Fixing the post office's finances is entirely doable. It has available a business model which would turn it to profitability quickly (thread)
The new service is: Portable addresses. You get one nationwide PO Box which never changes, even when you move. When you move you simply tell the post office where you're moving and on what day and all your personal packages get rerouted
It costs X/month. If X was $20 I personally would immediately sign up, stay signed up for the rest of my life, and never think about it. So would a lot of other people. That adds up fast.
This would be better both for privacy and for law enforcement than the system we have now. Addresses would be hidden from randos who shipped someone a $5 toy, but readily available to law enforcement when they needed it, which is the opposite of what we have now
The main technical headache is how you deal with people knowing how much shipping will cost. Many shipping prices are already flat nationwide, and for the ones which aren't the USPS could offer an API for approved vendors where they could look up \
current shipping price from their location to a particular target address.
Calling it a PO Box is a bit misleading, since the destination could be a residence, or a PO Box, or a private mailbox. Ideally they'd print as something pretty instead of just a number, no reason they couldn't have fictional street/place/state with vanity ones extra
All that's needed to make this happen is for Congress to decide to do it: Given the USPS the budget and orders to make it happen and it will happen, and the need to budget for the USPS in the future will go away.
I'm not holding my breath, but I can dream

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More from @bramcohen

17 Mar
Some thoughts on RandomX. The audits are more useful than the docs on this one (thread) github.com/tevador/Random…
Oddly the pop writeups babble on about virtual machines and such instead of straightforwardly saying it's based off Argon2. That's something which one should be proud of instead of obfuscating.
From the audits it's clear it went about how you'd expect. Some people with more CPU than cryptography experience took Argon2d and applied mixing functions which are reasonably spread out across the functionality on a standard CPU
Read 13 tweets
3 Mar
Came across some discussion the other day of academics talking about how hyperinflation killed Mojo Nation. Don't have a good link (maybe it was Ian Goldberg) but will reflect on Mojo Nation a bit (thread)
Mojo Nation was a glorious failure. It went down in flames, but directly lead to BitTorrent and Bitcoin. There are few failures anywhere near that successful.
I can confirm that hyperinflation did in fact happen in it, although I haven't thought about it much, and hadn't realized that that had been studied and the learnings incorporated into later projects, most notably of course Bitcoin.
Read 10 tweets
3 Mar
It's a bit emotional for me to talk about this, but I will say that Len posted pseudonymously on the cypherpunks list constantly, including at least one fleshed-out and long-lived handle, and even I didn't know what it was leung-btc.medium.com/len-sassaman-a…
Also I have a vague memory - mostly because Len told me about it and I wasn't paying close attention - that there was a nym called Product Cipher which pseudonymously posted the first ring signatures implementation to cypherpunks and then disappeared.
The implication with that one seemed to be that it was Hal or Len or some combination of the two, very unsure though, and don't know if it got clarified later.
Read 4 tweets
27 Feb
Got Clubhouse working again. It seems to have a better idea what it is now. It's talk radio. Like, exactly talk radio. Talk radio is fairly popular, and if it stays apples-to-apples the same there's no reason an app couldn't wipe out that whole industry, so it may do well
That said, the usage numbers still aren't terribly impressive, maybe a few thousand simultaneous users spread across a dozen channels at the most, which is decent but needs a lot more growth to be a real success
The content seems a lot more diverse than before, although when VCs are on they still seem to be trying to fit all the negative aspects of the 'tech bro' stereotype they possibly can. It's so weird how that stereotype is pinned on founders who are rarely that way
Read 5 tweets
24 Feb
Serious question: What is an NFT? Meaning, what is its technical functionality? (thread)
From the descriptions (and very opaque specs) it seems an NFT is a singleton (or group of singletons, but that's just because contracts in the EVM are heavyweight) which is transferable and has a current value of some kind
And it's important that anyone can go look up this value on the blockchain? Or that someone can prove to someone else what the value is? And the database of the singletons and what they represent is held somewhere or widely distributed?
Read 6 tweets
14 Feb
What everybody really wants to know about the recent grudge match between @RealKidPoker and @DougPolkVids is: Why did Dan agree to it? Since there isn't much good commentary, I'm now going to engage in rank speculation (thread)
(For those not in the loop Doug entered as the favorite and won by what's probably about the amount expected)
First there's the explanation Dan himself gave: That he has some financial interest in GGPoker and this served to promote it, although not as if it had been able to host directly
Read 23 tweets

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