cazalla: asciilifeform, as much as i appreciate the translation (my primary school teacher died on mh17), it's a bit of a stretch for qntra to publish it as bitcoin news
decimation: thestringpuller: you want to ssh to your wallet?
assbot: Logged on 25-10-2014 03:56:49; asciilifeform: the correct solution is that (now unix-only) turdcoind will listen on a tty. serial tty.
Adlai: now that's an interesting hypothesis to test: a bot lurks and tracks "shortest path" to each past message, then records when i link it as opposed to somebody else links it to me
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: 0.5.3 and earlier have wallets, and all the concomittant braindamage... << the wallet code oughn't be snipped outright, but corralled. for later porting to msdos.
Adlai is exponentially more likely to have read a log entry, according to the shortest path from the present moment back in time to the target entry, where b-a.com links are weighted roughly the same as simply reading backwards
cazalla: Adlai, i read the logs daily, just yet to finish today
cazalla: thestringpuller, not up to date on logs so no idea what this conversation is about yet
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: yes, nominated for consideration on qntra
Adlai: while people might not treat people as interchangeable, dama fortuna does. "shit happens", especially in warzones... is the revelation in this article supposed to be surprising?
Adlai: the article i linked looks just at confirmed transaction count, which is a narrow metric of all the stuff happening across the bitcoin network
assbot: Logged on 15-11-2014 02:49:52; mircea_popescu: Adlai afaik there was never in the entire history of bitcoin proposed some sort of credible / evidenced based interepretation of wtf it does.
mircea_popescu: "Despite being drowned in graceful donations and membership fees, they just keep piling new and new code without proper specification and proper testing, making mistakes or even forks inevitable and thus providing cover for abominable interests."
mircea_popescu: much like strippers and whores pay for their place of work, don't get paid by the landlord.
mircea_popescu: like, gavin et all, should pay a daily fee to be allowed into the amusement park where they pretend like they matter
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes the sort of "programmers" that "add features" should actually be charged to go to work.
Adlai: people aren't interchangeable, but shoes (and artifacts of their ilk) are increasingly produced and repaired in an interchangeable manner
mircea_popescu: there isn't some sort of "us" that could just as well be a standin for any of us.
asciilifeform: whole point of the anecdote.
mircea_popescu: Adlai: this roman doesn't seem to care much for his friends' feet. perhaps the shoe's pinch points would bother them too, if they were to walk long enough in the same shoes? <<< you know your crowd-* obsession is at some level based on the fundamentally evil notion that people are interchangeable.
ben_vulpes: for the first time ever my mpoe holdings are underwater
mircea_popescu: Adlai afaik there was never in the entire history of bitcoin proposed some sort of credible / evidenced based interepretation of wtf it does.
ben_vulpes: Adlai: if anything, i'd have expected a surge as those who held mpoe bought more to balance their crypto holdings while accumulating more btc
Adlai: note that i'm asking less "why did mpoe drop" and more "what evidence supports a correlation as the explanation for the temporal coincidence?"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: except! in the case of the 1990s alt.tasteless 'golden turd award.' <<< anything good in there ?
ben_vulpes: many legs to the trade
Adlai: so, why would they need to dump mpoe to boost btc?
mircea_popescu: undata you don't understand. siberia is a huge space, full of minerals they can't access because ice.
PeterL: doesn't russia pretty much have as much oil as they want right now anyway? why do they need an excuse to grab more?
mircea_popescu: <undata> if I were russia, I'd wait for the US to go balls deep into the middle east again, and then I'd grab some of the north pole's oil, <<< obviously, you're not russia.
mircea_popescu: <nubbins`> anyone else find it mildly interesting that the last 5 chars in deed ID of jurov's signed treasurer's contract are "urovj"? << it's in the logs.
