Ossa Sepia

The Bitcoin Foundation (also styled TBF or tbf) was created on 22 October 2014 by TMSR’s ¹ founder and leader, Mircea Popescu, who defined its minimal structure, made a seeding donation of 10 Bitcoin and offered the 2 chair positions with full decision power and responsibilities to Shane Kinney (mod6) and Ben Vulpes (ben_vulpes), who happily accepted. Four days later, Juraj Variny (jurov) took on the role of Treasurer ² for TBF. Throughout the whole interval, jurov kept the treasurer position. Mod6 kept his co-chair position until April 2020 when he stepped down and was replaced by jurov. Ben_vulpes remained nominally a co-chair throughout the interval although he stopped being actively involved in any way somewhere in 2019 or earlier ³.

As the logs of those early days attest, there was significant public support for the new foundation and this support materialised quickly through donations of bitcoin, signed reference code, development and testing work. A charter was drawn up by mod6 ⁴ and discussed in the forum within days ⁵. According to the archives of TBF, there was a flurry of activity initially, focusing on patching the bitcoin codebase and setting up a place (the mailing list), format (initially plain patches, eventually vpatches) and clear process for receiving, checking and integrating patches to the code. The first 10.1747 BTC donation was received in December 2014 and recorded in the first treasury statement. The same month, a declaration of sovereignity ⁶ was published as well, setting out TBF in the wider context of the #bitcoin-assets channel and stating TBF to be the intended recipient of a taxation requirement “of 0.1% or a hundred thousand satoshi per full Bitcoin realised” ⁷. Over the next months, code patching and testing proceeded quickly and V as well as its implementation were developed as well. The monthly “state of the bitcoin address” (SOBA) communications noted the need for more people to be involved but did not set out any plans to find new contributors.

One year later, by the beginning of 2016, the SOBAs stopped mentioning even the need for more people involved and the activity as reflected in the mailing list archives seems greatly reduced by comparison with the previous year. The SOBAs focus exclusively on the code work done mainly by mod6, asciilifeform and trinque. Nevertheless, donations are still received during this time, with another 10 BTC recorded in the treasury statement for March 2016. There are no expenses recorded nor do any of the SOBA mention any need or plans for attracting new contributors in any capacity. This trend continues during the following years ⁸, although as early as 2016, the problems and the lack of growth are explicitly mentioned in the forum, alongside concrete suggestions made by Mircea Popescu as to potential avenues for TBF to pursue for growth and exposure:

mircea_popescu: incidentally : it occurs to me we might be well advised to run an advertising campaign along the lines of “No University in the world can rival the Republic’s own STEM research lab”. would this be something teh foundation might consider sponsoring, ben_vulpes mod6 ? and any of the marketing minded fellows want to make the website ?

mircea_popescu: mod6 the main consideration there, strategically, would be that while foundation’s conservative finances are certainly the path to victory, the absence of any and all expenditures is probably by now becoming a drag – why’d someone donate his tax dues when the coin is just going to sit ? he might as well donate it mentally and let it sit in his own pocket. sooner or later something will hafta be done, or else why bother. something like this has the advantage that it’s an entirely uninvesting expenditure (exact opposite of what the faux foundation did with its “hiring” of nsa asset gavin andresen), it commits the foundation to ~nothing and can be discontinued at any point. it’s good to be able to say you know, here, we have a track record of usefulness, trust us.

mircea_popescu: Framedragger the problem isn’t “founding os projects” but quite orthogonal to that : ustards have a significant mental problem whereby they imagine they will separate funding and activity. the existence of a so called “foundation” is the usual macula of this sort of idiocy, much like chancre is the mark of syphilis.

mircea_popescu: btw are you foundation people gonna make a prize gala or something ?
mod6: gala? last we were discussing some sort of university advertising
mircea_popescu: hey i’m just an idea guy
mod6: and we had some ideas regarding the same, but didn’t come to any specific conculsions.
mircea_popescu: nething public ?
mod6: not as of yet. working on it.

mircea_popescu: mod6 incidentally, it occurs to me : it might be a good idea for the foundation to have some kind of policy whereby people interested can donate servers ? exactly like freenode, in theory, except they fuck it up so uttertly in practice it’s not even funny. but their being retarded doesn’t mean we can’t do it right.

mircea_popescu: is this something the foundation may maybe consider ? open us an embassy in beijing, hire a chick to sit there 4 hours/day or such ?

By 2018, TBF’s failure to grow and matter in the world is pointed out in plain terms and the very goal of the foundation is discussed as well:

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-09-30#1855821 << imo the only limiting factor in foundation finance atm is the twin perception that foundation doesn't need more money nor has anything useful to do with it if it had more money.

mircea_popescu: the ~only~ thing you get out of “removing obstacles” is another linus debacle, whereby you belabour for however many decades under the false flag of an unredeemable asshole. he will sell you out, and pretend he’s doing you a favour.

hanbot: asciilifeform actually in principle i very much am interested. i’m not sure i fully grasp what it’s supposed to do beyond making trb available tho’…if “fruit”‘s so far unsatisfactory, what’s good fruit look like?
mircea_popescu: hanbot you ever heard of stanford university ?
hanbot: surely
mircea_popescu: stanford university exists because a rich dood took some money out of his pocket, stuffed it in a bag and wrote “Stanford university” on it.
mircea_popescu: however, it ~actually exists~, today. plenty of people interact with it that might not even have heard of the douche in question or his insufferable drowned son
mircea_popescu: or w/e the fuck happened there.
mircea_popescu: this means, to live. if stanford university today were nothing more than an entry in the rich guy’s lawyer’s workledger, it’d not live. as it is, it lives.
mircea_popescu: (and, amusingly enough, the founding donation was a whole of a lot less than 10 bitcoin, also.)

mircea_popescu: i don’t give a shit how. sponsor a sports team, for all i care. god knows the charter’s written openly enough to not get in anyone’s way who wants to do things.

The foundation’s charter is also discussed in detail and this discussion apparently needs to be linked and read again since only recently there was again contention regarding the need for any outreach from TBF:

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-01#1856375 << let's give it a public reading, then. it says : "1. Bitcoin is a far reaching innovation with effects unknown and unknowable. 2. It is altogether probable that its effects will conflict with all currently established human conventions. 3. Maintaining the core values as established by the original author in the form of a reference implementation that is lightweight, coherent and cruft-free in face of this conflict requires deliberate effort involving multiple people, which in turn require management and guidance. 4. ``THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION'' will endeavour to provide these, while fostering community growth and development, under the general principle that if and when any other thing conflicts with Bitcoin, that other thing must either be discontinued or amended in such a way as to no longer conflict with Bitcoin." mircea_popescu: now, when and how did 3 kill 4 ? mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-01#1856377 << well, the way i read the 1-2-3-4 progression from above is that "it is focused but not limited to trb, supposed to outreach from it". the "focused" part is imo not in dispute. the "limited to" part, though, maybe ? diana_coman: yes, it's better stated that way: focused but not limited to trb mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-10-01#1856381 << kinda the idea though -- if uncharted territory stays uncharted... well ? what are we, the folk living across from zanzibar, waiting for indonesians to come over and discover it, because it's easier for them to cover 5k miles than for us 50 ?

By the end of 2018 and throughout 2019, several attempts to revive TBF as a growing and visible entity fail and the entrenched opposition or incompatibility of those involved to the very type of activities required by the notion of “foundation” comes more plainly to light. While the whole logs of those days are worth a read as they pack a lot of relevant discussion, a few highlights would be those:

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2018-01-25#1776346 << i suspect his idea is "ideally, nothing". in any case foundation has not managed to keep up with the rest of the pie despite periodic prodding. Then again growth is hard. a111: Logged on 2018-01-25 19:15 trinque: what is the foundation's role then?

mircea_popescu: not even entirely sure what precisely we’d be missing if there was no foundation at all, right off.
mod6: Alright. If we disband it, what do we do with the coins?
mircea_popescu: exact same as so far, i reckon. winge and whinge and wring our wrists and worry about it.
mod6: I didn’t mean to piss ya off with my comments above, Sir.
mod6: Maybe it is time to give someone else a turn at the helm of the Foundation, or move to not have a foundaiton at all.
mircea_popescu: nevermind the pissing off, that’s not the issue. this foundation item, it got a nest egg from me, and some more donations from other people back in the day. it didn’t manage to turn these into either a growing stream of more donations or a growing stream of activity.
mod6: This is true, I kicked in 10 BTC of my own, even.
mircea_popescu: it is exactly what it was in its first week, a nomina nuda, bare name, with no more life to it acquired meanwhile than what it starded with. a flying brick.
mircea_popescu: we can kick it as high as we want, no wings, no life.
mircea_popescu: if i have to run a balance sheet putting the active on one side and passive=delayed-keccak-adoption on the other side, it’s coming out in the red as it stands.

hanbot: http://trilema.com/forum-logs-for-29-oct-2018#2491231 << not even so much interest, i was more or less drafted. i'm happy to do whatever i can, but i see multiple issues here i don't in any case want to take your seat, and honestly i don't think "outreach" is a splinter of the foundation's operation, fit for a single person. afaik it's the core of what the thing was supposed to do, and the core of its failure to date, and given a potentially unbounded budget and a by now insanely oversaturated market, i can't imagine anything less than hundreds of hours/week is going to save it. i don't have the hours to make it my sole concern, but i do have some to help out. i think it'd be a shame to kinda decoupage some tasks here and there to a floundering ship. as much as i'd like to see it sail, seems obvious to me that here and there won't cut it at all. mircea_popescu: it's certainly true my hope lo so many years ago was that the foundation will provide the basic material (people, expertise, history, and so on) upon which to construct these days a republican diplomatic service rather than a library.

mircea_popescu: it’s infuriating to see movements a la “oh, ima hijack this foundation thingee to crash your standards process”, whether meant as that or not.

mircea_popescu: maybe that’s the right move here, transform the badly mismanaged foundation, have it start a college. Something’s gotta be done about that, too, i dun recall right off but there’s however many six figure dubaloos stuck there since last decade.
diana_coman: I’d love to.

mp_en_viaje: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/trilema/2019-10-03#1939760 << oh, well, i figure the people not calling won the stalemate with the people not making a foundation -- so no further use for it. if we re-do it later it'll be a different number for a real foundation.

mp_en_viaje: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-10-08#1942903 << because he has exactly none of the skillsets involved in running anything even remotely like a useful foundation, and no interest in acquiring them (or perhaps no capacity for acquiring them) as proven by years of practical measurements. this aren't fucking onorifics, i dunno how to put it in some form comprehensible to the morgraine fans. these are opportunities to do work. "doing something" is not doing work. if the thing dun work -- you've not been working, there's no subjective-standard basis for arguing this, "oh look how much i sweated" or anything like that. shit gotta work for activity to be called work. mp_en_viaje: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-10-08#1942906 << don't be an idiot, http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/trilema/2019-08-31#1932784 not to even look into "oh but mp, foundation didn't actually have to do anything, as per my inept read of its charter" lulz. what, it says "emplace noads" in there now ? ossabot: Logged on 2019-10-08 21:51:32 asciilifeform: nao asciilifeform is no one in tbf. but will be sad if it comes to be the case that there is no tbf to fund emplacements of noades, curation of the ref. trb (incl. mod6's very fine build system) . ossabot: Logged on 2019-08-31 19:15:27 asciilifeform: will put in l0gz, ftr : the only nodes that gave >100 blox of the 46115 :
ossabot: Logged on 2019-10-08 21:47:31 asciilifeform: incidentally i dun agree w/ mp’s verdict that tbf is somehow broken (aside from 1 of the 2 chairs having gone awol.) charter reads, clearly, ‘This charter establishes the existence of a virtual organization whose mission is to maintain the Bitcoin reference implementation.’ this was carried out .
mp_en_viaje: “oh, it’ll be sad to not have a thing we don’t have, to do things it didn’t do anyway that i just argued i tshouldn’t have been doing in any case”.
mp_en_viaje: what is this!
mp_en_viaje: yes, it’d have been perfectly fine to say, YEAR+ AGO WHEN THIS CAME UP, “well mp, maybe we don’t do other things, but we have a donations program that’s growing an average 0.2% per month, predicated on building trb nodes, which we do built, at the rate of ~one per quarter”.
mp_en_viaje: this — was not said, then. don’t fucking cpome to me with your insulting infantile narrative bullshit today, as if i’ve fucking forgotten, they sat on ass and sucked each other dicks about how important they are for bitcoin “Because mp says so” while bitcoin went exactly by them, like all other plowing flies. but like EXACTLY.
mp_en_viaje: this ground was covered already, and in the exact terminology, of “your whole relevancy to this space is my say so, you’ve built nothing out of it, and if tomorrow i do not say you do not fucking exist, idiots”.
mp_en_viaje: attempts to re-approach this without addressing the central fucking problem will result in what pantsuitism always results in — ima fucking cut the involved heads and move on.
mp_en_viaje: no outreach = no foundation. forget about it.

