Why Garden? So You Can Write Cheques To Strippers.

The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and in order to create the conditions most favourable to its growth must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.i

With joyous frequency, conversations on #bitcoin-assetsii are so complete that there’s little for me to add other than a few clarifying footnotes. This is one of those times.

So without further ado, a discussion of lost bitcoins, reputation, temptation, choices, and stripper power:iii

mircea_popescu: TradeFortressiv is now known as “Free hugs! ♥” on scamtalkv << why is it always the scammers that push the purely formal “be nice to people” angle ? o wait! because that’s how mimicry works,vi and that’s what they are!

moiety:vii And I still dont believe he is a scammer.
mircea_popescu: Didn’t he run off with a bunch of bitcoinz ?
fluffypony: He “lost” 4200 Bitcoins
moiety: I don’t think he did though and i believe he reimbursed what he could out of his own funds

pankkake: He probably lost them throught CoinLenders.viii Still a scam, running a fractionnal reserve is a scam.
mircea_popescu: That’s easily believable.

mircea_popescu: Yeah. The problem is that this take in 4k btc, take a vacation for half a year then come back and split a btc or two to the idiots is really very good business. And if it becomes socially acceptable bitcoin will become entirely sealed off to the poor. Even as it is they have a hard time.ix

moiety: lots of people close due to hacks (whether true or not) and don’t reimburse anything
mircea_popescu: and none of them may come back, ever again, in any capacity. Sooner or later people will come to the realisation that reputation is worth a helluva lot than money, (This is why the WoT matters. Reputation is everything.) Which was in fact truth, plain as day, for as long as the state was weak and the hansax and its successor guilds ruled supreme.

fluffypony: The problem is it’s hard to say with any degree of certainty that he didn’t con people out of their Bitcoin.
moiety: I know fluffypony it’s just too hard for me to believe thatxi 

fluffypony: Let me put it this wayfor that amount of money even the most straight-laced individual would have a hard time not wanting to lift a little and once you’ve stolen a little it snowballs into “how can I steal the whole lot” the reason this doesn’t happen in big companies is because of the number of people involved you’d have to collude with so many.
mircea_popescu: Except it does happen in big companies. The only reason it doesn’t happen, as long as it doesn’t, is that they don’t actually have access to it. Basic corp governance, nobody may write checks on the corp account. See, you simply can not write a check. at all. no sig whatsoever. Corp only pays specific types of things to specific types of people and that’s that. Which is why random nobodies can’t b2b. Because for the corp, it’s too much like simply being stolen from. So you gotta have a big corp to sell overpriced shit to another big corp. It‘s a whole bezzle.xii This happens to also be why I’m quite so powerful. sure there’s other people with money on twitter, VCs or whatnot. The difference is that i can write a check for ten million dollars to a stripper, if i feel like i it. They… not.

This is the benefit of Bitcoin.

This is why we have power.

This is why we garden.

___ ___ ___

  1. Quote via The Road To Serfdom by F.A. Hayek.
  2. #b-a is where the best gardeners meet. This is where we, the Citizens of Bitcoin, share knowledge.
  3. You can read the unedited conversation here, in the logs.
  4. TradeFortress owned and operated a Bitcoin webwallet service called inputs.io up until late 2013 when it was “hacked.”
  5. scamtalk aka Bitcointalk.org
  6. How does mimicry in business work? Like so.
  7. Yes, this is the moiety of Bitcoin Hotline fame. Have you tried calling her yet?
  8. CoinLenders was yet another wallet inspector.
  9. The poor, from a technical perspective, are nearly precluded from using Bitcoin safely. They can use webwallets, maybe even Circle’s fiat-denominated turdsicle, but high-entropy paper wallets require time and equipment not readily available to them.
  10. Hanseatic League, also called Hansa, was an organization founded by north German towns and German merchant communities abroad to protect their mutual trading interests. The league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century. (Hanse was a medieval German word for “guild,” or “association,” derived from a Gothic word for “troop,” or “company.”)” -via Britannica.
  11. It’s hard for many of us to believe that reality can’t be whatever we want it to be. Reality can be some things, but this largely depends on our choices, not our trainflake imaginings.
  12. For more on the “bezzle” term, see Trilema.

3 thoughts on “Why Garden? So You Can Write Cheques To Strippers.

  1. […] into a friendship with the guy ? saifedean: It’s on my hard-drive, a long Talebian/Popperian/Hayekian fisking of climate science and its pretenses of knowledge. Taleb was the reason I went heretical, […]

  2. […] the computing space, this little digital garden of ours, some of the most poisonous offerings are sold as “easier, more convenient, and more […]

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