Tag: Scrip
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Reciprocal realism
Now that QT is nearly done collapsing the Bitcoin bubble, there’s much less material for snark. One thing still holds true: Polistra’s Reciprocal Realism Rule. Realism(bitcoin) = 1 / Realism(world) Writers who see the world in stark clarity fall for bitcoin, or shill for bitcoin. Writers who see bitcoin clearly are lunatics on all other…
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Checking the source 3
Several months ago I read most of the bitcoin C++ code. I wasn’t trying to suss out the plot, just reading for dialect and stage directions. Those are thoroughly familiar, so the author must have picked up programming the same way I did, by absorption and experience, not by Computer Science training. Now, motivated by…
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Catching onto the magsman
Liron Shapira is puzzled by Balaji, the top galaxybrain bully. Balaji isn’t a mystery, he’s a classic conman type. I’ve mentioned him in two different references. Now that I look at both together, I realize they’re both British and both from the same decade. (1) Definition from the 1874 dictionary of British slang: Magsman, a…
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Why 1907 needed scrip
Enid Buzz posted this ad from an Enid clothing store in 1907. On account of scarcity of currency reminds us that the Panic of 1907 was a huge but brief Innovative Disruption, sponsored by Innovative Disruptor Edison. Scrip was born in this depression, and resurrected in 1933 when FDR broke the banks to restore the…
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Bimetallism cubed
Screencap from an ad in one of the Reddit bitcoin zones: Finance is failing and DeFi can fix it. But not yet. Right now the tools for DeFi are not sufficient to allow devs to build secure apps etc. This is what happens when a cult of inexperienced THEORY MEMORIZERS are led around by galaxy-brain…
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Booms and busts
An essayist at Medium gives us 12 quotes from Beat Generation philosopher Alan Watts. I read the piece to see if his selection was the same as mine. Nope, it was disjunct. He remembered and treasured the stuff that I had tossed aside as mystical drivel. I read Watts when I was about 14, and…
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Flow chart
Just for fun, let’s try another multiple-choice bet. Assuming Elon is really done with the game, Twitter has two choices. (1) Keep the litigation going, or (2) charge Elon a billion dollars as per the contract. Take the money and run would be the only conceivable choice for humans, but I don’t know how demons…
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WTF is wrong with insurers, part 541679
I’ve been asking this question since ZIRP started in 2009. Insurers and pension funds are required to stick with dependable interest-bearing investments. When ZIRP started, anyone could see that insurers and pension funds would either collapse or force the banks to retract the terrible decision. But insurers didn’t lobby for changes in their restrictions, and…
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Model of the solution
MindMatters is worrying about hard-to-detect deepfakes in “scientific” research. As with replication, this is not a serious problem, and doesn’t affect real research. The real problem is tenure and federal funding. Quantity, not quality. The vast QUANTITY of low QUALITY papers is a direct result of tenure and grants. These papers don’t matter because real…
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WPA 4/5, post offices
My subscription to Academia.edu brings in interesting articles from obscure sources. This article lays out the concept of devotional conservation. When I model these Lost Places and Patient Things, I’m trying to counteract the modern chaos generators by giving new life to artifacts and viewpoints from saner times. In an era of millisecond-scale Github updates…
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More on central vs decentral
Continuing with the Sucker Filter of bitcoin. Another obviously fraudulent claim is privacy. Running all of your transactions through NSA is not the ideal way to preserve privacy. NSA is a SPY AGENCY which knows better than anyone else how to break cryptography and bust through software limitations. Even more obviously, the transactions themselves can…
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Olympic-quality swindle
Here’s a silly hypothesis. Bitcoin is a digital demon who specifically preys on realistic people. I’ve been observing in the last three years that most HARDASS realists, people who seem to grasp the overall picture of the world AS IT REALLY STANDS, are also selling Bitcoin. It’s a peculiar exception. Why should firm and consistent…
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Endless Bitcoin point-missing
Greenwald has a long interview with a bitcoin activist. At least for the purposes of argument, Greenwald is taking the objective devil’s advocate side. As an experienced lawyer, he knows how to do this. The anonymous (clearly German) bitcoiner brings up all the usual stupid arguments about decentralizing and freedom from authority. Greenwald does an…
Polistra's Mill 