Actually, somebody is asking him questions, which he is ignoring:


...and other substantial questions being ignored on that thread, including:


PrimeNumber7, take note!


The code-illiterate “hacker” was banned less than one year ago, which is a long time only to children; and there is evidence that he was involved in ICO bumping as recently as five months ago, which is a long time only to infants.  If you want to argue a legal analogy, legal statutes of limitations are much longer; and in some jurisdictions, in some types of cases, if there is substantial evidence of a fraud upon the court, then a judgment can be set aside long on motion even long after appeals are out of time.

Note also “hacker’s” total lack of remorse—actually, the opposite of remorse:  A self-righteous belligerence toward anybody who questions his spam business.


Questions are being asked.  But the indignant “hacker” has “had enough”.

---

---

Well, I see that you noticed how I despise Wikipedia legal arguments. ;-)

Just how is this in any way “very similar to” an ex post facto law?  Spamming generally has always been against the rules.  Quoting mprep’s reply to me, I cited three very specific rules which have been “on the books” for a long time.

The time passed since an offence is also completely irrelevant to the question of whether a law is ex post facto.

In the abstract, the principal problem with ex post facto laws is one of notice, or the lack thereof—i.e., retroactively banning behaviour that people had no way to know would or could be illegal.  It would be a manifest absurdity for any user to pretend that he did not know that spam is wrong.  (And if any user would so argue, it is really not somebody a forum community should want, anyway.)

(And since you linked to a clearly written explanation from Cornell LII, I will presume that you did not mix up your terminology with some other concept.)

Your argument makes no sense whatsoever.  I am answering it because it is a serious attempt to argue a counterpoint; at least that is a refreshing change from the trolls’ responses.

I note also that although I tend to couch arguments very roughly in quasi-legal language, I do so for the sake of precise analysis, and not to suggest that legal standards should apply to forum policy.


Reductio ad absurdum, theymos (and by extension, those to whom he delegates ban-hammers) have a right to ban people based on disliking their eyes, or on flips of a coin.  I think that would be (to understate the matter) grossly stupid policy; and I would publicly express my opinion on the topic.  That is a reductio ad absurdum.  Here, on the flipside, I am arguing that forum administrative policy does not adequately protect the community from spam, if it does not take appropriate and necessary measures in what I am arguing as a test case for a crackdown on spammers.

It is a suitable test case:  A forum user was granted lenience and unbanned, then subsequently discovered to be an unrepentant spammer.  If the ban hammer comes down on him, that will send a clear message about spam, and encourage reports from investigators.  If it does not, it shows that the rules are ineffectual and arbitrary, and spammers can get away with anything.

---

Are you serious?

Above, I quoted mprep on multiple rules broken by your ICO bump “business”, also known as spam.  Also, your plagiarism was obviously against the rules—and you were only unbanned due to being granted a lenience that you do not deserve, apparently based on a mistaken impression that you were generally a good user who did one thing wrong, once.


Translation:  “I had them fooled real good.  Therefore, I deserve to get away with it!  How dare you call me out for bad things I did, which apparently were not taken into consideration eleven months ago, and which continued at least as recently as five months ago!?”

Do I need to spell this out?


Announcement:  I will now found my own forum—just so that I can invite this user over, and apply the above-shown didactic tool for a hard lesson in spelling:

Quote from: kulmena on April 18, 2020, 11:41:13 AM

Bunning me

Ill-bread and ineducable, he is!

(Doughn’t try to stop me.  I’m on a roll.  Well, I have a rye sense of humour.)

---

Unpaid, non-ICO BUMP!

Unpaid, non-ICO BUMP!

On grounds of simple logic, I was sure that Naficopa must be wrong; at least, that is a quite twisted definition of “spam”.  (Compare what n.a.n.a.e. called “one bite of the apple” arguments by e-mail spammers who claim it’s not spam, if they blast out only one advertisement to millions of people who never asked for it, then “respect” opt-out.)  However, I did a brief search to confirm; whereupon I found that Naficopa was only partly incorrect, insofar as the ref link must be on topic (not merely “posted [only] once”):


That referred to this—I have redacted the reflink url in this quote:

Subject: Re: How to become a bitcoin millionaire

So...  That was explicitly permitted by theymos.

