Miner cartel, Bankster cartel, or an altcoin? Your choice?

[dinofelis]

I just don't see how it is a "bankster cartel" when you have devs like gmaxwell constantly pushing for anonymity features like confidential transactions, mimblewimble etc, and guarantee that the network remains decentralized by letting the small man have a role by being able to run nodes.

I think you are fundamentally missing the expected dynamics of LN.  In order for you, as a modest bitcoin user to be able to use the LN, you will have to open a channel to a LN hub.  If you do 5 bitcoin transactions a year, to buy shoes, a book and two smartphones on Open Bazaar, you will need to keep your channel open to that hub for all that time ; if you close it, you have an on-chain transaction - which you could have used directly to pay the counter party and not use the LN ; but that's HUGELY expensive with a small "settling" chain block and A LOT OF TRAFFIC on the LN.  Essentially, the on-chain traffic is soo difficult and expensive, that only VERY BIG AND SPORADIC settlements are going to be possible on chain.  

So you have to connect to a hub that will not settle your channel before you've done what you wanted to do with your bitcoins during a year.  And it needs to have sufficient other channels so that you will be able to get through THIS partner to your destination (your coins are locked up in this channel, so you cannot put them in another channel, again, without a transaction on chain).

--> so you better have a big, reliable hub partner, that is himself connected to other, big reliable hub partners, so that you can reach your destination *without settling*.  If ever it settles along the path, you're in for an on chain transaction, which is too expensive and in any case, there's no room on chain.

The only way this can reliably function is if there's a back bone of BIG hubs with A LOT OF COINS in their backbone channels, that reach *everybody* and to whom you REMAIN connected.  In other words, these hubs are banks, and you are a customer, opening an account with them.  They know ALL YOUR TRANSACTIONS, and who you are ; they put their "terms and conditions" and if you don't like it, you can't remain a customer.  They may refuse certain transactions (they pull the plug and make you settle).  They may require monthly payments from you to remain their customer.  They may report all of your transactions to tax authorities.  Maybe "being an LN hub" will become regularised ; people would enjoy the legal framing of LN hubs.

The ONLY difference is that they cannot steal your money.  But they work like a normal bank.  Most normal banks don't steal your money.   They put up conditions, fees, ... for you to remain their customer.

The same Poisson statistics that pushes people to pool hash rate, is also the reason that big hubs have statistical advantage over small hubs: small hubs have to settle their small channels often, that is very expensive.  Big hubs can keep their channels with a lot of coins open a long time, and divide the settling cost over many more transactions through that channel. 
In fact, the economies of scale go almost linearly with the invested amount of coins.  I'm not saying that the rewards go linearly, no the *economies of scale* go linearly with invested amount of coins (even more so, quadratically, because of Poisson statistics).  That's WAY WAY worse than the economies of scale in mining.

Only big hubs can survive in the fee competition on the LN.

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[mining1]

@iamnotback yes and no, because BU-core war is different. Everyone knew ETH is official even before ETC was born. The "problem" was this: barry and chandler dumped ETH and pumped ETC, and obviously miners followed the price. Even though most mined ETC just to convert into ETH because everyone knew it is the official one,

This is why ETH is a centralized coin too.

We're not going to go over this again, but remember that ETH was the fork to save the DAO investor's stake, and ETC continued the "unstoppable and immutable" chain in the spirit of the original idea.  Y

it fueled the illusion created by  barry sillbert and chandler gao that a flippening was happening and that Ethereum foundation was going to switch aswell to ETC. But the illusion broke when vitalik officially stated that the vote was already cast out, the result both before and after the fork was clear ( like 95%+ of the hashrate followed the fork updating their client ). So, the result of the manipulation wouldn't have mattered because the EF was going to develop on ETH no matter what.

This is indeed when the market appreciates much more central leadership than decentralization and the principles that go with it.  It is something to keep in mind in crypto: principles are OK, until they aren't, and big money is at stake.

From my POV and almost everyone else's, the immutability wasn't broken. The hackers money were locked thanks to the mechanisms the fat guy from dao put in place (atleast he got that right ). So, ethereum could hardfork without messing with any past transaction. Except for the hacker's who lost all he took, because that was the point, to not let him get away. All that was doable because the tokens were locked, otherwise the hardfork wouldn't have been possible. Even EF agreed with that. Wether you think it was for investor's sake or to not let the hacker get away, that doesn't really matter. The point is, it was doable without messing with the transaction history, therefore immutability.
And yes, central development is needed in public blockchain scene. Every project has it, can't be done otherwise. Bitcoin only is alive today because of central development ( remember that HF when shitloads of btc were created ? ).

Because ETH is implicitly "honest" about the BDFL being Vitalik and that its raison d'être (at least for the current juncture) is ongoing R&D experimentation (or at least that is the geekcool idealism marketing to drag in the greater fools to part them from their money), so it is clear that it is not intended to be immutable at this time. My mistake when I originally sided with ETC was I was projecting my idealism (protocol immutability) on the project, but the project's community has a different priority (also a form of idealism) which is about decentralizing experimentation in blockchain apps.

Thus ETH's overriding mandate isn't "code is the law" and instead is "decentralized community governance" is the law.

Remember that before ethereum happened people didn't even agree with hardforks as necessary upgrade steps. Because, they knew about bitcoin, litecoin, and every other shitcoin. And what all of them had in common ? Well all of them aimed to do the most basic things a blockchain can do, transfer tokens representing value. And with that mindset they looked at ethereum and they thought it sucks because it hardforks, because if BTC doesn't need it then why does eth ? Because it sucks !
None of them took into consideration what ethereum means, the fact that today it can do what top 50 projects can do combined and better is something still many can't even process. Ironic is the fact that soon it will be better than all of them combined with raiden's implementation, even as payment system, the only thing they can poorly do.

About immutability, read above. Nobody would agree with a hardfork that would break the immutability, aka change the transaction history. And the fact that not even the most primitive blockchains, those that aim to become payment systems, cannot work in a perfect decentralization manner should make you even easier to understand why such a complex project like ethereum cannot be possible with a perfect decentralization ( aka no developers, no leadership, as dinofelis naively understands it ).

And that "code is law" thing was mostly promoted by idealists and that is the finish point, where we all hope this trip will end. At this very moment we don't even have simple decentralized payment systems working properly after 8 years and we're so naively going with "code is law" ? That's like not understanding water but aiming for the stars. "Code is law" will never be the case, because code will be law as long as it will do what the developer intend it to do. Is that simple.

