Yesterday, in my response to SmartGold01 I mentioned that I had just come across this thread, and today,
in this post, I made some further responses to SmartGold01 regarding this topic.
In some sense, reading this thread is almost like reading a eulogy... so there is some discomfort that comes from reading about myself .. and it seems that the posts add up over the years.. and surely any of us might find some kind of a niche or some motivations regarding how we end up spending some of our time, and so in that sense, it is nice to be appreciated - even though surely, it is also nice to receive criticisms too.
Part of the reason that I joined this forum in early 2014 was to be able to discuss various ideas around bitcoin, including advantages that come from being able to interact with various like-minded people - even though surely none of us completely think alike, and each of us have our niches and our specialities and maybe even some of our bad habits, too... and it seems like, it can take a year or two before other members even pay attention to various interactions that any of us might attempt to make, and I am not even proclaiming that it is necessarily easier to get substantive responses to posts, but there do seem to be some advantages that may well come from any of us to have had been around for awhile, attempted to maintain some degree of consistency and perhaps attempting to learn along the way too. and even maybe sometimes any of us might get moody as well or even have some interactions with other members that do not necessarily go very well.. including that I have had some of those kinds of interactions along the way, and sometimes there can be ways that the interactions get fixed or maybe there might be some lingering thoughts around our forum interactions or if we look back our texts and we might have difficulties recalling the exact contents of our posts or if that sounds like a post that we might have written.
So far, I have had a practice of NOT deleting posts, and if I edit my posts, usually it is within less than an hour of the initial posting of it, usually before anyone had responded to it or quoted it, and it is pretty rare that I will go back to a post and edit it more than an hour or two later - and maybe if I did edit later, I would probably put some kind of a note in the post in order to attempt to clarify the editing - even though sometimes too many notes can become confusing too... and I don't even assert that all of my post are necessarily coherent, and sometimes they may well need some editing or cutting down of the repetition - but my posting style does not tend to be to go into that level of editing or professional presentation anyhow (and surely there are some members who really do present their thread OPs in ways that are very succinct and easy to read, like they were writing a book - which I claim that I do not do that - even though my claims are relative - since some members might consider my posts to be way more than mere streams of consciousness (which I don't claim to do that either, even though some posts might come off in that kind of a steam of consciousness direction).
It seems that I mostly have attempted to describe aspects of my smerit sending practices, and I am not even proclaiming to be consistent or feeling that there is much if any need to lock myself into having to continue to follow whatever practices that I have already been practicing - such as the mostly 1 merit per post, or even some of the ways in which I might merit posts that others might consider to NOT be merit worthy, so many of us likely realize that there are likely no requirements that merit sources even have any clear policy practice - and likely one of the main rules that applies to merit sources as compared to non-merit sources is to not be selling merits, which could be characterized in various ways that a merit source member might be personally attempting quid quo pro behaviors or there are appearances of those kinds of improprieties..
Some members likely remember that theymos had not even disclosed who were the merit source members in the beginning, but over the years some members have admitted to being merit sources, and Coin-1
(in this thread) and other members tried to figure out who the merit sources might be and even sometimes engaging in practices to get merit source members to admit whether they were a merit source or not or if their merit source allocation had changed (upwardly or downwardly).
I suppose that any member could report merit source members who they consider to be abusive in how they spend their smerits, and even I have made some assertions that maybe the merit sources could be rotated more frequently.. but I am not even going to claim that theymos has to do anything to fix something that he might not consider as being broken currently, even though you never know with theymos in terms of his sometimes springing some rules (or dynamics or member appointment) changes upon the forum.. which he had done with the introduction of merit sources, changes in merit source allocations and assigned members and even changes in the trust system - not all of those sudden changes
(nothing more permanent than a temporary government program) were April fool's jokes, either.
I don't know if there would be any need to self-describe as a human or a bot, and surely there could be times in which any account might no longer be active, and then sometimes we might end up finding out some real world meat space things that happened with such forum account holder (death, illness, decapacitation and even some kind of corruption or rage quit)... There seem to be some members who have accounts that they share, and would those be corporate accounts, and who knows about how turing complete any kind of an account holder might be since even bitcoin seem to need some kind of human interaction to continue to survive - even though something like bitcoin might survive in some kind of state that is more difficult to recognize in 80 years.. and how many current forum members will still be alive, kicking and typing posts - whether they have AI assistance or not?
For sure, quite a few forum members have been accused of being bots or using bots, and does it matter? or can we tell the difference? and surely our meat space identity is not necessarily relevant in order to participate in this forum, but some members will choose to voluntarily reveal their meatspace identity or maybe connect various identities that might exist in other forums.. and surely sometimes, I get pissed off in my posts when I can see some forum member is interacting with me or even interacting with some other member and the forum member is not really drawing from personal experiences and seeming to communicate with superficial theoretical ideas rather than really grappling with various hypotheticals, but then bots are getting better at those kinds of things too.. so not easy to tell the difference between a bot and a human.. and how much does it matter?.. how much are we going to trust those fake posts and fake ideas and perhaps attempts to control us by getting us to believe something that the bot wants us to believe to be within our own self-interests, contrary to our own prior perceptions about what we had thought that we had believed to have had been in our own self-interests.
Sometimes we might not even know or realize what is in our own self interests.. whether we are considering bodily health, or social participation, but surely many of us participate in this forum and even participate in bitcoin because we believe that bitcoin might help us to better be able to have more options that we might not otherwise be able to have if we had not worked on acquiring bitcoin, and the options may well help us in determining our own self-interests beyond mere number go up but self-sovereignty in terms of deciding when, how and if we want to save our value or to spend it...
what's more basic than that? spend value? and spend time? and spend energy? spend our own energy psychic and mental powers and learn along the way? and does bitcoin help us in terms of our own self-sovereignty and achieving other basic values that we believe to be valuable and important whether it is recreating or maybe we like to make art (do we call those ordinals and inscriptions?), since surely many of us are still ongoingly working to figure out the kinds of balances that we might want to have and there is likely going to be a lot of individual variation in terms of even figuring out our own timeline about how long we might expect to live, and merely if we expect to live a certain number of years, there are unexpected aspects to our own timeline, and would we like to not be removed from our bitcoin by making too many mistakes along the way in regards to how we might accumulate bitcoin and then allocate bitcoin as compared to other assets and manage our BTC holdings and if we are actually holding our own bitcoin keys.. and trying to maintain some privacy in those kinds of practices too. Those seem to be ongoingly important topics.. with a lot of connection to current events, too.
