Quote from: the_end_is_near on May 26, 2017, 11:30:38 PM

Farewell to BCT with this final post. Follows a summary of wisdom (re-)gained.

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 2:18 am

Just this week at the 4th of the 6 month antibiotic treatment for my 6+ year disseminated (e.g. gut, lymph nodes, brain, lungs) Tuberculosis infection, has my health improved such that I can function normally in work and daily intense athletics without crashing. I want to code and think about code only. This speculative trading and Internet discussions activity is a huge distraction that will destroy my focus on the Bitnet project if I do not cease it. That would be damn shame.

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 2:15 am

So to K.I.S.S. principle, I am remaining in BTC and if LTC drops to 0.009, then I will buy. I have no strong compelling reason I must buy here at 0.0115. I need to not lose money, more than I need to make money. My BTC is for my expenses so I can focus on my programming and complete Bitnet pronto. And I need my regular sleeping patterns, not being slave to staring at a trading screen.

The hypothesis since April 2 was that in 2013 LTC had to move towards 0.03 then 0.05 in April and November, in order for BTC to start moving towards a significant new ATH. When LTC caught up at 0.05 in November, then BTC crashed and we entered a 3 year winter. Why wouldnt that pattern repeat. Remember the majority is always wrong. If everybody is afraid LTC will crash (and BTC has peaked), then LTC will not crash and BTC has not peaked. When everyone starts thinking BTC to $10,000 or $100,000, that is when BTC has peaked at perhaps $4000. Just remember that any linear increase in blocksize such as 2MB + SegWit does not resolve nor stop the exponentially rising transaction fees which will force everyone off chain, and even SegWit enables Lightning Networks which places more demand for on chain transactions for settlement of off chain centralized Mt. Box aggregators who will easily afford to pay $60,000 per transaction fees. Every blockchain consensus technology to date is winner-take-all political struggle of the whales. And we have a Dot.com-like ICO bubble that will probably also soon burst. Are we really surprised that the recent scalability agreement is not a panacea and thus BTC price is not going to the moon in a straight line.

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 4:30 am

The main impediment was the illness. You could research what chronic illness does to a human. You really have no way to understand it. Imagine you had to spend the next 6 years inside a barrel of oil with a breathing tube.

Try to code drunk with someone punching you in the stomach while working and get food poisoning also. Something like that describes my condition before these antibiotics. The high dose vitamin d3 would give me enough hormones to fight through a 2 hour workout, but the crashing after it was like my first sentence. I am not exaggerating. It was really horrible. My intense desire not to fail somehow super-willed me to get some work done, but when I remember working in that chronic illness condition, I shudder.

That is 100% truth.

That description didn't really accurately describe the malaise though. It is like you are asleep and can't not wake up. And very bad feeling in your head and body. And feel so fatigue can not hold your eyes open, but if you lay down you can not sleep either. I really can not describe it well. Until you have experience it, you can not know the feeling.

The feeling is so horrible. You just wish it would end. You wish you could just sleep and never wake up. I need to think about how to describe it with words such that someone could visualize the feelings.

Unlike in a normal health, we enjoy being awake. We feel interested to do things.

During my 6+ year sickness or especially the last 2 - 3 years, doing anything (including doing nothing) was so horrible and difficult. You just want it to all end.

The only thing I could do was fight and try to be productive so as to try to not think about it, but it is nearly impossible to ignore it. Ah I really can not describe it. Just so very thankful I am feeling better, even if I still have a little bit of the symptoms remaining.

Quote from: anonymous 27 May., 4:33 am

yeah I remember those moments you had lost the hope and were talking about just starting to run somewhere and run until you die, can't really imagine what it was like

if you didn't have your athletic spirit and talent you wouldnt' be here today, I'm certain

when someone is sick normally with fever or stomach flu or even has a hangover, the knowledge that it'll be over in a few hours or days makes it bearable.. but if there's no hope that tomorrow will be any better, then... well let's just say I'm happy I haven't had to experience it!

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 4:37 am

Yeah sort of like that!

But now I wake up and I am interested to do things. I am enjoying life mostly. Still some symptoms but not so continuously and not so horrible. Just slight.

Quote from: anonymous 27 May., 2:19 am

It certainly would be. Do you feel your stance on discussion has changed for the better? Has it been helping at all?

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 2:26 am

When I was a very productive programmer in the 1980s and 1990s (before I was attacked and lost my right eye on 12/1/1999), there was no Internet (or at least I did not participate in any Internet discussions). I started to dabble in Internet discussions around 2005.

