Eastfist

Why Bitcoin Cannot Save Greece
By Chongchen Saelee

You can see the desperation in the eyes of Bitcoin’s cultish eloquent tragic hero Andreas Antonopolous who believes himself the savior of his beloved Greek peoples, having “inherited the Greek Drachma”. It seems Greece is victim to crooked banksters and politicians taking good chunks out of its citizens money, apparently to pay off national debts. How could Bitcoin possibly save anyone if it’s just a matter of replacing an exploited currency with another one? If those crooks can take the Drachmas, what’s stopping them from taking away the people’s Bitcoins?

Money only works when there is trust amongst the people using it. It’s an abstract concept. The farmer who raises the cattle for your hamburger is more valuable than you if you don’t know how to raise livestock. However, if you are a charismatic sociable person with resourceful friends who could possibly trade resources with you and the farmer, then you’ve got a little bartering ecosystem going for yourself. You may very well become very valuable to the cattle farmer if you have a friend that knows how to mend shoes, or grow a special crop, or give awesome haircuts. The value is relative to the people in the ecosystem.

So if Greeks want to stop their crooked government officials from taking their hard-earned money, then they gotta fix it themselves. Why do they owe so many people? How are they going to pay back their debt? You wouldn’t honor your debts if you’re not honorable people. And I think that’s the whole point behind politics. People are sometimes so honorable, they let others take advantage of them.

Without doing anything extreme, I’d say the best solution for Greeks feeling ripped off by their authorities is simply to move and stop using Drachma. People have picked up and moved in a heartbeat since the beginning of time. If you got the will and are a hardworker, you can make it. Now, whether or not Bitcoin is a suitable currency to replace Greece’s weakened financial system, that’s just not predictable. But I’d say to avoid it.

The only thing that can save Greece is its own people. No amount of money, even fake money can solve the fallacies of human dynamics.

By Chongchen Saelee

http://www.doritos.com/crashthesuperbowl/toolkit
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ctsb-production/footer/CTSB+Rules+%26+Details.pdf

So Doritos brand tortilla chips runs this contest every year to draw in user-made ads that aim to play during The Super Bowl. BUT, you have to read their fine print. Check this little cheat in their official contest rules (link above, can be found via their official website, also link above):

By entering this Contest and uploading your Submission, you irrevocably grant to
Sponsor and their agents, to the extent permissible by law, the unconditional and
perpetual right to post, display, broadcast, publish, use, adapt, edit, translate, dub,
and/or modify such Submission in any way, in any and all media, throughout the world,
for any purpose, without limitation, and without notice or consideration to you.

You know what that means? It means that if you submit an incredibly awesome ad that you came up with all by yourself, starring yourself, then Doritos can steal your idea, or use some Hollywood hocus-pocus and erase you out of it, or do whatever, and not have to tell you anything about their con.

That’s some shady stuff.

Why not just say: make us a commercial for free? That million dollar prize is just to trick you to make us an awesome FREE commercial, of which we will profit off of.

ALWAYS read the fine print.

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/nsa-denies-it-used-heartbleed-bug-gather-intelligence-n78356

Well, well, well, NOW they’re getting more specific about what the “Heartbleed bug” actually is. Turns out, it’s a vulnerability in OpenSSL. You gotta be pretty stupid to use OpenSSL to log into a secure site. Like anything that is opensource, any joe schmo can go in there and put their own code leaving a backdoor open for them later. I don’t care if there is a peer-reviewed system in place. If all those supposed peers are crooked and corrupt, the entire system is already compromised. Such is the case with certain forum software (I won’t name names, but they have very sketchy behavior).

Thank goodness I never used OpenSSL (and I would never enable it if it came with any software). So I’m not too worried.

Fuck you, NSA. You guys need to stop playing games.

(OpenSSL is something the NSA would have created. But they’re claiming they didn’t. Do your research. Most of the encryption algorithms the entire Internet uses is written by NSA. Remember, NSA isn’t some righteous cream of the crop elite superhero group, they’re people, and people are flawed, crooked, corrupt, selfish, etc. Bad shit can happen and it does.)

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll play one on YouTube just to fuck with you. (more…)