[dinofelis]

From my POV and almost everyone else's, the immutability wasn't broken. The hackers money were locked thanks to the mechanisms the fat guy from dao put in place (atleast he got that right ). So, ethereum could hardfork without messing with any past transaction.

Well, if you change the RULES so that past transactions "don't count" any more, that's just as well killing immutability than when you change the data in the block chain.  

Except for the hacker's who lost all he took, because that was the point, to not let him get away. All that was doable because the tokens were locked, otherwise the hardfork wouldn't have been possible.

They were only *temporarily* locked and according to the rules that should have remained immutable, and according to the contract that should have been unstoppable, he should have gotten them.  The only way he didn't get what he was supposed to get according to the execution of the unstoppable contract and the immutable rules, was to stop the unstoppable contract, by changing the rules (hard fork).

Whether morally, legally, etc... right or wrong, according to the principles of an immutable set of rules on which an unstoppable contract runs, he should have gotten them.

The denial of his having obtained his coins is a form of breaking permissionlessness, while ethereum was permissionless before, so this WAS a modification of the rules, and hence their immutability was not a matter of consensus, but of a (large) majority denying the use of the system according to the former rules by one single individual.

Even EF agreed with that. Wether you think it was for investor's sake or to not let the hacker get away, that doesn't really matter. The point is, it was doable without messing with the transaction history, therefore immutability.

Immutability is both of course: the data and the rules.  They modified the rules.  I agree they didn't modify the data.

If I give you a contract in which it is stated "I pay you 1000 dollars and you wash my car"

and then I redefine "wash" into "handing over property" ; I redefine "my" by "possessive adjective of the second person" and I redefine "car" as "the land and the house in which one lives", then I can say that the contract, without changing a word, now specifies that I bought your house for 1000 dollars.

Even though I didn't change a word of the "data".  I changed the rules that tell what the data mean.

And yes, central development is needed in public blockchain scene. Every project has it, can't be done otherwise. Bitcoin only is alive today because of central development ( remember that HF when shitloads of btc were created ? ).

There is a difference between developing software implementing a protocol, and modifying the protocol.  My idea is that many people can develop software, change the user interface, do things on top, and so on, but that a crypto system, if it is to be decentralized, is laid down once and for all, and if you want to modify it, you are actually making another decentralized crypto system.   If a system's protocol can be modified, it is not decentralized.  It is then just a system like any other, with "leadership", "voting" and so on, and there's nothing special about it.

Remember that before ethereum happened people didn't even agree with hardforks as necessary upgrade steps.

I'm still of that opinion, UNLESS regular hard forks are part of the protocol.  That is, you could have block chains which have only a finite number of allowed blocks.  At a certain point, the chain stops.  You can then use this chain as a genesis block for another chain (or different other chains).  If it can hardfork by a centrally planned authority, I wonder why one goes through the hassle of finding consensus algorithms: the central authority decides.

Vitalik's private key could sign all blocks on the ETH chain, and you wouldn't need miners, or Casper.  Proof of emperor.  Much simpler.

About immutability, read above. Nobody would agree with a hardfork that would break the immutability, aka change the transaction history.

No.  Immutability means also that all rules remain eternally the same.  That the rules are laid down with the genesis block, and that they will never ever change again, so that, when you buy your very first token, you have a contract with all other users of those tokens, that the rules are for ever graved in stone and will not change.  Immutability is not just keeping the old blocks as they were, if you are allowed to change the meaning of those data, or what you can do with it.

If the rules can change, and you don't know how, the system is not immutable, but arbitrary.  If there are leaders that decide about these changes, the changes are not only arbitrary, but centralized.  You only have customers that play according to the ever-changing rules and try to adapt their strategies along the constantly newly dictated rules.

[dinofelis]

And the fact that not even the most primitive blockchains, those that aim to become payment systems, cannot work in a perfect decentralization manner should make you even easier to understand why such a complex project like ethereum cannot be possible with a perfect decentralization ( aka no developers, no leadership, as dinofelis naively understands it ).

The importance of the "pure form of decentralisation" (the only meaningful definition of that word in fact) is that it is the only guarantee of freedom of corruption.  If the rules are graved in stone and cannot evolve, then nobody can put them to their hand once you're in it, and no government or other power structure can corrupt the leadership of the system, because there isn't any.  Only a perfectly decentralized system has no "single point of failure" and can survive in a truly trustless and dangerous environment in which most of the others are your enemies, and only a few people, far in between, can be counted on.

I see the most important reason for decentralized systems, as those that remain operational in "occupied territory by the enemy" (the state and all its servants and worshippers in my case), even if largely infiltrated.  From the moment there is "leadership", you can forget about such properties.  The only reasons why I care about decentralized systems.

[mining1]

Well, if you change the RULES so that past transactions "don't count" any more, that's just as well killing immutability than when you change the data in the block chain.  

That's the point, past transactions weren't touched excepting the hacker's money that were locked. That is why there was 1 month deadline before he could withdraw money. The hardfork wouldn't have been possible past that point.

They were only *temporarily* locked and according to the rules that should have remained immutable, and according to the contract that should have been unstoppable, he should have gotten them.  The only way he didn't get what he was supposed to get according to the execution of the unstoppable contract and the immutable rules, was to stop the unstoppable contract, by changing the rules (hard fork).

You're one of those that go with "code is law". A code can aim to be immutable as long as it works as developer intended. Claiming "immutability" should take priority over everything else in any given scenario is pure hypocrisy and stupidity, and that's not even debatable. It's common sense.
And you're a hypocrit, because in real life you wouldn't do that. Go do something considered "wrong" and then interpret the laws to fit and excuse your action. And tell that to a judge. If you really go with code is law. But you won't because we both know i am right.

If I give you a contract in which it is stated "I pay you 1000 dollars and you wash my car"

Let's go with this example. We make a smart contract that states every time i wash your car, the contract automatically pays me from your bank account 1000$. But then i find a way and i exploit the contract and for one car washing, i reactivate it over and over again and it gives me 1000$x 167 times ( somewhat similar exploit to what dao hacker did ). What will happen then ? Well, then you will go to court, and i will lose, might even go to jail. Because i exploited a weakness in the system with the purpose of stealing money and a weakness which wasn't in agreement with the intended purpose of the contract.

