Hi, Note: I am not set up with pgp, so this message may be corrupt. On Wed, Aug 5, 2020, 2:58 PM Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

On Tue, 4 Aug 2020 1 hi5:41:34 -0400 Karl wrote:

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Punk, do you know how often the cypherpunks archive is updated?

usually in real time, or a few minutes.

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I seem to be disconnected from the list; didn't get the last archived email yet, and recent posts aren't showing up.

sometimes the confirmation messages get lost, but your messages are posted to the list anyway.

I've been having the opposite. I'm getting confirmation messages, but many threads haven't been showing up in the archives. The last email I have from this thread in the archives was https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2020-August/081663.html : none of our bitcoin history emails are showing up for me, but I have acknowledgement emails for them. I emailed Greg a few days ago but no reply. Maybe it wasn't received or I got his email address wrong. Below messages are related to politics and blockchains. Blockchains provide more reliable message delivery than email.

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But NOW he's complaining that his dear 'meritocratic' big businesses are siding with BLM. Which in turn tells you that BLM is just controlled opposition and which makes James' position even more ridiculous.

The businesses are siding with BLM due to the effort of thousands of american activists pressuring people to notice what's up in the flag of violence against blacks, if it matters. It seems something else may have mysteriously helped, too.

The position you describe is in line with Trump, who lumps the mainstream with the left.

Not sure what position you're referring to. You mean my observation that US govcorp is pretending to be 'anti racist'?

Kind of a merging and mutual learning between some fringe and right wing behaviors that started before trump was elected, and then accelerated with his election. It's meaningful for me because some of the professors who spoke out against Trump's more oppressive policies experienced targeted bullying by misled people with some similarity to what I experienced after taking action against international energy pipelines and large banks.

It was a very minority view until he was

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elected; mostly held by rural demographics near major business enterprises in the areas I'd visited.

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You could also use cryptography to make those things private, and mixing layers to increase your anonymity, but that's not what I mean to worry about here.

But that's the thing. The more public information there is, the easier it becomes for censors to decide which transactions to reject.

Not with full nodes: the network is invalid if any information at all is missing. But yes, you need a miner to accept it, and you could be identified, posting it

the bare minimum is something like monero where amounts, senders and recipients are hidden(at least in theory). A system like monero leaks less information than bitcoin so it makes it harder for miners to censor.

Zcash has a messaging app, too. Reference client is written in node, which can scare some hackers away if it isn't ported to another language yet.

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There's a way to push miner acceptance: you can make future transactions require old ones. Like, you can post a special message, and then buy or sell a product in a way that the purchase only goes through if the "special message" is also mined. Once that money is spent for something else, it is required that _all_ preceding transactions go through, for the entire lifetime of the blockchain. Censorship is actually incredibly hard if the protocol is used properly.

is that something that works with BTC? do you have a reference?

Yes, that works with most chain protocols including btc. Apparently because the usual issue is fee related not content related, google says this technique is called "child pays for parent". Here's an article on its use at coinbase, but I haven't read the article: https://blog.coinbase.com/improving-bitcoin-reliability-through-child-pays-f...

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I also know that mining isn't too 'distributed'

What's relevent is that it is still distributed enough to defend information in the face of a nation state adversary.

We'll see...

This has already been shown to my satisfaction repeatedly. What would demonstrate it to you?

I mean, we'll see how well cryptocurrencies fare when attacked by govcorp. So far they have been tolerated or even encouraged.

In USA they were severely discouraged and attacked for many years. I was briefly in the development team of the blockchain qora before the dev team was dispersed after publishing a nonworking client. This happened after I posted publically that the system made deletion of information impossible.

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bitcoin mining is going to be centralized because of economic forces. The underlying economic system is pretty centralized and controled by govcorp, so only big mining operations can be 'profitable'.

This is another thing the devs seemed to realize too late that would be changed if there were focused, productive harmony in their community. They made Jim's error of believing money was held by the people, not the leaders, and better capitalism would provide freedom.

Some developers may have made a mistake, while others are actually happy with the current situation...

A lot of overlap there. We are all still learning that billionaires don't care about money.

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Instead they produced a mess of cryptoanarchic millionaires which is still quite helpful.

well, I don't think they are too helpful. Even roger ver who has somewhat clear ideas is more ultimately more concerned about all his money than freedom .

