BC CRYPTO
Saved by @AnmolNarula11

I've just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I've yet to encounter. 1/

 It comes from David "DSHR" Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements including helping to develop X11 and the core technologies for Nvidia.

https://t.co/tkAMShno4k 2/
Rosenthal's critique is a transcript of a lecture he gave to Stanford's EE380 class, adapted from a December 2021 talk for an investor conference. 3/
It is a bang-up-to-date synthesis of many of the critical writings on the subject, glued together with Rosenthal's own deep technical expertise. He calls it "Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities?"

The presence of "externalities" in Rosenthal's title is key. 4/
Rosenthal identifies blockchainism's core ideology as emerging from "the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks," and states that "libertarianism's attraction is based on ignoring externalities."

This is an important critique of libertarianism. 5/
The idea that "liberty" is the freedom to do as you like, provided it doesn't harm others is simple enough on its face, but the reality is very few of our actions are free from the potential to harm others. 6/
The freedom to drive, or operate a firearm, or to determine your own vaccination preferences all have impacts on others. 7/
We can (and should) argue about what consideration you owe to your neighbors and what tolerance they owe to you, but all to often, that argument is settled by ignoring it. 8/
Think of the people who talk about masking as a "personal choice." Human beings have an undeniably entwined epidemiological destiny. There are few epidemiological choices that are purely personal - they redound to the people around you. 9/
The existence of a shared destiny and the necessity of a society to manage it runs smack into the idea that messy personal conflicts are best resolved by carving out individual zones of autonomy. 10/
All too often, the libertarian definition of "liberty" is cover for "I don't want to pay taxes to support a society." This is a pretty unpopular position, so libertarians form alliances with naked authoritarians, like the Christian right:

https://t.co/kbmvG5MRbq 11/
That's how you end up with archlibertarians arguing that the world would be "freer" if women weren't allowed to vote:

https://t.co/bIwXOkJfZH

That democracy itself is incompatible with liberty, since it lets workers vote to limi their bosses:

https://t.co/oL2cBCYJMB 12/
The maintenance of libertarian ideology may not require that you ignore externalities, but it sure helps. 13/
When advocates for "liberty" champion the likes of Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and slaughtered his political enemies by the thousands, they are discounting the lethal externalities of Pinochet's economic "freedoms" to zero. 14/
Rosenthal's critique of contemporary blockchainism starts with this idea of discounted externalities - the foundational contradiction that one's "liberty" exists in a state of pristine isolation, and doesn't harm anyone else. 15/
To get to this, he looks at the history of blockchains. He divides blockchain technology into an older, "permissioned" blockchain technology, invented in 1990, and "permissionless" blockchains, which were invented around 2008 with the first Bitcoin white-paper. 16/
A permissioned blockchain require on a central authority that dictates who can write to the chain. Within that stricture, it produces a highly computationally efficient public ledger that can identify malfunctioning or corrupt nodes in the network and route around them. 17/
Permissionless blockchains, like the Bitcoin blockchain, are born decentralized. No one authority gets to decide who can participate in the ledger's creation - at first. This decentralization comes at a high price, though. 18/
Blockchains are vulnerable to "Sybil attacks" where one attacker impersonates a horde of unconnected actors and takes over the system. 19/
To defend against this, permissionless blockchains make Sybil attacks expensive, so that the most you can steal in a Sybil attack is less than it would cost to pull it off. 20/
The inescapable corollary of this is that using the network has to be expensive - the system has to have a giant electricity bill and hence a massive carbon footprint.

