Most hopes are false; and the persistent self-delusion of Hope is what drives mortals to endure suffering.  That is why the ancient Greeks placed Hope at the bottom of Pandora’s Box, as the enabler of all of the other ills of the world—“the most malign of evils” (in Nietzsche’s description).  Hope is truly a wicked device of psychological torture.

Of course, you are correct:  Satoshi is probably dead, or otherwise incapacitated.  Nonetheless, I hope that Satoshi is alive and well.  And that is the nature of Hope!

<edit> Yes, I realize the irony of making this observation right after the Dante quote in my prior post.  The juxtaposition neatly illustrates how much Western culture has changed—in my opinion, how badly it has been corrupted.  In ancient Greece, Hope was an evilly self-destructive foolishness; in Dante’s worldview, Hope was what one must most fear losing at the entrance to Hell. </edit>


That is only credible if he has seen the secret grimoire.  

I do know that there have been multiple instances of liars claiming falsely to know Lauda’s identity; and in at least one instance, some idiot passed off a completely unrelated person’s real dox as Lauda’s.  The harm caused to random bystanders by such chicanery is my principal reason for being so emphatic here.

Lauda also revoked and/or declared compromised all keys associated with her identity.  That is more significant; and I believe that she fully understood why.

---

Although such a negative cannot be proved, I am morally certain that Lauda is really gone.  I don’t know why there is a common urge to speculate about alts, as if people cannot leave this forum.  What is this, Hell?  “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

I also had this thought, and many others.  Some of the things that she said seemed to hint in that direction; but it was all so vague, and I could be seeing nonexistent hints through the lens of my own worries.  I can only hope that she is alive and well—somewhere out there.

This cypherpunk anonymity thing has its downsides.  I also hope that Satoshi is alive and well...  Such is the nature of life in the nym zone.


Oh, noes!  I had thought myself safe from catmification curses after the Catbat Witch made herself disappear.  But the lingering echoes of her magic still enthrall me.

---

Any luck thus far? 

---

No.  And anyone who claims to is lying.


Unknown and unknowable.


No.  And anyone who claims to is lying.  I myself knew her just well enough to be sure of that.  I still don’t even know if she was a “she”.

She did reveal to me that her first name is “Laura”, she literally is a cat, she knows real witchcraft, and she is married to the Terminator.  As proof, I have Lauda KYC dox signed with a pawprint.  Beyond that, she is as mysterious as Satoshi.

This is one of the problems with the transparent blockchain:  Anybody in the world can peek at your finances, then offer you unsolicited advice about how to run your business.  (Or worse.)

Transparency is for fools...

...so, why have those coins not been run through JoinMarket or something similar?

---

When you Americans allowed your Democrats to steal your 2020 Presidential election with massive fraud, you may thus have doomed freedom of speech for the whole Internet.

I am still saying that here while I can; and I would not use a site where I couldn’t.  I get the feeling that I will probably someday be gone from here.  Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook could not ban me, because I never used those sites.

It seems that you may have missed a few of my prior posts on this thread, q.v.:

• (re NFTs as digital autographs, etc.)
• (re real estate titles, and more)
• See the top of this post for my bold prediction that in the future, NFTs will make copyright economically irrelevant.  Let’s see how well that prediction ages in, say, the next 20 years; Internet filesharing shook up content distribution on about that timeline.
• My earlier post in the Wall Observer about NFTs

Note:  I am not an NFT expert, and do not claim to be; here, I seem to have fallen into that rôle by default.  I neither know nor care about most of what is going on in the NFT markets now; my interest is in the future, and in the use cases that make sense.  Most of the following is simply my own musings, although I vaguely recall having seen the art provenance use case discussed somewhere.


What stops a random person from selling a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge?  That was such a famous scam that it inspired an American idiom, “I have a bridge to sell you.”


Yes, there are fraudulent NFTs now being sold.  They are no different than the fraudulent deeds that George Parker sold for the Brooklyn Bridge and various other landmarks.  A fool and his money are soon parted.

Now, let us flip the scenario around:  Suppose that you do own the Mona Lisa.  You hit hereby on an issue that I have specifically spent time thinking about—specifically in the context of NFTs:  Art provenance, and the certification thereof.

You invest considerable money and effort in having art provenance experts certify that you own the actual Mona Lisa.  They give you a certificate which states, “We, the undersigned, hereby certify that the painting in PrimeNumber7’s possession is the genuine Mona Lisa,” with some attached documentation.  You want for that certificate to be infeasible to counterfeit; you want a means to back it up; and you want a secure means to convey it to buyers—a means that provides a timestamped and authenticated chain of transfer, which helps to keep provenance established as the asset and its attached certificate are subsequently resold.

