@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org wow that’s a beast. 😅

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I appreciate you calling out my point on inflation last night. I’ve learned a lot more about inflation now. I am better for it. My goal last night was to seek truth. And some truth we found. When you say things like “Cryptocurrency has ruined the brains of so many people” it’s difficult for me to see how that’s seeking truth. And frankly, I found it infuriating (which is why I muted in order to de-escalate). I don’t mind disagreement. It’s totally valid for you to feel the way you feel about Bitcoin. While I would prefer if you didn’t think my brain was ruined, I am deeply committed to the idea that you have a right to believe what you believe. I’d rather keep an open line of communication (no mutes). However, last night I realized that I really care about this subject. I intend to find a way to keep talking about it. I’d understand if you don’t want to follow me or you just want to mute me entirely.

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s why I was so excited about search the other day. I was thinking about the possibility of hosting my twtxt on IPFS which would mean effectively hosting it on no machine in particular. (It would change over time and could be multiple at the same time.) However, this would prevent me from knowing my own followers because the request log would be spread out across many nodes which most definitely wouldn’t share their user agent logs with me. That’s not great but perhaps it doesn’t matter. I personally only care about knowing my own followers so that I find people who mention me that I don’t happen to also follow. This is where search/registries would be really valuable. I could just periodically search various indexes/registries for mentions. I feel like this could have a benefit of keeping trolls at a distance. If I only search once an hour and put them in a separate queue, I can handle people outside my circle differently.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah I gotcha. I was saying that ownership of one’s twts are a bit more complicated when they’re one someone else’s instance. The instance owner could, for example, delete the feed of someone who was behaving badly. If they hadn’t backed up their feed, might be game over for all those twts.

@prologic@twtxt.net This is something I really like about this model. Your twts are still your own. You can at-mention whoever you like however much you like. They just don’t have to listen. Of course, if you’re on someone else’s instance, then it gets a bit more complicated. But at least it’s possible to move to your own.

I didn’t express myself very well earlier when mentioning muting abucci. I muted to stop myself from saying anything regretful (which would be a waste of my time and theirs). Also, I try to make all mutes temporary.

@prologic@twtxt.net I appreciate that you were trying to be civil. I do see that, and I thank you for that. And on second read, that last message might be a bit harsher than I intended. I’m sorry for that. I do think it’s clear to me that we’re not gonna get anywhere having a discussion in this format. I think I’m realizing this is a terrible medium for this sort of discussion. It creates a false urgency, at least for me. Maybe a long form blog post where commenters can reply in an email 1:1 would be better. I think it might allow everyone more time to allow their ideas to “bake” before sending.

@prologic@twtxt.net I have muted abucci. He’s clearly not wanting to interact in a fair or open manner. Clearly, any further conversation with him is a waste of my time. I appreciate your attempts to act in good faith in this conversation. However, you haven’t brought any material facts to light that I wasn’t already aware of. You haven’t directly addressed any of my core arguments. Your previous reply is super condescending (“poor brasshopper@twtxt.net”). And frankly, I find it hilarious that you’re the one thinking that I’ve drank the propaganda kool-aid. You, sir, are the one trapped in Plato’s cave. I believe any further discussion to be a waste of both of our time. Don’t bother replying.

It’s all taxation. Don’t pay your taxes? They take your stuff, lock you in a cage, and/or shoot you. If your store your value in anything other than AUD and it appreciates, you owe income tax on it at some point. This is typically when you “realize the gain”. Although, I have heard (never confirmed) that some countries tax unrealized gains in some circumstances.

@prologic@twtxt.net If I understand your claim correctly, you’re saying “I don’t like Bitcoin and therefore the amount of energy spent on it is not worth it.” Of course, I would never say that you can’t feel a certain way about a certain thing. I strongly support your right to feel that way. However, this argument doesn’t convince me or prove anything.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think practice is proving this one. In addition, I’ve heard of reports of folks memorizing their seed phrase, uninstalling their BTC wallet on their phone, crossing the Venezuelan border, proceeding to reinstall it, and restoring access to their wallet using their seed phrase. Try that with Gold or fiat.

