In which life moves on.

This article suffers a little from the split audience issueⁱ, but we'll try our best.

So, since late 2007 I have been running a small but almighty management consultancy firm, which has done all sorts of scary things such as changing the laws of the small but marginal country and so forth. I've pretty much never employed Romanians for reasons I won't go into but which are detailed on this blog. I've pretty much never worked for Romanian customers for the obvious reasonsⁱⁱ and within months I wasn't taking new customers except by recommendation anyway.

Also since late 2008 I have been running what soon became Romania's most read blog. This was a fun exercise of shooting fish in a barrel - as you might imagine it's not particularly difficult to be the smartest, most cultured, tasteful, cool and whatnot guy in a country roughly the size of Oregon and just aboutⁱⁱⁱ as cultured, tasteful, cool and whatnot. Anyway, friends and "enemies" were made, fun was had, loads of butthurt were generated, all that jazz.

As part of the entire "let's do stuff for this cultural space" I also ran a Romanian *chan clone as well as a sort of Romanian-only Reddit. Except better, in that my chan regularly published stuff that's banned in Germany^iv and has nigh-on given our prudish friends across the pond heartburn^v whereas the Reddit clone stood with Reddit in about the relationship humans stand with sheep.^vi

Then Bitcoin happened. Amusingly enough, I had no fucking clue. It was mentioned right here on this blog a few times in early 2011^vii. I checked it out then, superficially. I stumbled on some paper about "assasination markets", I came to the conclusion the entire thing is indescribably stupid and dropped it. Then someone asked me point blank and well... Bitcoin happened. I stumbled on the original paper, then followed some of the original discussions and within days I was buying my first Bitcoins.^viii Maybe one of these days I will get a hold of vragnaroda and publish the original 24 hours of my involvement in #bitcoin-otc, it'd probably be a great read to all you noobs out there : MP as a noob himself. I think I was cute. Anyway.

Things kept ballooning, soon enough MPEx was arguably a contender of the Romanian Stock Exchange, except MPEx trades stuff that's actually cool, rather than whatever junk nobody cares about. Note that the original act founding MPEx was written in Romanian. It did however have to include a translation to English, and this problem simply grew until that sad day for the obscure language when I finally gave up.

On October 3rd^ix I announced that Trilema will henceforth speak English to the world, closed the aggregator and so forth.

But life moves on, you see. After living for years (five, to be exact) under polimedia.us, this blog finally moved on its own domain, yesterday. polimedia.us/fain is no more, polimedia.us/dtng is no more, and starting today polimedia.us will simply redirect to trilema.com. I won't be taking any new customers at all, I have a couple of projects which are just about finished and wrapping up, a few more in the lifetime support cycle which will continue as contracted^x and that's that. It was fun while it lasted, but I can't in good conscience either apply my time and skill towards that which pays less nor impose upon customers to compete for my time with something like Bitcoin. I doubt any fiat world endeavour can actually do this, it's just unsound.

In spite of all these cutbacks it still doesn't look very good for S.MGs intended 15th date. I guess we'll see. Meanwhile, Happy French Socialism day, as well as a heartfelt

1. The difficulty of public speech arises principally from the incoherence of audience. This I suspect is the reason why authoritarian regimes (such as for instance Universities, at least the better ones) tend to push for a "new" but necessarily homogenous man : it's fucking impossible to stand before a large crowd of random people and talk of anything in particular. [↩]
2. Funny how to the English speaking world the former are unobvious but the latter would reasonably be obvious. In Romanian it's just about the opposite I guess. [↩]
3. Or perhaps a little behind that - as far as I know it's not the case that ~40% of households in Oregon don't actually have running water or sanitation. [↩]
4. Originally it was "banned in Boston". [↩]
5. This bitcointalk thread is pretty lulzy. Owing to the coincidental trifecta that child porn was never actually included ; CP actually stands for counterparty risk among actual pros (something the "community" aspires to one day contain) and calling things you don't like "the devil" is pretty much the universal signature of the stupid, we're now in the position where child porn is pretty much a Bitcoin meme, of sorts. [↩]
6. I don't really have the time to go into it, but it used a complex scoring mechanism to make spam impossible - that's a fact, open registrations for years, not.one.single.piece.of.spam. Ever. At all. Not moderated by people, moderated by well written AI. It also rewarded users for their activity, it created hierarchy in the blogspace, it made all sorts of cool things, including pretty pictures. [↩]
7. In passing in February 2011 but then in earnest in April. [↩]
8. If you're curious : I bought a few coins here and there, paying with Paypal. And then I bought 60, when Bitcoin was ~15 in 2011. And I looked like a sucker as it went to 2, but I kept buying and buying and buying. Eventually if you keep buying you either run out of money or run out of looking like a sucker. [↩]
9. It might be worthy of notice to the conspiracy theorists of the future that theymos only found out on the 6th. I was already moving on the 3rd. Strategic superiority eh. [↩]
10. Here's a hint for the enterprising young consultant : lifetime support for any project should be your main income generator. The idea is that you make things so well that they never need any support, and so get paid for doing nothing. Those customers that notice this and try to cut your "costs" are customers you never wish to work with again. They will go across the street and get badly hurt. The smarter will figure it out and try to come back but you're never taking them. The majority will never figure it out and so inexplicably will be out of business soon enough. It's tough out there, you know ? Especially for the stupid. [↩]