An NFT, with ownership controlled by a private key backed up with whatever means you use to back up your cryptographic seeds, meets all of these criteria; and an NFT far exceeds any physical medium per these criteria, just as Bitcoin has many practical properties superior to paper cash notes.  (Of course, the analogy is imperfect insofar as a non-fungible asset cannot be combined or subdivided.)

N.b. that I am not talking about some arrangement of pixels that appear to be the Mona Lisa.  I refer instead to cryptographically secured, strongly authenticated provenance paperwork.

I think that in the future, the sale of physical artworks may practically require provenance to be certified and conveyed via NFTs, insofar as buyers may start to demand it.  That could take a bite out of art forgery and other frauds!

(Of course, there is no way to cryptographically guarantee that a physical artwork is transferred together with the NFT.  But that is no different than the situation with paper documentation of provenance; the security of an NFT is still strictly superior.)

Compare and contrast what I just said about art provenance with what I previously said about a much more common use case:  Real estate title.  Just be sure to avoid the scams with people selling NFTs of title to the Brooklyn Bridge.  Yes, it is trivial to make a token contract that sells as many instances of the Brooklyn Bridge as you want—just as trivial as making a bunch of plausible-looking paper deeds for the same purpose.

---

Nothing.  Depending on how the contract is written, they may not even need to change any pixels.  It is just another dumb fraud.  The systems for creating an NFT (such as the ERC-1155 standard) typically just specify a set of interfaces; in the application thereof, you have great flexibility in defining the semantics.

The world is chock full of ways to scam people.  That is not a problem specific to NFTs, although the problem with scams is always bigger with new technologies and new markets.  As people learn, they wise up until the scams can only fool some real suckers.  This has happened in various forms many times.


As you probably know if you saw my posts in Lauda’s goodbye thread, I love GANs!  Especially GANS that create nonexistent cats.  😼

What you ask is really just a question of valuation.  People’s ability to value such things may currently be impaired, because both GANs and NFTs are unfamiliar new technologies.  If anyone is spending huge sums of money buying an artwork NFT generated by an adversarial network, well—a fool and his money...

That being said, GANs do take some skill plus compute resources for generating the model.  Arguably, they also require at least a modicum of artistry to obtain a quality model.

I might consider paying a moderate amount for GAN imagery that I found especially pleasing—especially for high-resolution imagery, which would require terrific GPU resources to get the model.  (For hobby-level computing costs, you probably will not go above 512x512 pixels—if that!)  And why should I not pay?  I have considered asking around to see if I can find someone who will make me GAN images of X, Y, and Z; for you see, I want high-definition nonexistent cats.  NFTs could simply be a convenient way for me to pay for that type of thing.


How much of this supposed excess money has gone into Bitcoin?  Hmmm.  (To be clear, I think that would be a good thing insofar as it may lead to bitcoinization.)

I think that the current crazy prices for some NFTs are the result of media hype.  Remember that Pets.com collapsed, but Amazon.com is (unfortunately) still here—and more apropos, the Internet is still here.  These things happen with hot new technologies—when every fool wants a piece, and the scent of “get rich quick!” hangs heavy in the air.  After fools get shaken out, then adoption stabilizes, and the technology becomes ubiquitous.  And yes, a few people will get fantastically rich off of it.  A few.

I agree.  It is undesirable to risk winding up on this list:  https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks

The maintainer of that list is not anonymous; his name is Jameson Lopp.  However, he took extraordinary measures to “vanish” after he himself suffered a real-world physical attack.


Security instructions:  Use PGP for code signing.  Generating a PGP key does not require identifying oneself, just as with generating a Bitcoin key.

The only plausible reasons not to sign code this way are either ignorance, technical ineptitude, or a desire potentially to repudiate the code.  Just do it!


If that is true, past performance is no guarantee of future results.  What if Github gets hacked?  What if a Github employee acts maliciously, or an Amazon employee with access to Github’s AWS download backend, or...?

Every serious crypto project uses PGP signatures to verify downloads.  Bitcoin Core does not rely on Github’s security, or the security of any download server; they have a highly sophisticated process for making sure you can verify that what you download is exactly what the developers are trying to give you, and it is all ultimately anchored in PGP signatures.  See what I said above about Monero—oh, and I think you can be sure that the Monero people love anonymity!  Examples abound...


By design, mining is supposed to be trustless.


LOL, bank account.  I do not trust that.  I trust my Bitcoin wallet (and my underlying OS) much more.  Of course, I have verified the origin of every bit of code on my system using digital signatures—no exceptions!  There is no excuse to do otherwise!  (I have also audited not-insignificant portions of the source code myself; but that is obviously no way to exclude all vectors for malicious code.)

In which delusional fantasy is prima facie evidence clearly shown up-front a matter of “your word versus mine”? 


