Not time for war with Islam

October 28th, 2023

Since the war in the Ukraine is not going too well, the faction currently in the saddle in the Global American Empire is looking for war with Islam.

For a long time the ruling faction has been seeking to converge Islam, and to this end, because they have had considerable success in converging the official faith of Iran, pursued an accommodation policy to Iran. Biden and the generals have now suddenly started talking war with Iran, which is an abrupt and sudden one eighty, and the shill Christians and fake right on Gab and on this blog are now arguing that the current invasion of the west is Jihad by Muslims. During the past forty eight hours, the US government has been issuing threats against Iran, to discourage them from intervening.

A few days before this, the fake Christians and the usual shills and entryists started promoting the Islamic Jihad narrative. Supposedly the current invasion of America is Islamic Jihad. And therefore the right, the reaction, and the Christian Nationalists should support war with Islam now. I should have seen what was coming when the usual shills and entryists on this blog suddenly started complaining about Islamic Jihad, which was a thought crime until a few days ago. Until a few days ago, when I talked about Jihad, the shills would respond as if neither I nor anyone else had ever had that thought. And then a few days before Israel claimed to be engaging Hamas for real, the shills abruptly went to the other extreme.

No it is not Jihad by Muslims. The only reason Mohammedan invaders in America are a problem is that the Democrats. in substantial part the same Jews who organized the brother war in the Ukraine, are importing them to live on crime, welfare, and voting Democrat. We don’t need to fight a war with them. That problem is not Mohammedans, but Democrats, and in grossly disproportionate part, Jewish Democrats. Stop crime, turn off welfare, and turn off voting Democrat, and they will take the next boat home. We can worry about recovering the Holy Land, Egypt, and the bits of Eastern Europe that they have in century or two. The Indians will need to worry a little sooner than that, but we have bigger problems. Our problem being that the officially unofficial state religion is demon worship, and sooner or later there is going to be a holy war inside America over that, for demon worship unopposed always gets crazier and crazier, and demands greater and greater human sacrifices. And in the coming holy war with our officially unofficial state religion, old type Mohammedans will be our allies. Highly unreliable and dangerous allies, but me against my brothers, me and my brothers against our cousins, me and my cousins against the world. In the coming holy war, Muslims are our cousins.

The war in the Ukraine is the work of Blinken, Nuland, Kagan, and Soros. All of whom hate Ukrainians even more than they hate Russians, and hate legacy Americans more than anyone.

Soros, under instruction by the state department, using money provided by the American taxpayer and laundered to Soros by the World Bank, conducted color revolution in the Ukraine, arranging for his own people to be shot in a false flag operation. (Working for the GAE is bad for your health, for it is run by people who hate you) The Ukrainian government was appointed by Victoria Nuland, in a conversation that the Russians bugged and leaked. From 2014 onwards, the Global American Empire appointed government in the Ukraine has been shelling civilians who speak Russian, think themselves Russian, and are considered Russians by Russians. This shelling of civilians came, in large part, from locations a few minutes walk from a heavily fortified officially unofficial Nato base in Avdiika. This program looks like it was instituted, or at least advocated, by Kagan, who is not officially part of the US government, but has the ear of Blinken and Nuland. He was following the Reaganesque strategy of drawing Russia into attritive war to exhaust them, but he is no Reagan. Reagan’s strategy, as he told us in the primaries, was that the Soviet Union had great soft power, but its GDP was fake and gay, so could be logistically exhausted in a multitude of pinprick attritive wars, and its soft power was diminishing, and would diminish a whole lot further with logistic exhaustion. Today, it is the Global American Empire that has great soft power, but its GDP is fake and gay, and its soft power is diminishing.

The current brother war in the Ukraine, which was created and is run by certain Jews, has killed about four hundred thousand Goyim, and the way the wind blows, there may well be nukes soon enough. What have the Mohammedans been up to?

Mostly killing each other over sand. The Arabs cannot get it together, the Taliban are good guys so far. The only guys who could actually prosecute a serious war are the Iranians, and if it is Iran versus Israel, why should I care? Iran is not going to invade America. They might hog the Middle Eastern oil, but we should be developing our own oil. America should be a major oil exporter, and if the Iranians wind up jacking the price of oil through the roof, that is good for us (provided we can crush the worshippers of the Gaia demon) and bad for China. Looks like future war in Afghanistan is going to over water, and to the extent that it is holy war, going to be old type Muslims versus postmodern Muslims. Not our problem.

Posted in war | 336 Comments »

The Book of Revelation

October 14th, 2023

Christian evangelicals have a one sided love affair with Israel. They love Israel, and Israel hates them.

They misinterpret the Book of Revelations. The Jews have returned to Israel for another chance at redemption, which requires them to come to Jesus. The way the wind blows, they have returned to Israel for another tribulation. If America goes Christian nationalist, then Israel might go Messianic Jew, in which case a less unpleasant prophecy might then be applicable.

A faith is a synthetic tribe. When governments disintegrate, the most cohesive synthetic tribe tribe takes power, which is why in Russia the left minority (the Kadets) took power from the Tsar, a leftist minority of that minority (the socialists) then took power, a leftist minority of that minority (the communists) then took power, and leftist minority of the communists (the Bolsheviks) then took power. You always have an army, and you always have an official faith. In our case, an officially unofficial faith.

