Hey so guys I just wanted to tell you that graphene is definitely not trash software.

In fact, the better that I got to know it, the more that I liked it.

Especially from an efficiency perspective, graphene is very very impressive. It's use of the boost libraries is more or less masterful. But people, the emperor is wearing exactly zero clothing.

Let's have a look at EOS, shall we?

Daniel Larimer, a supposed libertarian, raised about 4 billion dollars in the EOS crowd sale. The fundrais was ostensibly illegal, it should not have had any legal challenges though because every participant in the fundraise was there voluntarily and people should be able to do whatever the hell they'd like to with their money.

It's just better that way, poor people deserve to be able to invest in much more than lottery tickets. That said, current American law restricts poor people to lottery tickets as investments. They cannot invest in startups, they cannot invest in new cryptocurrencies, And since those are really the high growth investments, they can't invest to get rich. This is a crime. Not the EOS crowd sale. The EOS crowd sale was actually a beautiful use of the Ethereum platform. I have no problem with that. Now, I do have a problem with the fact that the government gave EOS preferential treatment and find them just 24 million dollars out of their 4 billion dollar fundraise. But that's the state of our current law. The government can choose winners, and let me tell you they choose bad winners every time.

So now you got Dan Larimer running around with Brock "Flappy New World Order Illuminati hat and multiple pedophilia accusations" Pierce. Folks, fuzzy is right. Brock Pierce is a slime wad, and Dan has sided with the slime wads because That's an expedient thing to do. Oh and the 4 billion dollars? They mainly invested it in US Treasury bonds. sounds like folks who really can't stand the government right?

EOS is a giant spinning garbage heap, and that's why blurt has fees. Yes we messed up our fees, and one transaction type did not have fees properly implemented. That's our fault.

Oh and by the way did you know that steem was born out of a government contract tendered by the gentleman who goes by the name blocktrades, Dan Notenstein? I believe that it was a DARPA contract. Remember guys, the internet is ultimately DARPA's bitch. furthermore if you take a contract like the one described here, you're probably DARPA's bitch too.

@rycharde will reply with the link that confirms this claim. He is full of useful info like that.

look, steem was certainly parameterized enough to be used for all kinds of forks, dozens of them. Condenser was perimeterized in the very same fashion. Ned Scott did not want forks to launch, and went far out of his way to ensure that forks did not happen. Regardless, people saw the value and forks blossomed. Today, steem holders could be holding the tokens of a hundred or more related block chains. SMTs were about the dumbest idea ever. This thing was designed for multi-chain use. Even Daniel Larimer has affirmed that multi-chain is the only way to scale, by launching his new silly social network voice independently of the EOS blockchain because EOS is a giant spinning garbage heap. You can't build applications on EOS. It's whales are too busy spamming the chain to death.

Comparison of consensus

The consensus mechanism used by blurt is called graphene and it's pretty unique. On blurt, we use approval voting to choose witnesses, and the witnesses dictate what is added to the chain.

The approval voting part is seriously pretty nice. One user gets 30 votes for witnesses and their full weight of staked blurt power is used to select witnesses in a stake weighted fashion.

In Cosmos, stake is bonded to a particular validator. You can unbond over 21 days, very similar to the 13-week unbonding that we have on blurt. We will not be reducing that to four weeks. Instead, when we moved to Cosmos, it will be 3 weeks, that works very well. In fact the unbonding time is a parameter, so we can discuss the exact length of time that's appropriate for unbonding. I don't mind.

That's one economic change that will be necessary. Another thing is the reward pool. I want to have a reward pool. I think that it's a really great growth mechanism for a blockchain community. I also think that content has value. However, our current reward pool implementation allow a certain actors To earn from valueless content. I believe that we need to discriminate more effectively. This will prevent botswarms from uploading random gibberish to blurt, and then cross up voting it from many accounts simultaneously. this is a real thing, and I have observed it happening here on blurt. Probably the way that I'm going to do this is to allow validators to maintain a blacklist collectively. The blacklist won't harm user funds in any way. That makes no sense. It also won't prevent people from paying to post the content of their choice. It's just that if the super majority of witnesses, let's say 2/3, feel that an account should not be able to earn rewards on content, they will not be able to do so. this will be a consensus level mechanism that is not easily avoided like our current COAL system.

this feature may or may not be implemented in the launch version, because the goal is to put up a baby blockchain, and mature it over time using the upgrade module to allow for fast and frequent software updates that are approved by at least 2/3 of delegated stake.

exploiting mainnets

Some folks who know this software incredibly well, chose not only to exploit blurt (I don't mind this) but to do that in a manner that showed clear intent to kill. look, as a tester of blockchain systems, I have exploited both testnets and mainnets. But people, there is a way to do this. There is a way to explain a blockchain and gain its creators trust and admiration. Here's what you do, you exploit the chain. You document the exploit. You put that documentation in a GitHub or GitLab issue or you just tap the creator on the shoulder and say hey you've got a problem, I can't disclose this problem publicly because it's a security problem. Then you tell them about it and you tell them your guess is it how to fix it. And guess what? They love it! Nobody minds that you exploited their chain and then told them about the exploit and how to fix it.