Wow.  Blatant defamation and extortion in one shot—and done for the purpose of trying to induce me to drop a prima facie valid accusation against you.  You must be worried!  (archive.is)

You should “reconsider” doing X, because I could “dredge up” scandal Y, “but I’m just not that kind of person” is a quite classic form of blackmail threat.  I will tag you accordingly.

It won’t work, because:  (0) You materially misrepresented what happened.  In the only thread which even comes close to matching your description (archive), I was “sexting publicly on the forum” with a party that theymos had age-verified; and n.b. that at least three current DTs were directly involved in that thread, all of whom found it delightful and not otherwise.  (1) The thread is indeed public.  Indeed, I myself just linked to that thread three days ago!
(Note:  Those “other” threads had nothing to do with alia, and were made by me after alia was outed as a scammer and banned.)

“Perhaps you should reconsider...  I could dredge up something totally public that you don’t even try to hide” is—well, let’s put it this way:  Are you high right now?


I tag for plagiarism.  That is off-topic in Meta; if you disagree with my tag, consider opening yet another “nullius trust abuse” topic in Reputation.  I will probably ignore it, even if I see it; it has been months since I followed Reputation on any regular basis, and if I want to waste my time wading through the muck there, I have higher priorities and planned posts.


Eh.  I’m sure that if you trip hard enough, you can believe that pretending to ignore me makes me upset or angry or something.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Hey.  Assigning such cute names to people is TOAA’s job.  My official nickname is nerdius, you nut-case!

Sorry, CH; I do not intend to insult you by comparing you to notil-duh here.  I am sincerely trying to protect your turf with the cute nicknames.  Mine is awesome!

---

The foregoing discussion goes far off-topic for this thread.  Most of it belongs in Reputation, not even in Meta; and the rest of it belongs in the plagiarism accusation thread.

Loth though I may be to complain about nutildah bumping my thread here, I must request that we please stay on topic:

Quote from: nullius on April 05, 2021, 12:13:04 AM

I am, in essence, benevolently trolling in an attempt to push people to think about what plagiarism is, and what harm it causes.  To question the nature of my “plagiarism” (or as I call it, my contraplagiarism), the reader must develop a clear concept of why that rule exists.  Why do I say that I am doing nothing wrong, when I cheerfully stipulate that I am intentionally violating the rule?  What could I possibly mean?  To follow that train of thought, one must examine plagiarism from first principles.

I was explaining to the purpose this hereby topic, you functionally illiterate drug addict.  To make that clear, I have restored to the above quotation some important context that you dishonestly snipped.  That is the highlighted portion.

I left you negative trust feedback for plagiarism, because you committed plagiarism; it is that simple.


Forking hell, you have a thin skin.  Probably because you realize that anyone who sees our posts quoted together can see that you are guilty.

Anyway, if I wanted to “harrass” you, I would harp on the point that you are a self-made psychotic who tries to push others into abusing hallucinogenic drugs like you do.  I hadn’t even mentioned that!  And anyway, this ain’t leddit.  I guess that you could try reporting me to the Internet Police for cyberbullying your poor little plagiarist self:  “Waaah.  I plagiarised his post, and now he is so mean that he tells other people that I plagiarised his post.  Stop him!”

Sure, and the dog ate your homework.  To see just how much that strains shatters credulity, people simply need to look for themselves.  I posted in a thread that you very regularly follow—where, I may add, you have sometimes popped up out of nowhere to spout nonsense at me when I wasn’t even addressing you.  About two weeks later—well, when the quotes are placed side by side, a five-year-old child could see what happened:

---

Correction for the record:


No.  To the contrary, as quoted above, I said that you “paraphrased” my Unicode checkmarks with different Unicode checkmarks (just as you paraphrased my words); I said that you used the same placement of the checkmarks; and I otherwise accused you of “aping” the checkmarks.

I don’t know why you would lie about what I said, when it is right there for everyone to read.


Protip:  Although your plagiarism was the impetus for me to bump this thread, the topic hereof is not about you any more than it is about Ratimov—whose plagiarism you defended, fittingly enough.

This topic is about my unspecified violations of the letter of the forum rules.  If you want to try to get me banned for that, this would be a good place to do it.

I am, in essence, benevolently trolling in an attempt to push people to think about what plagiarism is, and what harm it causes.  To question the nature of my “plagiarism” (or as I call it, my contraplagiarism), the reader must develop a clear concept of why that rule exists.  Why do I say that I am doing nothing wrong, when I cheerfully stipulate that I am intentionally violating the rule?  What could I possibly mean?  To follow that train of thought, one must examine plagiarism from first principles.

I have no dog in the fight between PhoenixMiner and NiceHash.  I am just dropping in to note the following:

• The unsigned list of hashes that you provide is worse than useless:  It is a total waste of time, and it is security theatre which causes a false sense of security.
  
