For a long time Bitcoin transaction fees were high and unpredictable, as Bitcoin runs into its scaling limit of seven transactions per second. This has caused grave damage to the lightning network and to daos.
During this time more and more people have moved to layer two solutions, such as Liquid, Lightning, and Liquid Lightning, with the result that the number of transactions has finally fallen back to below the scaling limit. From time to time, not often, but often enough, the mempool empties, something that has not been happening in a very long time.
If you are not in a hurry, most days one sat per vbyte is sufficient. This is fifteen cents for the simplest and most common Bitcoin transaction. Which is still higher than it should be, but it is quite tolerable. As a result the lightning network is now finally starting to recover.
Liquid provides substantially more privacy than level one bitcoin, unless you know what you are doing and are very careful with level one Bitcoin, in which case level one Bitcoin can provide considerably better privacy than Liquid, but lightning is better than either.
Three minutes before I wrote this, mempool.space showed a coinjoin transaction worth millions of dollars which had hundreds of outputs. The government has been successfully suppressing most coinjoins, but they are coming back.
I don’t know what the current state of coinjoin is. It has been changing fast and I would welcome information in the comments. For a while it seemed that it had gone away, partly because of repression, and partly because of unacceptably high transaction fees, but it is back.
The great majority of lightning nodes are darknet nodes, which provide substantial privacy, or combined clearnet and darknet nodes, which can provide substantial privacy.
Lightning software is still unbearably difficult to use unless you are transacting through a centralised, and usually custodial, wallet, but presumably all those darknet nodes are using a self custody wallet.
And you can lose your money if you mess up the rather difficult task of administering a full self custody lightning wallet.
Lightning protocol still has a horrible and easily fixable privacy hole, which strangely remains unfixed. (And fixing it would make the creation and destruction of lightning channels cheaper and more convenient.)
Lightning provides substantially more privacy than layer one bitcoin, because channel creation and destruction inherently mixes level one bitcoin.
Existing scaling solutions are now finally working, but, as the shills correctly point out, will not work forever, will not scale to the size we will need to replace SWIFT, the US$, and the Chinese renminbi as an international medium of exchange. Efforts to replace SWIFT are now primarily focused on Liquid and Liquid Lightning, but Liquid will find it hard to scale to SWIFT size. Maybe Liquid Lighting can scale to SWIFT size,
I await the Grail Bridge becoming a bridge to a level two that can scale forever.
If I had 8 or 9 or 10 figures (USD) of bitcoins I too would probably jerk myself off over its technical details. Since I have none I’ll settle for fully and finally killing off the crypto scam with something that grandma will use.
Hey look it’s the talking toasters guy sans frenulum!
So tell us, does your perfectly conscious and perfectly intelligent washing machine agree more with Confucius or more with Laozi?
Are you mocking me for (allegedly) having been mutilated shortly after birth in one of the most severe and permanently physically and psychologically damaging possible deliberately inflicted traumas at the surrogate hands of the Devil himself, the scum-sucking nurses and doctors of the U.S. medical apparatus?
Yes.
Then die.
Lol triggered.
I console myself with the fact that I wasn’t born an Ashk.
Well, you should just ask the perfectly conscious and intelligent chat GPT how to stop your penis from being so Jewish; no doubt it will tell you all about it, and then you can just follow through with the instructions and finally have a non-Jewish penis. It might take several decades, but patience is a virtue.
Come on man, don’t be so sensitive.
You need to grow thicker skin.
Thank G-d that in 3 years the ASI (Artificial SuperIntelligence) will be able to tap into the quantum subfield and turn the cosmic energy of the aether around my penis into fully enervated tissue.
>I console myself with the fact that I wasn’t born an Ashk.
>G-d
Lol what, you a sephardic Jew?
I’m sure he listens to Ofer Levi while writing these posts.
Then again, my own son is uncircumcised (by my own decision) in a country where 99% of the boys are circumcised, so you can’t really accuse me of being a “bad person.”
Check-mate, goyim.
The dilemma was between depriving him of sexual pleasure by snipping that skin vs. depriving him of sexual pleasure by rendering him an incel due to having ant-eater penis in snipdick country. I chose the latter option.
Is my sense of humor dark? Or is reality itself sometimes less than totally bright, and I actually make the best of the cards I’ve been dealt?
