– Lots of good stuff on the dark enlightenment.
– Also, don’t miss a new blogger.
– And a side discussion of the inherent left-ness of Christianity.
– educationrealist shares some thoughts on being in the dark enlightenment.
– “The progressive fervor for buggery”
– Book review on introverts (HT).
– More trouble for Bitcoin?
– I’ve been in a lot of these airports. I’d quibble with the list (avoid Heathrow or Frankfurt, if possible) but airports in the US do suck. I often wonder what foreigners must think when they land in New York and notice buckets catching rainwater in the terminals.
– In DC news, Yglesias notes that lots of residents don’t want their neighborhood to get nicer. He suggests building more units that are too small for people to raise families in, which is his solution to all urban problems. He doesn’t realize that the neighbor that objects to more trees is the sort of neighbor that flips out when someone suggest building a 700-unit condominium. If you want to know how the city really works, check out election results.
Foseti 
Damn. That bitcoin article is powerful stuff. More so than moldbug’s.
Information Assurance is a very difficult business. It’s more than just encryption and secure signatures. It’s difficult for the designers of any system to foresee potential vulnerabilities in the same way that a determined malicious actor will. But “overloading” / stuffing the channel, is a common failure-mode.
The large and rapidly growing blockchain size had troubled me for a while, but a friend said, “Well, people are transferring, copying and mirroring terabytes of media content on peer-to-peer network constantly, what’s a few Gigabytes? Even starting fresh over an ordinary broadband connection – an hour? And staying up to date is trivial [something like 20MB a day, currently]”.
This put me at east for a while. But if Bitcoin truly went viral, the huge numbers of individuals, and the accumulation of the sum of a lot of tiny ordinary transactions, could amplify those numbers by several orders of magnitude, and it never gets better.
I don’t know when the blockchain becomes too big, or it’s velocity becomes too fast, but it seems to be a non-trivial issue. And if a group with significant computing experience and resources is deliberately trying to get it there, then Bitcoin is definitely not designed to counter their efforts.
However – I can think of an easy fix. Their proof-of-work system that they use for ‘mining’, the hashcash algorithm, was originally designed to deal with the spam / denial-of-service issue.
Bitcoin could add a second hashcash requirement to each transaction. Except high-frequency traders, no one really cares if it takes a few seconds, or even a few minutes, to clear a normal transaction. Think of how long it takes to clear checks and credit cards now.
Here’s how that would work. One of the early counter-spam ideas was (ironically, in this context) ‘micropayments’ – you have to spend 0.01 cents every time you send an email from ‘trusted accounts’. For an ordinary person, this is trivial. For a spammer that relies on sending millions of emails a week, hoping only a fraction pay out small sums, this is prohibitive. Good idea, but impractical to implement. But a substitute could be requiring that one’s computer solve a certain, time-consuming, and resource-intensive mathematical problem, and introducing a little latency for each action.
Again, for normal individuals – this is a trivial, almost undetectable cost. For people wanting to do massive amounts of fake transactions, this should act an effective deterrent. More to the point – it is easily adjustable upward to fit new challenges.
Any information distribution system will come under attack soon after its inception by two vectors: Porn, and Spam.
The success of the distribution system can be gauged by the amount of both which attempt to infiltrate it. If there’s little or no Spam, it doesn’t work very well. If there’s little or no Porn, it doesn’t work at all.
Anyone who designs an information distribution system – and Bitcoin IS an information distribution system – and does not take into account the inevitable attack by these two vectors is, in a word, incompetent.
It seems like the principle of P2P information sharing is well solved and that kiddie-pornographers and wikileakers could create their own free SW for their own purpose without piggy backing (at currently micro expense) upon bitcoin.
I hope that the free software-o-philes will adjust the software so that it kills invalid addresses/unconfirmed transactions.
Re: blockchain size, I thought I read somewhere that the blockchain may be prunable. If so, it is possible to imagine that a only a few big servers will preserve chain of custody of every bitcoin from mint down to present day, and the rest of the network will only keep the last N changes of hands.
[…] links to randoms from the Dark […]
As race reality sets in, more and more liberal whites are going to shift to Mara and the Pubs. Whites in DC will move to the right concerning schools and crime, but will want to keep gay, lesbian and feminist quotas/hate crime laws in place for a while.
White heteros need to keep their heads down for the next 20 years or so. Sooner or later, they will be a majority and will dismantle racial identity politics towards meritocracy. For instance, 92% of Metro drivers are black. Pepco is an affirmative action plantation, etc.
But right now lesbians and gays, for you, are the shock troops, clearing out the blacks.
In 2012, there were something like 1,300 hate crimes reported in DC. The next closest state was Connecticut with 325 or so. Blacks are terrified of the gays and for good reason. They are beating them at their own game.
