I don't know exactly what kind of brainworm it is that makes most people who are coming into mentions of crytypocurrentseas and NTFS to be So About Them that they mention them in their Twitter bios, but on the plus side it makes them real easy to block.

Has anyone made a bot which connects to your Twitter account, searches all your followers, and autoblocks everyone who is like "Jon McJohns. 37. Proud father of 8 rabbits. EthernetPoints will take us to THE MOON hashtag elomnusk"

Ethernet Points, by the way, are Ether*um. It's the least obvious of my typo renaming anti-keyword searching but I find it so funny that I have to keep doing it.

It makes me think the whole crytypo thing is based on some kind of Linksys loyalty program where you get bonus points every time you buy a network cable or a wireless router

And, fun fact, that would actually be a less wasteful and more valid currency than most crytypo

So there's EthernetPoints, Buttcon, the whole BorkChimp/blerkchan technology in general, the "sell me a jpeg but don't call it gacha" nonsense that's NTFS, and Crytypocurrentseas of all sorts.

I nonsense these words for three reasons.
1. That's how seriously I take them and how seriously I think they should be taken.

2. Bots. There are bots that look for any mention of crytypocurrentseas and if you have enough followers, they will quickly rename themselves to match your Twitter name (almost) and display name and avatar and then reply, running a crypto-currant-sea scam.
So a scam on a scam.

3. Keyword searching humans.
SOME PEOPLE are so very ingested (no pun intended) into the whole idea of Monopoly Money But Math that they keyword search anyone mentioning it in a negative manner so they can show up and yell DEBATE ME

And while I can block them, of course, I'd rather avoid the whole problem in the first place, plus hopefully preemptively discourage them talking at me about it because of how clearly I just don't care

Because if I went "man I don't know if this webpack.js thing is really a good fit for my project", a webpack expert might show up and say "no it's great, here's some tips on how you can make it work".

On the other hand if I was like "you are a fool and a sinner for even considering using wobpuck.sux", then clearly I'm not coming at it from a mostly neutral position that could be easily swayed back into the positive camp

I'm starting from a position of "this thing is bad and you are bad for liking it and it's not worth taking seriously and do not @ me on this"

Which hopefully serves to scare off at least some of the Debate Me! replyguys, since they might go "hmm maybe foone is not a person worth trying to convince right now, I'll keep looking"

And really, please do move on and/or shut up. Crytypocurrentseas are fractally bad ideas and even if I am wrong on some element of them and you convince me of that, I'm still against them for all the other reasons.

They're bad money. I'm against bad money.
They're bad for computers. I like computers, as much as it doesn't seem like it.
They're bad for the environment. I happen to live on the planet so I want to not kill it

They enable and are repeating in alphabetical order ever single scam every played on and by the stock market, just without centuries of regulation written specifically to stop those scams.
For that matter, they're a stock market with no SEC to oversee them.

I'm not a huge fan of the stock market in the first place, so you can only imagine how I feel about your brilliant idea of "what if we made a new stock market but without oversight or regulation"

The way these new crons (Inept Cron Offending) are sold is somewhere between (and overlapping with both of) multi-level-marketing (aka pyramid schemes) and gambling, and I'm not huge fans of either of those.

The way that valuation of curramptees is based on public perception, plus the need for users to buy in early, heavily incentivizes spam. You have no idea how many reddits I have blocked in the last few months.

Because there'd be r/NewCoins4Musk and it'd get swamped with up vote brigades and then some fool would want to promote their new PewDieCoin (the only virtual radio shack battery club stamp powered by letsplayers) but couldn't manipulate that reddit enough

So they'd create r/moonrocketcoins and install their own mods and now they can manipulate THIS reddit

There was a week long period where I'd scroll through five pages of r/all posts and end up blocking ten new reddits, each with a single big post with 20,000 upvotes

And don't get me started in NTFS. I've read the spec, it's a bad idea, it's badly implemented, it's a badly implemented bad idea. It's being sold (literally) as things it's not and cannot do, and it's quite clearly failed and become a scam that depends on ignorance.

NTFS is a bad way to make selling a jpeg possible. But even then, it fails at that. You can't sell a jpeg, because the boekxhan is too expensive to embed images in, so you instead sell a URL but with no verification of contents

Meaning that if you sell a jpeg you're actually selling a pointer to foobar.egg/ntfs.jpg and guess the fuck what? The contents of that url can change or go away at any time.

You can "solve" this problem by basing it on IPFS, but this has its own problems because IPFS isn't a magic host things forever service. You still have to have someone providing it. So to ensure you don't lose it you'll need to maintain a server and keep backups

At which point you might as well ask "why is the borkchan even involved in this?"