  Sorry, but—I am not sorry.  After so many years of dealing with this nonsense, I must be blunt:  To provide an unsigned list of hashes for “verification” requires such a level of mental retardation as to make me wary of everyone who does it.  Oh yes, this world is just chock full of retarded monkeys...  Duh, use some logic:  A hacker who can replace the downloadable files with a malicious version can easily replace the unsigned list of hashes, too.  Why wouldn’t he?  🤔  
• To produce digital signatures, you do not need to reveal your “real” identity.  Use PGP.  That is what I do.  See my PGP key fingerprint in my forum signature.  I did not dox myself to get that!
  
  You only need to dox yourself if you want a code signing certificate from certain CAs—including, I think (?), all of the CAs that Microsoft Windows trusts for Authenticode code signing.  Easy solution:  Use PGP.  Use PGP.  Use PGP.
  
  If you are new to PGP, a fun way to get started is to check out use PGP to send OgNasty a private message in public.  Then, get busy using PGP for digital signatures!  It should go without saying:  Secure your private keys.
• As a privacy advocate, a Tor user, and a strongly pseudonymous party myself, I take offence at the suggestion that only criminals want to avoid being doxed.  What PhoenixMiner alleges NiceHash to have said would make me tend to distrust NiceHash, if that is an authentic quote:
  
  
  Quote from: PhoenixMiner on March 09, 2021, 04:27:07 PM
  In the meantime, we received another message, with quite different tone:
  
  

  Quote

  djeZo on March 8th, 2021, 07:58:33 AM
  
  Everything will be established back as it was. But I am really curious, why are you so anonymous? I got another hint from someone that you are collecting fees from botnets. Is that true? Because then this is really not good for our business - we cannot afford to be linked with a crime of such proportions. And we would have to make greater distance between.
  
  Also what I dont understand is, even if you are connected with a crime somehow and this is the reason to stay anonymous, why not create a second miner, as a legal business - a miner that you could sign and distribute without any worries for end users?
  
  To be absolutely clear:  I do not know the PhoenixMiner people.  I neither defend them, nor accuse them; and I certainly cannot vouch for them.  They may be honest or dishonest; I do not know, and I have no reason to investigate.  However, I do NOT hold their anonymity against them.
  
  Satoshi Nakamoto never revealed his “real” identity; and according to theymos, he “always used Tor”.  Would NiceHash ask Satoshi, “Why are you so anonymous?  Are you doing something criminal?”  That is just the stupid old “nothing to hide” chestnut.

Note:  I myself would not run closed-source binary blobs from anyone whom I did not deeply trust.  On that particular point, digital signatures are irrelevant.  “Official” identification is irrelevant; I have deeply trusted totally anonymous parties, although that is very rare.  What is relevant is the level of trust required.  I will not hereby launch into some open-source rant; I know that the world is full of scum you want to rip off others’ work, etc., etc.  I simply must note the level of trust involved.

---

An exemplary lesson on why digital signatures are important:

In November of 2019, an unidentified malicious hacker compromised the downloads of Monero binaries (onion link for Tor users).  Some people got coins stolen straight from their wallets because of this.  I am not so sympathetic to them, for they were foolish:  They didn’t verify the files against the PGP-signed list of hashes.

Anyone who checked the digital signature on the hash list (and then verified the hashes!) was absolutely safe against this attack.  And the hacker could not simply replace the hash list, because he could not fake the digital signature.

The lists of file hashes for Monero downloads are signed by someone named “binaryFate” with the PGP fingerprint 81AC 591F E9C4 B65C 5806  AFC3 F0AF 4D46 2A0B DF92—always check the PGP fingerprint!  I have no idea what binaryFate’s “real name” is, and I do not care; it is none of my business.  I always check the validity of binaryFate’s digital signature.

This raises the question of obtaining and authenticating the signing key.  binaryFate’s public key is in the Monero source code repository; anyone who uses git to track the Monero sources has a copy of the key which would be difficult for an imposter to replace without anyone noticing.  The key is signed by some other people, though that may not be useful if you have not already obtained and authenticated their keys.  And when you import the key, you should check the PGP fingerprint to see if it is what you expect it to be.

Practical tips:

• Use digital signatures.
• Safeguard the private key.
• Distribute the public key in ways that make it easy for others to obtain, and difficult for an imposter to replace with a fake key.
• Scrawl your PGP fingerprint all over the Internet.

For the record, I did pump Yacoin for April Fools’ Day as I said I would:


Now, today in the Yacoin Horror Show:


Forking hell.  RealBeave162🧟 does not know what “consensus” means, in the context of Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed systems architecture.  I recently wrote a post about exactly this issue, and have been planning a whole thread about it.


