Closing statement for No Such lAbs (S.NSA)

Here we are : one of Bitcoin's longest living corporations is today closing shop. 7th of October 2013 through 28th of October 2019 makes for just about exactly six years. The postwar tradition is to say something about it having been a "wild" ride, because supposedly loudness is a good substitute of having fun and so on. Nonsense ; it was a slow grind. A slow grind which ultimately failed to produce much of anything worth the mention specificallyⁱ, but which also, and undetectablyⁱⁱ, changed everyone's life -- involved, and uninvolved -- and for the better.

That said, there is one patently false claimⁱⁱⁱ which will have to be disposed specifically :

asciilifeform: diana_coman: whether 'blind' buy or not, i'm not aware yet of anyone 'buying asciilifeform's ver.'; and for that matter i fully expect mp will continue to very successfully sell his narcissism , using bait made from (among other things) asciilifeform's stolen work, for years.

As a factual matter, for the interval quoted, which is to say the past six years, Stanislav Datskovskiy has produced exactly nothing. S.NSA has produced. That's the agreement we're now releasing.

It would seem, to the naive observer, that such an agreement can not be discharged gratis, on the basis of naive extension of the commonplace observation that even domestic animals have a value. A chicken may indeed not pull quite as well as an ox does, but it'll still do 1/1024 of the job, a fraction, something. Counterintuitively, this is not actually the case : the present value of Stanislav Datskovskiy's future work is today exactly zero, for very good reasons^iv that stand on a lot of historical backing -- if your first impulse is to disagree, please, I beg you : review the logs. See how long it takes you to come to the same conclusion, leave me a note even, I'm quite curious to hear.

Further, as to whatever residual value or interest S.NSA may hold in whatever nontangibles, however construed : there's no such thing, nothing has changed. It'll be nominally released^v through the working of this instrument as well, and also for free. To any investor concerned this might constitute some kind of leak of value, I must point out : it is all banal nonsense of no practical value anyway ; thinking otherwise is about on par with trying to extract rents out of imaginary monopolistic ownership of basic geometric figures. Everyone bored enough can (and, given enough time insulated from any kind of meaningful activity, certainly will) come up with the dodecahedron ; and that "coming up" makes entirely no difference. There's no trade in "the dodecahedron", nor ever was, nor ever will be.^vi

Outside of all that, S.NSA holds, as per the previous report, 434.32844813 Bitcoin in cash, 2.47419727 in Bitcoin-equivalent tangibles, and an (at the time) estimated 30.26784266 Bitcoin in intangibles & goodwill. There was exactly no trade that occured, either in purchase or sale, during the entire extended^vii quarter prior, so the previous report's figures stand undaunted.

As far as the last item is concered, those 30.26784266 Bitcoin are money we indeed have spent, over our six years tenure, coming to a present rate of about fifty thousand fiats per year. Needless to say, as the foregoing makes it as plain as it could be made, we did not in fact receive 30.26784266 Bitcoin worth of value out of this capital deployment, let alone any kind of multiple. Not even any kind of fraction -- we have received nothing. On a personal note I do not regret pouring more Bitcoin into the sand, god knows I've done a whole lot of that during my longstanding ordeal trying to help the common man bridge the gap to Bitcoin (to say nothing of the time I spent with it, although... Bitcoin you can always rebuy). As far as the company is concerned, a burn rate of 50k/year is easily the most outstanding performance since the invention of venture capital, do ask around. I expect nothing less than all the available medals for management posting this kind of result, especially in the face of quite as retarded a tech stable. I very much welcome discussion on the topic as well as the trading of war stories &c, but this will be a credentialed discussion -- unless you've been involved in some kind of executive capacity in the start-up field, I really don't care what you think (and what's more, neither do you, even if you might momentarily be mistaken on that point).

As far as the tangibles are concerned, of the 2.47419727 Bitcoin nominally on the books we have 0.9 Bitcoin in the deadpool of pizarro, which I expect is in fact solvent, and which I deem likely we will recover. As for the remainder, I instructed Stanislav Datskovskiy to produce an inventory on October the 28th, in response to which he has produced... something. I don't know what, I have not yet looked through the pile of assorted whines, blather and kindergarten professionalism so as to recover whatever in there may actually be of some interest, maybe (god knows that if I don't spend my time to so recover it, there it'll rot among the garbage, self-fulfilling itself in the same manner fractally an' endlessly forever). I will proceed to looking presently, upon publishing this first draft ; while I do not expect to find anything, I will amend the figures should the search contradict the prediction.

Consequently, the liquidation value of S.NSA currently^viii stands at 435.22844813 435.28344813 Bitcoin^ix ; as S.NSA has 4`737`075 authorised shares outstanding^x this indicates an absolute floor of 0.000091877 Bitcoin per share, coming to a 8.123% nominal Bitcoin loss for investors over the six years interval. With apologies for having not managed to do any better for you, though not for lack of trying, and in the hope that we perhaps may try again later, an' wiser, this'd be, then, the final word on this most bold attempt we undertook, and by which captivated so many eyes and touched so many hearts.