Let's say I set up FooneJpegWarehouse.egg and you can log in and see pictures of floppy disks and pay me to own them. When you pay me, I put "owned by Bob Foobar" on the page.

And if you want, you can even resell them! Just send me an email saying "hey this is bob Foobar, I sold my jpeg of the hard sectored 8" Wang disk to Sarah Qux" and I'll update the page.

And now I've just built a system which has basically all the selling points of NTFS, is just as reliable moving forward, and doesn't have the ecological or economic impact, because instead of building the whole thing on abusing too much math and GPUs to get EthernetPoints...

I just use MySQL.

Because remember the actual point of BookChin technology is to build a distributed "database".
It's often called a database, at least, but it's more like an append-only text file.

But hey, this isn't 100% fair, there's one very big feature FooneJpegWarehouse.egg doesn't have that NTFS have, which is why anyone is into NTFS over simpler systems:
It doesn't have any buzz and is too easy to understand

Because don't get me wrong: NTFS are a complicated solution (built on a problem that doesn't exist) that needs other complicated and intentionally labyrinthine technology to even work at all, and it barely does, and this is honestly the main selling point.

The workings of NTFS are hard to understand and that makes them better, because the real "market" for them? It's scammers.

Look at the current state of NTFS discourse and this becomes obvious.
Do you see people excited to buy them? Excited to make new things and sell them as NTFS? Occasionally, but that's not the most common reason they're brought up.

No the two main reasons anyone is still talking about NTFS is:
1. Technical people going "oh my god ntfs are a scam do not touch them"
2. Older brand or artist or meme creator announces they're doing some NTFS in collaboration with *mumble mumble*

And #2 isn't happening because the Numa Numa guy woke up one day and was like HOW CAN I MONETIZE MY OLD VIDEO?

It's because someone came to some creator who already had some amount of name or creation recognition and sold THEM on the idea of NTFS, counting on the fact that they wouldn't understand NTFS enough to realize it's a bad idea

And for the scammer it's win win.
Either the NTFS sale goes off and they skim some fraction of the price off (or they just run off with all the money), or, as increasingly happens, the community rises up and yells at the artist over supporting such a bad thing

But importantly, they yell at the artist, not the probably unseen party that convinced them to work with them to sell the NTSC.
The ones whose idea this was? They can just fade away, unharmed, and look for another target.

The artist may be "canceled" and lose fans, but that's no problem for the scammer. Doesn't reflect on them, at all.

And that's the other thing you should consider as a negative for things like NTFS:

people are increasingly against them. People will cry "traitor!" and stop supporting artists and companies when they become involved with them.

And I've explained why I think there are many reasons for the fans to react that way, but a point I'd like to make is that, for this downside, it doesn't actually matter.

If it turned out we're all run and crytypocurrentseas and NTFS were totally fine, somehow, you'd STILL have the fact that you are going to get that backlash for touching them.

Even if you find a way to shout down every other complaint on this list, if this last one of "you will face a big fan backlash for touching NTFS" remains true, you still haven't won.

So it'd still be a bad idea to touch NTFS, because even if legally and ethically fine (and they sure as fuck are not), your userbase will react negatively.

And in any case, even if there was no backlash and it wasn't a scam and there wasn't the horrible technological/ecological/spam/scam impacts of NTFS, I still am against them.

NTFS are being sold as "supporting artists" which is a lie. The main the NTFS enables is resale of art. Guess what happens when art is resold?

THE ARTIST DOESN'T MAKE ANY MONEY OFF IT, OBVIOUSLY.

Look if you want to support artists and/or have something uniquely yours, just commission artists. You can pay them with, like, PayPal and credit cards and Amazon gift cards.
All of those are better, more real, better regulated, less impactful to the environment, types of money

The artist gets your money (supported!) and in return you get some art that's more yours than any NTFS could ever be.
It is made to your specifications! It might have your name on it! You might even have the only copy!

And NTFS is pushing digital works in the opposite direction I think they should be moving. See, I'm an archivist. I want things backed up and shared and available because I think that's morally right and a duty we have for the future.

Moving digital works more towards traditional physical objects by trying to impose some kind of artificial scarcity on them is exactly not they way I want to be moving.

That's a step backwards from my perspective. So even if you fixed all the other issues somehow, I'd still be against them!

And don't get me wrong: NTFS are still a badly designed, badly implemented, badly considered attempt at making artificial scarcity work for digital works like it does for physical objects.

As implemented it absolutely cannot do any of the things it is trying to do. It's only useful as a hypothetical you can scam somebody with by claiming it works.

