Ademan: mircea_popescu: considering the trezor hasn't been released yet though, it hardly bothers me.
asciilifeform: dexX7: the vendor's site has a bunch of stuff but none of the actual interesting bits. this may change at some point, ask him.
mircea_popescu: Ademan the space between going to be and is.
Ademan: "slush said so in the advertising video"
benderp: Shakespeare: what was the slippage on that one?
Ademan: asciilifeform: I was under the impression both the hardware and software are going to be open source
mircea_popescu: i am hereby the first and probably only simpleminded psychotic peace priest.
mircea_popescu: carsam ^ you misspelled the domain name.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: if you must know, the answer is no.
mircea_popescu: the daphne chick misspelled her own email in her own sigblock, it's like...
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, given that my question is whether you, specifically, will trust it - there is no way to do so other than to ask you :)
mircea_popescu: dude what's with these people mispelling sites
Shakespeare: if they dom it's certainly not satoChidice.com
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: there is sufficient information available about 'trezor' to learn the answer to this. but please do own homework
mircea_popescu: i didn't even know they had an inbox
Shakespeare: SEC isnt run by the devil or whatever, i thought it was run by perverts and sex addicts?
mircea_popescu: nah, the greek girl was phyrne
mircea_popescu: is this the same one as before or a totally different identical one ?
Apocalyptic: will get one then
asciilifeform: esp. if the stake was thick (the 'dracula' chronicle i translated some weeks ago carefully specified 'thick')
asciilifeform: the 'client' would be left alone with his thoughts for some days.
asciilifeform: benderp: impalement (of the king vlad, rather than assyrian, variety) was a much more leisurely affair
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform can't blame them. it's only the past 10-20 years that you can safely go in the undies of people picked off the street.
asciilifeform: except the jerries did it in reverse
asciilifeform: (or rather, adjacent to one)
asciilifeform: where the germans came across a school full of orthodox jews and publicly dispatched them in exactly this way.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the air compressor story is inescapably linked in my mind with Latvia.
asciilifeform: in the ussr, trade in (and even possession) of gold bullion was theoretically a capital opffense
Ghaleon: the system is corrupt. it makes monsters out of many of us
asciilifeform: if anything, they are hungry for easy meat
asciilifeform: so u.s. bureaucrats are not harmless merely because of their everyday impotence.
mircea_popescu: why do you think it's mostly the lowlifes that scam ?
asciilifeform: well, their standard diet, for whatever biological reason
Ghaleon: tiger only go man eater when they lose their teeth , get wounded and cannot hunt normal prey, most animals avoid humans
asciilifeform: a study of tigers and when/how/why they eat human
mircea_popescu: at the time bitcoin didn't look as big as it does today. iirc it was ~2-5 bux per or somesuch
mircea_popescu: afaik he got some job in the uk and forgot all about this
joecool: bitvps 2.0 was supposed to happen for him too but he started selling the equipment he lined up for that last week
joecool: mircea_popescu: i'm guessing he got embarrassed about his habit and stopped reporting P&L statements when the L was coming from heroin acquisitions
joecool: mircea_popescu: heroin was the likely answer regarding that case
asciilifeform: (see the 'new york death ray' case recently)
joecool: heh i never read the bitvps story on trilema
asciilifeform: no need to go far for other examples. fbi, for instance, mainly relies on entrapment to manufacture 'terrorists'
mircea_popescu: you have no idea what depression is until you've seen the depths through the eyes of a high ranking bureaucrat.
asciilifeform: just the same way as nsa is built for a certain purpose
mircea_popescu: it's true that reptiles are great hunters. it's false that they're uber hunting machines as the kid imagines them
asciilifeform: sec can be manned by devils, or by mild-mannered bureaucrats just plodding along, paying their credit card bills. but in point of fact, it is a machine built for preventing americans from doing certain voluntary things with their money
mircea_popescu: or w/e other reptile.
asciilifeform: then, delicious crunch crunch
mircea_popescu: the devil only has superclever kids ? how.