Debt is central to modern central banking and money 1 2. I think even your economist neighbor would probably agree.

@prologic@twtxt.net This is a great resource. I like this one as well.

@prologic@twtxt.net I would argue that that this is also true for USD, AUD, etc. I think this is more a property of “money” than it is a property of Bitcoin.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not sure what your definition of diluting is here. As I understand it, dilution means that something is losing value, not gaining.

@prologic@twtxt.net See my comment on abucci’s twt: https://twtxt.net/twt/a6n4mtq

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I think you’re probably right. What I think I meant, after some more Googling, is that commodities tend to be valued through the lens of the stock-to-flow model 1. And the stock-to-flow model seems to have pretty strong explanatory power for tracking how Bitcoin appreciates 2. I believe that Bitcoin is effectively a commodity and the nature of its stock-to-flow ratio will make it such that it will tend to appreciate over long periods of time. (More stock converging towards a fixed value with an ever shrinking flow [newly minted bitcoin].) This is in contrast to fiat money which has been consistently losing value, due to inflation. Thank you. This has shown me that I need to do some more research to understand the distinction better.

Every fiat currency has laws that basically make it such that people have to use it—or else.

I think I actually mean currency here. A decent definition is “the most marketable thing”. Meaning, it’s the thing that most people believe to be easily redeemable for the broadest possible set of things. A currency that nobody believes in collapses. So yes, the value is increased by getting more people to believe the thing is valuable—but that’s how it works for all currencies.

Economics is driving Bitcoin to use more renewable sources of energy and seek out energy sources that would be impractical for other uses.

It is trivially easy for a government to steal someone’s USD, AUD, etc. It can be harder for a government to steal someone’s gold. It can be even harder to steal someone’s Bitcoin. In addition, it’s nearly impossible for the government to stop me from transferring my Bitcoin to whomever I damn well please.

There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin (eventually). The yearly inflation rate (new bitcoin created) will drop below gold’s inflation rate in the next few years. Eventually, it will go to zero.

When someone is in debt, they have promised to pay their creditor back with interest. Basic morality dictates that you pay it back according to the terms of the agreement. However, various decisions could hurt people’s ability to continue paying their creditor back. This could, for example, keep someone in a job that they otherwise wouldn’t stay in because “it pays well” (a.k.a. it pays enough to pay for their giant monthly debt payment).

Taxation is theft and inflation is a tax that hurts the poor the most.

Bitcoin arose without any need for coercion/violence.

Fiat needs coercion/violence to survive.

If Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme, then ALL money is a ponzi scheme.

I don’t buy the “environmental disaster” arguments. In fact, I think the opposite may prove to be true.

Bitcoin represents the strongest property rights that have ever existed.

Long term, Bitcoin is an appreciating asset. This discourages debt and therefore discourages slavery.

Debt is slavery. Fiat encourages debt. Therefore, fiat encourages slavery.

1. The inflation we see with fiat currencies (USD, AUD, etc.) is straight up theft. This theft hurts the least advantaged people most.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci @prologic@twtxt.net I want to emphasize that I asked that question in good faith. I genuinely want to know what ya’ll believe to be true. I don’t know everything and maybe you know something that I don’t. (In fact, I’d love to know why @prologic@twtxt.net thinks there’s been “harm to the economy”, but we can save that for later.) I wanted to hear you first before I started spouting off about why I think Bitcoin (excluding other crypto currencies) is a net good for society. But since ya’ll asked, I’ll list them in a fork of this twt. (Not gonna try to prove them off the bat. I’m just gonna list things I believe and we can discuss in forks for each one. In addition, I’m leaving room for the fact that writing these things out might lead me to realize that I’m wrong. I’m happy to admit that I’m wrong. I hope you can go in with the same attitude.)

