• Steve@awful.systems
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        9 months ago

        On top of the libertarian agenda there is this gambling/betting agenda that is in the DNA of all this stuff. For example, immutability is a bet that the bad reasons for modifying something will always be more prominent than the good reasons. The reasons for modifying something in the future is an unanswerable question, but they’ve bet on an outcome. I remember reading the Arweave documentation about how they feel they can claim that it is a permanent storage solution based on tokenomics and all that shit. Just like the halvening, it’s a bet that the thing will exponentially increase in relevance, usefulness, importance etc. The bet is that more people are mining bitcoin because it is becoming more important for life. It’s like they’re so sure of the usefulness they never bother to talk about it, instead they talk about the nitty gritty around an imaginary world where the bet has paid off.

        It’s like picking numbers for a lotto ticket you’ll buy in 20 years time and spending the next 20 years planning how to properly manage all the money you will win.

        • gerikson@awful.systems
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          9 months ago

          Funnily enough, a big cheese in the early Bitcoin era is noted crazy person Luke-Jr, who released his own fork of a client that censored SatoshiDice because he is a sedevacantist Catholic who hates gambling.

            • gerikson@awful.systems
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              9 months ago

              I’m low-key fascinated by Luke-Jr’s craziness, but it’s kinda sad because apparently he has multiple kids.

              • he opposed “big blockers” (the proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size beyond 1MB) because he lives in rural Florida and has bad bandwidth. (The big blockers subsequently created “Bitcoin Cash”, tried to get it the ticket BCC, but did not succeed because that was used by scamcoin Bitcoin Connect. They also missed registering /r/BCH, which was instantly squatted on by anti-Bitcoin Cash people)
              • in the beginning of Covid he washed all fresh produce in bleach
              • he proposed Tonal as Bitcoin nomenclature: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tonal_Bitcoin (1 bitcoin-bong, anyone?)
              • he lost a lot of coins in a scam in early 2023: https://gerikson.com/m/2023/01/index.html#2023-01-02_monday_01

              Since BTC went mainstream these people just don’t have as much impact anymore.

              • Deborah@hachyderm.io
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                9 months ago

                honestly when you put it that way sedevacantist catholicism is completely on-brand. Lots of schism about weird ideological points that don’t matter and have no real world effect.

                Lots of the off-the-rails conspiracy weirdos make me sad. Even Yudkowsky makes me sad. I deeply resent that I know enough about sovereign citizens that I can’t just point and laugh, because they ruin their lives so much.

                  • Deborah@hachyderm.io
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                    9 months ago

                    Heh, “They can’t even be Catholic without being Protestant” is basically the same thing jewish twitter used to say about Edgy Online Atheists.

              • self@awful.systems
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                9 months ago

                he opposed “big blockers” (the proposal to increase the Bitcoin block size beyond 1MB) because he lives in rural Florida and has bad bandwidth

                it’s always fucking Florida

                there’s something quaint about the pure crankishness behind blocking an important change to a global network you think will revolutionize everything because you might not be able to mine at home with your 1 Mbit of shitty Comcast cable internet and for whatever reason don’t want to move into even a cheap data center. just shitty mining on a shitty connection forever and fuck everybody else. when ex-crypto folks tell me the block size decision was when crypto got too stupid for them, I didn’t imagine it’d be this level of stupid

        • Steve@awful.systems
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          9 months ago

          I know it’s obvious. I’m just marveling about a subject I’ve avoided thinking about for a good amount of time