my man this is epic. I've been lurk-reading since you came back online and I have to say.... the depth, breadth and ... well ... all of it. It's nothing short of great. I'm subbing.
I'm still trying to figure out how even with Wall Street-sponsored sabotage, ConTracked wouldn't be way, way superior to the current government contract and acquisitions system.
I mean, hedge funds gonna hedge fund, right? So you'll have some that short the ConTracked and hire saboteurs to blow up the bridges, but others will go long the ConTracked derivative instrument and pay for security and help with financials and such... Sounds perfectly feasible.
Maybe with Reddit's collective effort we can short squeeze ConTracked and therefore force Wall Street to buy non-existent bridges. "Ohhh Wall Street, I have a bridge to sell you...."
The only way your attempted joke about RedCoin works is if you haven't read and understood Marx's criticisms of money and the commodity form in general.
CryptoKitties: An Etheruem based platform for buying and selling digital kitty icons. Cats can also be bred with other cats, resulting in offspring with a unique combination of traits, including fur pattern, eye shape, and eye color. The first cat generated, Genesis, sold for over $100,000 two months after launch.
Banned because: The game became so popular that it eventually took over the Ethereum platform, preventing any other businesses from using it. This was considered monopolistic behavior and it was forced to shut down.
When one party had unified control of the government, they passed a major infrastructure bill on a strict party-line vote to issue ConTracked for a bunch of large construction projects that the other party opposed.
A few months later there was an election, the other party took power, and they barred all workers from the construction sites for trespassing on government land.
There's some other issues (or potential benefits: In general, infrastructure contracts are a monospony, so one of the things that make them cost-effective is to have a good government-side team who knows what they need from the contractors and how to resolve issues (this is why privatizing doesn't let you eliminate the city's planning department - the city still needs to know what it's paying for). OTOH, in theory if the goals are vague enough you might be able to use betting markets to replace the city planning department - just make the contract pay out when people vote that they can (in the bridge example) effectively get across the river. If the contractor discovers a geological issue and needs to know if moving the bridge two miles upstream would still qualify, they can announce their intention to do this and see if the value of the coin goes down.
Integrity: All traditional blockchains are vulnerable to corruption if enough nodes in the network decide to go rogue and may be attacked by a bad actor who has accumulated vast amounts of computing power or on-chain currency. Using cryptographic obfuscation techniques, the Integrity network can achieve trustless consensus even when every node but one is maliciously coordinating. Participants in the network do a great deal of computation and exchange large amounts of data, but no one can tell what the computations are actually doing or what the machines are saying to each other. The workings are irretrievably scrambled, they can't be feasibly decoded even by a hypothetical omniscient agent. You submit a transaction or query to an input buffer and some moments later the confirmation or result is written out for you along with a digital signature proving it genuine, but everything in between appears to be garbage, a black box. Because processing of transactions only needs a little bit of redundancy with full trust, the only overhead on the network is the cryptographic protocols required to scramble its internals, which due to recent algorithmic breakthroughs makes Integrity over 100 times more efficient than BuffyCoin, the closest competitor, using 1000000 times less electricity.
Banned because: The entrenched crypto industry is too big to fail
> spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time
Read it first as if they're racing against each other, which would be an even more interesting idea. E.g. you have to get as fast as you can to some point, and your money is at stake
RandiCoin: A decentralized protocol to make and verify claims of supernatural phenomena. Users may post claims of supernatural activity at the cost of a transaction fee. Other users are then rewarded for attempts to verify or refute these claims. If the claim stands up to all scrutiny, the poster of the claim is rewarded with a significant portion of the market cap of the currency.
Banned because: Mysterious messages started appear on the blockchain that gave eerily accurate predictions of the future. The cryptographic signatures seemed to rule out every single user as being the originator of these messages. The SEC deemed this to be a form of insider trading.
CellCoin: A technology that harnesses your cells to engage in proof-of-work without requiring any computer or even conscious effort. In a feature added to spread the wealth, you can also share CellCoin with your neighbors without diminishing your own stake.
Banned because: Excessive investment in CellCoin can cause fever, respiratory distress, and (in some cases) death.
MittCoin: Mitt Romney launched his ICO at the same time as his 2024 presidential campaign, promising an executive order to make it the official currency of the United States if he wins.
Banned because: congress and senate still controlled by dems, preemptively impeached Mitt in October 2024.
