"These fools have been handed a technology so clever, so disruptive and revolutionary, that the rulers of the world would have to fully unmask themselves as ruthless tyrants in order to suppress it, — or give up their thrones on their own free will — if it were used correctly, that is."

The title is a quote from an otherwise great article by Stan : Bitcoin, or How to Hammer in Nails with a Microscope.ⁱ

We are not going to apply it to the circumstance that the very next day after MP humiliated Gavin in his own stronghold (reddit & such), stoolie shows up on #bitcoin-assets. It's really too stupid to mention, what exactly was the plan there, that am I going to do what, order murders online via Shrem ? Thank you very much, I do my online murders on twitter directly, no need.

We are also not going to apply it to the circumstance that once MP announced he's going to wring necks, the BTC / USD lost 30%. Too much comedy gold to be mined from plain reframing like "oh, Bitcoin is down because too small blocks are preventing adoption" to even bother. Yeah, I'm sure that's why it is lol.

Instead, we will focus on the much more amusing :

Exhibit A, qntra.net article on reddit :

So, 10 votes, 30 comments betweern three different subreddits. Nice.

Exhibit B, qntra.net traffic past few days :

Holy shit, look at that! One of the largest peaks to date, for what's still a very new outlet. Thousands of clicks out of 10 votes ? Seriously ?

Exhibit C. No. Not seriously.

Wow check it out! That's the longest stream of 300+ comments on a one comment article I ever saw before!!1

How do you suppose that happened ?

Reddit is user driven, right ? Unlike digg, reddit is user driven. Except, of course, if the users in question happen to contradict the vested interests of a certain ninety year old reptileⁱⁱ, which happen to be exactly alligned with the interests of the other ninety year old reptileⁱⁱⁱ. Because they have a little reptile club thing going.

So, if the users in question happen to contradict the worldview of people born before Hitler... well... then there's ways to handle them. God forbid young people become independently rich and independently powerful and start rocking the boat! They conspire to raise taxes, and you let them, because hey... free money. Not like you own anything, right ? What does it then matter that high taxes present an ironclad guarantee you will never own anything ?

They conspire to poison gender relations, because hey, that is the one thing they can't do - gendered anything. Old men are as genderless as ants, and it burns them. Oh how it burns them. But If you also can't get close to a man or woman your age for all sorts of retarded, wholly imaginary reasons, that "evens the field". For them. It castrates you, but it evens the field for very stupid, annoying old men. Historically the chokehold of Oldhouse, "jr" on world affairs was broken by the workings of sexual intercourse, which is why they're driving you insane about it. But these are "complicated" matters, right ? And there's "no right answer", right ?

"It just so happens", right ? It was "an error" or something. Fine. Here's a quote from an older article, that's quite the most important thing before us today :

This is a massive part of the problem : most good outlets out there consist of five articles the author wrote over the past three years, because smart people have no discipline whatsoever. Exactly opposite, Trilema is a behemoth the size of which boggles the mind. Millions and millions of words, a never ending deluge of cool.

This may seem ultimately pointless, to the very poorly disciplined smart people in question, a rehash of the ancient La ce imi serveste mie radicalurile ? for slightly better educated people. Consider this point : when a month ago the various alphabet soup secret services of the USG finally discovered that they should have been paying a lot more attention, an intern was given the task to "read and summarize Trilema". A month later about a dozen or so people are working at it, and they're still not done. Because it's not god damned easy, to go through thousands of articles, many of which are in Romanian, and summarize my point. What point ?

I couldn't have produced this retrospectively, or on a JIT or as-needed basis. The only way to have some classes of things is through making them when you don't actually need them for any directly discernible purpose, something known on #bitcoin-assets as asciilifeform's parachute, but otherwise illustrated by that ancient fable where the fox asks the wolf why's he sharpening his teeth when there's no one to fight, to which the wolf retorts that when there'll be someone to fight there's going to be no time to sharpen teeth.

So now, consider the following similarity to illuminate your present situation : cryptographically complex, mathematically beautiful algorithms are not defeated because they weren't sufficiently complex or beautiful. They're defeated, and quite trivially so, as a matter of course, because they were trained to be defeatable from the get-go. They were constructed with this purpose in mind. Their defeat is baked in, from the very beginning, in the form of carefully chosen priors.

This is also why you're trivially defeated. It's not because you're not smart enough, it's not because you're not, in principle, as the theoretical construct you view yourself as, perfectly able to resist. It's because in practice you never do, because you're trained to fail, and because you're trained to construct your failure as you go. The Reuters reporter covering the SEC and financial fraud told me that I'm the only one to have ever released SEC schmooze, why do you think that is ? Do you suppose I'm the first person they came to with their "be our friend, give us free stuff for free" proposition ? Take Zachary Warren as a fine example, ever heard of him ?

The ideology you subscribe to can either empower you, or it can empower them. Them, the dead hands of this world hanging tooth and nail to relevancy, ready to choke you in the process. It's fine to choose either one, really, just like for Shrem it's perfectly fine to choose either one, just like for Renton it was fine to choose either one.

But if you choose "life", remember one important point from Shrem's misadventure :

That. Is. All. You're. Ever. Getting. Better make damned sure that whatever you're signing includes three meals a day and all the accomodations you could possibly wish for, because that's all you're getting.

Don't sell yourself cheap. You're really all you have.

1. This was penned as an outside observer. Years have passed, and his outlook did modify in some spots. It is probably appropriate to suspect what you might perceive as errors & shortcomings are exactly those spots. Can't hurt to ask, but it's probably unwise to assume otherwise. [↩]
2. Reddit is owned not by idiots that buy powerless, toothless "notes", but by Conde Nast, which is owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. One's born in `27, the other's born in `30. They're telling you what it's okay to see and what isn't okay to see. For your own good, of course.

   Grow a pair sometime, eh ? Who ever heard of adult men and women having their lives organised by reptiles on respirators ? [↩]

3. Hey, remember when Warren Buffett was structuring the hell out of his holdings and paying himself no salary so as to avoid paying any tax whatsoever, then pretending like taxes are too small on "the rich" by which he of course meant the middle class, so that his young managers could be taxed even higher so none of them could accumulate any sort of pile that'd give them a voice ? Odd how that works, huh, you'd think if someone genuinely thought they weren't paying enough taxes they'd just write the IRS a check. There's not much need to talk about it unless what they actually think is that YOU may still have a dime somewhere the grubby hands of their system hasn't yet pocketed. [↩]