@Five@slrpnk.net did not! He among a pretty broad consensus of other people was singing the praises of an earlier ceasefire, and claiming this was confirmation that Biden could have achieved one any time he wanted.

I appreciate that in your slander of me, you link to evidence that completely contradicts your statements. I hope that the dwindling group of people that gives you any credibility will check the receipts and understand what you represent.

You could feed your whole family with that much soup!

Don’t downplay it – it’s a whole $4! That’s a bowl of soup for all of your privacy. Until they appeal it, that is.

The speed of technological progress tends toward an exponential curve, and Frank Herbert understood and knew this, but wanted to write a serious medieval saga set in the distant future. The Butlerian Jihad was always a plot contrivance to explain why in the thousands of years of intergalactic civilization, human life is still recognizable to us, and still recognizable from their in-story ancestors.

But just because AI was treated as an enemy by fictional fascists, doesn’t mean it was good. Fascists are enemies to other fascists. It’s an ideology that is always seeking enemies, and will either invade outwards or purge inwards - but their enemies don’t need to be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ they only need to be ‘other.’

It can both be true that a technocratic class using thinking machines would have dominated the human race, and the force that prevented their rule is a theofascist eugenic autocracy. The theme Herbert I think would have appreciated his readers noticing is that there is no real difference between a crushing totalitarian dictatorship under an inhuman technocratic class, and a crushing totalitarian dictatorship under a charismatic leader and a religious cult.

The primary reason we decided you weren’t a good fit for SLRPNK wasn’t your ideas, but your chronic pattern of toxic behavior in advocating them. Bad moderation is not the only method of censorship; online bullying can make people disengage from a conversation in spite of arguing good points. I suspect you feel your actions are justified, and people have definitely been toxic to you.

The demographic we value most is people who use de-escalation in conflict and good faith discussion as tools to create a better world. As an anarchist, I know firsthand that these tools become more difficult to wield the father you stand from the rightward-sliding political median. We didn’t enjoy reversing your membership, especially since you were transparent about your identity in your application, which I respect and appreciate. I also feel you used non-SLRPNK alts for most of your fights, which is still inappropriate, but kind of a compliment. I’m happy you’ve found a home where you feel you belong.

Why organize a labor union to keep the tyrants from paying you poverty wages when you could just submit the name of the tyrant to the assassination market and let somebody take care of it?

The more unpopular you are as a human being, the shorter your expected lifespan, because the reward for you not existing would increase proportionally to how much of an asshole you were.

What are some ways that you can think of where a scheme like this could have undesirable results?

How big would a country need to be before it is too big, and what mechanism or entity would effectively enforce it from reaching or exceeding that size?

Bitcoin = Monero in your mind. They aren’t the same, not even close.

LOL. I understand they are very different entities.

One of the hilarious details I discovered while researching this is that according to the US Government Accountability Office report “Use of Online Marketplaces and Virtual Currencies in Drug and Human Trafficking” in 2022,

Representatives of two analytics firms and one exchange also noted that illicit actors use privacy coins less frequently, as they are more difficult to obtain and are supported by fewer exchanges compared to Bitcoin, making it difficult to convert funds to government-issued currency.

So whatever benefits Monero claims to have in protecting the privacy of illicit activities, the people who could face real time in jail don’t consider the benefits worth how extremely annoying it is to use.

What is Politics, and Why Should Anyone Give a $#&%?

Both the United States and the Soviet Union cracked down on organized labor. The corruption of the word ‘socialism’ was encouraged by both super-powers, one to falsely associate it with dictators and tyranny, and the other to claim its virtue for itself.

George Orwell wrote, “Rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand grenades are inherently democratic weapons.” Anarchists generally don’t oppose safe recreational drug use, and see addiction not as a criminal act but instead a public health issue. Historically anarchists have flirted ideologically with assassination, but the modern consensus is that the means and the ends of revolution are too closely related to embrace political murder as a tenet.

It sounds like you’re interested in becoming more politically literate. One question to ponder is if it may be moral for people to conspire to assassinate tyrants, is it also moral for people to organize a labor union to prevent tyrants from paying them poverty wages?

According to your definition, casinos and online gambling isn’t a scam, because what they do is well-defined. If I use ‘scam’ to mean a reliable way for the downtrodden to become even more downtrodden, or ‘bitcoin’ as a shorthand for cryptocurrency, telling me I’m wrong because you have a different definition of those words is not an impressive rhetorical feat. And you claim I’m the bad faith actor in this conversation.

