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This is precisely one of the things that scare me, and that I commented about on another post yesterday.
The problem is that there is no retroactive solution for this, which means a lot of people will have problems.
Digital hygiene is quickly becoming something we have to plan to teach children sooner than later.
Part of me would really like to ask you the explicit things I am not understanding, but I don't have time for this (please, take it as a hint to make a sardonic comment on my chronic lack of time to learn which is also connected with my 13 years of absolute sin you seem to be incredibly interested in).
Lower your expectations, not lower them, be disturbed, not be disturbed, do whatever you want and have a good life.
Explaining the joke is not ideal but I think with you now it's necessary: I have no shovel to dig a hole sufficiently profound to adapt my expectations on you based on the whole conversation we had.
If you are still disturbed, try a cup of tea.
OK, you managed to completely shatter my expectations beyond reason. I applaud you because you have been able to consistently act like a disturbed teenager who read one poems from Baudelaire's "Les fleurs du mal" and keeps citing it even when random people ask him the time.
Not one single time you said something of value, and you concluded with being disturbed by my lack of understanding of a thing you (very poorly) made up and called natural law. I tried to give you constructive feedback for bettering your definition, and you completely ignored it because you were too disturbed by my lack of understanding. This would be hilarious if I did not spend too much time in this conversation, and if you were someone different from the internet stranger who wrote some very useful and knowledgeable guides.
Well, it seems I found yet another broken clock...
So long.
I'm starting to think you're what young people call a troll, and I admit I'm not update on how to deal with this type of internet characters.
To my objection regarding how what you call "natural law" is nothing but a label you put on a subjectively chosen set of reasonable predicaments, and that this set of predicaments is too simple to be actually used in the current state of deployment of the society of human beings, your main reply is:
LOL is not "my law". Is an universal law.
And you need to review your beliefs. Seems that you still live in the state cage.
I don't know the type of arguments you're accustomed to have (online or in real life), but your replies do not offer anything at all.
Let me try to see if I can convince you of how poorly stated and thought is your idea of "natural/universal law". Given our past interactions, I already infer you're going to completely misinterpret whatever I say, pick some decontextualized fragment, and comment about it with a sarcastic and juvenile sequence of almost non-informative words, perhaps with a pinch of meme. However, if there's even one chance out of 10 trillion that you may finally agree to have a meaningful debate, than I root for that solitary chance.
In your very own essay, you write:
Let's start with the simple definition of Natural Law
and then proceed to list the reasonable predicaments I keep referring to.
That's it. That's enough for you to define a natural/universal law.
In no other place you comment about where is this law coming from. Did you come up with it? Did the law already appear somewhere/somewhen else? I assume you think it's some kind of Cartesian truth we human share, but you are not explicit, so who knows? That's already quite disappointing for something introducing a natural/universal law.
Then, what is so natural about this law? And what do you mean by natural? Since your predicaments only talk about man and Honour, for sure this natural law is not natural for anything else beside men who know Honour. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things in nature that are not men knowing honour. This makes the "natural" part of the law quite weak.
Let's pass to the "universal" qualifier. If it's universal it applies to everything, which we already saw it's not true. So universal in which sense? The readers of your essay can not know. If they find this conversation, at best, they can get a LOL, but I doubt this counts as an explanation.
After such a weak introduction of what seems to be the most important foundation of all your essay, you start saying a lot of things (some agreeable, some understandable, some delirious) which I don't comment upon because that's already too much, and because there's no sense in commenting the fruits of shaky foundations.
Having said that, I'm happy to review my beliefs if there are substantial arguments. In the meantime, I ask you to go back to the various questions I posed you, and try to honestly answer at least one in detail. Let's make all this not a complete waste of our time just to fulfill the atavic need for confrontation humans seem to have also digitally.
The Star Wars reference? That I liked and found it well applied (only when looking at things from your point of view, of course).
I don't get your way of interacting with people. You seem to believe that the only meaningful is combination of juvenile derision and redirection to your guides as if they were some kind of containers of absolute truths
I already read your article on natural law, and that's why I commented as I did. Unfortunately, nothing of what you write there replies to my objections. Natural law is a label you created for a set of reasonable predicaments, nothing more. Society is more complex than what your law seems to imply, and there's no practical way to solve even the simple (schooling) example I mentioned without leaving natural law for whatever national obligation you have.
A more appropriate way of replying to my comment to the post would have been: if only you could read my guides, I talk about these issues and how to prevent them. This would have been an informative reply, that also makes clear the limits of your guides with respect to the situation I mentioned.
Anyway, it was (not really) fun while it lasted.
I genuinely didn't think our interaction would have been so sterile.
I also hoped it would have stayed more on point with the themes in the post, and not derail on personal things and vague philosophically inspired slogans.
Anyway, I'll bite. What you call natural law is just your personal selection of important things. There is no natural law because all laws are formalized and expressed by humans inferring abstract structures from a small dataset of realized instances. The fact that your selection does not appeal to things like society, governments, and so on doesn't make it "more fundamental".