undata: and I'd most certainly try to help stir up whatever particular brand of shit the americans can't resist in the middle east
undata: if I were russia, I'd wait for the US to go balls deep into the middle east again, and then I'd grab some of the north pole's oil, and whatever I wanted in eastern ukraine, at least
undata: seems like the US and Russia are gradually building support for a very large war
undata: asciilifeform: the usgov can tag its own pentagon with a missile in broad daylight
undata: these events serve as fine propaganda tools no matter what for both sides
Adlai: it's considerably shorter than the usual legalese, but just for starters, they could have separate terms for all the paid cruft, and leave the free service simple
undata: asciilifeform: the strange thing to me: it doesn't matter at all what actually happened
asciilifeform wasn't there, didn't watch, cannot swear to it
asciilifeform: either 'google' or mircea_popescu
nubbins`: anyone else find it mildly interesting that the last 5 chars in deed ID of jurov's signed treasurer's contract are "urovj"?
undata: asciilifeform: because unintentionally they're undermining their own existence by existing in the first place
undata: mircea_popescu: regarding the NSA conspiracy, it's amusing, but doesn't seem likely that they'd undermine fiat intentionaly
ben_vulpes: bitcoin is the coin that changed the world but that doesn't mean the first try doesn't sink in heavy storms
ben_vulpes: leather over wood prehistoric thinger?
ben_vulpes: currach is the word i was looking for
ben_vulpes: no desire to tax the poor leaky boat
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes why the sleep ?
ben_vulpes: hardly groundbreaking. just tiptoeing around, because...enthusiasm kills the sapper.
ben_vulpes: this abomination is what's edging my copy of 0.5.3 up to the wedge point: http://pastebin.com/itWYUk9f
ben_vulpes: i don't have a blockchain that wedges yet, nor have i reproduced the wedging point
mircea_popescu: basically there'
ben_vulpes: Adlai: additionally, i'm scripting the approach to the wedge point so that i can reproduce both the wedge and it not happening trivially with git bisect and other scripts
ben_vulpes: the story behind its selection is pretty amusing and may need to be revisited.
ben_vulpes: 0.5.3 is just a not unreasonable starting point for the project.
ben_vulpes: 0.5.3 and earlier have wallets, and all the concomittant braindamage like "reindex"
ben_vulpes: reverifying the blockchain is something else entirely.
ben_vulpes: joecool: "reindexing" is something that gavin's fork does to find all of the transactions relevant to addresses in your wallet in a given blockchain.
ben_vulpes: Adlai: git bisect is actually the plan
Adlai envisions a method of automatically sussing out the wedge point, but it requires the use of automation tools...
ben_vulpes: thestringpuller: i'm still inching my blockchain to wedging
ben_vulpes: but if you're going to hack on it, start with the 0.5.3 dist at f9beb4d9.org, apply asciilifeform's "chicken" patch, and then yours on top of that.
thestringpuller: "There are no infinite loops in Ethereum because cycles cost currency and there is a finite amount of currency."
ben_vulpes: (albeit poorly at any of them individually)
ben_vulpes: the preference of "the community" for something that sorta-works across a broad spectrum of use cases
ben_vulpes: kinda why the open source ownership of satoshi's codebase failed so dramatically.
joecool: asciilifeform: i see, what exactly has been happening? were people expecting gavin to crap out a reference eventually or just keep adding BIP's and pile on the crap?
nubbins`: np, may our day in the sun come
asciilifeform: at the moment - we don't have a reference.
asciilifeform: joecool: i don't believe that the current participants in turdatron really agree on what the ultimate end product should be (e.g., something like what conformal has, or a hardware implementation - what i want, etc.) but we do agree that a reference implementation is necessary before it even makes sense to ask the question.
Adlai: this roman doesn't seem to care much for his friends' feet. perhaps the shoe's pinch points would bother them too, if they were to walk long enough in the same shoes?
joecool: hm reading about the assets project to roll back to 0.5.3, i see "rip out bdb" ? drop wallet support so it only functions as node?
asciilifeform: 'A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, "Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?" holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. "Yet," added he, "none of you can tell where it pinches me."'
asciilifeform: where - they did.
nubbins`: i still want to print this if/when the time comes that the chicken is whittled down to edible meat and bone
nubbins`: - if the project is deemed infeasible, 0.5 BTC (less tx fees) will be returned to a Bitcoin address specified by asciilifeform, no later than 2014-11-15.
assbot: Logged on 09-04-2014 09:10:25; mircea_popescu: tbh im kinda surprised teh tradepress isn't howling all about "in january, 'Bitcoin Baron Keeps a Secretive Open Source OS Alive' ; in april, nsa's crown jool is thrown in the dirt of the public space."
