asciilifeform: the paypal thing makes me wonder: what happens when someone with serious meatspace pull starts an altchain?

asciilifeform: MJR_: you can profit from an altchain without controlling it (in the sense that Warcraft gold is controlled) - simply through pre-mining.

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_: free money

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: ebay is a de-facto monopoly, so an altcoin which one can use on ebay (via paypal) will have a serious advantage.

asciilifeform: seems like most ebay users insist on electronic payment

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: 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: at any rate, it is much cheaper to have the owner of the servers "voluntarily" open the door. Let's say, with one of these: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_collarbomb/ around his neck.

asciilifeform: topace: do you - personally - live, eat, work, etc. behind 8 feet of concrete? if not, the above link is relevant.

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: 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: 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: 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: or partner with someone you can trust, who is.

asciilifeform: KRS-1: you know what routinely gets in (and out)? Replacement switches, routers, cables. That come from hell knows where.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: some people like fire.

asciilifeform: KRS-1: this is why Blackwater (or Craft International) or who knows where else.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: mercenaries work for the highest bidder. at the moment, the fellows with the tinted windows are the highest bidder.

asciilifeform: The U.S. money printer can buy you all the coke you could dream of.

asciilifeform: I imagine that working for Blackwater is less like being a normal whore and more like being the king's expensive mistress.

asciilifeform: At least, if you're somewhere above the bottom foot-soldier level.

asciilifeform: ThickAsThieves: Chris Kyle, etc

asciilifeform: it happens

asciilifeform: $xxxx for ASIC; enjoying the same BTC yield as a cheap GPU today when every other chump has bought an ASIC: priceless.

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: topace: you will need a reflow oven, though. (make your own.)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: no, shortage of Jolt Cola

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: AFAIK no, hence the shortage.

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: "The miser pays twice."

asciilifeform: oldie but goodie: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/01/31/stone-soup-for-the-capitalists-soul/

asciilifeform: "You are fair game for hustlers who understand your wealth better than you do."

asciilifeform: "fool and his money soon parted", etc

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: seongyupyoo: using the word "destroy" when the BTC ends up in your pocket is disingenuous

asciilifeform: why not use actual destruction (send to a blackhole address) ?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this just shifts the moral hazard to the SDICE people.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: now if I run SDICE, I have the incentive to siphon BTC by triggering "destruciton."

asciilifeform: *destruction

asciilifeform: yes. free money is free money.

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: 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: mircea_popescu: it isn't disposal if you give it to a third party.

asciilifeform: see this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

asciilifeform: fines have to go to /dev/null to be truly fair

asciilifeform: funny that, I'm an ethnic atheist. but I do see the spice and humour in "trial by combat."

asciilifeform: seongyupyoo: /dev/null is a perfectly disinterested third party who will never do you ill.

asciilifeform: other thing is that a scheme like this has to rely on an open/verifiable crypto-contract protocol, rather than some guy's phone app

asciilifeform: seongyupyoo: what's the advantage of your scheme vs. Shitcoin, in your view?

asciilifeform: Shitcoin: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=988

asciilifeform: Shitcoin was my own modest proposal for MAD/Nash equilibrium reputation management/bonds

asciilifeform: I wrote that before I was told of mpex (and before I was really 100% clear on how the BTC protocol works.)

asciilifeform: sure you can. bitbet does all the time (send it back.)

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: clean coins can be thought of as "eating sardines"

asciilifeform: the best part is that shitcoin can't do anything whatsoever to you if you don't use it.

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: you have to destroy coins for real (that is, threaten to) to punish without creating perverse incentive for the party triggering the punishment.

asciilifeform: The proposal to test welfare recipients for drugs reminds me of:

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: poor, or the fact that one is happy."

asciilifeform: (http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/08/miserable-pursuits.html)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: burning man is full of "marie antoinette poor", not actual poor.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the difference matters.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nobody would bother testing the poor for drugs if they didn't need to work.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: Aristotle's natural slaves?

asciilifeform: (re: slaves: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html)

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: AFAIK testing mcdonalds cooks isn't mandatory (vs. truck drivers etc)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: altman is an infamous social butterfly / master investor milker. most of his success is from being chums with paul graham.

asciilifeform: the urban poor are a tremendous profit making engine for various industries (e.g. pharma: http://partialobjects.com/2011/06/staggering-thought-of-the-day/) into which oceans of money are funneled through them.

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: you can make the horse drink. but sometimes the horse is Munchausen's horse: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/forgottenfutures/munch/cruik4.gif

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: they're in school to figure out hierarchy/obedience.

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: times table and lashes plus a real person = educated, functional; times table and lashes plus a meat pupper: expert at dodging punishment.

asciilifeform: *puppet

asciilifeform: "with an ugh and a groan and a click of the heels, death comes quiet or it comes with squeals..."

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: "The world's best magician cannot pull a rabbit out of a hat unless he is already in the hat."

asciilifeform: time to call it what it is: obedience training. like the dog kind.

asciilifeform: MJR_ the solution is pictograms. or ditch the clerk and install robots.

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: 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: mircea_popescu: the "people who must be told how to live"

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: most researchers are meat puppets (with good calculating and recall ability)

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: I'm more of a "reich der zwei" sort of guy

asciilifeform: sort of how cats spend most of their time sitting around. efficient predators.

asciilifeform: rms above is a bad example. he has a "mad hermit" image (external and internal, as well) to maintain.

asciilifeform: his unbathed carcass and rags are as important as an actress's manicure.

asciilifeform: even if he's a natural.

asciilifeform: more like "prospiracy" (things that happen a certain way, because it actually makes sense, but having the appearance of purpose.)