After the first halving, the price shrank to 10% of the high, or 90%. Subsequent halving's had the price shrink to 20% then 15%, then 20% from that cycle's highs.
My most conservative estimate is 15% down from this cycle high of 150k, at 22,500$. Others have suggested 40K or 50K bottom in the next bear cycle.
I'll probably be wrong. With the ETFs and the halving pumping the price to ridiculous levels, really a historic event for boitcoin. Either way it will be interesting.
After the first halving, the price shrank to 10% of the high, or 90%. Subsequent halving's had the price shrink to 20% then 15%, then 20% from that cycle's highs.
My most conservative estimate is 15% down from this cycle high of 150k, at 22,500$. Others have suggested 40K or 50K bottom in the next bear cycle.
I'll probably be wrong. With the ETFs and the halving pumping the price to ridiculous levels, really a historic event for boitcoin. Either way it will be interesting.
This is a solid analysis by Rajat
nostr:note15lk0fce5skttqt5279s8nwusp7yula0grw80ffkn4ah7r728vj7svjmnq6
note15lk0fce5skttqt5279s8nwusp7yula0grw80ffkn4ah7r728vj7svjmnq6
I wonder if you had not backstopped the investment, he would not have invested so readily; he may have waited, learned more, and eventually patiently HODLed and might even still be here today.
This video of Bukele on the illusion of taxes is astounding.
We pay taxes to make it increasingly difficult for us to get ahead, and force many of us to rely on ‘services’ supplied by our corrupt government.
They don’t need our taxes, but they sure DO need to control us via taxation.
This is part of a longer 22 minute speech.
https://video.nostr.build/3676bae8df235c1572e9d93acad6a5de989c953dce4abdc4faecc5c9d7535800.mp4
Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching - Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
Bitkey replied on my Twitter. It's a "secure MCU".
This is from https://www.ledger.com/ledger-101%25e2%2580%258a-%25e2%2580%258apart-2-why-hardware-wallets-are-secure
There are two types of microcontrollers:
the “normal” one used in your microwave, hobbyist drone or TV remote controller. It’s called a MicroController Unit or MCU in short.
the “secure” one used in payment cards, SIM cards or passports. It’s called a Secure Element or SE.
So it's just a microcomponentized computer.
Interesting. I'm waiting for the Snowden /Assange of the nostr generation to come along and release *still secret* things directly on nostr. nostr:nevent1qqsxngkuq4vfd783r7muav9pdcp46h88v2q2xc8kj8axj6wujyc4y8czyz6uqg0n8rvasnywmrl940q2y9l4ua0vtdwapvya7k5msf4p68ajq8677eq
Found something on AliExpress that isn't on Amazon yet!
Seems sketchy
Hydrogenated Ion Soap Solid Hydrogen Soap 1600ppb-1800ppb Hydrogen water
https://a.aliexpress.com/_mLm75js
The value of limiting chatter with others - Tim May
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.cypherpunks/c/8fU395P7Orw/m/UCtlFOsoUfcJ
(Note: A long message, especially in this time of short, repartee,
chattering. I composed this here in my newsreader, not bothering with
using an outliner or even with running the text through any kind of
spell checker. Some things just need to be dashed-off, without too much
introspection and reworking.)
Recently I've gotten a few e-mails, anonymously sent, either urging me
to return to the CP list or thanking me for staying away and not giving
my "racist" opinions.
I sometimes look at the archived messages. I'm glad I never moved over
to the "Al Qaeda" list when the last of the earlier nodes went dark.
What I see is a very small base of posters, many of the same Eurotrash
lefties who had dominated the list in the last months of 2003. And
mostly just chatter: news snippets on minor security issues, the 2004
election, etc. In other words, a very low-volume list with several
opinionated lefties and geeks.