[*your positions are arguable, reasonable, and worthy of reply, but deleted anyway for failure to conform to the moderation policy.
[*deleted*]
No thought crimes detected.
>And you can lose your money if you mess up the rather difficult task of administering a full self custody lightning wallet.
That’s an important point. If you want one of these digital currencies to become widely used – something worth having because normal everyday people will accept it as payment for goods and services, it’s got to be idiot-proof.
Because one does at times need to do honest business with idiots. Maybe a lot of the time.
Not really. There have been times when it was usual to use different currencies for different types of transactions, e.g. Western currency for serious purchases and local currency for every thing else in most of Eastern Europe before the wall came down. In unoccupiend France during WWII people used gold when they bought valuable stuff and paper currency for everyday shopping.
Just use fiat currency to pay idiots and bitcoin for serious business.
It is ok if BTC isn’t idiot proof anyway, it just further incentivises smarter behavior.
You need to be able to buy from idiots and sell to idiots. And it does not take an idiot to lose a self custody lightning wallet. Normies are going to balls it up.
Should there be idiot proofing against lost Bitcoin? There’s an argument to be had that the passive permanently decreasing of the money supply is a good deflationary hedge against deflation, but at some point doesn’t that pose a risk of liquidity crisis?
What if it were possible to mine stagnant Bitcoin wallets?
Absolutely there is idiot proofing against lost bitcoin.
For a long time, Bitcoin wallets have used a recovery system based on a master phrase, so you can always recover your bitcoin from master phrase.
But that is level one Bitcoin, and liquid level two bitcoin.
Recovery of Lightning is far more fraught. It does not need to be, but it is. The protocols to fix the problem almost exist.
Removing foot-guns and making the entire experience as safe, seamless, and intuitive as possible is just good engineering. Everyone makes a mistake on long enough timescales.
I am not sold on prioritizing UX over functionality, I am not sold on BTC being what you use to buy groceries or it goes bust. Looks to me like we get soverign banks, and lots and lots of different little currencies. This process was happening naturally as corporations felt their oats on the fronteir, before the government squashed them. Well, now these ‘tokens’ are much harder to stifle. We’ll have lots of them, most of them scams, until things mature, then a lot of scams and some with real utility.
So people with lots of wealth learn to use cryptographic wallets, and learn techniques to manage valuable secrets. The middle people learn some basics. The lower get highly curated apps and whatever they can pick up from the middle.
The upper stores significant wealth, does lots of deals. The middle less so, uses it to manage certain finances, navigate around failing bureaucracy. The lower uses the system to gamble and play online games.
Expecting middle and lower people to manage all their assets trustlessly, keep very valuable secrets around, always, this I don’t expect to work out. They’re going to be sold a service, and this is fine. The risk of the service going bust is likely lower than the risk of the average person losing their secret.
Speaking of doing business with idiots, a few years back there was a real flourishing of merchants and vendors willing to transact with Lightning, and there were even a few online directories up; but as of about a month ago (last time I checked), it’s now mostly a pile of dead links, scams, domain squatters, and stores/merchants that are technically still around but show no evidence of accepting crypto payments or ever having done so, like the Beef Initiative.
Maybe this isn’t the right place to discuss it, and if so, that’s fine – feel free to delete the post. But I’m curious if there’s much of an “economy” still up and running with Lightning, or Liquid for that matter. To be clear, I’m not talking about shady black-market/dark-web stuff, which actually isn’t that difficult to find; I’m talking about normal above-board merchants taking crypto payments for real rather than digital goods.
With some effort, it’s possible to get a lot done using either regular layer 1 bitcoin or litecoin, but lightning and liquid seem to have gotten into a Monero type situation in which the transactions are obviously still happening, but not for any mainstream commerce, only between private parties transacting exclusively in crypto.
It’s strange because I’m not aware of any explicit crackdown on the layer 2 protocols. Seems they just went underground all on their own, maybe anticipating a future crackdown.
I see two reasons for lack of demamd currently for transacting in BTC as the main means of exchange. 1st, you have to pay capital gains tax if you want to stay out of trouble. Why pay extra tax for using BTC if you have the cash? 2nd, with BTC not hitting its full valuation potential spending BTC over USD makes no sense. Why spend the asset that will be going up in value long term when you have excess devaluing cash lying around?
