sennight

Ah, yeah I'm familiar with it - a PoW scheme, where the work is memory cell wear. I feel for anyone who missed the incredibly short period of time where bitcoin gpu mining pools were anything but distributed space heaters... but I don't see a future in trying to chase that dragon. At least it isn't a mindless hardfork cash grab, or an unintentional joke like that time that communist redditors came out with a coin that would randomly delete balances at rest.

> There are proof systems that are not truly Proof of Work and are also not Proof of Stake.

Got any examples in mind? Because the only stuff that I can think of besides the two are convoluted Rube Goldberg methods of concealing what is actually PoS. Take any one of the goofy token based protein folding style coins as an example. Unless you are thinking of some kind of premined fedcoin, which is closer to a giftcard than a cryptocurrency.

It has been a long time since I last debated this stuff, so it is funny to see the same talking points from 10 years ago.

1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon, because you'd need some way of representing stake that is just impossible. As far as the whole "waste" complaint: relative to what? I've never seen a comparative study that included the entirety of the existing financial system. The academic papers I have seen complaining about bitcoin were full of comically bad errors: using geolocation to try and pin mining operations to nearest power plants, estimating hashes per watt based on FPGA or first gen ASIC miners, etc.

2) Bitcoin volatility has been going down every year, which makes sense given wider participation. Volatility is obviously different from price.

3) Bitcoin has had the capability for offchain transactions a long time now - using smart contracts with onchain settlement, so this really isn't a real concern any longer.

Well you definitely have a very abnormal way of coming to it. I've encountered people who came to it for the pure love of technology - but they usually gravitate towards one of the shitcoins because they actually harbor a bit of greed and feel they "missed the boat".

> What's dumb as shit is the idea of basing the future of finance on it.

As I said, I burned through my convert zeal a long time ago... but your situation does have me curious. Do you have any formal experience with the backends making up the global financial system? Because I do, and it blows my mind that anyone trusts it at all. The US has, in recent years, proven itself to be such an awful steward of the global reserve currency that it is at the point now where multiple militarily weak states are openly discussing replacing the petrodollar with something else. A few years ago that would have resulted in a coincidental horrific end for them, but after the naked weaponization of the international financial system against Iran and then Russia... well the end is very near. All that is to say that it is now clear that everyone now knows a fiat currency controlled by a single interest makes a poor global reserve. Combine that with the likely future in which software agents need to directly handle money in order to pay their own bills... and meatspace money won't work, because humans are thieves with access to fraudulent chargebacks. What alternative could there be besides a crypto currency? I'm not saying it will be bitcoin, because there have already been several fedcoin lead balloons floated, but bitcoin has thrived in an incredibly non-permissive environment (economic, technological and political) for a long time now.

Is the Mozilla Foundation still a politically active sideshow? That is what made me switch, I could put up with the performance gap - I couldn't put up with their plugin moderation and activities in the whole "combating disinformation" sphere.

Huh, everything about what you said seems off to me.

How did you anonymously fund your account at Mt Gox? Because I only remember them taking bank wires. I don't remember them ever having any kind of payment provider that would have accepted anything like pre-paid Visa cards, and in any case: by the time btc was at $15 - there was only one money transmitter (that wasn't a bank) allowing btc related transactions. I know this because I was debanked by two banks and had my paypal account suspended around that time.

How did you come to learn about bitcoin, this "dumb as shit" concept? Buying drugs on Silk Road? Because most of the early people came to it from reading the white paper after seeing it posted on the cipherpunk mailing list, or on a board discussing Austrian-economics/anarcho-capitalism... for those people it was a political act - not an investment (as you seem to view it).

> Crypto has become a very polarizing topic with people...

Certain people. I was involved from the beginning, and most of the OGs just shrug at the present day noise - the convert zeal being long exhausted by all the complaints about how PoW makes Mother Gaia cry. The people who have a crazy level of investment are the tech journalists that took very public positions badmouthing bitcoin. That is probably also true of anyone else who can't resist calculating how much their mistake cost them when they compared bitcoin to beanie babies at $150.

> ...which certainly needs to happen for it to have a future too, but governments...

Firing first in a duel, global economy style - that is why the foot dragging has been so protracted.

I'd take malice over stupidity - because at least it can be anticipated. If you were being charged with a crime you didn't commit, would you prefer that half the jury believe in ghosts and flying saucers - or a smaller fraction just be plotting on you?

... and this is why it is disconcerting that anyone else has any amount of influence in your life under a democracy. Half of everyone has a below average IQ, and many of those on the other side of the curve are just awful.

Delusion on whose part? That was an explicitly stated objective. It has been a long known and well documented fact that Ukraine has an abundance of neo-nazis, a magnitude like nowhere else. So much so that the ADL had to run interference with the goofiest defense: "All those pictures of captured Ukrainian soldiers with swastikas? Ironic race-hate... they're just trolling guyz!"

> ...Russians planned a few weeks to take.

According to who? Are you intentionally demonstrating how silly pro-Ukrainian propaganda is? Russia made the objectives very clear from the beginning: demilitarization and denazification. I don't think anyone aware of that could come away thinking "Yeah, so obviously they expect to accomplish that in a few weeks."

You think it would be profitable to source a spec similar screen, market it, backdoor it, exfiltrate in a detection evasive manner what started out as a 3.5MB wide data stream... and build out the infrastructure to receive hundreds of thousands of backchannel connections? Really?

I would also love for you to bring to market a price competitive replacement screen that is somehow backdoored. I don't know why you think that would be profitable at all, but I welcome the price pressure.

You are forgetting about the phased nulling. Military GPS has been including jammer detection in the firmware for a long time. I remember my handheld unit constantly annoying me anytime the IED jammer (which was waaaay more than 1 watt of rf) went active... 2005ish - it would simply mask the signal coming from that direction and continue to provide positioning data.