The closure of TMSR in March 2020 did not result in any clarification of TBF’s status. So far, there’s neither clear closure for TBF as a part of the now non-existing TMSR nor a clean restart as an independent entity unencumbered by past failures and unresolved issues. As mod6 stepped down and ben_vulpes remains so far only nominally a co-chair as far as it can be discerned by any public records, jurov took the co-chair position and is aiming by his own statement to “carry on” and maintain the same narrow focus on the code base.

At least so far, there is no public sign of any consideration of the full history nor addressing of any of the points raised in all the forum discussions linked above ⁹. There was however a repetition of the argument that the charter doesn’t include outreach as such, without any rebuttal of the answers to that as they have been already given and can be read in the logs linked above. The interpretation of the “fostering community growth and development” part of the charter remains also to be inferred from future events, as is the actual re-definition of TBF and possibly of the very term “foundation” from its title.

1. TMSR stands for The Most Serene Republic, meanwhile closed down; see also the articles in my tmsr category, the log summaries and the full record of the logs on trilema.com.[↩]
2. Here’s the content of the treasurer contract in full:

   Hash: SHA1

   ..::[ CONTRACT FOR BITCOIN FOUNDATION ACCOUNTING SERVICES ]::..

   0x0] INTRODUCTION ; RESPONSIBILITIES

   DATE: OCTOBER 26, 2014

   PARTIES:

   The virtual organization known as “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION” [R.1], as
   represented by #bitcoin-otc entities mod6 and ben_vulpes, hereinafter The
   Foundation.

   Juraj ”jurov” Variny, as identified by GPG fingerprint:
   BBB0 A999 5003 7551 F533 850A 677A BD62 D0AE E7D7

   WHEREAS:

   “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION” seeks a Treasurer to secure The Foundation’s
   assets, and issue monthly statements of receipts and expenditures.

   jurov is a member in good standing of the #bitcoin-otc Web of Trust,
   capable of and willing to secure Foundation assets and issue monthly
   statements of The Foundation’s receipts and expenditures.

   The parties hereby solemnly commit to the following:

   “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION” will accept donations in the form of Bitcoin
   only, contributed anonymously to address:

   1FundZy7m7b8begbh9haCguKJcAdFopRJ9 (The Foundation Address),

   an address controlled exclusively by jurov.

   jurov will remit Bitcoin as unanimously directed by both directors to
   addresses of their choice.

   jurov will prepare and issue statements each month no later than the 5th of
   each month, detailing all receipts to and expenditures from The Foundation
   Address.

   For his services, jurov will be paid 1% of The Foundation’s receipts up to
   a 1 Bitcoin maximum per calendar year.

   0x1) CLAUSES

   Either The Foundation or jurov may cancel this contract by GPG-signed
   notice, no less than 25 days before the next statement’s due date. After
   the Treasurer issues his final statement, he will remit the balance of
   secured Foundation funds to an address of the Foundation’s choice.

   Signed: B71EADAF, D2D031DA, D0AEE7D7.

   [↩]

3. If anyone has the exact date on this, please let me know in the comments, as I wasn’t able to find a clear announcement as such.[↩]
4. The charter in full:

   ..::[ THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION: CHARTER ]::..

   0x0] INTRODUCTION

   THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION

   ESTABLISHED: OCTOBER 22, 2014

   CO-CHAIRS:
   Shane “mod6” Kinney
   (identified by GPG fingerprint):
   027A 8D7C 0FB8 A166 4372 0F40 7217 05A8 B71E ADAF

   Ben “ben_vulpes” Vulpes
   (identified by GPG fingerprint):
   4F79 0794 2CA8 B89B 01E2 5A76 2AFA 1A9F D2D0 31DA

   This charter establishes the existence of a virtual organization whose
   mission is to maintain the Bitcoin reference implementation.

   0x1] BACKGROUND ; SCOPE ; OBJECTIVES

   Bitcoin is a far reaching innovation with effects unknown and unknowable.

   It is altogether probable that its effects will conflict with all currently
   established human conventions.

   Maintaining the core values as established by the original author in the
   form of a reference implementation that is lightweight, coherent and
   cruft-free in face of this conflict requires deliberate effort involving
   multiple people, which in turn require management and guidance.

   “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION” will endeavour to provide these, while fostering
   community growth and development, under the general principle that if and
   when any other thing conflicts with Bitcoin, that other thing must either be
   discontinued or amended in such a way as to no longer conflict with Bitcoin.

   0x2] GOVERNANCE

   “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION” is governed by unanimous decision of its two
   co-chairs.

   At any point during the lifetime of the foundation, either co-chair may
   announce his decision to step down, through the publication of a GPG signed
   document to that effect. It is the responsibility of the outgoing chair to
   announce his retirement at least six months in advance of circumstances that
   make his continuation as chair unfeasible.

   Consequently, the two co-chairs will unanimously appoint a third, and for a
   period of six months the newly appointed chair and the remaining chair will
   govern through unanimous voting, except should they be unable to reach
   agreement the remaining chair together with the outgoing chair may decide.

   0x3] ACCOUNTING ; DONATIONS ; EXPENDITURES

   “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION” will accept anonymous Bitcoin donations
   only. “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION” will publish monthly reports detailing its
   intake and expenditure. Donations collected are to be spent as decided by
   the co-chairs.

   The co-chairs promise and warrant to only expend the Foundation’s Bitcoins
   on that which is necessary to achieve its objectives.

   The Foundation’s chairs shall retain the services of a Treasurer to issue
   monthly statements and secure Foundation assets. The Foundation shall
   publish an address under that Treasurer’s exclusive control to which
   interested parties may donate Bitcoin.

   In the event of expenditure, the co-chairs shall instruct the Treasurer as
   to the quantity of Bitcoin to send, the address to which the Bitcoins shall
   be sent, and a description of the foundations goals in expending said funds.
   Every month, from these authorizing notes and transactions inbound to the
   Foundation address, the Treasurer shall generate a Statement of Account
   detailing receipts and expenditures.

   0x4] LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY

   Neither “THE BITCOIN FOUNDATION”, the present or any future co-chairs, or
   any other person or entity in any way associated with “THE BITCOIN
   FOUNDATION” assume any liability for any losses suffered or alleged to
   have been suffered by any third party as a result of the execution of this
   Agreement.

   Signed: B71EADAF, D2D031DA.

   [↩]

5. asciilifeform doesn’t see the point of a charter for the foundation and considers it “cruft” though he didn’t voice this opinion when the request for a charter was initially made:

   asciilifeform: mod6: why we need the charter thing, again ?
   mircea_popescu: asciilifeform what can it hurt ?
   asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what can it hurt << cruft

   [↩]

6. In full:

   —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
   Hash: SHA512

   BITCOIN DECLARATION OF SOVEREIGNITY ;
   PROPER VENUE FOR ALL FILINGS ;
   DISPOSITION OF TAXATION
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   —–END PGP SIGNATURE—–
   ————– next part ————–
   —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
   Hash: SHA512

   Title: BITCOIN DECLARATION OF SOVEREIGNITY ; PROPER VENUE FOR ALL FILINGS ; DISPOSITION OF TAXATION

   In #bitcoin-assets, November 8th, 2014.

   When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one person to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with the human herd, and to assume among the powers of the world the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle them, a modicum of respect to their own intelligence requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

   We hold these truths to be self-evident : that no men nor women are created, but born ; that nothing ever is or could be equal to any other thing ; that each man and each woman are sovereign entities and the sole sovereign entities ; that sovereigns and sovereigns alone are entitled to anything they may take for themselves, but nothing more ; that “rights” are a poor substitute of liberties much like railroad tracks are poor substitutes of wings, for on wings one may soar and on his liberty one may soar, but on the railroad tracks of alleged rights one can but trudge ; that things made not born have no liberties, nor are nor can ever become sovereign, but must remain subjected to the will and disposition of those sovereign in the world and limited by their rights as granted by their sovereigns, like slave is limited by his chains and computer programs by their language.

   To secure our liberty from the encroachment of virtual entities, devoid of substance, deriving their pretense to power from the pretense of consent, that is in the ideal a shameful subversion of the sacred principles of sovereignty and in fact absent, we find —

   That whenever any one or any thing becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that things long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such nonsense, and to provide new guards for their future security.

   Such has been the patient sufferance of the Internet ; and such is now the necessity which constrains us to reject the pretense to power of obsolete forms and fictions left over from a time long gone. The history of the present fiat governments of the world is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over us. To prove this, no facts shall be submitted, you may research on your own.

   We, therefore, free and independent of any bond or link of loyalty or fealty, in #bitcoin-assets assembled, appealing to no one ; recognising nothing above and the whole world below us, do, in our own name, and by our own authority, solemnly publish and declare, that we are and of right ought to be free and independent ; that we are absolved from all allegiance to any entity, whether it styles itself a “crown” or a “state” or a “government” or however else ; and that all political connection between them and us is wholly imagined, by them ; and that as free and independent we have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which sovereigns may of right do.

   For the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred rating.

   THEREFORE, it is established that the Web of Trust, the #bitcoin-assets deeds registrar and the channel itself are the proper venue for all filings, of whatever type and to whatever end, to be dealed with according to our laws and customs.

   THEREFORE, it is established that any Bitcoin company, or trader or merchant or other entity deriving a worldly profit from the otherworldly workings of Bitcoin, is to pay a tax in sum of 0.1% or a hundred thousand satoshi per full Bitcoin realised, into the coffers of the Bitcoin Foundation ( http://deeds.bitcoin-assets.com/deed/9ULZPc7yeZ9fQEA1aZ73H6mcv1s2C4gYFAbNTb5urovj ) as the sole and complete public contribution that may be required of him ; that such payment satisfies the total burden of taxation upon him, and no further payments may be required, in any form nor for any reason or under any title or pretense, by anyone ; that the satisfaction of this obligation is a moral requirement, and outside of the oppinion of the sovereign people it will not be enforced.
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   [↩]

7. Given recent discussion regarding taxation received or not by TBF, I’ll note here that there was at least one instance of taxation received although it was indeed as a result of the liquidation of a business rather than the success of it:

   davout: jurov: can you give me a foundation address? foundation will be owed .1337 btc after the bitbet receivership is done

   [↩]

8. By 2018 there are only a few experimental patches published and in 2020, there’s a whole argument made that the code should be left as it is, too.[↩]
9. Unless the addressing is meant to be this statement:

   jurov: And I pay no heed to TMSR anymore, because it behaved to my clients worse than any government.

   [↩]

~mp_en_viaje: diana_coman, i guess you’re stuck with a much larger chunk than originally contemplated, unexpectedly enough.~

The context of this review is the recent closure of TMSR by its founder, Mircea Popescu, after ~9 years of pouring his own time and resources into it. In the immediate aftermath of that closure, I asked those I knew involved and still around if they cared to say their mind on it at all. Some left their own silence on this speak for itself and some talked through it with me in #ossasepia and/or with others in other venues, or wrote about it on blogs and in comments. Others I didn’t even know were reading my words in chan followed up with questions in the comments on the Closure article. As for myself, I said in #ossasepia as much:

diana_coman: […] there’s […] the significant part that the republic failed to exist and so the whole context is changed and so far it hasn’t even been reviewed as such; which is pre-requisite for *any* thinking of any related work, whether os or anything else anyways; I’ll probably end up doing the review too since apparently nobody even considers it needed or something but that’s besides the point.

Where does one even start though to review a project on the scale of TMSR, even considering for starters only all the publicly ¹ available information and documents on it? I have of course the significant advantage of having been part of it and well active in it over quite a few years but this is just… not enough in itself for a review, it never is, no.