Christian Nationalism is right now by far the largest cohesive synthetic tribe, with ten percent of the percent of the population being strong adherents. In the event of a crackup, which looks increasingly likely with Global American Empire falling, we stand a good chance of taking power. Our adversaries will be the woke, who are the current ruling faith, the communists, and the Mohammedans.

Problem is that the most cohesive faction within Christian Nationalism expects to immanentize the eschaton, which is always a disastrous idea. It is becoming very possible that Christian Nationalists will take power in America, as our government is increasingly incohesive, foreshadowing a crackup, and the woke are becoming cynical about wokism, after too many U turns, too quickly. But, though Christian Nationalism is the most cohesive large group, and you need a large group to take power, a large group is too large to rule, and a smaller group within that group is apt to take power, proclaiming itself the executive organ of that larger group., as repeatedly happened during the Russian Revolution.

And a substantial and cohesive faction of Christian nationalists expect and intend to immanentize the eschaton. Which is always a disastrous idea. On the other hand, that faction tends to be passive. They expect Christ to do the heavy lifting.

Until the late nineteenth century, the Book of Revelation was generally not interpreted as Christ making the eschaton immanent. Rather, the prophesied troubles were put in the context of the eschaton. Some of the prophecies have been fulfilled, some have been fulfilled over and over and are likely about to be fulfilled again. It does not mean the eschaton is about to become immanent.

We have to do the heavy lifting.

Posted in Faith, war | 539 Comments »

Future war

October 7th, 2023

Airsea power is going down. After ever increasing efforts to keep their fleet in Sebastopol, the Russians are finally pulling their fleet back, despite clear and overwhelming airsea dominance over Ukraine. If the Russians are pulling their fleet back from Sebastopol, US airsea bases ringing China are just hostages.

Drone warfare has become dominant, and is rapidly becoming more dominant, rendering grunts trudging through mud increasingly irrelevant. In future war the grunts will be sent in to run up the flag and install supply depots for the drones after the battle is won.

The front line is dissolving, becoming ever deeper, broader, vaguer, and more porous. A multitude of bloggers are trying to figure out where the front line is, and legitimately disagree. Hence the meaningless debate on whether the Ukraine has reached the first line of defence, and on whether they have penetrated it. Troops are spread out more and more thinly, because the closer any soldier is to another soldier, the more likely he is to be identified.

No one knows how to do war of movement yet in a conflict of peer powers. It is all horrifying and terrible war of attrition. The Russians have some bright ideas on how to do an offensive, and are trying them out right now, starting this morning. But they are still pussyfooting around because no one knows how to do it yet. Their basic idea is to shut down enemy movement deep within enemy territory, and then the cut off troops will eventually surrender. We shall see what happens. If it works, the surrender is likely to take quite a while. If it works, no one will know that it is working for a quite a while.

Assassination of enemy leaders is still off the table, but targeted killings are moving steadily and rapidly up the chain of command.

Troops attempting to advance are looking more and more like spies and infiltrators, and less and less like an army on the march. The dissolving front line is likely to foreshadow the front line being everywhere, with battles resembling the sudden manifestation of flash crowd, rather than an army advancing. In retrospect the question of whether the Ukrainians reached the first line of defence is likely to be irrelevant and meaningless.

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Posted in war | 464 Comments »

Ukraine counter offensive update.

September 11th, 2023

I don’t cover the events of the day, but in my previous post I remarked:

This is not a tactic that can be repeated too many times. You continually need fresh troops. And they are now running mighty short of fresh troops. At the moment the offensive is stalled, awaiting the next shipment of fresh cannon fodder. I have repeatedly been surprised by their ability to dig up more cannon fodder, and likely I will be surprised again, but they have been digging mighty hard, and will have to dig a whole lot harder.

One day after that post:

Men with missing limbs have now received callup notices. Next time I need to preen on predictions this is going on the list.

When Napoleon started conscripting men with missing limbs, the end was not far off. And he never considered calling up women in their fifties. I think the Ukrainians have watched too many action girl movies.

Ukrainian ground troops have reached the first line of defence, but it has not been penetrated, in the sense that tanks and armoured personnel carriers cannot drive through it – or even get near it. They dump cannon fodder some distance away, which cannon fodder is then marched over minefields under artillery and drone fire to the first line of defence. Cannon fodder being cheaper and more easily replaceable than tanks or armoured personnel carriers. However, replacing cannon fodder is evidently becoming considerably more difficult.

It will be interesting to see how the war goes when one side is relying on women, cripples, and the elderly.

Posted in war | 602 Comments »

Three months of the greatest Ukrainian offensive

August 29th, 2023

The offensive seems to be turning out much as it turned out three months ago.

They have tried for a breakthrough in lots of places over a broad front, with uniformly disappointing results. The goal of counter envelopment of Bakhmut was swiftly abandoned early in the offensive. The goal of cutting through to sea of Azov, thus breaking the land bridge to Crimea was downsized to taking Tokmak, which would significantly and substantially impair the land bridge to Crimea. but not actually cut it.

In recent weeks they have abandoned all their other efforts, and thrown everything they have into an advance from their salient at Novandrivka, which they had before the offensive began, towards Tokmak.

The red arrows show how much they have gained in three months.

The red dots represent Russian fortifications. As you can see, they have made a dent, they are significantly closer to Tokmak, but it is still a long way to Tokmak. And Russian doctrine is that the fortifications start out soft, and get more and more formidable the further you go.

