“Science” and the post-truth meme

I am feeling that the issue runs deeper. Science has been hijacked by the state, so I find the post-truth thing as a meme that rejects the corruption of science. Unfortunately, those hippies are throwing the baby with the bathwater in the process. But I see legitimate issues that need to be acknowledged if we want to reach out to those post-truth hippies.

For example, in my opinion:

The issue is not with 5G, but with this:

  1. Not wanting to be “bathed” 24/7 in waves of higher frequency (3 to 30 GHz). I understand the fear and skepticism on this.
  2. The push towards so-called “smart cities”, which are more like surveillance-cities. Granted, those technologies will bring benefits, but I see an issue with a top-down planned system controlled by the state and its contractors rather than a more organic system, with participation from many actors and little central planning. Of course, politicians and “experts” are always trying to link together smart-cities with 5G as if they must go together.
  3. The state is appropriating the radio spectrum and renting most of it to its cronies from the telecom companies, while it only leaves tiny scraps for open use by the population.

The issue is not with vaccines, but with this:

  1. pushing forced vaccination under the guise of “science”.
  2. an ever-growing list of both mandatory and “recommended” vaccines, some of them for diseases that are just an inconvenience and definitely not life-threatening.

I feel it must be acknowledged that the state has hijacked science, in the same way that the church has always hijacked spirituality. So, just telling those hippies that they have to trust science because facts and because the “experts” say so, won’t cut it anymore. A different approach is needed.

The virus is just a symptom, not the cause

You may want to believe that the world works like a video game, where you can press the pause button, come back three months later and everything will be waiting for you exactly as you left it. But real life doesn’t work like that. The difference is that in the video game you are in control, whereas in real life you are not. Maybe you want to believe that the worst is over, but this is just getting started. Supply chains are breaking down and the economy is starting to collapse. To make it clear, “the economy” is not something abstract; it’s real people losing their jobs, their businesses, their incomes and their homes. Your authoritarian fantasies will just make it worse for you and others until you cannot handle it anymore and you accept reality and surrender to it. I get that you are afraid, and that’s OK. But to hold your fellow human beings hostage because you are afraid is not OK. It’s getting to the point where if you still support lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, mandatory tracking, mandatory testing or mandatory anything you have blood on your hands. History will not judge you kindly.

Then there are those of you who want to believe that the bailouts and the “universal basic income” will make the problems disappear. For example, I read Charles Eisenstein in his otherwise excellent piece The Coronation come up with all this UBI nonsense. You probably realize that if you grab a piece of paper and write “$1,000,000” on it with a marker pen of your favorite color, you don’t become magically rich. But you still want to believe that if the government does exactly the same thing, your problems will go away. On the one hand, even if you are not fully aware of it, you realize that the government and its satellite corporations are abusing you and sucking your blood more and more every day. Yet on the other hand, you keep begging your very abusers that are trying to deprive you from earning an honest living for yourself to give you a measly monthly UBI check in the hopes that it will magically make you feel good and solve your problems.

Aside from the fact that printing money cannot solve the issue the governments themselves have created in the first place with their mandatory lockdowns: maybe you expect that you can control your masters, or that they will benevolently give you the UBI check with no strings attached. Of course not: receiving the check will likely be tied to being a “good law-abiding citizen” (a.k.a. obedient slave); something like the social credit system they have in China. You will end up completely disempowered and depending on the government to even feed yourself and have shelter. I find it quite infuriating and sad that any “spiritual teacher” would want that for you and that you fall for it.

Consider this:

The issue is not the coronavirus itself. The virus is just revealing the cracks in the system.

You are not a victim. You always have the power. Not the power to start a “revolution”, mind you, which just consists in replacing the old abusers with new ones. As Buckminster Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

You have the power to walk away from this dying system of nation-state governments and fiat “money” and into the nascent paradigm of cryptocurrencies and decentralized governance. But first you have to question and confront the beliefs you have accepted as “reality”. It’s hard, I know, but unavoidable. So, the sooner you begin, the better for yourself and for humanity. Do you want to be free or do you just want to have a “fair” master?

Liberal cowardice

To be blunt, people want “authority” to exist because they themselves are immature cowards. They want an all-powerful entity to impose their will upon others. This takes different forms in different varieties of political advocacy, but the basic motivation is always the same. The “liberal” for example, resents reality. He does not want a world in which suffering and injustice are possible. But instead of doing what He can as a human being, he wants a “Government” to do it for him. He wants some magical entity to make sure that everyone, himself included, is fed, housed, and taken care of, no matter how lazy or irresponsible they are. Instead of trusting human beings to take care of each other, he wants a super human”authority” to guarantee housing, food, health care, and all sorts of other things, for everyone. He wants it so badly that he refuses to accept the obvious truth that no such guarantee is ever possible, and that if mere mortals do not take care of themselves and each other, nothing else will take care of them.

“The Most Dangerous Superstition” – Larken Rose, pg. 124

On Rollo McFloogle’s response to Antony Zegers’ “Bitcoin Core Cargo Cult”

This is my response to the article On Antony Zegers’ “Bitcoin Core Cargo Cult”. I have enjoyed reading the article. The article mentions twice that Zegers’ arguments are a “red herring”, but I don’t see an explanation on why that is true. It’s very easy to dismiss an argument as a red herring without never explaining why.

