"Business", whatever that may mean.

A year and a half ago (it's been a year and a half already!) I was saying

Suitwearer, Contractbearer, Master of the World.

It's a banal observation, it happens to also be true.

Yet everyone obviously wishes to live, from the depths of the Kalahari to the swamps of the Amazon, one call unites all species and ours is no exception : the will to live. And if survival shall depend on being one of them in suits, then local copies of what may look like - or in the practice of social intercourse as seen locally may come to be accepted as - a suit shall be manufactured and distributed and used.

A decade ago I was in Luxor, which is a sleepy town cut in half by the Nile, with the expensive hotel and most of the town on one side, with a smallish village, sort-of like Egyptian suburbia on the other. Two halves connected by a noisy and old yet functional boat moving back and forth every half hour. Wifi was not common in Egypt a decade ago, but they did have an Internet cafe. It was not called "Internet Cafe" however, nor "Muhammad's Place of Porn", nor anything you'd readily come up with to describe a dirty, small room with two very old computers on two rickety tables, dirt flooring and one modem blinking at 29kbps.

It was called...

That's right.

In it, local "businessmen" of any age under about thirty-something, in more or less dirty galabiyas, working at... well... what were they working at ? In their own estimation they were working at the business of businessⁱ, which in Luxor means something quite very specific : the acquisition of an older white fat female, and with her either cash or credit resources to build a few houses in which to house tourists, and also the contacts to bring forth those tourists and the ability to talk to them in such a way as to get them to stay and spend.

That's it, that's right : if you are an older woman of European descent you can trivially find a young eager male to fuck you silly, and a stable of sexually repressed and socially shy young women (his other wives) to serve you abjectly for the rest of your days. All you have to do is move to Luxor, spend a few dollars on their building project and help a little with the translation, whenever foreigners happen around. Give them that feeling of familiarity, the illusion of connecting, the impression they're not cast off into the abyss. And if you happen to not be fat you can easily fix that, can't you ? They'd prefer it if you did, this being a more important point than whether you ever take Islam seriously or not (just as long as you don't do anything drastic on the topic, publicly).

So now, these unwed boys of twentysomething, beta males striving to leave their mark... what are they ? Scum, right ? Perhaps. To their eyes there is no difference between your toiling in cubicals atop plastic flooring awash in fluorescent lighting and their toiling in the ex camel stable repurposed by the installation of one electricity cable and one phone cable with acoustic modem attached. No substantial difference, that is. Surely they perceive - and in the superlative! - the beauty, the esthetic appeal of plastic flooring in its delicious uniformity, and fluorescent lighting in its eerie un-natural-ness. They do. What they don't perceive is any substantial difference between you and them - you wish to live, they wish to live, you wish to matter, they wish to matter, you wish to leave offspring, they wish to leave offspring. What do you mean you don't particularly wish to leave offspring ? That's ridiculous. What do you mean you don't particularly believe in Allah ? Sure, but you believe in your own thing, which is exactly the same only different (except in no substantial way), right ? What do you mean not right ? You're obviously confused. And what's this nonsense about "the main difference being the worldview, and the understanding of the world around you" ? There's no such thing, the world is the world and everyone understands it, directly and the same way. So do they.

That's about the difference. Now consider some problems. First and foremost, MPOE-PR's year old banal observation that

It's a simple point of competition for finite resources. This is not quite as visible in fiat, because in fiat bs gov'ts can create and do create fake money to prop up wasteful/pointless paraeconomic ventures run by the "right people", which is just another way of saying "popular" (which is, of course, the wrong game to play if you aim for prosperity).

In BTC however, where resources are absolutely finite, there will only be so much BTC available for investment at any given time. This BTC will be allocated to the available investments somehow. Part of it will be allocated by idiots, on paraeconomic criteria like "we don't like MPEx". Part of it will be allocated economically. As time goes on the share available to the idiots to allocate as they see fit dwindles, and the share available to the rational players increases. Since human behavior is reinforced by success and (usually, except in the case of a really limited pile of hardcore idiots) discouraged by failure, the flow is even faster as individual people realize they are being part of the idiot group and jump ship.

Soon enough the situation reaches equilibrium, which is pretty much where we're at. In short, the beauty of economy is that it works.

None of this is to mean MPEx is perfect, by any means. That's not the point at all. It just means MPEx is the standard, and because stock exchanges are fundamentally a convergent, naturally standardizing market it also means the accretion trend will continue, exactly in the same way and fundamentally for the same reasons Bitcoin grows against fiat currencies.