The American armored vehicles have proven to be little use. Their advances have come primarily by herding cannon fodder over minefields under fire. This is not a tactic that can be repeated too many times. You continually need fresh troops. And they are now running mighty short of fresh troops. At the moment the offensive is stalled, awaiting the next shipment of fresh cannon fodder. I have repeatedly been surprised by their ability to dig up more cannon fodder, and likely I will be surprised again, but they have been digging mighty hard, and will have to dig a whole lot harder.

Posted in war | 413 Comments »

97% of scientists agree that should they fail to worship the climate change demon, they will be sacrificed

August 29th, 2023

I kind of stopped reporting on the climate change hoax years ago, because everyone based knows the truth, but after so long, deserves a recap.

Behavior reveals belief. The behavior of the climate priesthood reveals that they do not believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming as a scientific material fact, but treat it partly like a scam for profit and power, and partly like sincere demon worship. The falsification of empirical evidence has been documented at enormous length elsewhere, and I will not repeat it unless someone makes some empirical claims in the comments. A better indicator is the sale of carbon indulgences. Precisely none of the money paid goes to things that would actually offset carbon emission, such as fuel removal from forests. which would be highly effective in removing carbon from circulation. Mostly it goes to people flying around in private jets telling the peons to turn off their heating. If these guys believe that anthropogenic climate change was bad the way they believe that earthquakes are bad, they would be worried by fake carbon indulgences. Rather, they believe that the indulgences are real if they go to worship of the climate change demon, rather than real if they actually went to offset carbon emissions. Observe how the nuclear power and fuel reduction arguments flow off them like water off a ducks back.

Also, we are just not seeing anyone bothering with empirical and scientific claims very much any more. They are now increasingly comfortable with the mask and robes of empirical science and empirical this-worldly fact dropping off.

Climate change is real. There are warm days and cold days, warm years and cold years, warm decades and cold decades, warm centuries and cold centuries, warm millenia and cold millennia. And some of those cold centuries were terrible, and most of those cold millennia were very terrible indeed. all of the warm millenia and warm centuries were nicer.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide has no significant effect on the earth’s temperature, because the effect is saturated. Each doubling of carbon dioxide levels produces about the same noticeable but not very alarming rise temperatures.

Each bomb during nuclear testing created a fair bit of carbon fourteen in the atmosphere, but the carbon fourteen in the air disappeared fairly fast, indicating the atmospheric carbon dioxide equilibrates with an enormous reservoir. So worrying about human emissions of carbon dioxide affecting atmospheric levels is like worrying about causing a flood by spitting in lake Michigan.

What does cause changes in carbon dioxide is temperature. When the climate changes for warmer, carbon dioxide levels rise for the next century or two, and when it gets colder, they fall. Because cold rain dissolves more carbon dioxide than warm rain, and carries it into the enormous reservoirs of which I spoke.

Plants hunger and thirst for carbon dioxide. Green houses for agricultural production generally raise the level substantially above current atmospheric levels. Conversely, when carbon dioxide falls to levels typical of ice ages, most plants can barely survive.

During the period that satellites have been observing the earth, it has become seventy percent greener. Partly due areas that were formerly white with snow turning green because the snow melts, mostly areas formerly too hot and dry, now wetter, and everywhere because plants like carbon dioxide.

The world has been getting warmer, greener, wetter, temperatures less extreme, and extreme weather events like hurricanes less frequent, for two or three centuries. Because of year to year and decade to decade fluctuations, it is impossible to say if it is still getting warmer, but it has been getting warmer over the last century or so and probably still is. However, over recent decades, warming has been far less than advertised, and the warming trend may have ended. Or paused for a few decades. Hence the need to manufacture wildfires and burn rural and exurban people out of their homes, as we recently saw in Hawaii and California.

Cold centuries tend to be unpleasant because in response to low rainfall levels, entire populations pick up everything they have, move onto someone else’s land, and kill off everyone. Conversely, warm centuries tend to be peaceful and civilization rises. Or decadent civilizations manage to linger on because the barbarians are comfortable enough in their own lands. (This time around, the barbarians will probably be after pussy, rather than grazing lands for their cattle, since we have a pussy shortage, not a grass shortage.)

Sea levels are rising. They have been rising at about the same rate for about two centuries. They have been rising at three millimeters a year, or one inch a decade. Don’t sell your seafront property just yet.

Remember those low lying lands that were going to disappear by the year two thousand creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees? They have actually grown significantly – because most low lying lands reflect sediment accumulating, and with fewer extreme weather events, it continues to accumulate, but is washed away less often. Sea level has very little effect. Sediment accumulation is by far the dominant factor. If you check out your beach, you will notice the sandhills and the beach grow or drop by about the height of a human over a decade or so. Severe and prolonged bad weather is the major factor causing big drops, and with the world milder than it was, we have less severe and prolonged bad weather. Low lying lands have been growing for a long time, and will keep on growing, like the forests, and for similar reasons.

Posted in global warming | 33 Comments »

Vivek Ramaswami, empire, and Thermidor

August 22nd, 2023

The Republic is dead. No matter what happens, and numerous unexpected and unthinkable twists in the road are coming up, we will end with a Stalin or Napoleon or Cromwell. If we are lucky and brave, a Caesar.

Vivek Ramaswami’s policy positions are wonderful. He tries to out Trump Trump. And some faction in the deep state is protecting him.

But there is something deeply fake about him. And it is most odd that he gets away with stuff which would result in any other namefag being unpersoned. I don’t know what it is, but I have recently found a clue: We had an infestation of Vivek shills on this blog, and when I asked them about Soros’ color revolutionary activities, they softly and silently vanished away.

