asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: does there in fact exist a 'free world' of non-kyctronic fiatola banking ?
asciilifeform: 'why would anyone' live on boiled cabbage, wear a striped pajama all year long ? maybe because in a prison ?
asciilifeform: 'failure to collect KYC paperwork for 34 customers, failure to report 9 customers to legal enforcement on suspicions of money laundering, and failure to further interrogate 20 customers, for which the declared wealth allegedly didn't match the transaction volumes.' << lol!
asciilifeform: ( suddenly you have, e.g., an intrinsically-safe (cut the field - cuts the reaction) betavoltaic reactor that fits in pocket, runs on ordinary KCl... )
asciilifeform: btw the 'beta decay can be arbitrarily sped up in magnetic field' throws a bit of new light on just how 'strange, new' a world with roomtemp supercon would be.
asciilifeform: ( if 1890s folx had given up on airplane, same way today's grant-eaters gave up on, e.g., room-temp superconductor, could have gone quite differently )
asciilifeform: it is not even clear which these are, except in retrospect.
asciilifeform: today - 'trb-i', ciphers of known strength, a few others.
asciilifeform: ( where, e.g. in 1890s they were flight, radio, few other lessers )
asciilifeform: we had, iirc, a 'problems of the age' thread
asciilifeform: ( and if only alphabet. there is a quite serious qualification to meaningfully starting to learn from the l0gz, yes )
asciilifeform: you start with alphabet. which i dun recall being taught here, either
asciilifeform: can learn , e.g., galois theory, from the l0gz ?
asciilifeform: thread wasn't about 'which one gets into valhalla, maxwell or marconi', however. i specifically assert that n00bs ~learning~ from the thief -- whose achievement is essentially accidental, quite destructive overall to everybody else, and at any rate in no sense ~replicable~ -- vs from the maxwell - is the problem.
asciilifeform: woz drew up a 6502 box with slightly reduced glue logic chip count, vs the state of art at the time. about same level of accomplishment as, e.g., fuckgoats.
asciilifeform: and to hear the inmates, in every asylum - 100 napoleons
asciilifeform: wozniak wasn't an originator of anything serious
asciilifeform: i thought thread was re: the age of the great pirates.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: there was not a tmsr in '09. bitcoin was quite equivalent, by afaik any possible litmus, to similar crackpotteries which were known then.
asciilifeform: hanbot: at one point i tried to unearth what rotinculos (other than a portmanteau, presumably, rotten arse) were , and gave up
asciilifeform: in mircea_popescu's conception, only a thief is 'a man' ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and the answer can be 'i was in the laboratory, creating the things that the scum later stole'
asciilifeform: the microshit thing was a civilization-scale disaster, and it continues.
asciilifeform: incidentally, putting up framed pictures of lottery winners, praying at their feet, etc. does nothing per se, is harmless. it is when n00bs begin to try to 'learn' from them, there comes problem.
asciilifeform: 'was scum, but he grabbed the brass ring, where were you' gives you cockroach world.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: recall naggum's (and then -- our) discussion re how computing was wrecked not so much by microshit per se (which in 1980s was not a mega-power) but by the idiot worship of gates and his lottery winner 'success' ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: a man can be a navigator. a piece of dead wood -- is, whatever else it is, not a navigator. i did not think this would be controversial.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: pretty sure d00d transitioned to 'model airplane' mode, and has no intention of 'remembered'
asciilifeform: mno. if a broken oak trunk made its way from europe to 'new world' pre columbus, it does not follow that oak is great navigator.
asciilifeform: likewise i suspect that mircea_popescu's (or, say, mark twain's) positive view of 'good con men' is also 'fata morgana', mirage, con men is not necessarily a 'force of will' ubermensch, he is every bit a creature of the times and the opportunity, the rat crevice in which he finds himself, as is any clinton.
asciilifeform: fundamentally just another sort of pirate40.
asciilifeform: on other hand, early bitcoin did not exactly attract 'cream of mankind'
asciilifeform: they were willing participants in pyramids, it seems clear to me
asciilifeform: this is why, when reading about the early (1st 3 or so yrs) bitcoin landscape, i found it hard to feel any sympathy for the scamola victims
asciilifeform: with 0 demand of proof of whatever kind.
asciilifeform: the quoted text is hilarious per se : if i say 'invest in this High Thrust antigrav engine, with Extremely Low Energy Cost energy intake' -- everyone will laugh. but if mr.suavetalker offers a 'High Yield Pass Through ... in the EXTREMELY LOW RISK group' financial instrument, greedy idiots jump over one another to buy,buy
asciilifeform: does scenario where the coins end up permanently parked in graveyard orbit because the operators refuse to move'em count as 'safety' to Framedragger ?!
asciilifeform: Framedragger: describe for me, how this works
asciilifeform: Framedragger: there is a very basic fallacy at the root of 'multisig thinking', that somehow you can cut up control over a key and give the pieces to a group, which somehow can 'keep the owner honest' but not (why not?) fuck him
asciilifeform: there are no sane robotic solutions to this kind of thing.
asciilifeform: ~having~ this device around, is a quite expensive proposition.