Why sell stock that’s been doing well, when the company still has good long-term fundamentals, when you still have cash lying around in bank accounts? Asset allocation – you often want to avoid any excessive concentration of capital in one particular class, and an individual who’s been hodling BTC for ten years might find himself highly over-indexed in that class.
Exchanging for fiat can be somewhat less smooth and drastically less private than spending it directly. There are P2P exchanges, but selling on them can be hit or miss when prices are high.
Speaking purely hypothetically and in broad strokes, I doubt that most people transacting in cryptocurrencies (and off the centrally-owned exchanges) are gung-ho about paying capital gains taxes on an asset that wasn’t even regulated at the time they acquired it. While it’s not quite as insulting as the concept of taxing “unrealized capital gains” we keep hearing about, it’s still tantamount to naked theft. Therefore, a U.S. resident with Bitcoin is like a California resident with an AR-15 who lost it in a tragic boating accident: hard drive died, with no backups, and the little slip of paper with the seed phrase was tragically thrown out by the cleaning lady who thought it was trash.
There was a big push to get lightning into person to person transactions, and these efforts have failed everywhere, even under the most favorable of regimes. But for people who do long distance transactions where one or both of the parties has a wobbly banking regime, or the two banking regimes do not talk to each other very well, or the currency suffers severe inflation, getting good penetration among normies. There are plenty of hosting providers who take bitcoin, plenty of suppliers of grey market pharmaceuticals who take bitcoin, and plenty of normies who do not have a full time business, and are therefore not prepared to jump through all the hoops required to get permission to accept credit cards, and who lack the leverage that makes it possible to safely accept credit cards, who take bitcoin. But the pattern among normies is that having bypassed the failing banking system, they then cash out or cash in at an exchange.
While getting merchants to take Bitcoin for a cup of coffee was dismal failure, Bitcoin is experiencing natural and substantial growth in international transactions by small time and part time businessmen. Whose disinclination to put up websites under a government registered name saying they take Bitcoin may have something to do with taxes, or, as in China, Bitcoin being simply illegal but widely used.
Making payments inside Russia is extremely easy. Anyone with a bank account can send money to anyone else and the fee is always zero. You give me your phone number and I enter it into my banking app and see accounts at various banks with the name “James Robert D.” I choose one, type in how many rubles, and click Send. Cash is also accepted everywhere. Minibus rides cost 30-50 rubles and most pay cash, but for cashless passengers the driver hands you a slip of paper with his phone number and the name of his bank, or writes it on the inside of the bus.
Outside of Russia, moderately more difficult, but not difficult enough within one country to provide a strong use case for Bitcoin. Internationally, difficult, dangerous, and frequently impossible. Right now I could not buy something, because I could not pay the vendor, despite my connections with no end of fiat international networks.
Presumably international payments are even worse in Russia, because of sanctions, but they are bad everywhere, and much worse in countries that are not quite part of the globoempire. For a private individual to pay a small business, or a small business to pay a private individual, it is mighty rough. There is a clear use case for Bitcoin, and I am seeing substantial Bitcoin adoption by normies for this use case.
Bitcoin was illegal in Russia, and they are still attempting to regulate the stuffing out of it, but when sanctions hit, no end of highly respectable well politically connected Russians simply had no alternative to Bitcoin, so they just did it and the regulators rolled over.
https://x.com/RadarHits/status/1927815150024732788
Guaranteed that Vance is announcing the coming worst regime against cryptocurrency privacy ever.
Mark it and send it.
JD Vance proposes to remove the many and severe sanctions against stablecoins and to “vastly expand the use of stablecoins”
“Stablecoins” are the one real stablecoin, Tether, just as “Crypto currencies” are the one real crypto currency, Bitcoin. All the enemies of “cryptocurrencies” denounce Tether for its role in facilitating black market transactions and exchanges of fiat and Bitcoin. So, removing the many and severe sanctions against Tether would, the enemies of crypto currency believe, be good for the price and use of Bitcoin. Probably they are correct, though I find the enemies of Bitcoin to not be a reliable source of information. Probably removing sanctions against Tether would result in even more information about Tether transactions becoming available to the US government. But just as Bitcoin tends to be exchanged as Liquid by the bigger operators, and lightning by the smaller. Tether transactions tend to have Bitcoin at one end of the transaction. If you convert Tether and lightning, you normally do so through a KYC exchange, but Bitcoin lightning remains difficult to trace.