This expense, in turn, compensates miners for the money they pour into defeating Sybil attacks. 21/
These miners get paid in cryptocurrency, and for cryptocurrency to have value, it has to have someone who's willing to buy cryptos with "fiat" - dollars or other easily spent money. 22/
The only reason for someone to trade fiat for those cryptos (apart from making ransomware payments) is as an "investment" - that is, because you think the cryptocurrency's price will rise. Thus these blockchains *require* speculation to function. 23/
All of this means that the majority of blockchain activity is just about maintaining the blockchain - not about buying or selling things. There are only about 27,000 "economically meaningful" Bitcoin transactions in a day - and 75% of those are inter-exchange transactions. 24/
All told, only 2.5% of Bitcoin transactions represent someone buying something from someone (fewer than five per minute, globally).

This profound wastefulness is a feature, not a bug. 25/
It's the expense that keeps Sybil attacks at bay, without centralizing authority over the blockchain, as would be the case with the otherwise vastly more efficient permissioned blockchains that have been around for 30 years. 26/
But here's where Rosenthal unveils the other half of his critique: the drive to maximize the efficiency of mining drives miners to consolidate, in order to attain economies of scale. The more valuable a blockchain is, the more centralized it becomes. 27/
Today, 10% of miners control 90% of the mining. The top 0.1% of miners control 50% of mining. Five mining pools control the majority of Bitcoin mining. Last November, only *two* mining pools controlled the majority of Ethereum mining. 28/
This is the worst of all worlds: a highly volatile blockchain that is incredibly wasteful *and* centralized, with control in the hands of largely anonymous parties who are accountable to no one, who can cheat with impunity.

https://t.co/fO5fciIW3u 29/
So far, the focus of Rosenthal's externality critique has been energy consumption and climate harms. But here he comes to his second externality: e-waste. 30/
To maintain their position in the highly concentrated mining sectors, miners have to run their equipment hard and discard it quickly as it burns out. 31/
The average service life of an ASIC used in blockchain mining is a mere 16 months - whereupon it turned into ewaste, retiring its embodied materials and energy. Other blockchain verification systems, like proof of space-and-time, do the same thing to mass storage devices. 32/
Now, it's true that the finance and tech sectors produce a lot of ewaste on their own. But that's because their equipment wears out despite their best efforts to preserve it. 33/
The foundational premise of cryptocurrency mining is that you are in a race with other miners to discard and replace your equipment as rapidly as possible, to eke out every speed advantage. 34/
The blockchainst response to this is to ignore the ewaste problem and hand-wave the emissions issue by claiming that they're fixing it with offsets. Offsets, meanwhile, are a market for lemons. Most carbon offsets are fairy tales:

https://t.co/xbJRf73SZy 35/
And, as Rosenthal points out, even if your cryptos are being mined with renewables, that is only carbon neutral if you assume "that doing so doesn't compete with more socially valuable uses for renewables, or indeed for power in general." 36/
Blockchainists are aware of the problems with proof of work, and many are calling for a transition to proof of stake, a notionally less climate-intensive way of running a permissionless blockchain. 37/
Rosenthal's critique of proof of stake begins by observing that it drives even more centralization than proof of work. 38/
A proof of stake network allows the people who have the most to tax the transactions of those with less, cementing their dominance and increasing centralization. 39/
So both permissioned and permissionless blockchains end up centralized, but permissionless blockchains - the type beloved of blockchainists - are centralized into unaccountable and often anonymous hands. 40/
So while a permissioned blockchain that is run by a benevolent (or at least accountable) authority can reverse frauds, permissionless blockchains struggle to do this. 41/
This immutability is part of the reason that blockchains and fraud go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Thefts on working permissionless blockchains can't be readily reversed, making them permanent. 42/
Meanwhile, the entities who end up at the top of the centralization pile in these networks can commit thefts by rewriting the "immutable" ledgers. 43/
It's not a purely hypothetical problem. The Steem proof of stake network was compromised by Justin Sun in 2021, who took advantage of the highly centralized staking sector to hijack the Steem blockchain. 44/
The immutability problem is worse in programmable cryptos like Ethereum. The "smart contracts" that operate on these chains are effectively bug bounties whose maximum payout is everything in the wallets connected to them. 45/
The attack surface of programmable money which is connected to social media, Discord servers, standalone wallets, etc, is virtually unbounded. 46/
This is another important point raised by Rosenthal: not only are permissionless blockchains highly concentrated, they're also ineluctably bound up with Web 2.0 technologies. 47/
The fact that Binance conducts two thirds of crypto derivative transactions and half of all spot technologies using browsers and other 2.0 stuff multiplies all the blockchain vulns by all the non-blockchain vulns. 48/
Here Rosenthal cites Adam Levitin's recent, excellent analysis of the legal status of crypto exchange users in bankruptcy proceedings (tldr: if your exchange goes bust, you'll probably get nothing or nearly nothing):

