asciilifeform: topace: ATMs encased in concrete (as bulletproof as it gets) are routinely stolen, using bulldozers. it might help for your cage to be several floors above ground.
asciilifeform: an iris scanner is only useful if there is a man with a rifle standing next to it. otherwise the enemy can rip it off the wall and replace it with a doctored one, for replay attack.
asciilifeform: seems like most ebay users insist on electronic payment
asciilifeform: ebay is a de-facto monopoly, so an altcoin which one can use on ebay (via paypal) will have a serious advantage.
asciilifeform: paypal wants to live. so it will set itself up as a very odd sort of bitcoin exchange, where you have to buy into their scrip to play.
asciilifeform: my prediction: PayPal will take 'paypalcoin' as deposits/withdrawals, and it will pre-mine the first million or so. they will say "take it or leave it," and plenty will take it.
asciilifeform: MJR_: you can profit from an altchain without controlling it (in the sense that Warcraft gold is controlled) - simply through pre-mining.
asciilifeform: the paypal thing makes me wonder: what happens when someone with serious meatspace pull starts an altchain?
asciilifeform: "IF twitter(whitehouse exploded) THEN short" is as easy to write as "IF twitter(whitehouse exploded) THEN dump"
asciilifeform: Bugpowder: the correction was probably algo-driven as well, considering the speed.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: maybe this time, but not the next.
asciilifeform: the crash happened within seconds, not hours
asciilifeform: evidently a bunch of algo traders' idiot code does indeed care.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: "we've been hacked" = "somebody on the staff knew exactly when to short a bunch of stocks."
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if by "use" you mean "try to force others to use at gunpoint", then perhaps.
asciilifeform: I'm especially amused at the altcoin authors who add demurrage/inflation. Because clearly, everybody loves money that rots away.
asciilifeform: not that it is physically impossible to steal Bitcoin's Schelling Point status, but you would have to actually add something astonishingly interesting, vs. merely swapping out the genesis block and finding a catchy name.
asciilifeform: altcoins are a mechanism for siphoning value from chumps, strictly of the volunteer variety. Sort of like SDICE.
asciilifeform: truffles: you can use all the altcoin you want, and nobody will hate you. just as nobody hates that guy who sawed off his arms with a chainsaw in a hardware store.
asciilifeform: Scrat: wait till he puts up an exchange and 'feathercoin' starts having a positive cash value... 'a sucker's born every minute, and two to take him,' etc.
asciilifeform: firemen. banks do occasionally burn. esp. if they need to.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: from the standpoint of an owner or other person with unhindered physical access, a bank is exactly the same as a video store.
asciilifeform: my point wasn't that this kind of scenario will become routine, but that it is unwise to tell people without a need-to-know exactly where your coldwallet physically lives.
asciilifeform: in any system, find the real weak point. anyone who can access the vault during off-hours and pause the camera recorder, can pick the locks at his leisure.
asciilifeform: they had door-to-door house searches in Boston last week, without any messy paperwork.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I didn't say it had already happened.
asciilifeform: depends. perhaps your envelope will smell especially strongly. (squirt bottle.)
asciilifeform: however it is the police (or hypothetical Gold Confiscators (TM) ) get in
asciilifeform: your hosting provider and bank manager might be saints, or they might not be.
asciilifeform: re: the defunct EC2 wallet: I'd advise anyone against telling his web host that he is hosting a wallet on the latter's disks. Or, for that matter, letting it be known that a certain bank deposit box has paper coldwallets in it.
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: people with old-fashioned money and connections bought in. This much is clear as daylight at this point.
asciilifeform: I don't really keep up with btcdrama in real time
asciilifeform: fiat banks won't surrender to the idea of moving $1 across the ocean costing $0. They want it to cost ~$50 (in pure profit for the parasites,) as it does now.
asciilifeform: fiat banks declaring total war on BTC was only a matter of time. seriously, it isn't like nobody saw it coming.
asciilifeform: how about btc-e? is there something evil about it?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I am interested in the question of virile fucktopias because I am interested in "the science of the possible." that is, "the is" vs. the idiot "the ought" that most scholarship tends to be about.
asciilifeform: reminds me of a tale where Chinese peasants, shortly after the red victory, calmed down upon hearing that the Emperor has returned.
asciilifeform: but I still think the abstraction is a useful one.
asciilifeform: the scholar profession (vs scholarship per se) is really just embroidery on the fabric of society, like the palace mural-painting profession.
asciilifeform: this subtle structure would appear to be hidden from king and slave alike.
asciilifeform: did you know that only the men with top marks in flight school were initially accepted into the Tokkotai (Kamikaze corps) ?
asciilifeform: but if she sucks with art and enthusiasm, perhaps that's all the proof one could hope for. Think Kamikazes instead of Chinese imperial auto-beheaders.
asciilifeform: well it matters, of course, if the front rank is a thousand blue blood knights, or three bums you've collected from a boozing den.
asciilifeform: but yes, if you can successfully order the front ranks to self-behead, you've probably got the Mandate of Heaven.
asciilifeform: Seppuku is a bad example: the men ordered to do so generally faced the alternative of being beheaded like commoners (not to be confused with voluntary seppuku.)
asciilifeform: you have a point in that analysis is vulgarizing. hence "the spartan speaks with his sword."
asciilifeform: yes, but you do it for jollies/education-of-the-masses-by-the-cock, not because you feel that you have to.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the ancients were a different kind of animal from us. they had notions of aristocracy/future-oriented behavour. vs. the tinted window crowd, for whom "I plug the other guy -> get double the gold" is the order of the day.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: point. but I'm not certain it would scale.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: stable shared thrones is probably why Red China outlasted the USSR. but China is a bureaucratic clusterfuck rather than the virile fucktopia you envision.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: let's re-phrase the question a bit: who would you personally be content to share your throne with?
asciilifeform: the public (for some value of public) is who eventually swings the swords. and they would rather duke it out, with one guy coming out on top, rather than pressuring Pompey to be chums with Caesar.
asciilifeform: the crowd is irrelevant, except that it does seem to have a tendency to throw its support behind one guy.
asciilifeform: you don't plug your fellow top dogs for the wormy multitudes. you plug them so they don't - you. because there are only so many palaces/harems/etc. to go around.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you seem to think that the power game has one level (sexual/personal charisma.) But it really has two: the charismatic men rise to the top, and the winner ends up being the fellow who is quicker on the draw.
asciilifeform: note that Stalin couldn't even ride a horse (Zhukov rode in the victory parade in his stead.)
asciilifeform: yes, but he pissed him off by being the successful square-jaw in the nightclub.
asciilifeform: but in what sense is it true, if you plugged the four other contenders before it found you.
asciilifeform: yes, the throne finds you. everybody seems to say this.
asciilifeform: consider Gen. Zhukov. Too popular, more or less un-purgeable. He had to be slowly demoted, transferred to the outskirts of the empire, finessed into oblivion. Or he would have gone for the throne, for sure.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and what, you would let the successful generals live? so they can take your throne?