Ademan: mircea_popescu: I got a good chuckle out of your correspondence with the SEC, bravo.
mircea_popescu: there's a lot of space between "exists for the good of the people" and "was spawned by the devil and is making him proud"
asciilifeform: because it is a fruit of the poisoned tree (fdr/'newdeal')
asciilifeform: it's an arm of the beast
mircea_popescu: maybe they're honestly just trying to understand wtf is going on. i could sorta see if i was in that position i'd go fishing like this. why not.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: to the extent sec exists for some actual purpose, that purpose includes infesting the btc world with whatever plagues can be conjured up, not extinguishing them
mircea_popescu: dexX7 maybe the sale was fictitious. maybe erik had the wrong kind of friends, a la shrem. maybe shrem was his wrong kind of friends. who the hell knows at this point.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the incentive it does have. it's more effective, more effectual and cheaper. that's really the eos.
ninjashogun: I'll pay your backtax on unseemly behavior (along with my apologies). I have a better grasp of the channel dynamics here.
mircea_popescu: this obviously will have to chance, and this obviously will change. it's just that a number of otherwise well meaning people didn't even know they had this problem until last month
asciilifeform: or the incentive.
mircea_popescu: well... it doesn't have the people, the brains, the training or the intellectual culture.
mircea_popescu: the clash of cultures is between the ankylosis of old bureaucratic paperwork and contemporary digital openness
dexX7: they may not want to say it, sure. but what do you think about it? any guess?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: might as well ask the buggers to skip straight to kissing the ring (tm)
mircea_popescu: but the real clash isn't "you wanna phone me ? get on irc"
mircea_popescu: dexX7 they don't want to say, apparently.
dexX7: what does the sec want with the user data etc.? i'm wondering, if this is about the sale of sd, btc stocks in general or an investigation about some fraud going on etc..
mircea_popescu: i'd be curious in what happens if they fuck a rabbit
moiety: http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs17/f/2007/216/d/d/Japanese_Chin_puppy_by_Lena_Lou.jpg i would like one of these, but unsure if actual dog or just cat that can bark
Ghaleon: what is the best route for a startup to go public btc style?
benderp: can we buy them already in a butt?
mircea_popescu: Neil are they on a string ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform so you got me reading the adventures of the 14th waffen grenadiers, which resulted in much amusement at the freitag guy
mircea_popescu: the blood argument is incredibly weak. there's a shitton of blood on "romanian", doth not make it particularly unusable.
TomServo: or the beginning I should say
TomServo: around 2:00 is the more relevant piece
gribble: Charlemagne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne>; Charlemagne - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com: <http://www.history.com/topics/charlemagne>; Charlemagne (Holy Roman emperor) -- Encyclopedia Britannica: <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/106546/Charlemagne>
jurov: was that 17 lines? guess i'm sending 0.17btc as donation then
jurov: . This most likely reflects the fact that system
jurov: found in the LulzSec leak, which was
jurov: characters, a lot longer than the
ThickAsThieves: hmm so the new Bitcoin "Core" allows payment requests
jurov: than we expected. The average length is
jurov: The first thing that stands out when looking at the data is the average length, which is much longer
mircea_popescu: tl;dr : things happen in ways things happen, it's very important to either this or the other and make sure you brush your tits in the morning.
dexX7: haha yea, that's the tltr
ThickAsThieves: i these articles that take so many words to say something you'd see in a tweet
benderp: i think i'll be getting my babe and my pit another puppy here soon.
ozbot: Bitcoin Is The New PayPal | TechCrunch
dexX7: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/bitcoin-is-the-new-paypal/ slightly related to "scammers kill bitcoin".. half of it is about the beginning of paypal and the troubles they faced
mircea_popescu: benderp if anyone was curious to see how the bega looks.
Apocalyptic: the thread keeps on delivering
Apocalyptic: Otherwise, the altcoin and bitcoin world is going to fall apart! Who will want to have unsafe coins?"
Apocalyptic: "Something like that needs to be done! We must counterattack and find the criminals who do this kind of theft!
mircea_popescu: a 1% is apparently within the market granularity.
ninjashogun: mircea_popescu, so the idea is that people know that there is a small chance they have an opportunity to invest at an early stage in the next "monster.com", and this would be a small incentive to upload their profile for some equity.
TomServo: mircea_popescu: that sounds much better. More since the bitbet and your "new era" article?
ninjashogun: benderp - it doesn't just take a weekend. Part of what I'm doing is the ideation portion. For example I'm soliciting mirceau's feedback on just one aspect right now.