I urge the administration to reconsider this policy.  It is not beneficial to high-quality discussion; and it conflicts with at least the spirit of this:


To be clear, I am not opposed to all advertising in posts.  If somebody is creating substantial high-quality content, and (say) links to a variety of relevant commercial resources, that seems to be a reasonable way for people to support their own good work; that is specifically what dogie was doing, in the wider context of theymos’ statement about ads in posts.  I also sometimes see forum accounts created to promote a specific service, where it’s clear that that is what they are doing; everybody expects for, say, a company account to favourably mention the company’s own products or services.  However, arbitrary reflinks are pernicious because it is easy for a user to slip in actual spam in an underhanded manner.  It opens the way for deceptiveness by shill accounts created for advertising, which just pretend to be helpful; and it can also have a corrupting effect on ordinary users, just as special consideration given to magazine reviewers can and does corrupt their reviews.

It is also annoying to anybody who has deliberately avoided the perverse incentives created by referral links in posts.  Surely I am not the only one who can say this:  I am quite sure that in popular posts where people were likely to click, I have occasionally recommended sites which have referral programs.  I have not even bothered signing up for any of those.  I never even thought about that, except for sometimes considering that maybe I should put a reflink in my signature.  I just consider reflinks in post bodies to be spam—unless it is similar to what dogie was doing, or otherwise clearly-marked and clearly benign advertising in content that actually contributes to the forum; and I behave accordingly for my own part.  If forum rules disagree, then perhaps I should take advantage?  

---

Edit 2020-04-22, an historic and historical footnote:  The foregoing inspired me to finally add a paid reflink to my signature.  It is the principle of the matter—and good, honest crypto-fun!

So, the wannabe-“hacker”, a plagiarist and a very poor liar who eventually admitted to being a paid spammer and averred to continuing to protect a paid forum-spam ring, has now:

• Demanded that I be banned because he dislikes my opinions;
• Knowingly and maliciously spread factually false, defamatory statements about me; and,
• Concluded by insinuating a wish that I should catch COVID-19.

Disgusting.

---

I am off the forum for the next day or so, and intermittently for the next few weeks.  Busy.

Meanwhile, please feel free to keep bumping this thread with your self-pwnage.

P.S., I know your type:  Dumb s’kiddie, big-talking hacker wannabe.  LOL, even your basic opsec is so shitty that you got caught red-handed doing paid professional spam (!).  You couldn’t hack your way out of a wet paper bag running unpatched IIS 5.1 ridiculously stupid “smart” contracts, which real hackers find to be much more profitable than ICO bumping.  According to your customary personal text, “NO SYSTEM IS SAFE !”—what, from you?  Well, you are an Advanced Persistent Threat for causing spam, spam, plagiarism, spam, spam, spam and spam some spam spam annoyance.

Thanks.  Though if answers to gmaxwell’s explicit request from the previous Bitmain thread get deleted, I think there will be bigger problems than my losing a post. :-)

P.S., if you like any of my Bitcoin advocacy arguments, please feel free to copy and share anywhere you want, with proper attribution of my authorship.  For the greater good of Bitcoin (which is in the self-interest of anyone who has skin in the game...).

---

Those quite-a-few-words explain reasons why that is a shortsighted, self-defeating business strategy.

Try reading.  Good idea?

---

Having said my piece, I will probably not make a habit of posting in Bitmain threads here.

ICO bump services:

• Are incentivized posts on threads which are totally off-topic in the only forum where incentivized posts of any kind are allowed (i.e., Games and Rounds).
• Are usually paid in shitcoins.
• Have no conceivable design purpose other than to evade the limitation on the frequency at which a topic OP is allowed to bump his own topic.

In addition to being definitional paid spammers, ICO bumpers thus violate multiple explicit rules of this forum:

Boldface is mprep’s; the emphasis is only hereby relevant insofar as bumped ICO topics are obviously not in Games and Rounds:

Therefore:

• Forum users should be guided accordingly.
• Investigators should report ICO bumpers and their posts for rules violations.
• I urge the administration to review the case of a longtime spammer who was granted leniency for plagiarism!

---

Thanks for the replies, Jay.  My forum time is strictly limited now; some other time, I will need to catch up with your replies here and elsewhere.  Your thorough posts are read and appreciated.

More generally, I may be gone from the forum on and off for at least the next few weeks.  I will be going back through to reply on multiple different topics that I recently seem to have been ignoring, and catching up with some folks in PMs that deserve my undivided attention.