Looks like his spambots, like vivek himself, cannot speak of anything related to Globohomo empire or the curious lack of any rules in the “rules based order”. They can speak of some of the crimes of Soros, but not of imperialism – which is most of his major crimes and the primary activity of the Open Society Foundation that Vivek warmly endorsed.

Could be that there is a faction that wants to keep Global American Empire, since after all without it a whole lot of people in Washington, New York, and Boston will suddenly be a lot poorer, and figures Globohomo is heading for a train wreck. “Lets keep on doing color revolutions, but use the nazis instead of the gay parade”

Vivek Ramasawami supports the Soros Open Society foundation, fails to criticize the Global American Empire and color revolution, and made his money in bed with the state and quasi state kleptocrats who are getting rich skimming the gravy off the Global American Empire.

The Global American Empire has been suddenly revealed as a paper tiger, due to de-industrialization, and army full of gays, trannies, and coloreds doing logistic work in base areas – camp followers dressed in soldier’s uniforms for stolen valor.
gay trannie colored army of women
Camp followers should wear a different uniform. If you have one man in your army who does not fight, bye and bye there will be no men in your army who fight.

If you are going to keep empire, have to re-industrialize. No prospect of re-industrializing except by Trump and/or Vivek. RFK Jr is anti imperialist, and Trump wants empire downsized by spinning off its unprofitable provinces. The kleptocrats want to keep empire and don’t want downsizing, because the reason the provinces are unprofitable is that the kleptocrats are skimming all the gravy. But the way things are going, the empire is about to fall. Vivek wants to keep empire.

When Vivek talks about the Ukraine, he somehow neglects to criticize empire, or, unlike Trump, even highly unprofitable empire. His proposed solution for Ukraine is to keep empire while not getting up Russia’s nose. It looks like he is backed by an imperialist faction – and of course his entire private career was cosy with the the kleptocrats. His private wealth is all connections to the kleptocracy. Could be that there is a kleptocrat faction that is planning a Thermidor?

If there is a Thermidor, we are going to be the Incroyables. When the left was in retreat, the right felt their oats. The Incroyables failed. Failed horribly. But we have something they did not. We have the lessons of history. The Incroyables failed because they celebrated the degeneracy of the Sun King’s decadent aristocracy of the Robe. Bad idea to identify with losers. This time around, or enemies will want us to identify with the Nazis, following the example of the Ukraine Nazis, who are currently fighting for a gay Jew who does not speak Ukrainian very fluently. The Ukraine Nazis are machine gunning and cluster bombing white Ukrainians who attempt to retreat in a war inflicted on them by far away imperial Jews. It is working for Globohomo in the Ukraine, so they will figure it will work for them here. And it will, if the alt right falls for it.

So, several possible outcomes, listed in order from that which I think most likely, to that least likely.

1. The Thermidorian faction of the elite is killed by the woke faction, no one cares about the nominal president (Robespierre had no official office, role, or title), and the empire cracks up in external war and internal democide and civil war.

2. The Thermidorian faction fails and fades away, a waxed corpse of Biden is elected to maintain the pretence that elections still matter, and the empire cracks up in external war, and possibly internal democide and civil war.

3. The Thermidorian faction installs a Trump/Vivek presidency. Thermidor ensues.

In the unlikely but now possible outcome that the Thermidorean faction installs a Trump/Vivek presidency, next step: The alt right becomes the incroyables. Trump/Vivek will theoretically fire the Deep State, but it will continue right on going with changed office stationary. The Deep State will attempt to massage the alt right into the Ukraine Nazis, and to the extent that they succeed, we will be following the failed footsteps of the Ukraine Nazis and the Incroyables. The Ukrainian Nazis, once no longer useful to Blinken, Nuland, Kagan, and Soros, are going to die after having been used up destroying their race and their nation.

Posted in party politics, war | 757 Comments »

Fat is a reactionary issue: retrospective.

August 1st, 2023

The main new information in this post is that four years on from my first post in the series, “Fat is a reactionary issue” still at my healthy weight, despite all the fake science saying that all diets work short term, but no diet works long term. Supposedly no one ever loses large amounts of weight except by illness, and no one ever keeps it off for very long

No diet that official science is allowed to notice works long term. No one that doctors are allowed to notice loses large amounts of weight and keeps it off permanently.

Well, I went from 267 pounds, 120 kilograms, to 168 pounds, 76 kilograms, somewhat above my ideal weight, but within the healthy BMI and WHR. And it has been about eight years so far within the healthy BMI and WHR – though frequently a bit above my current weight. But then, I have lost some muscle because I slacked off pumping iron after I got remarried. So probably roughly constant over the past six years or so.

Some new information has been discovered in the interim, the most important being that epidemic of the diseases of modernity are all downstream of soaring insulin resistance, which like high blood pressure produces no visible symptoms until it has finished writing your death warrant. In particular, it does not show up as high blood sugar until your system is already badly hosed. This also explains the harmful effects of sweet diet drinks, since they produce the same insulin surge as drinks sweetened with natural sugar.

The evidence for excess omega six polyunsaturated fats (seed oil) has now mounted considerably further. That stuff is poisonous, and the evidence against going to heavy on any polyunsaturated fat, as in more than you would get from a largely fish diet, is starting to come in. Saturated fat is the cleanest source of energy for your body, the healthiest macronutrient. Everything else is apt to be a problem if consumed in amounts large enough to be a major source of calories.