TomServo: Sorry, I've been away a while - are we still going on about the social media rape whistle?
ninjashogun: so rather than raise a traditional angel round of investment, you directly pay for the users, who "know" they are the product, to upload. Having 10,000 senior, lead, etc, technical profiles, is worth a substantial amount for the company, as well as enabling b2b deals etc.
ninjashogun: So, the idea is that the first 500 qualified profiles (full name, highly technical with CV, and in a major market - e.g. San Francisco, New York, London) - would get a 2.5% fully diluted equity in the company. The next 1500 profiles get 2.5%. And the following 8000 profiles get 5%.
Apocalyptic: it's wasn't humiliating enough to get hacked & lose all funds, but now they came with the IDEA of an btc insurance company
ninjashogun: So I would solve this via another fact. People, especially highly technical people, know that if "you are not paying for a product, you ARE the product".
ninjashogun: and it would not have job ads in the beginning. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.
ninjashogun: If I put an MVP I code in a weekend online, and put it on hackernews and maybe reddit, it would not have profiles in the beginning.
ninjashogun: So, the site is going to accept profiles from people (similar to LinkedIn). This sets up a chicken-and-egg problem because people would only upload a profile if htere is something in it for them, and in the beginning there owuld not be a big value proposition on the site.
ninjashogun: The following is what I was thinking:
ninjashogun: mircea_popescu, I was very highly impressed by the way in which you funded your site, and I was interested in your thoughts on a funding model I am working on for the jobs website that I mentioned to you earlier. (Based on a back-end skills graph that knows that, for example, C# is close to C++ and Java, but very far from embedded electronics design.)
mircea_popescu: well maybe the usg open sources its english translations/summaries of romanian t articles
mike_c: ok, i think i got the jist: IP isn't real. IP has little to do with the success of the company. It's all about management. close?
mircea_popescu: eh what's the rush.
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, I find some of what you have said useful. I wouldn't adopt the tone of enlightening a stone-age man, as I have a lot of experience in several areas that also make my background interesting. we can simply have a conversation you know :)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: doesn't seem to work terribly well. perhaps my hands simply don't grow from the correct place.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: trying my hand at doing the kind of thing you do - enlightening stone age man
ninjashogun: That doesn't mean that ATM's aren't MASSIVELY useful, even though they are a flawed architecture.
ninjashogun: The existence of this: https://www.google.com/search?q=atm+card+skimmer proves that ATM's are architecturally braindead. If a vulnerability vector like this existed even in theory, it would invalidate use of ATM's at foreign, unknown locations.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you know it strikes me how much pr/social media you're doing these days
ozbot: Loper OS » Don’t Blame the Mice.
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, okay look I get that it's kind of braindamaged. ATM cards are also inherently extremely braindamaged - and loads of people have been ripped off by card swipers, false things they put their card into that is in front of a real ATM.
asciilifeform: (i thought you owned one of these, it's clear if you do)
asciilifeform: the toggle switch.
ninjashogun: do you know what that circular thing is in the middle of the xray you posted? (showing leads at 10 o'clock and 12 o'clock position)?
mike_c: geez, the article is in romanian and french? what's a poor american to do.
ninjashogun: ? The product you linked? So that it escrows your secret and your secret doesn't make it to a file on your PC or your PC memory...
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, you oculdn't determine exactly what the micro does with any amount of money short of a multimilion dollar lab, but if you make reasonable assumptions (such as commodity components not being a highly engineered replacement) you can verify its operation for <$100 in equipment.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: you mentioned a chinese manufacturing contact. ask him. he'll tell you an exact cost, in the currency of your choice.
asciilifeform: what would it cost you to determine exactly what the micro does
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, (I don't think this is a good use of the word "just"). But it answers your question regarding what is inside.
asciilifeform: ok, now what's inside the micro ?
wilimprex: asciilifeform: most importantly the card sw is cloused source and access to sdk is under nda
mircea_popescu: you just don't read the right languages :D
mike_c: that must be the only topic i've ever looked for that it was silent on :)
mike_c: trilema seems silent on the topic of patenting IP
mircea_popescu: moiety the cleavage was spectaculay. oodlebunches of starving aspirational chicks wearing their friends' only designer outfit.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: you were just told why a 'security' gizmo in the shape of a card is inescapably worthless. care to disagree? or do you even read replies at all
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, because he could not patent it to protect his R&D research into it. It's a somewhat tough problem due to the very very fine sizes involved, and also the need to have a very low cost of goods if oyu are going to sell it as a plastic cafrd. There's no model that I can think of that would support this.
