Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

If one rejects that Bitcoin 'happened' to us, and that there is a system/deep intent behind it, then what's left is that Bitcoin is a moral/ideological failure of its designer(s), and the society as a whole failed to inform the designer(s). But the idea that the the society needs to develop a

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

I just watched this lecture, which really interesting and entertaining, because it's so full of contradictions that it seems to be able to capture the complexity of the moment really well. For one thing, neither in the talk nor in the question period after, Zooko -- a long-time, deep operator in

Re: So what does awakening mean to you?

Hi Brian, Afro-pessimism has had its vogue in Africa too, especially in the decades around the millennium. Its protagonists are still around, but less blatant than before, not least in France. Stephen Smith won the Prix essai 2004 France Televisions for Negrologie: pourquoi l'Afrique meurt (why

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

There is one: you can quickly estimate one's ethics based on whether they own Bitcoin or not :) On 12/30/17, 05:51, Felix Stalder wrote: Zooko -- a long-time, deep operator in the field -- could not come up with a good, actual use case. The best use-case was donating money to # distributed

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 7:12 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote: But I want to get back to Bitcoin as a random mindless technology that > found its receptors in the society, and use proof by negation: Bitcoin has > three key components: asymmetric crypto (for signatures), Merkle

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

It's not either-or (technology and political agency), but both-and. The two things aren't cleanly separable. And this isn't any new or revolutionary insight, but exactly what McLuhan meant with "the medium is the message" and Wiener with the "human use of human beings" (or Lenin with his equation

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

Do you see a possible scenario where it's not a nefarious plot, but instead that technology is invented, iterated, and adopted based on culture, world view, and politics that are often latent and/or are held in complete obliviousness? It feels like much of this tech (Bitcoin, or other modern

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

On 30 Dec 2017, at 8:51, Felix Stalder wrote: And besides, the ever rising transaction costs (because of the low number of exchanges that can be settled per second, which Zooko puts at 3, rather than 7) make it as an actual means of exchange almost useless for everyday transactions

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

I more or less agree with this, not sure if others do. Having gone through cycles of development, I see randomness - sheer luck, and not doing something utterly stupid as key factors, in that order. The original volume of proposals is high, people try everything, and only a tiny fraction gets

Re: So what does awakening mean to you?

That's a fantastic response, Keith. Actually I agree with you about culture: be against it! That's my understanding of counter-culture: accent on the counter, not on the culture. Your words on two-way relations are moving. What else to do with one's life? Of course I am more pessimisstic

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, deep conspiracy and that Bitcoin creator(s) actually did bother to read "Austrian economics" (neither of which I think is probable - looks like a parallel construction), and chose a hard limit instead of exponential backoff or any other of dozen possible

Re: Deep Fool

On 29/12/17 20:05, Morlock Elloi wrote: > Longer version and remarks: current ML systems appear to be linear, > so it's possible to synthesize diversions even without knowing how a > particular system works. Systems can be fooled to miscatergorize > visual images (turtle gets recognized as a

Re: Deep Fool

It will become progressively harder to have big secret database: it's just one planet with only so many possible frames, and anything on a disk eventually becomes (more or less) public. The race for data then ends as everyone has everything. Ultimately, the situation gets analogous with

Re: Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

Very possible. The mechanism of financialization of the society is inherently artificial and divorced (or just separated) from 'value'. The traditional requirement that it is somehow tied to the reality (as 2nd or 3rd derivative) is seen as deficiency. Bitcoin may finalize the divorce.

Re: Deep Fool

On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 11:52:45AM +1300, Douglas Bagnall wrote: Just by looking at the Athalye et. al. turtle, you can see that the system associates rifles with the texture of polished wood. And indeed when you look in the ImageNet rifle category you see a lot of wood, not only in the guns

So what does awakening mean to you?

"You know when you’re going to sleep and it feels like you’re about to fall, so you wake up? What if you never woke up? Where would you fall?" With these questions, director Jordan Peele asks *you* to explain the real horror of his box-office sensation, "Get Out." The film is totally about