I don't think that will work. My public key is public. The ticket's public key is public. Right?
Thus, anyone can make QR codes that show the 2 public keys. It's trivial. This is the "showing a picture" scenerio I mentioned above. Anyone can show the right picture, especially since the picture that needs to be shown is public information.
>I don't know why but the whole cryptocurrency space feels like a philosophical parody of the real world. Money without people. Contracts without enforcement. Ownership without property.
The common denominator between these being: process without purpose.
And this is why the parody works so well. The world is already like you describe, though it's hard to notice if you view it through the rose-tinted glasses that the ever-shrinking in-group is more than happy to sell to you for good "old" fiat money. (If 50 years ago is old.) Neoliberal "infinite growth" capitalism is already an inter-generational MLM, sanctioned by a global monopoly on violent enforcement. All power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and we have all become so delightfully non-violent... The logical conclusion: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia locked in perpetual war upon the background of a collapsed ecosystem?
Well, fuck that. Techno-capitalistic nation-states are an early-stage performance optimization. And since violent uprisings lead nowhere, we're doing the sane thing. We're refactoring 'em the fuck out of existence.
If "having a court enforce [a] process" is "simple", how come so many people already have "avoid courts", "distrust lawyers" as rules of thumb, and "don't side with authority" as a general life principle? For the marginalized majority, every state is a failed state, and every system is hostile and oppressive. The thing everyone's getting out of crypto is the same thing they've been getting out of all the other silly pyramid schemes, from Tupperware to contraband. Which is to say, the same things they've been aggressively denied by the state-sanctioned economic mainstream.
Hope. Opportunity. A voice.
A functioning parody of existing economical processes gives people the hope that there's a better economic system right around the corner. Maybe we just have to collectively sort of stumble into it.
Of course, it's only that simple if you have a simplified view of human creativity. But that's OK, too. Every invention that truly revolutionized our way of life was a somewhat accidental result of thousands upon thousands person-hours of organized research. And that's exactly what we're doing here - about as haphazardly as virtually any other kind of software development, but at the same time crowdfunded on a global scale.
Today, we're offering people the same sort of economic "junk food" that the current system has gotten them addicted to for the better part of the 20th century. Tomorrow, someone finally sneaks distributed consensus technology into the mainstream, and makes the world a little less corrupt.
Let's face it, powerful forces in our society discourage self-control and critical reflection, and culture encourages people to have children regardless of whether they have learned those skills
Royalties don't really apply when you're being paid a wage for the work in the first place. The cognitive dissonance in both railing against spec work then demanding a piece of profit in perpetuity is, well... impressive.
This is also why I advocate for JS as a scripting language (if it's already a part of your stack, anyway). Curiously, every time I mention it HN gets mad at me.
Personal story: moved into a EU country and tried to import my car tax-free as personal property. Went to a customs agency because apparently you don't talk to customs directly, you go through one of those. They had me collect all sorts of documents, which took me months before it became evident that this type of car cannot be imported tax-free in the first place.
The stress from expecting people to take their responsibilities seriously has cost me many meaningful interpersonal relationships, not to mention innumerable brain cells. On the other hand, the work to achieve more self-sufficiency is alienating in its own right, and, depending on starting conditions, can twist a person into an unlikable mess.
Well put. When you become medium-level at all areas where you like tinkering, it’s hard not to get bitter about people who aren’t doing it correctly for you…
"Nature vs nurture" in the hairless ape presupposes free will, which is a linguistic universal but a metaphysical unprovable.
Look closely enough and there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors. Other than maybe some people jumping to the conclusion that one has an axe to grind with minorities when one attempts to explain certain things with genetics. Which is just as much an arbitrary social taboo as the preceding taboos that constitute what we today call bigotry. (For the record, I'm a staunch opponent of all forms of violence and oppression.)
For me it makes exactly zero difference. Even if free will does exist in some essential sense, I do not believe that people generally choose what opinions to espouse. They simply acquire them through mimesis of their social environment. If that makes me a nihilist and a coward, then so be it.
Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality. I dream of a world where the concept of free will is considered just as poor taste as racial slurs. I think that, perhaps paradoxically, it will be a much more free and just world.
> Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality.
I like this idea of a "deterministic" language. In fact it reminds me of Nonviolent Communication, and is probably a good tactic for discussions that might otherwise devolve into personal attacks.
