By David Futrelle
A couple of days ago, ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman tweeted out some advice on a hitherto unacknowledged peril of dating for (at least mostly) straight women in our digital age: when the seemingly normal dude you’re having coffee with suddenly, and for seemingly no reason, brings up Bitcoin.
While there were many Tweeters who seconded this advice, some of them mentioning their own Bitcoin date nightmares, not everyone who replied to Huseman agreed with what seems to me to be her eminently sensible dating advice.
“Is [the] goal to screen out passionate men working on one of the most important technologies of the next generation,” asked one fellow.
Er, yes?
“#Bitcoin bros deserve better, and by the time she realises this he’ll be unattainable for her,” warned another.
There were even some women standing up for the Bitbros — one of them going so far as to write an entire article about it for Bitcoinist, a website that seems to be devoted to constantly mentioning Bitcoin in any and all circumstances.
Christina Comben, whose articles for the site generally sport headlines like “TOP 5 CHEAPEST COUNTRIES TO MINE BITCOIN” and “3 REASONS WHY BITFINEX LEO TOKEN HAS FLOPPED” decided she needed to reassure the men in her audience that some ladies actually like cryptocurrency and the bros who talk about it on first dates.
After acknowledging that the Bitcoin community is pretty much a sausagefest — with only 5% of those in the business being female, according to one source — she plaintively assured the fellas that “NOT ALL WOMEN DISLIKE BITCOIN.”
“Don’t worry guys,” she wrote,
if bitcoin is your thing, it isn’t completely game over. Some women actually said they quite like it.
Her evidence? A handful of crypto-gals replying to Huseman on Twitter.
Comben then delved into the enigma that is Jessica Huseman: Woman Who Doesn’t Care to Hear About Bitcoin. “[A]lthough she seems to hate Bitcoin,” Combed wrote, seemingly baffled by Huseman’s existence, “she appears to be an extremely intelligent lady.”
Huseman, for her part, was considerably more delighted by Comban’s article than she is by cryptodudes on dates.
She now quotes the bit about being “an extremely intelligent lady” in her Twitter bio.
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@Cat Mara
There’s bitcoin cruises? I wouldn’t touch one with a 10 foot pole.
…and that’s American “libertarianism” in a nutshell. Ancap is just another word for corporatocratic totaliatarianism.
Also, you can double-spend coins? I’d think the system would try to stop that.
@Surplus,
Check your phone against the game hardware requirements to see if it’s compatible. If not, you can try and find a local tech repair store and see how much they charge to upgrade your phone to the latest iOS. I have an old iPhone 5 that Apple no longer supplies updated iOS for, but my local tech mechanic was able to upgrade without a problem. YMMV, as usual.
And if you choose to play Pokémon GO, or the Harry Potter game Wizards Unite*, do a Google search on PoGO [your city/county] Discord, and you should get a listing of almost all the Discord and Facebook groups based in your area. The main reason to join a few of those isn’t so much for the socialization (though that is a good), but because a well-run group will be planning meet-ups to take down assorted Legendaries when they spawn in gyms, trade game tips and news, and warn when things like marathons are being run right by the best spawning spots.
Or you could always download Zombies! Run! (or whatever that game is called 😀 ) and see if you can solve the puzzle while jogging/walking in real life. Or download any game that catches your eye and still makes you get up and about your neighborhood.
*Though Rowling herself is questionable in many areas, the game itself isn’t too bad. It can be a bit of a money sink if you’re not careful, but otherwise it does have an interesting mystery at it’s core. At least so far, anyway.
ETA: didn’t see Surplus’ answer about the phone until after I posted. :/
My main issue with her is that she’s a TERF. What other bad things did she do? I’m curious now.
I never really got that into the HP series anyway.
@Naglfar:
Not to worry. The 10 foot pole is provided. Actually, it’s longer than 10 feet, because it’s making a point. It sticks proudly out the ship’s bow, for it is a useless, but mighty and impressive bowsprit.
Naturally, it is shaped like a penis.
@Naglfar:
Bitcoin has no “single point of truth”; it works by consensus. The state of the bitcoin “world” is simply the version of the blockchain that is accepted by a majority of the network. If a cartel of bitcoin miners is able to control more than 51% of the network, they can basically do what they like, including double-spending or blocking transactions from bitcoin addresses they don’t like making it onto the blockchain. There is no real way of stopping this in bitcoin’s current design– it was kind of written off as a problem when bitcoin was created because its creators felt that while it was theoretically possible, it would be impossible in practice because trying to organise a conspiracy like this in the massively-decentralised system bitcoin was originally envisaged to be would be akin to herding cats– thousands of cats. Thousands of libertarian cats¹. But once the mining started centralizing, it became feasible. The bitcoin fans have tried to downplay it by arguing that it’s in no-one’s best interest to start playing silly buggers like this but, well, I don’t share their optimism.