Chimps can do fine on an all vegetable diet. Humans, unlike chimps, are obligate carnivores. We cannot survive on all vegetable diet.

We can survive on all meat diet provided we get plenty of saturated animal fat. A high protein all meat diet will give you what the pioneers called rabbit fever. Butter, sour milk, yoghurt, and cheese was the enabling technology that allowed pastoralism on the steppes, and eventually there was genetic change that allowed adults to drink fresh milk. Rabbit fever reveals that we have a dependency on saturated fat, and the current epidemic of obesity and collapsing testosterone may well be in part a result of the widespread substitution of vegetable oil for animal fat.

Well that was short. So to pad it out a bit, a brief recap of the diet information given in earlier posts of the series since most of those reading this far will want to know how to lose weight.  And once they have measured their insulin resistance will want to know how to cure insulin resistance.

1. Be a manly man.

2. Weigh yourself every morning.

3. Target a very slow weight of rate loss, or it is going to be rough going after you have lost ten or twenty pounds.

4. Diet and exercise. Restrict yourself to eating within an eight hour window, do the occasional three day fast to shove your set point down, particularly when you are over your target weight, lift iron, and a paleo diet. Low carbs, moderate protein in the form of red meat, lots of milk, cheese, sour cream, and butter. The best oil is clarified butter. I make my own, also make my own sour cream.

Nutritional deficiencies are common and the paleo diet in modern times with modern foods is apt to make this worse. If you get cramps, your intake of divalent salts (calcium, magnesium, zinc, manganese, and copper is likely unbalanced or inadequate. Potassium deficiency is common, and the keto diet, which, if done right, is an extreme form of the paleo diet, is so low on fruit and veggies that it is apt to cause potassium deficiency, which also causes cramps.

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Posted in culture, science | 845 Comments »

How to apply recursive snarks for a fully scalable, fully private, currency

July 28th, 2023

From the very beginning of bitcoin, people worried that it could not scale to the required size.

It does not scale because it is a massively replicated public ledger. Thus any real solution means making the ledger not public. Which means either centralization, a central bank digital currency, which is the path Ethereum is walking, or privacy. You cure both blockchain bloat and blockchain analysis by not putting the data on the reliable public broadcast channel in the first place, rather than doing what Monero does, putting it on the blockchain in cleverly encrypted form, bloating the blockchain with chaff intended to obfuscate against blockchain analysis.

I have for some time remarked that recursive snarks make a fully private, fully scalable, currency, possible. But it seems this was not obvious to everyone, and I see recursive snarks being applied in complicated convoluted stupid ways that fail to utilize their enormous potential. This is in part malicious, the enemy pouring mud into the tech waters. So I guess need to explain.

A zk-snark or a zk-stark proves that someone knows something, knows a pile of data that has certain properties, without revealing that pile of data. Such that he has a preimage of a hash that has certain properties – such as the property of being a valid transaction. You can prove an arbitrarily large amount of data with an approximately constant sized recursive snark.

A recursive snark is a zk-snark that proves that the person who created it has verified a zk-stark that proves that someone has verified a zk-snark that proves that someone has verified …

This explanation is going to require you to know what a graph, vertex, edge, root, and leaf is, what a directed acyclic graph is, what a hash is, what a blockchain is, and how hashes make blockchains possible. And what an sql index is and what it does, and what a primary sql index is and what it does. You need to know what a transaction output is in the context of blockchains, and what an unspent transaction output (utxo) is. Other terms will be briefly and cryptically explained as necessary. All the crypto shills must do the homework that they have been so egregiously neglecting, or else will be silently blocked. I am heartily sick of crypto shills confidently dumping scripts prepared for them by scriptwriters almost as stupid and ignorant as themselves.

A struct is simply some binary data laid out in well known and agreed format. Almost the same thing as an sql row, except that an sql row does not have a well known and agreed binary format, so does not have a well defined hash, and a struct is not necessarily part of an sql table, though obvious you can put a bunch of structs of the same type in an sql table, and represent an sql table as a bunch of structs, plus at least one primary index. An sql table is equivalent to a pile of structs, plus at least one primary index of those structs.

A merkle graph is a directed acyclic graph whose vertices are structs containing hashes

A merkle vertex is a struct containing hashes. The hashes are the edges of the graph. So using recursive snarks over a merkle graph, each vertex has a proof that proved that its data was valid, given that the vertices that its edges point to were valid, and that the peer that created the recursive snark of that vertex verified the recursive snarks of the vertices that the outgoing edges (hashes) of this vertex points to.

So, you have a merkle chain of blocks, each block containing a merkle patricia tree of merkle dags. You have a recursive snark that proves the chain, and everything in it, is valid (no one created tokens out of thin air, each transaction merely moved the ownership of tokens) And then you prove that the new block is valid, given that rest of the chain was valid, and produce a recursive snark that the new block, which chains to previous block, is valid.

A blockchain is a merkle chain and a reliable broadcast channel. In Bitcoin the merkle vertices are very large, each block is a single huge merkle vertex, and each block lives forever on an ever growing public broadcast channel. It is impractical to produce a recursive snark over such huge vertices, and attempting to do so results in centralization, with the recursive snarks being created in a few huge data centers. So we need to structure the data as large dag of small merkle vertices, with all the paths through the dag for which we need to generate proofs being logarithmic in the size of the dag.

