Tag: #conformity

100 Based things

Here is a list of 100 of the best based things:

  • Writing clever, articulate and edgy raps – Based
  • Eating food with no care for nutrition – based
  • Making jokes at the expense of politcally correct people – based
  • Creating witty and inspired retorts – based
  • Refusing to conform to society’s expectations – based
  • Developing viral content – based
  • Dreaming without the boundaries of reality – based
  • Taking no sh*t from anyone – based
  • Standing up for what is right – based
  • Throwing away society’s conventions – based
  • Experimenting with new ideas – based
  • Making creative use of your skills – based
  • Celebrating all forms of success – based
  • Questioning the world around you – based
  • Expressing yourself through Art – based
  • Learning from your mistakes – based
  • Breaking the mold – based
  • Making bold statements – based
  • Improvising on the fly – based
  • Challenging the status quo – based
  • Working hard without complaining – based
  • Respecting others’ opinions – based
  • Venturing beyond your comfort zone – based
  • Befriending other outliers – based
  • Taking risks, but staying safe – based
  • Developing mental strength – based
  • Acknowledging the beauty of the world – based
  • Choosing courage over fear – based
  • Embracing your uniqueness – based
  • Worrying less, but achieving more – based
  • Being a loyal friend – based
  • Working to help others – based
  • Succeeding in your own way – based
  • Standing up for the weak – based
  • Being honest about your failures – based
  • Tackling the world with passion – based
  • Leading without authority – based
  • Accepting your flaws – based
  • Owning up to them – based
  • Motivating yourself to go further – based
  • Making informed decisions – based
  • Listening to and understanding others –based
  • Analyzing problems and finding solutions – based
  • Seeing the world differently – based
  • Working against money-grubbing corporations – based
  • Refusing to be controlled by social media – based
  • Taking responsibility for your actions – based
  • Rejecting the influence of peer pressure – based
  • Showing gratitude for what you have – based
  • Developing a thick skin – based
  • Not taking no for an answer – based
  • Embracing the joy of risk-taking – based
  • Winning without gloating – based
  • Taking time for yourself – based
  • Diversifying your investments – based
  • Helping others around you succeed – based
  • Avoiding useless debates – based
  • Refusing to give into oppression – based
  • Going against the grain – based
  • Moving through life with grace – based
  • Not caring about popular opinion – based
  • Not caving into herd mentality – based
  • Outwitting conventional wisdom – based
  • Standing your ground against bullies – based
  • Reclaiming lost ground – based
  • Detaching yourself from material possessions – based
  • Questioning authority – based
  • Resisting unjust power – based
  • Ignoring criticism – based
  • Seeing through deception – based
  • Overcoming adversity – based
  • Pursuing excellence – based
  • Living life without regrets – based
  • Becoming Unbreakable – based
  • Following your gut feeling – based
  • Slaying the dragon of Conformity – based
  • Crushing comfort zones – based
  • Exploring the unknown – based
  • Keeping a cool head in a crisis – based
  • Analyzing data intelligently – based
  • Not wasting time with gossip – based
  • Adopting a Zero-Tolerance policy – based
  • Connecting with likeminded people – based
  • Committing thought crimes – based
  • Spreading your message – based
  • Asserting your autonomy – based
  • Resolving conflicts quickly – based
  • Not conforming to gender roles – based
  • Refusing to settle for mediocrity – based
  • Not taking life too seriously – based
  • Living life to the fullest – based
  • Rewriting stories with your own pen – based
  • Expressing yourself without limits – based
  • Being You – based

Trust is not based, and relying on trust is unbased. It is foolish to ever trust someone, because the only way to truly ensure that what someone is saying is true is to verify it yourself.

Relying on trust to make important decisions is the same as not making decisions at all, which would be why wise people have always told each other to never trust anyone, ever.

Instead, one should always verify all information, or else make use of carefully-chosen massive liabilities and hedges, so as to eliminate the need to trust.

…

Btw, did I mentioned the list was made by a Non-Human, Red-Pilled Entity 😁😋🤣

I would love to hear thoughts, opinions and critics about this, from you all dear readers.

CypherPunk Movement

THE CYPHERPUNK MOVEMENT

Let’s make a journey back in time to see where blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies came from. It will take us back to the CypherPunk Movement starting in the 1970’s.

Cryptography for the People

Encryption was primarily used for military purposes before the 1970s. People at that time were living in an analog world. Few had computers and even fewer could imagine a technology that would connect almost every human being on the planet – the internet.

Two publications brought cryptography into the open, namely the “Data Encryption Standard” published by the US Government, and a paper called “New Directions in Cryptography” by Dr. Whitfield Diffie and Dr. Martin Hellman, published in 1976.

Dr. David Chaum started writing on topics such as anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems in the 1980s, such as the ones described in “Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to make Big Brother Obsolete”. This was the first step toward the digital currencies we see today.

The Cypherpunks

We walk on shoulders of Giants!
Hughes, May, Back, Finney, Gilmore, Szabo

It wasn’t until 1992 that a group of cryptographers in the San Francisco Bay area started meeting up on a regular basis to discuss their work and related ideas. They built a basis for years of cryptographic research to come.

