Blake

Power corrupts. Unless it’s powering #Bitcoin. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-government-imf-had-wanted-100-peso-devaluation-2023-08-17/

WorldCoin: Where finding dead bodies or killing people unlocks all their wealth for instant transfers for bounty hunters. Modern treasure hunting!! What a time to be alive.

Discussions online typically live elsewhere to their primary source today. A few reasons why include who controls the primary source, how long it may be around, where/who hosts the primary content, and in what context is the discussion happening - perhaps different aspects/threads are of interest to different groups. With Nostr the primary content isn’t tied to a primary host or controller/moderator. It’s a published referential event. Discussions can occur directly in the same ecosystem. No need for bespoke external platforms comment sections like news articles, blogs, discord, forums, hacker news, etc. to host commentary themselves; the content and discussion can co-exist. That’s a truely unique and ultimately the winning model. What will still need development is how to ingest or navigate or collate or filter or ingest the discussions - as it’s now lumped into a single pool of inter-referencing discussion. One approach is to skin the discussion into views and effectively rebuild those external platform discussions directly on top of Nostr - tweaking views to suit. Other approaches will develop over time.

Reminder: Cloudflare is a man in the middle, and decrypts all traffic and re-encrypts it using it’s own certificate. Sometimes this is ok, for example Nostr events are effectively public, and relays can prevent DDOS. However it’s important to understand that the green certificate saying valid cert and encrypted in browsers does not mean private or 100% secure or true end-to-end without ease dropping. Their ‘malware detection’ capability is more likely there for dual purpose surveillance. If you mature and roll out systems that mass spy on your population, flipping the switch from passive to active is easy. If I was the government, I’d pay for a few (secret) contracts.

“End to End Encryption” is just marketing without having significant and deliberate tampering detection mechanism. Examples include secretly swapping out a certificate/key for an identity to middlemen, private key leakage, changes in code to specific safety checks or tampering protection mechanisms, or changes in forward secrecy pre-generated keys, etc. It would be nice if we had a way to better detect these types of changes and make it very obvious to the identity. As they happen and as part of updates. It would be nose to have a trusted host OS that could help validate.

People seem to assume a single AGI. I’d expect multiple. And for them each to be their greatest enemy.. not humans. That’s way off. What isn’t is ML used to manipulate humans - with greater control and less effort than current manipulators (media, propaganda, studies, social, etc). To change culture you need to bring open people into a new established culture — or.. You need a journey of 10,000 smaller ‘truths’ that you lead people on a journey of acceptance to assimilate them. Some adopt sooner than others. Governments and media - and more recently ’social groups/media’ - have learned this. It’s why history can be rewritten, maps changed, schools curriculum updated, people can believe they will die from something that is statically very rare, and this time will be different or better.. that ‘they’ (in power) learned a lesson or something; or worse, know what they are doing. The risk of technology is always abuse. And the role of government is to remain in power at all costs. Control culture and you control the near-term future.

Australia has 65,000 police officers. Many are murderers. Per 100,000 population, it wouldn’t be hard to argue (I have no hard data to share), that there are more murders per 100,000 in the active police force than the general population. What a successful institution - and one wonders why people fear and mistrust the police? https://www.itv.com/news/2023-07-20/officer-who-tasered-95-year-old-allegedly-said-bugger-it-before-firing

It’s important to understand that a small decrease in inflation _growth_ doesn’t mean a reduction in current or future prices compared to the previous value of money. It just means it’s not getting as bad as fast (alleged deceleration) - by that metric which is most certainly gamed and inaccurate. Prices will never return to previous values. That’s how inflation works and run away inflation takes off. https://twitter.com/ITVNewsPolitics/status/1681686884714414081?s=20

The reason why large corporate fines don’t work, is because the legal cost to fight them is a fraction of a potential fine halving the amount or the delayed payment value for decades that decreases its real cost. Simply put, larger and larger fines do not work to prevent or disincentivise behaviours that in the current system are punished by court settled damages and fines. The cost to fight damages legally is far far smaller than the likely savings by fighting. (E.g a $5B fine can become $2.5B with a 20 year delay on payment, with legal costs far below that). Why does this matter, it’s means there is a practical cap on how large fines can effectively become and we’ve hit it. It means that legal costs are much much smaller than the cost to not fight large fines - effectively making the original fines worth far far less than intended - and hence the actual punishment far far less significant. We will need another mechanism to replace or augment fines if we actually intend to have a mechanism to punish bad actors (corporations). Fines alone are broken. Limiting ability to sell product, criminal liability, forced company shutdowns/split-ups/receiverships, etc are all possible extensions. I don’t have an opinion on best approaches as yet.

Stock markets, budgets, funding, salaries, rental, house prices, fuel, travel, education, (even Bitcoin,) etc will all continue to be ‘all time highs’ - which isn’t a measure of growth or success; it’s a measure of less scarcity and greater dilution. It’s simply a sneaky wealth transfer, away from individuals.

What has truly stagnated is our ability to propose and collaborate on new and better systems - new political, governmental, financial, social, etc. the broken ones hold fast to protect themselves like a fortifying parasite, while the competition dies out or trails it’s ability to ‘catch up’ - it’s too slow. Definitely progress on the fringes and in small pockets - yet it’s worth pondering for a while why the above happened and what’s next? I link it to broken systems where incentives are wrong and bad entities have armour and too big to fail properties, the fact the system’s own protection mechanism largely sits on top of being too large + complex + intertwined for any alternative approach’s adoption strategy to be cost or time effective. Coupled with a significant over bloated legal system that makes much of what could be innovated gray or illegal - an example being private communities and roadblocks to their experimentation and existence. My pain point is the effort and time to exhaust these horribly conceived systems is now a frame of centuries - when it could (read: should) be decades. During the past few hundred years - it was only decades… and we’ve since built a nightmare that refuses to evolve.

Have global bio-labs tightened access and security / contamination procedures - and ideally reporting of accidents or early reports of contamination leaks? A sane modern journalistic system would be focusing on monitoring this non-stop until results - regardless of if Covid was a lab leak… we obviously need controls due to the very obvious risks of playing with fire.

“Our main new result is to show how to securely combine the techniques used in FROST and SPRINT, allowing one to build a threshold Schnorr signing protocol that (i) is secure and robust without synchrony assumptions (like SPRINT), (ii) provides security even with an unlimited number of presignatures, and (assuming unused presignatures are available) signing requests can be processed concurrently with minimal latency (like FROST), (iii) achieves high throughput (like SPRINT), and (iv) achieves optimal resilience.” https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1019

Government currencies are subprime.

Fiat: The balloon 🎈 economy circa 1900/2000.

They system was setup to (have high control over) extract wealth from its people, yet it’s sold as a way to stabilise an economy - yet it always seems to be out of control? And accelerating in frequency and volatility? #Bitcoin will become more stable and reliable than global fiat averages - and that will be the final tipping point. And by stable I mean downward volatility and loss of value. The reason why index funds work so well (lower risk to reward, especially in a relative sense to the market) is because you back the largest N with highest growth - now imagine that exists across global fiat currencies. The best growth regions will buy/invest more, while the slower/stagnating will sell - however gainers are larger than decliners in relative value. https://www.itv.com/news/2023-07-07/hunt-downplays-tax-cuts-odds-conceding-calming-inflation-is-tougher-than-feared