Looking at it broadly, there are the logs of #trilema and of the related irc chans or “castles”, the blogs of all those involved and the websites & various resources of different projects such as they were attempted (Qntra, The Bitcoin Foundation and Pizarro most prominently). Of all of those, the projects’ websites hold mainly specific information and while a review of it can certainly turn out instructive for someone setting out on similar projects, I don’t see a lot of *new* information for me to be obtained from pouring the time in reviewing them in detail currently.

I have arguably freshest in mind the logs of #trilema and of my own #ossasepia chan, by virtue of reading and re-reading them daily and even summarising them at times. Those same logs are however a mixed bag, not only as topics under discussion (which wouldn’t be a problem at all, quite the opposite) but more importantly as amount of noise, especially in the early days. So from my point of view and for my own needs, they don’t make the best starting point either since there’s less that is likely I overlooked/am not that much aware of in there and it needs to be extracted from a huge amount of text mixed with significant noise.

Having excluded both projects and the logs, I’m left with the blogs of those involved and given my reason for this review, the Trilema blog specifically. To further narrow it down, I chose to focus for now on the Bitcoin category on Trilema – for one thing, it’s the most relevant to TMSR anyway and for the other, the way I see it, what came to be known as TMSR grew in fact quite organically and therefore gradually out of MP’s public involvement with Bitcoin. While one can point to one moment or another as “the start of TMSR”, I’d rather look at it as a process, aiming to clarify for myself first of all what and how was attempted rather than what ended up being (or arguably failing to be) – to the extent that such a thing can even be gleaned at all from the articles on Trilema’s Bitcoin category, of course.

The Bitcoin category on trilema.com contains currently 224 articles, written between the 20th of March 2012 (a brief discussion in Romanian of Bitcoin’s ability to recover from events that would have sunk fiat currencies such as the Euro or the US Dollar) and the 14th of March 2020 (a detailed explanation of some events after the announced closure of TMSR, raising also quite a few pointy questions on the Republic’s actual effects on those involved). I had read all of those before, of course, but for the purpose of this review I read them now again ², yet another time and with pen and paper in hand too. And then I re-read my notes a couple of times too, going back at times to the original articles referenced in my notes – for more details when and as needed, for potential links that weren’t obvious the first time, for checking whether some inferred link is indeed supported by the article itself and not just an artefact of my notes. This is just part of my reviewing process and it’s not even all of it but I’m setting those steps down here explicitly simply so that they *are* set at least here as such – who knows, perhaps they are of *some* use to someone else too at some point, wonder of wonders ³.

As to what came out of all the above, there’s for starters my classification of what those articles are about – my aim with this was to see how it all started, what was attempted and how it evolved over time. The categories therefore reflect this aim of mine and the classification itself is of course something you may disagree with at any point and on the grounds that it’s a poor choice of classes to start with or that any given article is incorrectly classified. In some cases I might not even disagree with your disagreement, if that does anything for you.

Having re-read and thought through all the above articles again and looking once more at an even wider picture, there is a striking similarity that I can see in how both MPEx and essentially Bitcoin itself went from operating in plain view and offering a widely open avenue of access and involvement at first to operating in the end essentially behind closed doors and with very narrow avenues left for involvement – if any at all, indeed ³⁰. On top of this and not unrelated, it seems to me that there has been throughout a continuous decrease in the level at which support and education aimed for facilitating access was provided, not for lack of willingness on part of the provider but for lack or insufficient numbers or capacity of takers. I dare say that’s not exactly surprising, after all ³¹.

The above review of all those articles provided me with a much clearer picture regarding first of all the huge amount and diversity of resources, approaches and support that was offered ³². And for my own needs, I accept this as indisputable evidence of that old, old lesson that I should have learned already for all its bitterness: offering cannot do anything ³³ when lacking the matching request. So if there’s anything to be done indeed, it’s first the request that needs to be grown, teased out, brought forwards itself – and the same experience reviewed above points to the fact that there’s precious little request-capacity to be found as such in the current environment. Nevertheless, there still is, if not in those too old to want to grow, then in those too young to not want to grow ³⁴.

The way I see it, the extensive and quite exhaustive attempt to build the Republic, for all its failure in reaching the original goal, left nevertheless a significant inheritance, of which the knowledge and lessons contained in the articles reviewed above are only a part. What is done with this inheritance – if anything – and what comes out of it though depends on what one does and how, as it’s always the case. I plan to make use of it though, especially in the form of learning from what has been made available and not attempting to reinvent the wheel at any point.

My work remains fully focused on Eulora. My personal project, the Young Hands Club, remains fully focused on providing -indeed on carving even, if need be- the sort of learning space that I can’t see anywhere else around, aimed at figuring things out, not at “being right/comfortable” and focused on changing oneself for the better not on protecting oneself from change. While I can’t change a whole environment overall, I can still provide this different space and I intend to do it indeed. As there is no TMSR anymore though, Young Hands changes too in that it can’t aim for the nonexistent Republic, nor can it provide anymore direct access to a wealth of knowledge, resources and expertise beyond my own. And it further changes in that it has to stand entirely on my own authority such as it is, without the previous backing of a license from a higher authority and therefore without recourse to the same authority for any of those involved.

As to more minute changes to Young Hands and how it operates, I’ll take the time to further mull over the relevant lessons from the TMSR experiment before I fully decide on the exact shape that each part of this project of mine is going to assume moving forwards. So far I’ll say only that I see usefulness to it and I still stand by my original statement in #ossasepia:

diana_coman: fwiw and for as long as there is a use to it that I can see, I’ll still be here.

1. And if you didn’t even consider that the publicly available is not all there is or was to it, then you are indeed either very young and inexperienced or terribly shallow.[↩]
2. Yes, this is a basic requirement for a review – to actually re-view stuff, no matter how well you think you know it, no matter how many times you “viewed” it before, no matter *what*. And no, it’s still not *enough by itself* either, I’m not giving “recipes” here for you to follow to the letter while missing the substance and then claiming you “did what it said”.[↩]
3. A side effect of having re-read all those articles is that I got a significant dose of seeing a LOT of effort at stating things clearly getting even more clearly ignored instead of used. Can you tell?[↩]
4. asciilifeform on irc.[↩]
5. I admit I had a problem as to where does this article belong exactly, among my categories. Upon reflection I decided it counts best as education – the sort with drawing pictures for explaining matters.[↩]
6. Seeing how the 3rd proposed resolution goes as far as to mention the end of 2015 and it’s 2020 already, what would you say happened in the end?[↩]
7. I further find of interest here MP’s clear note regarding the lack of a different actual voice in the space and how time is running out for such voice to have any space left to say anything since he will soon have covered the whole thing: “Time is ticking away, in the sense that during the past four years there’s not yet been an actual criticism of Bitcoin published by anyone anywhere, in spite of a lot of ridiculously uninformed gargle being regurgitated wherever the brightly stupid meet. If you wait much longer I’ll have covered the whole field and there won’t really be any room to even try anymore. Hurry up, clocks are ticking away.”[↩]
8. Re-reading this in 2020, it’s really one sentence that pops out for its… understatement perhaps of the trouble it points out: “And so yes, the larger society which has prevented their individuation to date is in fact all encompassing, and all-“powerful”, and ready to meddle some more.”[↩]
9. The point of “multiple options” existing unmolested for as long as they are either only theoretical or otherwise small and inconsequential enough so nobody really cares about them is perhaps true in a wider context than just cryptocurrencies. Just saying here.[↩]
10. Go and read the whole thing and then re-read it a couple of times for good measure too. I’ll keep here the core statement though because it explains more than I wish it did:
    

    The adult children wish to start a house of their own. The infantile children do not, absolutely, as the chief point in their mind, wish to start a house of their own. This is actually the last thing they could possibly want, because they do in fact depend on the support of their parents (here in the form of welfare redistributionsiv) to survive. They do however still wish for all the things people commonly desire : a greater measure of control of their surroundings of interest coupled with a lesser degree of responsibility for their surroundings of interest, and the estimation of their betters. Not of their peers, infantile offspring is not yet advanced enough to have peers, which is exactly why they’re not ready yet to have their own house, either. They wish the estimation of their betters, and their betters are, universally, the food dispenser and the punishment machine.

    [↩]

11. Linking this to the infantile vs adult children kind of spoils most of the surprise of the outcome really.[↩]
12. Looking back at this now, it seems to me it rather got almost entirely overlooked, despite being the very clear and plain statement of *how to even work* effectively and fully leverage the forum and the others that were available.[↩]
13. On reflection this strikes me to have been the original idea of “open source” itself really – except of course those mythical continuators of work didn’t materialise for open source as they didn’t materialise for Republican work and possibly don’t ever materialise for much at all just for it being made available.[↩]
14. It’s funny to note though that, at the time, Mircea Popescu still considered that MtGox was not in the same bucket, “on account of its old age and well known brand”. Needless to say – from the vantage of now as opposed to then – the old age and well known brand went poof soon enough after that.[↩]
15. You’d think this was obvious but then again, what is indeed obvious depends on who is looking really.[↩]
16. Looking back at this from 2020 and noticing that it’s not even the first time when it’s stated plainly, I really wonder just why and how did such a simple thing turn out to be in practice such a nearly impossible thing to do for most. And the plain and clear lack of value attached by so many over all those years to *having this option* even is yet another thing to look long and hard at because it clearly has deep roots and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.[↩]
17. Ad delivery paid for in Bitcoin.[↩]
18. And I’ll note here this tiny bit that carries now perhaps way more meaning than it seemed to carry back in 2012:
    

    pigeons you live in a place where fighting back worked. the rest of us live in the rest of the world where we got crushed.

    [↩]

19. Does this sound familiar to you in 2020, 7 years later? If not, maybe in another 7 years or 70 years or 700 years, what’s time to you after all, right?[↩]
20. It was 2013, not 2020.[↩]
21. Do compare and contrast this with any of the businesses that have been at any point listed on MPEx.[↩]
22. Could go into “education” too I suppose, but as this very short article says “they never listen”, so I decided to set it as governance instead, there.[↩]
23. Were the giants too tall? Was the climbing too abrupt, were the winds too windy that high up and the air too rarefied and the years too many or too few or just not right, the sun too bright, the stars too cold and so on and so forth? Was it really something missing in the structure, would you say? And then pray tell – what exactly was it missing in *it*, what? But don’t hurry to answer, take your time instead and go patiently through it all, take your time to collect bits and pieces like this, set them one next to the other as they gradually build the picture of what was meant to be, of what was built awaiting those able to make it be and then go and look at what and how it all turned out instead, years later. Keep both the start and the end at the same time in mind and see what that does, what it says, what answer it gives really all by itself. Or what answer you prefer to choose perhaps, instead of reading it from such stark record. That choice is an answer too, of course it is.[↩]
24. There’s only ONE single comment to this and that one doesn’t go terribly far either.[↩]
25. And I’ll note here the fragment that sounds to me in hindsight as the very statement of the vision that was at the root of TMSR itself, the vision that carried within itself the assumption that it was indeed the tools that were missing and not the people: “Man at the center of all things. Man, the willing enforcer of his own promises. Man, the willing contributor to the wealth of an obviously much reduced, but by that fact probably much nicer, lovable and huggable cute little state.”[↩]
26. No, they weren’t used and it’s not even that they weren’t used efficiently and effectively but simply that the funds were never used. At all. Why exactly? What had those funds missing so that they were ignored essentially, just not used at all?[↩]
27. It took ~2 years for this idea to get a practical attempt through BingoBoingo’s ISP in Uruguay that failed nevertheless to thrive and closed down in 2019.[↩]
28. To me it sounds especially painful on re-read because it reminds me way too much of some conversations I had with 5 year olds. Seriously, they are adamant that “it won’t work” – when they either don’t want to do it (for whatever reason) or they don’t want to admit that they had no idea it could be done. And what they generally want is reassurance that it was/is indeed a terribly difficult task in itself rather than a lack of theirs making it seem difficult to them – once *that* given, *some* will at least move on and do it. But I’m talking of 5 year olds here, ffs.[↩]
29. This was implemented in EuCrypt for Eulora.[↩]
30. For Bitcoin, TMSR was precisely the wide open avenue of access and its failure and closure means not at all the failure or closure of Bitcoin – what silliness is that – but simply the closure of that previously open access. For MPEx, compare the initial plan with the situation 5 years later, at the time of the closing statement for MPEx and see for yourself if there’s any similarity or not.[↩]
31. It does perhaps beg the question as to what level is left now or just how low can the level meaningfully go anyway, before there’s no point to spending resources on it but this is a question that those spending the resources answer for themselves after all, not some generic question on which everyone and anyone is called to give their “opinion” of words that cost them nothing at all.[↩]
32. I shall not attempt to make some itemized list here as I’ll end up re-writing that Bitcoin category if I go for completeness and otherwise I think it’s best if anyone interested just goes through the entries in the table above and extracts their own list, as they see fit for whatever specific perspective on this they may have in mind, anyway. Or if you really can’t see what was offered, just ask a clear question in the comments I suppose – that’s how things get clarified anyway, through questions and answers, after all.[↩]
33. Other than frustrate I suppose, on both sides really.[↩]
34. And note that I’m saying this based on a whole lot more than what is visible online as experience with helping people learn. Sure, it may still be that I’m just an optimist or anything of the sort. There are no guarantees upfront for anything, there never can be.[↩]

At Stanislav’s request, here’s my review of the test-month during which I had my blog up on a Rockchip he helpfully provided within his rack at Coloco Inc., USA. I did not take his offer to write this instead of paying for the month of service and I also preferred and insisted – again – to pay for this service ¹, as I think that any service used should be paid for in the end, one way or another. Or at the very least, I’d rather pay for what I use. Beyond that though, as he asked specifically for a review, I’m happy to do this for him.