And as soon as you were challenged about statements you made on-topic, you disappear. I welcome your retreat. I would choose not to have more conversations with people like you.

I was curious what claims about Monero you thought specifically were defensible. Thanks for the clarification.

1. maximizes privacy
2. prevents third parties from committing human rights violations
3. stops rent seeking
4. financial autonomy to the downtrodden
5. refuge of last resort

How does Monero (1) maximize privacy between people who can’t spend crypto directly and need to convert it to and from their national currency? How do you think this scheme would work in a privacy preserving way? We’re talking about a non-tech savvy undocumented worker in the US playing the role of Alice, and Bob is his subsistence farmer wife in rural Mexico.

At least you admit implicitly that there is no known deanonymization attack on Monero.

There is very little overlap between respected cryptography researchers and bitcoin developers. The chain between theory to implementation to practice is difficult enough for state actors to handle reliably. The history of Enigma, Type B, JN-25, soviet one-time pads, and modern schemes like DES, 2-DES, FEAL, KASUMI, and BassOMatic, suggest not only that encryption isn’t a guarantee, but conspiracies to keep a scheme popular long after it has been broken are common and widely successful.

I don’t know a deanonymization attack on Monero. If that’s all it took to make you feel Monero is secure, you’re in for trouble. Encrypted or not, every transaction is immutably stored in the blockchain and replicated in millions of times to any bad actor who wants a copy. Even if there was no currently known deanonymization attack, that would not mean that a deanonymization attack is impossible for everyone and for all time.

I also appreciate your implicit admission that using Monero in place of wire transfers by immigrants is so stupid as to be not worth defending.

I think you’ve gotten lost in the weeds. I didn’t come here to drop my 0-day on Monero.

I don’t know or care what legally-actionable claims are written on the side of the tin cans of authentic Monero purchased directly from the Monero factory. It matters what hucksters, con-artists, and true believers who are selling it claim. And considering the level of bullshit that fills the cryptocurrency world, demanding some rando meet your standards of proof in exchange for internet points comes off a little unhinged.

The most recent true believer claim is that the solution to Hispanic immigrant day laborers having their wire transfers being surveilled by the government is that they start using Monero. The reason that’s an absurd statement is obvious to almost anyone who has experience with immigrant communities, cryptocurrency, and/or reality.

One of the true claims you can make about Monero is that it is not traceable by people on a day laborer’s income. These are the targets of scams facilitated by Monero and other cryptocurrencies. If you’re a wealthy person who preys on desperate people, I guess Monero does what it says on the tin. But if you’re trying to reliably send your wages to family in a place without reliable internet and secured computer endpoints and your English and computer literacy isn’t great, Monero is one of many ways you can lose your shirt.

Yes. It is untraceable to the people who are harmed by it, yet traceable to the powerful actors from whom it claims to protect. Your claims that Monero is fit for opposing state-level actors originate from salespeople, not scientists.

You’re replying to my comment that Monero is a scam. Your assertion that I prove it is untraceable is a non sequitur.

As for Venezuela, yeah, it’s going about the same as dollarization went

It’s interesting you confused an article about the Trump-loving capitalist dictator of El Salvador with one about Venezuela.

The important thing about any cryptocurrency scam is that it can’t effectively be traced by the victims.

Meanwhile, you have only whitepapers on your side. No peer-reviewed journal has ever asserted Monero is untraceable. Meanwhile, there are some very smart people with a strong incentive to both test the ad-copy and while not breaking the illusion. Why are you so confident?

This completely murders the idea of a mining farm and completely murders the idea of being able to centralize in a place like that.

Does it? Why wouldn’t there be economies of scale and advantages of locating near cheap electricity for Monero miners? Why are a million shelf-CPUs quieter to cool than the same computing power in ASICs?

Why bitcoin is worse than a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme by Robert McCauley

Brazilian computer scientist Jorge Stolfi is one voice who has contended this. His view is based on the following observations:

1. Investors buy in the expectation of profits.
2. That expectation is sustained by the profits of those that cash out.
3. But there is no external source for those profits; they come entirely from new investments.
4. And the operators take away a large portion of the money.

All of this rings true true. But in calling bitcoin a Ponzi scheme, critics are arguably being too kind on two counts. First, bitcoin doesn’t have the same endgame as a Ponzi scheme. Second, it constitutes a deeply negative sum game from a broad social perspective.