Fabulously dressed shock troops!
[…] Foseti with links to Dark Enlightenment articles. […]
Just a shout-out for the newest Radish. I wasn’t overly enamoured of Radish for the first couple of episodes, partly because of what I perceived as something of a juvenile rhetorical style, and partly because of his irreligion (sigh), but the latest one is particularly important and not to be missed – because we can’t succeed without this sort of propaganda.
because we can’t succeed without this sort of propaganda.
Really, please do have a look at the posters – they’re great. I think Radish shows a keen insight into what might make a young person interested in us.
Agreed. The posters are beautifully designed and executed, and the supporting Carlyle quotes are well-chosen.
I’ve been in a lot of these airports. I’d quibble with the list
Holy mackerel, you think? I can’t remember which it was, either Frankfurt or Munich (I think Frankfurt), that struck me as the-worst-airport-I-can’t-possibly-believe-the-Germans-built-this kind of airport.
Nice to see my hometown on there, which really *is* a good airport.
I highly dislike the term “neoreaction”, by the way. “Neo-” anything sounds too inauthentic, like hangers-on of a legitimate movement, not to mention sounding too modern. We need something that makes it sound like the weight of time is on our side. Has it ever occurred to anyone to compare us to pre-modern scientists and how they thought the best way to “learn” “new” knowledge was to comb the ancient Greek and Roman annals?
I’m rather partial to “dark enlightenment”
I am too, except I’m not sure it has enough mainstream appeal (like when Lisa Simpson wanted to name her doll “Minerva”). Does it sound like a legitimate term, or is it too cult-like?
I don’t think there is anything “dark” about the enlightenment.
‘Neoreaction’ (like ‘Dark Enlightenment’) is a compact paradox — and paradoxes prod people to think.
[…] H/T: Foseti […]
Heathrow Terminal 5 is pretty nice. Berlin is insane: hideous, tiny, totally inaccessible, and the main airport for the capital of Germany.
I always forget: is it Berlin or Frankfurt that has those stupid buses and shuttles that you have to take to get anywhere?
The only airport I actually *like* is Bremen, but seeing as how there’s hardly anything in Bremen, it’s so small it doesn’t have room to screw up.
JFK is purgatory. It does not deserve to be on any ‘top’ list.
Yglesias has to be an aspy or a mild autistic. The photos he uses for head shots scream “Dead body in my basement!”.
For Pete’s sake .. Detroit’s airport is on the list. I was there about a year ago, and it was an ugly, depressing dump. Narita is ok, but overrated.
Then again, we all want different things out of airports. I don’t care at all about shopping at airports, but some people are really into it.
I really prize airports that minimize my time getting into or out of the airport, no matter how ritzy or crappy. I was in Kansas City and, if you’re being dropped off or picked up, the shamrock design means that the distance from plane seat to car seat may be under 100 meters.
The major highways are close-by, low-traffic, and fast. I was able to go from jet-bridge to on-the-road in three minutes, and was cruising towards my destination at 75 miles per hour in just a few minutes more. Few other airports I’ve been in can claim that.
By that metric, Reagan is near the top.
Of Bay Area airports, SJC (San Jose) puts SFO to shame.
Remind me again; Why exactly does anyone give a rat’s patoot what Matt Yglesias thinks? I mean who IS this guy? Hell, I could grab a random liberal off the street, and he’d be more insightful and interesting than this guy.
Check this out…the Dark Enlightenment on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DarkEnlighten/status/330397227006705665
Was just retweeted by Roissy….
…
[…] Samson J. […]
Another new blogger: http://raptros.wordpress.com/ Although he’s been on Twitter for a while.
I’ve never had any problems with the Frankfurt airport. I actually like it a lot more than the American airports I’ve been in, which are always incredibly confusing and packed with crappy food vendors who spew their stenches everywhere. (Although it’s still not as bad as… what was it, Penn Station, I think, which smelled like someone had dropped a McDonald’s on an abandoned bakery, lit the whole thing on fire, and tried to put it out with a firehose connected to a sewage tank.)
Thanks for the tip.
I should clarify that the airport isn’t that bad, but it’s way too crowded (yeah, it’s Frankfurt that has the shuttles that you have to take sometimes).
‘Neoreaction’ (like ‘Dark Enlightenment’) is a compact paradox — and paradoxes prod people to think. — Nick Land
And the most perplexing aspect of this “compact paradox” that prods one to think is how one “neo-reacts” having literally no spirit to speak of???
[…] Explosion of the Dark Enlightenment continues. With so much to read and so little time, I point to Foseti’s randoms to help you keep pace this month. If you happen to follow news about politics, how vulgar, […]
[…] Samson J. […]