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Saifedean Ammous @saifedean
, 9 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
Play stupid games... win stupid prizes!
Two important lessons from this shitcoin's demise:
1- The price has barely budged, which shows that demand for these shitcoins has nothing to do with their function, security, or safety and is entirely driven by speculation on exchanges.
2- It took more than a day for ETC fans & promoters on Twitter to even realize this attack was happening after @pierre_rochard told them about it, because they couldn't find anyone who runs a node!
This was Barry last February when this shitcoin was being pumped to 6x its value today. Not watching today, Barry?
According to the easily-inflatable "market cap" metric ETC is the 17th most valuable coin. We now know that anything below it can be easily attacked, but how far up the shitcoin food chain do you have to go to be safe?
The longer the bear market goes on, the more idle hashrate can be mobilized to kill shitcoins. The most lucrative to kill are the ones that can be shorted on exchanges because the attack can be really profitable that way.
Could this happen to Bitcoin? Yes. Bitcoin has only been operating safely for 10 years, and you should be extremely cautious about putting serious money into Bitcoin. But...
Bitcoin may fail, but it has a non-zero chance of success. Shitcoins, on the other hand, have no hope of succeeding in anything except enriching their makers. That's why shitcoins NEED promoters to survive, whereas Bitcoiners don't care if you buy BTC.
Shitcoiner who owns 20% of a shitcoin's supply: "Watch my coin go! This is the Bitcoin killer! Buy now before it's too late!"
Bitcoiner:
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Bitcoin has now been operating for ten years without confirming a single fraudulent transaction, and without deviating from its original monetary issuance schedule.
Deal with it!
If Bitcoin continues operating for the next 30 years exactly as predictably as it has for the last 10, we'll only have ~20% more bitcoins in existence. Nobody has a clue how much more of government currencies there will be, but it'll be much more than today for those that survive
Unless you can stop bitcoin working (good luck!) or stop gov't inflation (good luck!) your thoughts & actions are irrelevant to economic reality imposing itself in the long run: harder money will hold value rewarding its holders, while easy money loses value punishing its holders
Read 4 tweets
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Anyone who believes proof of Stake can work is either:
1- completely clueless at to how and why Bitcoin works at all.
2- a con artist using it as a buzzword to promote a worthless scam like Ethereum.
Proof of Stake is no different than the Federal Reserve system, which is owned by its constituent banks, who have a monopoly on increasing the money supply you are forced use. It's the problem Bitcoin solves with proof of work by making money creation hard for everyone.
In a free market, productive people would choose the hard money over the proof of stake easy money. That's why central banking needs government force to protect its monopoly & why no shitcoin with PoS can survive without an army.
Read 6 tweets
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Today in centrally-planned shitcoins:
Imagine how much human time & talent is spent on anticipating the decisions of central planners with absurd aggregate models.
Now imagine a world in which all that time and talent goes toward producing things of value to others. That's why bitcoin is worth the electricity.
Read 5 tweets

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Spinning off a thread that @KillerMartinis is doing: I know I can be a bit of a Polyanna at times, though I try to keep things grounded.

I will always assume that something can *still* be done, because I'm either right or I'm wrong, and if I'm wrong, it doesn't matter, does it?
There are people on here who will tell you how bad things are and how bad they can get. End of the world as we know it. Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.

Some of them message me, in the middle of the night.

Asking if I think we might make it through this.
And I tell them that I think we might. I think we can.
Read 25 tweets
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ok but imagine a yoonkook soulmate au where once you turn 21, your soulmate’s name is tatted on your wrist. yoongi turns 21 when he gets the name “jeon jeongguk” on his wrist and he freaks out because that’s his little brother’s boyfriends name and whAT THE FUCK ??
of course he and jeongguk are 4 years apart so jk doesnt know that he’s yoongi’s soulmate so he and tae continue to date. yoongi has to watch his soulmate date someone else and he didnt have an issue with it before but the tattoo burns whenever he’s away from jk so he
hangs out with his brother tae and jk more often, just to soothe the burn. he wears sweaters and long sleeves all the time now, even in the summer. tae always bugged him for it and also questioned why he couldnt say who his soulmate was.
Read 17 tweets
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Games aren't magical because people don't know how they're made. They're magical because of talented people doing complex work to make sure the illusion doesn't break.
Games are magical because of the worlds painstakingly crafted by people, with attention to every detail and every location that you come across, whether it’s a dreary skyscraper, a bustling space station, or a beautiful forest.
Games are magical because of the characters that we fall in love with, drawn and modeled, textured and mapped, rigged and animated, written and voiced by people who care about bringing you a character that will matter to you.
Read 13 tweets
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A little birdie told me @sehnaoui has been arrested.

bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/…
He’s had me blocked since I publicly labeled him a spy on Twitter some time ago... he showed up on the American hacker scene around 2012 and started spreading LOTS of money around.

No one questioned it. That money fueled a metric ton of hacker events over the last several years.
At the @Telephreakparty two Defcons ago, I confronted him — for good reason, I had written the original copy for the Krypton Security website in 2012 — even reported it on my clearance.

Output was “pilgrim” (his handle) shouting in a crowded room of hackers:

“THIS IS MY PARTY”
Read 7 tweets
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#Important:
Yesterday late afternoon #Russia/n forces took 3 positions in Qusseyr and Juseh and established checkpoints. #Hezbollah, not informed of the Russian presence, came close to these forces and asked their immediate pull out+
Following the direct intervention of President Bashar al-Assad, the Russian force pulled out this morning and avoided any clash with #Hezbollah in the area.

hezbollah maantin and kept all positions. The #Russia/n move was not coordinated.+

#Hezbollah did not...I repeat, did not pull out one single element from the area.

I spoke to people on the ground: The Russian decision was unclear and considered unwelcome by the forces on the ground. Still, many elements of this move are unclear.

Read 6 tweets
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1) @jaketapper, who again is TOTALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM @ChrisCuomo (damn lookalike @cnn anchor crackers), tweeted out McCabe's statement after being fired, probably received it using the same channels McCabe used for leaks. Let take a look.
2) 'I'm a 21 year veteran of the FBI! I spent half of that investigating Russian Organized Crime in New York!' Well, for one, PRETTY sure theres other things that the FBI in New York investigates. But hey, Muh Russia 4 Lyfe, amiright?
3) 'I spent the second half protecting this country from terrorism' Too bad you couldnt prevent: The Boston Marathon bombing, Parkland, Orlando Nightclub, Las Vegas, and who knows how many other terrorist attacks and mass murders.
Read 23 tweets

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