Thank you, mprep.  Bottom line up front:


I do understand the struggle to keep your unofficial rules list readable; for otherwise, its purpose would be defeated.  Accordingly, I did not try to push my previous suggestion about PMs; you were quite right that at least, people should heed the warning they see every time they see a PM.  Here, however, I suggest that there is a significant problem that can be better addressed by measures including a succinct user-educational note in the rules list, as well as mod reports (as you have been discussing with Lauda) and publicly urging that spammers be banned (a matter that I am taking up on other threads).


Obviously, multiple formal, well-known rules are violated by paid bumps of ICOs which are totally off-topic in Games and Rounds, and are usually paid in shitcoins.  (Also obviously, that is definitional spam as I said—whereas now, I am referring to the forum’s rules.)  Forum users should be guided accordingly.

Why should Chainalysis have all the fun?  Why should you be stuck trying to pull information off of whatever analysis block explorers have done?

A quick note for those who may be interested in more advanced investigative techniques:

https://github.com/citp/BlockSci

IIRC, requires a powerful machine with a strong CPU, at least 64 GiB RAM, and plenty of storage.  For those with EC2 access, an AMI is (or was) available.  I have not looked into the latest developments, but the code repository appears to be actively maintained.  I have not personally tried this, due to the high resource requirements.

It does cross-chain analysis, so you can correlate transactions as your investigative target moves money between Bitcoin and alts.

Information:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/09/11/blocksci-a-platform-for-blockchain-science-and-exploration/

https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02489

Bonus:  This will scare you into wanting better blockchain privacy for yourself.

Found via Artemis3’s excellent response:

Artemis3 said everything that I usually would have, plus more; and the discussion thus got me thinking about Bitmain.  What is their strategy, on a deeper level?

Well, let’s talk business.  Most people on this forum know me for being suicidally principled; but I do understand business, in a purely pragmatic sense.  And, “business is business.”  Mining is a for-profit activity; miners obviously don’t want to shoot themselves in the foot financially with poor business decisions based only on idealism.  Of course, one of Bitcoin’s finest qualities is how effectively it aligns self-interest incentives with the greater good of Bitcoin; and if Doing The Right Thing makes business sense, then you must be incredibly stupid to do otherwise.

My flash of insight here:  When you buy from Bitmain, you are funding a hostile competitor.  Not only as a miner, but as an investor in Bitcoin.  Moreover, you are incurring a dependency of your business on a hostile competitor.  All of this is sheer idiocy, from a perspective of “strictly business”.

---

I observe that Bitmain attacked Bitcoin’s uniqueness.  Anyone who has studied the nature of money should know how detrimental an attack on uniqueness is, without further explanation.  Moreover, Bitmain are not only willing, but overly eager to make ASIC miners for altcoins—even for altcoins that deliberately attempt ASIC-resistance.  I followed the Zcash backpedalling on their ASIC-resistance promise, and Monero’s repeated hardforking of their proof-of-work algorithm while they developed RandomX (and if there were one altcoin feature that I could steal for Bitcoin, it would be RandomX—yes, I know why that will probably never happen; don’t bother explaining).  Bitmain has invested serious resources on all fronts to make a giant, undifferentiated market of lots of coins, in which all coins are just coins mined by Bitmain.

Bitmain is not only an ASIC maker:  They are an ASIC-maker whose self-evident strategy is to proliferate the market for mining hardware in every way they can, no matter how that may damage the market in other ways.  They don’t want for any particular coin to be uniquely valuable:  They want a general market of cryptocurrencies where one is pretty much the same as another, and no matter which one you choose, you will buy a Bitmain miner for it.  Meanwhile, they themselves can mine them all, and dump them all—it’s all the same to them.

At this juncture, I recall a vintage Joel on Software strategy letter:


My analysis:  Bitmain seeks to commoditize cryptocurrencies as such.  Note the plural.

For HODLers of any cryptocurrency, this is disastrous.  For miners of any cryptocurrency, this is even worse, insofar as you are paying for the privilege of having your worst strategic competitor actively attempt to undermine your whole market.