¹ Cats are not libertarians, despite what people might think. Even they’re not that self-centred. ?
I’d guess that cats are more likely to be aristocrats.
Ten minutes ago, I didn’t know that Bitcoinist existed. It was a simpler, happier time.
@WWTH
I’m absolutely certain you’re right. The very few Bitcoinbros that I have had the misfortune to encounter personally, however, have been of the brocialist type. You know, the kind that think class is all that matters because it is the only thing keeping them, straight cis white dudes, from their place at the top of the heap, a place to which they would naturally rise because they’re just smarter and better than other people, bro. The kind that call themselves socialists but idolize Elon Musk somehow.
Some interesting things have happened to “money” since my 4th grade teacher’s lesson that “money” isn’t really a REAL thing, merely a representation of other things the society places value on…. In essence her argument was, you can’t buy and sell money….
May I present: “BITCOIN”
(not to mention about 75% of traded stock, which also has no counterpart in the world of “real” value….)
I think we tried that with gold and prospecting 🙂 Until we realized that digging it up just to hide it underground again was a bit silly.
I thiiink @TruthBot was the new comment let through? I don’t recognise your name, welcome! You can pick up your package to the right, hope you uh… maybe not enjoy? But find fulfillment during your stay. XD
I haven’t met many bitcoinbros in the wild, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is that overlap. :/
I can certainly understand being super into something complicated and wanting to talk about it in detail with people, but trying to do so on a first date seems like a terrible idea unless the other person is all “I am also super into The Thing let as talk about it in detail.”
Right now I’m getting back into World of Warcraft and am obsessed with an addon called WeakAuras2, which is INCREDIBLY flexible and INCREDIBLY complicated… and there’s no one that I can discuss it with IRL.
My “favorite” thing about Bitcoin is that its fans are the same dudes who go on about how “fiat currency” has no real value.
Bitcoin cruises: If you don’t throw up from the noroviruses that are always rampant on those ships, you’ll puke from all libertarian bro fumes.
Basically I see this as the same thing as the (multiple!!) dudes I went on dates with where they would ask about what I do, I would explain how I’m working on migrating some data from an aging program to another type of program that’s designed to handle that type of data better, and they would spend the next hour splaining to me about how all I really need is a simple search engine. (No, there are entire companies dedicated to making this one type of data storage who make big bucks on contracts because it’s a hard problem to solve.) And now that I’m a software engineer I wonder how they even thought the search engine idea they had was “simple.”
In short: the problem is a) attempting to apply a technology you don’t understand to a problem you understand even less, b) thinking you’re smarter than the people who have already been working on this problem for decades, and c) thinking this will impress your date. Folks, when you’re on a date, check in after you talk for a few minutes, don’t just talk about the stuff you want to talk about, and ask the other person lots of questions so it’s not just about you.
@kupo
I’ve had to do some of that myself. I feel your pain.
Also, how would a search engine help with that exactly? I don’t understand.
This is something I have to be careful to remember on dates, as I have a tendency to talk for a very long time otherwise. Though at least I’ve never rambled about bitcoin on a date.
My understanding is that some people crunched numbers and found that you can actually completely dominate Bitcoin with only about a third of the network, and it only has to be a coalition working together having a third of the network. Basically you don’t need to control 51% as long as you have 34% and can keep the other groups of 33% or less from agreeing on things. And, of course, as the mining has got more difficult (due to deliberate design decisions to give the system a maximum number of coins) it has got more concentrated. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the botnets that are used for mining are close to that level.
Bitcoin was one guy’s ‘bright idea’ based on an incomplete understanding of the math and politics involved. If anybody wanted a blockchain money system that actually worked, Bitcoin would be recognized for the flawed prototype that it is and discarded in preference to one of the better systems that has been built. Alas, the cult-like attitude around Bitcoin has prevented that, and the cult-like attitude around most of the potential replacements has prevented them from getting anywhere. Cryptocurrencies are dominated by cultish personalities and people who are convinced that they are the brightest person in the room and have the next big thing.