Ether-ium: named after a character in the Book of Mormon, the latter day saints were having trouble tracking the state of their global membership across thousands of parishes (which they call Wards and Stakes), and decided to use a distributed ledger. This also simplifies the process of collecting tithing, as ten percent of the coins automatically revert to church control upon minting. To reduce chances of adversarial takeover, only church members are allowed to participate, as verified by proof of Stake.
Banned because: concerns about separation of church and state
RedCoin "reverse proof of stake": splitting your holdings of RC into N even-sized wallets increases the quantity of RC you earn by N^2-fold (for the obvious interpretation; or at least N-fold, for a flat per-wallet distribution). Not banned, just submerged by the number of wallet creations.
No, your Honour, I was not soliciting. All I did was gift this upstanding young lady a modest quantity of altcoins, backed by a smart contract such that they would lose their value unless I got laid tonight.
(does anybody else spend a weird amount of time thinking about WWII Hawaii Overprint banknotes?)
I have been toying with the idea of Vice and Virtue coins. One of the interesting things about systems like ethereum and coins built on top of it is that if a smart contract awards you a Vice coin (perhaps a non fungible token indicating that you have done some specific bad deed), there's nothing you can do to reject or pass on that coin without the smart contract letting you.
This could let you assign Vice coins that advertise someone's misdeeds, and only clear them if they acquire Virtue or purchase Indulgence coins.
...sometimes I wonder about "fitting in" at SSC. Like, Scott posts something funny, and my first impulse is to quibble with (large) bits of it. Well, maybe I'll look at what other people posted.
RedCoin actually sounds pretty fun to build as a learning project. Unfortunately, I don't understand enough about regular money to understand Bitcoin; only the technical CompSci parts make something close to sense to me...
Umanity sounds like a good thing, but probably wouldn't work in real life since computers are now getting so good at solving certain types of Captchas that they even beat humans - e.g. see the shift from the two word captchas 5 years ago to what we have now; that happened because to evade the latest bots the words had to be so convoluted that a significant amount of humans couldn't decipher them either. The pressure to automate the solving process for the Umanity captchas would be immense given the potential reward to whoever manages to crack it.
CthuCoin: CthuCoin is mined by gibbering and shrieking in incomprehensible tongues which were ancient when the stars were young. Validity of this shrieking is verified in a decentralized process whereby Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, causes those who have heard his dread name to all call out in one voice that it is so, it is so, this coin bears the Name.
Banned because: when addressing concerns regarding the spontaneous flammability of the hair and eyes of professional shriekers, the head of the SEC was heard to cry 'They are here! All is woe! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn!' before promptly expiring. Though this is not strictly speaking illegal, the SEC frankly finds this to be a bit of a nuisance and is pulling rank.
WHJCoin: Invented by the r/WSBs crowd and popular among proponents of gold-backed currencies, WHJCoin was the darling of the industry. Through a proprietary combination of GPS and Fitbit whenever an HJ is given in the parking lot of a Wendy’s a Coin is created. Coins are accepted at 7-Eleven, Super-8 Motels, and Apple Pay.
Banned because: A hedge fund manager shorted WHJCoin. The bet looked to be going well until a group of Redditors drove the price of WHJCoins sky high. The hedge fund manager had no other option – at least for this investment – but to acquire more Coins and, well, you know the rest.
I don't subscribe to the podcast Patreon, so I just want to give a shout-out to SolenoidEntity who clearly cracked a bit at reading the Driverify portion. :)
my man this is epic. I've been lurk-reading since you came back online and I have to say.... the depth, breadth and ... well ... all of it. It's nothing short of great. I'm subbing.
I'm still trying to figure out how even with Wall Street-sponsored sabotage, ConTracked wouldn't be way, way superior to the current government contract and acquisitions system.
I mean, hedge funds gonna hedge fund, right? So you'll have some that short the ConTracked and hire saboteurs to blow up the bridges, but others will go long the ConTracked derivative instrument and pay for security and help with financials and such... Sounds perfectly feasible.
I LOL at these kinds of posts harder than just about anything. I really missed these during the great absence.
Maybe with Reddit's collective effort we can short squeeze ConTracked and therefore force Wall Street to buy non-existent bridges. "Ohhh Wall Street, I have a bridge to sell you...."
The only way your attempted joke about RedCoin works is if you haven't read and understood Marx's criticisms of money and the commodity form in general.