Besides their regular meetings, they also started the Cypherpunk mailing list in which they discussed many ideas including those which led to the birth of Bitcoin.

In late 1992 Eric Hughes, one of the first cypherpunks, wrote “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” laying out the ideals and vision of the movement.

Note: We encourage you to read A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto. The Manifesto is just as relevant today as it was in 1992. This short read takes only a few minutes of your time. It’s astonishing to see how much foresight the early members had when most people didn’t even think about computers yet.

A Cypherpunks’s Manifesto

An excerpt from the Manifesto:

“Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.

Privacy is not secrecy.

A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know.

Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

“Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography.

If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it.

If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy.

To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy.”

“We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any.

We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place.

People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers.

The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.”

“We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems.

We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.”

Electronic Cash

Although you might have just heard about this movement for the first time, you have most definitely benefitted from the efforts of some of their members in building Tor, BitTorrent, SSL, and PGP encryption. It should not surprise you that many concepts and ideas that originated from this group led to the emergence of cryptocurrencies.

In 1997, Dr. Adam Back created HashCash, which he proposed as a measure against spam. A little later, in 1998, Wei Dai published his idea for b-money and conceived the ideas of Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake to achieve consensus across a distributed network. In 2005 Nick Szabo published a proposal for Bit Gold. There was no cap on the maximum supply but he introduced the idea to value each unit of Bit Gold by the amount of computational work that went into producing it. Although this is not how cryptocurrencies are valued, the price of production (comprised of hardware and electricity cost) plays a role in the pricing of these digital assets.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper, citing and building upon HashCash and b-money. Citations from his early communications and parts of his white paper, such as the following on privacy, suggest Nakamoto was close to the cypherpunk movement.

“The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone. This is similar to the level of information released by stock exchanges, where the time and size of individual trades, the ‘tape’, is made public, but without telling who the parties were.”

Technology did not enable strong privacy prior to the 20th century, but neither did it enable affordable mass surveillance. We believe in the human right to privacy and work towards enabling anyone who wishes to claim his or her privacy to do so. We see a cryptocurrency with selective privacy as a good step in the right direction of reclaiming our privacy.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

The obedient must be slaves.”

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet. Thoreau’s writing is heavily influenced by his own life, in particular his time living at Walden Pond. He has a lasting and celebrated reputation for embracing non-conformity, the virtues of a life lived for leisure and contemplation, and the dignity of the individual.

Portrait of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), 1847. Private Collection.
Heritage Images / Getty Images

A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay “Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs.

Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. In “Civil Disobedience”, Thoreau wrote: “I heartily accept the motto,—’That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—’That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. … But, to speak practically and as a cit­i­zen, unlike those who call themselves no-gov­ernment men, I ask for, not at once no gov­ernment, but at once a better government.”

Legacy

Thoreau did not see the huge successes in his lifetime that Emerson saw in his. If he was known, it was as a naturalist, not as a political or philosophical thinker. He only published two books in his lifetime, and he had to publish A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers himself, while Walden was hardly a bestseller.

Thoreau is now, however, known as one of the greatest American writers. His thinking has exerted a massive worldwide influence, in particular on the leaders of non-violent liberation movements such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom cited “Civil Disobedience” as a major influence on them.

Like Emerson, Thoreau’s work in transcendentalism responded to and reaffirmed an American cultural identity of individualism and hard work that is still recognizable today. Thoreau’s philosophy of nature is one of the touchstones of the American nature-writing tradition.

But his legacy is not only literary, academic, or political, but also personal and individual: Thoreau is a cultural hero for the way he lived his life as a work of art, championing his ideals down to the most everyday of choices, whether it be in solitude on the banks of Walden or in behind the bars of the Concord jail.

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

“I was not born to be forced.

I will breathe after my own fashion.

Let us see who is the strongest.”

Henry David Thoreau, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…”

Henry David Thoreau

“The question is not what you look at,     but what you see.”

Henry David Thoreau

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

Henry David Thoreau

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.

I love to be alone.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

There is no play in them, for this comes after work.

But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things…”

Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience and Other Essays”

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.

There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

Henry David Thoreau

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.

Now put the foundations under them.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“All good things are wild and free.”

Henry David Thoreau

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Our life is frittered away by detail.

Simplify, simplify.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden and Other Writings”

“We need the tonic of wildness…

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden: Or, Life in the Woods”

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…”

Henry David Thoreau

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.

It is not so bad as you are.

It looks poorest when you are richest.

The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.

Love your life, poor as it is.

You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.

The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.

I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“As if you could kill time without     injuring eternity.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

Henry David Thoreau

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

Henry David Thoreau

“Things do not change; We change.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

Henry David Thoreau

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately                     or in the long run.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

Henry David Thoreau, “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

Henry David Thoreau

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

Henry David Thoreau, “Familiar Letters”

“I do believe in simplicity.

It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit.

When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms.

So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real.

Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”

Henry David Thoreau

“The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves.

Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes.

Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.

…The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free!

It is the freedom of a prison-yard.”

Henry David Thoreau, “I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau”

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“…for my greatest skill has been to want but little.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”