A merkle patricia tree is a representation of an sql index as a merkle tree. Each edge of a vertex is associated with a short bitstring, and as you go down the tree from the root (tree graphs have their root at the top and their leaves at the bottom, just to confuse the normies) you append that bitstring, and when you reach the edge (hash) that points to a leaf, you have a bitstring that corresponds to path you took through the merkle tree, and to the leading bits of the bitstring that make that key unique in the index.

So a merkle patricia tree and the structs that its leaf edges point to is an sql table that you can generate recursive snarks for, which can prove things about new transactions to be added to that table. We are unlikely to be programming the blockchain in sql, but to render what one is doing intelligible, it is useful to think and design in sql.

So with recursive snarks you can prove that that your transaction is valid because certain unspent transaction outputs were in the sql index of unspent transaction outputs, and were recently spent in the index of commitments to transactions, without revealing which outputs those were, or what was in your transaction.

It is a widely shared public index. But what it is an index of is private information about the transactions and outputs of those transactions, information known only to the parties of those transactions. It is not a public ledger. It is a widely shared public sql index of private ledgers. And because it is a merkle tree, it is possible to produce a single reasonably short recursive snark for the current root of that tree that proves that every transaction in all those private ledgers was a valid transaction.

Oops, what I just described is a whole sequence of complete immutable sql indexes, each new block a new complete index. But that would waste a whole lot of bandwidth. What you want is that each new block is only an index of new unspent transaction outputs, and of newly spent transaction outputs, which spending events will give rise to new unspent transaction outputs in later blocks, and that this enormous pile of small immutable indexes gets summarized as single mutable index, which gets complicated. I will get to that later – how we purge the hashes of used outputs from the public broadcast channel, winding up with a public broadcast channel that represents a mutable index of an immutable history, with a quite a lot of additional house keeping data that tells how to derive the mutable index from this pile of immutable indices, and tells us what parts of the immutable history only the parties to the transaction need to keep around any more, what can be dumped from the public broadcast channel. Anything you no longer need to derive the mutable index, you can dump.

The parties to a transaction agree on a transaction – typically two humans and two wallets, each wallet the client of a peer on the blockchain.

Those of them that control the inputs to the transaction (typically one human with one wallet which is a client of one peer) commits unspent transactions outputs to that transaction, making them spent transaction outputs. But does not reveal that transaction, or that they are spent to the same transaction – though his peer can probably guess quite accurately that they are.

In the next block that is a descendant of that block the parties to the transaction prove that the new transaction outputs are valid, and being new are unspent transaction outputs, without revealing the transaction or the inputs to that transaction.

You have to register the unspent transaction outputs on the public index, the reliable broadcast channel, within some reasonable time, say perhaps below block height (⌊h/32⌋+2)*32, where h is the block height on which the first commit of an output to the the transaction was registered. If not all the inputs to the transaction were registered, then obviously no one can produce a proof of validity for any of the outputs. After that block height you cannot register any further outputs, but if you prove that after that block height no output of the transaction was registered, you can create a new unspent transaction output for each transaction input to the failed transaction which effectively rolls back the failed transaction. This time limit enables us to recover from failed transactions, and, perhaps, more importantly, enables us to clean up the mutable sql index that the immense chain of immutable sql indexes represents, and that the public broadcast channel contains. We eventually drop outputs that have been committed to a particular transaction, and can then eventually drop the commits of that output without risking orphaning valid outputs that have not yet been registered in the public broadcast channel.

So that the public broadcast channel can eventually dump old blocks, and thus old spend events, every time we produce a new base level block containing new events (an sql index of new transaction outputs, and an sql index table with the same primary of spend commitments of past unspent transaction outputs to transactions) we also produce a consolidation block, a summary block that condenses two past blocks into one summary block, thus enabling the two past blocks that it summarizes to be dropped.

Immediately before forming a block of height 2n+1, which is a block height whose binary representation ends in a one, we use the information in base level blocks 2n-3, 2n-2, 2n-1, and 2n to produces a level one summary block that allows base level blocks 2n-3 and 2n-2, the two oldest remaining base level blocks to be dropped. When we form the block of height 2n+1, it will have an edge to the block of height 2n, forming a chain, and an edge to the summary block summarizing blocks 2n-3 and 2n-2, forming a tree.

At every block height of 4n+2. which is a block height whose binary representation ends in a one followed by a zero, we use the information in the level one summary blocks for heights 4n-5, 4n-3, 4n-1, and 4n+1, to produce a level two summary block that allows the level one summary blocks for 4n-5 and 4n-3, the two oldest remaining lever one summary blocks, to be dropped. The base level blocks are level zero.

At every block height of 8n+4. which is a block height whose binary representation ends in a one followed by two zeroes, we use the information in the level two summary blocks for heights 8n-10, 8n-6, 8n-2, and 8n+2, to produce a level three summary block that allows the level two summary blocks for 8n-10 and 8n-6, the two oldest remaining level two summary blocks, to be dropped.

And similarly, for every block height of 2m+1*n + 2m, every block height whose binary representation ends in a one followed by m zeroes, we use the information in four level m summary blocks to produce a level m+1 summary block than enables the two oldest level m summary blocks to be dropped.