It seems to me that once you admit that Bitcoin is “the one real cryptocurrency” you’ve admitted that Bitcoin’s purchase value has little or nothing to do with Bitcoin’s technical value. Right?
The issue is network effects are sticky. If bitcoin slowly adopts new technology, avoids state capture, and new technology adopts bitcoin, it will stay the one. No matter how fast other networks move on the tech front, if they cannot match bitcoin on liquidity and number of users, eventually they get swallowed. There is probably a better protocol out there than IPv4, and yet most things end up using IPv4 addresses.
Not if I get there first.
Anyone can copy Satoshi’s idea, so every copycat shitcoin and memecoin scam has as much technical value as Bitcoin, and several currencies (Litecoin, Monero, and Zcash) have important innovations that make them technically vastly superior.
Bitcoin is the One True Crypto Currency because of Metcalfe’s law. To remain the One True Crypto Currency mindshare, it has to be faithful to the vision of Satoshi, so it outsources technological innovation to level two Bitcoins.
The ultimate solution would be that a cryptocurrency actually implements ZCash promises.
USD has an intrinsic value of zero, true, but an implicit value inasmuch as it’s rooted in some combination of petroleum, military might, intelligence fuckery, wages, mortgages, bonds, derivatives, financial fuckery, etc. Bitcoin, like USD, has an intrinsic value of zero, minus all the other baggage, so it can go to infinity precisely because it’s literally nothing.
Everything has an intrinsic value of zero. If no one wants to buy it, it’s functionally worthless.
People who blather on about the “intrinsic value” of some asset are usually fishing for an excuse to steal it.
You are more spiritually Jewish than Mossadnik.
And just so you understand the same thing can’t be both a currency and an asset.
Nuts
Bitcoin is a currency and and asset, and its value is entirely because people think that eventually it is going to replace fiat. If it is purely an asset, its long term value is going to be zero.
That is the argument the shills are making, and they are right.
Gold has some intrinsic value — pretty, malleable, and corrosion resistant. Trump likes gold plated toilets — gold has intrinsic value because you can make nice toilets with it. But its price far above this value. Bitcoin has zero intrinsic value. But it is a better gold than gold, because it can safely move.
Are you sure it’s spiritually Jewish, and not technically Jewish, intrinsically Jewish, or implicitly Jewish?
Let me know if you’re ever running short on polysyllabic adverbs you can use to make any old bullshit sound plausible if you squint at it from just the right angle. We “spiritually Jewish” folk have tons of ’em.
How fascinating. So all those centuries where gold and silver were used as currency… never actually happened?
Please, tell us more of your 100% Really Truly Factually True Facts, I am but a parched man wandering the desert and you carry the only flask.
Jim: “Bitcoin is a currency and and asset, and its value is entirely because people think that eventually it is going to replace fiat. If it is purely an asset, its long term value is going to be zero.”
This translates to “Bitcoin is a thing with some currency-like characteristics that is currently an asset because people think that its currency-like characteristics will let it eventually become the dominant currency.” Or alternatively “Bitcoin is currently an asset because there’s a small possibility that one day it becomes currency.” Which doesn’t conflict with what I said really.
Jim: “But it is a better gold than gold, because it can safely move.”
Does that really make the world a better place? Why shouldn’t banks be robbable, actually?
Scaredbucks: “How fascinating. So all those centuries where gold and silver were used as currency… never actually happened?”
If you use the most expansive definition of “asset” you can make that work. Using the colloquial modern definition “asset” means something cashflowing. So during “all those centuries” the income-yielding assets would be estates and the estates’ peasants and the gold and silver coin (possessed and used almost entirely by estate-owning nobles and the merchants who served them) were just extremely stable stores of value. Here’s another way to think about it: you can buy an asset with leverage because it has a “return” and the “return” implies a valuation multiple; you can’t buy a store of value with leverage because there’s no “return” and anyone you propose that to will look at you like you’re a retard (because you are).
Of course you won’t respond intelligently to this because you think you’re considerably smarter than you are. It’s all so tiresome.