Moreover, you need consensus for a law to become so, and I fail to see how to implement consensus for your natural law in the current organisation of things. Try to put children in school (or any other thing, actually) only appealing to natural law, and if you succeed, you're a hero. Please, do not focus on this emblematic example trying to rebut it with things like "there's no need for school" and something similar, try to understand the enormous plethora of situations my specific example is only one instance of, and try to rebut the whole structure.
By the way, really believing that there is only one thing most important than everything else for everyone else is very akin to religious fanatism, and I'm interested in your opinion on this parallel
I don't think I understand your point.
Are you claiming that having different interests and priorities during 13 years of your life is either impossible or a type of original sin?
There are other things you can be more interested in even knowing BTC. But, just to be more precise, I learned about BTC because of the mathematical aspects there were in it, which were interesting, but definitely less interesting than the mathematics I was exposed to 13 years ago. Since I knew about BTC because of math, and since the sovereign angle was not immediately clear/powerful as it would have been years later, I simply did not pay attention to it. From there, I basically lost contact with the BTC world because I was not in cryptography mailing lists, I was not on socials or other digital places where BTC was discussed, and my physical social circle was made by people who would start a computer screaming very loud at it intimating it to start. In 2020 I had personal situations that really prevented me to have 1h per day of "free time" that I could spend actively focused and functioning to learn BTC, and to some extent this is still something ongoing today. To be clear, wanting to reply to your judgmental assumptions about my choices is costing me time that I'll have to take off from something else later (but I'm not complaining, I'm just explaining).
Believe it or not, having 1h per day of free time in which you are focused and energetic enough to understand BTC is not something a lot of people can have.
On the other hand, let's play your game. Let's say that I indeed am a total and utter failure who knew better but willingly decided not to learn because of whatever ignominious reason. What about those who learned about BTC 3 years ago and acted as I acted? How is your original comment useful to them?
Please, understand that I am in no way trying to attack you (even if I have the feeling you tried to attack me with your last replies). I am simply failing to understand how your comment and your guides are useful to my situation as your original comment seemed to imply they are.
If somebody do not have enough time to read and learn about Bitcoin, then I could say that the guy is wasting his entire life with crap things.
This is a very privileged take on other people's available time. Life's full of unpredictable things, and it is wise not to assume too much about other people's lives/possibilities/capabilities.
My guides are not the "ultimate guides", but are giving the right direction into where to look, are just like a door, no more no less. I am only opening you the door to the knowledge, I cannot make you step into it.
Yes, and I both really like them and am grateful to you for writing and updating them. However, I fail to see how your original comment address the issues I mentioned.
Let me start saying that, whenever time permits, I do read your guides, I do enjoy your guides (even though I do not agree with everything you say), I do appreciate deeply and strongly applaud your commitment to sharing your knowledge for free to help people understand BTC's universe, and I am sincerely thankful for the time you allocate for us in doing so.
Having said that, given the complexity of the argument, I have to admit your simplistic answer kind of misses the point.
Let me start with my situation first. Since I discovered your guides after I entered the KYC hyperspace and bought a cold wallet like I would order a pizza, I do not think I can go back in time retaining the knowledge I gained from your guides and apply it when I needed (or will need ??) it. Therefore, your guides can not make my life easier in this respect. If you are referring to your guides only for what I should do next owning the mistakes I already made and their consequences, I fear my paranoia can not feel better because of how the past influences the future.
Of course, if you have some guides explicitly explaining how to ameliorate past mistakes, then I take my hat off to you, I thank you again, and I'll try to find the time to read, understand, and digest them as soon as possible. However, if this were the case, for the sake of addressing the issues in the original post and my comment, it would have been better to add some details pointing to specific guides.
Then, let's pretend I did not make the mistakes I made, and let's pretend I found your guides at the right time. The most important bottleneck your simplistic comment is completely ignoring (perhaps willingly, who knows), is the issue of "available time". Most people live lives with very little time available to deeply study BTC and plan in advance. However, I would argue these people still ideally deserve the benefits of BTC (you may not agree with this because you think a sort of proof of work is needed to "deserve" these benefits, in which case, my arguments are completely vacuous). In this case, having the time to understand and fully implement a non-KYC DCA strategy is basically impossible (I would be glad to be proven wrong, though), or, at best, not something that is for everyone.
From this, it is clear that common people are either driven to KYC solutions, or to abandon BTC (both non-ideal outcomes). Then, all the consequences of the 5-dollar-wrench-attack for them can not be ignored, and can not be mitigated by simply reading your guides.
This is actually something that bothers me a lot. I recently got seriously interested in "entering BTC" while my daily life is overwhelmed by little, marvelous, pestiferous humans, and a work life seasoned with ever increasing flamboyant stress.
Consequently, I did not act at best of my capacities. I subscribed to a KYC exchange and bought a cold wallet using my personal name/address/card. Then, I connected the dots with the xkcd's 5 dollar wrench strip, and paranoia was free to grow inside me, with all these stories as particularly efficient nutrients.
