Stage n: Bitcoin exists.

Monday, 04 February, Year 5 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

A particularly strong headed but rather brilliant idiot (whom I've linked before) came up with an algorithm-looking history of the past and future of Bitcoin. It goes like this :

Stage 1: Bitcoin does not exist. Stage 2: Bitcoin exists, but is worthless. Stage 3: Bitcoin exists, and is used by strange and desperate weirdos and geeks. Stage 4: Bitcoin is used by Slashdot readers, perhaps slightly less desperate. (You are here.) Stage 5: Bitcoin is used by criminals. Stage 6: All Bitcoin exchanges are shut down by USG. Stage 7: Bitcoin exists, but is worthless. Stage 8: Bitcoin does not exist.

USG, for the roughly eight billion readers of Trilema who do not happen to know or happen to care, is short for United States Government. And since we're on that note, SCOTUS is short for the Supreme Court of that same state and POMPOUS is short for the current mulatto-in-chief.i I hope this little shorthand list may serve, tho I can scarcely imagine whom and how.

Moving right along, I would like to ask the otherwise brilliant idiot, and quite publicly at that, what's the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter ? Perhaps if he were to apply his algorhythmiaii to this rather simple problem we might arrive at some equally simple, 8 step solution. For me personally this solution would be useful.

In the interim, while that solution is no doubt being prepared, we will employ our time struggling with the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum.iii It's quite simple, really : something's the first if it's clearly bad, on its own. Something's the second if it's only bad 'cause a text somewhere says so.

Well now... wait just a minute here. What's the difference between these two again ? What's this "on its own", a sort of "in itself" ? How did it get to be anything "in itself" other than through a bunch of people reading it in a text somewhere ?iv There's still no intrinsic ethics-in-being, in spite of thousands of years and billions of pages wasted in a pursuit of the matter. An is is an is, a should is a should, never the twain shall meet.v

So here are the real layers to the problem : things that can be done are split into three categories : a. things nobody cares about ; b. things "the people" think are fine but "the state" thinks are not fine ; c. things that both "the people" and "the state" think are not fine.

Now, who are the criminals ?

Well, according to "the state"vi, anyone who does anything b or anything c. According to "the people", anyone who does anything c (especially if done to the speaking member of the people, personally). This last parenthesis also explains why crime fightin' is never a "the people" affair, in case you're curious. It's not some sort of evil conspiracy to keep "the citizens" ("the people" call themselves that when unsure of their footing) from exercising "justice". It's just that practically, left to their own devices, "the people" couldn't care less.

What shall we do ?!

The enemies of the state will always be "criminals". There's no difference here between Stalin and Reagan, as some airplane pilots and whatnot found out. There may be states which have naturally fewer classes of enemies and less populous ones at that, there may even be states with no enemies at all (at least as a theoretical construct). There shall never be states whose enemies are not "criminals". That's the whole story.

Bitcoin is. Much like gravity, sunlight during daytime or meteors-in-waiting in the Kuiper belt, Bitcoin just is. There's nothing it can do or abstain from doing, it's not an entity, it's a rule.

Unlike Bitcoin, both states collectively and the people making them up individually are entities, and as such they can do or not do things. One thing states can do is add Bitcoin to the list of their enemies. Another thing states can do is avoid populating their list of enemies with things that aren't entities, for the very simple reason that nobody's yet won the pissing in the wind and staying dry competition. One thing people can do is support states. Another thing people can do is not support states. In most cases this is statistically based on the list of enemies of each state, and their respective strength. For instance, not many people were supporting the American Confederacy a few years back.

As far as experience shows, people don't tend to support states that either stupidly or unwittingly include rules among their enemies. You can't win a war against math, or against drugs, or against "social injustice", or "kulaks". Soon after the Soviet government moved its focus from entities to rules, it lost the support of the people. Soon after the other-Soviet government moved its focus from entities to rules, it also lost the support of the people. There weren't that many people burning American flags in 1860, you know ? Why do you think not ? You can support a government killing Indians, or bison. You can't support a government fighting chemical compounds.

Seeing how that other-Soviet governmentvii is already widely engaged in a battle with the rules of the world it inhabits, it seems generally a waste of time to stop and consider what it does or doesn't do, whom it classifies as what and all that jazz. Its days are numbered. The people currently supporting it are likely to - on average - survive longer than it.