The list was exciting in 1992-94, got more oriented toward startups and
business opportunities in 1995-97, and then entered a period of
recycling the obvious after that (and after a bunch of formerly active
members were off trying to either start companies or save their
existing companies in the face of the dot com meltdown). Only one or
two significant contributors joined the list in the final few years
(one of them is now a grad student at Berkeley, the other I haven't
from in a few years). A few of the last to join the list were
especially clueless about even the basics.
There are several other lists I monitor. The capabilities lists,
including cap-talk and the E language lists, and the low-volume BitC
list (where they appear to be migrating to an ML-like language base,
which could be interesting, given that I've been using Haskell for the
past year or so and am positively encouraged about the connection
between security/containment issues and monads). I also follow the
Lambda the Ultimate blog site on a daily basis. And a few other groups.
Mostly, though, it is good to avoid joining one of these "communities."
These communities come in several different flavors.
The first flavor is the Slashdot flavor: lots of repetitious chatter
and repartee. Sort of a CP list with 2000 active posters instead of
fewer than a dozen active posters. The "one line repartee" is utterly
useless. I usually avoid these lists or sites, but my impression (from
when I dip into them) is that the very high volume and
repartee-oriented nature almost ensures a "current events" focus, so
the lists and sites are really just about people chattering about what
they read in the newspaper (of whatever kind or focus). The CP list is
mostly like this these last few years, albeit a very low daily volume.
The second flavor of community is the "ideological mission" kind,
whether formally adopting a mission statement (as with the Extropians
or Cryonicists) or just more-or-less adopting similar beliefs (as was
mostly the case with the Cypherpunk subscribers and attendees, circa
1992-96). Some of the language and developer lists are like this.
The third flavor of community is the "interest group" or "working
group," such as various language lists (such as the Haskell list and
Haskell Cafe list, which I follow via the archives). These are often
high volume lists, mainly made up of academics, researchers, the
languages principal developers, etc. Reports of new features, bugs,
pending releases, and "how do I do X?" tend to dominate.
(Usenet was much like this, especially in the late 1980s. Then the
obvious things happened. No need to get into this here. A few
newsgroups are still useful, such as comp.language.functional (for me,
with my current interests). I still post to a few other groups, but
mostly to vent or to attack leftie/PC/innumerate nonsense. Not much
effort is needed to make these posts, and they are entertaining to me.)
These types of communities change, and there are trajectories (maps)
from one type to another. The change in the CP list is a good example.
Anyway, I could digress on this for a while, but to what end?
The point is this: communities are islands which cause their members to
adapt their own interests to the dominant interests, or to change those
interests through argumentation.
"What have you done for the war effort today?" is the key meme. (Yes,
the Usual Suspect will probably write one of his faux-literate "er, um,
Tim, um, you _do_ realize, um, that the original was in German?")
A classic example from the CP list was the "how many lines of C have
you added?" put-down of anyone not "writing code." And yet, of 1000 or
so subscribers at one point, and of perhaps 100 who contributed most of
the postings, how many were actually writing any code at all? How much
of their code ever appeared in products, programs, tools, etc.?
Obviously not much, given the current state of things in crypto and
financial cryptography.
I have resisted the temptation to join the Cap-talk list because I know
that the adaptation meme would strongly pull me toward "helping with
the effort." This is natural, as these are the people in the community.
It's very similar to what happens when people join a company or a
sports team: the goals of the organization become one's own goals.
(Which is sort of the point of being hired by a company or team!)
Sometimes people join a list or a community but don't "support" the
goals fully. If they are polite and academic about it, they may fall
into the role of the "resident skeptic," whether about the nature of
capabilities, or the need for a new language, or the value of anonymous
transactions. If they are less polite, they may vocally defend their
non-support. Sometimes, as with Detweiler and Vulis and a few others,
this is pretty disruptive. (Which sometimes triggers calls for
"moderators" to approve or disapprove posts, etc.)