Nuts. Assets are what standard book keeping calls assets. If you can legitimately put it in the asset column, it is an asset.
You are using your own idiosyncratic private language and getting into pointless arguments because of odd language that means thing you do not intend and do not understand
This does not appear to be true, and if it is true it should not be true because it is an attack on our ability to speak and communicate by communists who intend to implement a brutal totalitarian terror state and to murder everyone like me.
“Something cashflowing” is capital — “capital” Capital originally meant “head of cattle”, so capital is something that produces more of itself, as cattle produce more of themselves.
Redefining capital away is part of a Marxist attack on speech in order to destroy capitalism and impose socialism. Because communists want the only factor of production to be labor, making capitalists parasites by definition and entrepeneurs parasites and scammers by changing the meaning of words.
Please do not corrupt the language. When you encounter terminological disagreement, check out what meanings the better people employ instead of confidently declaring your idiosyncratic and bizarre usage to be colloquial and modern.
And if it truly is colloquial and modern, then it cuts us off from past knowledge, so we should resist changes where they matter for war, politics, faith, and organisation of the enterprise. Leftists are always changing words, because they want to do over again what led to catastrophe last time.
The problem, from the point of view of those intend to impose a brutal totalitarian terror state, is that using the word “capital” to mean productive assets, and the type specimen of a productive asset is a cow, implies capitalism is productive, and they want to rule over starving peasants scratching the dirt with digging sticks.
Communists have been fighting redefine “capital” ever since Marx to remove its positive associations with productivity and the creation of value, with making it and being successful. As far as I can tell, not getting very far. So I very much doubt your usage is colloquial and modern, but rather very old and never widely accepted.
And if you persist in using language not widely accepted on this forum, that is shilling and manipulative, not debate and reasoned argument.
Please do not translate standard usage of widely used terms to your own unique and incomprehensible Humpty Dumpty speak.
Standard usage of words by intelligent well informed people forms a web of meaning in which everything fits together. Which is necessary for intelligent well informed people to be able to communicate.
Check your stuff with Deepseek, It hallucinates a fair bit, but it is rather good at recognising standard usage. It is a thesaurus in which you can look up words for a well formed sentence whose meaning other people can recognise. Use it as thesaurus for words you are struggling with, but don’t copy and paste its output, as it is not an adequate substitute for human output.
A financial asset is anything with a valuation, regardless of whether said valuation is denominated in the official national currency, cryptocurrency, shiny pebbles or cows and chickens. It’s anything you own that might possibly be traded.
And currency is a store of value/medium of exchange that everyone agrees on, usually (but not always) because the state or local authority forces them to, i.e. “legal tender”.
The definition of currency is not only not exclusive with that of an asset, it’s a proper subset. All currencies are assets, because all currencies have self-denominating valuations, and also float against other currencies.
It’s funny that I’m labeled “Jewish” for aligning on the simple, parsimonious definitions of these words that everyone intuitively understands instead of some twat’s incomprehensible squid-ink definition designed to be contorted into infinite legalisms.
What does this sentence even mean – what is the difference between “purchase value” and “technical value”?
A price is a price is a price. Only commies believe in hidden Platonic ideal values of assets divorced from the price that buyers are willing to pay.
“Only commies believe that a flea market is not man’s most sacred place.”
Sucking a dick would be less gay.
You would know.
Somehow, not the most unhinged shit he has said.
If Blackrock decides to buy up all key miners and starts censoring transactions in accordance to OFAC would you be supportive?
This is, in fact, a very real threat, unlike most of the bullshit you shills repetitively spam. Bitcoin has extremely dangerous miner concentration. In this event, Bitcoin will fork or die.
Monero has an effective system against miner concentration. But it merely reduces it, not eliminates it. We need something better. However, if the miners start OFAC censorship, Bitcoin will fork to the Monero mining system, or a coin with the Monero system will replace Bitcoin. But Monero is not able to replace Bitcoin for lack of contracts, so probably ZCash. Last time I looked, ZCash software lacked many important promised capabilities, rather too much vapourware, but its theoretical capabilities against censorship and blockchain analysis are the best.
Zcash is, or was last time I looked, rather like Musk’s Mars colony. Could happen, probably will happen, and an exciting prospect, but his last ship just crashed. For Zcash to get places, has to connect to the one true crypto currency, Bitcoin, by the Grail bridge and launch a level two Bitcoin.