I guess yeah. I'm not sure who finances Steem, but I think it managed to form a smidge of improved communication between techheads and oppression, just slightly. Many of these new blockchain businesspeople are against cover-up and have a technology to prevent it. Doesn't mean they don't get covered up and stigmatized.

Blockchains still show a single programmer can change the whole world,

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by stepping into the digital cultural spaces that people leave unaddressed, and automating them.

we'll see. Also automation isn't good per se.

Yeah automation is deadly. This list is mostly programmers. I see that bitcoin already has changed the world, by trending financial distribution and economic discourse farther from government control.

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My comment was somewhat obscure. What I meant is that

'satoshi' wasn't worried about mining being centralized...and wasn't worried about 'scaling' either. Here's the pertinent bit

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https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

"as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left

more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware"

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...you know, like amazon-NSA.

Nice pairing of names. This is just because Satoshi was making the Jim fallacy I mentioned above.

Question is, was that a honest mistake, or part of the 'design'?

Both. We're referencing a political issue. People raised in capitalism believe it to mean freedom. Within it, it can be, which moves capitalist power around a lot. For people who don't value money and can influence that, there's a lot of space the people who do value it are not worrying about at all.

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It takes a very long time for bitcoins to merge with amazon-nsa. They don't like them: the dollar seems more predictable and familiar, and the dollar makes it much easier for them to keep secrets.

The fact that bitcoin's supply can't be manipulated makes it unappealing to govcorp. However, other bitcoin features aren't as governmnt unfriendly as that one. Bitcoin as a surveillance tool with unerasable records is something that govcorp likes.

I like how it surveils everyone equally in that permanent record. Govcorp has a lot of secrets. It is easy for a skilled developer to add privacy to blockchains comparable to other private systems if needed, see monero, zcash.

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2. The design is such that censoring it e.g. by miner collusion also lets people steal money 3. There are more creative thieves than creative censors 4. When the protocol is attacked, it becomes obvious on the network:

1. Bitcoin is hugely valuable and is designed to rise in value exponentially the

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whole network is told

the protocol doesn't allow double spending, but it certainly allows 'discrimination'.

I don't know what you mean here. Economic discrimination and miner

collusion?

yes, miners can even mine empty blocks if they want and sitll be paid for it(block reward).

Mmm it doesn't sound like you have a good handle of the protocol. The design is such that nobody does that. Block rewards shift exponentially towards being proportional to included transactions as years pass. It takes a long time to mine a block.

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Look at ethereum. The chain was 'forked' and the majority of

people went to the chain that had some 'bad' transactions reverted. Same thing could happen to bitcoin.

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This required agreement from the entire dev team and is exactly how blockchains die. Note that ethereum is big enough that the original chain is still easy to acquire in its entirety. Bitcoin is much bigger.

yeah the original chain is likely to survive. My point is that it may be possible for govcorp to take an existing system and force a mahority of people to accept 'new rules'.

Yeah, they've been pushing that stuff, as could possibly be my references following.

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Disruptive forking has already happened to bitcoin with bch, bsv, etc. It doesn't mean any information is lost, though: each one of those chains has the entire history prior to the fork.

True. But those forks were not really attacks but rather competition.

Aren't these exactly what you describe above, with people deciding on new rules without agreement as rational collective decisions reduce alongside negative media etc?

All the people who

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trusted the blockchain to preserve something, in bitcoin and ethereum prior to their unexpected forks, have that trust still honored, without any regard to the content: except for the one person whose permanent impact was hacking the ethereum community itself.

True.

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It is still impossible enough to erase things on the Bitcoin

blockchain,

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for now,

True, for now. On the other hand, look at all the cancer that grows around bitcoin like coinbase-mosad-GCHQ-NSA. Bitcoin 'exchanges' are worse than banks.

Economic war is happening. But bitcoin still has friendly communities who will trade with you in person for cash. Most of the exchanges appear run by millionaire cryptoanarchists, learning business and the intense difficulties the situation entails.

I don't think any big exchange is run by anarchists. On the othre hand, something like coinbase is run by literal US govt agents.

I believe those two sets to overlap. Cryptocurrencyophiles call themselves cryptoanarchists but they are generally pro-capitalism and pro-blockchain-businesses. Many many cryptoanarchy business out there, see smart contracts, but often small yeah. The first exchange, mtgox, was run by a guy from the Bitcoin community; I wasn't around much after that.