https://t.co/jdtbWjOe3C 49/
Rosenthal's boils this all down to four points:

I. Permissioned blockchains can stop Sybil attacks without cryptocurrency and have no significant externalities; 50/
II. Permissionless blockchains *require* a cryptocurrency to stop Sybil attacks, and this produce major externalities;

III. To be successful, permissionless blockchains require proof-of-work or some other deliberately wasteful system, making externalities inevitable; 51/
IV. Likewise inevitable is that any security system based on wasting resources will create the centralization that permissionless blockchains claim to eliminate. 52/
Rosenthal concludes his talk by affirming that he values decentralization and it is that value that causes him to reject blockchainism. 53/
He reminds us that the billions pouring into the Web3 bubble are bets on attaining scale and dominance - the only reason to pump billions into a blockchain technology is if you think that you can corner a market and make it back. 54/
In other words, Web3 investors see high barriers to entry as a feature, not a bug, and they're committed to centralization. 55/
Image:
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters (modified)
https://t.co/bq5JJPcDcp

CC BY 2.0:
https://t.co/B930sKCLnf 56/
ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on https://t.co/iSBh8s9m7q, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://t.co/5rhyfeEW7L

More from Cory Doctorow RIGHT-CLICKING WORDCEL MENTALITY

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/


First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/
TRADING , STOCK MKT
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

1/


The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

2/

Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

3/

Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

4/

When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

5/
CULTURE
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The US election news has largely overshadowed a seismic moment in global finance: Ant, a fintech company that spun out of Alibaba/Alipay, was scheduled to have the world's largest IPO, topping even Aramco, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Then Chinese regulators canceled it.

1/


As @yvessmith writes in her excellent @nakedcapitalism breakdown, the consensus narrative on this is capricious Chinese regulators changed their minds and jerked the rug out from under Ali's billionaire owner Jack Ma.

The reality is a lot

To understand it, you need to understand the difference between the Chinese and American "money story." In the US, there is widespread, unquestioning faith in the fairytale that money predates the state and is separate from it.

3/

In this story, people come together to trade but are plagued by disparate goods: if I want to pay for your chickens with a cow, how do you make change? They spontaneously decide that something (gold?) is money and price their cows and chicks in it.

4/

Then, governments come along tax our gold away, and then to add insult to injury, governments abandon gold and insist that paper is as good as gold, print too much of it and crash the economy!

This probably sounds familiar to you, but it's just not true.

5/
ECONOMY , {GIG MONEY} , BANKING AND REGULATION
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mashing the Bernie meme; Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/cKWPSzuYHE

#Pluralistic

1/


Mashing the Bernie meme: What if every video game, except Bernie with mittens?

https://t.co/Zcs71oUras

2/
FUN
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

1/


Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your

That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

3/

It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM

And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM
AMAZON

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Dan Held
Dan Held
@danheld
1/ Fear and Bitcoin.

Whenever Bitcoin has a bull run, naysayers try to cope with missing the boat by rationalizing why it will fail through “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” or what we Bitcoiners have nicknamed “FUD.”
CRYPTO , FUD
Oliver Jumpertz
Oliver Jumpertz
@oliverjumpertz
"Blockchain technology is energy-intensive..." => No, it doesn't have to be.