[Lauda]

And Satoshi was mining silently way before I heard about Bitcoin for the 1st time (in 2013). I consider it almost like pre-mine. So I don't care either way.

In other words, every coin that was mined by anyone besides you (until you discovered it) means that it was premined. It looks like logic isn't one of your strengths.

Or the centralized MtGox and Bitfinex heists waiting to profit on the decentralization-minded Bitcoin "investors".

Relevance? I was talking about ETH.

What truth? That you had interactions with the chain that was heisted on MtGox and Bitfinex. (And don't tell me that there is nothing that can by done on chain to prevent losing funds on centralized exchanges, because there is something that can be done but your stupendous Core hasn't apparently realized or proposed it afaik)

What should be done?

Can you guarantee that?

I can guarantee nothing.

Just like when you mods banned me for posting too much about China's mining cartel.

Firstly, I couldn't have banned you anyways as I've never had that privilege. Secondly, I'm not a moderator anymore. You're preaching to the choir.

[dinofelis]

Well, if you change the RULES so that past transactions "don't count" any more, that's just as well killing immutability than when you change the data in the block chain.  

That's the point, past transactions weren't touched excepting the hacker's money that were locked. That is why there was 1 month deadline before he could withdraw money. The hardfork wouldn't have been possible past that point.

The rule was that he could withdraw it.  The fact that this rule was changed by the hard fork, means that the rule was not immutable.  There is no distinction between changing the data and changing the rules, as I said before, because your "rights" in a system are a combination of both.  If  the rules change, the system is just as mutable as when the data change.

You're one of those that go with "code is law". A code can aim to be immutable as long as it works as developer intended. Claiming "immutability" should take priority over everything else in any given scenario is pure hypocrisy and stupidity, and that's not even debatable. It's common sense.

That simply means that smart contracts and crypto are meaningless.  Intend is a vague, undefined and modifiable notion, and it is to do away with that, that crypto, and especially smart contracts were invented.  
Intend is something that cannot be verified, cannot be stated, and can only be JUDGED by a human jury with power to judge.  That judgement can vary from one day to another, from one culture to another, and the whole history of legal systems has to do with how intend is to be retro-actively decided upon.

The basis of scam is making the counter party understand a different intend than your real intentions.  If I say: "I will wash your car if you give me $20", then, when you give me $20, you think that my intention is to wash your car.  If secretly I have a different intend than what I made you believe, and I don't wash your car, then I scam you.   This is the basis of most, if not all, forms of scam: "purposely making the counterparty misunderstand your intentions".

Now, I could claim: "ah, yes but I understand by 'wash your car', in fact, 'looking at your car', this is an expression often used in my family 'wash that pretty girl', 'wash that movie' ... ".  Before a human judge, it is clear that I tried to scam you.  My ways of formulating the contract are evidently meant to make you think that I was going to put soap on your car and clean it.  So my claim about my intentions are clearly scammy, to a HUMAN judge.  

However, suppose that I say: "I will wash your car for $2".  You say: OK.  I wash your car, you give me $2, and I say, "Uh, sorry, that was a typo !  I meant $20 of course !".

Wrong intend ?  Would you have agreed for $20 ?   Was I scamming you by telling you $2, to get the deal, and then get $20 from you ?

I could argue that nobody washes a car for $2.  Right.  But maybe you wouldn't have taken ME to wash your car for $20, but a professional ?  

Only a human can judge, and in this case, you could say: CONTRACT IS CONTRACT !  

This last idea is what brings us to smart contracts.  The idea is that contract is contract, and NO NOTION of intend, so that we don't need (corrupt ?) human judges any more.  It is the basis of "code is law" because (non-Turing complete) code ALWAYS comes to a clearly defined outcome, whatever it is.  No ambiguities.

And if the dev made an "error" ?  Like I made an "error" by typing $2, and not $20 ?  The whole idea is to say that "code is law".  If you take that away, you have a PAPER CONTRACT written in a funny language, not a smart contract.  In the end, humans judge.  Corrupt or not.  

But smart contracts don't make any sense if code is not law.  If code is not law, but simply a language in which the dev is supposed to write down his intend, unless he writes down something else (but made an "error"), then you have just invented a way of writing paper contracts.

BTW, the fact that the language is Turing complete and rather complex makes that VERY smart devs can always introduce on-purpose "bugs" that they can reveal, or not, and claim different intend, after tricking the counterparty in signing up.  Only a (sophisticated) human judge will be able to distinguish both.  

So you've just invented a system, worse than paper contracts.

And you're a hypocrit, because in real life you wouldn't do that. Go do something considered "wrong" and then interpret the laws to fit and excuse your action. And tell that to a judge. If you really go with code is law. But you won't because we both know i am right.

You need the notions of wrong and right for that, and then you need a human judge for that, and then you have a paper contract, and the whole idea of smart contract is out of the window.  That is my point.

This is like bitcoin transactions: "oops, I didn't mean to do this transaction !  Can someone revert it ?"

If I give you a contract in which it is stated "I pay you 1000 dollars and you wash my car"

Let's go with this example. We make a smart contract that states every time i wash your car, the contract automatically pays me from your bank account 1000$. But then i find a way and i exploit the contract and for one car washing, i reactivate it over and over again and it gives me 1000$x 167 times ( somewhat similar exploit to what dao hacker did ). What will happen then ? Well, then you will go to court, and i will lose, might even go to jail. Because i exploited a weakness in the system with the purpose of stealing money and a weakness which wasn't in agreement with the intended purpose of the contract.

Only a human judge can see that "I find a way" was not "intended".  If it was in the contract, it was, by definition, the whole intention of the contract.  If you need a judge, one shouldn't have used a smart contract.  If this possibility exists, it is part of the outcome tree.  If you sign a contract with someone, you should agree upon ALL possible cases treated by the contract, and then you should automatically have seen this case.  If you do not consider all possible cases, that is equivalent to not reading the fine print in a human contract.

For instance, you may claim that the fact that Facebook becomes owner of all your pictures, must be an error in intend.  But it is in  the fine print.  The fine print is the law, even if you could not imagine this to be true.
 
And, BTW, the reason why such silly errors are possible is because the language is Turing complete.  No contract is ever written in a Turing-complete language.  This is the *fundamental* flaw in ethereum.   You cannot explore the full state tree.  The fine print is potentially infinite in length.

But, again: if you need human judgement to find out whether a certain behaviour of the contract was ill-conceived or was not the intend of the parties signing up, to distinguish between credible and incredible, you need a paper contract, and the concept of smart contract is dead.

