[survirtual]

Is it an oxymoron to generate an asymmetrical cryptographic signature, send it to someone, and that someone verify the signature with the public key?

Why not just "trust" them instead? You have a contact and you know them, can't you trust them?

This is what "trust but verify" means. It means audit everything you can. Do not really on trust alone.

An entire civilization can be built with this methodology. It would be a much better one than the one we have now.

[stavros]

> Is it an oxymoron to generate an asymmetrical cryptographic signature, send it to someone, and that someone verify the signature with the public key?

Of course not. I verify because I don't trust them.

> Why not just "trust" them instead? You have a contact and you know them, can't you trust them?

No, the risk of trust is too high against the cost of spending a second verifying.

> This is what "trust but verify" means. It means audit everything you can. Do not really on trust alone.

Your comment just showed an example of something I don't trust and asked "why not trust instead"? The question even undermines your very point, because "why not trust them instead?" assumes (correctly) that I don't trust them, so I need to verify.

[survirtual]

It was sarcasm. "Why not trust them instead?" Clearly, you wouldn't and you can't. It takes moments to verify a signature, so just do it.

[TeMPOraL]

> An entire civilization can be built with this methodology. It would be a much better one than the one we have now.

No, it wouldn't. Trust is an optimization that enables civilization. The extreme end of "verify" is the philosophy behind cryptocurrencies: never trust, always verify. It's interesting because it provides an exchange rate between trust and kilowatt hours you have to burn to not rely on it.

[survirtual]

Yes, let's trust VCs and bankers instead, they seem to be great keepers of civilization -- no calamities in sight with them at the helm /s

[TeMPOraL]

Possible > impossible.

I'd first trust unicorns shooting rainbows out of their posteriors before the cryptocurrency vision; neither works for fostering civilization, but at least the unicorns aren't proposing an economy based on paying everyone for wasting energy.

[survirtual]

The cryptocurrency economy is a sham to discredit a workable future.

The bitcoin economy, however, is a 1st generation system of distilling energy into value. It is the most honest form of value storage humanity has ever encountered and represents a product rarer than anything in the universe. Gold does not hold a candle to the scarcity of bitcoin, and yet bitcoin is more divisible and manageable.

These are neutral aligned systems. How we use them is up to us. Bitcoin, like an electric vehicle, does not care where the electrons come from. It will function either way.

Does your civilization use fossil fuels that poison the population and destroy the planet?

Bitcoin will run using that, and it will exponentially increase consumption.

Does your civilization use nuclear fission and fusion (which includes "renewables" since they are a direct fusion byproduct), that have manageable side effects for exponentially larger clean energy generation compared to anything else?

Bitcoin will run using that, and it will exponentially increase consumption.

Bitcoin is a neutral entity to distill energy into value. It cannot be tampered with like the federal reserve and a world cabal of bankers. You cannot negotiate with it, bail it out, or enrich your friends by sabotaging the ruleset for yourselves.

If your society has a selfish population, then it will be destroyed by the energy it requires to function. It is trivial to use energy sources exponentially more powerful without the destruction. The trouble with those sources is they do not have a "profit" motive, so countless elite will lose their golden spoons, and the synthetically generated "economy" will crash.

In exchange for the "economy" collapsing, the general populace can breathe again, the planet will stabilize, energy consumption can continue to grow exponentially without any harm, and a golden age for all beings will begin in this reality.

But my musings will have to stop here. I can say with certainty: you are someone who hasn't even remotely spent time thinking about and understanding this problem space on a deep level, so it is strange you would comment so confidently. It doesn't matter who you are, how much money you have, what innovations you've conceived and created, how respected you are, none of that matters. You're missing something very big here. If I was you, I would take the time to figure it out.

And truth is, I am not even replying to you. I write this out for the unspeaking and silenced people who are actually paying attention to validate their correct thinking.