Here is a thread which shows the flaws of the merit system. The forum admins and DT members must strive for balance and adopt a "do no harm" approach when marking Bitcointalk profiles. And that merit points shouldn't be given value at this point since it is given away frivolously by many of the active members.
http://archive.is/Pu7eTI’m not sure why you would use an archive link, whereas I have shown no propensity to throw my mistakes down the memory hole—rather, to the contrary. I
have been intending to edit in a clearly delineated corrective/informative note on this, and some of my other Alia-related posts. Your archive link will not reflect that.
The fact that you
only give an archive link, in a context where other readers likely would need to search for the original, does suggest that you want to stop people from accessing the live thread, and possibly commenting or (gasp!) awarding merit there. Curiously, my OP in that thread got another +2 since you posted this.
The live thread is
and will remain here:
Ciphersex 101 [NSFW]
It is only "cringe" if you read it as a genuine attempt at cybersex, which it clearly is not.
If you read it with a large pinch of salt, as intended, it is in equal measures funny and informative, which makes it immediately better than 95% of posts.
I observe that the forum’s posting interface is peculiarly unsuited for genuine cybersex—especially with Tor lag. Certainly, I could not make a quasi-realtime stream of posts with hands which were—divided in their attentions. But with onion-layered motives, I
could take pleasure in putting on a live sex show to amuse people like you, whilst benefitting of a cause dear to my heart:
...I think user education is important. For a forum dealing with what is now colloquially called “crypto”, only an astonishly small proportion of users are crypto-savvy.
One of my first thoughts on seeing anything Bitcoin-related is, “Why isn’t public-key crypto used for all authentication?” Of all places, the Bitcoin Forum should lead with that! If you use Bitcoin, you should also use PGP, at the bare minimum; and the attention brought by Bitcoin makes for an opportunity to introduce more people to what old cypherpunks call “crypto”, resulting in more security all-around.
I am appalled at how few users of cypherpunk money show even the slightest interest in actual “crypto”. I’m afraid that >95% of alleged “Bitcoin users” are seeking only get-rich-quick and/or a new form of Paypal. I want to change that—that, and more.
Overall, I am ideologically motivated to educate people about strong cryptography—and most importantly, to make more people actually use it.
Point blank, sex sells. If I could seduce (what I believed to be) a 19-year-old woman into learning how to secure her data and her communications, then that’s a “win-win” scenario on multiple levels. So much the better if I could take that public with an exhibitionist camgirl, and thus titillate a wider audience into
enjoying an otherwise dry discussion of practical cryptography:
What is your knowledge level of cryptography concepts? E.g., could you explain in basic (non-mathematical) terms how the ciphersuites in PGP, TLS, etc. fit together? Symmetric cipher, asymmetric cipher, hash function, etc. Also, concepts such as the distinctions between integrity, confidentiality, and authentication.
I can teach you all these things, and much more. I am looking for the starting point.
Now, how better do you learn? In my lap, or on your knees with your head betwixt my legs? I should mention, “in my lap” involves penetration. Penetrating insights into your most private cipher.
Of course, I do not expect serious pedagogy to proceed by such means. But as someone who has spent two decades futilely urging people to
use PGP (see my signature!), I well know that the main problems are laziness and lack of interest. By eroticizing a casual, beginner’s-level chat about “the distinctions between
integrity,
confidentiality, and
authentication”, I think that could do much for raising user interest. Perhaps I may even excite someone into reading a book on the subject! Most importantly, my intent as the thread developed was to add sex appeal to
actual usage of PGP, OTR, Tor, full disk encryption, and of course,
Bitcoin. Thus could I be making the world a better place, whilst enjoying some innocent fun.
It's cringe because some old dude creeping on what he thought was an extremely young women. It's even more cringe when you learn it turns out the creepy old dude was actually fooled by a 15 yr old boy... It's just gets plain sad when the old dude takes so long to figure out he was a mark all along.
0. I’ve never stated my age. The only evidence I have given thereof is that I
was doing cypherpunk stuff in the 90s—thus, I must be indeed significantly older than 19 years. But I have not said what age I was in the 90s. I suppose that brackets my plausible age to a range of “over 30” and “under 100”.
1. Many people got fooled here. My own default presumption is that anybody on the Internet claiming “[19F]” must be a 200 kg. swindler with external plumbing; in this case, that presumption was rebutted for reasons stated below. And by the way, I fail to understand why so many people presume that the posts are being made by a 15-year-old boy—based on self-descriptions
by the same serial scammer(s) under a different nym (revcback on Reddit).
I don’t make the same mistake twice: I know that at this point, I really have no idea who is
controlling the “alia” account.
“favours” was running a similar scam on this forum in
April 2017, as documented by ibminer; although possible, how likely is it that a
14-year-old boy was already running a sophisticated scam with access to or complicity of an older female? (I’ve been intending to address this point in the
Alia scam thread.)
2. I don’t share your system of moral valuation. Are you perchance American? I don’t ask that to be flip: It is notorious around the world, this peculiar American attitude toward sex (historically Calvinist-derived) combined with the presumption that everybody else must be of the same mindset. Anyway— I have my own principles, in which I am quite strict (
e.g.); and they do not preclude me from pursuing a younger woman, nor do they make me in any way ashamed of doing so.
Certainly, you shall have no pretense of holding some moral high ground over me here.
