Topic: theymosisms - A collection of posts for reference (Read 1185 times)

"BSV is a scammy project created by two conmen"

I was always intending to choose a random subset of 100 once more than 100 became eligible. This creates more people who have a credible threat of retaliation: if you give someone negative trust for some stupid reason, you have reason to worry about them or a close friend of theirs negative-trusting you for a similarly stupid reason, if not in this month, then in a future month. I think that it pushes people (without forcing people) toward acting in-line with consensus, so that any retaliation against your sent negative trust always gets the sender excluded definitively.

IMO it'd be nice if in the future it's a subset of 100 among a pool of 250+.

Agreed. I've heard very few worthwhile use-cases for "blockchain tech". When companies say "blockchain", they usually mean "broadcast everything to everyone and expect them to store it", which doesn't scale and isn't a new concept anyway. The real application of blockchains - decentralized timestamping - can be very useful, but it's not a holy grail.

It reminds me of this (replace "cloud" with "blockchain"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8

Of course not, do you really need to ask?

 - I was made a forum admin in 2011, after Satoshi left. (Silk Road also appeared after Satoshi left.) I didn't have any special access to bitcoin.org until around 2013, and in fact I didn't even have any access to the bitcointalk.org DNS until 2013.
 - I've never bought or sold anything on Silk Road, Hydra or similar sites; nor did I have anything whatsoever to do with their operation; nor AFAIK did I even have interactions with anyone involved in running these sites. While I am opposed to drug laws, I have never used illicit drugs, and in fact I also abstain from alcohol & nicotine. Furthermore, since the beginning I have warned over and over again that Tor is not secure against active government attacks: I wouldn't be found dead running one of these sites.
 - I never had any interaction with CSW. I don't have any keys related to CSW's (probably fictitious) SSS thing.

CSW's whole shtick is to just lie constantly. He's so brazen about it that some people think, "there must be some truth there," but really it's 100% nonsense.

I admit I was a little tempted to troll the world by roleplaying CSW's allegations as totally true...

BTW, email is a big privacy issue in general. It's too expensive (mainly time-wise) to create new email addresses, but if you use the same one, it creates tons of links. Ideally, you should use one email per service. I've had two ideas in this area:

First, you could create a simple email forwarding service like this:
 - Without registration (but maybe with a tiny fee via eg. Lightning), take a user's email address, generate a random key, and use the random key to encrypt the email address.
 - Also encrypt the email address with a server secret.
 - Give the user an email address of the form [email protected]
 - When the service receives email at a forwarding address, it decrypts the email first using its server secret, and then using the provided decryption key. Then it forwards the email to the email address
 - To destroy forwarding addresses, users could provide the service with both their forwarding address and target address, and the service could then send a confirmation email.

This would be convenient, and it'd fix the problem of services being able to connect users across multiple sites through email-address reuse. But it trusts the forwarder not to log the per-email decryption keys or give up the server secret key. Though if multiple services like this existed, you could chain emails through them to increase security.

My second idea is:
 - The user would be using his own software (like eg. Thunderbird or perhaps prontonmail). From this software, the user could instantly create low-capacity throwaway accounts on the server. Each throwaway account could be (or behave similar to) a POP3 account with low capacity (eg. 50MB) and quick message expiration (eg. 60 days).
 - The client software would use Tor and careful polling to download all of the messages on its throwaway accounts without leaking to the server info about which accounts are connected. To improve anonymity and efficiency, you could perhaps use PIR, or the server could publish hourly/daily bloom filters meant to match email addresses which received mail in the time period. The client software would collect all of the messages into a single inbox for the end-user. Since it polls frequently, the client wouldn't have to worry about the low limits on the individual throwaways.
 - The server could anonymously require a small one-time for each throwaway account by using blinded bearer certificates.

With this, the server shouldn't ever be able to connect any of the accounts together. You could also send mail from the throwaways.

The main thing necessary for this second idea is a really smart email client meant to juggle many throwaways. You also need a cooperative server allowing quick account creation (like cock.li), ideally via an API.

The active administrators are currently:
theymos (me)
Gavin Andresen
sirius

Sirius runs the server.

I am one of the world's foremost experts on quasi-law, after all. Surely you've read my widely-cited article in the Journal of Laws or Whatever titled, "A new approach to the rigorous design of legal systems: just worry about it later."

This is a topic for theymosisms, and likely does not relate to BSV. I don't think we should discuss about BSV here. Did you really publish your post in wrong topic, that would have been published in BSV's ANN topic.
For Steamtyme, yesterday, theymos made announcements on Trust Flags, that is totally new system in the forum, with lots of clarification posts. I suggest Steamtyme to create new section for this in the topic.
Say Bye to Trust Drama, Welcome Flags

~snip~
I hate having to "defend" BSV and BCH, which were created with deception in mind, are technologically bankrupt, and are run by huge assholes, but you can't say that their supporters broke a contract with you when they didn't. Give them a newbie-warning flag if you want, but not a contract-violation flag unless they actually broke a contract with you. (Note that you might have a case for breach of implied contract if you were actually tricked into buying one of these coins instead of BTC.)