My experience having my blog hosted on Stan’s Rockchip was very smooth from a technical point of view: he transferred my blog from Pizarro promptly and totally painlessly for me, in the best way possible really – all I had to do was to switch the IPs and then start everything on the new machine. Some measurements of speeds from/to various locations I already provided in an earlier article and I won’t repeat them. Throughout the whole month, there was only one blip – an instance when I couldn’t access my blog – but so short-lived that I didn’t even get the time to complain about it or indeed let Stanislav know at all. I have a knack of stepping in exactly at the right time to catch things and people on the wrong foot otherwise but I really don’t have any complaints about this. For all the time otherwise, everything remained online and accessible and without any technical degradation of service that I could notice in any way.

Despite recent TMSR tribulations and the exposed rift in which No Such Labs fell to its death, I had initially all intentions of keeping my blog where it was, on Stan’s Rockchip, as there wasn’t any pressing need to move it, nor any specific problem with it being there as such, nor indeed any real trouble moving it at a later point whenever needed. It’s a personal blog after all, not a business venture such as Minigame and as a result it can very well stay hosted in a friend’s rack, why not. But then Stanislav complained in his chan of too many customers already:

asciilifeform: currently just under half the avail. wattage already spoken for. folx who are waiting, if wait long enuff, will find that train is full.

…and went on to add his quotes to my otherwise as-plain-as-possible words:

asciilifeform: diana_coman: ‘no complaints’ but ‘not right thing’… aite, ‘customer always right'(tm)(r) .

Your mileage might vary and I don’t claim mine here to be objective at all – quite on the contrary, in this particular case for once, I’m letting it stand precisely at its most extremely subjective end and I choose for once to cut it out precisely on the line that works with *least effort* from me ². And so I choose to walk away for now and avoid dealing again with this sort of unexpected communications and not-business-but-not-quite-sure-if-really-friends-either service. As I previously said already publicly that I don’t have otherwise any complaints from a technical point of view but I also don’t have at all any certainty from an interaction & communications point of view, I’ll simply preserve here the same words for easy access and completeness:

diana_coman: asciilifeform: I haven’t forgotten about that, it’s still somewhere on the list (though I’m not sure there is a lot *new* to say there); re service my main understanding as you pointed out is that you already have too many customers and moreover you anyway find me [http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/asciilifeform/2019-11-21#1002657][rather incomprehensible or a bothering-customer] so it is what it is.
ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-17 13:21:23 asciilifeform: currently just under half the avail. wattage already spoken for. folx who are waiting, if wait long enuff, will find that train is full.
ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-21 12:05:26 asciilifeform: diana_coman: ‘no complaints’ but ‘not right thing’… aite, ‘customer always right'(tm)(r) .
snsabot: Logged on 2019-11-20 19:47:57 diana_coman: http://logs.ossasepia.com/log/asciilifeform/2019-11-17#1002484 – I will make one space more empty on that train so that nobody else loses out; thank you asciilifeform for the service, I don’t have any complaints with it really and I would still prefer to pay for this month that I used it.
ossabot: Logged on 2019-11-17 13:21:23 asciilifeform: currently just under half the avail. wattage already spoken for. folx who are waiting, if wait long enuff, will find that train is full.
diana_coman: if things change in the future and you have availability + looking for customers (me included), I’ll happily use the service, yes.
asciilifeform: diana_coman: i in fact have 500 watt of capacity yet-unsold, fwiw. and diana_coman was a++ customer, is welcome to return any time, if she finds that the offerings meet her needs / at agreeable price.
asciilifeform: diana_coman: at the current rate (somewhat surprised there was interest) — will likely buy the full tower w/ 20A & 1G/s in 2020.
diana_coman: asciilifeform: you know, from your communications and approach otherwise, I couldn’t and can’t really tell so the only thing I can reasonably do is to wait and see.

I sincerely wish that Stan’s communications turn into reliable once – and when that happens, I’ll gladly use the service. I also wish for him that the rack service truly takes off and morphs into a business that can give him otherwise the financial support and free time he is looking for.

1. I was willing to pay and even insisted on it right from the start; he agreed to receive the payment and invoice me only now, after I announced my decision to not subscribe to his service beyond this initial month.[↩]
2. I earned my right here and in spades.[↩]

What, are ideals and perfections not *things* to work with? No? Why not, after all, they’d be great to work with by definition! And in all probability, they would also reduce “work” to entirely pure pleasure since it would all become just a matter of sliding one perfection on top of another and through the needle hole of just a few ideals scattered about for a pleasing effect. No more stables to clean, no more swamps to drag one down, no more towers of shit and no more uncertainties either, only hard guarantees of goodness, wouldn’t you like that?

At first pass the enthusiasm still carries me over and I would too, I can tell you. But then that’s the thing with me, there’s always a second pass ¹ and in this second pass the air-headed enthusiasm is killed savagely, eviscerated and spread all around for good measure and only *after that*, merely left to rot. The first easy blow is that I’m no perfection myself and nothing in this world ever is, so that image of gliding perfections between ideals is more likely to turn in practice for anyone-less-than-perfect into something akin to trying non-existence while still alive. Not that some won’t try or look for exactly that but this particular quest doesn’t appeal to me, as imperfect and as grounded in this here life as I find myself.

The second and much harder blow though comes from experience really. That first-pass enthusiasm keeps popping up again and again it would seem, no matter how well spread it found itself *last time* so there’s quite an accumulated pile of various sad recognitions for memory to throw at me on each new occasion of first-pass entertainment of this particular folly. And so it did today yet again after spending much of yesterday and quite a few hours this morning going through past logs and collecting the history ², ³ of working trying to work with one whose knowledge I still admire, whose products I still find pearl-like and whose dedication to theoretical ideals and perfection ⁴ has him turning in circles on trajectories that palpably and instantly recoil as soon as they touch even just tentatively the mundane line of imperfect and even downright filthy at times reality that an actual business in this world is bound to follow.

For a balanced view and as usual, I still want at any rate to mention Stanislav’s own assessment – the one that at least makes some sense really as otherwise there is a lot of spew – of the situation, as stated in his chan:

asciilifeform: diana_coman: i dun expect any resolution to ‘mexican standoff’ where mp wants to isolate self from asciilifeform’s ‘charlatanry’, and asciilifeform wants (imho reasonably) to isolate self from mocky-style suicide missions.

Even regardless of anything else really, the assessment above is to my mind rather indicative of the fact that this is another one of those irreconcilable differences, coming (finally!) into sharp focus and inevitable clash. The moment you perceive and state the other party as asking for “suicide missions”, there is certainly no way left to work together, how would that even be? So here’s this rift gaping and you can stare at it as much as you like for as long as you can afford to further remain stuck really. I don’t think though that there’s any solution other than precisely what is currently happening: Stanislav will do what he wants to do, released of the burden of contributing-while-isolating-self. I hope even that he’ll be more productive and successful for it, certainly healthier to be in actual isolation rather than attempt to isolate while at the very centre of it all. And on the other side, TMSR will be also released of the burden of this conflict at the very least, if nothing more. For all the state of sadness, there is at least clarity gained and on this burnt soil, growth can start anew, unencumbered by the old conflicts and fixations. I truly hope it will, too, and I will do whatever I can to help it along.

As to the impact of all the above on matters closer to me, it is indeed precisely as noted only recently: time packs a lot of punch those days and the recent S.MG board room meeting certainly did. For all the calmness of the surface, the waters had to stir deep down because, as Hannah aptly points out there is the most practical aspect of it, if nothing else: just how would you go about getting the salt back out of a bread that’s been baking already for quite a few years? And even more so, the question facing me at this juncture is just how do you go about figuring out in any certain way whether there is salt in your bread and of what sort exactly, given that you’ve been eating it all this time? Because it comes to more than just reconsidering the solutions and the code for correctness (as I did already prior to signing them) – it all comes now to *also* assessing them for essentially political merits, along the lines of vouching that “there is no barb.” Or is there and I just don’t see it (yet), perhaps because of previous familiarity with it, perhaps because of current blindness, perhaps?

Setting aside for a bit the doubts about the real possibility of even giving an answer to the question above, I can of course still commit to go through the list of items that S.MG imported – software, hardware and perhaps more importantly design choices – so far and look at them in the light of the new situation: are those sane business choices that help S.MG thrive or are they dangerous ideal choices that will sink S.MG in the end, all the more painfully for the prolongued agony that existing resources can allow? I tell you that I don’t quite see what *else* can I do but at the same time, I also don’t quite see how can this can be done with any guarantees.

The only tiny sliver of light I can see in this is perhaps an approach from the other side to help change the perspective and maybe provide from that end a better focus for such an evaluation. If that’s even possible, of course.

1. And a few more than 2 actually but here the second pass is already quite enough, I’m not 18 anymore.[↩]
2. The whole is in the logs really but looking at it all now in one go, it was rather painful and most probably on both sides, basically forcing that circle to a line it abhors. I’ll leave just a few revealing (at least to me) examples, mainly to find them faster next time:
   Getting the sane-MPI provided v-tree to actually press reveals in the end an issue but only after quite a struggle:

