• 5 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2024

help-circle
  • Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted your usage of “last line of defense”?

    These aren’t regular conservatives that we’re dealing with. MAGA is a fascist movement. The MO of fascists is to gain and hold power for their in-group by *any means necessary*. While it should never be our first option, we need to be willing and able to violently resist them, because they sure as hell don’t have any qualms about violently subjugating us.


  • Interesting, this is the first I’ve heard of the “reputation rehab” angle on the guy. Do you have any further reading you could link me to?

    Rather than going full Inglorious Basterds, I think it’s important to have both “carrot” and “stick” options for these people. It doesn’t really do us any good if there’s no way to come back from having been involved in hate groups. Just make sure to keep the Richard Spencer treatment available, to provide them some motivation to get their heads right.


  • public shaming is the last line of defense we have against these types of people

    Wait, really? I know liberals tend to like weird pseudo-pacifism, but have y’all really committed so hard to it that you think “public shaming” is our last line of defense?

    Get armed, and get trained. You may end up needing it. *We* may end up needing it.









  • It’s yet another demonstration of how ineffective electoralism is at stopping fascism. The Democratic Party is centrist (or center-left if we’re being generous). Centrism isn’t really an ideology, just a strategy for winning elections. Principles are just tools to be either used toward that end, or discarded. It does tend to be pretty effective, which is why it’s so prevalent.

    Fascists, however, are committed to gaining power *by any means necessary*. While centrists are constrained by rules and norms, fascists have no such limitation. By discarding any moral restraints, fascists become far more effective at the centrist strategy than centrists could ever hope to be. In turn, the centrists are forced to double down on discarding any principles that they may have grown attached to, following the lead of the fascists in an attempt to catch up.











  • Scalability isn’t quite as simple as “how much data can a well-off enthusiast from a developed country store”. You need to consider the behavior of your lowest common denominator users.

    You want as many users as possible to run fully-verifying nodes, rather than SPV (“simplified payment verification”) nodes that can be tricked by a malicious miner. The more transactions are being done through SPV nodes, the more potential payoff there is for an attacker, and the more resources they can dedicate to an attack.

    Further, if your number of full nodes gets low enough, it becomes feasible for state actors to track down and compromise the remaining node operators. At that point, you may as well just be using a centralized, government approved payment system instead.


  • IMO, you shouldn’t be investing in cryptocurrencies or any currencies for that matter. Currencies should be
    used, not hoarded with the expectation of gain. If you’re buying cryptocurrencies as an investment, you’ve already lost.

    Cryptocurrencies literally cannot function without speculative investment. Even in the absence of formal investors, *someone* has to be the first person to accept the tokens in exchange for something of value, in hopes that they will have value of their own in the future. Until then, the tokens are unusable.

    Further, the market cap and liquidity of a cryptocurrency impose practical limits on what it can be used for. You can’t very well conduct a billion dollar transaction through a cryptocurrency that has a market cap in the millions. Investment raises the market cap, “unlocking” these higher-value use cases. Conversely, loss of investor confidence will reduce the market cap, and effectively reduce the utility of the coin.

    This is why ability to scale is so important. The current market values of Bitcoin and the various alts are based far more on speculative investment than they are on usage. Those investors believe that the coins will see far more usage (and have far more natural demand) in the future than they do today. If that turns out not to be the case due to an inability to scale, investors will start to flee, and the vicious cycle will start.


  • I’m not interested in spending a ton of time on this, but I did go and watch this short interview with him about scaling misconceptions.

    Wasn’t convincing at all. For one, the guy comes across as kind of dishonest. Not scammer-level dishonest, but more like a politician. The main thing though is that he’s just a big-blocker, which is just a total dead end. Having everyone store every single transaction that was ever made until the end of time is just not realistic.

    In order to scale to any globally significant number of users, a cryptocurrency needs a second layer to aggregate transactions, such as Lightning. Monero seems to have nothing in this regard beyond “However, academic and industry research is ongoing and promising in this area.”

    they are a hell of a lot smarter than me

    You should not be investing money in something based on this level of understanding, and you *definitely* should not be advocating it to others. Scaling is an existential problem for cryptocurrencies. Their utility is based on their monetary value, and their monetary value is based on investor assessment of their future utility. Without the ability to scale, there will be no growth in utility, which means no investment other than temporary dumb money, which becomes a vicious cycle.