There are aspects of the trust system that are clearly less than ideal, some of which are probably solvable (and some probably not). But caucusing with people who have very clear and serious questionable behavior isn't going to help you convince people of anything. Anduck had a good case for the trust system being broken. You (cryptohunter) might've had some case for the trust system being broken if you had handled your initial trust issues with rationality and patience instead of absolutely losing your mind and throwing lies around, and even now I could imagine your red trust eventually being cleared if you were able to attain a stable mindset. olcaytu2005 on the other hand hasn't even attempted to defend himself against the accusations (from several independent widely-trusted members, based on publicly-available data) of knowingly assisting scams, so he does not have a good case for the trust system being broken.

There are a lot of pointless "summarize something obvious" posts, but IMO btcsmlcmnr's summary added something.

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Forgiveness and de-escalation are key to getting Trust working smoothly:
 - Forgiveness: Often people make fairly small mistakes, but then they seemingly get red-trusted for life. This isn't really fair, and it discourages participation due to paranoia: if you think that you have a 1% chance of running afoul of some unwritten rule and getting red-trusted for life, you might just avoid the marketplace altogether. Red trust should mostly be based on an evaluation of what the person is likely to do in the future moreso than a punishment/mark-of-shame.
 - De-escalation: If some people end up locked in a feud where they're only really giving negative trust to each other in retaliation for negative trust, then one of them should propose burying the hatchet and removing the negative trust. Otherwise it never gets resolved, and everyone is worse-off for it.

Don't over-create Trust Appeals; keep minds/ emotions stable. No more Red
Maybe, this thread is helpful for people whom usually over-react with their negative feedbacks.

Newest one from theymos on suggestion to add new board/ child board for Blockchain Developments. In fact, theymos rejected to create such an unnecessary board/ child board. I am not sure about your strategy to manage the thread, but in my opinion, you should create a new category, suggested namely like 'Denied Community Suggestions'.

Then give a better suggestion on how the system should be operated and if it sounds reasonable and achievable I'm sure theymos would give it a second thought. You should note though dissolving the system isn't an option as that'll only make the forum worst as spammers will be able to rank-up easily and scammers or potential scammers would be disguise as the average forum user, which will be chaotic.

I wrote a new unified IP logging/retention system, and I changed the way backups are done in order to ensure limited retention on certain privacy-sensitive things. See: https://bitcointalk.org/privacy.php

Previously I said that IPs are only logged when you post and in some limited other cases, such as when you encounter certain errors. This is no longer true: you should now think about IP logging as happening constantly.

There's now an option in your account settings which will allow you to reduce retention of your logged IPs to 3 months. You should only consider enabling this if you've staked a pubkey in the thread and you're sure that your account email is correct. I'm not sure if 3 months is enough to respond adequately to all abuse; we'll see, and I might change it later or perhaps restrict it based on rank.

I considered putting a warning on trust pages for users who have enabled limited retention, since it theoretically might make legal action against them more difficult in case they scam you, but my current thinking is that this is kind of pointless because someone could just not enable the setting and use Tor for the same effect. And it'd be both privacy-invasive and futile whack-a-mole to try to indicate when people are using proxies. On the other hand, scammers are often pretty stupid, so I could be convinced to add the warning.

No. Previously IPs were logged sporadically but usually kept indefinitely; this is an overall significant reduction in retention.


Right. Though if someone really wants to know, I might consider manually giving them their logs after verifying that their account doesn't look hacked.

Logged IPs are logged forever, but IPs are only logged in certain circumstances (such as posting). Just logging in doesn't result in your IP being permanently logged.

I am willing to cooperate with police on real scams. Whenever someone asks me to release a scammer's IP, I tell them to have police email me from an official police address. I have received police requests a handful of times. Mostly the cases were real scams and I gave the police the requested info. In some cases I've rejected their requests. For example, I refused to give information to some foreign version of the SEC because securities laws are unjust. Of course, you should not trust that I will act in your best interest. If you want to be anonymous, then you must use Tor (or whatever).

fuck this list,theymos itself doesnt follow his own guidelines.He does allow scamming but these abusive people on DT keep tagging those who scam.

Logged-out users will now see a warning in trust-enabled sections if more DT members neg-trust the topic starter than positive-trust him.

This increases the responsibility of DT members not to give negative trust for stupid reasons, but only for things that cause you to believe that the person is a scammer.

Then give a better suggestion on how the system should be operated and if it sounds reasonable and achievable I'm sure theymos would give it a second thought. You should note though dissolving the system isn't an option as that'll only make the forum worst as spammers will be able to rank-up easily and scammers or potential scammers would be disguise as the average forum user, which will be chaotic.

trust system is a big mess,lets face the truth no bullshits.

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I am a 21-year-old computer science student in the US and an avid bitcoiner since early 2010. I am the head admin of the Bitcoin Forum and the top mod here, though I didn't create either community. I wrote Bitcoin Block Explorer and ran it for a long time, but it is now run by Liraz Siri. I am one of very few people with a copy of the Bitcoin Alert Key.