And becoming a team player, a supporter, may not be best for a
contributor. Instead of going his own way, he spends valuable time
defending the approach of the group. Further, the approach already
favored by the group constrains certain approaches. (For example,
someone with some new ideas about domain naming and pricing may not
find the ICANN working groups or lists very hospitable to useful to be
in. Or someone with developing ideas about an approach to AI may not
find a neural net or machine learning list a good place to be, both
because of hostile reception, the "help the war effort" pressures, and
the time wasted in reading other opinions and in defenses of opinions.
The fact is, "communication" with others is often over-rated.
Personally, when I think of the most significant things I ever did,
they had little to do with communicating with others. The communication
tended to come after the key ideas, even the key experiments, were
done. Most casual communication in the hallways of Intel, where I once
worked and did some of my best work, were of the "gossip" sort. Lunch,
vending machine chatter. Sure, sometimes people wrote on blackboards
and had ad hoc seminars in the hallways, but this happened a lot less
than might be thought. The Thomas Watson Research Center at IBM, in
Yorktown Heights, was famous for building its office and hallways so
that whiteboards and ad hoc conference areas were ubiquitous. And yet
most of the best work that came out of that place was the work of
individuals deep in thought (from my visits to the place, from talking
to people, and from what I know of the work habits of some of the key
people there).
Some types of communication _are_ fruitful. One example of relevance to
this list is the story of how Eric Hughes visited my place in 1972,
ostensibly to look for a place to rent. He had just returned from
several months working at David Chaum's operation in Amsterdam, and I
had spent several years working on the implications of strong
cryptography (anonymous remailers, Blacknet, data havens, digital cash,
etc.). He stayed in a spare bedroom at my place for three days...and
ended up doing no apartment or home rental searching. Instead, we
talked about logic, number theory, the long-term implications of strong
cryptography, the "essence" of why digital money works, and areas
likely to become important (this is when I first had the vague
glimmerings about category theory, for example, but I didn't pursue it
at the time).
I had made hundreds of pages of notes about "crypto anarchy,"
developing some of the consequences of strong crypto. Many of them came
to pass...I even made a few bucks investing in some of them.
The point is that this communication was very fruitful. It set both
Eric and myself on paths which lasted for a bunch of years. He
suggested we have a seminar and communicate some of our conclusions to
a group of our friends (mostly that we knew through the Hackers
Conference and various Bay Area circles). We put together a list of
about 30 people, with a little more than 20 showing up for our
August/September gathering in Oakland, at Eric's newly-rented house.
The morning was spent on tutorials about public key encryption, the
basics of RSA, and some of the notions like "bit comittment" (tossing a
coin and covering it, but doing it digitally and irrevocably, using
crypto protocols), "blinding" (the essence of David Chaum's system),
and several other "building blocks" for a future where bits and bytes
were more important than bricks and mortar.
The afternoon was spent doing a simulation, a kind of war-game, which I
called "the crypto anarchy game." Using simulations (paper cards)
representing digital money, buyers and sellers set up markets in things
like "B-2 bomber blueprints for sale" and "Merck's newest drug release
date" information. (If the motivation for this is unclear, much has
been written about this stuff. Consult Google on Blacknet, information
markets, untraceable assassination markets, etc., or consult books like
"Building in Big Brother," Levy's "Crypto," Kelly's "Out of Control,"
etc.
While flawed and unrealistic in obvious ways, this "game" put a picture
in the minds of participants about how, with some work on the building
blocks, there was really no reason this world could not be made real.
(In category theory terms, one would say that the parts of the game
were categories (objects with arrows or morphisms), the playing or
behavior of the game formed various functors (mappings from one
category to another), and that the realization that a real world
version (functor, broadly speaking) was a "natural transformation" from
the game we had played into the real world.