In the event of OFAC censorship, the ideal outcome would be everyone uses level two Bitcoin on the Zcash blockchain. (And Musk’s rockets become reliable enough and cheap enough to move to Mars.)
What about a self-custodial Lightning wallet that’s also its own $1000 portable computer, with all the right software pre-installed, built-in backup/soft-shutdown battery, fault-tolerant SSHD, etc?
It could have blinky-lights tho indicate certain… states and processes that someone needs to know about, etc.
Is that imaginable? Or rather, have I ignorantly missed the point entirely?
(For example, if this were something I bought from someone else, I’d worry that it was somehow key-logging everything in cahoots with Russian hackers somewhere.)
They have these. Umbrel, mynode, raspiblitz, etc. All of them have pre-packaged lightning nodes, most are under $1k.
They are, of course, computers, so they’re not appropriate for zero-trust environments where you don’t even trust the hardware vendor, but I’d put them in roughly the same trust category as a Ledger device.
The advantage of the Raspberry Pi based stuff in particular is that you really can build it all yourself, even most of the hardware. Well, who knows, maybe the CPU has its own back door, but eventually everyone has to make up his own mind on when a solution is good/secure/private “enough”.
CPUs all had backdoors, required and installed as part of the GWOT. (E.g., “intel management engine”, basically a special hidden CPU on your chip.) Then after some years Google grew tired of this security hole and made the case for the manufacturers getting rid of it, which I believe they did. (Trust us we did, goyim!)
There may still be holes of course. For instance, your USB stick may have an embedded ARM processor of no clear purpose.
China has been going over this stuff with a fine tooth comb, to insert their own security holes, to take over Global American Empire created security holes, and to refuse the import of backdoored hardware and software whose backdoors they cannot control.
I conjecture that the reason globohomo security holes are being removed is that the Chinese are successful in taking them over.
The Chinese keep trying to push backdoored software into the linux distributions, but, on the other hand, if a linux distribution is allowed in China, probably not backdoored. They seem to want to use linux to spy on people who speak Chinese a lot more than they want to use linux to spy on everyone. The Chinese empire has always been inward looking.
Microsoft exports a special non spyware version of Windows to China, because the Chinese threatened to ban Windows, and replace it with their own (very bad) version of Linux. However, the vast majority of Chinese cheerfully use Chinese phone apps, which report absolutely everything to the Chinese government, and you really cannot do anything in China, cannot buy or sell, without these totally intrusive phone apps. Because these give the Chinese government a wonderful window into the activities of everyone in China (and anyone who turns his phone off gets face recognition tracked by omnipresent security cameras) the Chinese government no longer cares much about installing spyware on regular computers, and continues to do so only through bureaucratic inertia. If someone spyproofs their computer in China, the Chinese government does not care. Which is why so many Chinese businesses cheerfully take Bitcoin for international transactions.
But, fortunately for us, the Chinese government still cares very much about the Globohomo empire inserting its spyware on Chinese computers.
There were spy cameras watching spy cameras when I last visited the UK. As far as I know they were all manual though. Did I dream that some had speakers so the staff could tell off the drunken revellers in the street?
Interestingly, San Francisco banned facial recognition a few years ago. I wonder if it got too embarrassing.
I’ve seriously thought about setting up cameras with facial recognition at least on the outside of the house. Too many poorly identified cars and swarthy people with no clear purpose turning up and I live in a europoor somewhat-high value area. Unfortunately, I think doing so might be against the law.
Older systems collect far too much footage for a human to go through at one minute per minute. The better ones are motion triggered, as by branches waving in the wind.
Newer systems, just now becoming available, can recognise people and cars. So have it collect footage of non family people and non family cars. Bleeding edge, so usefulness not guaranteed.
No one dares program them to collect on the basis of race, unfortunately.
I’d enjoy growing a local database of kebab and wogs. I want gait recognition too.
I think Clearview AI does, or was accused of doing so anyway. Maybe it is just really good at recognizing potential perps and the potential perps happen to all or mostly be of specific races.
Either way it gave the Left a collective aneurysm from day one and they’ve spared no expense trying to destroy the company, the software and all the employees, which is how you know it’s precisely the software that every homeowner and neighborhood watch/militia should be running for its private surveillance, if only it were actually available to private citizens.