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci @prologic@twtxt.net I totally get it. I probably would have agreed with you not that long ago. I’m curious what your objections are.

@tkanos@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve scrolled the front page of lobste.rs a few times. I always left with the impression that it’s basically HackerNews but with fewer comments and everyone basically agrees on most things. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but I find the sheer volume of perspectives on HackerNews more enjoyable. I feel like I learn about so many interesting extra things from the comments.

@tkanos@netbros.com How do you like lobsters? I’ve heard about it a few times but never actually checked it out.

@tkanos@netbros.com Of all the subs I subscribed to, r/ProgrammingLanguages and r/SelfHosted we’re probably my most frequented. I found that the more niche subreddits tended to have higher quality discussion.

@prologic@twtxt.net There are some folks in podcasting trying to figure it out. People can send podcasters money for every minute of their watch time. It’s voluntary in this context, but I could see this being adapted to a “pay to post” context. These micro transactions probably wouldn’t be feasible with current payment rails. They’re using the lightning network which is a layer 2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Transaction fees can be as low as one ten thousandth of a penny (USD). That makes it feasible to send ridiculously small amounts back and forth between two parties.

@prologic@twtxt.net Enough to make garden variety spamming not worth it but not so much that I regular folks can’t afford it. I think a larger one time fee to establish the account (that you don’t get back if you get banned) might be slightly more effective, especially with the current payment rails that exist.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci looks like it was the “AI said so”. I “got caught in Reddit’s spam filter”. They unbanned me. I get why this happens, but it’s super annoying since my conduct was not even close to bannable. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I think I’d prefer to pay a one time fee or a small fee for every post on sites I use a lot rather than them being ad supported and having to put up with overly aggressive spam filters.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I suspect this is probably the case.

@prologic@twtxt.net I can’t say that I’m surprised either. I kinda knew in the back of my mind that it was a matter of time. I don’t exactly hold conventional views on things (Minarchist with AnCap tendencies and a borderline Bitcoin maximalist). I just figured that I’d actually know why I was banned 🤣. Perhaps I’ll find another forum-style site to patronize.

lol apparently I’ve been suspended from Reddit due to some violation of content policy. However, they haven’t actually told me what content policy that I have violated. How to get unsuspended? Prove that you haven’t violated the content security policy. This is the most asinine thing that I’ve ever seen.

@prologic@twtxt.net Well. All I needed to do was tell my local dev instance to scrape and crawl your feed. The data directory is at 231MiB now. 😀

@akoizumi@social.kyoko-project.wer.ee Sounds like rust has personally offended you.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I figured I’d finally dox myself (my git.mills.io profile). 😉

re memory usage: is there some memory target you’re trying to hit? I would suspect that it partly depends on the data set, but maybe that plus search stats could give me enough to figure out a good set of test data.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m taking a look at yarn.social search codebase. Just created a tiny PR to add some documentation around setup. I was thinking that I might start with “Document how to use the query language really well” since that would be a good learning exercise. It looks like maybe https://search.twtxt.net/help would be a good place to put that work. Were you wanting to put any search help text anywhere else in the UI?

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I agree with you on all points. I want to clarify that while I think we should build stuff that preserves peoples rights, I’m am strongly opposed to forcing them to use it. It’s entirely possible that what I build might be misguided and actually hurt those ends. It might also just suck. Ultimately, I think people’s free choice should be the decider.

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s a really good point. Education definitely makes a huge difference. In addition, I think we as technologists have a duty to make the decentralized/rights preserving tech the most appealing.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci @prologic@twtxt.net I agree that IPv6 would/will be a great thing for decentralization. However, I think folks would like easy to use software regardless of whether it’s centralized or decentralized. I have found a deep lack of care about privacy and rights in general from your average citizen. They just want nice stuff. They don’t care if it means giving away rights/becoming slaves.