What I have learned during this illness when I spent a lot of time exploring, learning, and discussing on the Internet, is that it is a valuable activity for gaining awareness and information, but it is a horrible activity for coding productivity. So to mix the two is not good.

Also it has helped for me to learn the importance of posting more judiciously and with more careful thought about writing positively and just not post if it would be negative and/or if it is not that important. We can not discuss every minutiae (minute detail) with others and expect to get any productivity in our own work. Our minds move much faster than we can communicate. Which is precisely why the Mythical Man Month exists and why the future is Inverse Commons (open source and everyone thinks on their own and contributes to a commons which improves and does not have a tragedy-of-the-commons).

Fungible money was important for aggregating economies-of-scale during the fungible mass production age (agriculture and factories). They are winner-take-all paradigms. Bitnet and Inverse Commons are about individualized production.

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 2:38 am

But yeah it has been very helpful to observe how you communicate positively and thinking about how I can handle discussion with different personalities.

The key is reduce (especially PUBLIC) posting and think a lot before posting something. If it is not valuable enough to put enough time into thinking out carefully (and thinking about the potential pitfalls of the people in the discussion), then do not post on that issue. Every PUBLIC post is a liability that has a cost. They are not free. So I must budget my public posts more carefully.

That is not for judging others. It is a diverse world. Everyone should be free to do it their own way, because we need diversity. So when I communicate, I need to think more about the liability, costs, and pitfalls, and not blame nature for being a snake pit of diversity that can suck up order into disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics requires it to be so. Order is not anti-fragile, thus the less of it we require, then the more conducive our activities to the trend of maximum entropy. In other words, be like water in the sense of not creating unnecessary burdens, not by doubling-down on a clusterfuck as @Skalpell demanded, but by not participating in the clusterfuck.

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 4:22 am

And if we sell any of the smallish premine on exchanges (maybe our own decentralized exchange per my discussion with @miscreanity last month), those are fungible, unlocked tokens. We can just sit on the Ask for the volume rate which we need to sell to meet our expenses. Those investors who are astute will be buying when it is under the radar and underpriced. So gradually onboarded tokens will become free trading (unlocked) so they can also be traded on exchanges. But locked up tokens can still be transferred, i.e. spent to app devs, they just are not fungible for exchange trading.

In other words, we do not stop the locked tokens (awarded to users in return for the activity to encourage onboarding) from being transferred, but they can not appear as transaction inputs with other tokens that have a different lock period. We might also limit the rate at which locked up tokens can be transferred, so that they can be transferred in smallish amounts for spending to app devs, but not viable for exchanging in bulk.

Once the lock period expires, the tokens are free trading and fully fungible.

The entire point is that onboarded users can not just join and then sell their tokens too fast. They can spend them for apps and other services on Bitnet (providing revenue to encourage more apps and developers), and they also see the tokens rising in value over time (their balance growing), thus they learn to value the tokens and not cash out. It is sort of a teach by forced experience. I can imagine some users leaving and forgeting about it, then later realizing it has become valuable and coming back. A form of long-term stickiness.

Quote from: anonymous 27 May., 4:28 am

you have been thinking this non stop for the last years, and it shows.. if you had rushed something way earlier it probably wouln't have been the success Bitnet has a real chance to be

your plan has multiple attributes feeding each other into a positive cycle, like onboarding, if it goes viral, app devs will find the large audience irresistable, and the more and better apps there will be the more people will spend the tokens within th ecosystem and tell their friends etc

but it can also be a chicken-egg problem, hopefully it's gonna be the former

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 4:45 am

Yes it would have been worse if I had rushed. But I could not rush. I was really ill. In hindsight, I was much more ill than perhaps you realize.

The hen-egg problem resolves itself if you have something that the participants need. I am creating a decentralized foundation on which others can build without the problems of centralized systems. I think a wealth of advantages will percolate out of it. I am an idea machine, so I will just keep adding features and advantages and eventually it will gain traction. The long-term quality product wins in the end. But obviously we must launch something within this year, else we are getting too late.

Quote from: shelby 27 May., 6:10 am

Decentralization is the theme of the coming global transformation given the short dollar vortex driving safe haven capital stampeded into the USA with the 40+ year sovereign bond bubble peaking in 2018 and ensuing waterfall collapse, devolution of the West accelerates next year and then the civil war in the USA and collapse starts in 2022 with Asias coming flash crash bottoming in 2020. By 2032, Shanghai and Singapore will replace (see also) New York and London as the financial capitals (centers) of the world.

(Philippines standard time is GMT+0700)

...for posterity's sake