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No because it's a I don't like how this is going so I'm going to burn a cross in your front yard kind of soft fork.
@justin_shocknet, is lightning.video working? I tried to create a new channel and paid a symbolic fee to see if it would work, but after the payment I got an error about "websocket" and the channel wasn't created.
I think that I tried to be too cute with this post and thus introduced too many distractions.[1]
So, I will try again in order to see if @Undisciplined can't put this wrong-headed explanation of mine to bed:
Imagine you had a nice stack of 2 bitcoins when the fork happened. You hate this fork, and you think forkcoins are going to zero, so you put in a sell order in for all of your 2 forkcoins. Nobody knows what the price of forkcoin should be in terms of bitcoin, but you really want to crash the market, so you decide to put your order in really low: you will sell each one of your fork coins for half a bitcoin.
Not only that but you also convince a couple of your friends to sell their forkcoins, too. They aren't quite as convicted as you, but they are all good bitcoiners, so each of them offers their forkcoins for bitcoins at a less than a 1 to 1 trade.
Here's a depth chart for the BTCFKC trading pair at an exchange. Forkcoin buy orders on the left in green. Forkcoin sell orders on right in red.
Look at that sell wall! This seems like it pretty obviously is going to crash the price of forkcoin.
But let's express this in terms of demand for bitcoin. If we reverse the trading pair from FKCBTC to BTCFKC so we can look at your dumping of forkcoin as your demand for bitcoin expressed in terms of forkcoin. Here is what your bids for bitcoin look like:
But this is mistaking a personal view for a view of the whole market. The whole market involves both sides of the order book.
Since we're interested in being reasonable, we'll assume the forkcoin supporters are just as convicted of the merits of forkcoin as you are of the merits of bitcoin. And we should also assume that they have the same amount of pre-fork bitcoin as you and your friends did, because otherwise we are just assuming that our side has more bitcoin which is another way of saying more people will want bitcoin than forkcoin.
If we assume the forkcoiners also have 5 bitcoins to sell and that they demand forkcoin no less than you demand bitcoin (all forkcoin sellers were willing to pay at least 1.43 forkcoins for 1 bitcoin), we must admit that these forkcoiners would also be willing to trade 1 of their bitcoins for 1.43 forkcoins.
Using the same assumptions for both sides of the fork, here is what both sides of this orderbook look like:
Things do not look so good for bitcoin.
If we're being reasonable, we cannot deny our opponents the same assumptions we are going to make for ourselves. To view the market as a whole, we have to view both sides with the same assumptions. Otherwise, it's just wishful thinking (I just know our side is going to win...)
When you combine these two separate views of the market with equal assumptions, it is *never the case that one side dumping their coins causes a drop in price...unless there is actually less demand for the coin being dumped.
So I still maintain that the only reason the price of a coin goes down is because there is less demand for the coin, and that therefore a person's choice to dump a coin does not mean the price will go down. It will only do so, if there is less demand.
It may feel like this is a distinction without a difference: but it's important, because if bitcoiners think that they don't need to do anything other than dump their forkcoins to defeat an opposing fork, they are wrong. There must be demand for the side of the fork they want to win. And we have to do the work to convince the world to demand bitcoin. If we think dumping forkcoin will be enough, we may find out we were wrong about which side was actually forkcoin.
[1]: From the OP, I'm most interested in this chart:
This chart is really surprising. It seems to suggest that Saylor tends to get his bitcoin at below market rates when the price of bitcoin is going up and he tends to get his bitcoin at above market rates when the price is going down. It's exactly the opposite of what I expected!
What do we make of this? It's possible I'm totally screwing up the data somewhere here or that there's a wrong assumption I'm making or at least that I'm over-indexing on the importance of this, and it's probably just a difference between OTC and exchange pricing -- but it's backwards of what you'd expect. I figured it would be more difficult to buy OTC when the market is hot and the bitcoin price is rising...yet that's the opposite of what I find.
But you'll notice that the above chart is not the same as the one I put in the OP. In the OP I flipped the y-axis to be sats/dollar like below. But then I made a mistake. I should also have reversed the below/above market labels, because now we are referring to dollar dumping.
Saylor tends to dump his dollars above market rates when the price of dollars is going down and tends to dump his dollars below market rates when the price of dollars is going up.
Another way to say this is that Saylor is able to get more for his dumped dollars when people want fewer dollars.
I spent more time than I should have trying to figure out why this trend should exist and I sure couldn't grok it.
Does it really improve privacy to always remove cookies after browser close?
Maybe, if you also reduce fingerprinting, and never log in anywhere. However, I've recently found some things that Brave nor Tor Browser (with js on) catch, such as the navigator js object properties, feature preferences and webgl-in-canvas rendering.
This means that the only way to be non-fingerprinted right now is to use Tor Browser with full security enabled (no javascript) and thus you shall have no web apps, and you will be happy.
In the spirit of @k00b's reply, I think the real question is:
Can I be a paid lightning protocol developer?
I have implemented part of the spec, I have contributed to the spec, so in some sense, I'm already a lightning protocol developer.
It's rather about convincing someone to pay me to continue doing what I've already done for free. I have time, so I'm giving it time. I've also only been doing it for free for a couple of weeks so far.
I think it would be a great honor to get paid to work on the lightning protocol. If the money comes through a grant, even though it's called a grant, I wouldn't take it for granted, haha
Someone will make Cheme and it will be awesome.
It's like Signal but every chat message is placed on a meme template or series of meme templates automatically.
We aren't getting it like you all are I'm sure, but people keep asking me how my prep is going. I'm on my last roll of toilet paper, my fridge is empty, and I have some sprouting sweet potatoes in my pantry.
