Tag: #Consent

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.

Controlled Supply

Bitcoin

“A fixed money supply, or a supply altered only in accord with objective and calculable criteria, is a necessary condition to a meaningful just price of money.”

Fr. Bernard W. Dempsey, S.J. (1903-1960)

In a centralized economy, currency is issued by a central bank at a rate that is supposed to match the growth of the amount of goods that are exchanged so that these goods can be traded with stable prices. The monetary base is controlled by a central bank. In the United States, the Fed increases the monetary base by issuing currency, increasing the amount banks have on reserve or by a process called Quantitative Easing.

In a fully decentralized monetary system, there is no central authority that regulates the monetary base. Instead, currency is created by the nodes of a peer-to-peer network.

The Bitcoin generation algorithm defines, in advance, how currency will be created and at what rate. Any currency that is generated by a malicious user that does not follow the rules will be rejected by the network and thus is worthless.

Currency with Finite Supply

Block reward halving
Controlled supply

Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.)

The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence will not exceed slightly less than 21 million.

Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value “21 million” are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number. Satoshi has never really justified or explained many of these constants.

Cumulated bitcoin supply

This decreasing-supply algorithm was chosen because it approximates the rate at which commodities like gold are mined. Users who use their computers to perform calculations to try and discover a block are thus called Miners.

21M or Death

21 Million or Death
Arise…

The supply of Bitcoin is fixed at 21 million BTC, and as a hard coded monetary policy of the protocol, the fixed supply of the dominant cryptocurrency cannot be altered.

Former Google Product Director Steve Lee stated that only 1 percent of the world’s population can own more than 0.28 BTC, due to the fixed supply of Bitcoin.

In late 2017, Chainalysis, a blockchain forensics company that monitors and investigates cryptocurrency transactions, revealed in a research paper that up to four million BTC are permanently lost on the blockchain as a result of theft, loss of wallets and private keys, and the dormant wallet of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, which experts have said is no longer accessible.

Kim Grauer, Senior Economist at Chainalysis, said at the time, that the lost supply of BTC is not taken into consideration by the market cap.That means, the real price of BTC could be substantially higher, as 4 to 6 million BTC are estimated to be lost.

Based on the estimate that the supply of Bitcoin is around 17 million, only 0.8 percent of the world population can own more than 0.28 BTC and less than 0.2 of the world population can own more than 1 BTC.

The 0.28 BTC figure introduced by Lee assumes the supply of Bitcoin to be 21 million, as it divides 21 million by 0.28 and divides the outcome of that by the world population that is 7.442 billion. If the research of Chainalysis is accurate and that 4 to 6 million BTC are lost on the blockchain, the supply of Bitcoin should be closer to around 16 to 17 million

The fact that any investor in the global market can be within the 1 percent of the world population with a $1,830 investment demonstrates that the cryptocurrency market is still at its early phase, and in terms of adoption, market development, infrastructure, and regulation, the sector can still grow significantly in the mid to long-term.

Hal Finney
There is no “Whole Coin”

Your Silence…

Silence is the absence of ambient audible  sound, the emission of sounds of such low intensity that they do not draw attention to themselves, or the state of having ceased to produce sounds; this latter sense can be extended to apply to the cessation or absence of any form of communication, whether through speech or other medium.

Sometimes speakers fall silent when they hesitate in searching for a word, or interrupt themselves before correcting themselves.

Discourse analysis shows that people use brief silences to mark the boundaries of prosodic units, in turn-taking, or as reactive tokens, e.g., as a sign of displeasure, disagreement, embarrassment, desire to think, confusion, and the like.

Relatively prolonged intervals of silence can be used in rituals; in some religious disciplines, people maintain silence for protracted periods, or even for the rest of their lives, as an ascetic means of spiritual transformation.

Joseph Jordania has suggested that in social animals (including humans), silence can be a sign of danger.

Many social animals produce seemingly haphazard sounds which are known as contact calls. These are a mixture of various sounds, accompanying the group’s everyday business (for example, foraging,  feeding), and they are used to maintain audio contact with the members of the group.

Some social animal species communicate the signal of potential danger by stopping contact calls and freezing, without the use of alarm calls, through silence.

Charles Darwin wrote about this in relation with wild horse and cattle. Jordania has further suggested that human humming  could have been a contact method that early humans used to avoid silence. According to his suggestion, humans find prolonged silence distressing (suggesting danger to them).

This may help explain why lone humans in relative sonic isolation feel a sense of comfort from humming, whistling, talking to themselves, or having the TV or radio on.

See Also:

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