Someone who is ignorant of the precise meaning of the word “consensus” in the context of distributed consensus protocols should not be involved in the development of cryptocurrencies.


That’s the spirit, Joe_Bauers_👻!  No pain!  NO PAIN!  (Well—maybe a little a lot of pain.)  I infer that this must be your experience as a Yacoiner:


Perhaps this may comfort you:  Yacoin has inspired me!  As an expert in pessimization, I want to create a coin that is even worse:  Slower, more wasteful of resources, and not merely impractical, but humanly impossible to use.  I have some great ideas for this.  If you want to be a bagholder for a coin even worse than Yacoin, then I will be happy to prey on your financial masochism!  Seriously, I am assembling a team of world-class pessimization experts for this.

eddie13, it’s good that you saw one of the best and most important posts that I have ever made on this forum.  I hope that you didn’t miss my point; it seems that everyone else did, and gmaxwell avoided it.  You could probably discern my opinion of “money laundering” from my older post that I linked about “so-called ‘money laundering’”, plus the use of scare quotes; whereas the real issue hereby is the use of “money laundering” as a weapon for FUD, fearmongering, and negative hype.

To accuse NFTs of being “really 90% cover for money laundering” is worse than a foolish shitpost:  It is unethical.  My gut reaction to that post was a long string of profanities, although I tried to keep my public responses reasonably professional.  For in the realm of anything related to cryptography, vague broad-brush smears accusing others of “money laundering” is like dumping radioactive waste into the yard of someone whom you happen to dislike for whatever reason.  It is a dirty-bomb for public relations.

Why would he do that?  The more that I analyse it, the clearer it is that he was defensively projecting his own issues when he spoke about “massive insecurity” and “blockchain fetishism”.  I am not insecure; and I am the last person in the world who could be accused of “blockchain fetishism”.  I have a solid history of explaining in technically precise terms what the blockchain is and is not good for; and it’s just dumb to suggest that the blockchain is good for fungible but not non-fungible assets, insofar as the use cases of “financial ledger” and “chain of title” are almost indistinguishable in terms of their respective requirements and security models.  Whereas it seems that gmaxwell got triggered by the word “blockchain”.  Perhaps he suffers post-traumatic stress from the Fork Wars and/or the ICO Plague; I sympathize with that, but it’s no excuse for lobbing a dirty-bomb into your neighbour’s yard.

To put things in proper perspective without potentially inviting blowback to a leading Bitcoin developer who is a genius at inventing methods to conceal the source and destination of funds, I reframed the discourse around something which is too big and too powerful to be vulnerable:  “Modern art”.  I claim as fact that >99% of all “modern art” is a cover for “money laundering”.  This is well-known in some circles; I am far from being the first to observe it.

My purpose hereby is to tell people who are worried about “money laundering” to go slay a dragon, rather than stomping on an innocent little mouse.

PSA:  If you really want to stop “money laundering”, then you need to ban “modern art”.  This will have the ancillary benefit of making the world less ugly.  Eh, well, good luck with that.  Write to your Congressthingie, and don’t forget to vote!  🐑

---

As a matter of readily ascertainable historical fact, yes.  😿  Straight from Page 1, posted about 37 minutes after the joke thread began:

---

Go ahead.  I will not interfere.  For if there is such a thing as a natural and indefeasible right, it is an animal’s right to its own body and life.  In more civilised and rational societies, no one ever attempted such outrageous tyranny as the Christians thought their superstition authorised—certainly no one attempted to curtail that inalienable right of free men, and efforts to prevent the suicide of slaves or captives were regarded as a form of vicious selfishness.

The door is always open, such that life cannot become a dungeon in which we are hopelessly imprisoned.  If the thought of crypto Kitty NFTs makes life seem insupportable to you, I will not do the cruelty of trying to deny your right to leave.

It is unusual for the victim of a plagiarism to be the one to one to report it here.  Has that ever happened before in this thread?

As presented above, the quotes of the posts present a visual punch in the face.  That is such an obvious rip-off.  It is reasonable to infer that nutildah deliberately avoided acknowledging me, out of personal spite.  Quote nullius?  Never!  If ever there was a reason to have a rule against plagiarism, this is it!

For obvious reasons, I wish to avoid giving hints about what non-plagiaristic quasi-plagiarism I have hereby confessed.  However, it would be beneficial for me to reduce the inscrutable abstractions of my OP to a few hypothetical concrete examples.  I will then briefly explain why I am bumping this thread.