A result of this first physical meeting was the formation of the
mailing list and the start of a series of monthly meetings, held
essentially continually from October 1992 to around late 2002 (I held a
meeting at my house and 50 people crammed in). And at one point there
were similar meetings in other cities....I will never forget a 3-site
linkup between Mountain View (us), Cambridge (Mass.), and Northern
Virgina, with the conference call DES-encrypted...this must have been
around mid-1994. Hugh Daniel helped make this happen (as he did with
the mailing list itself). Jude Milhon joking referred to us as a bunch
of "cypherpunks," and the name stuck.
To recap this section, the intense communication between Eric and
myself caused a lot of ideas to coalesce, and a course of action to be
taken. This "movement," or meme, had a lot of momentum for most of the
90s. It came at a fortuitous time, of course. The controversy about
Clipper and key escrow, the issue of NSA surveillance and Echelon, the
arrival of PGP (Version 2.0, the first reasonably robust version, had
arrived the same month we met at Eric's house, in August/September.
Some of the attendees worked with "Mondo 2000," formerly "Reality
Hackers," and "Wired" was about to be launched. Kevin Kelly, whom
several of us knew from other circles (the Artificial Life Conference,
Bay Area events), wanted to do an article on our group. He arranged for
a photographer, with Steven Levy (author of "Hackers") to write an
article. This appeared in the second issue of "Wired," in early 2003,
and generated a large increase in list subscriptions, more press
attention, and more attendees at meetings.
But all was not well, of course. Work on the core building blocks was
slow in coming, many of the algorithms were patented (RSA, blinding,
etc.). I did a version of Blacknet in 1993 which actually worked,
modulo the fact that no actual payment system existed, except in trades
of information. Still, it worked. And got the attention of the security
apparatus, which deemed it a threat to the security of the national
labs like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.
By the mid-90s, several of our group had formed companies. Sameer
Parekh's Community Connection morphed into C2Net, then got funding,
then hired a dozen or so list members, then morphed in other ways (and
eventually was acquired by Red Hat, as I recall). Lance Cottrell formed
his Anonymizer nym company. Several people worked for Phil at PGP,
quickly acquired by a large company, then folded, and since reborn
again with some of the same people. And Zero Knowledge formed in
Canada, hiring several people closely associated with the list.
But my purpose here is not to reminisce about the glory days. Life
moves on. A few people made some substantial amounts of money on crypto
software, many did not, and most who had been active in corporate
crypto did not choose to return to the CP list as their main forum for
discussion. Which is not too surprising.
Meanwhile, the list was increasingly oriented toward gossip and chatter
about current events...the events of 9/11, for example, had a
predictable effect on themes. Surveillance technology, TEMPEST, RFID,
all this kind of stuff gets talked about ad nauseum.
Me, I'm glad to be out of the day to day chatter. I am glad to not
argue with Eurotrash lefties about capitalism, I am glad to not
struggle to correct the misapprehensions of people who haven't even
bothered to figure out why blinding works the way it does ("but, um,
with powerful enough computers they can figure out who spent it, no?",
and most of all I am glad to be able to to research and think about
what I think is important without carping along the lines of "so, how
much C code have you written this month?"
I outlined the rough focus of my efforts in some long messages to the
list in mid-2002. Some of the emphasis has shifted. I'll say more when
I want to. (Not getting committed to a position is really another way
of making the point about avoiding communities.)
However, for the curious, I'll mention a few general and a few specific
road markers along this "I took the road less taken" path:
* Logic. Not the kind of simple Aristotelian or Boolean logic so often
dismissed as obvious. Rather, how lattices and posets generate Heyting
and other kinds of logics. Modal logic. Constructive logic, and how
this relates to financial cryptography.
* Belief systems. How reputation works, as a set of beliefs ("Alice is
trustworthy," "The Bank of America will not steal my savings account
money," "This financial note is worth 98% of its face value."). This is
much more than Dempster-Shafer belief propagation (aka Bayesian
networks). This is the world of toposes, of constructive logic, of
Kripke's "possible worlds" semantics, of category theory.