So let's make the best sort of bet there is : a bet for token consideration. At that time when Bitcoin is worthless, I will pay you 10`000 Bitcoins - thats 0.1% of the Bitcoins that currently exist. At that time when the USD is worthless, you will pay me 20 billion dollars - that's 0.1% of the dollars that currently exist (roughly speaking). This bet has no specified date of closure, it's either party's own and free decision when this "worthlessness" event has occured. Remarkably, neither party has any interest to lie : once their side is truly worthless the closing of the bet is, from a game theory perspective, a rational, +EV move.

Any takers ?

———
  1. Isn't it funny when members of stereotyped groups end up living to the stereotype ?! []
  2. A portmanteau of the greek word for thinking and the turk word for diarhea. Do you happen to know what "making love to your wife turkish style" would mean ? []
  3. Random link somewhat related, if you read Romanian : Pedofilia si raul. []
  4. For the purposes of this discussion, obviously all communication whatsoever is "a text". We're living the poststructuralist years, baby. Intertextuality and whaddafucknot. []
  5. Quite illustrative point : most native English speakers will consider something like the butchering of a cute fluffy rabbit for the purpose of making a point quite malum in se. Most of the people in most of the world today (and all of the people for practically all of the world's history) would not see any malum in killing an animal, any animal whatsoever, for any purpose whatsoever. []
  6. For which "USG" is a particularly crude symbol, showing a certain... mental primitivism on the part of our brilliant idiot, similar to what would be the case if one said "digit" when they meant "number". []
  7. OSG, right ? []
Category: Bitcoin
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47 Responses

  1. Sure, states can't fight Bitcoin or statistics. They can, however, fight people that use Bitcoin, much like they can fight against statisticians who spout False Data about the dear gov't.

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 4 February 2013

    Sure. So ?

  3. CLOSE UR COMPUTER NOW AND HIDE IN DA BASEMENT

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  4. [...] Darwin_Fish: mircea - why do you call yourselves a terrorists org?xiv mircea_popescu: Darwin_Fish, http://trilema.com/2013/stage-n-bitcoin-exists/#selection-45.0-45.165 Darwin_Fish: ok, thanks. I'll read it mircea_popescu: Darwin_Fish, another advantage of having a [...]

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  6. [...] room to even try anymore. Hurry up, clocks are ticking away. ———For the record, this bet is still open. [↩] Category: Bitcoin Comments feed : RSS 2.0. Leave your own comment [...]

  7. [...] these two. Obviously as to the latter the state would imagine this sort of nonsense, this has been discussed to death, I won't rehash. The former is also outrageously [...]

  8. [...] In the end, representing the problem in terms of hurting X, Y or Z special interest group, or in terms of "bad for Democracy", or in terms of anything else is equally uninteresting. Bitcoin is doing away with big government, and everything big government supports. Everything pretty much is going away, and there's nothing anyone can do about any of it. [...]

  9. [...] absolute limits to regulation and pointed to the cannonical piece on governmental irrelevance, ie Stage n: Bitcoin exists (which tweet got some retweets etc). She obviously went at least a coupla paragraphs in, because [...]

  10. [...] to either personal or legalistic, or some mix of the worst in both worlds. Consider for instance this discussion of citizen justice to get an idea of how it [...]

  11. [...] magically the USG manages to report inflation significantly under 10% annualized, when all the reports that reach me [...]

  12. [...] again this is unavoidable, in practice for good reasons we've already discussed in the Stage n: Bitcoin exists article, and in theory because of Godel's holy theorem. [↩]I hope both ID and Evolutionist [...]

  13. [...] instance soldiers in war, such as for instance druglords in any inner city, such as for instance terrorists/freedom fighters. This theoretical advance is due to Kant's work. [↩]Which does reduce such equality quite [...]

  14. [...] Moldbug is, of course, the self-important kid that's still cowering over my proposed bet. [...]

  15. [...] of the republic in the middle of a democracy that hasn't yet exhausted itself. [↩]Well, "criminals". The problem of defining what that means has a good chunk of ideology baked in. [↩] [...]

  16. [...] regulation seeps in where people don't care. As the nomadic Greeks became more settled, the passions and lusts of the herd of men running into [...]

  17. [...] from ζῷον to βίος and - fearfully - back again. Or whatever you may wish to call these, the magical transformation from "freedom fighter" to "terrorist" and [...]

  18. [...] guys any more or any less than it helps the "bad" guys, for any definition of good or bad you may arbitrarily pick. Therefore, unless you're willing to abandon your ideology and embrace my neutrality, you're [...]