We summarise the data in the earliest two blocks by discarding every transaction output that was, at the time those blocks were created, an unspent transaction output, but is now marked as used in any of the four blocks by committing it to a particular transaction. We discard commits which refer to outputs that have now been discarded by previous summary blocks and have timed out, which is to say, commits in a level m summary block being summarised into a level m+1 summary block that reference outputs in the immediately previous level m+1 summary block. However if, a commit references an output that is now in a summary block of level greater than m+1, that commit has to be kept around to prevent double spending of the previous output, which has not yet been summarised away.

We produce the summary block of past blocks just before we produce the base level block, and the base level block has an edge pointing to the previous base level block, a chain edge, and an edge pointing to the just created summary block a tree edge, a chain edge and a tree edge. And when we summarize two blocks into a higher level summary block, their chain and tree edges are discarded, because pointing to data that the reliable broadcast channel will no longer carry, and the newly created summary block gets a chain edge pointing to the previous summary block at the same level, and tree edge pointing to the previous higher level summary block.

We have to keep the tree around, because in order to register a commit for an output in the blockchain, we have to prove no previous commit for that output in any of the previous blocks in the tree, back to block or summary block in which the output is registered. Only the client wallets of the parties to the transaction can produce a proof that a commit is valid if no previous commit, but only a peer can prove no previous commit. Once all the necessary commits have been registered on the reliable broadcast channel, only the client wallets of the parties to the transaction can produce a proof for each of the outputs from that transaction that the transaction is valid. They do not need to publish on the reliable broadcast channel of what transaction that was, and what the inputs to that transaction were.

So we end up with the blockchain only carrying order log(h) blocks where h is the block height, and all these blocks are likely to be of roughly comparable sizes to a single base level block. So, a blockchain with as many transactions as bitcoin, that has been running as long as bitcoin, will only occupy a few dozen megabytes of disk storage, rather than near a terabyte. Bitcoin height is currently near a hundred thousand, at which height we will be keeping about fifty blocks around, instead of a hundred thousand blocks around.

And when it gets so big that ordinary people cannot handle the bandwidth and storage, recursive snarks allow sharding the blockchain. You cannot shard the bitcoin blockchain, because a shard might lie, so every peer has to evaluate every transaction of every shard. But with recursive snarks, a shard can prove it is not lying.

Posted in crypto | 115 Comments »

Enormous move in bitcoin coming up

June 29th, 2023

The good news is that in the not very distant future, everyone who matters is going to be using Bitcoin. The bad news is that if they will be using something resembling currently available software, they will still be net peons, not netizens.

Probably no dramatic price changes next week. Or next month. Maybe not next year. But we are on a big move up that will likely continue going up and up for a very long time.

The dollar is failing as a medium of international exchange.

Cannot do transactions internationally in fiat when the bankers are untrustworthy and untrusted. Cannot do international transactions in gold, because difficult and dangerous to move long distances.

Russia and others have been messing around trying to come up with fiat alternatives to the dollar. They just are not flying. The sovereign of country A agrees with the sovereign of country B for a deal that allows fiat transactions between A and B, and tells the bankers and bureaucrats to work out the details. But a deal that was actually workable would involve bureuacrats giving up power. So they work out a deal in which the bureaucrats of both A and B have complete power. Which means that in practice the merchant lacks the power to actually perform the transaction. You get a bunch of mysterious pieces of paper that are impossible fill out in a valid manner, your money disappears until you have met requirements that no one will explain to you because no one understands them, least of all the bureaucrats that created them, and your money gets frozen and eventually confiscated. So, increasingly, international transactions are getting done in bitcoin. Eventually bitcoin is going to replace to dollar as the medium of international exchange. Because sometimes, increasingly often, there is no useful alternative.

The US dollar is locked in place by Metcalf’s law. For it to fall, an alternative network must achieve critical mass. Bitcoin does not yet have critical mass but it is getting there. People are being forced into bitcoin because the international fiat money system is broken and getting more broken. Dollar dysfunction is likely to force a critical mass into existence. The more people using bitcoin for international transactions, the more useful it becomes for international transactions, which is likely to result eventually in a quite sudden transition.

This foreshadows a huge upmove in bitcoin. Also a huge attack to get state control through the dangerously concentrated miners.

Hodlers are generally betting on Wiemar style collapse of the US$ for everyday transactions, which is probably still some distance away. But a slow motion collapse of the dollar as medium for international exchange is happening right now.

For international transactions, the bitcoin blockchain suffices. The merchant sends you a public key he wants given value, usually over a highly insecure channel likely to leak information to all sorts of people who might want to rob you or just maliciously harm you. You transfer the requested amount of bitcoin to that key. Which should suffice because the transfer shows up on the bitcoin blockchain, which is a reliable broadcast channel, but the merchant frequently wants you to also send him a screen shot of the information that you just published on the bitcoin blockchain, after the transaction has gone through and received a reasonable number of confirmations, on the same insecure channel, because he wants the bitcoin transaction linked to rest of his highly insecure transaction metadata.

For everyday transactions, we need the lightning network. The cryptographically secure Nostr social network has recently been linked to the cryptographically secure lightning network, but the linkage is horribly insecure.

Nostr uses ssh style public private keypairs. Which is not good enough if there is money on the social network, plus people are used to wallet style public private keypairs derived from a master passphrase. People are used to doing it right, and SSH has forever been doing it wrong. And now Nostr is walking the footsteps of SSH. However, the one nostr client that integrates lightning wallet uses wallet style keys, and presumably eventually they all will.