Good luck ; and thank you.

1. This is perhaps an exageration : its tortured existence certainly equipped the republic with much finer tools than anyone anywhere possesses. Whether they'll ever be used for practical benefit remains an open question, they're not exactly the sort that's fun, they're not toy-tools, they're actual tools, exacting, demanding, and often enough painful. Yet such is the fate of toolmakers, this dilemma. What can you do... [↩]
2. I suppose it does live up to its name, huh. [↩]
3. Very much in the vein of the recently deployed "say absolutely all the things, in order, alphabetically -- who knows, maybe something sticks" strategy of a disgruntled engineer recently gone berserk. Who knew how many objective truths stood for only as long as they credibly "liked" him!

   Then again, a systematic and magically recurring confusion as to agreements, doubled by a structural inability to abide by agreements (and, if pressed, tripled by a complete disinclination to make agreements, if they're going to be those pesky things which must be understood and abided by), is very much the direct cause of the dissolution. Unless, of course, you're in the mood for hearing ever more sophomorically ridiculous excuses -- in which case, by all means, have your fill. I've had mine. [↩]

4. Think : all the garbage piles in the world, however many of them there are, do contain "still usable" discarded furniture and such. Whatever the objective merits of the pieces in question as they stand, their economic utility is exactly zero. It can become nonzero if you go there, pick them up, fix them, deploy them, whatever you do -- but the entirety of that gain is the product of your work ; and even if you "pay them", by dropping coins out of your pockets while seated, or by taking them to a carpenter for repairs and paying his bill, or in whatever other manner -- exactly nothing changes on that score. They, on their own, by themselves, stand exactly as the bison on the Great Plains circa 1392 -- items outside of the economic circuit, and therefore of no economic value. When a wolf comes on the farm and eats a sheep, he produces an economic loss ; but when he goes in the wild and eats a wild goat, he produces no such thing. For anything to have value it must first and foremost, as a sine qua non prerequisite, participate in human activity ; our object structurally and systematically (you could even say deliberately, if such a thing as deliberation ever took place) does not.

   This said, the illusion to the contrary could readily be produced (at least on short stretches at a time) ; and the trade in "just good enough", "it'll hold while I'm in office" illusoria is pretty much the signature activity of the Empire. What do you want me to do, indulge ?! [↩]

5. You will note that I have no intention of providing copies of the historical website and of whatever materials were or might've been there on my own cost ; if you honestly deemed any of it valuable I expect you made copies long ago -- god knows the pace of production has been sufficiently glacial to allow even the slowest of wgets time to catch up.

   If you have not, then by your own deeds and omissions you are manifestly in agreement with the forestated evaluation, a view you are not at liberty to change later on (and certainly not on the thin air of words alone). And while at it, to all the future "searchers of lost technologies of the forefathers" : do go out with the retard, you absolutely belong together. He truly ruined his own life through specifically this same form, the quest for putative nonsense as a procrastination technique. Exactly what you aim to do, too, and for the same reason : so as to have the ready excuse. The psychopathology is directly self-evident, "oh, I couldn't do my homework, I had to spend my time searching for clues to The Lost Fuckgoats" "what makes you think this is worth the time ?" "oh, nobody can know!!! it is lost!!! so nobody can evaluate if it's worth it or not!!!". It takes the mind of a nine year old to not perceive the transparency of that "so", seriously now. By all means, take Xrays of antique chips while your pizarro burns down, it'll work for you exactly as it worked for him, and it'll deliver to you exactly what it delivered to him. If that's what you want out of life, you will most definitely have it. [↩]

6. The sort of deranged fuck encountering difficulties digesting these simple facts is cordially invited to spend some time meditating upon the whys and wherefores porn was a billion dollar industry built on the strength of distributing depictions of men fucking women, not on the strenght of the trade in used condoms, howsoever "perfectly" used those condoms might've been.

   I get it, all sorta bois are really pissed off at the world, because what sort of false world is this that won't give them "delicious schnitzels" in trade for the used condoms (they used by themselves!). They've got a basementfull of 'em! Whatever. If they could understand why men want to watch women get it, they wouldn't be sitting in a basement filling condoms by themselves, cataloguing them and generally wasting their lives in the weirdest ways possible. But... they can't, manifestly, and so there it lays, I've no interest in and no connection to the matter. [↩]

7. So as to include the month of October. [↩]
8. Ideally we should be done with everything, including distribution of recovery to shareholders, by the end of the month. Watch this article for details, I don't intend to publish another but will either edit or comment here. [↩]
9. As detailed in the logs and comments, a further 0.055 BTC was produced through asset sales. [↩]
10. Management stock warrants hereby expire worthless. [↩]