This last thing may very well be the case.  I think this is what ethereum proved: smart contracts of Turing complete complexity are dead, because nobody can explore them entirely, so there is always room for errors/scam, and only humans can try to distinguish both.

Because worse: let us take your example.  Suppose that we DID write such a contract in ethereum.  And suppose that you DID find the trick to get me 167 times $1000 out of my wallet for washing my car.

Can I now ask for justice, and write an e-mail to Vitalik, as benevolent Supreme Judge, to see that I've been ruined because of a typo in a contract ?  Or will I get "code is law" on my nose ?   Will ethereum hard fork over my case, with my measly $167 000 lost, or is justice variable, and for small fish, code is law, and if they fat-finger their contracts, too bad for them, but important people can get a human judgement ?

Should any smart contract system have a "popular jury" mechanism that can overrule any smart contract, and stop the unstoppable ?  Wouldn't that be much fairer than having to ask Vitalik to write a hard fork, which only very rich and important people can ? Is that the idea of "immutability", that it is immutable, except when not ?  That code is law, except when not ?  That contracts are unstoppable, except when not ?

What remains of all crypto if that is the case ?  We already have such systems in place.  It is called "court".

[iamnotback]

How can we replace hashrate with nodes  

Exactly. Miners can far more easily spin up well-connected nodes to protect their position than nodes owners could build up hash power. Lost cause before it started.

This can be argued more fundamentally. A Sybil attack is not a finite resource which can form the basis of a consensus rule. Consensus doesn't exist in a voting system that can be Sybil attacked, i.e. it is a Tragedy of the Commons power vacuum and to avoid divergence it requires a coercive power to have a monopoly on the unbounded resource.

Core developer Luke-Jr didn't seem to understand reality:

Feb 04 23:29:00 <iz>    so.. if you have a majority of the hashing power, but not a majority of clients.. even if you were to change the bitcoin client rules, you couldn't get these new rules into the block chain
Feb 04 23:29:07 <iz>    even if you had a majority of the hashing power
Feb 04 23:29:13 <dub>   iz: no, you are wrong
Feb 04 23:29:17 <mircea_popescu>        Luke-Jr stop arguing like a stupid cunt. you say something, stand by it. where is the motherfucking unanymous community!
Feb 04 23:29:20 <iz>    how would that work then, dub?
Feb 04 23:29:26 <pigeons>       no maxblocksize is not there to keep the size of the blockchain down, i thought it was there so blocks can be verified and propogated sanely
Feb 04 23:29:26 <dub>   iz: because bitcoin
Feb 04 23:29:36 <Luke-Jr>       dub: iz is correct

[iamnotback]

There is an option that could have made your poll list and you said as much in your linked post.

5. No Change.

Because that choice does not exist.

And that is a very fundamental and crucial absence of sovereignty.

(and I'm not exactly referring to the fact that present never exists, only the past and future but they are just but grand illusions, yet that is covered elsewhere not in this post)

The "no change" choice is about as stable as the delusion of a high functioning democracy:

mircea_popescu wrote: The notion that "democracy", ie, an implementation of democracy without a martial population and strict limits on the franchise is even practicable... Seriously, very thin ice sheets to shade you from the Sun. a) they're transparent b) they melt. GLHF.

Pay special attention to the way I will define the term 'regulation'. When regulation is inherently impossible, then we have decentralization. But I am referring to the fundamental of what regulation is, not any particular manifestation of it such as when USG.MIT does it.

If we had decentralization such that no one can change anything other than to follow the pre-existing protocol, then you would have that choice. And because that choice to do nothing does not exist, thus we can conclude that Bitcoin can be regulated, and this is fundamentally why Bitcoin is broken and why we are all preferring the illusion of decentralization instead of being honest, frank, and probably disappointed.

I thought that we the token hodlers could vote with our choice of which token to trade to, but there are two reasons that fails:

1.

Voting is not decentralization, i.e. in democracy we are not sovereign because we can collectively regulate each others' outcomes and we are not independent w.r.t. to some a priori immutable protocol ground rules. Even if you argue that the choice of which altcoin to trade to is sovereign, the problem is that exchange rates can be painted and regulated by the ability to fool the greater fools, such as c.f. the upthread exposé on Dash, such that it becomes a collective Tragedy of the Commons, which is the antithesis of the sovereignty of the Inverse Commons— wherein selfishness can only improve everyone's outcome. It is very important you understand the Inverse Commons, because it is intimately involved with my upcoming proposal on how to make blockchains decentralized and impossible to regulate. The tragedy of the commons predicts only three possible outcomes. One is the sea of mud. Another is for some actor with coercive power to enforce an allocation policy on behalf of the village (the communist solution). The third is for the commons to break up as village members fence off bits they can defend and manage sustainably (the property-rights solution).

2.

With colluding control of +50% (not the ~80+% I erroneously wrote earlier) of the hash rate, the mining cartel can control the longest chain on every possible fork that employs the same PoW hash function. Which means they can shut down all transactions on the fork which makes no changes to the protocol. Hardforking the PoW hash is either a security hole or shifts the control to a new set of whales who have every Tragedy of the Commons opportunity cost of not colluding, thus regulation was not avoided. decimation wrote: well, Munger comes to the same conclusion as Moldbug, that is USG is highly resistant to voting - because to be otherwise would be terrifying, Because as much as I bitch about it, 'rule by derpy bureaucrat' is 100x better than 'rule by crazy mob'

Let's take some edification from the soi-disant DAO "attacker":

Fire in Alabama, let's make the most of it.

She then pointed out that of course I realise this all ends when Bitcoin gets regulated. Isn't this smarmy "let me suggest things for you to believe" attitude obnoxious ? Talking heads...

Anyway, I replied that "right after gravity gets regulated"...

While I slept and did other things™ she must have read and maybe even re-read that a few times, profoundly disliked the results and decided to erase the whole episode from her feed, from her memory and therefore (of course!) from existence. This is culture shock at its finest, person that fully, completely and unquestioningly believes reality is a spawn of consensus (and who better to represent this braindamage than some blondy newswomani ?) runs into person who couldn't care less what people think, and generally makes it his job to show the heretics that in any disagreement between reality and belief, reality always wins. You wouldn't think this needs much showing, you would think this is painfully obvious and tepidly banal, and yet...

