asciilifeform: now, i cannot pay what these fine massages from mircea_popescu costs. but if he were not fond of giving them for free, i would have to forgo the massages.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: my offer to actually pay what that thing costs, stands.
asciilifeform: so that wrath can fall on the correct heads.
asciilifeform: it is not a replacement for working bitcoin. but a pill to wake folks up to the fact of the broken one.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is horrible ! but was the pill suggested in the trilema bbet article.
asciilifeform: (and not only mircea_popescu , but i think many folks swallowed them in one pill)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it melded into one in your head with the DER encoding thing.
asciilifeform: but i will note that the story ends up having some of the unpleasant flavour of the usg secret court trials with secret evidence, resultingly.
asciilifeform: and yes, i fully grasp why he loathes to deal with the sort of folks who do sigint.
asciilifeform: and, like most folks direly missing a tool, come to believe that 'i don't need screwdriver, hammer's claw in expert hands is always just as good or better'
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: my current understanding, based not only on this incident but others, is that he has pretty good (world class?) humint, but atrocious sigint
asciilifeform: certainly i lack the lsd to process the sheer number of my-intel-told-me-so-and-you-will-take-it-on-faith-because-dirigible-and-fuckyou
asciilifeform: he can correct me if this is not a valid summary, when he wakes up.
asciilifeform: that is, that miners do not prb and are not affected by prbism.
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: iirc it is specifically mircea_popescu's position that not-this.
asciilifeform: i.e. that someone chose to make a particular exception from ordinary prb rules in order to ding bbet.
asciilifeform: PeterL: well the contention is that it was fired maliciously
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu described the high-S thing as noncontroversial, but for some reason it did not alarm him that miners could agree on something which theoretically leads to dropping PERFECTLY VALID TX on the floor ?!
asciilifeform: it ought not to have been possible for the miners to agree on this.☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: the high-S thing was the most serious, imho, warning bell that there ~is~ such a thing as miner collusion
asciilifeform: (note, the protocol PERMITS a block with high-S tx. hence my suggestion to build a high-S-only pool.)
asciilifeform: PeterL: poor example, the extant miners somehow agreed not to mine high-S
asciilifeform: perhaps this is a failure of my puny brain, but i am at a loss as to what assurance mircea_popescu could possibly have had, and from whom, that there is not a prb vermin between mpb-net and the miner.
asciilifeform: learned this from al schwartz, and eminently confirmed in years since.
asciilifeform: i, for instance, will not deal with han chinese unless the deal is strictly cash&carry basis and involves no ongoing trust arrangement.
asciilifeform: and that whichever meatspace folk with whom he had peering arrangements, a) bamboozled him and/or b) were in turn bamboozled by their peers.
asciilifeform: the 'lighter weight', parsimonious hypothesis is that mpb-net was bamboozled by sybils. rather than miners.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it is not actually my business how mircea_popescu transmits his tx, but since he chose to present the bbet matter in the tmsr public forum, rather than limiting it to folks 'whose business it is', i will say, that the mpb (client and network both) is a serious ?????? in the story. i have nfi how it works, and imho it actually matters for making sense of the observations.
asciilifeform: but if mircea_popescu signed a statement that he transmits directly to the miners, and has no doubt that this is so, because he ran the cable himself, i will believe...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the bbet event suggested that there was at least one layer of prb between mircea_popescu and the miners.
asciilifeform: sybils putting transactions in their pocket and lying about the contents of their mempool, works.
asciilifeform: at no point did i state a belief in 'imperceptible miners', just observing that the miner collusion is not a necessary hypothesis re the bbet event.
asciilifeform: to which the miners connect. and likewise everyone else.
asciilifeform: there is a network, consisting, apparently, mostly of sybil.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is synthesis from earlier threads where you stated that yes, there are sybils, but your octopus of mpb connecting to various trusted folks, incl. over crypted links, is not sybilable
asciilifeform: the 'is not stable' thing is pure handwaving.
asciilifeform: well if mircea_popescu demonstrated the logic whereby miner collusion is a necessary hypothesis, vs sybils alone, i must have slept through it ?
asciilifeform: the number is simply to ensure that folks connecting at random, in public toilets, end up with a thick layer of sybil between them and the statistically probable genuine non-gangrenous flesh somewhere far away.
asciilifeform: sybil attacks work not because there are many sybils, but because they ~act in concert~
asciilifeform: the 'trees' very much DO have motherfuckingt tongues here.
asciilifeform: i must agree with phf. and i think this is how nubbins` ended up killfiled by mircea_popescu, for the 'i speak for trees, for the trees have no tongues' thing.☟︎
asciilifeform: nubbins`: or was the idea that it ~ought to be~ successful enough to be able to cover any loss with simply the profit from any particular month ?
asciilifeform: nubbins`: was it really meant to live only until the first disaster, however small? e.g., stolen server ?☟︎
asciilifeform: nubbins`: the one mega-mystery in my mind is still the 0asset thing.☟︎
asciilifeform: but mircea_popescu is the one stuck driving the grim bulldozer.
asciilifeform: is this not how sport bet generally works ? BingoBoingo ?☟︎
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: but thus far i don't see how the bet is difficult to resolve. the presumption is that the game was legit, no? barring actual proof of shenanigans ?
asciilifeform: i recently finished an interesting history, 'Расстрелянные герои Советского Союза' (Heroes of SU who were condemned to the firing squad)
asciilifeform: 'vow of poverty' surrounded by gold and jewels, 'chastity' with cocksuckers in every corner, etc.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: aha, it was, in the copies, a mega-l0l quite comparable to the false asceticism of medieval monks
asciilifeform: (notably, refused, for his entire reign, to sell mineral resources from his country to foreign devils. successors IMMEDIATELY began this burning of furniture, culminating in modern ru 'pipe economy.')
