60 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 11h \ on: Stacker Sports- NBA Round 3 Pick 'em Stacker_Sports
Celtics in 5
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215 points
I think @nemo was in a place with clear and present danger that might stem from having it known that you own btc, so I can at least understand how that would influence your attitude. But we're in the States, where that's not true; and there's a more foundational dissonance: either btc is for real, in which case everybody will own it and use it and all this secrecy is stupid, it would be like keeping the "secret" that you eat food and drink water; or else btc is a farce, in which case the problem will shortly take care of itself.
How do you think about the opsec part of it? I really struggle with this aspect. It would be nice, in so many ways, to bring some of real life to btc stuff. But then we have people taking such great care to not reveal a single detail about themselves, going so far as to delete every utterance, no matter how trivial.
Both parts of the spectrum make sense at different times, but I'd be curious to hear about your journey on this one.
If it's any comfort, that seems the much more likely growth path, given the frictions involved. Which means that people around now, and the culture unfolding now, will likely be way more consequential than it would be in other places.
Which is both something to celebrate and something to fear. Massive leverage on SN to Be The Change.
We've discussed the danger of the current development model, and reliance on centralized hubs, a few times. I think this is both necessary and inevitable for most projects in the btc ecosystem:
With the US government seizure of the Samourai server came the shutdown of their Gitlab instance, previously hosted on code.samourai.io. We utilized their self-hosted repository which made it easy for us to maintain our fork of their node software stack, Dojo. Thus the seizure put an immediate halt to our operations and development, to include the Beta testing for v2.2.0.
We are currently moving to our own self-hosted instance that will be available via tor browser. To clarify: we cannot rely on middle-men such as a domain registrar to protect us from any government procedural overreach. With this preemptive switch to give access only with onion URL's, we can be sure that we serve our code for as long as we are in control of our own servers.
I generally believe in not pre-solving most problems bc most of the time you don't understand the nature of the problem till you have it, and solving it in advance amounts to wasted time. Wrt this one, I think it would probably be worth pre-solving it for things like core development; but there seems no appetite for doing so. We'll see how it works out.
Worth keeping in mind that HN has probably two orders of magnitude more users than SN does, and it's hard to know what SN would look like, or operate like, under those conditions. Hope to find out eventually, tho :)
Related: I've been on HN for a decade or more, and I literally couldn't name a single other user. Very different feel from here, different paradigm of interaction. One of the most interesting things to me is exploring these differences.
This is so interesting -- like watching organ differentiation in real-time.
I'm no political genius, but my sense is that anti-crypto positioning is almost the purest footgun situation that could be wished for: people who dislike crypto have it as number 46 on the list of things they hate about the world; and for people who like crypto, it's like the most important thing in their lives.
Given razor-thin margins of victory and widespread voter apathy, it dumbfounds me that someone would pick that hill to die on.
But the reason this doesn't resolve the tension is that it still relies on showing up and doing the work. And there just so happens to be far fewer individuals willing and capable of doing that than there are individuals who wish they had a say on the direction of their favorite software.
You can't solve that tension, only acknowledge it. I've dealt with it for literally twenty years with my work on Rails and a million other open source projects. There's an ever-latent instinct in a substantial subset of open source users who will continuously rear itself to question why it's the people who do the most work or deliver the most value or start the most projects that get to have the largest say.
This is great advice for life in general, esp for younger folks starting a career: in whatever industry you're in, the active doing-of-things and taking responsibility for them, whether they are 'officially' yours to be responsible for, will begin to lift you, little by little, in a compounding fashion. You became, over time, somebody whose opinion people value.
You do it, and then are considered to be worthy and capable of doing it, and then become formally empowered to do it. Not the reverse.
Summary: shilling a new quasi-stable shitcoin anchored in gold and other currencies; kind of like Facebook's failed Libra or whatever it was called.
Here is the underlying asset, called the Unit.
This seems like big news -- not so much bc Oklahoma is a powerhouse of btc industry, but as a precedent-setter, and a signal. Would be interested in savvier takes than mine, though.
52 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 15 May \ parent \ on: What Bitcoin Is And Why It Matters bitcoin
It's got something for every thoughtful person, I think. RR would be a cool dude to talk to I bet.
79 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 15 May \ parent \ on: What Bitcoin Is And Why It Matters bitcoin
Not literally, but the fact that RR ranges so broadly, and talks about whatever he wants, and brings a general economics mindset to whatever topic, so Econ Talk is less about economics than topic X informed by wide reading and great economic literacy.
If you replace "economic literacy" with "bitcoin" that's pretty close to the podcast I'd want to be capable of doing.
41 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury 15 May \ parent \ on: What Bitcoin Is And Why It Matters bitcoin
I wish RR would re-engage w/ btc. Seems like plenty of new angles to think about, and he's a really eclectic guy. Actually he seems like a good candidate to do the podcast that I want to do.
I think that's sort-of true, and is one implication of an exoself of sufficient breadth / magnitude that other people care about it, or that it even incorporates them in some fashion s.t. they become part of each other in important ways.
But there are also much "smaller" variants that are interesting to me. For instance, a friend of mine, the most talented hacker that I know, has turned his house into an extension of himself -- both how the place is designed, how it's decorated, and the million little hacky features where he's built to augment it. To go into his house is to enter a part of his Being. You're very aware of being present in the heart of a respirating meta-organism, part of it.
This guy is pretty amazing and stands a reasonable chance of being remembered in 100 years for other things, but this would still be a beautiful and impressive type of exoself even if that weren't true.
Possession of money by a man is definitely a correlate of attractiveness. It's not the only way to be attractive obviously, but it's pretty effective.
129 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 12 May \ parent \ on: Thoughts on the exoself mostly_harmless
I was hoping there might be an interesting double standard. Like, thoughts are sacred and their manifestations aren't.
There's an intriguing idea. Perhaps: the more obviously connected in origin to a human being, the more sacred? And the more connected to abstract hierarchies (e.g., a company) the more profane?
Although I can immediately think of examples that violate it.
I expect there's something to your idea, but it's super nuanced, just like Terry Regier's work showed the underlying sensibility of why prepositions work the way they do.
150 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 12 May \ parent \ on: Thoughts on the exoself mostly_harmless
The political boundaries for and against IP were the most surprising.
I wonder if it's because the default situation without IP, or at least, the mythology of it, is some lone inventor spends his life pursuing something and then dies a pauper, while others grow fat on the profits of that work.
To me, this one seems damn near impossible to even research with good intentions, since figuring out how to control for assorted factors would make natural experiments really hard to do. I expect people get the results they want to get.