints about a “toxic work environment” pretty much describe how many bitter altcoiners shriek at Bitcoin Core, just because their bad ideas were not coddled to their satisfaction.  Bitcoin Core is the last place that should welcome this type of thinking.

(This brings to mind something from my own experience:  A time when I reached out in private to a Core developer to ask about the prospects for something that I wanted, which Core had previously rejected when proposed by others.  He replied with a polite, but very firm explanation of why it would not be accepted.  His reasoning was sound, so I accepted it with thanks for the time that he took to explain this to me.  I paused to reflect on the public flamewars that I have seen in Bitcoinland, and realized that many people simply must be unable to accept that their pet ideas were rejected.)

Quoted at length to demonstrate the effect of the punch line.

You do realize that many people here are not Americans, and also that many of the people not buying your party line are anything but fond of Trump, and that an interesting Venn diagram could be drawn of these various groupings?

Oh no, no you don’t.  You live in a fantasy in which all the world is America, and everything is about your stupid “election”.  And you are casting about the word “moron”?  With a bunch of stock-phrase cliché types of pseudointellectual insults not sensible in the context, no less...

The politicization of Covid by morons such as yourself costs lives and destroys economies.  You and panic-porn peddler goldkingcoiner should take a good hard look in the mirror before preaching to others.  But then, you really don’t care about anything but your goddamn “election” and your “Progressive” agenda, do you?  The “orange emperor” comment gives it away.  You are obsessed.  And you are probably obese.  By the way.

And so it begins... sigh...  [Edit, note:  There are three different PR links scattered within this post, for those seeking to track the issue.]


[WO] Whom the gods would blacklist...



Somehow, you and I and others missed this quietly slip through in June—a time when many projects were doing such goodthinkful Political Corrections:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/19227

The “blocklist” thing resulted in a terminological clusterfork, for the obvious reason that BobLawblaw stated.

For want of time to write an essay of my own right now, I will quote something insightful that I happened across in June from a four-digit slashdotter, after the OpenZFS lead dev suddenly renamed all of the “master/slave” variables:

https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=16559200&cid=60174924

Eh, I don’t buy it.  The mother is always the greatest influence on the development of a child’s character.

That’s not feminist stuff.  Even Napoleon said so; and he was so much not-a-feminist that he banned women from wearing pants in public within the city of Paris, on pain of arrest by the police.  (That law was repealed in 2013, when feminists realized it was still on the books and screamed bloody murder.  Napoleon’s own mother, by the way, was of such a famously forceful character that Nietzsche later cited her as an example of “the most powerful and influential women in the world” (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 239).  And she raised a son who conquered the Continent...)

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that all of a man’s efforts directly to shape a child’s character are nugatory.  A father is, in the abstract, a fixed axis of power and authority in a household (which is why modernity prefers single motherhood...).  His primary influence on the child is through his relationship with his wife; it is the attitude that she exudes toward him which is absorbed by the child, at the very young ages when the mind has the plasticity to be shaped—a matter of emotions, the woman’s domain, and not of rational didacticism.  If a woman respects and admires her husband, then the children will absorb her devotion, and they will later report being “close to Dad growing up”.  If she despises him, then even without conscious intention, she will undermine him; and the children will always have “daddy issues”, no matter what he does.

If it seems I make women out to be powerful—yes, they are.  In all times and societies in which men have held exclusive political leadership and “oppressed” women through “patriarchy”, women have exercised a profound influence on the world by shaping the next generation of sons—and the next generation of mothers for grandsons.  The sexes are unavoidably interdependent; and talk about men “going their own way” is equally foolish to feminist nonsense about fish and bicycles.

Moreover, if you were to look back to times when families were really stable—before 1850, maybe even earlier—you will find that society had a very different idea of the paternal rôle.  Fathers weren’t babysitters; they were certainly involved with their families, but much more detached from daily childrearing (especially of very young children) than people would expect nowadays.  Within the family, fathers and mothers were not “partners in childcare” or anything of that nature.  Don’t forget that the feminist masculinization of women has been linked to the feminization of men, which has been ongoing for at least 170 years now.  Much is made of how far women have moved into masculine jobs; how much have men moved into women’s work?

Before approximately the middle of the Nineteenth Century, indeed, the respective rôles of the sexes were so drastically different that it is difficult for us nowadays even to imagine what life was really like.

None of this discussion is new.  Read books on the subject from the circa 1900, plus or minus a few decades; you will find them eerily similar to arguments seen all over the Internet nowadays, but much more insightful.  And they, in turn, will provide you references stretching back much further.