This is an example of a business that would be a perfect fit for a sovcorp. Entirely digital in nature, just sell subscriptions.
It has been done — not happy with the result.
Could be done right.
Continuing the previous discussion on classical liberalism on two key points.
By today’s standard, the Classical Liberalism of the Founding Fathers is extreme racist thoughtcrime. I have a hard time any of the former Woke could even entertain such thoughts, not even thermidor.
From Jared Taylor’s ‘What did the Founding Fathers think about race?’:
From a quick google search, Jefferson also said:
Such a sentiment is echoed by Lincoln:
I remember there were a plethora of ‘spicy’ quotes, even lengthy essays, by the Founding Fathers on race, but search engines have made it terribly difficult to find when I went looking just now. A few years back there were no end of race realist infographics quoting the founders on /pol/, but those have seem to disappeared into the ether as well.
No, I’ve brought this up before, ‘equal’ in 1776 had a meaning much closer to ‘similar’ in today’s lingo. Similar in the way a pit-bull is to a golden retriever in that they are categorically and obviously both dogs, but obviously one is a family dog and the other is more often than not a biological menace.
There is no disagreement from me however, that Classical Liberalism bore terrible fruits for which it should be judged for, but ‘death to whitey’ is not a logical extension of the ideology, though it is a logical conclusion to the experiment. The reason being that Classical Liberalism removed Chesterton’s Fence on a great many of defenses against demonisms, and the ideology therefore quickly disappeared, outflanked by what Moldbug would call America’s ‘Race Communism’.
America’s actions in Haiti, and for that matter the wider Caribbean, had less to do with Classical Liberalism and more to do with Machiavellian geopolitical objective of kicking out competing European interests in the Americas, justified under an ideological venear, and in that why they were unprincipled exceptions to Classical Liberalism and not a logical extension, but that really just further the point that it had little to no defenses against demons so to speak.
“Death to whitey” is the ideology of classic liberalism. It is just that in 1776, everyone had a mental reservation, an unprincipled exception. Being an unprincipled exception, when whites were being genocided in Haiti, they neglected to apply it.
If all men are created equal, whites have got to go. When you have a falsifiable faith, reality must be corrected to conform to theory.
But they did have an ideological veneer, one conspicuously lacking with for the founding fathers race realism. The founder’s race realism was an unprincipled exception to Classic Liberalism. Their policy in Haiti was classic liberalism.
Had they not been classic liberals, would have intervened in Haiti, and maintained a social system run by Haitian whites, except answerable to Washington rather than France, which which blacks were not slaves, but were under a different legal regime to whites, similar to that previously enjoyed by freed slaves in Haiti. This would have been far more successful than the policy that they and France followed, which removed France, and removed Frenchmen, but left America with a festering sore that continues to fester to this day.
The least drastic and most effective way of controlling Haiti would be to get the local elite on your side “OK, we are going to take away your slaves, because you cannot control them yourselves, but, unlike France, we will keep you alive, and in control as our satraps.”
>If all men are created equal, whites have got to go. When you have a falsifiable faith, reality must be corrected to conform to theory.
Why would it need to be whites who “had to go”, rather than blacks? When it comes to technological and cultural achievements, Sub-Saharan Africans are far more of an outlier than are Europeans.
I suspect it was really more that other white people were seen as the competition.
All technological and scientific innovation is the result of hard work performed by brave, stunning, beautiful, Sub-Saharan African lesbian wymyn, which WYPIPO then stole so they can oppress the poor dyke-nigras, and all men and women and cocksucking gay-faggot trannies being created equal, the pale-skinned patriarchy (which won’t let wymyn practice their precious hypergamy and only sleep with billionaire vampire pirate demon kings) has to be abolished and the oppressive evil sinister wicked white race ewwww genocided completely so the theft and oppression will finally stop and we can all be equal and equally live in mud huts and have a life expectancy of 25.
Any question?
This is closer to the mark, since liberalism was undoubtedly devised as an instrument of class warfare and power struggle for aspiring/upstart elites to wage on the royalty, aristocracy and landed gentry.