Adlai: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=09-04-2014#610903 << does security-over-obscurity preclude discussing further your uses of obsd?
Adlai: which is quite an illiteracy, these days
assbot: Logged on 14-11-2014 22:24:42; asciilifeform: (for n00bs only: who is 'lizard hitler' ? a character approximately as real as magnetic field lines were to michael faraday. don't look for magnetic field lines, they aren't there. physically. or as far as we can tell, anyway.)
Adlai: Homo sapiens [sapiens] being essentially some form of automaton / robot slave / controlled experiment, conducted by these lizard-nazis
Adlai: he/they are responsible for crossing mammal and reptilian "genes" (phenotypes? genotypes? details, damnit! details!)
assbot: Logged on 11-12-2013 00:40:16; asciilifeform: i can't help but imagine some fellow at Meta-NSA, with a pill against ECDSA hidden under a flower pot in his office, laughing his arse off at these morons.
Adlai: the lizard-hitler popular with my conspiracy friends has dabbled in history from a much earlier age
joecool: Adlai: used to ! on the otc channel, bad habit
undata: asciilifeform: this brings me back to my comments about the pile of weapons
assbot: 00:57:19asciilifeform:anyone knows the story of a man called Anatoliy Golitsyn? - Pastebin.com
undata: bitcoin could easily be one of the most dystopian inventions ever
undata: here's a doubling down of it: NSA intends to take over the hashing power of the network and implement coin validation
assbot: Logged on 15-11-2014 00:43:25; TheNewDeal: second that statement
assbot: Logged on 15-12-2013 00:57:19; asciilifeform: anyone knows the story of a man called Anatoliy Golitsyn?
undata: TheNewDeal: supposing "he" is usgov; why wouldn't they just sit back and let it take over, and hold their 1/21 or more of it?
TheNewDeal: not interested about the nsa connection now, but the "why hasn't he pulled the plug?" question
undata: why would they create it? impending fiat disaster?
TheNewDeal: the only one I can think of is, wait until it gets 10, or 100 times bigger
asciilifeform: i think each of the regulars here has his favourite.
asciilifeform: Adlai: there are at least six different hypotheses for why dr. evil has not yet pulled the trigger.
Adlai: surely these purely hypothetical martians already had their eyes on it before "bitcoin was valuable"
undata: but this can be taken to the absurd
asciilifeform: what recovery can there be, when your $maxint coins walk away?
asciilifeform: nor have any reason to place trust in the creators
asciilifeform: i won't use, because i was not privvy to the process whereby it was born.
Adlai: well, you can't convince another person you're not a martian. hell, i don't think i could convince myself that i'm not unwittingly carrying out martian bidding.
asciilifeform: why aren't we using them?
asciilifeform: and 2 or 3 others.
undata: I'd observe it then try a clean re-implementation
undata: I might not try and use the thing at all.
asciilifeform: we want to know, even if it is fifty years too late, who they were.
asciilifeform: let's pretend that it just happened to fall upon the earth.
asciilifeform: undata: picture the 0.5.3 turd as a piece of martian technology.
asciilifeform: the most important thing is that each and every change, however slight, is attributable.
asciilifeform: Adlai: there are two separate questions here, and we are only dealing with one
Adlai: of course, but the "manual trust verification" approach taken further would suggest only applying critical bugfixes, as patches, signed by the developer who wrote them (preferably with a signature published at the time of the fix, alternatively obtaining a signature in the present day... or manually verifying the patch's trustworthyness, and signing yourself)
undata: he uses WoT to manage what makes it into the kernel
undata: torvalds addresses this regarding the kernel and git
undata: Adlai: there is a mountain of bugfixing to re-apply
asciilifeform: but i will not be signing any patch that i can't apply with my mind, in my mental model of the code.
asciilifeform: and a dependence on the machine to resolve questions which ought to be resolved by the mind, and thus kept 'light weight' enough to be easily resolved by the mind.
asciilifeform: but the argument here is not about sabotaged ken-thompson-style tools. but about tools that foster intellectual atrophy.
asciilifeform: (less easy to test if it is -capable- of lying, but that's another matter)
Adlai: undata: this is more along the lines of "confirm by human approval that an unforseen software/bureaucracy/insanity 'bug' isn't afoot"
asciilifeform: software is helping to the extent it is reasonable. for instance, i am trusting my text editor to display the actual source and not some diddled version.