Let's look at Proof-Of-Stake, an alternative to the energy-intensive Proof-Of-Work algorithm.

🧵🔽

1️⃣ A Quick Recap On Proof-Of-Work

A Proof-Of-Work algorithm requires miners to do a certain amount of work that is compute-intensive to gain access to a service or the right to do something. This algorithm, by design, also requires that the work done shall not ...

... be reusable for anything else than what it was performed for. This lies at the core of the security concept of a blockchain. To gain the right to append a new block to a chain and to get some currency as a reward, there is work to be done, and this work must be verifyable.

That work is a race between different miners. Many miners try to compete and to be the first to find the answer to a problem presented to them. This implies that a lot of energy is wasted as only the first correct solution is accepted.

You can find a more detailed thread on Proof-Of-Work
CRYPTO
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David Schwartz
David Schwartz
@JoelKatz
@VentureCoinist @HypeBillion @MycolePawket If the whole world settled on one stablecoin, I'd agree with you. But stablecoins are always going to be tied to jurisdictions and counter-parties too. So it is unlikely one winner will emerge.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket Today, one of the roles of the dollar is acting as an intermediary or bridge between currencies. For that role, its tie to the US jurisdiction is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Better US than a worse jurisdiction, but a pure digital asset is better still.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket Imagine a future (maybe not so far off) where everything is tokenized and you can have your salary agreed in dollars but gold gets delivered to your wallet and you can buy groceries by selling tokenized shares of a REIT.

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket In that world, there will need to be concentrations of liquidity. You can't go from gold to shares of an obscure REIT by finding people who want to go those same shares to gold. The liquidity-concentrating asset likely can't be one country's currency. How could that be universal?

@HypeBillion @MycolePawket So, sure, if you get paid in dollars and pay your bills in dollars, it may make sense for you to use a dollar-denominated stablecoin for short-term holdings and payments. Absolutely.
CRYPTO
Vlad "BTCTKVR.com\u201d Costea \U0001f7e7
Vlad "BTCTKVR.com” Cos...
@TheVladCostea
I usually stay away from price predictions, but this time I couldn't help it. Just published "10 reasons why bitcoin will hit $100.000 in 2021".

Share it with a normie friend, maybe he/she will understand the value proposition of

Reason no. 1: during its 12 year-old existence, Bitcoin has performed a lot better as a store of value than gold.

Reason no. 2: Bitcoin is easier and less expensive to transfer than gold. This one is pretty self-explanatory, as gold is heavy and expensive to secure.

However, I believe that we should look up to gold a lot more often & look down to USD less

Reason no. 3: Bitcoins can be carried across borders a lot easier than gold and cash.

It's simple, really. With only a general-purpose electronic device (phone, laptop), piece of paper, or even 12 words that you memorize, you can move your wealth in a different country.

Reason no. 4: Bitcoin transactions cannot be censored.

In a world where PayPal and Visa can dictate your policy as a business and can shut you up from expressing political opinions, Bitcoin has a lot of value.
CRYPTO
Trolly McTrollface
Trolly McTrollface
@Tr0llyTr0llFace
On the importance of leverage for the crypto ecosystem.
A long time ago, BNP Paribas bought a retail forex exchange, because they thought they'd get an insight into forex trading flows and positions. What they quickly discovered, is that the website was a muppet slaughterhouse.


People would get stopped out ALL THE TIME because they used too much leverage. Over 90% of them lost money in a consistent way. Those are worse than even casino odds.
That's why around 2005, you had so many forex trading websites popping up. They would offer up to 500x leverage.

The higher the leverage, the better (for the website).
This became such a huge trend that regulators stepped in, and introduced maximum leverage rules. Something like x30 for forex, if I remember correctly. All of a sudden, all the ads and Premier League sponsorships vanished.