   diana_coman: mod6 or asciilifeform, can you help? I’m trying to press asciilifeform’s second patch for sane-mpi and V complains that it can’t find the vpatch file although it is there (and I checked the sig too and it’s all fine); I’m running your V, version thebitcoin.foundation/v/V-20170317.tar.gz.mod6 ; I have the following folder structure: http://p.bvulpes.com/pastes/1ZwgW/?raw=true; Here’s the error when I run v press verbose . mpi_second_cut.vpa
   diana_coman: tch: Error! Could not find vpatch “mpi_second_cut.vpatch” ; when I run v a mpi_second_cut.vpatch I get: Error! Could not find vpatch “mpi_second_cut.vpatch”
   asciilifeform: diana_coman: is it in your patches dir ?
   diana_coman: yes; see folder structure above
   diana_coman: ftr it finds the genesis patch fine
   diana_coman: but it seems to think there are no descendants on it (so v d mpi-genesis.vpatch returns empty)
   BingoBoingo: No pictures of quality this time, but have located mall, mall casino, and place where sleeping
   diana_coman: v f shows only the genesis
   asciilifeform: diana_coman: are you using mod6’s vtron ?
   diana_coman: yes,as stated
   asciilifeform: pretty strange, mine and phf’s vtrons ate it up without complaint, e.g. http://btcbase.org/patches?patchset=mpi
   diana_coman: ok, let me try with yours too then, can’t hurt
   asciilifeform: sounds like a bug in mod6’s vtron, thus far
   asciilifeform: where it silently barfs on a signature and doesn’t say why
   asciilifeform: where did you get asciilifeform’s key, diana_coman ?
   mircea_popescu: diana_coman possibly you have old ver of alf sig ?
   diana_coman: ftr I used mod6’s vtron on ch1 of ffa and it worked perfectly fine
   mircea_popescu: (expired at some point)
   asciilifeform: sigs dun change tho
   mircea_popescu: had alt paths there
   asciilifeform: diana_coman: then can rule out bad pubk
   diana_coman: mircea_popescu, nope, I just downloaded it again today so it’s the new one
   mircea_popescu: a ok\
   diana_coman: asciilifeform, got it from your website
   asciilifeform: i redownloaded own item just now, and verified the sig successfully
   diana_coman: a gpg –verify here worked perfectly fine for me too on both patches
   asciilifeform: so it ain’t hoster shenanigans, unless quite elaborate and patch-dependent
   diana_coman: (did that before even running v anyway)
   asciilifeform: fwiw sha512(mpi_second_cut.vpatch) : 594052a750c3ab2ad16bbd73c578df9d99a98cc9811e6537e452dc2386b58c24555918e8d02e9e8d35c25808ac31a10babf0614e2d647afdf4f58b38059af118
   asciilifeform: sha512(mpi_second_cut.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig) : 7b14150fd5100dc90f7130a491214fceda5984fdad20491487d45727c4be88885dc9d9245e7f1bee30fa236e1e774e03f6cba8f34ccc4508eaed0df53af329a0
   asciilifeform: *path-dependent
   diana_coman: anyways, will try with asciilifeform’s v for now; maybe mod6 has some idea on this later
   diana_coman: asciilifeform, same sha512 here
   asciilifeform: hmm possibly mod6’s v requires ‘vpatch’ extension
   asciilifeform: my mpi genesis had ‘vdiff’
   asciilifeform: ( but otherwise conformant )
   diana_coman: ah, that might be it, makes sense
   asciilifeform: what i did :
   asciilifeform: mv patches/mpi-genesis.vdiff patches/mpi-genesis.vpatch ; mv .seals/mpi-genesis.asciilifeform.sig .seals/mpi-genesis.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig
   asciilifeform: or hm
   asciilifeform: still fails to recognize that mpi_second_cut.vpatch exists
   asciilifeform: this VERY POSSIBILITY of silent failure is a bug, mod6
   asciilifeform: at least oughta have a verbose mode one can optionally enable, wtf
   asciilifeform: silently ignoring bad input by-default can be permissible, but to do it ~always~ is not The Right Thing , gotta give something to debug with.
   asciilifeform: ./v.pl d mpi-genesis.vpatch returns nothing
   asciilifeform: and neither does
   asciilifeform: ./v.pl a mpi_second_cut.vpatch
   asciilifeform: otoh the flow,
   asciilifeform: ./v.pl f
   asciilifeform: mpi_second_cut.vpatch (asciilifeform)
   asciilifeform: mpi-genesis.vpatch (asciilifeform)
   asciilifeform: returns both.
   asciilifeform: this happens only in mod6’s vtron, the bug is replicated by asciilifeform just now ( however yet unexplained. )
   asciilifeform: and persists still if the filename is fixed, so it wasn’t the cause.
   diana_coman: myeah, I had done the renaming
   diana_coman: asciilifeform, v99 (taken from here: http://therealbitcoin.org/ml/btc-dev/2015-August/000160.html ) complains that “No roots found!” -> what am I missing?
   diana_coman: these are my files: http://p.bvulpes.com/pastes/oXdqh/?raw=true
   diana_coman: and I ran it : v99 –wot .wot –seals .seals patches a mpi_second_cut.vpatch
   asciilifeform: ok now ~that~ is odd
   asciilifeform: diana_coman: do me a favour, tar up the entire thing
   asciilifeform: vtron, patches, seals, all.
   asciilifeform: i unfortunately will not be able to touch this in next few hrs.
   asciilifeform: but will before nightfall.
   diana_coman: k
   ben_vulpes: and in “fiddling while rome burns” http://ul.vave.pw.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/_/17/12/75b4d27.jpg
   diana_coman: asciilifeform, http://p.bvulpes.com/pastes/mINB0/?raw=true encrypted .tar.gz of whole dir with everything
   asciilifeform: ty diana_coman , i’ma check it out as soon as hands free
   diana_coman: thank you
   asciilifeform: diana_coman: post plaintext one, possibly ben_vulpes or mod6 or someone else, will notice what is the cause before i do
   asciilifeform knee deep in saecular liquishit atm
   diana_coman: asciilifeform or anyone else: http://ossasepia.com/available_resources/testmpi.tar.gz
   asciilifeform: thx diana_coman
   asciilifeform: now i recall also that phf had some trouble at first eating the thing, http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-15#1739113 and elsewhere. but i can’t seem to find in the log whether he ever said what the problem was, and how fixed.
   a111: Logged on 2017-11-15 18:23 mircea_popescu: maybe his thing didn’t eat it for some reason.
   mod6: hi, looks like you’ve had some issues with my v : asciilifeform & diana_coman, I’ll have to take a look at this later when I can. thx.
   phf: asciilifeform: i had issues specifically with an older, genesis-less version. my system doesn’t require antecedents to be there, but for some reason when there’s only one, antecedent-less patch it gives me a 404. i’ve not actually investigated, since you produced a genesis since
   asciilifeform: genesis was posted from the day my article was written, phf
   asciilifeform: it is in the tarball
   asciilifeform: ( supposing this makes a difference )
   asciilifeform: or, to be absolutely pedantically correct, it was posted when the article first written, whereas ‘second cut’ was added later.
   asciilifeform: both can be seen at http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1533 .
   phf: asciilifeform: something like that. my btcbase vpatch grepper is dumb (it’s my own eyes, but not the brain) and it’s mostly just looking for things that look like a vpatch/vdiff. i definitely didn’t unpack the first post tgz
   asciilifeform: makes sense
   asciilifeform: since that item i’ve avoided stuffing’em into tarballs, it doesn’t help but often trips up various automated items like phf’s
   trinque: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-12-06#1747237 << I saw, first reaction was "AH SHIT, WHY IS THE BALANCE OFF" a111: Logged on 2017-12-06 14:10 mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-12-05#1746620 << pretty sure i "accidentally"-ed a hundy or so at some point, look carefully through the couch cushions. asciilifeform: let plain text, stay plaintxt trinque: notbad cushion money asciilifeform: i considered to ask 'a hundy of what' but decided not to mircea_popescu: wise. mod6: where is the de-facto mpi tarball? asciilifeform: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1533 mod6: thx asciilifeform: meanwhile in world of thick people, http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1927&cpage=1#comment-18402 mod6: are we trying to get this one going then? http://www.loper-os.org/pub/mpi/sane-mpi.tar.gz asciilifeform: nope asciilifeform: i prolly oughta remove that link asciilifeform: it contains simply a press mod6: it sounds to me like diana_coman was using that one. diana_coman: mod6, no mod6: 'sane-mpi' asciilifeform: ( at the time i was not yet ready to say properly fuckyou to my heathen readers, who had nfi what is v and did not want to ) diana_coman: yes but the vpatch, not the press itself asciilifeform: i think diana_coman has the actual vpatch asciilifeform: from the genesis tar diana_coman: mod6, this is what I have and on which it failed: http://ossasepia.com/available_resources/testmpi.tar.gz diana_coman: basically this "sane-mpi" tar.gz: www.loper-os.org/pub/mpi/mpi-genesis.tar.gz asciilifeform: oooh aaaah asciilifeform: looks like i found the boojum asciilifeform: this was one of those pieces i cooked using obsolete vdiff asciilifeform: that included timestamps asciilifeform: the genesis, that is mod6: aha mod6: that'll do it asciilifeform: the secondcut was proper. mod6 looks asciilifeform: who wants to recommend The Right Thing for an item like this ? asciilifeform: i can sign a vpatch of ~the genesis~ per se asciilifeform: or alternatively sign a cleaned genesis asciilifeform: but would rather preserve the chronology. asciilifeform: hey mircea_popescu do you wanna make the call ? mircea_popescu: sign a new genesis, abandon this one. asciilifeform: worx asciilifeform: fwiw the secondcut requires no change asciilifeform: the file hashes from the fixed genesis will be same. mircea_popescu: asciilifeform just as soon as someone puts a patch on top of it, the trees will diverge and then phf can exclude the legacy one or w/e it is he does to them asciilifeform: they won't diverge though mircea_popescu: oh, it's a clerical problem only ? asciilifeform: think about it. aha. asciilifeform: it's a straight formattingbug. mircea_popescu: so then why doesn't it press ? there's something amiss here. asciilifeform: it doesn't press because vtron chokes on the timestamps. asciilifeform: they should not be in the hashlines. BingoBoingo opting out of major decisions until getting in a full sleep in. But, Haz uruguayan numero de telefono mircea_popescu: so then why is it on eg phf's site asciilifeform: ( they however were in there, in asciilifeform's ~original~ vtron . and vdiff . ) mircea_popescu: im guessing we're just about ready to tighten format here asciilifeform: phf's vtron apparently is clever, and able to eat both types. mircea_popescu: SOFT FORK! asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the crapola was formally abolished in v proper. asciilifeform: phf's is 'too liberal'. mircea_popescu: aite then. asciilifeform: mod6's is actually correct, though i'd prefer it barf loudly and with pomp, rather than silently. mircea_popescu: aaanyway, suppose diana_coman wants to add a patch to mod6's vtron, to better error messages mircea_popescu: (because complaining of absent-present file is no good) mircea_popescu: WHERE does she put it ? mircea_popescu: mod6 wanna genesis your vtron ? asciilifeform: i tried it with diana_coman's copy of asciilifeform's last vtron, and it has correct barfola asciilifeform: says 'are you sure this is a vpatch' asciilifeform: which immediately took me to the culprit mircea_popescu: asciilifeform and how about you./ asciilifeform: pretty sure i did ? mircea_popescu: i dun see it in btcbase asciilifeform: having to comb l0gz to find these, is becoming painful. any chance of deedbot learning to eat vpatches+sigs, trinque ? mircea_popescu: atm there's bot, lam-par (terrible name), fg, mpi and ffa. asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: lol i'm all ears if you have better name for lam-par mircea_popescu: asciilifeform why deedbot ? should be a111. asciilifeform: traditionally deedbot is the one who eats signed matter mircea_popescu: asciilifeform : "Lamport Parachute (a crypto identity bootstrap solution)" mircea_popescu: asciilifeform you misunderstand teh tradition! mircea_popescu: !#s ".sig" a111: 217 results for "\".sig\"", http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=%22.sig%22 mircea_popescu: !#s ".patch" a111: 111 results for "\".patch\"", http://btcbase.org/log-search?q=%22.patch%22 mircea_popescu: asciilifeform phf pluriously said he's doing it by hand for now ; i see no problem with this. correct procedure would thereby be to ping him with items asciilifeform: > > http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1533 < < updated asciilifeform: ^ mod6 , diana_coman , mircea_popescu , phf , et al asciilifeform: clean ( in terms of not actually having any effect on pressed hashes and the descendant patch 'second cut' ) fix. asciilifeform: diana_coman: plox to verify that this worx as described above, when you get a chance. asciilifeform: i tested with my vtron, as pictured in diana_coman's tarball, and it worx. asciilifeform: fwiw asciilifeform has purged afaik all copies of old-style vdiff.sh from his boxen, so this headache should not recur. asciilifeform: i recommend other folx to look at their vdiff, and see that it does not suffer from timestampism. asciilifeform: ( pretty sure asciilifeform is not the only one who has committed this sin. ) asciilifeform: phf: if you had some code in your patch viewer to eat this type of horror, as 'special case', it is now a good time to throw it out asciilifeform: afaik i dun have any other unfixed vpatches. asciilifeform: ( aside from some obsolete matter on trb ml ) trinque: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-12-06#1747462 < < don't want to step on phf's toes here; he's operating the logger and v-patch viewer a111: Logged on 2017-12-06 19:48 asciilifeform: having to comb l0gz to find these, is becoming painful. any chance of deedbot learning to eat vpatches+sigs, trinque ? asciilifeform: let me also demonstrate for the record: asciilifeform: grep "+++" mpi-genesis.vdiff | cut -f5 -d' ' | sort > sad.txt
