asciilifeform: 'Ernst & Young, the firm organising the auction, said the bitcoins had been "confiscated as proceeds of crime" but did not elaborate on the case.'
asciilifeform: 'A collection of bitcoins worth about £8m, which had been confiscated by police in Australia, will be auctioned off in June. The 24,518 bitcoins will be sold mostly in blocks of 2,000 - each with a value of about £680,000.'
asciilifeform: and if it were the year 1850 and a letter that comes in can be presumed to be from a learned gentlemen simply by virtue of being a letter,
asciilifeform: and i have similar barbed wire in my head.
asciilifeform: which is that mircea_popescu has thick walls in his head covered in barbed wire, and newcomers are necessarily massaged by said barbed wire.☟︎
asciilifeform: they impose a different kind of cost on trilema.
asciilifeform: it is a means of authentication almost as good as pgp.
asciilifeform: to clarify, i am not 'in love with paper' so much as with 'paper whose untampered age i can smell with my nose'
asciilifeform: do you know the stories told by math profs, of how up to 1980s or so they would accept unsolicited manuscripts purporting to prove a theorem, but then had to stop ?☟︎
asciilifeform: they result in a thickening of the mental carapace of thinking people☟︎
asciilifeform: there is also another cost imposed by sewer rats, that is not solvable by technical means
asciilifeform: and, if it comes to it, news blackouts
asciilifeform: diana_coman: generally the rats find it much more cost-effective to 'bring it down' by signal jamming
asciilifeform: the sewer rats impose a considerable cost on thinking folk just by being there.
asciilifeform: but i find it hard to see how it is not obvious that 'every sewer rat can publish' is a considerable damper on culture☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: aha, smaller-scale version of the same idea
asciilifeform: likewise the expense of printing/binding (and in the age of living culture it was quite expensive) was a pretty good bozo filter.
asciilifeform: hence more effort is put in, prior to printing
asciilifeform: which could not be fixed remotely (legends of 'great soviet encyclopaedia' owners being sent razor blade and list of what to censor notwithstanding)
asciilifeform: long ago i wrote an article re the undisputably higher quality of hardware products vs software, on account of the impossibility of patching hardware
asciilifeform: diana_coman: i am most sympathetic to precisely the 'anyone-can-print killed the book' argument.
asciilifeform: and in any case unmutilated copies abounded and could not be remotely fucked with.☟︎
asciilifeform: and generally not undertaken without a specific reason.
asciilifeform: diana_coman: every derp can distribute mutilated copy. the only pill against this is wot, and it remains to be seen whether the pill even works.
asciilifeform: diana_coman: the medium is intrinsically unfriendly on account of every-derp-can-modify.☟︎
asciilifeform: fact is, EVERYONE on planet3 who is worth so much as ~two shits~, is a child of books.
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-30#1473575 << let's try a gedankenexperiment. take a bunch of folks who grew up on books, and another set who grew up on blogs (let's say, the spiffiest blogs!) -- and see which set can solve a set of differential equations, build a cement mixer, a house that stands up, write gcd, whatever torture test you prefer.☝︎☟︎
asciilifeform: clearly i do not properly apprehend this particular greek yet.
asciilifeform: also mircea_popescu in the original 'books are dead' you have '...tot asa cum n-ati stiut niciodata greaca veche...' but we know you ~do~ greaca veche !☟︎
