Bitcoin is creating a whole new set of problems

Wednesday, 17 October, Year 4 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

MrTiggr We d0xed one of the recent scammers in -otc that way. Funny how scammers run with tail between legs when you deliver d0x like that to them.
mircea_popescu Turned out he was 14 ?

MrTiggr 18 :P Living at home in mum's basement.
mircea_popescu Myeah. Big part of the problem is that very normal development of teenagers -> scamming. They do this normally in their friend circle, talking shit and strutting. But on the Internet... it has worse consequences.

Here's the story : striplings of all times and places employ two basic coming-of-age strategies. In rural comunities the strategy consists of a. pretending (completely unwarrantedly) to be equal in all respects to anyone in sight and b. pretending (completely unwarrantedly) to have a comparative advantage to those present with regards to the subject at hand. In urban communities the strategy consists of a. pretending (completely unwarrantedly) to be equal in all respects to anyone in sight and b. pretending (completely unwarrantedly) to have a comparative advantage to those present with regards to the subject at hand.

It really is that invariant. The exact implementation may vary, obviously (for instance in a rural community, where the costs of verifying information are small and outside pressures are also limited, the stripling might leave his original community and join a new one strictly for the benefit of being practically anonymous ; whereas in urban communities, where the costs of verifying information are significant and outside pressures are also significant the striplings will form little groups that in modern terminology would be called circlejerks but really much predated the Internet in both form and functioni) but the two prongs remain unchanged : denial of the superiority of the outside, no matter how clearly baseless, no matter how utterly unjustified ; assertion of the superiority of the inside, no matter how ridiculous or untenable.

The species is deeply constructed to work this way, mostly because people are disposable carriers of random genetic material. The force that pushes them isn't just merely disinterested in their own personal welfare, it is quite contrarily interested in ensuring their general failure. It's after all how selection works, if the vast majority of young ones don't fail there's no practical way for the superior to be selected and for evolution to occur, nor is there indeed any incentive whatsoever to even manifest superiority. And so year after year the fish are hounded by unseen will through the very place of most dangerii and just like the fish so are people (well not really people, just people-to-be).

I have had the pleasure so far to try and teach philosophy to 19 year old impudent cockletsiii who thought they knew it not only better than me, but certainly better than the various dead people therein named ; to run the most widely read blog in a tiny language space and interact with literally thousands of tweens who honestly thought that they were equal to me except in those parts I was clearly wrong ; to visit Egypt with an older, white woman (which happens to be the ideal-in-life of the socially marginal and completely despised male youth there) and enjoy the desperate attempts of the unwashed, galabeya-clad multitudes to show how we're really equal, except how they're really better and in fact the list could keep on for thousands of pages. Come to think of it, it's well known that domestic animals of pretty much any kind see their caretaker as a same-species creature, of the same sex and roughly the same age. Equal, as it were.

From the other end of the spectrum, Bitcoins make everything easy. They make transactions very easy, they make breaking promises very easy. Mix these two together and what do you get ? Well now that all depends. If you know enough about the cultural context you get lolcows. If you don't, you get scammed. You enter into "insurance agreements" with Ito calculus experts who've just heard of it five minutes ago ; you entrust your money to security experts who know all about bcrypt, that "best solution on the market"iv ; you "invest" in entrepreneurs who have business plans that are secret and so on and so forth.

This problem is currently - at least in my eyes - the largest issue plaguing Bitcoin. On one hand, its fascinating ease of use is possibly its greatest asset. On the other hand, kids' ease in disregarding reality and highly esteeming themselves may not be their greatest asset, but it is statistically and from a species point of view their only utility. Neither can reasonably be made to go away, neither can sanely be dispensed of, and yet their contact creates a huge problem.

As far as I can see there are no solutions. Mounting barriers to entry is not only ideologically indigest to Bitcoin people, but it is really just a way of trying to solve the problem by making Bitcoin less easy to use. This is nonsense, why blunt advantges ? Another possible solution might come in the shape of a cultural shift from the urban to the rural mentality. Information is in fact very cheap to verify, outside pressure is in fact minimal. The fact that most people live their daily life in an urban setting does not make the Internet any less rural. Amusingly enough, the first step towards implementing something like this is possibly the renounciation of anonimity, which at least in the eyes of the superficial is the main asset of Bitcoinv.

I'm curious how the practical solution will eventually look, but I'm pretty sure this problem is going to be plaguing us pretty much forever from now on.