Then this morning, fierce beauty strikes :

Mircea Popescu ‏@Mircea_Popescu
Mayor says they'll let fire be to prevent further injury. Why no regulation against this type of thing @Dawn_Kopecki ? theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/24/fuel-barges-explode-catch-fire-in-mobile-ala/

So... yeah. Why haven't they regulated against this type of thing yet ? For that matter, why's the crisis not regulated, why are so many niggers poor and so many kids stupid these days ? Don't they have a law for that yet ? A trillion dollars worth of college loans is not ever getting repaid (out of a total one trillion worth of college loans out there). About half of it is in deferment or forbearance already. Kids leave college unable to write, let alone think. Isn't there a law of some sort ? Why don't they make it already, don't they realise without a law fixing these problems the Union is practically at an end ?!

Collectivization (aka regulation) doesn't anneal, because only actors who are close to information can optimize (this is why ice that is cooled slowly has less cracks, because there is less top-down collectivized force of the reorganization of the molecules in their local context). In the democracy or voting model, it fails because actors far from information see that information as random noise:

Democracy and finance don't mix - the math involved

IX. It then follows that democracy (ie, counting Ps) and finance (ie, finding the right A in the set) don't mix, and in general that democracy is antithetical to any professional endeavour, to science, and to human welfare generally.

Power-law coercive control over the Tragedy of the Commons doesn't anneal for the same reason, because those at the top although might be more expert in some areas, can't be omniscient.

X. If Ps are selected so only very few Ps towards the power end of the powerlaw are included, paradoxical effects may be discovered, but these are by definition not common. Furthermore, there is no guarantee they scale (ie, continue to manifest past an arbitrary count of selected Ps), nor is there any guarantee that a selection of Ps exhibiting them can be in fact made for any arbitrary Q or set of Qs and their associated As, nor is there any guarantee that there can be a selection process declared that is computable in any general case.

As explained above, the mathematical topological space of information is exponential vast, such that having the right answer is exponentially more valuable than having an unbounded quantity of random noise:

The end of democracy

...as a horny if virgin teenager you might have entertained delusions of "totally destroying cunt" once you get your true self or whatever. With any luck you did get to see that no - try as you might, cunt will be still there when you're done, and done you will be. In between these two fundamental distractions, the life of the peasant flows in a very strict servitude to the problem of scale : his work proceeds linearily, for that lovely but ultimately brief interval before fatigue kicks in ; meanwhile the land proceeds by the square. Taking one step delineates an area a quarter as large as taking two steps does. Due to this squares problem, it makes relatively little difference that Joe tires after a hundred and Moe after a hundred nine, and so it is throughout : the extra nine isn't likely to figure much in Suzy's estimation of either of them (and so the natural harem can be flattened into a very contrived "traditional marriage"), nor does the extra drop drunk make any visible difference in the barrel, and so politics proceed on a fundamental basis of equality and equanimity : have ye enough drink and then have ye enough words. And then go home.

On the other hand, bravery is exactly opposite of this. Giving a man ten coins instead of one does not make that man a hundred times as likely to stand fast ; nor even ten times, and perhaps not even as much as the one. A single, bravest knight pays more than the whole sum of his inferiors together, because of exactly inverse geometric rules involved in warfare - which is fundamentally why jousting competitions were a big deal, but speedfarming competitions never interested anyone.

This settles feudalism : on one hand each peasant's exactly fungible with each other peasant, whereas one single faithful knight's not to be traded for the whole world. As a direct result of this situation in the field, the political forms are absolutist monarchy, and the religion is monotheistic and so on.

But time goes on, and lo! The industrial revolution is upon us.

On one hand working, as opposed to farming, is still a deeply equalizing experience, but the drivers have now slightly changed. It's no longer the silent ground, stalking the lone worm, waiting for him to tire of his toil, biding its time to sneak up behind him and swallow him whole. Instead the machine now awaits a moment's inattention to chomp down just a part, while hunger and disease dance a merry jig in the corners. The reward for performance has also changed slightly - it's not quite but almost linear, a worker twice as skilled is just about twice as valuable.

On the other hand being a merchant is much less demanding than being a knight. Addition and multiplication can be learned, and so can the whole trade. It does require a lively mind and a ready capacity for attention in the knaveii, but then again these are much more common than bravery and valor are - demanding virtues most expensive and difficult to train.

This settles "modernity", or however you wish to call it, the last half millenium or so, give or take : on one hand the proletariat is slightly less fungible than the peasants were ; on the other hand merchants are slightly more fungible than the knights were. As a necessary result societal mores do allign closer to the values of the peasant, and further away from the values of the knight. More equality, less meritocracy, more "humanity", less "cruelty", more "respect", less "honor", socialism (however you would double-speak it, nazism, communism, democracy, all the same) follows necessarily.

It is important to note here that this is to no degree "revolutionary", in no sense novel, and by no measure anyone's merit. Water finding a new level should you incline the bucket does not result in identifying rando H2O molecules to credit with "having led the wave" or "discovered the new level". For one thing, they didn't discover anything, they were, like their obscure equals, randomly distributed within a spray. Some section thereof was later cemented by events, but to pretend relationship between this happenstance and the happenstancers is ridiculous. I understand you're desperate to make a name for yourself because you imagine that you may thus escape military service - please understand this makes no differenceⁱⁱⁱ.

But lo! Changes are afoot!

Industry is quite obviously well over^iv and in that process the world has changed quite substantially.

On one hand, the social media [l]user no longer has any value or utility, and with that certainly no power whatsoever. Incapable to survive on his own, let alone produce any sort of surplus, he is fungible to a degree flesh and blood peasants of yore never were : barely a row in a database somewhere, much closer to the stuff of daydreams than actual reality.

On the other hand, being a content producer^v is incredibly difficult and incredibly rare. Not only can it not be trained, not even to the modest degree bravery and valor could be trained into the knight, but it exhibits a very active antieconomy of scale! To illustrate this concept - admitting for a second that the nameless ability in question is one and measurable by a scalar - it is the case that a group of ten producers each worth 10 units of productive worth will output LESS than a group of three producers each worth 12 units of productive worth. Yes, 3 * 12 = 36 is more, much more actually, than 10 * 10, because in this field multiplication is a very different beast than the quaint operand you're used to from your merchant class. As counterintuitive as all this may sound^vi, it is nevertheless the sad state of affairs : give me three decisive men and I can overturn a world that millions of derps can't otherwise keep functioning.