But that was just its function. When the instrument is a meme, or memeplex, then it matters what the meme actually says, not just why it was said. If all men are created equal, then it is a logical contradiction if some men perform worse than others. To resolve the contradiction, one must declare either that performance is actually equal, according to some revised definition of performance that everyone must accept, or that the apparent inequality is being caused by something other than creation, i.e. it is environmental and artificial rather than biological and natural.
And in actual practice, both those memetic failures happened simultaneously, and rather quickly. Negros having high impulsivity and women being generally irrational are just “Ugly Stereotypes”, and to whatever extent they cannot be written off as mere stereotypes, such as academic or job performance, it is the result of current and historical “Oppression”. This is not brand-spankin’ new woke jargon, it’s centuries-old.
Injecting race realism is just another unprincipled exception, another distraction. All white men are clearly not created equal, either. Elon Musk obviously comes from better stock than the light-skinned loser who goes around selling weed and stealing packages off neighbor’s porches. AMACE is evil gibberish constructed to sound noble and high-minded, and countless subsequent atrocities are the direct result of attempts to force reality to conform to the ideal.
Elite competition may be the subtext, but the memeplex is the text itself, and no ruling power can ignore its own doctrine forever. If your memeplex is AMACE then you eventually get Haiti and Rhodesia and South Africa, it’s only a question of how soon.
US Court of International Trade has struck down Trump’s tariffs. We are ruled by the liberal elites who [*usual inversion of reality deleted yet again*]
Trump’s still trying to face Harvard without tanks.[*usual inversion of reality deleted yet again*]
The time for tanks approaches. We shall see if he fishes in the Rubicon this time. Last time, he nearly died of fishing in the Rubicon.
Off topic, but Scott Alexander is chittering with rage against DOGE shutting down USAID (Tyler Cowen is the proximate object). He has tried and failed to formulate his attack for at least a couple of posts, but it all just looks confused and self-contradictory by now. Somewhat amusing to watch if you’re into that sort of thing.
Everything that gnostic kike believes in is fake and gay, and it looks like the mentally ill psychiatrist is about to experience an emotional breakdown — the cognitive dissonance he cocooned himself in won’t hold for much longer — as it becomes increasingly evident to everyone who isn’t an utter nutter that leftism (in which he has been so emotionally invested throughout his life) is not merely “misguided” but outright evil and satanic.
He is lurking here, and the gospel of “reality is real” has now nestled itself inside his brain — against his will — where it gradually and persistently bullies his ego to see the destructive, anti-civilizational consequences of his ideology. The final wake up, or (dark) enlightenment, or snap, won’t be pretty; I suspect it’s inevitable at this point, though.
Scott, consider drowning your brain in ketamine; you won’t truly grok any world religion until you actually experience ego-death (as opposed to just writing about that sort of stuff); it’s only the actual experience of ego-death that will allow you to both accept with equanimity that you’ve been a satanist this whole time and that you should practice and preach Divine Law instead. Scott, it’s time to kill your ego once and for all, and if you can’t do it with your Buddhist practices, then you will need copious amount of the K to achieve it.
He cannot say what is pissing him off, and perhaps cannot altogether think it, because it is a thought crime — that the left was substantially funded and coordinated from the inner sanctum of USAID which Musk raided.
You can say Hitler was right all day, and it is not a thought crime. In America, though not in Europe, you can say that Hitler did not genocide the Jews, but he should have.
But that the left was largely run out of a small group of offices in a single office building in Washington DC, that you cannot say, or even think.
The day that Musk hit that office building, the left was thrown into chaos world wide, a whole lot of shilling shut down, and a whole lot more shut down not long afterwards.
And since then they have been struggling, not very successfully, to re-organise.
As the permanent government became ever more dominant over the merely elected government, power slipped into more and more hands. But state power cannot be exercised in a decentralised fashion, so it had to be furtively re-centralised. And Trump sent Musk to shut down those centers, triggering massive chaos on the left.
Trump wonders why those trade deals were so bad for the US. He is only pretending to wonder. They were bad for the US because the permanent government got paid off, making Washington DC a concentration of staggering wealth, and funding the left.
The reason the greenies are so comfortable with exporting carbon emissions to India and China is that India and China are funding civil service employees and judges who are funding the greenies.
The reason Bernie Sanders wound up going along with the nomination being stolen from him is the reason he is a strangely wealthy socialist.