Incoming links: Dictatorship
Are cryptocurrencies useful? Updated 2025-07-16
Cryptocurrencies have two applications:
- illegal activities, notably buying drugs, paying for ransomware and money laundering. But also paying for anti-censorship services from inside dictatorships. Illegal activity can be good when governments are bad, and arguably selling drugs should be legal.For this reason Ciro Santilli believes that privacy coins like Monero are currently the most useful cryptocurrencies. Also, people concerned with their privacy are likely to more naturally make fewer larger payments to reduce exposure rather than a bunch of small separate ones, and therefore transaction fees matter less, and can be seen as a reasonable privacy tax. Also drugs are expensive, just have a look at any uncensored Onion service search engine, so individual transactions tend to be large.
- inflation-resistance due to money creation in fiat currencies. Money printing is a bad form of tax. But why not just instead invest in bonds or stocks, which actually have a specific intrinsic value and should therefore increase your capital and beat inflation? Even if crypto did take over, its value would eventually become constant, and just holding it would lose out to stocks and bonds. And pre-crypto, salaries should adjust relatively quickly to new inflation levels as they come, though there is always some delay. Also, for non-anonymous cryptocurrencies, governments will sooner or later find a way to regulate and pervert it. If you want to do things without anonymity, then what you really have to fight for is to change government itself, perhaps with a DAO-like approach, or pushing for a more direct democracy.
The key difficulties of cryptocurrencies are:
- how do transaction fees/guarantees/times compare to centralized systems such as credit cards:Obviously, decentralized currencies cannot be cheaper to maintain than centralized ones, since with decentralization you still have to send network messages at all times, and instead of one party carrying out computations, multiple parties have to carry out computations.
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1261/is-it-possible-to-send-bitcoins-without-paying-a-fee "The Blockchain Scalability Problem & the Race for Visa-Like Transaction Speed" (2019)
- towardsdatascience.com/the-blockchain-scalability-problem-the-race-for-visa-like-transaction-speed-5cce48f9d44
Crypto could however be close enough in price to centralized systems that it becomes viable, this can be considered. - how can governments tax cryptocurrency. Notably, because:See also globalization reduces the power of governments.
- taxation has to be progressive, e.g. we have to tax the rich more than the poor, and anonymity in transactions would weaken that
- it would be even easier to move money into fiscal paradises, and then just say, oops, lost my passwords, those coins are actually gone
If crypto really takes off, 99.99% of people will still only ever use it through some cryptocurrency exchange (unless scalability problems are solved, and they replace fiat currencies entirely), since downloading full blockchains is unfeasible, so the outcome would be very similar to PayPal, and without "true" decentralization.
For those reasons, Ciro Santilli instead believes that governments should issue electronic money, and maintain an open API that all can access instead. The centralized service will always be cheaper for society to maintain than any distributed service, and it will still allow for proper taxation.
Ciro believes that it is easy for people to be seduced by the idealistic promise that "cryptocurrency will make the world more fair and equal by giving everyone equal opportunities, away from the corruption of Governments". Such optimism that new technologies will solve certain key social problems without the need for constant government intervention and management is not new, as shown e.g. at HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) when he talks about the cyberspace (when the Internet was just beginning): youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=2375. Technologies can make our lives better. But in general, some of them also have to be managed.
In any case, cryptocurrencies are bullshit, the true currency of the future is going to be Magic: The Gathering cards. And Cirocoin.
One closely related thing that Ciro Santilli does think could be interesting exploring right now however, notably when having Monero-like anonymity in mind, would be anonymous electronic voting, which is a pre-requisite to make direct democracy convenient so people can vote more often.
TODO evaluate the possible application of cryptocurrency for international transfers:Of course, the ideal solution would be for governments to just allow for people from other countries to create accounts in their country, and use the centralized API just like citizens. Having an account of some sort is of course fundamental to avoid money laundering/tax evasion, be it on the API, or when you are going to cash out the crypto into fiat. So then the question becomes: suppose that governments are shit and never make such APIs, are international transfers just because traditional banks are inefficient/greedy? Or is it because of the inevitable cost of auditing transfers? E.g. how does TransferWise compare to Bitcoin these days? And if cryptocurrency is more desirable, why wouldn't TransferWise just use it as their backend, and reach very similar fees?
Atomic Weapons Establishment Updated 2025-07-16
Their website, and in particular the recruitment section, are so creepy.
There's not mention of bombs. No photos of atomic explosions. The words "atomic" and "weapon" do not even show up in the front page!!! The acronym AWE is instead used everywhere as an euphemism.
In the recruitment section we can see a bunch of people smiling: web.archive.org/web/20211007213222/https://www.awe.co.uk/careers/working-at-awe/, suggesting:There's even children outreach!!!