Miners who buy Bitmain are, of course, buying from their direct competitor in the mining business.  I have never understood why people do this.  You pay Bitmain top bits for fast hardware, and thus fund Bitmain and Bitmain-operated pools to compete against you in hashrate.  You even buy from a direct competitor who was most probably deploying covert ASICBOOST in secret back around early 2017; so you know that they will play dirty tricks to gain an unfair competitive advantage against you.  You also know, as Artemis3 pointed out, how generally hostile they are to their own “customers”, with their history of control-freakery over business-critical capital hardware that you thought you actually bought from them—even to the point that they have sometimes “sold” you miners that came with their ability to remote-brick “your” business (!).  And you keep paying them!?

All this is simple, tactical, obvious at the surface; how do people not realize it, other than total thoughtlessness?

Whereas my point here is much deeper, and accordingly even scarier.  If you HODL any coin—not only Bitcoin, but any coin—then Bitmain is working to undermine the long-term value of your investment on a strategic level.  And if you fork over your capital investment money to Bitmain for mining hardware, you are forking yourself over in the long term.

Think business-wise.  Think about how best to grow and protect your own wealth in the long term.  Be guided accordingly.

---

This is a specific, concrete instance of a general, abstract point that I have been urging for awhile now:


As a Bitcoin idealist, I understand that many people couldn’t care less about Bitcoin principles.

As a HODLer who gets hit in the wallet by the destructive market effects of fork-attacks against Bitcoin, I do not understand why many other people don’t seem to care about the value of their own money.  Please.  Be more selfish.  It’s good for Bitcoin, and good for you.

Full disclosure:  I have a personally significant financial interest in Bitcoin.  I have skin in the game, and Bitmain’s strategy is thus adverse to me, me, me.  A considerable part of my enmity for Bitmain is driven by pure self-interest.  You see how that works?

That is an excellent point.  From here, the discussion inevitably devolves into big talk about some plan to redesign the Web to have at least the decentralization that Usenet had 40 years ago.  To avoid that discussion, all I’ll say is that “cypherpunks write code”. :-)


Sound advice.  With a centrally controlled resource, it is all a matter of trust.  There are some individuals whom I myself would trust with such responsibility.  (And what happens when they die—is there trustworthy clear succession of responsibility?  And what if others do not likewise trust them?  And...)

That said, I must point out that this:


...is exactly an instance of this:

Bottom line up front:


In my experience, the moment that I hear the phrase “Blockstream propaganda”, I know that I am speaking to an idiot.  It’s a kind of shibboleth for those who believe everything that they read on /r/btc.


WTF, were you now around in September–November 2017?  All that talk about “the flippening” may seem like a sick joke now; but at the time, it did not seem so.

I myself will never forget the day of 12 November 2017.  I was fucking glued to the computer screen all day as our hashrate plummeted—I think that at some point, Slushpool alone was something like 70% of our hashrate, which is really bad.  Block generation slowed to a crawl, mempools backed up to hell, and meanwhile, all the Btrashers were on social media prematurely gloating about their victory as BCH prices spiked something like 300% in about 12 hours on FOMO rush—for before the dump, first comes the pump...

(Details thereby are recounted off the top of my head, subject to the lability of human memory.)

Of course, what ultimately happened is that even the worst bad actors in mining had to come crawling back to Bitcoin if they wanted to pay their electric bills, the BCH price crashed as quickly as it had spiked, FOMO sheep got fleeced, and Bitcoin moved on.  But that would not have happened if fewer Bitcoiners had my attitude, and more Bitcoiners had your attitude.  If the economic majority had your way of thinking, Bitcoin would have been “flippened” out of existence; and its replacement would have been pwned by Jihan & Co. as a centrally managed shitcoin, with no alternatives remaining.


What part of “X and Y would both have been very bad” is difficult to understand?


Interesting, the part that you ignored there.  Well, let us take the three that you did list one by one:


As a security expert, I can attest that you have no idea what a Sybil attack is.  How does Blockstream Satellite generate unbounded numbers of sockpuppet identities using cheap identifiers to overwhelm your view of the network?

I myself love the concept of Blockstream Satellite because, if used properly, it can give a 100% anonymous (receipt of broadcast radio waves with <$100 in commonly-available hardware) view of the blockchain that is immune to targeted attacks, and is probably more reliable on average than an anonymous peer randomly selected from a network currently infested with actual Sybil nodes.  When combined with the P2P network, I think that Blockstream Satellite adds a safety check against eclipse attacks.  Although that is not their primary advertised use case, I myself think it is a good use case.