Quite interestingly, avoiding KYC and tax reports while saving/using BTC where I live is extremely difficult, and becomes every month worse, so that I honestly still don't know how I would have had to act if I had the chance to start from scratch (except buying the cold wallet using Amazon gift cards and send it to a post office).
Moreover, this situation led me to think that using passphrase is potentially dangerous because, even if you finally give up and are ready to give everything to the attackers, if they know you're using a passphrase, you'll never be able to convince them you have nothing left, thus making your situation quite uncomfortable.
I believe this phenomenon will either die on its own because it "loses appeal" to the bad guys (only once a non trivial number of such episodes realized, unfortunately), or it creates a new behavioural paradigm for the vast majority of BTC (and other cryptos/DeFi) users that is very likely leave everything on even more centralised and controlled exchanges offering a sort of "customer protection" more in line with traditional finance. Either way, a little bit of a shit show is unavoidable, I fear.
Luckily (??) for me, I can only save very little given how respected is academia nowadays, and how expensive things grow everyday because of our well-thought monetary/economical/financial system, so I hope bad guys do their own due diligence and simply opt to buy a lottery ticket instead because it's going to have better success rate.
Sorry for the wall of text. I genuinely ignore why I needed to write so much right now.
I'll try to find the will to find the time to exercise at least 30/45 minutes at least 3 times per week (like running or some simple training at home).
With little kids and work being ever so demanding, if I make it, I'll feel like the master of the inner fabric of spacetime.
Ah, I'll also try to finish a children's book I ought to have finished one year ago, and finally learn python by trying to implement some streamlit dashboards to feed my idiosincratyc needs to collect and look at data.
More realistically, if I manage not gaining about 20kg because of stress eating, forget how to read/write, and sell my soul and personal data to Google for Gemini to show me nicely formatted plots without any real connection to the data themselves, I'll call that a win.
Some weeks ago, I was setting up an old laptop with bitcoin core (in pruned mode because of disk space) to start learning-by-doing. After the initial set up, I created a sparrow wallet, I hit the wall of privacy/xpub sharing you mentioned, I got frustrated because I couldn't easily find a work around, and I turned off the laptop demoralised.
Then, I find your post, and @DarthCoin's reply, and I discovered block filters, so that I can happily start falling into a new rabbit hole.
Thaks Spidey ;-)
I resonate with essentially all you wrote.
Because of physical constraints (lack of space and frequent space relocation), I had to stop collecting physical books/comics/mangas/magazines well before ebooks (and tablets/smartphone on which to read them) were as good and as widespread as they are now. It has been dramatic for a long time. I loved (and still love) to physically manipulate written words and images, and I absolutely adore the quest for finding them in new libraries or old/weird/hidden second-hand markets.
However, with the passage of time and the advancement of technology, I started realizing that digital reading is more efficient, it is better adapted to my cataloguing/labelling/annotating brain, especially with the help of software like Zotero and Obsidian, and allows me to be as ruthless as I want when I read out of home because I do not have to select in advance what I'll be reading.
Obviously, if I had adequate surplus of space and purchasing power, I would definitely indulge myself in collecting a lot of books/comics/mangas/magazines, but making sure I also have digital copies (and multiple backups).
Finally, I am still wrapping my head on the webpages>e-books relation you mentioned. At first, I instinctively disagreed. Now, I think I get what you mean, and perhaps I have to say I actually agree. The fact that you could also get something like an e-book/webpage like:
is an even more evident support of your thesis. The real problem is that I do not know something like Zotero to save locally and organize websites (and automatically update entries).
I agree with what you say, and I thank you for indirectly leading me to discover Micah Warren's book on the game theoretic aspects of Bitcoin. I had planned other readings for the "Christmas Holidays" but now this is going to be n°1
I'm glad you liked it. May I ask what are the gems you are referring to? Also, do you have suggestions of further readings?
That's exactly the point! The vast majority of people do not care about privacy-related things, and the inference is that this attitude will make things way worse for privacy-conscious people interested in BTC.
P2P services are ok for some BTC users, but most of the privacy-conscious people who may be interested in BTC will not have the strength to manage two completely separated stashes of BTC.
I think constantly how to make them "the correct amount of paranoid". I made a lot of mistakes, and I will try to at least use them as a kind of real-life example of what can go wrong (assuming I'll be able to have an honest an reasonable relationship with them).
I also think that introduce them to the rudiments of programming and informatics could be beneficial because they could endogenously develop a curiosity about the issues and weaknesses of the current digital world we are immersed in.
On the other hand, I believe the most difficult obstacle will be peer pressure. I genuinely do not know what I would do if my kids would be in a position of being excluded because they don't have phones/social media. I know what I should do ideally, but the details and potential consequences I can not reasonably predict are too many.
Concerning moving, I get that it would help if an address is leaked, but it's obviously a non-solution to (what I believe is) the vast majority of people suffering from these data breaches since work/life flexibility is kind of a "luxury".