---

In what circumstances may a person with absolutely honest motives commit an innocent act which, in a mechanistic application of rules, could be misconstrued as “plagiarism”?  Off-the-cuff, for the purpose of a threshold demonstration that such a thing is possible, I present hereby but a few examples:

Privacy, especially for “IRL” relationships:  An interpolated line from personal correspondence, or even from someone else’s secret diary may be a silent acknowledgment of that person’s influence.  If the other person reads it, then it may be a private in-joke.  For example, if I had an illicit affair with the associate editress of an art magazine, suppose that she were to pilfer a single unique sentence from one of my encrypted love-notes, and insert it into an unsigned editorial about Puritanical attempts to censor the fine arts.  I would laugh—and I wouldn’t rat her out to the editor-in-chief for her naughty little “plagiarism”.

An intellectual guerrilla’s freedom of speech:  Under a book-burning régime, an activist who finds it too dangerous to express his true opinions may quote without quotes from a banned book by an unmentionable author.  He may do this as a quiet show of solidarity—and to spread banned ideas in a way that “flies under the radar”, whilst ultimately preserving credit to the originator of the ideas.  It is a literary commitment in the manner of a cryptographic commitment, made with words and ideas instead of numbers.  Years, decades, or even centuries later, after political fashions have changed, professors may analyse the texts to reveal hidden sympathies.

(Note for future scholars:  Although the technique itself is surely age-old, I believe that this is the first description thereof as a “literary commitment” by analogy to a cryptographic commitment.  I leave to future work a detailed comparison and contrast of the properties of literary and cryptographic commitments.)

Ethical ghostwriting:  Although I would never do such a thing in an academic environment, I acknowledged somewhere that I have worked as a ghostwriter.  For example, I once did a long-term stint authoring all of the English-language personal and business correspondence of a businessman who barely even spoke English.  My involvement was strictly confidential; and anyway, identifying the true author of a ghostwritten piece would be counterproductive.

---

Although I have been silently contemplating these issues for years, what motivated me to instigate this topic was my annoyance at inaction in the Ratimov case.  I had no personal stake in that case, and no reason to take it personally.  Nonetheless, I was outraged to see excessive lenity being granted to the blatant, methodical ripping off of authors who surely would be aggrieved to see that.

At that, my sympathy with authors I do not know rose from my knowing how I would feel if someone did that to me.  Dare I say it?  I empathised with those authors.

Now, this is personal:  Someone else ripped off one of my posts in a way so blatant that to see the quotes together is a visual punch in the face.  Adding insult to injury, that person is known to dislike me; he has even claimed to have me ignore-listed.  It is reasonable to infer that he desired to avoid acknowledging me, simply from spite:  Quote nullius?  Never!  What nutildah did is exceptionally malicious.

By approaching the subject from an unusual angle, this topic hereby should incite people to think more deeply about plagiarism.  What is plagiarism?  Why is it wrong?  Whom does it hurt, and how?  N.b. that in all of my above hypotheticals, the author suffers no detriment—and neither does any other party, unless “inability to persecute dissidents” is accounted as detrimental to the would-be persecutors.

By contrast, what harm is caused by actual plagiarism?

I myself would not want to contribute or to engage with the community in any venue where plagiarism is treated as acceptable.  I doubt that I am alone in so saying.  Do you want to spend time from your limited lifetime posting on a forum where, although random shitposting n00bs may be banned for plagiarism, a free pass to plagiarise is granted to high-profile users in positions of community trust?

Whereas I myself have violated the absolute letter of the forum’s rule against plagiarism—knowingly, intentionally, with honest motives, with unselfish motives, in an unusual way that accords with authorial interests.  Not oft—rarely; sparingly—occasionally; from time to time, as warranted—I have done it; I continue to do it; and for as long as I continue to post here, I shall continue to do it.  If I were to reveal just what I mean by “null plagiarism”, which is truly contraplagiarism, then the results would be... interesting.  Perhaps I may do that someday—or perhaps never.  For today, this is my way of urging people to examine plagiarism from a perspective different than “the rules say that it is forbidden”.

Nullian prediction:  NFTs will disrupt the copyright mafia, by creating new business models that respect the rights of both content creators and content consumers.  In the course of time, NFTs will make copyright economically irrelevant.

I have not seen anyone else mention that.  It is my own original thought, or at least my independent thought.  And I have spent a lot of time thinking about this.

The Internet has been wracked with copyright wars for over two decades.  Where are we now?  After years of “fix your business model!”, the copyright mafia said, “OK!”  Bittorrent is being replaced by Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Apple Store, et al.—and EME makes it infeasible to build an independent web browser.  The copyright mafia is winning.

I am a content creator.  As you may have noticed, I am quite protective of the integrity of my work.  But I hate copyright; I do not want any legalistic prevention of the mere copying of my own work.  (Consider my forum posts to be public domain, like Shakespeare.  No, you are not allowed to plagiarise Shakespeare.)  —But—well, ideally, I would like to get paid.

