Are you important enough to have Theymos and forum members close to him comment on your threads (or quote your posts) to have positive conversations with you? Well, that happened to me in the past and it gives me great joy considering how humble they were to then nobody. [...] I believe you can find potential World Leaders from forum superiors here. [...] (I think that was part of my conversation with Mprep or Achow... Theymos was probably about
This is a thread for the purpose of name-dropping, salted with arse-kissing. FYI, it is one of the reasons why people in VIP positions are sometimes reluctant to interact with people. Take it as advice; more is below.
Sometimes, I wonder if theymos ever uses an alt account to engage with the forum as an ordinary user. The problem is, of course, that he could not risk engaging in discussions very deeply,
lest style and substance may reveal his identity.
An even bigger problem is nonpublic contacts. If anyone in a high-profile position engages in casual PM or e-mail correspondence with someone relatively unknown, it runs the risk that some loser will go around gratuitously bragging, “Oh, I was just chatting with X,” as if suddenly they are pals. Unless you really are close to someone, it is inappropriate—and you will never be close to someone famous (let alone famous yourself), unless you have sound judgment about such matters of social appropriateness, and moreover,
privacy. It is why I try to avoid even mentioning such things unless there is a reason to do so—even in one instance when the other party took the initiative of reaching out to me, then quoted my reply on Twitter (with my permission). Well, that is obviously not private; but I will not pretend that I’m best buddies with X just because X took an interest in something I wrote, and we had some interesting chit-chat about a topic of mutual interest.
For referring to public discussions, context is important. To illustrate by way of example: If, in Lauda’s final thread, there were occasion to recount the origin of Lauda’s final avatar, it would be relevant to retrace the history of how I made a satirical thread in Lauda’s defence, and theymos was so amused that that inspired a little piece of his April Fools’ joke that year, and my satire became a kind of a meme for Lauda in some of her later posts, and she used a clip of a William Blake painting that I had made for that thread as her final avatar. But it would be gauche to make a merit-seeking Meta thread about the times that OH MY GAWD, SO-AND-SO REPLIED TO ME (and that makes me so “important”) with a list of my past interactions with theymos, forum staff, Bitcoin Core developers, etc., etc. As if that validated my existence.
Ucy, try flipping the question around:
How important are you to yourself? People who are worth talking to, usually know it—so it feels natural and normal to talk to someone famous.
So you'd better believe that when a lot of members have personal interactions with Theymos--who was around during the days of Satoshi--they figuratively piss in their pants as if they got a phone call from Chris Pratt [or pick your celebrity].
Who is Chris Pratt? (Seriously, I have never heard of him/her/it.)
If I just disappeared tomorrow, I doubt there'd be much notice at all.
So, why are you here? If you are not connecting with anyone, and if you think your posts are of such ephemeral, negligible significance to everybody else, is there any purpose?
In some of my past disappearances, when it seemed I may not return, people have sometimes created threads asking what happened to me. Without any intention to deprecate the VIPs, it frankly touched me much more on a personal level to find that relatively unknown people had been wondering about my fate than to have perfectly normal interactions with famous folks.
The Bitcoin Forum is not Bitcoin. The forum is obviously centralized; and the central authority on this forum
does matter. Nonetheless, in a different way, this evokes an important point:
Isn't it like Bitcoin, where no one person even 'matters' (as long as there is 1+ person.. I suppose)?
One of my favourite quotes:
“Bitcoin’s greatest vulnerability was and always is that it can’t be any stronger than the people who use it. It’s possible for the public to be just too dumb for Bitcoin.” —
nullc on Redit (2021-12-30). The context: A proposition that if, hypothetically, CSW were really Satoshi, then it wouldn’t matter, because no one person matters to Bitcoin.
I think most people wouldn't give a hoot
I'm confident you're wrong. Too many people are hidebound authoritarians and simply can't wrap their head around a system that doesn't have a central authority.
The history of the public's interaction with Bitcoin has been a comedy of errors with people (press, organizations, etc) incorrectly fixating on one person or element of the system as being in charge of it... only to end up mired in confusion, oscillating between options, because they can't wrap their head around a named 'system' that has no central authority... even though there are plenty of other things in our lives that don't (e.g. the English language, to give an example we're all familiar with).
Bitcoin's greatest vulnerability was and always is that it can't be any stronger than the people who use it. It's possible for the public to be just too dumb for Bitcoin. I'm generally pretty positive about the world's ability on that front, but in a hypothetical dystopia where it turned out that somehow an incompetent narcissist conman created Bitcoin, one fixated on destroying its properties, confiscating coins for personal gain, and destroying its decentralization? ... in that world Bitcoin would be well outside of my personal risk tolerance. Wright would be way too much of a headwind.
This is even more true today because BSV exists so we don't have to speculate what a Bitcoin of the Craig believers looks like. It isn't pretty.
Although I disagree with him about some details, I agree with Cøbra’s proposition that Bitcoin is hyperpolitical money. And in politics, these things matter: Charismatic leaders, founders, VIPs—authority figures. Bitcoin’s distributed database consensus is decentralized; its development consensus is largely decentralized, because the Bitcoin Core developers think in terms of decentralization; but its broader wetware-layer social consensus never can be. And an ideal that contradicts human nature is worth no more than an idea that contradicts the laws of physics or of mathematics.