For those with very limited Internet connections, receiving blocks through Blockstream Satellite and then checking the block hashes against those observed on the P2P network would give all the security of the P2P network, and would not in any way be comparable to SPV.  I have not configured it this way, and I admit I don’t know off the top of my head exactly the magic to make Core do this; but if I were consulting for someone with limited Internet access, it is the first thing that I would look into.  The first thing that I would check is if Blockstream has already done the hard work here...

Core independently validates the blocks that you would be receiving through Blockstream; and if the chain you’re being fed by them does not match the hashes of whatever your P2P peers are advertising as their best chain tips, Blockstream  has no way of stopping you from downloading the other blocks from the Internet, and immediately figuring out that Blockstream is trying to mislead you.

If Blockstream were to broadcast bad blocks worldwide through a system that by its nature cannot target users, it would be an excellent means for them to out themselves as totally corrupt and worthy of universal hatred.


I have not evaluated Blockstream Green, nor was I familiar with its predecessor GreenAddress; so I can’t speak to this.


So, bluematt flamed them for an advertisement that damn well deserved it.  His twitter bio still proudly lists him as Blockstream co-founder.  Call me when he starts tweeting about “Blockstream propaganda”.

I don’t (and can’t) transact on Liquid.  Insofar as I have looked into it, it seems to be primarily a way for non-Bitcoin assets to be managed.  Call me if Blockstream starts to position it as a replacement for Bitcoin, or otherwise as a competitor to Bitcoin.


Such as Lightning Network?  Most of what I know directly about Blockstream’s current market position comes from my following (in various degrees) c-lightning and related Elements Project work on Lightning integration with everything from shopping carts to tipjars to pay-per-call Web APIs.

https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Merited by nullius (100)

Insofar as I can see as an outsider with no relation to Blockstream, it looks to me like if Lightning fails, Dr. Back will probably be a poor man.

I also admire some of their ongoing R&D, such as Simplicity for advanced smart contracts with mathematically provable security properties—unlike Ethereum’s foreseeable security nightmare of a Turing-complete VM bolted onto a blockchain, covered over in a fashionable Javascript-like language.  It is not the first time that I have raised this point:


(Oh, and libwally is little bundle of joy.  I say that based on having read the code, not based on the name of the company who published it.  I have been planning that if/when I dust off some of my little Bitcoin utilities on Github, I should probably use libwally to replace my own address-wrangling and BIP32-derivation code.  It’s a small thing in the big picture, but nevertheless worth mention in small text.)

Of the Blockstream goodies that I just described, all of which you somehow forgot to mention, what doesn’t push trustlessness and decentralization?

---

I actually do oppose forks almost categorically.  I began to write a long essay on that, which perhaps I may finish later and post somewhere...  The nutshell version is that:


Indeed, you are right.  But without fallacious overextension, the same analogy works perfectly well for observing that excreted toxins are just that:  Shit (or shitcoins) which are dead weight to be flushed down the sewer.

It is not exactly a ringing endorsement of forks. :-)

---

Long post by Jay came in while I was writing my long post.  Will catch up soon.

Is Cøbra seriously pretending not to know the meaning of the term “neutral” in the context of forum feedback?  

I myself have been critical of the avoidance of responsibility for substantively negative neutral feedback based on only rumour and innuendo.  But that is clearly not what is happening here.  Lauda made a well-supported observation, and marked it as “neutral”.  Why is Cøbra deliberately confusing the issue by speaking as if she red-tagged him?

Also, it’s always nice to see whom the troll brigade is defending.  Anyway, as to the substance of the matter...

---

If you showed the foresight and wise judgment to distrust the clusterfork misadvertised as the so-called “Bitcoin Foundation”, then you should damn well know why people are worried about the potential that you may turn out to be another Gavin Andresen.

I so note this as the first and, thus far, only person who has red-tagged Gavin’s forum account.  Yes, that is symbolic; but if people won’t step up even that much...  Anyway, I think my point is clear about why people do not trust you to exclusively control bitcoin-dot-org:


References:
https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984
https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1023566782001541120
https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1037102542537334785
https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1036652944916140032

---

I was around at the time; and I do recall that it was specifically the “denounce-segwit2x” page linked above that gave bitcoin.org sufficient ongoing credibility for me to continue recommending it to newbies.