Now if Nostr could be upgraded to use wallet style keypairs, and the linkage between lightning and nostr fixed up, and if lightning’s backup problem was fixed up, we would have a useful system for transactions. Unfortunately the people implementing the linkage were rightly aiming at user friendliness, mass usage, and getting it up in a hurry, and security got trodden under in the rush.

The linkage has now achieved critical mass, which is great, and may well soon show up on Twitter, which would be super duper great, but cleaning up the security mess is likely to be hard and will get harder the more the insecure system is adopted. Still, no one has incentive to do it right, until large numbers of people doing it wrong creates problems. And whatever is wrong with this system, it is a big improvement on what we have now. At present, you can only use nostr with certain peon wallets, though the underlying zap protocol is perfectly capable of supporting the real thing. Unfortunately the real thing is difficult, dangerous, and expensive to set up, which is why Nostr developers have not bothered with it yet.

If you use the standard easy to use lightning wallets, you are a peon. Someone else controls your money, knows what you are doing with it, is selling that information to all and sundry, and you are using your money by his permission. And some of the people buying that information do not like you very much. The real lightning wallets are Lnd and C-lightning. Which you really have to be a unix guru to use. And even if you are unix guru, you are likely to foul up and lose your money.

To use the money safely, you have to have a C-lightning wallet running on a dedicated always on machine, the wallet state has to be continuously backed up moment to moment to a nas running on another machine, (and the wallet is in the clear, and a nas is by its nature not very secure), and the ip address that the lightning network sees your machine at cannot be your home address, because then all manner of bad people know there is money at your home address, which can be physically taken by taking the machine running your lightning node. You are at risk of state authorities deciding that you must be doing something bad, taking your computer with your lightning bitcoin in it, and to get it back you have to prove you were not doing something bad, which is impossible to prove. Or random criminals may just take your computer.

So you want the transactions to go through the vpn, but you don’t want the backup to the Nas to go through the vpn. You don’t want the vpn blocking local network access.

Umbrel and Citadel use Lnd for the lightning network, and are designed for small cheap machines. Unfortunately Lnd is broken, because they never fixed the backup problem. It is only safe to run Lnd on a big expensive highly reliable machine, typically a nas, and not all that safe even on a big expensive highly reliable machine. It is impossible to backup wallet.db, because it is continually being written to, and if your machine dies, you probably have a broken copy of wallet.db. It can only be safely backed up when Lnd has done a clean shut down. And as soon as you start up lnd again, your backup is not only useless, but dangerous.

And wallet.db is where your money actually is.

channel.db is not a backup copy of your money. It is an overly clever and too complicated by half mechanism for recovering money lost in a computer crash, which might or might not work. Will likely recover some of your money. And after you have recovered some of your money, all your lightning channels, accrued reputation and connections are gone.

And if you are running it on a raspberry pi or something similar, you are likely running off an external drive attached to a usb port. And the port connection is going to start randomly failing from time to time sooner or later, probably within a few months. And boom, you have lost all your channels, and probably some of your money. Not to mention rasberries just keep dying.

C-lightning however uses the more reliable and crash resistant sqlite3 database format, and more importantly, allows dual sqlite3 databases. So you have your primary database on your local machine, and a backup with the same name in a different directory on a network drive in the basement on the other side of the house. The backup contains stealable money, and is in the clear, so probably not a good idea to put on the cloud, assuming sqlite will work reliably with a cloud drive, which I doubt.

A “successful” recovery on Lnd is painful, complicated, and no matter how clever and technically savvy you are, you will lose a great deal. A successful recovery of c-lightning will simply resume where it left off.

Lnd is experimenting with a database that is designed to run over the network, as part of their failure recovery strategy. But, last I looked, not yet ready for prime time. And the way Lnd is implemented makes it difficult to implement a reliable backup and restore facility.

What is really needed is a custom database that physically writes a new block on local and remote disks for every lightning transaction, and then from time time creates a packed copy of that data, and then, when the packed data verifies as correct frees up the blocks. Sounds like a big project. And you would want a social network with parity files so that each person kept a parity file (or parity data structure in sqlite) that would enable any one party to recover everything from his seed phrase the way you can with a normal bitcoin wallet. People expect to have a system where they can just download the software from the internet onto a new machine, type in their passphrase, and they get everything back. We know in principle how to accomplish this, but actually accomplishing it is hard.

At present what you need is a wireguard vpn server in the cloud, a dedicated computer on your local hard wired network running wallets, and another dedicated computer hard wired on your network acting as a nas. TerraMaster F4-210 is remarkably cheap nas that can store a lot of data, though you can go somewhat cheaper if you are only going to use the nas to backup your lightning wallet, and therefore do not care about big storage. You can also get a perfectly good fanless mini pc capable of running wallets for a whole lot less than a preconfigured umbrel or citadel strawberry.

To enable people without a pile of hardware on their local lan and good nix administration skills to operate a lightning wallet that is truly their own, and a monetized Nostr identity that is truly their own, without requiring them to do a whole lot work, and risk losing money if they mess up that work, requires a whole lot of software not yet written. We don’t have reasonably easy to use software that makes a man a netizen rather than a peon of big tech.

Demand is coming, while our software is still broken. And no end of people are happy to fill the gap with scam software and peon software. Bitcoin is about to hit the big time, and for international transactions it is good enough, but for lightning transactions, not yet ready, Nostr may well hit the big time, and our software is not ready. If you are on Nostr with a peon lightning wallet, still a peon.

Posted in crypto, economics | 1,586 Comments »

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