   asciilifeform: grep “+++” mpi-genesis.vpatch | cut -f3 -d’ ‘ | sort > happy.txt
   asciilifeform: diff sad.txt happy.txt
   asciilifeform: ^ null
   asciilifeform: ( one is, if it isn’t clear, the 2015 sad genesis; the other — the fixed, in http://btcbase.org/log/2017-12-06#1747474 . )
   a111: Logged on 2017-12-06 19:59 asciilifeform: > > http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1533 < < updated asciilifeform: http://www.loper-os.org/pub/mpi/mpi-genesis.vpatch http://www.loper-os.org/pub/mpi/mpi-genesis.vpatch.asciilifeform.sig for the l0gz. asciilifeform: ^^^ mod6 , diana_coman , mircea_popescu , phf , et al ^^^ mircea_popescu: ok ok simmar down asciilifeform: the issue is as fixed as it gets. i posted the grep item as example of how to verify, without even a vtron, that nothing has been slipped in from under the table. diana_coman: asciilifeform, thank you, I'll look in a minute; (had all hands full a minute here with all sorts) asciilifeform: ( a working vtron will immediately barf if encountering a file mismatching the claimed hash ) mod6: alright, im about to check your new ones here. i can confirm that the original 'mpi-genesis.vpatch' (f254bedf1e3241eb9de17232b630a0614f1cc54ff9c5407d87d79174e211833bcfc0135c89b4abcab2446acd93137a8e1b0798704ad7e4d498cc52c836c82c2b) gets dropped on the floor because of the addtional timestamps. diana_coman: I can confirm that the new genesis & the old second_cut vpatch are now at least recognised by mod6's v diana_coman: asciilifeform, did you take out the second_cut patch link from the updated http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1533 ? or am I just not seeing it/not getting something? asciilifeform: ugh asciilifeform: ffs asciilifeform goes to see mod6: now, on the other hand, yeah, i saw the second_cut vpatch link removed from loper... but I went ahead and updated my sandbox to have alf's latest & greatest mpi-genesis. mod6: when i went to press, bzzzt. mod6: looks like second_cut might need a re-grind. asciilifeform: diana_coman: fixed asciilifeform: mod6: show me the eggog ? asciilifeform: it SHOULD NOT NEEED REGRIND FFS diana_coman: asciilifeform, here it seems to barf on the ...README file? asciilifeform: grr asciilifeform: paste ? asciilifeform: considering that i made the new genesis by pressing and re-vdiffing, there should be no differences aside from the timestamp cut. mod6: http://p.bvulpes.com/pastes/0dlz1/?raw=true diana_coman: 2 out of 5 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file mpi/README.rej and contents of README.rej are here: http://p.bvulpes.com/pastes/J8ESM/?raw=true mod6: yup, unhappy with README diana_coman: aha, seems to be same here, confirmed asciilifeform: diana_coman, mod6 that text only appears in 'second cut' asciilifeform: not in genesis asciilifeform: it does not appear in either the original genesis, nor the regrind, see for yourself. asciilifeform: ( i.e. the text in 'UPDATE #1' ) diana_coman: asciilifeform, there is something I don't understand: shouldn't I be able to press the second cut now with the new genesis present? asciilifeform: yes!!! diana_coman: so then : I try to press and I get...that diana_coman: is there now a problem with second_cut? diana_coman goes to take it again asciilifeform: whereas i just now 'pressed' the old and the new genesis with plain old patch -p1 < old and patch -p1 < new asciilifeform: and diffed the READMEs asciilifeform: and they are bitwise identical asciilifeform: just as they ought to be asciilifeform: and so is the rest of it! diana_coman: uhm, something is weird mircea_popescu admires how the "finished" mpi managed to take a whole day of 3 people's time and shakes his head displeasedly. mircea_popescu: this can't be what finished ever means. asciilifeform: what means 'finished', it's a spoil of war artifact. asciilifeform: ( and fwiw phf pressed and built the demo year+ ago ) asciilifeform: diana_coman, mod6 , both of you appear to be suffering from mod6's barfolade-leaving vtron asciilifeform: it stops mid-press and leaves liquishit asciilifeform: which it itself afterwards fails on asciilifeform: make a fresh working set, with no failed-press residue, and you will get a working press. diana_coman: asciilifeform, this was FRESH asciilifeform: plox to tar it up and post ? diana_coman: wiped previous dir, took everything out with curl etc asciilifeform: whole thing, as before. asciilifeform brb, teatime. diana_coman: I'll wipe again and try your v too for completeness at least mod6: <+asciilifeform> diana_coman, mod6 , both of you appear to be suffering from mod6’s barfolade-leaving vtron << wut mod6: <+mircea_popescu> mod6 wanna genesis your vtron ? << at this rate, doesn't look like it. mod6: Despite 2 years of development, we still arn't there yet. trinque: genesis doesn't have to mean perfect. mod6: I had started a new V in Ada, had to stick it in the drawer for a while. Not getting to exactly where I wanted to go (easy to read, fits in head, no perl/perlisms) with it at this time. trinque: nobody's going to come for you with pitchforks mod6: Anyway, the hope was that it would replace my other PoC. trinque: ircbot's genesis features me writing CLOS like it's Java classes. mod6: <+mod6> <+asciilifeform> diana_coman, mod6 , both of you appear to be suffering from mod6’s barfolade-leaving vtron < < wut < < my V pukes exactly when it can. mod6: during the press process, it finds that shas do not match the expected, and DIES. trinque: will at some point release vpatches with sane method names. but thing works, and I'm not going to obscure history because I knew less in the past. mod6: it can't check the expected sha of a patch BEFORE its DONE patching. mod6: s/patch/patched file/ asciilifeform back asciilifeform: now where's that tarball mod6: which asciilifeform: either diana_coman's or mod6's barfamatic set asciilifeform: at this point i'm quite curious re what gives mod6: everytime we have this problem (note it's not the first) where we have someones vpatch with garbage in it.... mod6: then it gets re-generated mod6: then we have to regrind stuff. mod6: goto regrind; asciilifeform: mod6: in this case asciilifeform is quite puzzled why it appears to need a regrind; none of the file hashes should have changed asciilifeform: ( patches themselves are never hashed , aside from by gpg when verifying sig ) asciilifeform: confirmed barf on readme asciilifeform: now trying to find why ! asciilifeform: ( the two README are bitwise-identical ) mod6: ok. i'll see what i can dig up diana_coman: asciilifeform, mk, so no need for the tar I gather since you can easily reproduce it anyway asciilifeform: ok this is pretty sad asciilifeform: how come nobody bothered to look at second_cut with naked eye ? mircea_popescu: asciilifeform> what means ‘finished’, it’s a spoil of war artifact. < < that's entirely not related to the discussion. asciilifeform: phf how the hell did this get eaten by your vtron asciilifeform: the second_cut on my www -- is not a proper patch at all asciilifeform: but a genesis . all of the antecedents are 'false' mircea_popescu: asciilifeform that's the smaller problem. mircea_popescu: the larger problem is that to arrive to this conclusion, you first bitched at everyone else. asciilifeform: the bigger problem is that nobody noticed. mircea_popescu: no. mircea_popescu: now stop doing this inane shit, it's a significant drag on resources. mod6: fwiw, i've never even looked at this! asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 9 of 10 occasions it is somebody else's bug!1 mircea_popescu: 2 of 2 here. asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: at any rate, mod6 is right , i'ma have to regrind the 2nd patch. and also stuck , deservedly, with the chore of demonstrating that the payloads are unaltered. asciilifeform: serves me right. mircea_popescu: observe that after bitching about the quality of work in empire, along the lines of "everything works for as long as you don't use it", our pile of stuff exhibits the same exact property. asciilifeform: if not tried -- wrong to say that it worx. asciilifeform: 'schrodinger's worx' asciilifeform: now i'ma go and get the mop, pick up the liquishit, brb. mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-12-05#1746776 a111: Logged on 2017-12-05 17:47 asciilifeform: ( lessee if i properly ate & shat, 'i do not consider myself a programmer, for i have another craft. let's say i am an amateur programmer. and yet though i am an amateur, i find myself having written tens of thou. of loc in this-here life. and at least a min of 10k loc for web. but wanna hear sumthing ? never have i created a security hole in any. never. do you suppose i simply had good luck ? possibly luck. or possibly i wrote the c mod6: I should have examined/tested your mpi vpatches, alf. I'll continue to try to be a second pair of eyes, reading them. There's no substitute for reading. For those following along, take note. asciilifeform: and i oughta properly read yer vtron, mod6 . mod6: Cheers! mod6: Additionally, if someone in the republic wishes to create a vpatch/genesis and have a second pair of eyes look it over, by all means, send it to me. mod6: I'll do what I can to vet it. trinque respectfully points out that at least by his eyes, V forces personal responsibility, not a pretense to being immaculately conceived. mod6: indeed. mod6: never hurts to have someone measure for the n'th time for you before you cut, however. trinque: no argument here. asciilifeform: this is not the 1st time i plugged a finger into 220v. the breaker, i will however point out -- worked asciilifeform: now to see which finger... mod6: <+trinque> genesis doesn’t have to mean perfect. <+trinque> nobody’s going to come for you with pitchforks << no one expects a spanish something or other either... trinque: loller mod6: but furthermore, i tend to agree. if i thought that my V would stay in perl forever, i'd probably already have created the genesis. however, i'd like to see if I can get the Ada version off the ground. asciilifeform: ok this is pretty strange: asciilifeform: i broke 'second cut' into patchons, and found : asciilifeform: http://wotpaste.cascadianhacker.com/pastes/RP2TH/?raw=true asciilifeform: AND http://wotpaste.cascadianhacker.com/pastes/tpDxG/?raw=true trinque: mod6: makes sense, not vpatching a prototype mod6: because what i don't want to do is have a perl genesis, then some vpatch that deletes everything and inflates a bunch of ada stuffs. prolly be better to start in the lang you expect to say within for the lifetime of the application. asciilifeform: or hm nm asciilifeform brb mircea_popescu: mod6 it's not a crime to have a perl vtron. however, if you plan as your own strategy to move away from perl and you're judging it more of a liability than anything, then by all means, eschew. mircea_popescu: original mod6 perl vtron was important prototype in the early life of v, made all sorts of latter things possible. exactly like original bitcoin. nobody said you have to marry it now though ; or divorce it for that matter. mod6: It /is/ a bit worrysome that I believe that I'm the only person who knows how it works. And since it's the only version in existence that encompasses all of the rules arbitrated in our chamber, that a new version that is easier to understand is warranted. mircea_popescu: what language(s) you work in is your own, entirely personal, choice. mircea_popescu: i'm not going to pick a wife for you, "here, THIS is the woman you should be comfortable with". pick your own. languages idem. mod6: :] mircea_popescu: on a long enough timeframe, there's going to exist a vtron in ~any language anyway, i expect. asciilifeform: hey folx mod6: mircea_popescu: that's kinda neat really mod6: asciilifeform: werd asciilifeform: i'ma double-chexk this before running mouth... asciilifeform: because i think i may have found a bug in diff mircea_popescu: ahahaha mod6: :D asciilifeform: i'ma tar it up and let people replicate mod6: ok. mod6: cool mircea_popescu: inb4 ffa.diff reimpl mod6: haha asciilifeform: http://www.loper-os.org/pub/mpi/wtf.tar.gz mod6 looks asciilifeform: there was no mistake in asciilifeform's procedure for baking the item. second_cut is in fact a patch, not a genesis, asciilifeform spoke hastily. there is also no bug in mod6's vtron, or in asciilifeform's. diana_coman did not make a mistake. asciilifeform: i will not spoil the surprise , folx who look in the tarball will see what the caltrop was. asciilifeform: the sad part is that i have nfi how to cure this , it is a consequence of using unix diff ( with in-band signal ) to begin with. asciilifeform: ( observe that the sha512 sums of the readme in 'a' and 'b' match the ones given in the vpatch. but unix patch cannot actually make the patch happen. ) mod6: crap, just a sec, haven't even looked yet. bbs. asciilifeform: i recall a similar boojum in my 1st attempt at the FG release, that time it was a '+++' inside a uuencoded blob asciilifeform: some texts cannot be (!) vdiffed, for so long as we use unix diff; these appearently include gpg sigs asciilifeform brb, fresh air asciilifeform: ( clearsigs, to be exact . ) asciilifeform: *apparently asciilifeform brb forrealz mod6: <+asciilifeform> i recall a similar boojum in my 1st attempt at the FG release, that time it was a ‘+++’ inside a uuencoded blob < < lol, ok i see the problem too. you're right, this similar thing happened before. mircea_popescu: lol check it out, diana got split with the bots. BingoBoingo recalls diff being an issue, forgets the context mircea_popescu: we'll end up with a s/-/=/ intermediate step or wtf. mircea_popescu: alternately, of course... "no clearsigned material within patches". this may even be a right thing independently of the actual bug. mircea_popescu: in that there's no reason to have them, and their presence is in itself sign of babbage's braindamage, much like say a canister for light, or a faucet for patience.