Should you doubt how hard I myself was against S2X particularly, back in 2017:

---

Within the four corners of what I just quoted, it is a good analysis.  However, you are drawing a false dichotomy between the threat of XT/BU/2X types of fork-attacks, and the threat of BCH/BSV/“Bitcoin Super Diamond Gold Mauve” types of fork-attacks.

Both are destructive to Bitcoin.  Both are based on lies, greed, and mass-manipulation.  This argument is like positing that it’s better for a cancer to metastasize outside the original tumour:


Say what?


Have you not been around for long enough to see all the “Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin” arguments?


That is one of my “Newbie” posts, from the same thread as:


I quote that specifically because n.b. that Jet Cash is neither a n00b nor a shill.  That makes it particularly alarming that he would fall for this type of scam argument.

---

Although bitcoin.org is a very influential site (and we would not be otherwise having this discussion), the set of all people who know that bitcoin-dot-org is “the first Bitcoin site started by Satoshi himself” is numerically minuscule relative to the set of all people who see bitcoin-dot-com as legitimate because it is the Dot-Com.

Ultimately, what has actively stopped BCH from winning the public-relations mindshare war is that an unorganized, decentralized cadre of Bitcoiners who have pushed back unequivocally.  This set very visibly includes Greg Maxwell, and also his former colleagues at Blockstream—Dr. Back, et al.  It very visibly includes laanwj and harding, whom Lauda mentioned.  It very visibly does not include you, the exclusive controller of bitcoin-dot-org.


The day that Blockstream starts pushing Liquid as something other than a private commercial venture that is complementary to Bitcoin, primarily for the handling of non-Bitcoin assets, is the day that I unequivocally condemn Blockstream and everybody involved in it.  Whereas there are no indications of any such thing; and as it stands, Blockstream has a stainless track record for promoting privacy, decentralization, solid Bitcoin R&D, and Lightning.  (Also as a coder, I appreciate the cleanliness of their open-source code.)  Thus your statement is basically FUD on Dr. Back, Dr. Wuille, and their current and former colleagues at Blockstream.

To be execruciatingly clear, I don’t trust Blockstream!  To anyone with technical expertise, their self-evident agenda is, “Don’t trust us:  Keep Bitcoin trustless.”  I like that:  Keep down the blocksize so that ordinary people can keep running nodes (I say this with real-world experience needing to run Bitcoin on inexpensive hardware), and promote Lightning as the future of scaling and privacy.  For as long as that remains the agenda demonstrated by their actions and their code (not merely their words), I will continue to defend Blockstream’s reputation in public discussions.

(I have been intending to write a forum essay about this.  Disclosure:  I have no affiliation with Dr. Back, other than that I always liked his cypherpunks stuff, and I first discovered Hashcash in the 90s.)

Whereas, with a different emphasis:


Thanks for clarifying.  The highlighted portion is exactly why people don’t trust you to be the exclusive controller of bitcoin-dot-org.


We don’t actually need a reason beyond that.


Fear has nothing to do with it, I assure you.


laanwj et al. bend to groupthink and public pressure?  LOL.  Try pushing them around, and see how far you get.

---

Edit 2020-04-22:  Fixed a very embarrassing typo.  Alas, I erred!  :-(

And the two subjects are not inextricably entwined when a single individual is trusted to control one of the most important Bitcoin websites, because...?

---

Why did you cut from your quotation the part where I said this?


That was edited in; but that edit was done within a few minutes after I posted, long before your reply.  (I also wanted to add links to two of my favourite websites, Gitian and Reproducible Builds; but I figured that may overwhelm nontechnical people who are just looking for the place to download Bitcoin.)


It offers the best place for people to download Bitcoin Core.

As a practical matter, I have spent 20+ years fighting to get people to actually verify digital signatures, etc.  I have been pushing that particular issue since long before Bitcoin even existed.  I know that people do not actually verify things; therefore, it is important to minimize potential damage by referring people to a better source which, by the way, has better information than bitcoin-dot-org does on verifying downloads.  See the link in my above quote about verifying the integrity of downloads.


What guarantees that bitcoin-dot-org will stay the same tomorrow?  Your personal integrity alone?


Please advise:  If you yourself were not Cøbra, then would you trust this person to be the exclusive trusted party in control of the Bitcoin.org domain?  That is pretty much a yes-or-no question.  Be objective here.


Just e.g., from an imgur album, “Uploaded Jul 26 2018”.  Thanks to an anonymous little birdie for the tip.