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, for example mircea_popescu could probably build a physical card that is a "lukewarm wallet" as you put it, he would have the funds, but I don't think he could get his R&D investment back - it would be money thrown away.
mircea_popescu: thestringpuller what specifically ?
ninjashogun: mike_c - No, I don't have any interest in building a device like that. The only way it would be feasible for a single person who has not made a substantial exit in another company, is if it were strongly patentable. Idon't think it is.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: homework. determined the cost of, starting with nothing but idle hands, personally determining exactly what your 'yubikey' does.
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, nobody here (or anywhere) has any architectural insights on making the philosopher's stone, or cold fusion, a reality.
ninjashogun: asciilifeform - anyone who has an oscilloscope would not have to use a naked eye :) You can expect someone to have a magnifying lense ($0.50) if they have an oscilloscope ($100)
mike_c: wait for it.. here's the part where he asks for funding.
moiety: it's also made it clear, you don't actually read the logs
ninjashogun: but a combination of both does wonders. I would say we hit on several key insights in this conversation - that are also actionable. It might be very hard to make a reality, but at least we know the market is there.
asciilifeform: for instance, where in the keychain could one stuff an analogue rng, auditable with the naked eye and oscilloscope ?
asciilifeform: one of the things people refuse to understand about 'yubikey' et al is that miniaturization of the keychain/card variety is fundamentally antithetical to genuine security.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: anyway, take this to the 'trezor' folks, not me. i've personally no interest in manufacturing 'lukewarm wallets.'
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, if you took the architectural advantages of a chip'n'pin, and had it in a different form factor (not a card) then people wouldn't have started using it.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: if you'd like to trick people, you've the wrong address
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, it's more secure to use chip'n'pin because the card info isn't sent in the clear.
moiety: ok i may have been a little enthusiastic there.. BUT you cannot deny if you were offered gpg tea or normal tea, you would ask for gpg tea
ninjashogun: vice, is on the bitcoin network.
ninjashogun: I think that's a very good idea, moiety, and if you targeted the chip'n'pin form factor (looks like a card) sold with a networked home reader, you could sell them as a plug-in solution to merchants. I'm not 100% sure how card processing works, but it may be possible to piggy-back on that system and let merchants use it as though it were card, meanwhile the back-end processor (your company?) or an intermediate networked de
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, it was more on the smart chips in some atm cards.
moiety: i think we should use gpg for everything, everywhere, all the time
asciilifeform: where the vendors actually have a strong incentive to permit some fraud
benderp: don't see what all the rush is about
Diablo-D3: you're looking at the problem wrong
asciilifeform: what is the point of this?
ninjashogun: I mean if you took Trezor and made it look like an ATM card, by shrinking it down to the same chip size. (chip and pin)
ninjashogun: then its readers would be connected to the bitcoin network instead of to a bank network.
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, yes, if you moved trezor into the form factor of an ATM card with a PIN, and using the same technology - then it would be interesting.
benderp: hardware wallets are actually more complex and a greater pain in the ass. users must understand transactions, how to generate one, how to sign one, and how to transmit one.
asciilifeform: either his own, or some charlatan's remote box
ninjashogun: So in this sense the physical bitcoin 'wallet' would be a smart card with a PIN. It would NOT know its balance. However, people are very used to this mode of money use.
benderp: even moiety's in on the game now
asciilifeform: the only reason anybody even dares to talk about 'hardware wallet' today is that he's weaseled out of the task of building the hard part
asciilifeform: if you want to discuss a hypothetical device, you must approach from the standpoint of the builder.
ninjashogun: The issue then would be that the only conceptually accurate device hte users could think of like a physical wallet, would have to be hot all of the time.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: from the point of a luser, a mercedes runs by dwarves under the hood turning a crank.
ninjashogun: asciilifeform, ok. However I'm trying to approach this from the point of view of a user.