CryptoKitties: An Etheruem based platform for buying and selling digital kitty icons. Cats can also be bred with other cats, resulting in offspring with a unique combination of traits, including fur pattern, eye shape, and eye color. The first cat generated, Genesis, sold for over $100,000 two months after launch.
Banned because: The game became so popular that it eventually took over the Ethereum platform, preventing any other businesses from using it. This was considered monopolistic behavior and it was forced to shut down.
When one party had unified control of the government, they passed a major infrastructure bill on a strict party-line vote to issue ConTracked for a bunch of large construction projects that the other party opposed.
A few months later there was an election, the other party took power, and they barred all workers from the construction sites for trespassing on government land.
Since as rationalists, being overly analytical of jokes is our job:
One issue with ConTracked is that for infrastructure projects involving risk, it's better for the government to take the risk than to put it all on private contractors (since private companies are much smaller and require a higher risk premium, see here for more https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/30/who-should-bear-the-risk-in-infrastructure-projects/ ).
There's some other issues (or potential benefits: In general, infrastructure contracts are a monospony, so one of the things that make them cost-effective is to have a good government-side team who knows what they need from the contractors and how to resolve issues (this is why privatizing doesn't let you eliminate the city's planning department - the city still needs to know what it's paying for). OTOH, in theory if the goals are vague enough you might be able to use betting markets to replace the city planning department - just make the contract pay out when people vote that they can (in the bridge example) effectively get across the river. If the contractor discovers a geological issue and needs to know if moving the bridge two miles upstream would still qualify, they can announce their intention to do this and see if the value of the coin goes down.
Integrity: All traditional blockchains are vulnerable to corruption if enough nodes in the network decide to go rogue and may be attacked by a bad actor who has accumulated vast amounts of computing power or on-chain currency. Using cryptographic obfuscation techniques, the Integrity network can achieve trustless consensus even when every node but one is maliciously coordinating. Participants in the network do a great deal of computation and exchange large amounts of data, but no one can tell what the computations are actually doing or what the machines are saying to each other. The workings are irretrievably scrambled, they can't be feasibly decoded even by a hypothetical omniscient agent. You submit a transaction or query to an input buffer and some moments later the confirmation or result is written out for you along with a digital signature proving it genuine, but everything in between appears to be garbage, a black box. Because processing of transactions only needs a little bit of redundancy with full trust, the only overhead on the network is the cryptographic protocols required to scramble its internals, which due to recent algorithmic breakthroughs makes Integrity over 100 times more efficient than BuffyCoin, the closest competitor, using 1000000 times less electricity.
Banned because: The entrenched crypto industry is too big to fail
why has no one built GenghisCoin yet?
All of these are great. But the stake pun at the end made the whole thing perfect for me.
> spend it bidding against each other for right-of-way if they arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time
Read it first as if they're racing against each other, which would be an even more interesting idea. E.g. you have to get as fast as you can to some point, and your money is at stake
RandiCoin: A decentralized protocol to make and verify claims of supernatural phenomena. Users may post claims of supernatural activity at the cost of a transaction fee. Other users are then rewarded for attempts to verify or refute these claims. If the claim stands up to all scrutiny, the poster of the claim is rewarded with a significant portion of the market cap of the currency.
Banned because: Mysterious messages started appear on the blockchain that gave eerily accurate predictions of the future. The cryptographic signatures seemed to rule out every single user as being the originator of these messages. The SEC deemed this to be a form of insider trading.
CellCoin: A technology that harnesses your cells to engage in proof-of-work without requiring any computer or even conscious effort. In a feature added to spread the wealth, you can also share CellCoin with your neighbors without diminishing your own stake.
Banned because: Excessive investment in CellCoin can cause fever, respiratory distress, and (in some cases) death.
The last line killed me :D
But I think VatiCoin is involved in BuffyCoin...
MittCoin: Mitt Romney launched his ICO at the same time as his 2024 presidential campaign, promising an executive order to make it the official currency of the United States if he wins.
Banned because: congress and senate still controlled by dems, preemptively impeached Mitt in October 2024.
BeefCoin: independent ranchers needed a way to finance ethically raised, grass fed cattle. Backed by proof of steak
Ether-ium: named after a character in the Book of Mormon, the latter day saints were having trouble tracking the state of their global membership across thousands of parishes (which they call Wards and Stakes), and decided to use a distributed ledger. This also simplifies the process of collecting tithing, as ten percent of the coins automatically revert to church control upon minting. To reduce chances of adversarial takeover, only church members are allowed to participate, as verified by proof of Stake.