And so, to keep it short and sweet : I will by my own hand abolish democracy, and through no sort of "civil war". The simple workings of economical attrition will suffice. By the blessing of the trite yet incontrovertible fact that you - all of you - can not keep up with us^vii, a precious few of us, your world will come undone. All we have to do is reject most of you, systematically, and keep working. Delusions as to how anyone could in any manner oppose this^viii, or that the evolution in question is anything but nude, rude and unavoidable historical necessity may taste sweet, but other than that taste produce no further fruit. You will go where the level goes and that's all there is to it.

Note that I take no merit in any of this. Figuring out which way the wind blows does not make one a "wind magician" or anything of the sort. I understand you're used to hearing a different melody from your traditional shamans and whatever elses, but really, wouldn't you say it's time you grew up already ?

Interesting that the above essay is essentially the same as my Rise of Knowledge, Demise of Finance essay (which predates his by a few years) in that it is pointing out how knowledge or leadership is non-fungible and how it becomes the post-industrial age economy.

The failure modes of "democracy", from people who actually know what they're talking about.

There was some discussion earlier about rank nonsense like:

Why does that matter? Because people have a right to democratic institutions. People have a right to vote on or have a say in matters that govern their lives. Bitcoin, as it exists now, takes that away from people.

But the fact of the matter is that "people" have no such right. Bitcoin isn't here to take anything from them but their delusions, a topic otherwise amply covered here over the years.

I suggest also reading Why "representative democracy" doesn't work and doesn't make sense and the sovereign republic we hope to establish with blockchains.

Apparently Mircea Popescu (who claims he is a $billionaire in BTC and earns more than $100K daily primarily as a result of his MPeX high finance Bitcoin venture) believes it is an experiment that will sort itself out, i.e. if Satoshi's proof-of-concept wasn't good enough, then the sovereign republic will fix it:

You have to realise that even ignoring the hilarity of the economic section of bitcoin that the technology is not made for this kind of deployment. But I'm sure you know better, how long have you even been involved in bitcoin?

Bitcoin was conceived as a prototype. This is what it was, like a model airplane you make with your son over the weekend to test out this weird theory whereby "you can fly with objects heavier than air". It's not the author's fault that at the end of the test run the prototype - instead of being discarded, as intended - was picked up as the actual working thing for which it was to be a mere prototype. In the model airplane business the dad would be well advised to knock the kid one over the head if that's what it takes preventing his trying to fly over Niagara Falls. In this particular circumstance all the guy could do is get the fuck out of Dodge.

That aside, it may just as well work. It's just risky as all fuck, that's all.

The only way you're going to have a chance of liquidating those assets is if you convince a bunch of people with money to invest in the ponzi before it collapses.

I'm not particularly interested in liquidating, it's a computer game after all.

Mircea Popescu's group maintains The Real Bitcoin Foundation fork of Satohi's code before Core started mucking with it. I presume he thinks the whales can always change the PoW hash if they need to spank a cartel of miners who are censoring transactions and/or extracting exorbitant ransom fees, but the flaw in this thinking is precisely the error he noted in his mathematical analysis which is that the experts can't be omniscient. How will they know what level of security is sufficient and centralized control is not anti-fragile.

Thus I think Mircea Popescu either hasn't thought this out entirely or he is counting on someone like myself (i.e. the sovereign republic) to fix it.

@dinofelis thinks the solution is to periodically trading to different altcoins as the former ones die (a form of decentralization via creative destruction), but this means the money supply is unbounded or it means the greater fools get manipulated and we are then not sovereign. So I don't see how his idea works.

[dinofelis]

@dinofelis thinks the solution is to periodically trading to different altcoins as the former ones die (a form of decentralization via creative destruction), but this means the money supply is unbounded or it means the greater fools get manipulated and we are then not sovereign. So I don't see how his idea works.

1) money supply unbounded.  Yes.  Money is promises or hopes and beliefs.  Promises, hopes and beliefs are unbounded.  You can have an unbounded supply of different kinds of promises, hopes and beliefs, as long as they are not fungible as a whole, they organize in categories, and fluid exchanges between them help this organization.  Look at "coinmarketcap".  (almost) unbound offer of supply, finite market cap, because no uniform distribution (fungible) but power law or exponential distribution.  The supply of coins is unbounded ; the value it represents, not.

I see cryptos as a fractally meshed organization (not a hierarchical organization, but rather a fractal one).  I could set up, if I wanted, a small crypto in my street, with my neighbours.  I have to link that to another crypto with the crypto of the nearby street.  Hell, there can be 7 of them in my street, but they will organize in a certain, non-permanent, order.  In order to exchange, we need a "collateral" accepted by both, so a "higher order" crypto, at least for both of us.  That higher-order crypto doesn't need to be hierarchically organized.  It must just be recognized by both of us to be sufficiently valuable the duration of the exchange process.

My street coin can serve as collateral for two exchanges on the other side of town, if we have enough 'value' in our community.  But there will be more widely used cryptos that need to serve as collateral in exchanging between "remote" small chains.  Which ones doesn't matter, their life time doesn't matter.  They just need to be accepted and sufficiently valuable the time of an exchange.

I see cryptos as ephemeral bubbles in a bubbling sea, with small bubbles, bigger bubbles, helping people to do what they want to do.

After all, what's the USE of crypto ?  The use of money is to fluidify economic exchange.  If it can provide that, during a certain period, with enough ease, and under the conditions one wants, that's good enough.  It should get its value from its use, not from speculation about its capacity to store value "for the long term".  Although that nice may be taken too.  Bitcoin is a good candidate.  Or not.

2) greater fools merit to be abused.  But normally, after getting burned a few times, a greater fool learns.  I think that greater fool games is what is killing crypto.  It must stop.  When you realize that the life time of a crypto is maybe 10 years, you won't play again.

[iamnotback]

@dinofelis you are trying to conceptually separate unit-of-exchange from store-of-value and unit-of-account functions of money, but afaics that is inherently impossible if the role of money is to be an accurate information system where utility is rewarded (promoted) and unproductive activity is punished (squelched), c.f. from my prior post Democracy and finance don't mix - the math involved. Per the writings of the Bitcoin billionaire Mircea Popescu, the bankrupt socialistic democracy of the earth is dying and we are entering a WoT-organized, individually sovereign republic wherein all the unproductive masses will perish. Mathematically every exchange and/or hedge between units-of-account is loss (transfer of capital) that accrues to those who base on the least volatile (or let's say most informational in terms of promoting utiilty) unit-of-account. Thus you are correct that greater fool altcoins die out and there can only be one reserve currency. So we don't fix the problem of this thread by denying this math and postulating an ongoing marketplace of altcoins, because there will always be only one dominant reserve currency. Your model only works when there is very little trade between communities, so there is no need for the units-of-account to interact. We actually have to fix the technology of decentralized consensus. Satoshi's work is not yet complete.