Even the environmental aspects of Bitcoin are an effect of the initial design decisions. It was in fact deliberately designed as a Ponzi scheme, where the earlier you got in, the easier it was to mine coins, and so later people joining would have to do more work to create the same value. There have been systems designed since without this flaw.
Oh, they thought instead of the fancy program with all the bells and whistles that was designed for the specific type of data I was migrating I could just dump all the data into…I actually don’t know, a database?…and then type search terms into a simple search engine to retrieve the data.
It’s kind of funny because the worst versions of the software we needed relied heavily on a search engine (in addition to the many other features they offered) and that was the worst part–no way to browse to find the data you need. (I’m probably not explaining it well because I want to avoid going into the exact nature of the work I was doing or the type of data involved.) In reality we needed a way to author content, a way to browse content/data, a way to filter data, preferably some kind of workflow management, etc, etc. Waaaay more than just a search engine to retrieve data.
Edit: I think we all need to learn to ask questions of our dates/friends/whatever instead of just babbling at some point. 🙂
@Kupo:
“Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man”. — Sarah Hagi
*Sigh*….WRONG
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jk-rowling-transphobia-transgender/
@Naglfar
Speaking on behalf of bohos of every species, take another look at that poster. Those are bohemians in that band, possibly beatniks, even though the movie is from 1970.
@Jenora:
You’re absolutely right and I forgot to mention that– you don’t even need majority consensus to get up to mischief. I think it was Emin Gün Sirer at Cornell and the Hacking, Distributed blog that discovered it. I haven’t seen any rigorous refutation of his findings either– it’s all, “it’s theoretical/ it’s FUD/ no-one would do that because enlightened self-interest!!1! arglebargle/ la la la I’m not listening”…
That’s the thing: all these dudes who like talking about bitcoin at people because they think it makes them look like they’re on the leading edge and knowledgeable about cryptography and distributed systems and arriving at consensus in distributed systems where you can’t trust the members… aren’t. They think that installing a bitcoin wallet on their PCs and watching a few YouTube videos makes them so, but it’s all surface. I don’t understand it that deeply either but at least I’m honest about it ?
@Cat Mara
To believe in any sort of enlightened self interest, one must have far more faith in humanity than I do.
@Cat Mara, Naglfar:
I’m pretty sure I read about that on Bruce Schneier’s blog, which I don’t follow as much as I used to. Applied Cryptography was one of my textbooks in grad school.
As for the ‘refutations’:
As far as they know. If somebody actually was in a position to be able to forge the ledger, what makes them think that the person doing that would be stupid enough to talk about it? Doing that would eliminate a lot of the trust in Bitcoin, and crash the value of it. And considering that in order to have that control you’d have to have billions of dollars invested in Bitcoin (current total Bitcoin value is apparently $41B, and you need a third of it), the only reason anybody would talk about it is if they were willing to throw away billions for the sole purpose of killing the currency, rather than to use that control to make more billions by double-selling Bitcoins.
As was said about the Heath Ledger version of the Joker, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Anybody who’s done any study of actual law should know that a lot of laws exist precisely because of failures of ‘enlightened self-interest’ to actually control people, either through stupidity or sociopathy (or both). Of course, folks like this (or Trump) tend to think that laws exist to control those nebulous ‘other people’ or ‘sheep’, and they never follow that line of reasoning enough to realize that a lot of those ‘other people’ consider them the sheep.
In practice, ‘enlightened self-interest’ should be pretty much indistinguishable from altruism, because a lot of the ‘enlightened’ part is recognizing that you need a well-functioning society around you to support you while you do things.
So much of Libertarian thought seems to come down to “everyone’s a sucker but me”… which is exactly the mindset that con artists love to exploit.
It reminds me of the complex many conservatives seem to have where they think they’re a counterculture speaking truth to power when really they are the ones in power screaming lies.
The whole Bitcoin movement runs on pure doublethink. One of the purported advantages of Bitcoin was that it was designed to trade with people you didn’t altogether trust. But if “compensating for a lack of trust” is one of the key features, it follows that the system ought to include active measures to prevent people from gaming it. But when obvious, exploitable flaws in the protocol are uncovered, the Bitcoin boosters immediately switch to appeals to nebulous “rational self-interest”. C’mon, either everyone using it is an untrustworthy ne’er-do-well or a perfectly rational actor… which is it?
(One could argue that participating in a system that wastes power with a profligacy hitherto unseen to achieve a maximum transaction rate of a measly 7/second and contributes to the environmental clusterfuck in which we find ourselves is hardly acting in one’s own self-interest, rational or otherwise… but here we are)