Forex gambling is still around, but not nearly as profitable, because it takes time for people to lose their money with a pitiful x30 leverage. Currencies usually don't move by 3% in a day. It can take weeks for an amateur trader to lose it all. Plus the adrenaline rush is gone.

Enter crypto.
It's hard to explain how one-sided leveraged crypto trading is. Traders don't stand a chance. With currencies, you could expect to extract SOME money from real world flows. In crypto, there are no real world flows. It's just traders against traders against insiders.
CRYPTO

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Sri Mridanga Saileswari Temple Muzhakkunnu, Kannur KERALA

The temple is established by Parasurama and it is one among 108 Durga temples.
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It is the family diety of Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja.
Devi is present in three forms Kali, Saraswati and Lakshmi.

Legend...👇
Once a Mridungam ( musical instrument) shaped rock fell from heaven here.
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Devi originated in the form of Mridangam and Parasurama captivated the essence of Devi into a Vigraham. Vigraham is made of Panchaloham.
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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


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Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
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A Thread on the Boss himself @Mitesh_Engr

Mitesh Sir's Positional Option Selling 101:

• How to find direction
• Which options to sell
• How to deploy capital
• Exit criteria
• What ROI he targets weekly
• What % risk he takes

Done with the help of @niki_poojary


How @Mitesh_Engr Sir finds the direction?

• Daily charts S/R
• 75 min charts S/R
• Intraday trend
• Always play directional
• Never trades in strategies


Which options to sell in weekly expiry according to @Mitesh_Engr?

• Weekly candle High/Low
• Sell 1% away options from those
• Exit when levels breached


Position Sizing by @Mitesh_Engr Sir.

How to deploy your capital?

• First sell 20%
• Pyramid the next day
• When to exit
• What to do when view goes wrong
• What to do with idle capital


Some important tweets of @Mitesh_Engr Sir

• What Data to look at
• ROI for safe players per month
• Max risk per day
• Gather knowledge and play directional
• Never play strategies
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Novid Houellebecq (That's Hollaback)
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I want to explain what happened to tumblr overnight. And why Twitter as reached it's dream (or have come ever so close to it)

Yahoo, who bought Tumblr years ago, used to have a huge adult presence on the early net. They allowed adult groups and what not.

However, people and bots (just like now) misused the service, and Yahoo were forced to make a choice. They made private the groups (and later closed them down and sold some of it to other companies) and then ended their chatrooms on yahoo messenger...

after a incident with one of the chatrooms vid cams. The damage was done, Yahoo Messenger lost a lot of people - and with the closing of the groups - backpage and Craigslist came more important.

Now backpage is no more and Craigslist is slowly passing away. Tumblr had a semi strong community, but once 2014 came around and both porn, and political bots exploded the quality started to go down,
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Ashta Siddhi

Ashta Siddhi is mentioned in Patanjali Yog sutra and can be obtained by very few through countless years of practice and devotion to all eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga.

Siddhi can loosely be translated as accomplishment or a special power or unusual skill.


The eight Siddhis are:

1. Anima: Reducing one’s physical self to the size of an atom.

2. Mahima: Expanding one’s physical self to infinite level

3. Garima: Making one’s physical self so heavy as immovable by others

4. Laghima: Becoming almost weightless


5. Prapti: Being able travel anywhere in the Universe

6. Prakamya: Can know & understand what is going on in one’s mind. Can understand other person’s min.

7. Ishitva: Possessing title of Bhagwan

8. Vashitva: A seeker can subdue any person/thing

(Hanuman Jayanti is coming)


Hanumanji not only possessed all eight siddhis, but was also blessed by Sita mata as “Ashta Siddhi Nau Nidhi Ke Daata”.

When Hanumanji first reaches to Lanka on his mission to find Sita, he makes use of anima so as to be discrete in enemy territory.


He uses it again when he approaches Sita mata for the first time – reducing his size to that of a schoolboy, to avoid scaring her. He uses mahima to outwit & overpowers
the demons.
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