Saying "there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors" is arbitrarily different from saying "all is one, separateness is an illusion". That is, it differs in connotations and not in the essential content of the statement.
Which is exactly what you said, except that you chose to ignore that connotations conduct meaning, when you asked your rhetorical question. This is not e-prime, it is a plain old adverb answering the question "how?" like adverbs normally do.
No, I'm not. Can you be more precise in what you mean by "causative factors"? Without further context, and based on my understanding of the world, virtually anything internal or external to a person could cause them to be more or less skilled at something. It contains everything, and so seems that your statement could be interpreted that genetics and everything else in existence are one in the same.
You asked what was the difference between my statement (that genetics is not more special than other causes of being more or less skilled at something) and the statement that "all is one, separateness is an illusion". I answered that the difference between these two statements is arbitrary, which I still believe to be the case. Apologies if something else happened to you.
My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.
Genetics is obviously not the same as everything else in existence; I'm not sure that even makes sense as a statement. You seem to have somehow derived that I am arguing against the concept of distinctions at all. I'm not sure if language would be feasible without distinctions.
I don't disagree with any of what you just said, but I fail to see what point you are trying to make or what you are arguing against. Without the (linguistic) act of making distinctions, everything is indeed one and the same, but that's... kind of pointless?
EDIT: Sibling poster also seems to fail to make the distinction whether (a) we're comparing genetics to other causative factors, or (b) we are comparing my statement about genetics to your "all is one" interpretation of it.
In case it's still unclear, (a) and (b) are two completely separate things and I'm not sure how this conversation got to the point of conflating them. It just serves to reinforce my belief that the ambiguity of our language's syntactic structures makes it inordinately difficult to reason about many things in everyday language. Or maybe I'm just a bad communicator. "Me bad", "you bad" that's supremely easy to express lol
EDIT2: Correction, TheSpiceIsLife does actually get it.
> My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.
The confusion is in the difference between proximal and ultimate causes, the rest of the discussion is over the ultimate cause of certain phenotypic features being down to genetics, some other mechanism or not significant at all. You've then said "all these different things are just proximate causes and [because free will doesn't exist] the ultimate cause is the laws of physics" to which people have unsurprisingly gone "what the hell does that have to do with anything?" because, well, it doesn't.
The fact that the ultimate cause of me taking a dump is "the laws of physics" doesn't mean the proximal cause wasn't me 'deciding' to go to the loo, and the fact that you can always say "the laws of physics" (or some higher power) is the cause doesn't make talking about higher level causes any less useful.
I don't believe in free will but its such a good trick that you act as though it were true almost 100% of the time, and talking about my 'decisions' as causes is useful the same as talking about 'genetic' and 'environmental' is useful. We talk about the causes of the Big Bang usefully despite time only coming into existence when the Big Bang happened :)
What sprang to my mind when I read the arbitrarily response is that you have equally little control over the genes you’re born with as you do the place, time, family, society, economy, technology, and culture you’re born in to.
> How is this any different from saying "all is one, separateness is an illusion"?
> It's not arbitrary. "Other causative factors" is boundless.
These are distinctly different lines on inquiry. One is an inquiry to in the illusory nature of separateness, the other is an inquire in to the boundless nature of causative factors.
Fair enough. I still believe that tiptoeing around these issues gives power to those who consciously perpetrate and benefit from institutionalized violence.
Like another commenter said, operating with a comfortably skewed mental model doesn't help resolve the actual socioeconomic issues.
I was a little hyperbolic in my original answer. In all honesty, I think it's probably best to continue research in this area. However, in the current state of the world I don't see how that research is especially beneficial. Every finding would have to be taken with such a massive grain of salt that I have a hard time imagining we would find practical applications for it.
In the current state of the world, most scientific research will be co-opted by some violent apparatus or another. Does that mean we should lose hope and stop doing any research altogether?
By current state of the world, I mean that any research into this topic can't control for all the possible variables. That's why we'd have to take it with such a large grain of salt.
That's why I brought up metaphysics and e-prime actually. We can't resolve societal contradictions in a fundamental way if we do not have the tools to reason about them, and the main tool we have for that, human language, can at times be pitifully inconsistent and ambiguous - even if one does, in fact, control for people's automatic emotional reactions to controversial subjects.
Or just have your phone broadcast the public keys via radio to a turnstile.