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: please take the time to learn something about how btc actually works
ninjashogun: I don't know how an offline wallet will know its balance. For example, if it stays offline and the account receives a transfer for someone, how will it get updated?
asciilifeform: ninjashogun: let's work through this. how do you propose the wallet machine is to be communicated with?
mircea_popescu: more like in the sense nerd sex is a thing, but yeah
deadweasel: slightly, but only for the already technically advanced
ninjashogun: benderp - yes, probably. Do you think an offline wallet device that just knew its own balance (and displayed it continuously), had no backup or restore functionality, would ease this portion of the hurdle?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it's a thing in the sense communism is 'a thing' - folks will keep trying
deadweasel: benderp: yeah, low hanging fruit, I should have started there.
benderp: ninjashogun: the rational thing for long term btc holders is...
ninjashogun: moiety - the reason for leftovers is because you might want to buy something else as well? People generally exchange more currency than they will immediately spend, and keep the change to spend on other things.
ThickAsThieves: probly many people simply kept their contacts
ninjashogun: Oh....if in all the above you guys meant "you're not going to explain bitcoin Qua Investment to a newbie, and then get them to buy bitcoin" then that's probably true :). I wasn't thinking of it as an investment just then.
mircea_popescu: not that it ever was much of a thing, but for the sake of lulz.
moiety: i mean as in, what would be the point in having leftovers if you were only buying it to buy something else
ThickAsThieves: SR is an exception, not the common motivation to buy btc
ninjashogun: moiety, due to the spread?
ninjashogun: moiety, why would exact amounts be the best conversion?
moiety: otherwise ninjashogun people would be buying exact amounts for their purchases to get the best conversion
benderp: the thing with the people who buy things with bitcoins, is that eventually they will run out of bitcoins.
ThickAsThieves: there are some exceptions
ThickAsThieves: them*
deadweasel: they don't accept them and less than 1% of their biz is btc. they let Coinbase or Paybit or whatever do it
ThickAsThieves: i found the problem
mircea_popescu: he fucked up the url somehoiw but i can't tell how.
mircea_popescu: that leads to the proper article
mircea_popescu: ThickAsThieves no, that's the beauty of it : http://trilema.com/2013/stage-n-bitcoin-exists/
deadweasel: i wait for them to fucking beg me to explain it
ThickAsThieves: mp, did yo edit the url at some point?
deadweasel: ninjashogun: the mental hurdles people put up for themselves are far higher than the small mental hurdles you have bounded to understand it.
mircea_popescu: can anyone explain to me why clikcion on pete's link in note 5 http://bitcoinpete.com/2014/there-is-no-bitcoin-2-0/#fn-197-5
ninjashogun: Normal users, for reasons we can appreciate, would then proceed to buy bitcoins if they had something they wanted to buy in bitcoins. (And only then.) This is currency working as it should.
asciilifeform: 'throw transport down the well, so yer country can be free!' (sasha baroncohen)
asciilifeform: bitcoinpete: i wish people didn't spread messianic exaggeration re: cardano. it isn't a Final Solution, just intended to be a little oasis in the desert.
ThickAsThieves: they make zero effort to actually initiate a new user
ninjashogun: deadweasel - what's wrong with the answer to your question "explain a bitcoin to a a newbie and then convince them to buy some" - bitcoin is just a currency like euros or pounds, except you don't need to involve banks, it works more like cash. If you want to buy something in pounds (let's say you visit London) you get some pounds at an exchange (using dollars). if you want to buy something using bitcoins, you get some bi
deadweasel: ninjashogun, i seem to have lost you completely. but i know one thing, the last time I thought I had some insight on bitcoin I asked everyone here. turns out i was wrong.
ninjashogun: so as soon as people starting talking about "Buying things with bitcoin" then it's pretty obvious how it works.
mircea_popescu: maybe they work, fuck knows. let people try.
ThickAsThieves: in this way i think it's unwise to use normal cash wallets as the intro to noobs
ninjashogun: deadweasel, sorry I wasn't clear enough. The difficulty with 'buying' a currency is that people don't think of 'buying' a dollar, or euro, or pound. It's a difficult concept for most people. People think of using currency, not buying it.
mircea_popescu: turns out you can rent hotel rooms w/o credit cards just fine. provided you wear a suit and your gangster roll is larger than the receptionists' penis
ThickAsThieves: mp, but for the things you use cash for, would you ever use bitcoin instead?
mircea_popescu: did in the us, also. never had a problem with it, contrary to what people say
ninjashogun: deadweasel, the major hurdle is that people who don't do forex don't normally talk of 'buying' currency. That's the only hurdle. Specifically:
deadweasel: stop thinking then