"... from free digital bobblehead! Is this the start of a goldrush era in crypto merch?"

What will be reported:
How a bunch of regular old fanbros just paid their mortgage from selling wack-ass crypto bobblehead things that suddenly everyone wants
How easy it is to trade these tokens if you just go to $promoterPortalDisguisedAsFanBlog and follow helpful wallet creation wizard steps

What won't be reported:
"stunned fan" (along with 2 or 3 others who were helpfully introduced to the article's author) was a plant by the promoters of the bobblehead scam, who directly or through sockpuppets hold 20-50% of the total liquid supply so as to play chart wizardry with the price at will,
and/or: article author was approached with "free samples," a personal tech walkthrough of the crypto-bobblehead trading process to "try it out and just have some fun," and 75% of the article copy pre-written to help him/her spin^H^H^H^H explain all the futurist crypto-hustle jargon to the readers

(repost from unexpectedly AC-ified session, thanks New Chrome)

Username checks out

Crypto without "decentralization" (and thus the possibility of censorship resistant and anonymous transactions) is just digital currency, which governments have been trying to make happen for 30 years already. The hype around crypto is convenient and timely momentum to co-opt for their much older objectives.

Decentralization is a mirage, but it's the mirage that distinguishes "cryptocurrency" from "digital currency which happens to involve cryptography"

A project that sprang from a motivation to eliminate the ability for central bankers to arbitrarily print money (by transferring the function of money creation to "the people") becomes the very tool used to facilitate it. Shockingly, It turns out that governments are members of the set called "the people." /s

Blockchain consultant: "You see - it is all meet and right, for in the beginning, your Holyness, we shall have a Genesis Block. And thus through Proof of Works shall we suffer the poor to mine unto God what is God's for the glory of the one true Fork."

Papa F: "My child, this proposal seems canonically inconsistent with doctrines concerning salvation by faith. Indeed, should we not tempt the poor into the servitude of Mammon by making each the hustler of his fellow man, the wealthy must be persuaded to - what's that word you use - "bootstrap" the tithing with their voluntary contributions."

Blockchain consultant: "Your foresight is without equal, oh primus inter pares, for we deal address this in the next slide deck, "Phase 2: Indulgence Coin Offering"

Papa F: "A righteous solution, but how do you propose we explain all of this to the flock?"

Blockchain consultant: "We shall distribute this wisdom through the establishment of an official education and outreach program, a Center For Decentralization, if you will"

Papa F: "Ah! Complex problem answered by a Holy Mystery; the Eastern Orthodox will certainly be envious. However I have a final inquisition for you."

Blockchain consultant: "By your grace, please ask"

Papa F: "What's Phase 3?"

...in a less overtly hostile context. Yet the effect is exactly the same, with the innovation that blame for any unwanted harmful side effects and external costs is shifted from "disruptors" to the nameless, anonymous agency of of "the people" or "the investors." In the end, gravity wins, and that which was decentralized will re-centralize in roughly the same form.

People do track, because decentralization has dynamic limits due to signalling constraints, like any complex system. The people who care to invest the effort and time required to position themselves such that they can do the tracking, and thereby collect highly exclusive information about the informal hierarchies that structure the 'structureless' channels of influence within it, understand how powerful the cloak of decentralization is.

Since I was a kid I've wondered about something like this, although my (then) 12-year old way of expressing the question was a lot different (and a lot simpler in scope). What if you wrote a simple program that filled a 1000x1000 pixel matrix of 24-bit RGB values with every possible combination? The program could be short, but really the language is irrelevant, as you could design a special language with one argumentless 'instruction' that did only this. (We could start now getting into whether the language's host environment (OS) can be regarded as simply a fancy immediate-mode interpreter, but thats a different topic)

What are the implications? Forget how long it would take or the fact that perhaps 99% of the resulting images would be apparent garbage (could be looking at every square meter of sidewalk on earth), isn't it possible that every conceivable image in the entire universe would eventually get drawn? But how can that be, since although the number of possible combinations (64^1000000) is unfathomably large it is still finite, but isnt the universe (and therefore the subset of the universe that is visible in 24-bit RGB) infinite? Or is it? Every person's face that ever lived, every rock, stone, every animal, evey bacterium, every star, - everything, from every possible angle, would eventually appear.

"Aha", you say, "but at that fixed resolution two grains of sand/two stars/two ashley twins might look identical, pixel-for-pixel!" Right, but remember that all possible distances from each are shown, so if you multiply the zoom by two and tile 4 adjacent 1000^2 pixel zoomed images into a square the differences can be appear; if not, do it again and again until the sufficient resolution is obtained to show the differences.

Now remember my 1000x1000 grid is arbitrary, you can use a 10x10 grid if you like, and in fact that makes this more troublesome because the pace is much smaller: there are vastly fewer 10x10 24 bit images, but the zoom-and-tile method can still be applied - so does this mean the whole universe can be shown in 24^100 tiles? What about a 5x5 grid? 2x2? Help me out here because I'm trying to figure out what's missing in my logic - there's no way the limited number of permutations of 2x2 pixel grids is sufficient to express every image in the universe, but by zooming and tiling it seems like its possible. Or not?

Rob Cebollero (using an old account since I am not near my usual machine)

- Opinions subject to change without notice. -RC