  19. [...] mom's slavemaster "social service worker", why'd it not work when he names a molehill ? Oh, because he's a terrorist ? Mkay. Crazy shit out here in da wild, feel likes i’mma catch diabetes or some [...]

  20. [...] inclined to act like us than like the other coppers. That's the major fucking point, it's not that nothing can kill Bitcoin. It's that nothing can survive [...]

  21. [...] revisit an older article of a strong headed but rather brilliant idiot : The logic of the witch hunter is simple. It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins' day. The [...]

  22. [...] 2013's Stage n: Bitcoin exists : Unlike Bitcoin, both states collectively and the people making them up individually are entities, [...]

  23. [...] is not a question of whether Bitcoin will or Bitcoin will not "work with governments". Bitcoin does not work with anything or anyone. The question is whether every single person involved in these alleged "governments" is going to [...]

  24. [...] problems of all collectivisms. [↩]For a good complement to this discussion, see Stage n: Bitcoin exists. [↩]It is not just merely a little false, it is completely and absolutely, universally and [...]

  25. [...] at all. This arrangement happens to be cheaper, and this is the fundamental reason for which I was never particularly concerned : the thing wins by the same very logic, through the same exact process that allows the Reich to [...]

  26. [...] why... off with your head. Which happens to be a major fucking problem, because saying things isn't malum in se and shouldn't, consequently, cost you your head. Nevertheless, the practical choice the scumviii [...]

  27. [...] of work than it is for the average breaker of USG laws-and-regulations to go to prison. Such are the blessings of attempting war on abstractions, such are the bruises of the end of [...]

  28. [...] problem as I define it is that some idiots declared war on reality. The problem as the idiots in question define it is that why does this criminal pretending to be [...]

  29. [...] to land a major one when he begins with "In today's blabla world"iv, but let us not mince words : "the people" don't want to pay tax. It's what it is, stop with the pious fraud, it's not helpful. If those with [...]

  30. [...] moral being that there are wars that can't be won, like the war on gravity, or the war on Bitcoin. There are also wars that can not be lost, like the war on the [...]

  31. [...] it or not does not in any way impinge upon its existence, much like in the case of... I dunno, say Bitcoin [...]

  32. [...] wager, unforeseen) circumstance where you're keeping secrets for criminals. And not even jolly good likable criminals - just random scum that at some point or other tried to scam you and [...]

  33. [...] existence -- all of which seemed "insane" and "not even worth seriously discussing" to the horde of imbeciles, all of which came true. Trilema is still here, the horde of imbeciles changed numerous times over [...]

  34. [...] sitting on ass all day and labelling things is no path to either wealth or power ; and "the people" couldn't care less, as you deliberately and insistently trained them not to. Turns out Plato was indeed correct, [...]

  35. [...] And people can't reason, either, in the solid, predictable, reliable manner required for running their own legal system. Painful, but if it's the truth it's the truth. While either of these closes down a lobe of [...]

  36. [...] it out, he has prophecy also! [↩]This is somehow the secular error, the traditional "stage n" argument, that exercise in circularity where the proof of whether you set the idiot parade on fire [...]

  37. [...] success at all". [↩]You are aware of the early history of flight, right, back when it was a "the people themselves" affair ? [↩]It is not an idle question. Consider : I do not bother with random girly's [...]

  38. [...] & open source" needed a killer app, to enact itself past the various "experts" and assorted morons, this was it [↩]Check them out, sometimes Republic-style communication happens for the [...]

  39. [...] are buttressed by direct experience. [↩]"Treason never prospers -- because if it prospers you pretend to not notice it if you know what's good for you." [↩]To close down Guantanamo / take USG out of the criminal [...]

  40. [...] it to be true, but his childish attempt at forcing will upon world reads very much like any other pantsuit blogger's : ineffectually interchangeable. What he's precisely saying, taking for instance that opening [...]

  41. [...] because a confusion of causes with purposes results in the direct and strict impossibility of balancing the books. [↩]For "doctors", which is to say, for pointedly non-thinkers. Who cares about them ? Oh, I [...]

  42. [...] Bitcoin being rather than doing and MP's offered bet on it. [...]

  43. [...] an attemptiv to restart sanity on fundamentally inassailable infrastructure has ran aground recently over the exact same problem. Apparently the history of [...]

  44. [...] Schiff brothers. There is also a Ben Barnacle character who is his successor. No Hussein Bahamas as POMPOUS in there though as 'twas published prior to the forum, and not like Peter was savvy enough to read [...]

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