For my part, perhaps Lord Byron hoped for a Claire Clairmont with a happier ending. For yours, you should feel a liberty to ignore threads which are clearly marked “[NSFW]”—
an absurd term [NSFW link], in my opinion, but an efficient Internet colloquialism which is clearly understood by everybody. Whereas should you wish to preach to me, or insult me as “creepy”, then
pedicabo ego te et irrumabo, cinaede.
Joke or not its weird. It may have even been a plan just to get the "alia" account some merit but it's still creepy. I don't want to speculate their real intentions because ultimately those intentions don't make much difference to me.
At best its wildly inappropriate, weird and just eww, at worst it's down right creepy as fuck IMHO. Whatever way you slice it its gross!
IMHO
Key term, “IMHO”—your opinion is humble, indeed.
Mine is not.
I firmly believe that it is the generation growing up with cryptocurrency that will make it mainstream, that embracing it at a young age will make it ingrained.
My new (to teenage) son reads the forum.
We are planning a spring break trip, I tasked my son with finding a way to spend bitcoin. So far he has shown me Expedia for our hotels. He got excited (although he advised me to hold bitcoin!)
My even younger daughter has no clue about money, but is showing some interest.
My bet is nullius does not have kids.
I don't want either of them to find posts like these, I think it detracts.
I do appreciate your desire to upraise a new Bitcoin generation. I hope that you can inculcate your kids with a sound appreciation not only for some new money-spending technology, but for a
radically different kind of money. For in my experience, most adults are manifestly incapable of questioning their own implicit assumptions to the degree which would let them understand Bitcoin. For most, “money” will always mean what they learnt of it when young.
My suggestion for you as a parent is that you first teach your kids the principle that
Bitcoin is the first-ever form of money intrinsically based on personal responsibility. Bitcoin provides to you
ultimate power over yourself: No king, no priest, and no government can peremptorily countermand the authority of your private keys. Likewise, Bitcoin places you in a position of
ultimate responsiblity for yourself: If you send the wrong tx or lose your private keys, nobody can help you! Whereas it is a first principle of life in this world that
power and responsibility are two sides of the same coin.I think that is a lesson which should be taught to the young—not only to help them understand Bitcoin, but to use Bitcoin itself as a vehicle for imparting an important moral lesson.
Society decayed to its core long ago; and a significant factor in its decline has been that most ostensible adults
never understand the unified identity of power and responsibility. The result of such a failure is societies peopled by superannuated children who behave as self-entitled snowflakes, ruled by corrupt liar-politicians and plutocrats who are anything but “elites” in the proper sense of that word. Understanding that power equals responsibility and
vice versa is fundamental to a proper adult morality.
Now having given some brief version of my most important “Bitcoin parenting” speech, I will address your criticisms of me:
Understand that I don’t intend this as a flame, but as a frank and serious question: On the same grounds as you state in the foregoing (“I don't want [my kids] to find posts like these”), would you suggest that the whole Internet be turned into an AOL or Apple Store type of “walled garden”, restricted to content you find appropriate per your own parenting decisions?
If so, then I doubt that this forum will ever be what you seek, insofar as the main admin here also runs an 18+ subreddit called
/r/GirlsGoneBitcoin. —Which fact is actually relevant to this case. alia_armelle started
there, then leveraged GGB verification to fool me and others
here with a tag which has since been removed and replaced with a red tag:
If you expect me to constrict my posts on this forum to meet your criteria for what “detracts”, please be advised:
Won’t happen.I am not insensitive to your concerns. On a broader level, I think you (as all parents) face a tough challenge nowadays. If they have access to the Internet, to put the matter plainly, your teenagers
will see porn—some of it genuinely obscene, in the sense of revelling in human defilement.
Many people would not agree with your apparent implication that teenagers should be somehow prevented from any and all contact with sexually explicit material. I do think all
reasonable people would agree that parents need a sound strategy for protecting the youthful
psyche against the sort of stuff which makes me want to remove my eyeballs and bathe them in bleach. Moreover, teenagers
and young adults need to be protected against exploitation which can come from unexpected directions—sometimes in the sense of a computer software exploit. (I am here thinking of the notorious erstwhile darkweb site which collected private nude selfies for the express purpose of deliberately humiliating young women; much of their material was obtained by hacks.)
Most of my specific suggestions are shields which operate internally, rather than externally:
- A healthy and independent moral compass—such a rare thing in this world.
- A sound and solemn sense of personal responsibility.
- The savvy, difficult for youths, of knowing that there exist bad people who can sometimes fool even smart people. (Oops.)
- Computer security knowledge; and use of strong cryptography, especially for sensitive information. (Continuing my above parenthetical, I once had a married woman with a conservative social image entrust to me the custody of her private sex pics, on grounds that she wisely trusted my encrypted disk more than any of her own devices—let alone “the cloud”.)
As for the rest: I will thank you to make no assumptions about my family and personal life. For reasons of strict pseudonymity, I will decline to confirm or deny such assumptions—save to observe the obvious: You know nothing about me, but for what I choose to reveal. In my experience, the “you must not have children” argument is more than occasionally valid, but oftentimes just blowing smoke. Here, it is the latter. Clue: Those who downtalk parenting, demonstrate patent personal irresponsibility, or show myopic short-term thinking about generational issues probably do not have children. Whereas people who post about sex on Internet forums thereby reveal little but that they enjoy deriving pleasure from natural reproductive functions.