Bitcoin is in danger of losing its status as the de facto reserve currency of the coming sovereign republic, if it is soon shown it can be regulated by anyone (including the miners and/or Core). Because top-down control is not maximally informational per the math cited in the prior post. Mircea Popescu better pay attention because maybe his $billionaire computer game will have a reset button and he better not be late to liquidate.

But there is another possible perspective. If value becomes non-fungible wherein it can't even be purchased, then perhaps money dies as concept? The so-called post-scarcity civilization wherein we all survive of donations and we compete for reputation. Then reputation becomes the new money, but it can't be transferred. The higher your reputation, the more attention your projects and efforts get. It is a form of stored capital. Eric S. Raymond referred to this as the gift culture.

[dinofelis]

@dinofelis you are trying to conceptually separate unit-of-exchange from store-of-value and unit-of-account functions of money, but afaics that is inherently impossible if the role of money is to be an accurate information system where utility is rewarded (promoted) and unproductive activity is punished

Ah, you think that crypto is going to rule, I don't.  I think that fiat or centralized currencies are with us until humanity collapses (maybe not very far in the future).  Those are the actual backbone of finance.  Violence, finance, state and corruption are inseparable.  I'm talking about the underground, small, almost invisible "free" world for the few people that want to live that way (not many).  The "enemies of state" hiding out and trying to set up underground parallel economies to survive.

The few, far and in between, that live amongst the zombies.

there will always be only one dominant reserve currency

Yes, a centralized one, decided by the powers that be, whatever they are.

Your model only works when there is very little trade between communities, so there is no need for the units-of-account to interact.

Indeed, but these are the realities of economic exchange.  Most of your daily economic exchange which you want underground is in small communities.  I don't do business with the world.  I only interact with a few other economic agents.  We can have our "currency".  Those other agents are also only members of communities.  The difference with former national currencies is rather that those were geographically organized, and not economically (although both were in close agreement).  The local tokens are nothing else but agreements about who has done what for whom without having to give away names and relationships.

As I see crypto mainly as a tool of economic resistance and underground survival, the diversity and the exchange costs and risks are the price to pay for true decentralisation and protection against systemic risk of attack.

We actually have to fix the technology of decentralized consensus. Satoshi's work is not yet complete.

If only that could be done.  I have many ideas to *improve* but I'm almost sure that all of it corrupts eventually. This is why no single tech should be dominant for a long time, no uniformity.  Nothing should have a long life time, nothing should have a broad importance and acceptance.

[jonald_fyookball]

If only that could be done.  I have many ideas to *improve* but I'm almost sure that all of it corrupts eventually.

You and the OP are consistently pessimistic.  You almost sound like the same person.

[dinofelis]

You and the OP are consistently pessimistic.  You almost sound like the same person.

I'm not pessimistic at all.  In fact, the worse the world is going to be, the merrier I can face my own end of life
It would really piss me off to leave behind a world in which people have a lot of fun I cannot share !
(and no, as far as I know, I'm not dying yet, but one day I will)

But I have some ideas that some may consider "pessimistic" if they live off illusions.  I love to kill illusions.

1) there is an inversion of "good" and "bad".  What people are taught to be "good" is in fact bad (for them) and what people are taught is "bad" is in fact good for them, and perfectly normal human nature, perfectly normal "living being" nature.  This is what I call the social lie, and serves essentially to keep power over people and extort them (which is, by itself, perfectly normal - what is less normal is the Turkeys voting for Xmas).

2) humanity is a transition species between biological life and silicon dominant life.  Humanity is something like the first fish that crawled on the shores: it is the first biological life able to put intelligence at work to create more intelligence.  Evolution is switching gear, from the Darwinian algorithm to "intelligent design" (but not as creationists saw it).  Soon we will be subjugated by our own creation, like that fish has been eaten by the land species that are its descendants.  Biological life will be subjugated to "the machines", but without realizing it until it is over.

3) I believe in parallel universes, so everything happens.  But you only see one "movie" as a conscious being.  This means that there's no good or bad to be done to anyone but yourself.  The person you save, is killed in the other universe in any case.  And if you kill him in yours, he'll survive in the other one.  Perfect immorality.  No purpose, no history, no future.  Just your own "movie" in all possible universes.

There.

Is that pessimism ?

[iamnotback]

If only that could be done.  I have many ideas to *improve* but I'm almost sure that all of it corrupts eventually.

You and the OP are consistently pessimistic.  You almost sound like the same person.

Who is pessimistic? I see a glorious knowledge age coming where money dies finally:

But there is another possible perspective. If value becomes non-fungible wherein it can't even be purchased, then perhaps money dies as concept? The so-called post-scarcity civilization wherein we all survive of donations and we compete for reputation. Then reputation becomes the new money, but it can't be transferred. The higher your reputation, the more attention your projects and efforts get. It is a form of stored capital. Eric S. Raymond referred to this as the gift culture.

So high finance jerks like Mircea Popescu can't become billionaires and incessantly talk arrogant condescending shit about everyone else (er, maybe it is just a persona and a joke?), just for doing some math and having some automated finance model. Maybe he is actually an awesome leader and utility creator, so perhaps it really doesn't matter if he is valued in fungible units or non-fungible reputation units though.

When I say reputation, I mean in terms of the non-fungible knowledge creation that others value. I don't mean political reputation valued by how many false promises and illusions one can prop up with fiat systems and debt.

2) humanity is a transition species between biological life and silicon dominant life.  Humanity is something like the first fish that crawled on the shores: it is the first biological life able to put intelligence at work to create more intelligence.  Evolution is switching gear, from the Darwinian algorithm to "intelligent design" (but not as creationists saw it).  Soon we will be subjugated by our own creation, like that fish has been eaten by the land species that are its descendants.  Biological life will be subjugated to "the machines", but without realizing it until it is over.

And you know I think that Kurzweil is an idiot and his Singularity is for delusional, Malthusian-fear-oriented-irrational fools. And I will get back to debating you on that in future. But not here, nor now. I'd like to stay on topic.

