asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I imagine you could buy a medallion and sell it the next day, if you wanted to
asciilifeform: benkay: the bureaucrats (in practice) own NYC, and charge whatever the hell they want for taxi licenses. a bar can charge for entrance. nothing wrong with that. what I'm unclear on is why the MP fee is a different kind of animal.
asciilifeform: benkay: riffraff interested in automated trading are more or less written out of the script. MP runs his own house how he likes, I'm fine with that. But why not call things by their real names.
asciilifeform: MP has said, in essence, that he doesn't want MPEx to become a Shanghai crawling with the equivalent of rickshaws.
asciilifeform: Were it not for medallions, NYC would probably look like Shanghai (rickshaws, etc.) I'm fine with that, but the rulers of the place evidently aren't
asciilifeform: IMHO taxi medallions are a fair comparison. They, just as the MPEx fee, exist to keep the riffraff out.
asciilifeform: benkay: may as well ask how the cost of a NYC taxi medallion relates to the cost of the bureaucrat's pen that signs the paperwork.
asciilifeform: jcpham: idea: rape the algo traders who read this by implementing a contrarian algo
asciilifeform: his unbathed carcass and rags are as important as an actress's manicure.
asciilifeform: rms above is a bad example. he has a "mad hermit" image (external and internal, as well) to maintain.
asciilifeform: sort of how cats spend most of their time sitting around. efficient predators.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I'm more of a "reich der zwei" sort of guy
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: most researchers are meat puppets (with good calculating and recall ability)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the "people who must be told how to live"
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: don't know about you, but I would prefer a system that is up-front about the goal of separating people from meatpuppets, rather than pretending to do a million other inconsequential things
asciilifeform: well yes, and at one point I ran cables. there needs to be an escape hatch, and the process is rather inefficient right now
asciilifeform: MJR_ the solution is pictograms. or ditch the clerk and install robots.
asciilifeform: time to call it what it is: obedience training. like the dog kind.
asciilifeform: "The world's best magician cannot pull a rabbit out of a hat unless he is already in the hat."
asciilifeform: "education" is a seriously abused word in application to the schooling of the masses. The root 'educe' being == 'to bring out.' There isn't usually much to bring out.
asciilifeform: "with an ugh and a groan and a click of the heels, death comes quiet or it comes with squeals..."
asciilifeform: times table and lashes plus a real person = educated, functional; times table and lashes plus a meat pupper: expert at dodging punishment.
asciilifeform: the kid is taught the times table to see if he is trainable. as witnessed by the fact that the times table continued to be taught, even in times and places where the people running the show don't give a damn whether anyone actually knows their times table.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: they're in school to figure out hierarchy/obedience.
asciilifeform: any system of organizing society (education, work, whatever) that doesn't include a hard mechanism for separating actual people from meat puppets is doomed.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: altman is an infamous social butterfly / master investor milker. most of his success is from being chums with paul graham.
asciilifeform: drug testing is a multibillion-dollar business in the U.S.; arguably it is the employers who are the chumps here (they are bamboozled into thinking that it matters whether the fry cook smokes dope.)
asciilifeform: poor, or the fact that one is happy."
asciilifeform: " It is a curious fact that in America public assistance is only made available to the miserable and the downtrodden, not to those who are in need of some free money but are otherwise perfectly content. Although it is just as possible to be poor and happy in America as anywhere else, here one must make a choice: to avoid any number of unpleasant situations, one must be careful to hide either the fact that one is
asciilifeform: The proposal to test welfare recipients for drugs reminds me of:
asciilifeform: you have to destroy coins for real (that is, threaten to) to punish without creating perverse incentive for the party triggering the punishment.
asciilifeform: you can simply carry on pretending it doesn't exist (of course, at present it doesn't exist at all, and isn't likely to)
asciilifeform: the best part is that shitcoin can't do anything whatsoever to you if you don't use it.
asciilifeform: clean coins can be thought of as "eating sardines"
asciilifeform: also, since you can have infinitely-many addresses, being sent shat-on coins doesn't hurt you (you will need to come up with clean ones to post a bond, but for other purposes dirty ones will do fine)
asciilifeform: sure you can. bitbet does all the time (send it back.)
asciilifeform: I wrote that before I was told of mpex (and before I was really 100% clear on how the BTC protocol works.)
asciilifeform: Shitcoin was my own modest proposal for MAD/Nash equilibrium reputation management/bonds
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it isn't disposal if you give it to a third party.
asciilifeform: you might as well suggest that banks should play in casinos to recoup bad debts. it is nonsense to use SDICE as part of any kind of rational system (other than a chump harvester, of course.)
asciilifeform: Shitcoin wins, because everything is 100% voluntary. You don't even see the burned coin as burned if you don't use it.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: now if I run SDICE, I have the incentive to siphon BTC by triggering "destruciton."
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this just shifts the moral hazard to the SDICE people.
asciilifeform: why not use actual destruction (send to a blackhole address) ?
asciilifeform: seongyupyoo: using the word "destroy" when the BTC ends up in your pocket is disingenuous
asciilifeform: NashX seems like a pretty good idea. It reminds me of my "Shitcoin" proposal (http://www.loper-os.org/?p=988). The real problem is that the "destruction" isn't real destruction - somebody ends up with the BTC. Moral hazard.
asciilifeform: "fool and his money soon parted", etc
asciilifeform: "You are fair game for hustlers who understand your wealth better than you do."
asciilifeform: Somehow, all the ASIC "shares" schemes remind me of American chumps buying refrigerators on installment plans, with the payments totalling to the cost of a car.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: AFAIK no, hence the shortage.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: no, shortage of Jolt Cola
asciilifeform: topace: you will need a reflow oven, though. (make your own.)
asciilifeform: topace: the only sane place to get FPGAs is eBay or the equivalent. $100, instead of paying $XX,XXX for the same chip, because of "intellectual property" crapola.
asciilifeform: $xxxx for ASIC; enjoying the same BTC yield as a cheap GPU today when every other chump has bought an ASIC: priceless.
asciilifeform: At least, if you're somewhere above the bottom foot-soldier level.
asciilifeform: I imagine that working for Blackwater is less like being a normal whore and more like being the king's expensive mistress.
asciilifeform: The U.S. money printer can buy you all the coke you could dream of.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mercenaries work for the highest bidder. at the moment, the fellows with the tinted windows are the highest bidder.
asciilifeform: KRS-1: this is why Blackwater (or Craft International) or who knows where else.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: some people like fire.
asciilifeform: KRS-1: you know what routinely gets in (and out)? Replacement switches, routers, cables. That come from hell knows where.
asciilifeform: or partner with someone you can trust, who is.
asciilifeform: the idea is, if you have personal cryptographic control over serious BTC, you need to be ready (and physically equipped) to fight to the death.
asciilifeform: I mention the collar because it is picturesque, and because it is a simple and elegant way to have a guy without a family to take hostage do something "voluntarily."
asciilifeform: my point, as always, is that Bitcoin users are, like it or not, playing the Big Game. and this game has rules very different from everyday "public" life, and it helps to be aware of them.
asciilifeform: mirce_popescu: the damn collar bomb was front page news worldwide some years ago. and before that, it featured in two separate SF films, before some bastard actually built some.
asciilifeform: topace: do you - personally - live, eat, work, etc. behind 8 feet of concrete? if not, the above link is relevant.
