The stuple.

Fresh off da irc :

asciilifeform Well, eventually all the coin will be in the hands of people with brains. This endgame looks obvious.
mircea_popescu No, because they keep making doges.ⁱ Endgame is at least 20 years away. The fuck I'm gonna do, that's my youth.ⁱⁱ

asciilifeform P. T. Barnum and Carnegie can co-exist.
mircea_popescu NOT when Barnum thinks he's Carnegie and his visitors think they're there spinning the world.

24/12/13 Countdown reset due to delays, mailshot has copies of screenshots...merry xmas all ; 13/12/13 Sadly the beta release we wanted will be delayed by a week or so, more details in the newsletter ; 27/11/13 We have the gui wireframes back from designers..

That's the news. This is how them people think the reports of an IT project look.ⁱⁱⁱ

asciilifeform The furnace still burns, steel still pours, no? The occasional luser falls into crucible; free carbon that day.
mircea_popescu I have only one mouth and I must laugh! asciilifeform no, you're right, I've just gone through five minutes of disbelief. I'm fine now. Incidentally, I think this may well be why otherwise intelligent people decide Bitcoin is beyond stupid. They probably go through this intellectual cycle, "O, let's examine the data re this thing. What's intel got ? O wait, what ? You say what ? Did what ? What ?" In the end it's just a blank stare with a "wat".

asciilifeform That was more or less my first post on the subject. Microscope hammer. What I meant earlier was, the 'doge' investors are going to do something idiotic with their coin, regardless of what happens. If not doge, then lolcatcoin, or whatnot.
Duffer1 Doge... Investors....
mircea_popescu This is experimentally true. Duffer1 you recall the guy a day or two ago with the "200% is 200% no matter how you cut it" ?

Duffer1 Yea poor guy :/
asciilifeform But the people doing the fleecing, presumably have a bit more brain, and will do something moderately intelligent. And so on, up the foodchain.^iv The way I see it, it's rather like a farmer lamenting that a rotting deer carcass in his field is being eaten by maggots, rather than himself.
mircea_popescu The farmer is lamenting that the deer lays dead, no more. For it is Bambi, and Bambi's someone's mom.^v Anyway, yours is an exceedingly difficult proposition. My current belief is that mostly they're stupid in a different way. They're time-stupid rather than capital-stupid. In the end scammer and scamee make a tuple.

Duffer1 mircea_popescu I wish I could readily explain it somehow, save lots of people lots of pain. <<<< perhaps worth another article where my ignorance is yet again immortalized on your blog? :P I hang out in here to learn.
mircea_popescu That's fine, but I dunno how. At leasrt not yet. But let me expound on the capital/time stupid tuple. The sucker, let him be known as s, is in a rush. He has not the time to completely consider things, and this is built on a lengthy historical tradition of the same : he also "did not have the time" to properly consider functional analysis in highschool, which he mostly didn't have the time to do because in junior high he didn't have the time to properly consider fractions, and as a result learning FA for him is "learn all calculus from fractions onward", which is easily months of HIS time. (It'd be a lot less time for someone a lot more literate, because of the way economies of scale work in matters of the mind. however, this is not him). So basically the sucker's life is this escalating avalanche of unpaid time debts which he keeps extending and extending for more and more ridiculous interest. The scammer, let him be known as S, has been doing nothing but contemplating, the minutious detail that is otherwise irrelevant. For whatever reason, such as having a bad attitude to authority coupled with a duplicitous nature^vi, he has managed to both escape re-education and avoid actually putting his mind to useful purpose. He is then stuck, but also unable to admit this to himself. And he has no money, or more properly put, he's not making nearly as much as his less clever peers from kindergarten are making. s naturally tries to use his relative advantage to defeat a problem, S equally so. Together, they make a team. The alleged "theft" is nothing of the kind, teams reallocate resources all the time on common convention, which is what's happening here too. The sad part of this otherwise heroic arrangement is, however, that it STILL doesn't work. Capital can be good. Minutious attention to irrelevant detail can also be good. Both need a lot of central thinking to actualise their potential utility, and that's what the scammer can't, fundamentally, have. The union becomes pernicious in that s's capital could be useful irrespective of him, but S's mental issues lock s out. There we go, I'm happy with this model. It's a tuple.^vii

Obviously s spends a lot of money he'll never see again, for a lack of time. S spends a lot of time he'll never see again, for a lack of money.^viii The situation is quite symmetrical, but before you run to the interpretative races be advised that the "money" sybol is used correctly in its proper sense, rather than in what mistaken cvasi-definition you might have intuited for yourself, and this use colors the meaning of "time" too.

1. The elder name for this is "gems", in that for a while all forum Bitcoin investments consited of "buy this gem, the last person to buy it is the bagholder" sort of pre-mercantilist stupidity games. [↩]
2. This problem, incidentally, is not unknown to the men living under the revolution, say in Russia a century ago, or in France two, or in England three. Or four or five.

   For that is the queſtion : whether tis nobler in the minde to ſuffer the ſlings and arrowes of outragious fortune, or to take Armes againſt a ſea of troubles and by oppoſing end them. To die. To ſleepe. [↩]

3. No but seriously, "due to delays" ? Learn to fucking do it properly, it's free! But wait! Before you learn to do it properly, here's an extra introductory helping of "you dumb shit" at absolutely no cost to you! And what's more, it has a siding of "Jaysus!" absolutely free! [↩]
4. Stan's really fond of Swift's Rhapsody. To be honest, I suspect Swift's not nearly read enough these days. Not that anything is. [↩]
5. Video. [↩]
6. Obligatory reference to the anal child. [↩]
7. Which means to say in this context that the elements are not significant disparately and should only be considered as inherited properties of the holding object. You can't access either s or S directly, but only as stupid.S or stupid.s. [↩]
8. (Because if you imagine that every scammer out there actually strikes gold you're off the rocker. Those are the ones you hear about, but otherwise scamming, like spamming, is run on the Hollywood model : it's cheaper to pay one actor a million a year and pay nothing at all to the other nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, than to pay each of them fifteen bucks. It's fifteen times cheaper, and if you paid them fifteen bucks a year they wouldn't as much as look at you. Whereas if you pay them nothing they will probably lend you a twenty. Two or three times. [↩]