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Original text of OP, from 2022-07-29:
Transplanted from a reply that I was writing on an old thread elsewhere:This will be the same Taleb who gave credibility to the known scammer and fraudster CSW by appearing on stage with him? I would maybe take his opinions on bitcoin with a grain mountain of salt.
I found this thread by searching for information on Taleb—specifically, information about Taleb and Coingeek. The only two posts on this forum’s (ridiculously unreliable) search connecting those two keywords are [0]
a post in the BSV thread by
hv_—a known BSV shill, and
evidently a Taleb fan; and, [1] this exchange from the Wall Observer:
Coingeek Conference...
Calvin Ayre owns this shit. Isn't it obvious who the speakers would be?
It's a non-event. The party afterwards could be interesting though. Must be lots of pretty girls there, probably of the barely-legal variety, given Ayre's preference for young things.
Yeah. It's just sad to see how far Taleb has fallen from reality.
Elsewhere on the Web, I find:
- A 2021-07-03 article in Forbes. (Archive.org link for your convenience, because Forbes is blocking Tor.)
- A 2021-08-14 tweet by Saifedean.com. Although I cannot opine either way on his allegations in that thread, this is quotable: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad at bitcoin.” The following graphic is thereby provided, inter alia:
Enough time spent searching. Someone who knows more about this, please provide details!
Still it is important to remember that Taleb is very respected in quantitative finance, probability and related fields. He popularized the term "Black Swan". He wrote four respected books on these subjects.
I would, and do, respect and keep up (to the extent I can) with Taleb and his thinking. He may be very wrong on BTC, but he is worth listening to...
I have an intolerant personality—
a quality that Taleb himself would appreciate. However, for a proudly intolerant person, I have an almost unlimited tolerance on two interrelated fronts: Intellectual tolerance, and tolerance of the personal foibles of competent software developers.
The former is necessitated by my being a freethinker: Unless it’s waste-of-time trash, I will read anything by anybody! It is also required by my free-speech activism: I really will defend people’s
practical ability to say things I disagree with, even things that I hate. (Let’s not talk about “rights”. A theoretical, legalistic “right” is useless, if Big Tech, big banks, or other “private, non-government” parties can silence you or starve you; on the flipside, a lack of legal rights is
irrelevant in a cypherpunk world, where
the law is a dead letter!) The latter is merely a matter of being a meritocratic technologist: I
generally don’t care who you are, or what your irrelevant opinions may be, if you write the best code. In the context of software development, especially the open-source world, best code equals respect.
Now, by analogy, consider this:
Should I tolerate a cryptographic software developer who openly supports the authors of maliciously backdoored cryptographic code? And isn’t his own code now worse than worthless—a negative-value level of distrusted?He is materially advancing a fraud.
It is wetware malicious meme-coding. For Taleb to appear at a Coingeek conference run by Ayre and to help burnish Faketoshi’s reputation by association is exactly analogous to a cryptographic software developer boosting a known purveyor of backdoored crypto code. Henceforth, his product shall be consigned to
/dev/null.
Taleb is an accessory to identity theft. Either that is intentional, or he is wantonly and willfully reckless. Either way, this is so grossly dishonest of him that if he were a university student, he should be expelled for academic dishonour. Food for thought.
Taleb’s effectual promotion of a fraud even raises a suspicion of what else he may have done in his long career. I note that Taleb has suffered
prior accusations of dishonesty, which were
hotly disputed. A more searching review may be warranted.
I will also publicly commit to buying every bitcoin anyone ever wants to sell at a price of 0.01 cents each. Therefore, bitcoin can now never reach $0, since there the minimum price anyone can ever sell bitcoin for is 0.01 cents. There. I have refuted his "irrefutable" claim.
You may have competition. I heard somewhere that Dr. Adam Back,
an authentic Cypherpunk, has a buy order for 21,000,000 BTC @ $0.01 on the books on an exchange somewhere. Sorry, no link handy; and I didn’t confirm it. But I would be surprised if it weren’t true. It requires only $210,000, and the dollars are not actually spent unless some or all of the order is hit. That is a lot of money to me, but a relatively small amount for any successful businessman.
If you think that everything which could potentially be worth zero in the future is worth zero now, then I invite you to wire all your fiat to my bank account immediately.
BSV theoretically has negative value; but if someone wants to give me some freebie BSV, I will happily accept it so that I can sell it and buy Bitcoin.
Taleb’s career as a public intellectual and ephemeral scribbler may have a future value of zero, but it is apparently worth non-negligible money in the present.
P.S., there is one Taleb essay that I can hereby heartily recommend despite a few little flaws: The one to which I linked above,
“The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority”. (Archive.org link, because Taleb is a childish brat who sometimes
deletes his
writings, suddenly makes all of his tweets private, etc.) Read “The Most Intolerant Wins”, ponder it, and apply it here!