For my part, when I contemplate the general pattern of human society throughout most of history, excepting only periods of cultural degeneration and the collapse of civilizations, I am willing to bet on what enduring experience has shown to work.

And in the instances that you describe, I think you will find that there were many sources of dysfunction other than simply, “Dad was too busy.”

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For obvious reasons, I have ignored the opposite case of the “a man usually” clause.  Of course, if a mother devotes her life to her chasing money, money, money at the expense of her children, they will grow up to be neurotic, perhaps psychotic.

In Bitcoinland, it is unsurprising that some should be cryptic.

Cynical though I am, that is to me a shocking view of most investors.  Has the world really changed so much while I was sleeping?  “Back in the day”, I think, the goal that I stated was a significant motivating factor for most people who were striving to accrue wealth, and even a primary motive for not a few.

“I want a better future for my children and grandchildren, and their grandchildren” is unrealistic to expect as a motive for most investors?

On the other hand, maybe that explains why the markets are so fucked up:  The types of speculators who seek to Get Rich Quick are not typically long-term thinkers!  Of course, they would not give a hoot about their descendants.  Perhaps they may be fanatical Christians:  They take no thought for the morrow (Matthew 6:34).

(Boldface is Jay’s.)

I know that this will shock the hyper-individualists in the peanut gallery:  As an ethical matter, heirs do not receive bequests as their individual property.  Ethically if not legally, it is collective property held in trust for the family—for posterity, for future generations.

To protest this would be shameful.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.  With every privilege comes a duty.  People who receive wealth from their parents must accept that duty; thus, enjoy it though they may within the spans of their own lives, they must tend it wisely, and ultimately pass down the gifts that they have received.  You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.

No, heirs don’t have a right to spend their inheritances on “hookers, lambos and blow”.  If they do choose to do so, at least they should be subject to severe social shaming.  I think that used to be the case, when prodigal heirs were the exception rather than the rule.

Those who insist on having only absolute individual property rights should relieve themselves of this burden by having a solemn talk with their parents, and requesting to be disinherited.  That’s only fair.  Such individualists should earn their own wealth all by themselves, totally alone, and thus free up their parents to re-allocate bequests to their other children, or spend it all on their own pleasures, or bequeath it all to charity, or put it all into gold and then sink the gold to the bottom of the ocean.  It is their individual property right, yes?

That said, I don’t think that laws and legally enforceable terms in wills can help much here.  Perhaps a bit.  For example, once upon a time, in some European countries, there were laws that protected familial ownership of the family home.  If the inheritor of the family home tried to sell it outside the family, other potential heirs who were next in line could challenge and prohibit the sale; thus, the family home was effectually inalienable from the family, unless a unanimity of a whole generation should be in folly.

This must be unimaginable to most Americans:  There were families who held the same home for centuries.  I do not speak only of the nobility with their familial castles and palaces:  In some parts of Europe, it was not even rare for a family of peasant freeholders or the petite bourgeoisie to hold the same home for ten or twenty generations.  I think that most of this broke down during the Twentieth Century, and most of the relevant laws are probably no longer on the books.  It’s a shame.  Those people had excellent social stability.  They were productive and happy.  Children did not rebel against their parents, as seems to be expected nowadays (!).

But such things depend on the living.  Such “hand from beyond the grave” long, complex chains of devises as prohibited by the Rule Against Perpetuities could not instill in prodigal heirs the character that they lacked; and if they did not lack such character, the terms of long-ago wills would only be an unnecessary burden.

The point of my post was that the human element is much more important than the legalities.  If you have good kids, you don’t need fancy wills or trusts; but if your kids are


...then no legal instruments can make them behave themselves after you are gone.


Not just any others:  Their own descendants.  I hope that it is not politically incorrect nowadays to point out that people do and should prefer to benefit their own descendants over arbitrary “others”.  If so, then surely, mankind will go extinct.  I think that Darwin would agree with me:  What creature could long survive, if it did not prefer its own offspring?

(Of course, people often make bequests to charity, etc.—just as they often give such gifts in their lifetimes.  It is a different motive.  My point is that a bequest to one’s own posterity is very specific, and not just based on a vague notion of touching someone’s life out there.)

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I suppose that this ran far afield of the original discussion about investments.  Re-reading the above before posting, I hope that it doesn’t come off as too negative; it’s certainly not intended to be argumentative.