NFTs will solve the copyright problem, because they create digital scarcity without restrictions on the mere copying of content.  This the solution that people on both sides of the copyright wars have been seeking for two decades.  This will be the foundation for new business models that you probably do not foresee.  Just wait...

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That is an incorrect characterization of what occurred here.

For about the first 12 hours of this thread, I played along with the game.  I made at least a full page worth of posts about the game—either commenting on it, or playing along with it.  (Some of those posts are now deleted for nonobvious reasons; but they are all in various archives.)

When I later returned, I discovered that someone had raised the spectre of “money laundering” in a way that I would expect from 2013-era (or even current-year) mass-media articles about Bitcoin.  You wouldn’t be surprised at my reaction to seeing that same nonsense tossed at Bitcoin, CoinJoin, CoinSwap, mixers, Lightning (although it seems that only Craig Wright is paranoid about Blockstream helping drug dealers launder money off-chain in Lightning—anyone else?), Tor, or PGP.

—By the way, what would your reaction be if someone alleged (quite incorrectly!) that CoinJoin is “is really 90% cover for money laundering, graft, and pump and dumps”?

After the game was over, that line of thought converged with another.  I dislike purely negative arguments.  X is not bad is weak.  Thus, I added something positive:  X is good!  As, indeed, it is.  Aren’t you, of all people, at least a little bit intrigued by my above sketch of how NFTs could make copyright economically irrelevant?  —My prior post already mentioned some applications which should interest anyone who has ever been a party to a real estate transaction.


In my experience, when somebody replies to a rational argument with ad hominem armchair psychoanalysis whilst avoiding the substance, it means that that person is losing an argument.

Whereas based on your suggestion, I realize that maybe you should consider that (cough) some Bitcoiners have a massive insecurity about seeing other applications of similar technologies.  


Indeed:  Most criticism in the world is right.  Please apply that principle my criticism of bog-standard Four Horsemen FUD about “money laundering”.


Care to address the substance of what I said, beyond some general observations that I address below about non-fungible, non-commodity assets of any kind?


This is the key point.  I will put it in technical terms, without the trigger word “blockchain”.

Do you see any practical use cases for applying a trustless (or at least, trust-reduced), Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed consensus protocol for globally resolving the state of non-monetary asset ownership, and facilitating the transfer thereof between mutually untrusting parties without risk of double-transfer?

If you think that my positive answer to that question constitutes a “fetish”, then—sorry, but not sorry:  I will not waste my time with that.  Though I will admit that I have a Bitcoin sexual fetish—indeed, I invented the concept of a Bitcoin sexual fetish.  Specifically, a Bitcoin fetish.  At odd times, I have made various posts about this; e.g., recently:

My puns about elliptic curves were first seen in 2018; they even have an old thread in Off-Topic.  (Several threads; I don’t want to link to the others.)

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Publishing your thoughts on a public forum is a means to concern others with them.


I never denied that the current markets in NFTs are rife with large amounts of pure, unadulterated bullshit.  Indeed, I acknowledged that—as I acknowledged that early use of Bitcoin (including on this forum) was rife with bullshit.  On that particular point, much of the early criticism of Bitcoin’s community was right—albeit shortsighted; and much of that criticism was made by very smart people who, for whatever reason, just could not see what Bitcoin would become in the future.

You were one of the people who did see it—to the extent that together with a few others, you yourself devoted a terrific effort to refactoring Satoshi’s... *ahem*, less-than-ideal codebase into a software engineering masterpiece.  Something suitable for more than toy money.  The implementation of a network that can safely, securely handle a trillion dollars in value—to begin with.

Would you have spent the effort, if you didn’t look beyond all the early Ponzis, pyramid schemes, scams, hype, etc.?  Not to mention the early use of Bitcoin for a notorious drug market—

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I actually tried that.  Fun game, eh?  LOL.

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Tell that to all the small-cap altcoiners who do exactly that, even with at least a moderately liquid order book.  Market manipulation is a thing.


That unavoidably reduces to a general criticism of non-fungible, and even non-commodity goods of every kind.  —Including non-fungible physical goods, i.e., most things which actually exist in this world.  I don’t buy it.

I think that the problem here is a common confusion:  Perceiving an NFT as a thing.  An NFT is not a thing in itself.  It is an abstraction of ownership of a particular instance of a thing.  The thing itself may be of most any nature whatsoever, virtual or physical—just as long as particular instances of the thing can be distinguished from each other (or there is only one instance).

The hype about “investing in NFTs” commits the same error; as I pointed out, the concept is nonsensical.  It is like saying, “Invest in ownership of title!”—title to what?

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Edit:  Fixed typos, and made some small tweaks to phrasing.

This was an amusing April Fools’ joke; theymos has a knack for those.  But I have been laughing with it, not at it.

