Whites going ape for Blacks in America -- Re: Soros' BLM

[Karl]

Punk, do you know how often the cypherpunks archive is updated?  I
seem to be disconnected from the list; didn't get the last archived
email yet, and recent posts aren't showing up.

On Aug 4, 2020 2:20 PM, "Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0" <punks at tfwno.gf> wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Aug 2020 17:50:28 -0400
> Karl <gmkarl at gmail.com> wrote:
> > No tone cues for sarcasm on the internet.
>
>         So to sum up, James is an arch-right-winger trying to pose as some kind of 'libertarian'. He's the typical corporate apologist, pretending in typical randroid fashion that "big business are amerikkkas' most oppresed minority".

Many people seem to believe this.

> 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.  It was a very minority view until he was
elected; mostly held by rural demographics near major business
enterprises in the areas I'd visited.

> > I know that all bitcoin transactions are public,
> >
> > Right.  That aids censorship resistance.  You can put things on a
> > blockchain that nobody can delete, change, or even hide.
>
>
>         Transactions being public doesn't aid censorship resistance. Rather, it's what makes censorship possible.

Does my next reply respond to this?

> > 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

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.

> > and I know that 'miners' get to decide which transactions are included in
> > > the chain.
> >
> >
> > Partly true.  _Any one_ miner can accept a transaction for it to get
> > included in the chain,
>
>         yeah, so all miners would have to cooperate to censor a transaction. But such cooperation isn't far fetched. Also, if the majority of miners become censors, then the network would be censored most of the time. You would have to wait for your transaction to be mined by a 'good' miner, but that would take a lot longer.

This is actually already the situation in many cases.  I sometimes
have to wait for a number of blocks to be mined before my transactions
are accepted when I don't use the "special message" trick.  This has
been getting better for me, interestingly.

> >> 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?

> > The 'distributed' reducing problem reflects a situation where the corporate
> > and government spookies attacked the development and mining communities,
> > halting the expected curve of software development as demand increased.
>
>         Unless you change the proof of work algorithm,

Right: this was the plan but landed in forks instead of the main chain.

> 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.

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

Blockchains still show a single programmer can change the whole world,
by stepping into the digital cultural spaces that people leave
unaddressed, and automating them.

> > It
> > is an incredibly hard fight for them because cryptocurrencies are
> > incredibly lucrative and widely supported.
>
>
> > and that the supposed creator of bitcoin wasn't bothered by mining being
> > > done in the NSA datacenter.
> >
> >
> > This would be because the protocol was designed to be robust in the face of
> > arbitrary groups mining.  The NSA has to play by the rules of the network,
> > or they are kicked out and ignored automatically.
>
>         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
>
>         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"
>
>         ...you know, like amazon-NSA.

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

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.

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

> > 5. So, people are increasingly financially motivated to protect the
> > essentials of the protocol, and many fixes have gone in over the years.  If
> > fixes ever stop completely, somebody loses a lot of money and takes action
> > on it.
> >
> > You need to run a "full node" to participate in the censorship-free
> > network.  And due to the harm to the communities the situation does slowly
> > get a little more confusing and a little more delicate.
>
>
>         even if you run a full node and  have direct access to the 'true' chain, miners still decide what gets in the blocks.

But see "special message" trick above.

>
>         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.

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.

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.  All the people who
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.

>
> > It is still impossible enough to erase things on the Bitcoin blockchain,
> > 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.

> > that if you could afford it you could broadcast a video of all the
> > world leaders having a naked orgy and it would never go away.
>
>
> >
> > > On Mon, Aug 3, 2020, 1:25 PM Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 <punks at tfwno.gf>
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > On Mon, 3 Aug 2020 21:12:40 +1000
> > > > > jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > -BLM support from EVERY MAJOR CORPORATION ON THE PLANET
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >         That's your beloved capitalist libertarian heros James. You
> > > > > wouldn't be complaining about the actions of the Capitalist Masters of
> > > the
> > > > > Universe would you?
> > > > >
> > >
> >
> > K
> >
> > -
> >
> > There is proof inside many peoples' electronics.  Proof that a marketing
> > group would contract development of a frightening virus.  A virus that
> > responds to peoples' keystrokes and browsing habits, and changes what
> > people see on their devices.  A virus that alters political behavior en
> > masse, for profit.
>