———
  1. Have you seen A Bronx Tale ? What do you think that is ? []
  2. You know about the Scania market, right ? []
  3. Yeah, already on the defensive, aren't we ? Why, may I ask, if it's not at all true ? []
  4. Fun fact : MtGox only learned about it after leaking its entire userbase, tens of thousands of email + md5'd password pairs. []
  5. I do not share this opinion. The availability of anonimity is a great asset, but the indiscriminate use of it is really much akin to going anywhere with a loaded machine gun, all 30 kgs of oily metal goodness. Like for instance, shopping. You carry 30 kgs of gun there, buy half a kilogram of apples and trot back, cause you really can't carry any more. []
Category: Bitcoin
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18 Responses

  1. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    1
    Mircea Popescu 
    Thursday, 26 March 2020

    Apparently there's never going to be a solution, actually.

  1. [...] It also means home machines are uninteresting for DDoS attacks, servers don't deal great returns, and anyone who knows what is targets the routers either intentionally or unintentionally. It means the actual deep dark web is only going to grow. It means the cost of offering anything to all comers is only going up. [...]

  2. [...] into the Bitcoin space it was pretty clear early on that much of the space was filled with marginal folks causing problems, and the efforts to properly marginalize the marginal were coming out of MPEx. As time went on part [...]

  3. [...] notion that kids have anything to say about quantum mechanics or literary theory. Obviously this stops no kids, and so the continued efforts of adults in areas that are structurally and unavoidably closed to [...]

  4. [...] (CEO, Principal Securities Analyst) and Robert B. Kelly III (CIO, Fixed Income Analyst) are two underage muppets which have already made the comedy hour on #bitcoin-assets for their pompous pretense as "fund" [...]

  5. [...] you glad you've been still using Tor, much after MP told you to gtfo, because whatever, you're just equal to MP except for those places where you know better, and besides who is MP that you should kowtow to him [...]

  6. [...] Leaving aside the painfully banal (Ycombinator is anything but elite) and the parsimoniously explanatory (sure they favour fresh meat), what in the green Hells sense could this possibly make ?! It's quite in stark contrast with stuff like This problem is currently - at least in my eyes - the largest issue plaguing Bitcoin. On one hand, its fascinating ease of use is possibly its greatest asset. On the other hand, kids’ ease in disregarding reality and highly esteeming themselves may not be their greatest asset, but it is statistically and from a species point of view their only utility. Neither can reasonably be made to go away, neither can sanely be dispensed of, and yet their contact creates a huge problem. (Bitcoin is creating a whole new set of problems) [...]

  7. [...] problem delineated in the earlier article about the risks unsupervised children face on the Internet applies largely to unsupervised adults, [...]

  8. [...] in this we may in a little more time find a solution for the greatest problem plaguing Bitcoin : the problem of the innocent stupidity of youth.xxiii ———To give outsiders a little leg up, so the disparity between them and [...]

  9. [...] is predictive for how the bulk of it will look, this seemingly endless series was inaugurated by usagi (grep for "Ito calculus"), so they're in the best of [...]

  10. [...] happen to be very fond of this particular expression. Now consider the context. For one thing, in Bitcoin is creating a whole new set of problems This problem is currently - at least in my eyes - the largest issue plaguing Bitcoin. On one hand, [...]

  11. [...] topic of "extracting chump change from large numbers of chumps". Had chumps not had any change, the bright young lads we currently lose as "scammers" would have been doing something socially productive with their [...]

  12. [...] other prong to the problem is related to a point made in another article here on Trilema (Bitcoin is creating a whole new set of problems). To quote, This problem is currently - at least in my eyes - the largest issue plaguing Bitcoin. [...]

  13. [...] One's intentions matter not one whit in the world of cold equations. Yes that poses a major problem for the young, and for the inept, and for the outsider. Tough, in a word. [↩]A big fat 0, as per the [...]

  14. [...] be the first time the Arabs waited out the Christian nonsense and came back in style. [↩]The "kids have a problem" perspective, so to speak. [↩]Amusingly, the SAME people desperately pushing the modernist [...]

  15. [...] them stop trying in a day or a week or whenever next the BW bill hits ; but there's of course other 17yo experts waiting in the wings and ready to pick up the slack. Kinda how sexuate reproduction works in the [...]

  16. [...] ovens already, there's not going to be any more of your insufferable ilk soon enough. You've missed the last chance you were ever going to get. ———A "working settlement", посёлок [...]

  17. [...] idiots into a spotlight they can't sustain (nor, properly speaking, want or know what to do with). Our problems are entirely of our making, and we never actually figured out how to solve them ; the enemy is [...]

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