It's by now impractical for any serious company contemplating being listed in BTC to forego the significant capital available on MPEx in order to favor a different venue (in fact, the cost of doing so can be calculated on the basis of the volume difference, and is in any case significant) for a variety of reasons, and certainly such an attempt would imply the modification of said company to include "being an exchange", which requires rare and valuable skills (programming notably NOT being one of them) and other human capital. Such an effort necessarily spells a movement away from said corp's core mission, whatever it may be (*).

A willingness to move away from the core mission, a cavalier attitude towards incurring costs and foregoing benefits all work together to paint a very unflattering picture in the eye of the discerning investor (If these people have any confidence in their business, why are they working on moving away from it to do something else? If they have the capital to pursue reinventing the wheel, why do they need my investment? If they're not interested in cashing in now why should I expect they ever will get my shares dividends?) and rapidly the convergence effects become very strong indeed.

And in the opposite corner,

pankkake "The emergence of solar and wind farms to generate inexpensive crypto-currencies and the de-commissioning of carbon emitting mining devices."
mircea_popescu Lol. Is this some fuckferenceⁱⁱ

pankkake No it's super cereal. And on cryptolol exchange: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=431195.0 I didn't read it all the first time.
mircea_popescu Stealing Diablo's idea, for shame. Maybe they get a million bitcoin invested.

pankkake Well, except it has nothing to do with what the company is supposed to do. But I suppose every Bitcoin business has to make its own ASIC. It's like social media, you just have to!
mircea_popescu So retarded this, speaking of "exactly the wrong thing", every "business" has to make its own a) altchain b) asic c) exchange.ⁱⁱⁱ This is incidentally quite clear proof that they are not businesses in any sense of the term, but mere extensions in the verbal space of the will to live of some twerps. They do not with anything else than to matter, to impose themselves in the world. There's no business there, just the desire that drives some poor third worlder to spam or beg or try and steal. The will to live. Pseudo-businesses are all about the "ceo". This is why they do not in fact perceive they need a business plan. This is why the very sensible "ask mp's permission first" comes through as quite intolerable "before you may fuck youy must buy a bride from the elders of the tribe", an intolerable limit on the life of the young male.

pankkake Isn't MP?? all about MP?

So now : according to the stupid poor, the rich aren't in any way different, they are equally stupid and just got lucky. There may never be substantial difference in the world, because stupidity fundamentally means "has never improved over the course of its history", and consequently the "unchanging nature of agents" would be a directly-accessible point of personal experience. On which rotten basis it'd then follow that all agents are unchanging, and their success could stand in no relation whatsoever to an invariant, and so it must be otherwise explained, which'd naturally be done by recourse to the convenient category of "that which changes", personified as "lucky". Could as well have been "water", the rich were touched by Poseidon and if only the young aspiring third worlder (not geographically as much as mentally) were only to also be similarly touched... why then the sky would fall! The limits of the world collapse, the gates of Iericho ruin! Dogecoins could take over, because why not, the fiftieth doomed attempt to compete with MPEx in MPEx' business could somehow be successful and so on and so forth.

In short : it's not like the mind has anything to do with the results of one's activity. It's other things, who knows what random other things. This happens to be a necessary worldview to allow the stupid to get out of bed in the morning, and since their vitals are stronger than their mental of course they'd get out of bed in the morning, what! And so it logically follows... it necessarily follows, that they've just not yet stumbled on the exactly right string of text which pasted in yahoo mail over a modem connection from a dirt floored place will make it rain fat white rich women.

One of these days tho...

1. Quoth Seinfeld :

   RUSSEL: Look. I don't know how you two guys feel but we would really like to be in business with you.

   (George starts, Jerry starts later, both speak at the same time, nonstop)
   GEORGE: Well, we would like to be in business. Let's do business. We'll have some business. Let's have business.
   JERRY: We would love to be in business. We'll do business. We're in business. It's... it's business. This is business.
   GEORGE: Yeah!

   [↩]

2. You know, like a conference, except as practiced these days. Much in the manner college was the place where people went to exchange ideas but after equalitarianism took over it became the place where people go to exchange bodily fluids, so conferences were the places where people used to go to exchange ideas but now mostly go to exchange drinks. Because well... they're dorks, they jack off, what fucking ? [↩]
3. The constant and never ending "noob mentioning colored coins" trend, in spite of colored coins being dead as disco following my pronouncement last year, is exactly and precisely this. Cheap solution to what the willing-to-live animal naturally perceives as an absolutely necessary step. [↩]