Re: <nettime> Oliver Leistert: "Blockcian as a Modulator of Existence"

On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 7:59 PM Morlock Elloi <[email protected]> wrote:

In "Borat", there was a scene where a guy wanted to make sure that the
car he is interested in is a "*ussy magnet".

Blockchain is * magnet, in the sense that it attracts everything,
especially *topian discourses. The way out (if one indeed is looking for
a way out,) is to look at the boring details, and those have been
discussed on this list ad nauseam.

This is not to say that being just a magnet it does not influence the
world. But this influence needs to be dissected under memetics-like
optic, not technical one. On the technical side, there is little
relevant, if anything.

(ps. '*' in regular expressions matches anything, including nothing)

No, it does not match nothing (a set that contains nothing has cardinality 0) but the empty string (cardinality 1), this is Kleene's base case for the primitive recursion.

Leistert displays a recursion-theoretic flaw too, when he says that

>The Ethereum network, dubbed to be the first “world computer” by its inceptor Vitalik Buterin in late 2013, was the first manifestation of a technology that enabled to combine the time-stamping regime of secured hashes with a Turing-complete programming language on a distributed computing platformiv

The language is in fact only Turing-complete modulo gas, admitted inbetween the lines of reference iv, which has led to all sorts of pragmatic challenges to the owners of Ethereum. Including people like myself suggesting that verification be done outside the blockchain. Here's an analogy:

When the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project was launched, a crank came with the computer in case you ran out of 'gas.' I asked jokingly if you could install Vista on the OLPC, and one of the founders replied "We tried, but the little crank melted." Ethereum and all other platforms are still looking for a platinum crank and until they find it, Turing-completeness means nothing. (Yes, nothing.)

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