The people who laugh and sneer at NFTs are like people who laughed and sneered at Bitcoin in 2010.

Myself, I look forward to the day when I will send you a bitcoin in exchange for an NFT of a house.  I don’t mean a “virtual world” house.  I mean a real house, the legal title to a house:  An NFT minted by your local government to represent title to a certain parcel of land with all improvements thereupon.

The swap will be done atomically—either on Bitcoin with RGB/Spectrum, or with cross-chain atomic swaps.  If implemented properly, it will be incomparably more secure than a system of notaries public, lawyers, recording clerks, and title agencies; and it will replace all of these functions with something better.  “Closing of title” will consist of your cryptographic digital signature (“Not your keys, not your house!”), a tx broadcast, and some blockchain confirmations.

Laugh it up while you can.  —While some of the high-profile uses for NFTs are laughable.  —While it is still early.  NFTs will take over the world.  And you had better make it a fancy house—because the stupid legacy systems have institutional inertia; by the time we do the bitcoin-for-house swap, a whole bitcoin will be worth at least a few million dollars.

No, I am not buying into some hot new fad.  To the contrary.  In the 90s, when many readers of this thread were not yet born, cypherpunks were discussing the potential application of cryptography to some of the uses cases just now starting to be solved in practice.  I have been awaiting this for a quarter-century, and it is beginning to happen!


Strong cryptography makes life better.

Through PGP, I apply cryptography to my e-mail.

Through Bitcoin, I apply cryptography to my money.  PGP doesn’t get jealous, because Bitcoin is not encrypted e-mail.  Obviously.

Through NFTs, I will apply cryptography to numerous use cases which would take a very long post to list, let alone to describe.  —To things that are not money, just as Bitcoin is not e-mail.


If NFTs run on Bitcoin via RGB/Spectrum or similar technology, then obviously, there is no competition at all.  If NFTs run on another chain, then that other chain may be a competitor to Bitcoin—or it may be complementary, insofar as Bitcoin keeps its focus on being the most secure, most decentralized money ever invented; I have always been suspicious of proposals which may compromise that focus.  I think that it is too early to predict how all this will play out—other than to note that Ethereum is a dumpster fire, and the future of NFTs will probably be a competitor to Ethereum.

All that being said, just remember:


There is no such thing as “investing in NFTs”.  Perhaps an NFT platform may make a good investment—perhaps not; that is a question of whether a particular business which applies a technology will be a successful business.  Whereas the general, non-specific notion of “investing in NFTs” does not even make sense!  Which NFTs?  This is the meaning of “non-fungible”!

Your blustering ad hominem counterattack and irrelevant excuses are quoted for reference.  Anyone who reviews the above-quoted evidence can see that you ripped off my post; and it’s sad that every scammer you have ever tagged is better than you at flimsy evasions when caught red-handed.

“We had the same thoughts” is a classic.  And it’s a tough sell when your post so closely follows mine in substance, in structure, and in style:


A professor of textual analysis could do much better than that in collating the similarities of our posts.  I needn’t bother.

Your aping of my list with Unicode checkmarks is especially telling.  ✔✓   I have done that in several posts.  It is a relatively rare^* style of delivery.  By so noting, I do not wish to detract attention from how closely you copied the substance and structure of my post.

You are known to follow the Wall Observer, where I made my post.  Thus, you cannot even claim the amazing coincidence of “having the same thoughts” as some website (or forum thread) that you never even knew about.

Why would you do it?  If I had to guess, I’d say that you wanted to apply my arguments—but you did not want to reference my post, because you personally dislike me, and you pretend that you “never read” my posts.  However, the question of “why” is mostly irrelevant:  It is obvious what you did.

(* Amusingly enough, I think that it is probably much more rare than use of the English literary stock phrase “sow discord”; among other places, minor grammatical variations of that phrase are used in the King James Bible, in English translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and in one of my own Newbie-ranked posts from 2017.  So much for reasonably assessing the weight of evidence in various cases.)

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Edited to add one additional observation above, and to quote the edited version of nutildah’s reply:


(I had a reply tab open before that edit, but didn’t post till later because I was busy with something else.  I quote nutildah’s posts in full, because I have observed that he sometimes edits or deletes his own posts in a dishonestly misleading way.)

Now that April Fools’ Day is over, I am sad that I never actually obtained any yacoins.  It would have been fun—like owning a bundle of Zimbabwe Dollars, but oh so much more difficult to transfer. 

The good news is that I am stuck hodling bitcoins!

Eh.  Cheers, y’all.  I will lock this thread; please PM me if you have anything very interesting to say here.

Shameless ripoff is shameless.

User:  #317618 “nutildah” (trust summary)

First mentioned on the thread where it occurred.