I also have a hypothetical bridge if you're in the market for one

But those are all design and implementation issues with the current iteration of NTFS.

And if this Bad Idea is not stopped here it could continue on and get "better".

Some of the problems could be worked out. The hosting problems could be fixed with hashing and storing content directly in a bertchamp. DRM could be added. Laws could be passed to make it illegal to circumvent parts of the technology.

And as an archivist that would be an unmitigated disaster.
We'd have content hidden behind DRM that we're legally not allowed to archive and WHAT ABOUT THE PUBLIC GOD DAMN DOMAIN, PEOPLE?

Look I know that Disney has effectively infinite money and a vested interest in nothing have its copyright expire, ever, but in theory at some point works creates today will have their copyright expire and they'll enter the public domain and this is a good thing.

Copyright is not SUPPOSED to be perpetual. Copyright is a limited monopoly granted to artists IN ORDER TO ENCOURAGE THE CREATION OF NEW WORKS which will one day enter the public domain and freely enrich all.

But if we build our content into DRM on the bonkcramp it has no idea of copyright duration. Your NTFS will still be just as protected a thousand years from now (barring a complete failure of the encryption system)

I prefer things like copyright to be enforced by lawyers and judges who have laws they follow and can be swayed by public opinion causing those laws to be changed

Rather than a pile of math and computer code created by the very entity with the most vested interest in making as much money as possible, fuck the law and the customer and the "public good"

And getting away from NTFS and going back to general crypto-currant-seas, lemme tell about another part of them:

One reason they're sold as a good idea is that they're free from government control.

And yeah, in the wake of things like OnlyFans planning to drop porn, I can definitely see why you'd want that. Money policy is often set by politicians you don't agree with or controlled by companies who can be swayed by Concerned Citizens

But "free of government control" also means "free of government oversight" and some of that oversight is a very good idea.

Like, part of why there is oversight on large transactions is to keep things like bribes from being too easy to do. To keep organized crime from easily, well, organizing.

And there are things you can buy with a unregulated money transfer system that I don't think are a good thing. I don't care if you're full libertarian "you should be able to buy anything!", I am not

I'm not so bothered by people buying drugs and pictures of tits, no matter what the pressure on Visa and Mastercard is, but I don't think it's a good thing that this enables buying things that are not only illegal but morally wrong.

I don't like a currency that's optimized for buying assassinations and child abuse imagery.

And yes, you could buy those things with traditional money systems too, but your methods always left traces. You either had to use systems which had a paper trail, or meet in person and use cash, which is difficult and leaves other kinds of evidence.

Crytypocurrentseas being "free of oversight and regulations" also means its free of the oversight put in place to try to track things like this, and terrorism, and any number of things you hopefully agree shouldn't be legal.

And like I complained about it being a stock market without regulation, it's also banks without regulation.
You know how banks in the US have that whole "deposits secured by FDIC" sign in their windows?

That's an important agency created in the 1933 banking act to restore faith in the banks.
You know why people lost faith in the banks?

BECAUSE THEY ALL FAILED AND LOST EVERYONE'S MONEY!

And that shit can (and already has) happened to crytypocurrentseas too. A lot of the "selling points" of digitalmoney are things that are arguably true but aren't true in practice because you don't hold your own wallet.

Crytypocurrentseas (I need a shorter word for this but as someone named after a cryptographer I refuse to shorten it to just "cr*pto" ) is based on sending money between wallets, and all the guarantees it makes are based on that.

But actually having a wallet means running some software which uses bandwidth and has to sync with the borkchan and if your hard drive dies you better have backups or that money just evaporated

So intend people usually go the convent route and use some site to manage their crytypocons.

And that means you have just invested SO MUCH TRUST in that site.

They are acting as a bank for you but are almost certainly not run like a bank, and not secured like a bank, and not under the same regulations as a bank.

And people like to hear "regulations" and thing "bah, red tape, making everything slow and expensive" but hang on, a lot of that regulation is there because SOME BANK DID THIS AND IT ENDED BADLY FOR EVERYONE

It's like how people mock OSHA regulations like "no storing explosive chemicals in unsecured barrels next to the break room and orphanage for 3 legged puppies". Like yeah, "who would do that?"

And the answer almost always is "someone did. Because it was cheaper and easier and yeah the workers complained but fuck them, do it or find a new job, and then one day the thing no one could have forseen happened and now all the puppies are on fire."

We have a lot of financial regulations on banks and stocks and every level in which money is dealt with!
Because we have been doing this for a long time and every scam and mistake has been tried and it cost people their savings and lives and we tried to prevent it happening again

And so much of cryptocurrent is "let's build a new money system without all this regulation" without considering the problem of "how do we stop the scams and problems all that regulation aims to prevent or punish?"

