asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the chinese famously hang around the town scaffold
asciilifeform: at some point we'll see the destitute and desperate sell their organs for a btc or two, to pay their meters. but not soon.
asciilifeform: well, to be fair, if the participants paid for food/housing with btc, there might've been an actual body count rather than simple whining
asciilifeform: a 'kinder, gentler' tontine, where you don't have to plug your rivals, just help them forget to check their mail☟︎
asciilifeform: every year the participants put out crypto-signed whatever, if one doesn't, his share goes in the pot
asciilifeform: one could conceivably implement it as a 'dead man's switch'
asciilifeform: dub: there's maybe a dozen outfits selling dedicated rngs, of various cost and quality.
asciilifeform: funny that nobody is quick to help them.
asciilifeform: well that would depend on who's hoarding and why
asciilifeform: traditional argument - if enough of the hoard were dumped, one could see a catastrophic stampede
asciilifeform: that's sorta like saying that falling out of an airplane sans parachute isn't really so bad, i fell out of my bed as a boy once
asciilifeform: exactly. we had 'Muller's gate' in the '50s, with 'ready' signals. but nobody uses.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: afaik, postel's law came out of electronics, where you want to emit clear 'high' or 'low' voltage but do something other than choke & die if you're given a weird glitch (something in between)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this more or less reduces to your old observation that 'your dog thinks that you are an exceptionally large dog of the same type'
asciilifeform: the uninitiated tend to group mpex as 'something somebody wrote'
asciilifeform: re: mpex performance and outraged lusers: there was an article, many years ago, discussing an overheard: 'is that a real program, or is that something somebody wrote'
asciilifeform: all of this quite possible. u.s. reportedly had some very spiffy logistics code in gulf war I.
asciilifeform: because the thing he did for the next 25 years was a ridiculous and worthless usg boondoggle
asciilifeform: but worlds with mass chumpcasting don't produce caesars.
asciilifeform: caesar + mass broadcasting would've been a marvel.
asciilifeform: no special cunning required. just an unbounded willingness to use violence - 'soft violence' of disinformation on the rubes, the 'hard' variety for people who matter
asciilifeform: these folks have been learning the fine art of human-to-mupper conversion for more than half a century.
asciilifeform: 'cooperate like a gentleman or you'll rape someone in sweden tonight.'
asciilifeform: (one of the purposes of 'totalitarian surveillance' is, when they whisper: 'newspaper magnates can also have problems' and he asks 'how', there will be a relevant and persuasive answer.)
asciilifeform: no reason to suppose it wasn't dictated.