Adlai is not sufficiently familiar with each line of code itself to tell which of those contributions, or ones in the ensuing spikes, are trivially trustable, and which aren't
asciilifeform: and whiners who complain that this is arduous, unreasonable, etc. - are shown where the door is.
asciilifeform: all three - answer with their lives.
asciilifeform: one would read instructions. another, turn a wrench, whatever. third would check that 2 corresponds to 1. then, all three sign under that step in recipe.
asciilifeform: there was a three-man system
asciilifeform: but don't be surprised if it is treated in the same way as the phoundation's original - at the very best, a place to steal bug fixes from.
asciilifeform: undata: if you want to understand the whole point of the fork, try to understand what you lose when you choose a vcs as a canonical representation.
asciilifeform isn't either
undata: that is precisely the scenario git helps
undata: I'd like to slash out the db bits and try something else, but I'm not going to bother with trying to manually merge other people's patches as they come along in process
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes, the one fellow who is really still working on this gizmo, is
undata: to me you're saying damn the microscope or we'll never understand this cell
asciilifeform: it's bad enough that we are dealing with a turd that is quite impossible to fully understand in the original.
asciilifeform: let's put it another way. i will not sign anything that i cannot read.
undata: asciilifeform: there is not one single canonical timeline in any project
asciilifeform: undata: well, to the extent that any version control system can be cudgelled into coughing up output compatible with 'patch' - then yes.
undata: you're not removing complexity; you're just making the same process slower
Adlai: darcs seems the likeliest candidate right now, though
Adlai: i'm going to stop talking before i sound like a broken record, but this topic is likely to come up again once i've got something more substantial to say in defense of some tool for easing (ie, partially automating, up to the point of confirming signature verification) this process... no guarantee on how soon that could be, or which tool.
asciilifeform: dwarfing the actual healthy tissue.
asciilifeform: the point here is not to filter undesirable -people-
undata: it's just a pain in the ass
undata: asciilifeform: the process you've demanded be manual is not nearly a hard enough hurdle to filter undesirables
assbot: Program Provability and the Rule of Technical Greed
Adlai: at least, not to a great degree... but i get the idea
Adlai: apparently logs aren't either!
undata: and your nuke sub is going to get harder and harder to work on as the number of patches grows
Adlai: darcs isn't that intelligent. the input data it gets from a repository is a partially ordered list of patches, possibly signed. this is slightly more general than an ordered list of patches, but just as secure and interactive/manual
undata: asciilifeform: the process of producing a git commit is entirely dumb
asciilifeform: try to understand the nature of this 'nuke sub' and the pitfalls of tying one's fortune to 'darcs' or a similarly 'intelligent' instrument.
Adlai: a "conflict" would require a separate patch, which should be signed by the resolver
Adlai: same bounds hold, or don't, for "his patches, and all those dependent upon them"
asciilifeform: incidentally, the problem of 'patcher than is never fooled by deletions and line count shifts' is not solvable in the general case.
undata: Adlai: as you were then; git solves precisely this problem or would not work.
Adlai: asciilifeform: you can add metadata such as patch dependency which is not evident just from the patch's raw contents
Adlai: they're looking for verified patch lists
undata: Adlai: it turns out there are a few of those
Adlai: yes, and they're not looking for a hash database
undata: git and others are a damned hash database
Adlai: let's put it this way: the act of fetching signed patches with darcs conducts *exactly* the manual verification workflow which you currently do
asciilifeform: but when it's time to cough your changes back up and have them up for public study, they have to be physically minimal
asciilifeform: (the canonical representation can be taken and stuffed into a git repo, or darcs, or cvs, whatever, for your personal pleasure)
asciilifeform: try to understand why a git repo cannot be the canonical representation.
Adlai: i only set up the repo. doing so required going through all the manual steps (and i did verify gpg signatures with identities fetched from public keyservers)
asciilifeform: but it is only a tool that some people prefer to use. a 'git' or other similar gizmo will not be the authoritative representation of bitcoind.
