asciilifeform: not into or from the aether, but into a more clever man's pocket, from a chump's.
asciilifeform: a USB thumb drive from virtually any manufacturer, for instance, does
asciilifeform: or, likely, it has a firmware upgrade endpoint (most usb devices do, whether documented or not.)
asciilifeform: perhaps our friend left his plugged in, and it can be actuated through software in some undocumented way (rather than pressing the switch)
asciilifeform: the link appears to talk about a traditional wallet heist
asciilifeform: there is only so many times that this can happen without a real effect
asciilifeform: not even considering that, if what we just saw was the echo of an actual double spend, it is entirely possible that somebody just sucked out N BTC out of the aether
asciilifeform: jurov: the paper economy, yes. but people will still want to live, and will try.
asciilifeform: think: lead (and, naturally brass) "bullion" instead of gold and silver. "The lead standard."
asciilifeform: but the fun might end rather abruptly (at least in the U.S.) when the rolling blackouts begin.
asciilifeform: jurov: that's when the "Bitcoin as NSA honeypot" hypothesis will be tested until red-hot.
asciilifeform: jurov: slowly enough. the first step will be punitive taxation of metals (see the imminent U.S. national sales tax as a base to work from.)
asciilifeform: and not the wimpy FDR confiscation. the Soviet one. where possession of bullion carried the same penalty as murder.
asciilifeform: jurov: re: gold: eventually the physical metals market will decouple from the idiot paper-metal chump harvester. That's when the confiscation gasenwagen revvs up.
asciilifeform: with the little twist that ultimately if you eat shit instead of food long enough, you die.
asciilifeform: the permanently-unemployed say hello to the kolkhoz, and so on
asciilifeform: the next step is the slow outright Sovietization
asciilifeform: but, at the moment, there is still an effort to keep up the pretense that there is an actual economy, where physical goods are produced, bought and sold at a profit, plebes are paid salaries from a fraction of the proceeds, etc.
asciilifeform: and dispense with the elaborate spreadsheet charade.
asciilifeform: what I suspect is that at some point there will be a shift to a rather different, more Latin American social order, where the nobles are simply given bank cards with $ PosInfinity balance
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yes, they're just hungry and stupid.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yes, but ultimately why.
asciilifeform: So I won't be surprised when at some point the charade ends and the tinted window fellows will be handed actual titles of nobility.
asciilifeform: when considering the purpose of the fake money printing, I can think of two distinct goals: (1) keep the spreadsheets from failing checksum (prop up the charade of an American "economy") and (2) keep the hookers, cocaine, jets, etc. flowing to the "nobility" despite their total economic/social irrelevance.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re: 1820: agrarian America, most people did not depend on a working economy as such for physical survival. no comparison.
asciilifeform: I predict that American hyperinflation will lead to counter-intuitively slow rises in the price of gold and BTC. From the fact that large gold/BTC holders stuck in America will be selling off their stashes to buy basic necessities.
asciilifeform: jurov: yes, but that's the barometer to watch.
asciilifeform: jurov: when the U.S. dollar price of your lunch equals today's price of a used car.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: just the fact that the fake money will eventually circulate. and the consequences, etc.
asciilifeform: hence his "red pill" analogy. you need to be someone whose programming is already hickupping to benefit from the pill.
asciilifeform: nowhere on this planet are the unprogrammed to be found en masse.
asciilifeform: benkay: moldbug doesn't work on the masses. and he never intended to. his "red pill" is for the intellectually-curious/adventurous, by his own admission.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: do you intend to offer it for sale?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you are already developing exactly this, in-house? or intend to?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: one problem: AFAIK you're the only prospective buyer. interested? what would your specific requirements be?
asciilifeform: dub: if you can break the BTC crypto, don't settle for small change, go pwn the world
asciilifeform: I have an FPGA board right here on my desk, with a completely verifiable TCP/IP stack
asciilifeform: dub: no card. just the transformer and plug
asciilifeform: dub: PC software is running in a hostile environment. half a dozen of peripherals with firmware of unknown provenance. a multitasking OS with decades of cruft. etc
asciilifeform: all I'm doing in this thought experiment is applying the traditional principles of serious weapons system design to BTC.
asciilifeform: if performance isn't critical, they mix just fine
asciilifeform: the idea would be to have an implementation of BTC which could be understood in its physical entirety.
asciilifeform: supplied in sealed boxes, with manufacture dates predating the design of the hypothetical system.
asciilifeform: preferably RAID-5 with drives from different manufacturers
asciilifeform: 1tb is chump change if you attach mechanical storage.
asciilifeform: the client would choose the fpga and the board, and could even physically supply it
asciilifeform: the product I envision would be a single-purpose device which runs the block chain and only the block chain. the FPGA code implementing the instruction set, firmware, etc. would form a complete description of the system.
asciilifeform: there are numerous available FPGAs which have a programming interface which is not accessible from the routing fabric (i.e. separate pins.)
asciilifeform: the objective would be: serious security.
asciilifeform: and so, one can use any of a thousand commercial fpga dev boards
asciilifeform: the only peripheral needed is an ethernet controller
asciilifeform: I'm thinking of a node (not a miner, note) written for a custom architecture, running on an fpga (of the client's choice)
asciilifeform: that is to say, a box that implements a full node, from scratch, with no unix/c/c++/code written by anyone in the past on it. with complete docs under NDA.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: unrelated thought: do you suppose there could be a market for a hardware implementation of Bitcoin?
asciilifeform: pgp: just run a node that demands to be paid X satoshi before it relays transactions <=Y satoshi.