3) I believe in parallel universes, so everything happens.  But you only see one "movie" as a conscious being.  This means that there's no good or bad to be done to anyone but yourself.  The person you save, is killed in the other universe in any case.  And if you kill him in yours, he'll survive in the other one.  Perfect immorality.  No purpose, no history, no future.  Just your own "movie" in all possible universes.

Agreed. Einstein had written and I had explained my reasoning some where not too long ago for this statement:

(and I'm not exactly referring to the fact that present never exists, only the past and future but they are just but grand illusions, yet that is covered elsewhere not in this post)

[dinofelis]

@fyookball: see I'm not the same guy

[iamnotback]

@dinofelis you are trying to conceptually separate unit-of-exchange from store-of-value and unit-of-account functions of money, but afaics that is inherently impossible if the role of money is to be an accurate information system where utility is rewarded (promoted) and unproductive activity is punished

Ah, you think that crypto is going to rule, I don't.

If aren't able to achieve decentralization (i.e. no regulation is possible) with crypto, then humanity could still possibly move forward to the reputation gift culture that I am postulating.

I think that fiat or centralized currencies are with us until humanity collapses (maybe not very far in the future).  Those are the actual backbone of finance.  Violence, finance, state and corruption are inseparable.

They are incompatible with value in the knowledge age. Reputation is what is important.

I'm talking about the underground, small, almost invisible "free" world for the few people that want to live that way (not many).  The "enemies of state" hiding out and trying to set up underground parallel economies to survive.

Remember I told you that I refuse to live like a worm slithering and hiding under rocks. I'd prefer to fight than live a miserable existence. Sorry that isn't going to happen. The leaders who matter will fight. The dweebs (aka derbs) will perish as usual.

The few, far and in between, that live amongst the zombies.

Those who are willing to be worms are one-and-the-same with the rest of the zombie derbs. Fight or lose.

there will always be only one dominant reserve currency

Yes, a centralized one, decided by the powers that be, whatever they are.

Not if we succeed to decentralize blockchains.

Your model only works when there is very little trade between communities, so there is no need for the units-of-account to interact.

Indeed, but these are the realities of economic exchange.  Most of your daily economic exchange which you want underground is in small communities.  I don't do business with the world.  I only interact with a few other economic agents.  We can have our "currency".

Protectionism is impoverishing.

We actually have to fix the technology of decentralized consensus. Satoshi's work is not yet complete.

If only that could be done.  I have many ideas to *improve* but I'm almost sure that all of it corrupts eventually. This is why no single tech should be dominant for a long time, no uniformity.  Nothing should have a long life time, nothing should have a broad importance and acceptance.

Open source. Open source. The Inverse Commons. I keep telling how to do it.

Miners can do what they are doing because it is not illegal in the protocol. Make it illegal then open source the enforcement of the objective law that makes it so. Byzantine fault detection instead of Byzantine agreement.

That is my solution. Now figure out the details.  

However, I also can't conclude with 100% certainty that there isn't some mode by which centralized control is still attainable.

[dinofelis]

The few, far and in between, that live amongst the zombies.

Those who are willing to be worms are one-and-the-same with the rest of the zombie derbs. Fight or lose.

How would you have survived in the Soviet Union ?  
Too many gullible useful idiots out there.
Useful idiots with capacities to put in the hands of the powers that be, but unable to see the broader picture.  Zombies.  Too many of them, too powerful, too stubborn, too brainwashed.  Brave New World is here already.

[iamnotback]

I'm still of that opinion, UNLESS regular hard forks are part of the protocol.

Scripting interacting with the unbounded nondeterminism of the environment creates an indeterminate protocol.

For example, how do you prove that different implementations of the Bitcoin nodes all implement the same protocol?

If you tell me the scripting code is the law, then I will say your law is random and undefined. We can't prove a negative in an unbounded universe.

Vitalik is part of the environment. The hacker was part of the environment.

I think what you are driving at is that you would prefer a design that has proven itself over time to be resilient against any large unexpected outcomes in the widely held and/or documented expectations of for the protocol. But the problem in this case was that the widely held expectations were mutually conflicting. All those who invested in the DAO presumed the protocol would meet their expectations and they also thought this was consistent with fuzzy concepts of immutable protocols which can't be defined.

So I think what you are really promoting is not just immutable protocols (in those cases where they can be suitably documented and defined), but rather realism about the extent of what we don't know and can't define. But the greater fool derbs are always harvested by the more clever actors.

I presume the clever actors will settle on a blockchain protocol which is well defined and resilient against attacks from anyone, if such as technology can exist.

Ethereum seems to be a system for experimentation on what types of blockchain apps could provide utility to society. So it seems that well defined/refined protocols are lower on the priority list. Highly creative experimentation is necessarily chaotic.

Comments such as the following during the DAO aftermath ignored the above realization that I've had since then:

P.S. In crypto, there are no "rightful owners".

Contrary to the banking credit world where posession and ownership are distinct, in crypto, ownership is unambiguously defined by possession. That is a cardinal quality of the blockchain that asserts its role as "bearer instrument".

If the mining community acts to disaffirm this principle - albeit in a meta currency layer - it will create an ambiguity that will haunt Ethereum for the rest of its existence IMO.

The lesson to be learned here is that Ethereum blockchain and Ethereum (Solidity) applications are distinct entities with distinct levels of reliability. If I write a piece of code in solidity (say to develop a coin) and I f*ck it up and loose my investors money does that mean I can get the Ethereum foundation to do a rollback and cover my a*ss ?

If not, why not ?

@toknormal was describing Bitcoin with most of the opcodes removed. Some very well defined, closed ecosystem thing. That is a different set of priorities than Ethereum's.

[iamnotback]

How would you have survived in the Soviet Union ?

I don't know. But I would have fought to get out of the place probably. I mean in war sometimes you live as a worm while you are in the trenches fighting to get out of the situation. Not just existing that way and accepting it as an existence. I don't have a lot patience level for conformance, so I probably would have been shot attempting something crazy. But I couldn't even stay in the USA, because I am such a rebel. Many others managed to hang in the USA since the 1990s when I bailed out. I paid a price for that. But if I had to do all again, and I felt the society was telling me to be stupid, I think I'd rebel again (but be more careful about not contracting TB and losing an eye).

I would do what I am doing now, which is trying to find those people who are creating utility and help them if I can. Build a WoT with those people.