Sick of people calling everything in crypto a Ponzi scheme. Some crypto projects are pump and dump schemes, while others are pyramid schemes. Others are just standard issue fraud. Others are just middlemen skimming of the top. Stop glossing over the diversity in the industry.
(to the misguided people who fall into crypto because they are simply tech optimists looking for a place where tech optimism is normal: there are better places out there for you! Places that are driven by the inevitably doomed financial incentives)
a better world is possible, responsible technology can ease the burden of existence for billions, but read-only databases aren't the path, people just stand to make a lot of money but telling you that they are
also, i got into bitcoin early, in the traditional way: getting tipped .15btc in 2011 on reddit for posting advice on how to configure a linux server
I'm not a zelot. I've owned various cryptocurrencies since 2011, i've even done the weird paid coinbase training course things, i've pulled in pro/anti web3 and crypto podcasts, books, and essays. And other things. But IMHO this is the thing to watch:
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Boring thread: As a hobby thing, I figured I'd build a full text searchable database of all Foreign Agents Registration Act filers going back as far as I could. It's not rocket science to get all the URLs of these files from the DOJ and download them, so that's what i did
Unfortunately, many of the oldest files have not been digitized at all. I was expecting over 100,000 PDFs, but only got a bit over 80,000. Not a huge deal, I mostly care about newer stuff anyway.
36 gigs, 83,000 PDFs. So far so good...
Lots of old documents in here too, going back to at least the 60s (maybe more... i haven't exactly opened all of them).
So, next step, is to go though and check if they need to be OCR'd. Not a huge deal either way, with documents this age i expect to need to some text detection