So long as I'm reasonably certain I can walk somewhere with power/internet/heat/water, I shan't waver.
I wouldn't conflate belief and delusion like this. They are related only in that they are points of view without incontrovertible proof in their favor. Delusion is believing something that is incontrovertibly false.
Belief is an ingredient of delusion like flour is an ingredient of cake. But flour is not cake and cake is not flour.
I'm not delusional for believing I can be an opera singer. If I sing operas, even only in my lonesome, I am an opera singer. To be an opera singer only requires you do certain things. That's not belief or delusion. It is fact.
Maybe I want to be an accomplished opera singer though. Maybe I want to walk into a room and have beautiful women whisper to each other "he's that opera singer." Or maybe I want to get invited to sing at the best operas. Or whatever. If what I want is more than merely being a thing I can readily achieve in isolation, I should probably unpack that.
Believing that I can avoid defining what I want from life in detail and still get what I want from life in detail would be delusional.
While I do feel that a lot of higher profile people that get in trouble with the law over this are doing it on purpose though, because headlines, the imbalance is a serious issue. Especially since politicians are using this all the time against their critics.
The US solves this issue via the concept of "public vs private person".
Essentially being a "public person" means you largely give up your rights to slander / defamation since the concept is you willingly put yourself in the public sphere, thus there is a 'public ownership' portion of that...this mirrors in law the same idea that its not illegal to film someone on a public street.
Whereas a "private person" is one that still retains their ability to sue for slander / defamation.
The basic litmus test for public vs private is "making public statements", so that includes things like public speeches, writing articles, etc.
I know a very rich family who are very insistent on protecting their "private stature" as it relates to the law. Like even if they donate money to a charity and the charity wants to honor them by asking them to say a few words at their meeting, they refuse.
The problem is mostly the defamation laws. You still have broad freedom of speech protections but these become void if you address your savagery to another person/"identity".
So you could say "I think that rapists are disgusting pigs", but you cannot walk up to a rapist and call him a "disgusting pig". That would mean that a convicted rapist can sue you for defamation, and this gets taken seriously.
While I do feel that a lot of higher profile people that get in trouble with the law over this are doing it on purpose, because headlines, the imbalance is a serious issue. Especially since politicians are using this all the time against their critics.
As long as you politely resist, you'll be fine though lol.
I wouldn't conflate belief and delusion like this
Mhh, you are right! I made a big jump from belief to delusion here:
[...] their belief in some supernatural power on their side is what gives them power.
So essentially, I need to face that, apparently, I believe in the power of humans deluding themselves [...]
Here, I framed delusion as simply a stronger belief. As if believing something really hard necessarily makes it a delusion, where it doesn't matter anymore if there's incontrovertible proof against it. So yeah, you're right, it's not fair to frame delusion as just a strong belief. You can believe in something really hard and still not be deluded. Good point!
https://www.selfauthoring.com/
Ohh, I remember @elvismercury posting about this! This is the perfect time to bring it up again. I've been writing for myself in a journal pretty consistently for a while, and I started to wonder about other forms of writing that could help me. Like this!
I’m sure I’ve been subtly influenced by you, because the other day I called someone a ‘statist cuck’ in casual conversation. And it felt pretty good. So I went for my second try, and by then it was obvious that phrase is not right coming out of me. Not punk enough.
So yeah, you're right, it's not fair to frame delusion as just a strong belief.
You were directionally making a worthwhile point about the power of belief, but at some point you discarded the mantissa and kept on with the math.
Fear delusion. Let yourself believe.
No adwall/paywall: https://archive.is/PKe7X
The higher the power the more significant the mantissa.
[...] in order to believe X, what else must you believe [...]
This is exactly what I was thinking about when I thought about destiny vs. free will. If one believes in destiny, can they also believe in free will? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about what people commonly understand as destiny, though. I mean, I don't think it's common for people to believe in destiny and then be like, "Cool, I can now just do nothing, because destiny will do everything for me!" Right?
[...] it's useful to inspect the larger bundle that that belief nestles into [...]
There was a website that analyzed beliefs in a flow chart iirc. I think it compared believing in capitalism vs communism as an example. Maybe you know which website I mean, because it was you who mentioned it, haha? I didn't find it right now, but I'll try harder later.
btw, funny example you used there as an extraordinary belief
[...] What else would you need to believe, to believe you could be a lightning protocol developer? [...]
I think I would also need to believe that the opportunity cost of being a lightning protocol developer, so not being able to do other things as much as I may want to do them, isn't too high. Maybe that's what creates the most friction for me currently? Do I want to become a lightning protocol developer so much that I'm willing to not do other things, whether they're related to bitcoin or not at all?
Related to this, I've also been thinking a lot about @TonyGiorgio's post High Risk, Low Reward.
However, I also know that just because I started something, doesn't mean I have to commit to it forever.
Thanks for the questions, they are good ones!
I love this question and am kind of obsessed by it.
An interesting thing to consider is, in order to believe X, what else must you believe, in order to make X fit in with the larger belief ecology? The mind resists incompatibilities -- this is what dissonance is -- and it's difficult to integrate incompatible bits with the larger collection of what you already know. The bigger and more consequential the inconsistency, the more the dissonance manifests.
So when you encounter someone who believes something extraordinary (e.g., that women are inferior to and should be subservient to men) it's useful to inspect the larger bundle that that belief nestles into. Or maybe, more practically: to predict what else might be in there, to nurture and give rise to the thing you see demonstrated. Stuff fits together in complex ways, so you shouldn't be too confident, but you can usually make reasonable inferences.
It seems like you could make use of this strategically. What else would you need to believe, to believe you could be a lightning protocol developer? What things do you already believe that might resist integrating those beliefs into your existing edifice? What actions support those beliefs, pro and con?