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List:       cypherpunks
Subject:    Fwd: [Cryptography] Get offa my lawn. (was Re: BitCoin bug reported)
From:       Robert Hettinga <hettinga () gmail ! com>
Date:       2014-02-17 18:56:07
Message-ID: 2C454B95-CCE1-43BE-B50C-4556B8ADE398 () gmail ! com
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> From: Robert Hettinga <hettinga@gmail.com>
> Subject: [Cryptography] Get offa my lawn. (was Re: BitCoin bug reported)
> Date: February 17, 2014 at 2:01:13 PM AST
> To: Cryptography List <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
> Cc: cpunks <cypherpunks@cpunks.org>, Robert Hettinga <rah@rah.ai>
> 
> 
> On Feb 16, 2014, at 10:40 PM, Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> wrote:
> 
> > I say, let them and all of Bitcoin burn to dust.
> 
> Dang kids. Get offa my lawn.
> 
> 
> It’s been interesting, I’ll say that much. I have people on their honeymoon here in \
> .ai asking to see me, buy me and Mrs. RAH $30 hamburgers at Viceroy, etc. 
> Or “prove”, “stylometrically", on various Bitcoin fora, that I'm Satoshi. Heh. I’ll \
> never get tired of braggin’ about *that* one. :-) I expect others here know where \
> the stylistic clues came from, but I think Grigg has the right approach to that \
> question. Leave well enough alone. 
> 
> Being, even now, generally optimistic about the future, if not my own in \
> particular, I can’t help thinking there’s a pony in there somewhere. I *do* find it \
> annoying that the only time people wanna talk to me about this stuff is at the top \
> of a bubble. I expect that it may be a hint from the Almighty I should pay \
> attention to.  
> 
> At the moment, PayPal, which we all looked down the nose at back then, is still, \
> um, printing money, and a cypherpunk gave me some BTC a little while ago, a kind of \
> eating-the-dog food exercise for old time’s sake. Or something. The price has since \
> fallen 40%, but it’s bouncing back, and will probably be fine. “You have to be \
> *this* tall to take this ride”, as another friend said about Bitcoin prices last \
> week. Meanwhile I can’t think of anything I want to spend it on anyway. 
> Even in its current form, Bitcoin makes rather short work of those speed bumps Mr. \
> May used to tell us about, which *may* be the real point to the exercise. 
> Having to file several kinds of forms to get paid for a small consulting job as US \
> citizen outside the US was enough to make me foreswear getting paid for much of \
> anything anymore, anything small at least, and BTC solves several problems there \
> quite handily, push ever came to shove. Besides, my passport is stamped “Employment \
> Prohibited”, which, apparently, I’m evidently honoring even in the breach. 
> 
> So, I think BTC, or something like it, would make a nice numeraire, temporary or \
> otherwise, having gnawed at the edges of *that* problem when most of the \
> Bitcoinners were, as Marc notes, in short-pants. Yes, even in its current volatile \
> state. And contrary to the opinions of people who know better than I do about these \
> things. 
> 
> It wasn't quite what Dr. Fama got the Nobel for, but New Monetary Economics might \
> be as good once as it ever was, and Bitcoin might be the camel’s nose under that \
> particular tent, and given that it is the ultimate fiat currency that’s quite an \
> assertion. 
> As someone whose stated goal, back in the day, was to securitize *everything*, \
> debt, equity, cash, services, title to assets in storage, transit, or just sitting \
> there with a house on it, cats, dogs, mass hysteria -- and all derivatives thereof \
> -- using bearer-transaction financial cryptography protocols on a ubiquitous \
> geodesic public internetwork, Bitcoin *is* a bit, oh, please let me say it, \
> self-referent as a solution. I saw it blow by here on this list, said, “meh”, \
> shortly had the magic smoke go out of most of my internet presence by a power-spike \
> in a hurricane, and never got around to paying attention to either Bitcoin, or the \
> internet, very much at all until various people frog-marched my attention back into \
> focus recently with me muttering variously about being too old for this shit \
> anymore... 
> 
> So, Bitcoin, if it survives, makes a *nice* hack, by solving, what Barnes, and \
> ultimately everyone else, called the “loading problem”. And, so far at least, it \
> solves the “and then you go to jail” part of the book-entry transaction \
> error-handler, something Barnes was also noted for saying. That, too, only if \
> Bitcoin survives.  
> "...any [network] architecture that can survive a nuclear attack can survive \
> withdrawal of government subsidy...” Godwin said on Cyberia, long ago. I’ve \
> jokingly called it his Second Law. I suppose the Strong Form of that hypothesis, \
> speaking of Dr. Fama, is surviving not mere withdrawal of the implicit subsidy of \
> monopolistic contract enforcement, and all transfer-priced assets and \
> “externalities” appertaining thereto, but also active attack from the ostensible \
> contract enforcer itself. 
> 
> I hear of others, well, gnawing around the edges, actually, of securitizing other \
> stuff with variants of the Bitcoin protocol, but, like predicting the end of the \
> world, expanding the blockchain to other assets "has not been found agreeable to \
> experience.” So far as I can see. 
> Meanwhile, Chris Odom, aka, “Fellow Traveller”, aka, “Lovedrop” (yes, *that* \
> “Lovedrop”), is banging away on something called Open Transactions, which inserts \
> an actual transaction protocol, among other much more interesting things, into the \
> works to glue Bitcoin and other stuff onto, for starters, Wagner Blinding, using, \
> for starters, Ben Laurie’s lucre code. I haven’t seen a code-stoke like the one I \
> see Chris with, well, since the old days. Which is nice. Very nice. Big grins all \
> around, down here in the elbow of the Caribbean. Apparently, like me, he noticed \
> that he was delivering instantly-usable product now, and getting paid later, too \
> much later usually. I discovered cypherpunks in late spring of 1994 looking for a \
> solution to something Barnes (again) called the “latency” problem. Chriss bumped \
> into the gold-silver-crypto list, I think, about 10 years later. 
> Mr. Odom has been been kind enough to involve me in testing OT a bit, and, \
> ultimately, I’ve more-or-less bailed on iterative break-it-and-fix-it. Mostly \
> because I don’t have the patience for testing — much less writing — code, if I ever \
> really did.  
> But here’s the rub, I also I have no *idea* what I, personally, would do with Open \
> Transactions these days even if I could get it running in production. 
> I have lots of ideas in *general*, you understand, but they’re mostly of the “let’s \
> you and him fight” variety.  
> Many more people than *I* would have to be involved, they, and I, would risk much \
> more than money, and, ultimately, I’m not sure any of it would work. It’s a drag to \
> think that most of what I’m interested in doing requires the dissolution, or at \
> least dissipation, of The World’s Only Remaining Superpower to happen. As someone \
> who still, barely, calls himself mostly an anarcho-capitalist but still a patriot, \
> that’s about the only thing worse than only being interesting to other people \
> during the top of a bubble. Yup. A Mass of Contradictions, as usual. 
> 
> "Let’s you and him fight" is only two or three steps removed from Mr. Briceno’s \
> original observation, I figure. 
> Hell, even “set here next to the rockin' chair, sonny, and I’ll tell ya a story”, \
> is, ultimately, not much more help than “get off my lawn”, when you get right down \
> to it... 
> Cheers,
> RAH
> 
> 
> 
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