Ciro Santilli is not against storing a few nukes to be ready against dictatorships. But don't be such a pussy! Just say what the fuck you are doing more clearly! You are making weapons to kill people and destroy things in order to maintain the Balance of power. If the public can't handle such facts, then shut down the fucking program.
Freedom of speech Updated 2025-07-16
For Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China: Section "github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship".
Ciro has the radical opinion that absolute freedom of speech must be guaranteed by law for anyone to talk about absolutely anything, anonymously if they wish, with the exception only of copyright-related infringement.
And Ciro believes that there should be no age restriction of access to any information.
People should be only be punished for actions that they actually do in the real world. Not even purportedly planning those actions must be punished. Access and ability to publish information must be completely and totally free.
If you don't like someone, you should just block them, or start your own campaign to prepare a counter for whatever it is that they are want to do.
This freedom does not need to apply to citizens and organizations of other countries, only to citizens of the country in question, since foreign governments can create influence campaigns to affect the rights of your citizens. More info at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/mark-government-controlled-social-media
Limiting foreign influence therefore requires some kind of nationality check, which could harm anonymity. But Ciro believes that almost certainly such checks can be carried out in anonymous blockchain consensus based mechanisms. Governments would issues nationality tokens, and tokens are used for anonymous confirmations of rights in a way that only the token owner, not even the government, can determine who used the token. E.g. something a bit like what Monero does. Rights could be checked on a once per account basis, or yearly basis, so transaction costs should not be a big issue. Maybe expensive proof-of-work systems can be completely bypassed to the existence of this central token authority?
Some people believe that freedom of speech means "freedom of speech that I agree with". Those people should move to China or some other dictatorship.
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz (2008) Updated 2025-07-16
Hmmm, he does not know how to spell guerilla? sic? www.quora.com/What-is-the-correct-spelling-guerilla-or-guerrilla
That's how Russian shadow library maintainers do it, they know how to crime good old Russians. Maybe there is a good thing about having dictatorships in the world that give zero fucks about American copyright laws. There will always be some random Russian academic who will implement this and not go to jail. Maybe it's even state sponsored.
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) Updated 2025-07-16
All pages below are from the second edition from 2018. It seems that there weren't any changes in the text, the updated preface mentions
As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed since the 1st edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published, and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions. Some say that even Darwin lessened the power of his arguments in the Origin of Species through his multiple revisions, in which he dealt with criticisms and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction. I prefer my original to speak for itself, even if it turns out to be wrong.
This is partly addressed in the preface of the second edition from 2018.
Central thesis:
- there are two sexes because of mitochondria
- the acquisition of mitochondria was one of the most important steps in the evolution of eukaryotes.There are no known eukaryotes which never had mitochondria. Having mitochondria appears to be a requisite for being an eukaryote.Contrast this for example with multicellularity, which is highly polyphyletic.
- Apoptosis is largely regulated by mitochondria
- there are two main theories for how the mitochondria endosymbiosis started:
- parsitic hypothesis of mitochondrial endosymbiosis: a parasitic option rather than cooperative
- hydrogen hypothesis: a cooperative option rather than parasitic
Smaller points:
- 10% of our body weight (dry presumably?) is mitochondria. Also quoted at: www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/mighty_mitochondria. TODO confirm.
- eukaryotes can do phatocytosis due to their cytoskeleton
- paints a colorful picture of Peter Mitchell. Some Wikipedia edits are warranted!
- it is hard for complex organisms to evolve because longer DNA means longer replication time
- cancer is natural selection gone wrong
- multicellular organisms are not utopias where every cell lives happily. Rather, they are dictatorships, where any dissident is forced to commit seppuku. Lu Xun's petition quote comes to mind.
Nitpicks:
- the book calls ATP synthase "ATPase" in several points, which is confusing because -ase means "something that breaks", and in 2020 parlance, there are ATPases which actually break ATP: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPase. The book itself acknowledges that on page 135:
The ATPase is freely reversible. Under some circumstances it can go into reverse, whereupon it splits ATP, and uses the energy released to pump protons up the drive shaft, back across the membrane against the pressure of the reservoir. In fact the very name ATPase (rather than ATP synthase) signifies this action, which was discovered first. This bizarre trait hides a deep secret of life, and we’ll return to it in a moment.
Some criticisms:
- some of the later chapters are a bit more boring, like the stuff about warm-blooded animals. Perhaps is it that Ciro Santilli is more interested in the molecular aspects than macro
- the author talks about some very recent research at the time. While this does highlight his expertise, some of the points mentioned might still be in a state of flow. This is acknowledged by the author himself on the 2018 updated preface however.