Ah, wild bacon.. my favorite.
... after Socialist bacon 😀
So here's another drama. This might end Paralelni Polis, the reputation of Josef Jelačič, or both. And it is an interesting look at justice in free society.
Let's start:
https://www.paralelnipolis.cz/en/ethprague/
TLDR:
- ETHPrague 2023 happened in Paralelni Polis (I was there, saw it with my own eyes).
- The production company raised money and did not pay rent.
- The money was sent from multisig to some unknown account, @JosefJ_ refuses to talk further and told everyone to go fuck yourself
- Paralelni Polis in financial trouble. A 10 year project that many people put a lot of energy in jeopardy.
There might be a lot of "he said, she said" bla bla. Signal is this - event happened, rent not paid, other side is not discussing it and laughing that Polis will go bankrupt.
I highly suggest boycotting any event organized by @JosefJ_, definitely don't give any money to his PWN DAO (which had a commercial presentation at ETHPrague, also did not pay rent) and definitely do not sponsor any events by them unless they make it right.
If this is it for Paralelni Polis, I hope some other people will carry the ideas, organize events. For me, PP was mainly about HCPP (Hackers Congress Paralelni Polis), which is a one of a kind conference. It was the first place in the world that accepted only Bitcoin for coffee, coworking and other services. There were many stories, many complicated stories as well and a lot happened there. Many interesting projects were started there.
Sadly, probably killed by some powertrip. Don't give the power trippers any more money at least, unless they pay the non-profit what they owe.
What's the thing about reputation and justice in free society?
Transactions are in solarpunk mode (public).
So the main question is if @JosefJ_ wants to be remembered as a scammer who did not pay a non-profit organization entering the last year of its decade rent for an event he organized, despite having money.
Or if he values his reputation more.
My theory is that reputation is worth a lot, especially in the long term and especially with entrepreneurs and in crypto. It's super hard to build it, very easy to lose it. Josef had a good reputation, which he was building for years, yet, he is willing to lose it all due to some idea in his head, which he did not yet said out in public.
This is a sad loss of human potential, but I think it will be a good way to see how justice works in a free society without monopoly on justice. We will only see it long term, if it was worth it for him, even if Paralelni Polis does not make it.
I would like to see who is willing to do any business with him after this, because even the way he treats business partners in the LLC is a huge red flag.
I would love to see a prediction market of the outcome of this paralelni polis drama, episode 1337.
So how much money does PP need to stay afloat?
If's a revered space in the community, I'm sure there's enough of us around ready to help.
Not in the UI, but turns out people are selling all sorts of things for all sorts of coins. They specify it in the ad.
1) You are not a "bad" person for having such thoughts. That is just another thought. You are not your thoughts.
2) Don't judge yourself about it, that's - you guessed it - just another thought.
3) Developing mindfulness (vipassana) and concentration (samatha) will allow you to catch the moment where your strong emotions get triggered and simply observe, without judgement, and let it go. It will be 1 time in 10 at first, then 2, 3...
4) You develop those by establishing and adhering to a meditation practice. The basic instructions are very simple so I won't reproduce them here, just search for vipassana meditation or samatha meditation; I recommend you go heavy on samatha (concentration/calm abiding) for the first year or so, and build a strong base from which to develop the mindfulness side of things.
All it takes is faith in the process, commitment and consistency. Your mind will be transformed by this in ways that are hard to imagine if you have not been through the process.
And https://vexl.it but you need to build a network of friends (of friends) who're into it.
#bisq (https://bisq.network) is an easy place to get some.
They don't, much like Bitcoin the best they can do is publish code that node operators may or may not decide to use.
It is true though that Monero has historically been more flexible with backward-incompatible changes, with the full support of the community.
Bitcoin tends to be far more conservative.
Perhaps this is a good thing and we need both.
I find it really hard to understand how you can both call Monero a shitcoin and yet also correctly recognize the fundamental need for privacy.
It is precisely because of that reason that Monero is *not* a shitcoin.
I'm sorry but it comes across as close-minded. Monero offers today what we all would like Bitcoin to offer in the future. Therefore, pragmatism demands that Monero be used as the useful tool that it is.
It's not either/or.
YMMV, me personally I save in BTC but spend in Monero (and to a lesser degree Lightning). And the only reason for that is Monero's always-on privacy.
So putting XMR in the same basket as all the other cryptos is a bit naive and ignorant. No offense.
ecash is cool man, but yeah, there are tradeoffs to consider.
Or all this transparency and the masses of people failing to see why keeping digital privacy end up normalizing a world where transparency and full traceability is a requirement for legal services and in the eyes of the government.
It seems to me that by and large we are already there. And it was precisely the normalization of mass surveillance along with general apathy and ignorance that got us here.
In light of the above, more transparency-by-default seems to me like a very bad idea.
Why do you think all the KYC stuff is such a pain in the ass? Legacy banking got progressively blanketed with it, cash became less prominent, more/most payments became digital-traceable, and all of this was normalized.
Then along came transparent blockchains and now it's a whole new level. Whereas before you ostensibily needed some kind of warrant, now all the financial data is there for the world to troll for the rest of time.
And listen don't get me wrong, I'd be the first to cheer Bitcoin having always-on privacy like Monero, but I just don't see it happening.
Glad to be proven wrong about this one - I'm happy as long as there is some system that allows me to keep financial privacy, not because I have somethinf to hide but because it's my right.
Right now the best system for that particular purpose is Monero (I use Lightning a lot too). The important thing is that such a system exists.
Using different kinds of money isn't the issue imo.
The issue is friction to swap between them - unfortunately to this day this isn't as simple as it could be (not even close).
Why not both?
Monero has advantages that lightning doesn't have (and vice versa). Two basic examples:
1) all of lightning is one big hot wallet, and there is risk of loss of funds if your wallet is offline for extended periods of time.
2) It would be very difficult if not impossible to pay for a very large item (car, house, etc) on Lightning, unless you open a channel directly, which begins being cumbersome, reduces privacy, etc; with Monero, you just send it and forget about it.
For on-chain payments, honestly Monero just takes the cake, while for quality long-term savings, imo Bitcoin takes the cake.
Both are great tools, both have advantages and disadvantages, as well as a lot of overlap, and imo both tools are useful to freedom lovers.
No need to be tribal about any of this.
Amen. BTC, XMR, just tools. Choose the right tool for the job..
Well, goes hand in hand with Bitcoin's privacy :P
No one's forcing anyone.
People naturally seek status, vast majority just never questions that drive. Most are probably only dimly aware of it, even.
The ones who are then either demonstrate higher status by signalling that they are above status, or leverage all the usual things to demonstrate higher status.
Whichever way you go, status is important for primates. But we don't like talking about that - it's low status.