Adlai: people other than me have used it?
asciilifeform: Adlai: on the contrary, several people (even you?) are using 'git'
Adlai: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=Adlai << so, while the current contributors' reasons for not using git[hub] are understandable, i'll leave this up and perhaps update it at my leisure, in case it'll be useful to anybody inhabiting a separate region on the paranoia/lazyness continuum
Adlai: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=Adlai << /nick accidentally got squatted by ashley while i was in the army. never heard of waksman though.
mircea_popescu: "Lest this all seem merely amusing, meditate on the fate of those who have tampered with words before. The behaviorists ruined words like "behavior", "response", and especially, "learning". They now pl-ay happily in a dream world, internally consistent but lost to science."
mircea_popescu: well no meaningful content is directly obvious from the form of expression. you gotta know what the words sya.
thestringpuller: "The cryptography is the strongest point. Your enemies will attack the weakest point, which is you."
mircea_popescu: Adlai it just says "you're authed" and lists how that could be
gribble: Currently authenticated from hostmask Adlai!~Adlai@gateway/tor-sasl/adlai. Trust relationship from user mircea_popescu to user Adlai: Level 1: 1, Level 2: 1 via 1 connections. Graph: http://b-otc.com/stg?source=mircea_popescu&dest=Adlai | WoT data: http://b-otc.com/vrd?nick=Adlai | Rated since: Sat Oct 11 10:15:58 2014
mircea_popescu: double the hassle of logging. tide's not really that high yet.
Adlai: a stricter form of identity verification would require breaching *both*, rather than either, or only one
mircea_popescu: now imagine what happens if either is breached somehow.
mircea_popescu: as pointedly opposed to using the ecdsa in bitcoin
mircea_popescu: convenience is the enemy, of course.
Adlai: my reason/excuse has mainly been convenience, i had the btc auth set up years ago before i'd ever used gpg
asciilifeform: the abuser.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform are you asking me why or the abuser why ?
mircea_popescu: the only proper way to use bitcoin addresses as identification correctly is to run a never-connected node that has no balance.
asciilifeform: one could in principle maintain a bitcoin 'keypair' for the purpose of abusing it for public key signatures
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform not even getting into these technical discussion : getting people to use their credit cards as identification paperwork is a bad idea.
asciilifeform: whether this particular microscope is fit for use as a hammer, depends on two very separate questions - what you think of ecdsa, and what you think of bitcoind
mircea_popescu: http://cascadianhacker.com/blog/2014/10/20_a-summary-of-changes-to-bitcoin-since-0321.html#fn.24 there.
Adlai: although i guess it's less convenient to keep using in the face of existing automation of gpg auth
Adlai: it's not any better than gpg auth, but i don't see why it's any worse either
mircea_popescu: badly thought out, pointless functionality doesn't get much use among the sane.
assbot: GPG authentication - bitcoin-otc wiki
mircea_popescu: Adlai http://wiki.bitcoin-otc.com/wiki/GPG_authentication#Helper_scripts like that ?
mircea_popescu: Adlai ah, the book. no, never have.
mircea_popescu: what the fuck reporting is this.
mircea_popescu: Our biggest concern is the welfare of children who appear on this site. {Site name redacted} has a ZERO tolerance policy for rape or
assbot: Cyberselfish | Mother Jones
asciilifeform: ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1996/07/cyberselfish << briefly described here.)
asciilifeform: but from the article, it sounds deeply reminiscent of a similar turd, 'cyberselfish'
asciilifeform: the book? can't say that i have
asciilifeform: (esr suffers from some of the same problems as taleb)
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform im just saying, let's not confuse those who pass the fertility test with those who fail the turing test.
mircea_popescu: understand something : if female brain were not hackable, if female vulva had no opening, there'd be no species.
asciilifeform: and that was when we learned that there are those among us who... fail turing test.
mircea_popescu: rather than a universal problem
asciilifeform: and insisted that the thing was 'alive' and 'understood her'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: actually weizenbaum's story is more interesting than the 'prosteriority' lets on.
asciilifeform: unless there was a lizards-only 0th conference...
empyex: mircea_popescu: Next conference starts in 5 months and 3 days. Estimated cost today: 3.30951486 BTC (Details: http://trilema.com/2014/the-conference-third-edition/ )