Wow, lots of spam in this thread this week. Skipping over the inverse PoW....
Bullshit is an inverse PoW function
This is a great quote & if I use it in the future I'll credit it to you. You're exactly & succinctly correct: bullshitting is the opposite of having done any actual tangible work whatsoever. Anybody can bullshit, its free & has zero energy cost.
Keep up the good fight.
The analogy is actually a bit more complex than that: while PoW is asymmetric in the sense that it's highly expensive to produce a PoW but trivially easy to verify it, bullshit is asymmetric in the opposite direction: not only is it trivially easy to produce bullshit, but it's *also* highly expensive to debunk it.
Alas, I regret to inform you that I didn't come up with the analogy, I just picked it up from my social graph long ago. I don't know who first came up with it, but a quick Twitter search shows that JJ from Handshake (whom I've worked with in the past) said in 2020 that someone had previously told him the analogy, but he didn't seem to remember who told him either. I think I first heard it before 2020 (but it's hard to be sure), and I don't think either JJ or I am the other's source (again, hard to be sure). Anyway, it seems to be popular lore among cypherpunks by now. If you ever find out who first said it, please let me know, but in any event, crediting me is unnecessary: I'm just a relay.
The analogy is actually a bit more complex than that: while PoW is asymmetric in the sense that it's highly expensive to produce a PoW but trivially easy to verify it, bullshit is asymmetric in the opposite direction: not only is it trivially easy to produce bullshit, but it's *also* highly expensive to debunk it.
That makes sense. Guess that's why its not practical to secure a blockchain with bullshit.
Some irony there.
Would either of you speculate on the view that Namecoin is being carefully used not to encourage a decentralized naming system, but to prevent one?
Looking back over Namecoin's history, a common thread seems to be a subtle misdirection of any effort to bring the coin to a wider audience.