taoeffect

$200 in BTC for MSM Blocker Browser Extension

Here's what it does:

• Once every 4 hours, it scans headlines on homepages of NYTimes, Fox News, Huffington Post, CNN and Washington Post
• If there is a headline that contains the same word on 2 or more of the sites (excluding articles like "a", "the" and pronouns), it uses some type of fuzzy-filtering to grey out all appearances of all versions of this headline on all social networks, especially twitter.

It must work in Firefox 57+, and ideally it would work in other browsers as well (via WebExtensions). Released under some open source license.

If you like this idea and want to pitch in, feel free to post a comment below or tweet at me.

taoeffect

Generalized Sharding Protocol For Blockchains

The following was sent to [bitcoin-dev] on October 9, 2017 under the subject "Generalized sharding protocol for decentralized scaling without Miners owning our BTC".

---

Dear list,

In previous arguments over Drivechain (and Drivechain-like proposals) I promised that better scaling proposals — that do not sacrifice Bitcoin's security — would come along.

taoeffect

The NSA-Activist Duality ☯

The Activist wants to protect people, but in doing so acknowledges their methods also protect bad people.

The NSA wants to protect people, but in doing so acknowledges their methods also harm good people.

taoeffect

Net Neutrality

Whenever James Corbett takes a position on something, I pay attention.

Why? Because James is one of the few journalists worth paying attention to.

However, like everyone, James has his blind spots and biases. For James, an avowed anarchist, it's government (the good parts).

Today James tweeted an interview on an anti-Net Neutrality article by Jeffrey A. Tucker, who had this to say:

taoeffect

Why 9/11 Justice Takes Time

There are different reasons for different people.

Category: Fooled Celebrities

The 9/11 false flag fooled quite a large number of people. One could say it fooled several countries (thanks to centralized ownership of mass media).

1. If you took the early consensus stance as a celebrity (meaning, like most, you were fooled), it becomes very difficult for you to say anything on the topic of 9/11, simply because it's a point of embarassment and guilt.
2. If you have a large following and use it to go against the mythmaker-narrative, you may become a target for harassament.

taoeffect

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taoeffect

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taoeffect

On Short Labels

Whether it's because of websites like Twitter, with its limit on character counts, or whether it's something else, the use of short labels is astonishingly common online, in both tweets and headlines.

What do I mean by "short label"? Things like:

• Democrats
• Republicans
• Liberals
• Conservatives

taoeffect

Belief Confirmation/Perseverance: "Never Talk about Religion, Sex, or Politics"

Belief confirmation (or belief perseverance) is a kind of confirmation bias.

Let's look at how this works with people who have taken Never Talk about Religion, Sex, or Politics to heart (a saying that has some truth to it, but is also misunderstood by some to apply to literally all situations).

1. Person A hears, "Never Talk about Religion, Sex, or Politics", gets a superficial understanding about what the phrase means, and decides to follow this advice.
2. They avoid having conversations about religion, sex, and politics, and thus never having their views challenged, become fairly ignorant about all of these subjects.
3. Any time they do catch themselves having a conversation about any of these subjects, they are ridiculed because of their myopi

taoeffect

PoW vs PoS - Environment and Security

Date: Jul 21, 2019
Updated: See Github revisions timestamps

In questions sprouted from this thread: https://twitter.com/taoeffect/status/1151941939157012480

I copy them here into this gist in the hopes that it will serve others and so that in the future I have something I can link people to. My thanks to @Jehan for the opportunity to put my thoughts on this subject into a somewhat easier-to-read medium.

I've always had trouble understanding the narrative that the owners of huge