   Ben Vulpes plays Cassandra:

   ben_vulpes: not indefinitely postpone releasing this vpatch while i wait for stan to release an ada cryptor and link that from cl

   [↩]

3. 
   S.NSA consultancy turns out to not work for S.MG and so I have to start on implementing EuCrypt as there’s no other option available.

   diana_coman: asciilifeform, I’m currently looking at eulora rsa and I’m a bit foggy (I know and followed the bits posted in the logs but it’s a long trail): what is available/ready to use atm?
   asciilifeform: diana_coman: ffa arithmetic stack is theoretically available. however until i have barrett reduction going, it’s a ~30 second modular exponentiation ( i.e. per rsa op )
   asciilifeform: i.e. per 4096-padding -bit payload
   asciilifeform: and a ~week -long keygen.
   asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-20#1716110 << latest, iirc, thread a111: Logged on 2017-09-20 16:25 asciilifeform: in other noose, ACHTUNG, panzers, http://wotpaste.cascadianhacker.com/pastes/BAjEK/?raw=true < < 27.2 sec (4096b modexp) mircea_popescu: not actually usable for eulora as such, is it. asciilifeform: certainly not as-is, no asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: is a barrettian ( theoretically 1s/4096 ) rsatron, usable ? asciilifeform: that's still quite slow vs. heathen rsa. mircea_popescu: well, players are problematic. they might download the game and wait for a few hours to get a key going. then again they might not. nobody's waiting for a week tho, i don't expect. asciilifeform: this is a fundamental headache, innit. 'wanna use actual rsa, or that thing you've been fraudulently introduced to as rsa, that leaks key, but runs fast' mircea_popescu: in any case the problem is that i'll have to design some kind of extender, can't do pure rsa throughout because of the sheer load. there's multiple messages/sec asciilifeform: fwiw it parallelizes. mircea_popescu: asciilifeform in any case the implementation will be isolated, so that one can swap his preferred item in. asciilifeform does not know ~anything about how eulora goes together, cannot comment in detail mircea_popescu: but basically, the only practical approach here is to actually import the gpg implementation, warts and all, but modularily, and see later maybe it can be swapped out. asciilifeform: imho using a nonfixedtime rsatron in realtime, is worse than not using any crypto at all asciilifeform: you will leak key. mircea_popescu: since the client is intended to dissolve into competing community-driven implementations anyway, i don't expect to even be involved in weighing that maybe. mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i guess we'll be having this problem demonstrated in practice. what can i do ? asciilifeform: openssl already demonstrated quite satisfactorily. asciilifeform: ( you can ~trivially extract most privkeys, if you spend a coupla months ) mircea_popescu: need was correctly identified year+ in advance ; the fact work is ongoing is no solace -- something must go in, and it will go in now. mircea_popescu: the only item ready to go in is in fact koch's, and so he gets imported. asciilifeform: if hiring fortune teller - hire cheapest. but ftr i dun get how this beats not having crypto. mircea_popescu: at least it makes the community failure plain to the community. mircea_popescu: i ~tried~ to have crypto. mircea_popescu: what i got is what i got, and that's what the community in turn gets, and when it has a better idea -- implementation it is one comment out away. asciilifeform continues the very slow and painful walk through most of undergrad number theory that leads, possibly, to usable nonleaking rsa on pc.

   [↩]

4. He’ll deny this, running circles around it too, I know. I rather wish I didn’t, too.[↩]

On the 6th of October, my blog went offline as a result of what was quickly but adequately branded as the pizmess. The piz(arro)mess started in fact on the 4th of October, as an apparently targeted ddos attack on republican infrastructure including my logger machine hosted with MivoCloud as well as most/all Pizarro-hosted machines. While my Moldova-based provider needed however only a quick email from me to update their rules and mitigate the “attack”, the Uruguay-based data centre turned this initial blip into a full-blown catastrophy for Pizarro, nullrouting their IPs for a whole week and acting overall increasingly ineptly over it too.

As the uruguayan noise just increased along the lines of “ra-raaa attack, can’t do anything other than nullroute!!”, I even pinged again my moldavian provider to get some concrete data as to what terrible thing had hit my logger. And here it is, all of 1.5Gbit/s peak of it, with dump.pcap file attached and coming from just a few IPs really:

The incredible 2019 ddos on logs.ossasepia.com

While my logger was therefore quickly back online and happily serving TMSR, my blog and Minigame’s servers were not to recover as the pizmess quickly went from bad to worse. As a result, Pizarro, the in-WoT preferred provider of dedicated servers and colocation services went out of business within a week, as its data centre ¹ proved to have irremediably turned into a scam and a rather inept one at that, involving nullrouting of paying customers’ IPs on the basis of no data whatsoever and failed/inexistent cooling systems in place. On the very same data centre, a report less than 2 years old stated the rather opposite “Given the size and ratio of coolers to cabinets there seems to be a healthy amount of excess capacity”. In any case, overall the exact speed at which this centre->scam conversion happened is unclear but the whole thing seems to have taken Pizarro management entirely by surprise as there was no plan B in place and nothing to do other than to wheel the data and the hardware out of there as soon as possible, contact local lawyers, file a police complaint and otherwise write the adventure’s epitaph: servers for sale, in Uruguay. All of this was done and done timely, to Aaron‘s credit.

Still, despite all the good intentions, my younghands.club remained unreachable and this affected worst precisely newcomers and learners, the exact sort of situation I could have done without. My blog also remained offline and all my up-to-date backups of it (as of all other data, Minigame’s as well as mine, of all sorts) could still not paper over the sinking feeling of atrophiating writing muscle that came with the situation. So I had no choice but to look for a new provider to host both younghands.club and ossasepia.com.

The initial logical ² option was to attempt expanding the contact with Maxim from MivoCloud rather faster than initially contemplated. Responsive as ever, he came in for a talk when asked and was very willing to host republican machines as they come but in the end the whole thing fell through because of his unexpected refusal to actually use his acquired position in the WoT in any meaningful sense. So with this option closed, what else was there to do then to hit the list of ISPs again and start contacting more of them to see if I could by any chance find one I could actually work with. And as this tiresome talking to all sorts of pretend ISPs went on and on with mostly headache to show for it and very little else ³, the younghands.club that could not wait anymore was set up with MivoCloud and this blog here finally made it back online only when Stanislav discovered that he actually had all he needed – and cheaper too! – within 20 minutes drive from his very own desk.

So with many thanks to Stanislav for his quick and smooth bringing up of all my blog-data ⁴ on the new Rockchip in the USA, the first thing I did upon getting my blog back was to shudder at the ugly theme I had lived with for lack of anything else to choose from. The thing with crises like this is that they force anyway such an expense of time and effort that in the wake of it I get triggered again by *all* the pending/unsolved/still-broken issues and with an intensity that has deep roots I know only too well about. So I usually weigh very carefully and hold on to acting too quickly on those triggers so as to not end up doing all sorts rather than the most useful and truly needed sorts. Still, I considered that the new home for my new blog could do with a maximum of one hour spent on hammering an existing theme into something I could at least stand slightly better than that green thing.

Funnily enough it turned out that even less than 60 minutes on this task can make quite a difference: the “default” theme with the blue header morphed into what you can see with just a few touches to the .css files (both of them) to change some colours, some fonts and the wasteful padding of single-post pages, as well as a few further touches to .php to put in the server-side selection mechanism and tweak odd bits and pieces so it doesn’t look *that* terrible. Hopefully there will be some themes I can choose from before my next “can’t stand this anymore” hits again with such intensity.

In other technical terms and at Stanislav’s request, I did also a few tests of the new location, here’s some data for the hungry reader:

• From ossasepia.com server (USA), the ftp get aimed at logs.ossasepia.com (Moldova) went like this: 1105154420 bytes received in 539.60 secs (2000.1 kB/s)
• The other way around, from logs.ossasepia.com server, a wget of a file ~86MB went like this: 100%[======================================>] 89,944,680 131K/s in 10m 11s
• While the above may look surprising, the issue is not on the USA side I’d think. Here’s how the same wget went from my home (UK) to ossasepia.com (USA): 100%[======================================>] 89,944,680 998K/s in 1m 45s

Now that my blog is back up and running on Stanislav-owned iron again, there is of course the whole backlog of write-ups to be done on top of all the crisis-induced tasks plus usual tasks plus new tasks. How do adult people *ever* manage to get bored?

1. Latecho, of Uruguay[↩]
2. Not quite ideal though, partially because of grouping again *everything* in a single place and partially because of location (on Internet pipes map rather than purely geographical) and distance from any L1 presence.[↩]
3. There is in fact a pile of emails to show for it + at least two ISP representatives that made it to register a key with deedbot if not really any further than that. And now I have of course the added task of going again through the pile of emails and doing a write-up of it all, preferably sooner rather than later. I know it and my every-growing list of stuff-to-be-done overflowingly-knows it too, what more can I say about it.[↩]
4. Thanks to Aaron too, for his packing and sending of data from Uruguay.[↩]

While the world at large is making itself busy with the current fashion of discrimination hunting and public pillorying of any offenders it can get its public hands on, TMSR is peacefully and earnestly discussing in the forum the introduction of a new code release paradigm that is quite as discriminatory as it can be and as a result to rather significant benefit to all. The initial proposal as stated by Mircea Popescu in #trilema has the following parts (split and formatted from the logs in a way that I find easier to read):

the following code release paradigm :
client (code) author
a) releases code encrypted to l1, signed and deeded (so basically, gpg -aer asciilifeform -r ave1 -r etc) ;

b) releases precompiled binaries for allcomers.

advantages:
1. permits us to control binaries, which means stuff like http://btcbase.org/log/2018-07-16#1834888 (which i’m very much impressed with, btw) ;

2. permits to reserve some interest for the author, because the strategic thinking over at minigame is that we’ll want client competition (from skinning all the way to all the way) and remuneration by installs (hence all that hash dance in the new c-s protocol) ;

3. very clearly quashes the idiocy of rms-ism AND ers-ism (“open source” bla bla), and makes the strong political statement that indeed there is a difference between nose breathers and mouthbreathers and so on.

disadvantage:
this only works if we can rely on l1 to keep a secret ; which means things (such as, that it can’t be as big, for instance).

The discussion can be found in the logs but it can be a bit difficult to follow as it spills over into next day and into other topics on the way. The initial focus was on the issue of “keep a secret” and then on that of “controlling binaries”. While both those aspects are worth discussing and are certainly covered to some extent in the log throughout yesterday, they are actually NOT at all central to the proposal as I came to understand it at length. And the discussion perhaps focused on those at first mainly because the speakers – both I and Stanislav – have more practice with the technical perspective and so we read the proposal first through that lens. However, as I kept prodding the issue with questions, various bits and pieces fell into place for me and the whole thing started making more sense. Specifically, this is my current understanding of this proposal:

Discriminatory Code Sharing

The proposal is simply a clear and pointy (i.e. with actual practical power and means to use this power) discrimination between:

a. the general “public” who has access to binaries and nothing else.

b. qualified individuals (l1) who have access to sources.

Note the mass noun in a. and the distinct persons in b.

Note also that the a/b distinction above is a political issue first and foremost. It *does not matter* nor it could possibly matter if some non-l1 somewhere gets at some point his hands on some code or the other. So it sees it. So what? For as long as the “seeing” happens outside the walls of TMSR or otherwise put outside the structure of authority, there is no meaning to it. In practical terms, they can of course see the code, come within the walls and contribute as a result and then what’s the problem or the loss? Or they can herp and derp outside and be ignored by TMSR just as they were before they found that code in the woods, so again what’s the problem or the loss?

Essentially, code is to be shared but not with anyone able to push some keys. Code is to be shared with and even offered to those who can do something meaningful with it – and only to those. What they decide to do with it, if anything, is of course their own call entirely.

There are significant advantages to this approach:

1. It makes explicit and it gives more meaning to an existing and unalterable difference between “users of software”: some can and will read source code, others will just execute whatever they download. Those who consider themselves in the first category but possibly unjustly lumped at the moment with the second, have the option of doing some work and getting into l1.