I question the judgment of anybody who thinks that that’s a good argument in your favour; but anyway...

Would you want for Bitcoin.org to be under the exclusive, trusted control of a single individual with the history of public statements that you have made, if you were not that individual?

You could do much for Bitcoin (and for your own reputation) by answering that question honestly, and acting accordingly.


I would hazard a guess that many people would prefer for bitcoin.org to be not be exclusively under your control.

Bitcoin.org Domain Ownership #2548

https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues/2548#issuecomment-408711051

It is not a good sign when Cøbra speaks with a forked tongue, as Cøbra—in addition to that multiple-identity thing.




No argument from me here!

---

On Principled Practicality

Quote from: JayJuanGee on April 18, 2020, 09:47:23 AM

oh and say fuck you to the shitcoiners once in a while, that tends to be a bonus.

Whereupon:

Quote from: JayJuanGee on April 18, 2020, 09:47:23 AM

Quote from: Lauda on April 18, 2020, 07:12:45 AM

Essentially nobody trusts Cøbra except theymos and maybe a couple of bamboozled individuals. There is a reason for this, and there is a reason why many here have praised Cøbra when he has appeared here before: It is called ignorance.

I had kind of noticed the parts about some questionable deviance into being sympathetic into shitcoins and nonsense BIG blocker theories, but sometimes it is NOT clear about the various connections and maybe they do not matter too much in the whole scheme of things and if I feel that I am able to engage within the forum and share ideas, mostly about bitcoin, then I am good...

Jay, I think that it would be a real eye-opener (and ultimately beneficial to Bitcoin) if you were to do a market analysis to estimate approximately where Bitcoin should be today, were it not for the fork-attacks.  Bitcoin’s “honey badger” power in resisting those attacks has been phenomenal; but where would we be without those attacks?

I am now arguing from a business perspective.  Any reasonable prospectus on Bitcoin must disclose that Bitcoin’s biggest vulnerability is fork-attacks, also known as the trust attack.  Any reasonable investor should recognize it as in his own self-interest to fight those attacks.  The forked shitcoins falsely advertised as “Bitcoin” will, in and of themselves, never amount to anything in the long term; they are purely a negative, which harms the market as a whole by intentionally, fraudulently diluting the “Bitcoin” brand and financially diluting Bitcoin’s market capitalization. and reducing overall investor confidence in Bitcoin’s uniqueness.  To invest exclusively in the one and only genuine Bitcoin, and to defend your investment by defending Bitcoin against dilution attacks, is a strategy perfectly matched in both principle and practicality.

Whereas Cøbra is perfectly positioned to stab Bitcoin in the back.  He is a trusted party for a vital public relations channel—one to which such well-intended people as LoyceV (and unfortunately, I myself) have been referring newbies.  If Cøbra were just some guy posting his opinions on the Internet, it would be a different matter.  Whereas the trusted party exclusively controlling a website with major public mindshare is known to be at best equivocal—at best.  If he were deadly principled, it may arguably be a different matter; but he is obviously not, wherefore:

Quote from: Lauda on April 18, 2020, 07:12:45 AM

Next step: Cøbra to give up access to Bitcoin.org.

“Not your keys, not your coins.”

“Not your domain, not your website.”

The key difference is, of course, that a domain name is a (0) non-cryptographic identifier (1) under centralized control.  There is no avoiding that, unless you use only v3 onions, Namecoin, etc.  Still, it is critical to avoid reliance on domain names controlled by untrustworthy people such as, oh, say, Roger Ver.

E tu, Cøbra?

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Quote from: gmaxwell on April 18, 2020, 01:04:21 AM

I'm really sad to hear this. It seems like bitcoin faces such tremendous headwinds.

Thanks.

Quote from: JayJuanGee on April 18, 2020, 06:45:16 AM

Surely, I do not understand enough to understand the significance of your comments.

I think you get it.

Quote from: LoyceV on April 18, 2020, 06:55:28 AM

I don't get it either. Please elaborate gmaxwell.

Quote from: VB1001 on April 18, 2020, 07:02:44 AM

I am also concerned about this comment, it may be a little more explicit.

If he had wanted to elaborate explicitly, I think he would have.

Greg Maxwell is known for his general outspokenness.  If he is here being cryptic, I infer that he is choosing to be so.

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Quote from: LoyceV on April 18, 2020, 06:55:28 AM

And I wouldn't download Bitcoin Core anywhere else than Bitcoin.org anyway.