Believers in a fixed block size appeal to consensus, but I argue that consensus is not a guarantee of good ideas. For instance, the general consensus, or what the majority of the people believe, is that we need government. As an anarchist, I know that thinking by oneself and governing oneself is by no means easy, but it is way more rewarding than being told what to do.

  • A statist will say that we need government. The statist will also say that government is good because it is the consensus.
  • A minarchist will say that government is a necessary evil (note the contradiction, as if evil could ever be necessary or desirable).
  • An anarchist will say that government is an unavoidable evil.

Believers in fixed block size are right in that the 1 MB hard limit is the current consensus. But they miss that they are not just spectators, but also actors in the Bitcoin ecosystem. They choose supporting the status quo just for the sake of it, and then they justify their choice by saying that it is what the majority supports. That is circular reasoning.

The fixed blocksize believer is debating about what is. The dynamic blocksize proponent is debating about what could be. Without people thinking about what could be and acting on it, humanity would have not advanced a single bit.

I also think the statement that the Lightning network seems to be a better scaling solution is a fallacy. On-chain scaling doesn’t invalidate the Lightning network. I actually think that, in the long term, scaling will be achieved by a combination of both. Lightning, on its own, cannot provide the security and censorship resistance that proof of work provides. If a Lightning transaction is the same as a transaction on the blockchain, then, why is a blockchain even needed at all? Why not just use Ripple instead?

Moreover, there is no consensus among experts that Bitcoin cannot scale on-chain. Several experts say that Bitcoin can scale on-chain, and they have worked on identifying the existing bottlenecks and what optimizations need to be done to the Bitcoin software in order to scale on-chain without increasing linearly the resources (bandwidth, CPU, memory) needed. What happens is that those experts are working on their own projects, as their ideas are rejected by the Bitcoin Core community, and their work may go unnoticed among those who live in the Core echo chamber.

Bitcoin will (probably) always be the biggest cryptocurrency

What is then the reason that Bitcoin is still the non-contested leader? I believe that the reason is that, despite its current flaws, Bitcoin is providing utility for its users, mainly as store of value. I think that the value of a cryptocurrency comes from two components: its existing utility and the speculation on its future utility. Cryptocurrencies are currently in the speculative phase, where investors are mostly speculating about the future utility of each one of them. In the long term, a cryptocurrency must provide actual utility to justify its capitalization. With a 1 MB block, I believe the utility of Bitcoin will be very limited, as almost nobody will be able to write on the blockchain.

Altcoins are the testbed for new ideas. I think that Bitcoin will always remain the most capitalized cryptocurrency. Why? Because if any other cryptocurrency offers improvements over Bitcoin that are so dramatic that it threatens to overtake Bitcoin, then Bitcoin will copy those improvements and neuter the advantage of the competing coin. Bitcoin has the advantage of having the chain with the most cumulative proof of work, the most known brand and the biggest network effect. As defined on the Bitcoin whitepaper: “The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.” This means that any hard fork will be Bitcoin if it satisfies this condition, according to the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Core Cult is slowing the transition to a better monetary system and a better world

I acknowledge that Bitcoin is very resistant to change, and that can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because it can stop the spread of bad ideas. It’s bad because it slows innovation and adoption of Bitcoin.

I think that, fortunately, Bitcoin is resilient to agents and ideas that try to destroy it, even if those come from within the Bitcoin ecosystem. We will have to wait for more people to realize that 1 MB is just an arbitrary number and not the result of careful consideration after objective analysis.

I see Bitcoin as an embodiment of the collective consciousness of its holders. Bitcoin is just a tool, and it will only be as powerful as free are the minds of its holders. This is a battle about ideas. As long as the minds of the Bitcoin holders are indoctrinated into validating the status quo and not believing that a better world is possible and achievable, the impact of Bitcoin in society will be very limited.

Hello World!

I have just created this personal website and blog. What has prompted me to do this? These days we have been seeing censorship and banning of accounts by major social platforms and tech companies.

I have always believed that it is important to have a web presence under one’s full control, even if it is just a homepage with a short bio and links to social media.

Today, Twitter has suspended the @Anarchyball account. I follow this account and like what they publis(ed). Fortunately, they are still on Facebook, as I enjoy seeing their humorous and interesting content. I don’t see any reason why Twitter would ban them, but they are free to do so, even though I find it unjust. In banning everything that drifts away from cat videos and mainstream opinion, these platforms will be driving away the interesting content in the long term.

I believe now it is more important than ever before to have more control over one’s web presence. This is why I am spending time and effort creating this blog rather than relying on Facebook, Twitter et al.

¿Confiar tus desnudos a Facebook?

Fotografía de la cuenta de Instagram de la modelo Kendall Jenner, famosa por su participación en el 'reality show' familiar 'Las Kardashian'.

“Hay pocas pruebas que nos lleven a pensar que las prácticas de la NSA hayan servido para proteger a los ciudadanos y sí muchas de que han contribuido a que Internet sea un lugar más peligroso. La lección es clara: la mayoría de las veces, la privacidad es un medio para garantizar la seguridad, y las políticas que ponen en peligro la privacidad a menudo acaban minando también la seguridad. Por tanto, desconfíen de cualquier plan que pretenda sacrificar la privacidad en aras de la seguridad.”

“Nadie cuidará de su privacidad mejor que usted. Entre otras razones, porque nadie, excepto usted, tiene mucho que perder si se la arrebatan.”

https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2018/01/05/actualidad/1515171497_361286.html