2. It offers quite a few things to those who actually write useful code:

• a way of getting help from those most able to give it;
• as much protection as there currently is anywhere to be found against the significant and eternal pressures of the mindless horde ¹ as well as against the very real monkeys who are always looking to pick up the fruit of someone else’s labour when it’s ready;
• a clearer and arguably easier avenue to making a name for themselves and in the process finding their own place, be it in l1, l2, lx or outside the walls entirely.

3. It adds more meaning (power and responsibility, what else) to the l1 status.

4. It puts more pressure on the need for reproducible builds since the practical and technical aspects of most of the above relies to some extent on those and the actual exercise of the new powers will inevitably run into the issue of non-reproducible builds (as well as any other relevant technical issues that are perhaps yet to be revealed as people stumble upon them).

The only disadvantage stated from the beginning was the fact that the approach is unlikely to scale very well as the size of l1 increases – there needs to be a rather close agreement within l1 at the very least on the core aspect here: code is not secret but sharing it is a responsibility and choosing the recipients is a matter not to be taken lightly.

I can perhaps see a potentially different issue with submitted code that keeps growing in volume. However, I’d expect that it is a bit too early to worry about that and the solution is more likely to be naturally found – if nobody actually reads it, there is no effect. For the code’s author it’s just as if the code wasn’t even submitted in the first place if not even worse since he might easily land in the soup for being an idiot who can’t read the log and doesn’t understand at all how lines of code are weighed in the first place.

Based on my above understanding of this proposal, I must say that I’m all for it. From all I see, it’s a rather significant improvement for everyone even remotely touched by it and at relatively little real cost to anyone involved.

It might be of course that I misunderstood the proposal in parts or entirely in which case I very much want to hear in the comments below where I’m mistaken.

1. Also known as the horde of idiots, mountain of idiots, sewer rats and so on.[↩]

I could title this: the post I did not want to write. There has been a lot written already on the BitBet issue and the #b-a logs have frothed over it more than enough. Still, seeing how after all this time nobody in the midst of it all seems to either see what I see or otherwise care enough to state it, I have no choice but to write it anyway, because the alternative is that this view is never even put out there at all, for better or for worse. And to make it clear: I do not write this for whatever may come out of it (there’s nothing positive I can really see coming either). I write it because this perspective is somehow entirely absent from any public discussion that I can see and therefore I can no longer keep quiet on it.

Let me state from the start that I have no stake in BitBet at all. For full disclosure: I had a few shares bought in the very beginning and I sold those quite some time ago. I bought them because I saw (and still do) huge potential in the underlying idea of BitBet. I sold them when I realised that the infrastructure that BitBet needs to thrive is simply not there ¹.

The perspective I have to write here as best I can will not go into technical details at all. First, such technical details have been discussed to death in the #b-a logs by people more knowledgeable on this matter than I am. Second, I truly do not consider that I know enough of these technical matters to discuss them at this stage. On such matters, I specifically defer to people such as asciilifeform and mod6. Third, I don’t think that they are truly relevant to what I have to say, seeing how the discussion really focused in the end on Mircea Popescu’s call on the matter rather than on any of the technical issues involved.

A very short history of the issue here: the betting site owned and run by Matic Kocevar (Kakobrekla) and Mircea Popescu entered into receivership as a result of a irreconcilable difference between the two owners. This difference became apparent over the handling of an incident that started off as a significant delay in the processing of one of BitBet’s payment transactions. Mircea Popescu detailed his interpretation and handling of this incident in A Miner Problem. Both his interpretation and his handling have then been discussed in the comments section in Qntra and in the #b-a logs, with people mainly disagreeing on his interpretation of the result as evidence of a miner cartel. After he published the BitBet statement, the discussion focused almost exclusively on the 17BTC lost as a result of the incident and included in the statement as BitBet’s loss. Essentially, on one side Mircea Popescu stated that the funds were lost by BitBet and therefore rightfully a business loss, while Kakobrekla stated that they were lost as a result of a mistake made by Mircea Popescu and therefore his own personal loss (or a loss that is to be covered by him). This difference of perspective proved deep enough to cause BitBet to go into receivership and to cause subsequently what seems like a split of people previously in #b-a (known as members of tmsr) and currently in #b-a and/or #trilema.

It’s this last split that brought to light very clearly the fact that the issue is truly about the people involved and not at all about any of the technical issues or even the BitBet incident in itself. The BitBet incident was the trigger only. A trigger that proved to be attached to quite a bigger gun than initially thought perhaps, but what difference does that make anyway. In all this however, some misunderstandings seem to persist or are allowed to persist. Compare and contrast those two snippets from the #b-a logs:

On 2 March 2016, Mircea Popescu gives a brief statement of his reasons for his handling of the BitBet incident:

17:16:59 mircea_popescu: so that the problem can be fully exposed, in detailed, solid fact, so as to be handwaved by people.

17:17:04 mircea_popescu: i’m a masochist like that.

On 28 March 2016 phf and kakobrekla frame the discussion again as one of handling competency, while making reference directly to the statement above:

19:14:13 phf: but more importantly to a hypothetical court trial is how much knowledge mp had about this topography, so that way we can say whether or not his call was competent or not

19:14:42 kakobrekla: phf by his own admission hi call was ‘masochistic’ (but later billed sadistically)

This last part continues into a discussion of what Mircea Popescu actually meant by that statement that he was “a masochist like that.” While each of those involved has his own interpretation of it, none of those interpretations seems to me to actually hit the nail on the head ². And it’s a rather important nail seeing how all the discussion in #b-a keeps coming back to it.

In my semi-detached, silent-observer view of the whole matter, the BitBet incident was essentially a case of shooting the messenger for bringing up the unpleasant news in such a terrible, hurting manner. And at this stage one can say that both Mircea Popescu and BitBet were unwanted messengers, except that the first is way more difficult to shoot and he clearly shoots back too. The initial incident exposed a significant problem for BitBet first of all and as such one for BitBet to deal with and solve. The masochistic trait of Mircea Popescu in this has nothing to do with losing some BTCs or the like: it has to do with his deliberate choice to bring the bad news in such a way so that people won’t ignore it although he quite knows beforehand that they will still do all they can to actually wave it away. In his own words: “so that the problem can be fully exposed, in detailed, solid fact, so as to be handwaved by people.” So yes, he expected the double payment to happen, but that was at the same time the only opportunity to get full evidence of a significant problem for BitBet.

The 17BTC in this context was the price BitBet paid to ascertain the extent of the problem and to obtain clear and unavoidable proof of it, forcing it to light in a way which can’t be denied in any form (and indeed, post-incident, there hasn’t been any denial of the fact that yes, BitBet has a problem). However, despite the acknowledgement of this problem and of its importance for BitBet, the discussion solely focused on the 17BTC in the way of: oh, but they needn’t have been lost by BitBet! One has to stop first and consider: by whom should those BTC be lost then exactly to still have the problem exposed? The answer apparently given so far in the #b-a logs is: by Mircea Popescu! Presumably because he insists on exposing the problem – the messenger deserves at least a few lashes for insisting to make the bad news heard, doesn’t he?

There is also the opinion that the 17BTC shouldn’t have been paid a second time, given the clearly obvious and highly probable result of a double payment and therefore a loss. The question never asked on this is: how clear would the problem have been then? What proof would there be and of what exactly? What measures would have been taken and what value would they have on such shaky grounds?

At the end of the day, I see this as a clash of two approaches that are indeed irreconcilable: either expose rot as early and clearly as possible, at all costs and settling for nothing less than full eradication or otherwise mend and make do, working around the issues as best one can, minimising costs. I must say that I don’t really condemn either – people afford what they afford and make their choices accordingly.

I want however to make it as clear as I can that this is the choice being made, the choice that killed BitBet, the choice that split tmsr. Your choice to make at every turn, too.

1. I include people in “infrastructure” – call me names for this if you need another reason to do it anyway.[↩]
2. Nobody goes to just ask Mircea Popescu what he meant by that, either.[↩]

When too much text is too much text, what do I do to get to read it? Why, get a dump of all data ¹, throw some automated analysis at it and have the lulz quite guaranteed ². No better test to see text mining fail, it seems, than applying it to irc logs on bitcoin-assets: a careful calibration of state of the art tools ³ yielded only a clear case of “by the time you figure out and implement everything needed to obtain even reasonable results, you surely did the “automated” work at least 5 times if not 10, if not 100.” Not that it was totally unexpected, of course, but still, given the enthusiasm of text mining people (or possibly just that of text mining people I know), I’d have expected at the very minimum some more robust convo splitting and/or term extraction, with a bit of help ⁴. Not a chance: the results are better even if I split for convos based on the delay between lines (and that’s one rough way to do it for sure).

As for extracting key terms, the main result that can be offered is that text mining can find by itself only terms that one has no interest in, or at least not on btc-assets: it did manage to find “BTC” as an important term (go figure) and that was about it all. How terribly useful and incredibly surprising, isn’t it? Still, after a bit more fiddling around, it turns out that there is a bit of fun to get out of it. Here’s a pretty picture with main “key words” for the logs of May 2014. It makes for good candidate captions such as “never really need to tell,” “get one just like bitcoin people” or “mircea_popescu can like just bitcoin people.” Real bits of wisdom there, aren’t they?

Wordcloud for bitcoin-assets logs from May 2014

Still, data is data and text is no exception, even if spewed forth at incredible rates day and night by a bunch of bitcoiners (and the occasionally lost newbie) on an irc log. Hence, back to more basic tools and trusted numbers, via R. And at least I got some pretty pictures!

Easiest thing to find out: who’s most active? Top 10 contributers (as number of lines rather than number of words) seem to be quite the same, whether it’s the whole period considered or just a month. However, the contributions follow (of course) a power law distribution, meaning that there are a few users who contribute a lot to the discussion and many users who contribute very little ⁵ There is also quite a sharp decline at the top, with mircea_popescu contributing around 20% of the discussion and the next (ThickAsThieves overall or fluffypony in May 2014) barely contributing around 8% and 10% respectively. Here are some charts and lists (I excluded assbot, gribble and ozbot):

Percentage of lines contributed by distinct nicknames on bitcoin-assets logs between 26 March 2013 and 12 June 2014.	Percentage of lines contributed by individual nicknames on bitcoin-assets in May 2014.
Top 10 contributers on bitcoin-assets between 26 April 2013 and 12 June 2014.	Top 10 contributers on bitcoin-assets in May 2014.
Top 10 contributors overall (total number of words)	Top 10 contributors in May 2014 (total number of words)
Mean number of words per line for top 10 contributors overall	Mean number of words per line for top 10 contributors in May
Top 10 overall (mean number of words per line)	Top 10 in May 2014 (mean number of words per line)
Mean number of words per line for top 100 contributors (up to at least 12 words per line)	Mean number of words per line for top 100 contributors in May 2014 (limited to those with at least 12 words per line)

Why is the above interesting? Mainly because it gives the newcomer one reasonable way to start figuring out the whole mess that is otherwise dumped on her head if taking the logs as a whole. Instead of trying to go through all the logs, set a threshold and start by filtering the logs to show first only the contributions of top people, as they are most likely to actually lead the discussions anyway. Considering how fast the percentage of contribution decays, I’d say that taking the first 10 contributors is quite a reasonable option, but for those in a hurry, it will probably do to select even just the first 5. This would reduce the logs effectively by more than half, with minimum chances of truly missing anything really important.

Then again, you could also just hang around in the chan there and the important will not miss you I guess.

1. Thanks to kakobrekla.[↩]
2. And as a side result, I also get to actually read the logs, which was the point in the first place anyway, as I’d much rather read them for the purpose of designing some kind of tool to extract info out of them in the future than just…you know, read them. But that’s just me.[↩]
3. think GATE plus all the cool plugins that can be used with it, as well as some custom-made JAPE grammars for the task at hand.[↩]
4. To be fair, it probably can be done, but with a TON of help rather than a bit and it kind of defeats the purpose from my point of view right now. Sure, after knowing the logs inside-out and building a good ontology for them and then defining and testing and polishing the rules until they shine, you might be able to get something kind of reasonable from the machine too, but by that time you’d probably get something kind of reasonable on the matter even from your dog.[↩]
5. or nothing at all, but I did not count those users here.[↩]