asciilifeform: my current understanding is that treating price as a scalar is loony
asciilifeform: but whenever someone seems willing to mass-sell, it tanks ?
asciilifeform: possibly this sounds batshit, but it could explain why the 'early adopt' folks were so eager to part with their coin in return for a song and a promise
asciilifeform given that we had the thread re: 'market depths' today, cannot help but wonder whether a fella with, e.g., 10,000 btc in those times did ~not~ actually see himself as in possession of 40,000 usd
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: comment on the relative merits of -10 vs 'unrate'
asciilifeform: 'I saw a huge steam roller, / It blotted out the sun. / The people all lay down, lay down; / They did not try to run. / ... ...' - k. vonnegut
asciilifeform: (inside the firebrick, with the gas on, where else)
asciilifeform: hey it sure beats seeing them from inside !
asciilifeform: ne who isn't relevant and knows it has an automatic grudge against you. Since CS research is quite competitive, evolution has its way, and relevance goes the way of the snake's legs.'
asciilifeform: '... Whatever their tactics, what CS bureaucrats always sacrifice is relevance. Of course everyone has a conscience, and everyone would like to be actually relevant. But, especially when the only people checking up are your own godfathers in the funding agencies, it's much easier to pretend to be relevant. Actual relevance is extremely difficult to achieve, and hardly rewarding at all. In fact it's embarrassing, because everyo
asciilifeform: st, by turning it into a form of mathematics. Math outcompetes creative programming in the funding process, simply because it appears to be more rigorous. It is more rigorous, and it generates a longer, deeper river of more impressive publications. And, because its area is nominally applied, it doesn't have to compete with the real mathematicians over in "algorithms," who would clean the bureaucrats' clocks in five minutes.'
asciilifeform: as for why this general thing, see mr mold: 'The CS-research bureaucrat's main difficulty is that no one wants to fund bureaucrats. Therefore, he must pretend to be either a creative programmer or a mathematician, preferably both. Since this task is critical to his survival, he is extremely good at it. The bureaucrat has many strategies. But probably his best is to take an area of creative programming and devour it like a locu
asciilifeform: idk, how does 3B with 14M volume make sense ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i also suspect that one of the drivers of usg interest in demented pseudo-bitcoin contraptions ('permissioned blockchain technology!') is that these folks dream of a hybrid bulldog-rhinoceros, 'best of both', where usg can electronically steal everything you have, but without any bureaucratic snags - it will look precisely like a voluntary donation, from a mathematical standpoint
asciilifeform: ah the 'will' is per 'shave two zeros'
asciilifeform: and if you ~do~ have a 'good reason', you might still be dekulakized
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in usa, if you are so much as seen publicly with a bag of cash big enough for a car (much less a house) - immediate jail, unless you have an alibi
asciilifeform: back to u.s. cash, i suspect that it remains a thing at least partly due to ease of extrajudicial confiscation
asciilifeform: popular explanations range from 'nah they can't ban it, with what will we pay the mexican strawberry pickers' to 'it will come any day now'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the soup at md was poured by nsf (a good $2M worth iirc, straight from the crown)
asciilifeform: shinohai: l0l it wasn't just my doing
asciilifeform: the other thing is, i was briefly astonished at how broken the thing is, but then remembered an old mircea_popescu lemma which leads to 'it must necessarily be broken' - i haven't the link handy, but this was an article where 'usg dare not safely use a working bitcoin or even similar item, because it will begin to warp around it'