It seems that whenever I start to think that I am too cynical, I find that to the contrary, I am naïve; and that idea that most investors don’t even include intergenerational wealth in their explicit goals is really shocking to me.  Perhaps, to some degree, that may be the “ethnic” in me speaking; in some parts of the world, much of what I have said would be commonplace.  But then, as noted above, such thinking used to be commonplace amongst Europeans, too.

No wonder the world is doomed.  Life is cheap, and people have lost all sense of purpose.  They are all short-term thinkers:  Life is short!

Well, it’s an important insight, in and of itself...  I’m glad to have this discussion.

jbrehrer is shilling a contentious hardfork of the English language, and accusing you of using “ANYONECANSPEND” words.  Is my witnessing of this transaction valid?

Dr. Craig S. Wright created the English language.  Maybe we should ask him.

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As to the usage dispute, I have been preparing replies to JimboToronto and others.  Some of these little essays do take time.

Yes!  I am an extremist in most everything, and proud of it.  Here, I will argue for—not the “middle of the road”, but a nuanced analysis.  Observe that the two opposite poles you describe are simple “easy answers” of the type for which people tend to reach.  I think that the situation is more complicated.

I myself have never said that Covid is inconsequential.  To the contrary:  In my first public statement about it, I said, “Some of you will die from the coronavirus....  The virus may kill me, too; maybe, maybe not.”  I then proceeded to explain at length why we should not destroy the world whilst failing to save it.

Perhaps the concept of managing and accepting risks in balance with worse risks may be too difficult for most people?


How many people here have experienced hunger?

I mean:  Real hunger.  Chronic malnutrition.  A starvation diet for an extended period of time.  To feel your body slowly wasting away, dissolving itself from the inside out, as you weaken and descend into madness.  You lie down, feel too weak to get up, fall half-unconscious, dream about food—any food...

I have that experience.  I think it’s likely that soon, many more people will have that experience, too.

Most governments worldwide have been following exactly the policy that they would take up, if they intended to destroy their economies and cause a global Depression.  That is not a “conspiracy theory”:  It is a blackbox observation of actual behaviour, with malice and stupidity being indistinguishable.  I believe that I have used the term economic arson.

I have been saying for the past six months that I fear starvation more than I fear Covid...

Whereas I don’t brush Covid off or pretend that it doesn’t exist.  I know people who have had it, including someone close to me.  That was very worrisome; I mentioned it at the time on this forum.  I myself am at high risk of complications due to pre-existing conditions.  I have said this before:  I am taking personal precautions, which do not affect society.

So as for my own experience.  Thereupon, how about this for a change:  Isolate nursing homes.  Encourage people with high risk factors to get a little bit “OCD”.  And otherwise—let life go on.  Perhaps encourage some moderate precautions that don’t leave masses of people totally dysfunctional.  Improved hygiene and a social respect for personal space are good ideas anyway—hey, I never wanted anybody within two meters of me unless we intended to kiss!  I said that before Covid:  Back off.  What is unacceptable is turning the whole world into a prison, and potentially a starvation GULAG, in failed attempts to prevent the ongoing spread of a virus that has low lethality for people without high risk factors.

Too nuanced?  I am trying to be blunt.


Panic is also a foundation for malicious actions.  Panicked people are easy to manipulate en masse.  (Insert book-length post here.)

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Agreed.  I was always against the lockdowns.

What’s much scarier than Covid is that “lockdown” is prison terminology being openly applied to people sheep who fancy themselves to be “free” because they live in “democracies”.


Also agreed.  Though the death rate won’t be so low if (when?) economies are imploded to the point that people are starving in the streets.

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Almost everything that I have said in the foregoing is a repeat of what I said in March and April.  All that has changed is that we are further along on the same trajectory toward global disaster.

An apocryphal but amusing tale:

Alexander the Great sent to Sparta a demand for their surrender:  “If we conquer you by force, then we will slay your men, rape your women, enslave your children, seize your treasures, burn your city...” (etc., etc.)

The Laconic reply:  “If.”

(Alexander physically destroyed Thebes, killed the Theban men, and enslaved the Theban women and children as a punishment for their rebellion against him.  He left Sparta alone—probably because he didn’t want it, rather than from fear of conflict; at that point in history, Sparta was in decline.  I am guessing that the above story imaginatively plays off of that, and King Leonidas’ famous “μολὼν λαβέ” (‘come and get them’) in reply to the Persians’ demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons.  A more amusing bit of the actual history:  Phryne the courtesan later offered to rebuild the city walls for the surviving Thebans; her offer was rejected, but that gives a measure of how wealthy she was.)


So good to see that WO is just chock full of love, peace, happiness, and all those other hippie things.