Kickstarter Is A Waste, Pirate Is A Skyscraper

Again, from IRC:

mircea_popescu: assbot: Kickstarter project spent $3.5M to finish a working prototype and ended in disaster | Ars Technica << punkman to be fair, that’s not really either important or making a lot of sense. sometimes prototypes fail, which is why they’re called prototypes. i don’t think you can find any item which didn’t have millions “wasted” in prototyping. the problem with kickstarter and the shit trying to copy it isn’t that it wastes a lot of money, but that it wastes it pointlessly.
asciilifeform: sane people don’t sell prototype as product.ⁱ

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform sane people also aren’t on kickstarter, nor do they think everyone’s their peer, nor do they think they have something to “contribute” in random fields that never heard of them.

mircea_popescu: we’re in postmodernism here, and so therefore postsanity.
asciilifeform: lol
mircea_popescu: of course, actually wasting money is a net positive for the us system. in that it deflates the bubbles. the most important economic activity in a runaway inflation macroeconomy is the writing off of bad debts.ⁱⁱ

asciilifeform: it isn’t wasted ‘correctly’ though. it ends up feeding folks who ought to have gone hungry
mircea_popescu: which is kinda why the headlines read like they did, a few years ago. “x bank writes off y bilions”
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that’s the minor part of the binomial. the major part is that it is removed from folks who shouldn’t have had it.

asciilifeform: the people who did that kickstart, for instance, are separated from their true motherland – the uranium mines – for so long as the money lasts them.
mircea_popescu: as long as the scammers actualy waste it, rather than keep it, this is financial sterilisation. you’re looking at it up the river. entropy actually flows the other direction. but the reason these derps are on kickstarter and bitcointalk instead of whatever mine isn’t that they had enough money and bought their way out.

benkay: asciilifeform: it isn’t wasted ‘correctly’ though. it ends up feeding folks who ought to have gone hungry // mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that’s the minor part of the binomial. the major part is that it is removed from folks who shouldn’t have had it. // wait how is taking the money from people who shouldn’t have it and giving it to others who shouldn’t have had it either not subtracting a from x and then adding a back to x?

asciilifeform: from a different angle: why no cheap factorygurlz in usa? because the ‘candidates’ are instead paid to sit and wank
mircea_popescu: benkay because group 1 was “investing it” therefore wrecking capital allocation. whereas group 2 just spends it, therefore merely wasting resources.

mircea_popescu: consider group 1 of 50 idiots who “invested” with pirate,ⁱⁱⁱ thus creating for me the problem of there existing a pirate, something im still dealing with. vs the 50 idiots who bought pizzas and lost wallets and whatnot. which is the more pernicious iyo ?

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: aha i recall, you described this lemma in the ‘tin woman’ essay^iv
mircea_popescu: if there were no pirate and no silkroad whatshisname, the usg wouldn’t be tempted today by the very dangerous heresy that “maybe it can make it on its own.” generally, the sooner agents are brought to their knees the less blood gets spilled.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform: from a different angle: why no cheap factorygurlz in usa? because the ‘candidates’ are instead paid to sit and wank << false. the cheap factorygirlz in china come from families which have cared enough about them to invested beatings and other very valuable time. no such thing in the us. that’s why.

bitcoinpete: mircea_popescu: other than just having a mountain of coins and the ability to dispense of them erratically, how does pirate impact you?
mircea_popescu: bitcoinpete that’s exactly it.

asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: very pessimistic, but probably true. the inevitable conclusion is ‘biodiesel.’
bitcoinpete: a ok
mircea_popescu: bitcoinpete consider the case of a street where some idiot builds an unstable skyscraper. the cost of the thing falling may be 10k. but the cost of everyone on the street insuring against being fallen on ? 1mn over 10 years.

asciilifeform: if i recall, this used to be called ‘externality’
mircea_popescu: exactly
bitcoinpete: right. so the energy expending in making the infrastructure robust enough to deal with pirate’s hits are severely costly

mircea_popescu: that’s why you don’t let derps build unstable skyscrapers. not because the thing WILL fall, but because the thing MIGHT fall, which is more expensive than it simply falling.
asciilifeform: or, one could say, the cost of a maniac spinning round and round with machine gun is not merely the wasted lead.
mircea_popescu: something like that. and now y’all are better qualified risk managers and generally speaking financiers than pretty much everyone under 30 on ws. and an appalling fraction of the over 30 crowd to boot.

bitcoinpete: this appears to be one of those cases where the cost of uncertainty greatly exceeds the potential benefits of the construction. sort of like playground equipment with built-in buzzsaws. or the opposite of most of the de-riskified markets (and playgrounds)^v

mircea_popescu: bitcoinpete problem is there’s two kinds of risk. the risk that your prototype may not work, for whatever real reason, is one type, and eminently insurable.
bitcoinpete: sure, have lots of prototypes..
mircea_popescu: the risk that your boss may not let you make the prototype however, for whatever ideological reason, is the other type.
bitcoinpete: ya, can’t have lots of bosses
mircea_popescu: eminently uninsurable, and the confusion between the two things pretty much the #1 killed of insurance businesses.

bitcoinpete: interesting. so with pirate, we can’t make prototypes because we don’t know if he’ll say yes?
mircea_popescu: uh
bitcoinpete: in that we can try to make something and he could arbitrarily crush it. or not arbitrarily
mircea_popescu: no, more like we tell that Columbia girl that the best future for her is on her two knees and with a welted butt in our household. but this idiot with a flashy car tells her how he’s gonna make her a singer-actresss. and stupid as she is, she goes for it. two years later, she’s working that mfc^vi and wondering “why it all went wrong”

bitcoinpete: so another 5 years pass and she humbly comes to her senses, following the girls who make the right decision 7 years prior
mircea_popescu: there’s no coming back.^vii be “offended” by mpoe-pr, then “invest” in whatever, they’re still around, mostly, still derping, mostly. by the time you’re that defeated you really have no incentive left to admit you’re stupid. so they suck versus more humble, even later, entrants. “people”, ie, nobodies who got in in 2013 got in at a time their meagre disposable income already made it impossible for them to matter. so a lot of the heartache of discovering one is poor because one is stupid, not because one never “had a chance” is spared them.

asciilifeform: nobodies who got in in 2013… meagre disposable income already made it impossible for them to matter << not so simple. chumpatronic engineers, malware artists, etc. who got in 2013 (or even today) can still accumulate enough to build plenty of falling skyscrapers. or is there reason to think that we’ve reached a ‘ground state’ where all of the money has left the ‘fool pockets’ ?

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform the problem was 1mn btc sloshing together at a time the total circulating btc was like 5mn. nobody getting in today gets even 100k together,^viii let alone 3mn, to keep proportions. most “vc”s are exposed to less btc than usagi was three years ago, for crying out loud.
bitcoinpete: at least vc’s use back-ups^ix
asciilifeform: wouldn’t the increased fiat pull of btc today compensate? e.g. for 30k btc one can build an actual skyscraper – which proceeds to fall…
mircea_popescu: i do not care what happens in the fiat world. not anymore. let obama fix that.

bitcoinpete: mircea_popescu: so what do some of the scenarios of pirate shenanigans look like ?
mircea_popescu: “being arrested and dropping ten btc to the usg”

Bitcoin is Bitcoin. And it’s getting harder to come by, not easier.

If you have “an idea” for a Bitcoin business, you’d do well to pitch it to #bitcoin-assets. Y’know, if you want to succeed.

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