For the benefit of those asking me ¹ to talk about TMSR, Mircea Popescu, his death, the Bitcoin Foundation (TBF) and/or any further combinations of these and related topics, I'll aim to write here explicitly some basic common prerequisites that we have to agree on if any communication is to be at least possible, wherever it might (or might not) go further afterwards. And note that the questions stated are genuinely asked as such.

1. Actions speak at all times way more reliably than words. As such, specifically, respect for someone/something and valuing them either translates in concrete actions or remains merely a polite token. Polite tokens certainly have their role for smoother interaction and are entirely fine as long as nobody expects to get for them anything more substantial than further polite tokens at best.
2. I interacted and worked with Mircea Popescu extensively, publicly as well as privately, if mostly online, from 2009 and up to his death in 2021. If one wants to talk about any of this now, they need to answer first this question: why do they want to talk about it now when they chose not to interact directly previously, while it was both possible and entirely, publicly accessible at any previous point?
3. While people can certainly talk, discuss and write at any time, about anything and everything they want to, Mircea Popescu, TMSR, TBF or anything else included, there is quite a difference between talking from long-term experience and talking from outside entirely. Talk is indeed cheap but it is certainly cheapest when it is not drawing on any actual experience - so cheap in fact that even AI can quite do it fine enough nowadays. By contrast, experience never comes in cheap and while there might be willingness to share, there has to be first some rather clear and concrete trust established at the very least as to: a. who the audience actually is? b. why would sharing with them specifically be a good thing? c. how would it even be in one's interest at all?
4. Building that sort of trust and bridging that difference between an outsider and someone who talks from actual experience is certainly possible but it takes time and quite a significant amount of sustained interaction, at the very least. And it is inevitably on the outsider to put in the most effort for it, especially in the beginning. It has to start out of necessity quite further away from the wanted "talk" - to the extent that it's really successful communication that is wanted, there has to be first some common ground to make that possible. It's really neither new nor my invention at all, as far as I know it's exactly how competent journalists have always gone about writing their stories: not just a matter of asking someone to talk but getting immersed in and willing to participate to understand the whole context so that they may perhaps be trusted indeed to write about someone else's lived experience.
5. The best, most reliable and most extensive documentary/discussion/description/however-else-you-want-to-call-it on and about Mircea Popescu is, has been and will forever be the one made, maintained and grown by himself and through public interaction with others for years, namely Trilema. It's certainly complex and long and it requires effort indeed but with good reason and an even better reward. If one wants to make another version, there are a few questions to answer first: a. why and how are they better qualified than the man himself to talk about it all? b. what concrete value do they mean to add and for whom? c. who and what finances (whether money or intangibles, whether upfront or projected only etc) their initiative?
6. The articles on Trilema are multi-layered, inter-connected and hiding a lot of complexity behind an apparently simple, at times even jarringly crude expression. The writing is quite on purpose crafted to connect easily to a reader's biases, to even repel a merely superficial reader and to reward instead the reader who is able and willing to make sense of words as redefined by the text itself rather than as predefined by the reader's own background or ideas. As such, beware especially of jumping to conclusions based on trigger words, what an article "seems like" and generally beware of following the easiest, least effort route through any of it. Aiming merely to "lower the effort" is likely ill-advised to start with but giving it the benefit of the doubt, it would require one at the very least to provide a convincing argument that they are aware of what they propose to throw away in the first place and that they have good grounds to consider that the removal will not do more harm than good.

As to concrete interaction currently possible, public and even free to have, not to mention supposedly of interest to anyone who says that they are interested in anything from my past that inevitably informs this present: simply get in the Eulora 2 game and start building the sort of experience and common ground that will benefit your writing anyhow, even regardless of what talks may or may not come out of it in the future.

1. For some reason, most such requests come via email rather than as a comment on this blog, though there are some scattered around as well if anyone cares to search for them.[↩]

Category: Dark Modern Ages, Eulora, Outreach, TMSR

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