* Which brings me to category theory. Again, I wrote quite a bit about
this in mid-2002. Since then, I have of course learned more. I see it
as the unifying language to more clearly state problems and assumptions
in security theory, cryptography (the logic and security part, not the
more pure number theory part, which is just a building block for the
bigger picture), and in the nature of money and financial instruments.
(For a puzzler, a koan, what is the connection between the Curry-Howard
isomorphism and why money "works"?)
* Haskell. Eric and I had talked about ML many years ago, as it was
being used for "theorem-proving systems" and "provably-correct
designs," a la the Viper processor, proofs about some chip systems,
etc. We both thought, in 1992, that this would ultimately be important
for financial cryptography (a complex system where the smallest of
imperfections or "holes" can drain a digital system in catastrophic
ways). In the late 90s I thought that OO systems, such as Smalltalk,
would be useful, but I came to doubt this. So I looked again at ML-type
languages, especially OCaml (which some Cypherpunks have worked on,
including Damien G., the young French man who cracked a cipher
challenge in the mid-90s). Then I got interested in the role of lazy
evaluation (call-by-need, more generally) in belief systems, and turned
to Haskell, a purely functional (with side effects limited), lazy,
mathematical syntax language which was designed by a group of very
bright people to be a platform for work on these ideas.
(The role of laziness is debated by some. Non-lazy languages can
simulate it, via promises and futures, as in versions of Scheme. The
use in belief systems comes through the need for not computing or
evaluating everything that could conceivably be evaluated, but only
just enough. A kind of belief system version of the frame problem in
AI, for which laziness and possible worlds is ideally suited.)
* And so on, with excursions into Stone spaces, algebraic topology
(mainly via category theory), and "topology via logic," as in Stephen
Vick's wonderful book of the same title.
Do I expect this stuff to lead to some kind of "Tim's Digital Money
Bank"? No. But will it lead to my own better understanding of what
capabilities really are, or what containment really is, or why and how
people believe certain things based on evidence? Yes, I already see a
clearer and more unifying view of the ontology of these things.
Marvin Minsky once said that mmost of the work in AI is about various
researchers and groups giving new names to the things other people have
already found. I think this describes the security (and financial
cryptography area, which it functorially related to) area precisely. A
lot of security papers are filled with neologisms and vague word
problem arguments. The whole security and financial cryptography field
is crying out for a rigorous, category-theoretic analysis. Then the
theorems already proved, theorems about transitivity (of trust, for
instance), about commutativty of diagrams, about pushouts and pullbacks
and adjoint functors, and so on, can all be used.
This echoes/parallels (different metaphors for what is essentially a
natural transformation) a point that Philip Wadler has made about
"stealing" the best ideas out of math, logic, and category theory and
using them in programming. His paper, "From Frege to Godel" (umlaut as
desired, Google for his name and the words in the title), makes this
point persuasively. As he puts it, often computer scientists have
discovered things in programming languages...and found the
mathematicians had gotten there first. Example include Curry and
Howard, Hindley and Milner, and Moggi's idea that the abstract idea of
a monad from category theory could solve some thorny problems with side
effects in programming. Wadler took Moggi's ideas, made them work in
the context of Haskell, and now monads are at the core of Haskell.
"Theorems for free" is another of his papers, and makes the same kind
of point.
And this way of looking at things points to why scalar and even vector
reputation-based systems are so deeply flawed. There is no "authority"
for setting belief values, only sets of propositions. And if
propositions are programs, if propositions are types, then the ontology
of the world is NOT a top-down, object-oriented hierarchy.
Rather, truth is built constructively, by Brouwer's "creating subject."
The natural logic of computer programming is NOT Boolean logic, though
individual circuits will of course by Boolean (for reasons I won't get
into now). Instead, the natural logic of computer programming is topos
logic, or "intuitionistic logic" (don't be knee-jerked into thinking
this has do with ESP or newage mysticism). We operate in the effective
topos.