Banned because: concerns about separation of church and state
RedCoin "reverse proof of stake": splitting your holdings of RC into N even-sized wallets increases the quantity of RC you earn by N^2-fold (for the obvious interpretation; or at least N-fold, for a flat per-wallet distribution). Not banned, just submerged by the number of wallet creations.
No, your Honour, I was not soliciting. All I did was gift this upstanding young lady a modest quantity of altcoins, backed by a smart contract such that they would lose their value unless I got laid tonight.
(does anybody else spend a weird amount of time thinking about WWII Hawaii Overprint banknotes?)
I have been toying with the idea of Vice and Virtue coins. One of the interesting things about systems like ethereum and coins built on top of it is that if a smart contract awards you a Vice coin (perhaps a non fungible token indicating that you have done some specific bad deed), there's nothing you can do to reject or pass on that coin without the smart contract letting you.
This could let you assign Vice coins that advertise someone's misdeeds, and only clear them if they acquire Virtue or purchase Indulgence coins.
...sometimes I wonder about "fitting in" at SSC. Like, Scott posts something funny, and my first impulse is to quibble with (large) bits of it. Well, maybe I'll look at what other people posted.
...oh. Guess I am in the right place.
RedCoin actually sounds pretty fun to build as a learning project. Unfortunately, I don't understand enough about regular money to understand Bitcoin; only the technical CompSci parts make something close to sense to me...
I'd bet all my coins that the Vatican would call it DrachmaCoin.
You retroactively came up with the whole article so you could fit your pun at the end, didn't you?
I award you an ExcaliburCoin because laughter is beyond measure.
Thanks for brightening our mornings!
Umanity sounds like a good thing, but probably wouldn't work in real life since computers are now getting so good at solving certain types of Captchas that they even beat humans - e.g. see the shift from the two word captchas 5 years ago to what we have now; that happened because to evade the latest bots the words had to be so convoluted that a significant amount of humans couldn't decipher them either. The pressure to automate the solving process for the Umanity captchas would be immense given the potential reward to whoever manages to crack it.
BuffyCoin is just asking for Cobra effect and illegal vampire farms
CthuCoin: CthuCoin is mined by gibbering and shrieking in incomprehensible tongues which were ancient when the stars were young. Validity of this shrieking is verified in a decentralized process whereby Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, causes those who have heard his dread name to all call out in one voice that it is so, it is so, this coin bears the Name.
Banned because: when addressing concerns regarding the spontaneous flammability of the hair and eyes of professional shriekers, the head of the SEC was heard to cry 'They are here! All is woe! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn! Nyar C'tovl Ftagn!' before promptly expiring. Though this is not strictly speaking illegal, the SEC frankly finds this to be a bit of a nuisance and is pulling rank.
The fictional systems of governance posts were some of my favorite things. So naturally, I love this too, and a LOT.
GenghisCoin is genius.
WHJCoin: Invented by the r/WSBs crowd and popular among proponents of gold-backed currencies, WHJCoin was the darling of the industry. Through a proprietary combination of GPS and Fitbit whenever an HJ is given in the parking lot of a Wendy’s a Coin is created. Coins are accepted at 7-Eleven, Super-8 Motels, and Apple Pay.
Banned because: A hedge fund manager shorted WHJCoin. The bet looked to be going well until a group of Redditors drove the price of WHJCoins sky high. The hedge fund manager had no other option – at least for this investment – but to acquire more Coins and, well, you know the rest.
Other related old posts by Scott: :)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/17/slightly-skew-systems-of-government/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/02/little-known-types-of-eclipse/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160908033959/http://squid314.livejournal.com/331632.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160908034001/http://squid314.livejournal.com/298391.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160908033955/http://squid314.livejournal.com/349093.html
You fool !
Have you no idea what you have just done ?!
Has DogeCoin taught you nothing?
(EDIT : CryptoKitties, as posted by another commenter, is probably an ever better example...)
P.S.: *So* glad to not only have you back, but better than ever ! Subbed.
Charles Stross has invented something almost, but not quite, totally unlike RedCoin as a plot point in his 1999-2004 Accelerando book :
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html
(Also, Ethereum : search this book for agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 )
"They pretend to pay us RedCoins, and we pretend to mine them."
hex coin hex dot com
I don't subscribe to the podcast Patreon, so I just want to give a shout-out to SolenoidEntity who clearly cracked a bit at reading the Driverify portion. :)