I have made the mistake of referring newbies to bitcoin-dot-org, because it is more newbie-friendly (i.e., glitzy Web 2.0 style that breaks in my browser) than good old-fashioned bitcoincore.org.

I myself will STOP DOING THAT.

For years, for my own purposes, I have depended primarily on bitcoincore.org (onion) and the Github site for code, plus bitcoin-dev and this forum for information.  Observe that the Github project links to bitcoincore.org, not bitcoin.org.

Of course, it does not matter where you get your download, if you verify the integrity of your download using strong cryptography.  But let’s start by referring people to the download site that is actually run by Core.

Please heed Lauda here.

Quote from: Lauda on April 18, 2020, 07:12:45 AM

Again: Wrong. You should download Bitcoin Core only from https://bitcoincore.org. Please stop giving bad information on Core related matters. Thanks.

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Quote from: Lauda on April 18, 2020, 07:12:45 AM

How about the time he outed himself manipulating the public with multiple identities?

In fairness, I don’t think it’s ipso facto wrong to use multiple identities.  (Cypherpunk here.)  The question is of intent.

I am much more worried by his equivocation over Btrash, of which I was hereto unaware due to my having slept for almost two years.  Equivocation is always a bad sign.

And that is why the spammer should never have been granted lenience for plagiarism—and should not be granted lenience for spamming.

Thank you for making my argument for why “hacker1001101001” should be banned.

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Having made my point about “bonesjonesreturns”, his obscene rhetoric that no sane person would want to be associated with, and his way of accidentally advancing my argument whilst illogically pretending to do otherwise, I think that I should probably now start taking my own advice.

I request that the rules list be reviewed and updated with appropriate guidance to users about the form of spam known as ICO bumping.

It is obviously spam by any reasonable (or even useful) definition of the word.  I don’t think anybody can reasonably argue that users should not already expect to be banned for it, just as for any other form of spam.  Nevertheless, on grounds that more user education is usually better than less, I suggest that it would be wise to give this issue an explicit treatment in the unofficial rules list that everybody is supposed to read.

Unfortunately, I myself do not know and could not readily find any relevant quotes from administrators or staff on this issue; I would appreciate if somebody could provide some.

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Separately, just a few little notes on a request I consider currently closed; I didn’t want to spam-bump this thread for these last month ( ;-):


I agree that the warning should suffice; I only requested an explanation in the rules list after in the wild, I noticed multiple instances of experienced, highly-ranked forum users implying that publication of PMs was against the rules, and/or incorrectly stating explicitly that PM means “Private Message”.  Anyway, I think that I understand your reasoning; thanks for explaining.


Understood.  The unofficial rules list is indeed probably not the proper place to deal with legal issues.

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I didn’t “forget”.  I did not see that post before I made mine here.

inb4 five thousand threads in Reputation accusing JayJuanGee of supporting proven scammers and/or being a proven scammer.  Also, Jay is a hardened sigspammer alt of a ring of sigspammers, “milking it for every satoshi.”  

All couched in insults and intentionally disgusting, scatological and/or sexually degrading language...

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You sound angry.

Quotes re-arranged to provide better context:

The relevant part here is “hacker’s” opinion of you and your “defence” of him, not about your opinion of him.  Does he let such things be done on his behalf, without even a peep of protest?

Only the code-illiterate “hacker0101000101” can speak for himself on that point.

(As for your allegation that you are the “‘friend’ or pal of nobody”, I protest that you are not my friend or pal.  nullius = nobody.  Whereas you are not even nobody’s friend.)

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Insofar as I can tell, “some members” seem to be principally me.  I can’t speak for anybody else, of course.

More generally, I am also pushing for ICO bumping to be officially recognized as spamming per se, a bannable offence.  How is it not spamming!?  And why do so many people seem to be ignoring this issue?  What  “hacker1001101001” has admitted is arguably even a more damaging form of spam than garden-variety sigspamming.

The fraudulent nature of ICO bumping is for DT to handle, to protect people from losing money.  marlboroza and others have been doing an excellent job with that.  I support their efforts; and I encourage to continue, whereas ICO-bumpers are apparently not being banned, for reasons that are inscrutable to me.

Paid forum spam, spam-tactics, and spam-support of all kinds must to be handled by the administration, with the ban hammer.