Whether I believe, and to what extent, that Alice will pay me back on a
loan I made to her is partly-dependent on what others have said about
her "reputation" on such matters (but not conclusively, as they may be
part of a confidence game with her). And it is partly based on what I
believe about where she lives and what her birth or official name is
(but not soley, for obvious reasons). And it is partly based on my
beliefs about what I believe _she_ believes. In fact, we need to
replace the lattice of statements about "actual facts" with a parallel
(those darned natural transformations again!) lattice where "is
believed to be the case that" replaces many of the alleged facts. And
in this view, the "Aristotelian" fact that "A or Not-A," or "Alice will
either pay me back or she won't" is of little interest. Operationally,
all I the creating subject, moving through time and through a lattice
of events and established facts (proved facts, obtained or measured,
tangibly) can say is this:
"Yes, Aristotelian logic applies in the sense that a year from now, I
will know and the world will presumably all agree on the "fact" that
either Alice paid me back when the money is due, next month, or that
she didn't. But this is of no import RIGHT NOW, because we live in a
constructive world, a world of uncovering new facts. We live in a world
where Heyting logic applies, not Boolean logic."
(Beliefs about possible futures, even the largely ill-formed "THE
future," are the basis for our actions, our plans. And for why we
believe with 99.99% degree of belief that a twenty dollar bill will
actually be accepted by a merchant for some physical objects. The fact
that the bill is hard to duplicate (relatively hard, or with harsh
penalties believed by the duplicators to be a risk not worth taking),
the fact that most of us go our entire lives with twenty dollar bills
always being accepted, and so on, form a set of propositions which we
believe to some extent. This is where the "value of money" comes from,
not from naively-based "reputation networks" (with ill-formed
transitivity relations) or from top-down (Boolean) pronouncements.)
Lee Smolin, whose "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" I commented on at
length in a long article to the CP list in mid-2002, makes this point
about the likely role of intuitionistic, or topos, logic in the
explication of ordinary human and financial dealings. Google on these
terms and readers can find my article on this.
Combine this with category theory for rigor and for "theorems for
free," and with the Curry-Howard isomorphism (that propositions are
types, that programs are proofs, that _constructing_ something is how
we prove many things), and mix in some of the work on evolutionary
epistemology (Popper, Bartley, Hayek), and we have a solid foundation
for realizing why and how money works, why and how trust works, and why
and how security works.
And since Haskell and other functional languages tend to produce
"executable specifications," with runnable code (efficiently
compilable) looking isomorphic to formal specfications, the prospects
for building stable, hole-free security and financial cryptography apps
are intriguing.
So, this is what I have been doing. And I am happy not to have any
"followers," not to have plant stakes or flags in the ground and then
defend them against yahoos (Trademark of the Yahoo Corporation) or
trolls or just the idly curious who won't even take the time to read
Lawvere and Schanuel's "Conceptual Mathematics" or other intros to the
basic ideas.
I doubt that these interests will ever "align with the other planets"
in the way some of my crypto interests aligned with the planets of
Clippe, the Web, the interest in online transactions, and the whole
debate about privacy and security in the 1990s. That was a time of
ferment, of proposed legislation, of vastly increased degrees of
freedom.
It would be nice if there were some smart people to talk to these
ideas about. I've found a few, including some former list subscribers
(PH, others.) A pity Eric Hughes is off in Utah, not active on any
lists that I can see. The cap-talk and E folks are very bright, and I
may end up over there someday....for now I avoid it for the reasons I
mentioned, the tendency to have their particular causes siphon creative
energy away from my deeper interests.
This is what I have been doing, and what I am interested in doing.
Comments welcome, but don't count on my replying.
--Tim May
Corralitos, CA
We need a Twitter meta uri linking protocol because too many nitter links go dead.
I know, I know, we're building something better, but there's still some connections that overlap.
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