If you're feeling charitable, you can say that's just shortsightedness and not understanding how many times and in how many ways stocks and banks and money has been used in scams.

If you're not feeling charitable, you might suspect that those problems weren't considered specifically because the people building these financial systems without regulation wanted to enable those scams because they were pulling them.

Anyway, back on the "using a site to manage your fake money": even if the site isn't actively scamming you or enabling people to scam you, they just became a bank.

You know why people rob banks? Because that's where the money is.

And now those sites just put a huge target on themselves for every unethical hacker on the planet.

If you're doing cryptocurrams with your own wallet on your own computer, I might hack you and get all your pennies. Great, that's, a few hundred, a few thousand dollars?

If you do all your crytypocurrings with TrustUsCrypotato.egg and I hack them, I could make off with millions.

And real banks have regulations and oversight which means they have to have insurance and the insurance isn't going to insure a bank who never locks the fault and only has a small ferret as a security guard

If some guy from the 1930s puts on a nice suit and robs your local bank with a Tommy gun, you don't lose your savings.

The bank takes a loss and insurance or government systems like FDIC cover it and your money is fine.
If zerocool hacks CryoSeaTrading.egg and runs off with all the BanjoCoin, you are, to use a technical term, totally fucked.

This is not a hypothetical. This happened to me, technically.
Back in the early 2010s I was interested in this crytypo stuff so j went and got some Buttcon. After a bit, I learned more and decided to get out. I turned my remaining points into gift cards for Xmas presents.

But because you had to buy gift cards in multiples of line 20$, I still had some fractional points left in the account.

I won't say what site it is (because the name is a keyword) but they started as a site to sell magic cards.

So a year or so later, they get hacked, they declare bankruptcy, there's been ongoing legal proceedings to maybe get some of the NEARLY A MILLION buttcoms back to the users of the site.
It's been 7 years now. I haven't seen them yet.

In theory I might someday get back a fraction of them, but I certainly am not holding my breath.

But yeah. This thread is getting so long that my mobile Twitter client seems to be having memory problems replying to it, and keeps lagging.

Also my. Battery is at 17% and I haven't had coffee yet.
So I'm going to stop yelling at crytypo for now.

But just please, please:
1. Don't get into it. It's a bad idea on every level.
2. Don't try to argue with me about it. I wrote a thread this long about how much I hate it and think it's bad, unprompted. You aren't going to sway me, and I'll just block you and hide your posts.

So you won't even manage to persuade anyone else by hopping on the visibility of this thread.

So kindly don't bother.

I'm gonna go get coffee.
If you enjoyed this thread and would like to support me getting coffee, feel free to send me some entirely non-cryptopato dollars in thanks on my ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing 

I promise not to use your donations to buy any kind of fake money made of hidden numbers and complicated math.

After all, as my grandfather, Alan Turing once said:
"WE GAVE SAND ANXIETY FOR ONE REASON AND ONE REASON ALONE: TO KILL NAZIS.
NOT TO BURN COAL SO YOU CAN BUY WEED AND PEDOPHILIA OFF THE DARK WEB"

Though I personally don't care about the weed part. Have fun!
But I'm in California. Shit's legal here. Using cryptocurrentsea to buy pot is just a waste of money, money that could instead be used on BUYING MORE WEED

But Grampa Turing is of a different generation... And that generation was the one that thought "I know, let's invent an entirely new field of technology to kill fascists!"

So, you know, ya'll need to step up.

Anyway the final reason you should be against crytypocurrentseas is that we're currently in the midst of a silicon shortage because of the pandemic and it's therefore hard to find GPUs, a problem that's only made worse by a bunch of them being stuck in xetpto mines.

Instead of doing that they were designed for, what they were made for, what they dream of:
Rendering high-definition images of the sweet video game you're playing where you just shot a nazi with a tubalauncher

If all the gpus get wasted on crunching hashes so people can sell JPEGs of Lil Nas X, video games are gonna have to go back to this.

And as much as I love retro games, trust me, you don't want to be forced to only play games from 1981.

Although if you want to try the 1981 start to the Wolfenstein franchise, you can play it right here, in your browser. And you know why it can be played in your browser, even on a phone? BECAUSE WE HAVE FAST COMPUTER CHIPS NOT BEING WASTED ON MINING CYROS
https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Castle_Wolfenstein

As if to prove the point I was making in the first post in this thread, the first replier I blocked from this had the names of 11 curremcies in their bio

I'm very busy today but maybe tomorrow I'll build that bot to detect users with Overly Cryptkeeper bios.