Status Updates From Attack of the 50 Foot Block...

automagically synced from shelvd.io ✨

The price will rise and fall dizzyingly, though realising it as actual money will still be strangely problematic; exchanges will continue to be hacked on a monthly basis. People will continue to lament “if only I’d bought in 2011, I’d be rich!” – though if they had bought in 2011, they’d have lost it in Mt. Gox. Cooler heads will wonder just how much longer this can be kept going.

At least tulips are pretty.

“The good bits of blockchain are not original, and the original bits of blockchain turn out not to be much good.”

“‘You can replace the term “distributed ledgers” with “shared Excel sheets” in about 90 percent of talk about blockchain and finance.’
– Tracy Alloway”

“This illustrated the final major problem with smart contracts: CODE IS LAW until the whales are in danger of losing money.”

“The blockchain was ‘immutable,’ so they changed how it was interpreted. The “impossible” bailout had happened.”

Since cryptocurrency enthusiasts had already self-selected for gullibility, the very first smart contracts they wrote were chain letters, lotteries and automatic Ponzi schemes. These ably demonstrated «the requirement for coding correctly, first time, every time

The eventual fix […] demonstrates the other problem with smart contracts: the “immutable” system containing the smart contract was suddenly considered changeable the moment the big boys risked losing enough money.

“‘My immutable unforgeable cryptographically secure blockchain record proving that I have 10,000 pounds of aluminum in a warehouse is not much use to a bank if I then «smuggle the aluminum out of the warehouse through the back door.’”

Yet another of many things tech fails to grasp

The purpose of law is not to achieve philosophical or mathematical truth, but to take a messy reality and achieve workable results that society can live with.

“Smart contracts work on the wrong level: they run on facts and not on human intent – but legal contracts are a codification of human intent. Human intent is inexact, but contracts assume they will be running on human minds in the context of human institutions, for human purposes.”

“History doesn’t repeat, but it does «rhyme. One of the most famous share offerings from the South Sea Bubble of 1719-1720 was ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’”

Everyone had assumed that “Dread Pirate Roberts” had the most painstaking operational security imaginable. It turned out Ulbricht was protected by nothing more than an impenetrable shield of narcissism, and an apparent belief that he was too smart and virtuous to be caught.

Got to the Ross Ulbricht part of the story. Holy shit

“Wikipedia: Dunning-Kruger effect. From which another name for bitcoins, 'Dunning-Krugerrands.'"

“Burnt investors tracked him down. They found his name, they found where he lived, they even found his business that had closed at the same time. They initially had some trouble convincing the authorities not only that this was really money, but that they had given it to some guy on an Internet forum called “Pirate” on the strength of him saying “sure, I’ll double your bitcoins, no worries.”

In other news, Hailey Welch, aka Hawk Tuah Girl, has now been gone for 2 weeks and hasn’t dropped any episodes of her Talk Tuah podcast since “going to sleep” after rug-pulling millions in a memecoin (from Twitter)

Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions.

Pure commodities – gold and silver – haven’t done the job of money well for a few hundred years, and Bitcoin wants to be money but was set up to work like a commodity

The Bitcoin ideology propagated through two propositions:

if you want to get rich for free, take on this weird ideology;
don’t worry if you don’t understand the ideology yet, just keep doing the things and you’ll get rich for free!