That is the helpful and cool way to handle stuff like the discovery of the flaw in our fees. What can I say? I know this because I have done it.

But did you know that don't work in graphene land?

Why don't it work, you ask.....

I will tell you why it don't work my gentle reader, it don't work because graphene is built on sand. Sand and lies. In 2016, @baabeetaa and I stumble across a significant problem with graphene's handling of a SECP2K1 signatures. They are what you call non-canonical. Basically, they did not follow the standard laid out by the folks who made secp256k1 And therefore nobody can tell what the hell is going on with them. In fact, to this day, I have no idea what the hell is going on in the very library that will sign this transaction.

And nobody is answering. instead of explaining what the hell was going on, Daniel Larimer burned my ass at the stake. I valued the steem community enough to report problems. Every problem that I ever reported was denied. If you see a problem in blurt, I will investigate it personally. It's all a part of my commitment to constant improvement, and my gratitude to God for allowing me to live after my particularly stupid incident in 2017.

A little bit about me

By all rights, I should be dead or in jail:

https://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=60079&start=28

I mean I figure that I'm talking like I beat 99.9% odds. Yeah, maybe one in a thousand guys who have mental health problems that severe, and do something quite so stupid, make it out okay. I have enjoyed a pretty much full recovery, thanks to wonders of modern medicine. After 2 days in the loony bin in my hometown, 2 days taking lithium mind you, I came to my senses and in my mind I no longer felt like I was in some kind of bizarre international plot and realized that I may have stolen a giant truck full of sand and almost drove it into a damn political rally, for no reason whatsoever.

Now, You see it's a bit traumatic, when you find a real legit problem, tell folks about it, and are then simply tossed out. Did I have mental health and substance abuse problems before that? You better bet it.

Did Dan's actions make both of those worse? Yes.

I'm sure we can find a link to Dan's post, but basically you know he tossed me away even though I had been contributing to his project for nearly a year at that point. The mystery of the signatures used in this software lives on and others have found this to be a very legit issue.

I no longer think that the signatures are insecure in and of themselves, but instead are insecure because they are non-canonical. Good God folks when things like cryptographic curves are made, we are provided with very clear instructions on how to use them. If you don't use them in that way, you are doing it in a non-canonical fashion. You're really not supposed to use encryption that way. It goes against the pattern, just like adding fees to a feeless blockchain goes against the pattern. You shouldn't go against the pattern, you should follow the pattern when you are using someone else's software framework. Certainly Dan Larimer did not invent secp256K1.... So he should probably follow the directions. But that is neither here nor there. What I am saying is that I paid a tremendous personal cost for reporting that problem and that I have committed that at no time shall any user of blurt pay a similar personal cost for reporting problems in blurt.

but that is the standard of how things work in the graphene ecosystem. People get attacked. Sometimes, folks in the graphene ecosystem put on masks and threaten to rape women. You don't believe me?

@megadrive could you please queue up the appropriate link as a reply to this post? Thank you.

Look guys I'm not down with all that crap, and as such, I'm no longer going to make major code contributions in this ecosystem and I suppose that I should really apologize for not taking the time to figure out how to do the import without using graphene. I should have used Cosmos/Tendermint. That's my fault I'm really sorry about that because I exposed all of you to the terrible filth which is the graphene community.

To secure blurt, I used a technique that I believe I invented for keeping a public blockchain public while ensuring that participants in the blockchain are able to choose who can and cannot run nodes. The project that I was going to launch next, Clay, was going to explore this idea a great deal further and allow people to create private online communities to pursue their interests.

But the thing is I already made blurt with a lot of help from @baabeetaa. In fact initially, I was more of an investor and cheerleader than I was a coder. And it's totally fine, people play different roles in different projects at different times. @baabeetaa did the vast majority of the work needed to launch blurt. he did a good job and I'll always owe him a debt of gratitude for that.

Now, it's quite fair to say that I am actively coding on blurt. @baabeetaa has left the day to day of the project to trade Bitcoin professionally. I wish him all the best.

I no longer wish to contribute in any way to the graphene code base.

Every single technique and modification that I made is easily portable to hive or steem.

Like I said, I am living a sort of second life. Faddat died. Jacob Gadikian Rose from the ashes of faddat.

I don't care what religion you follow, I understand that we have Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and probably others as well using blurt right now. That's so awesome and I'm so glad to have all of you here, you have no idea.

Please no matter what religion you follow, look at my little situation, where I stole that truck in Cambodia, and could have easily killed people. I was insane, it wasn't exactly exactly my fault, I certainly was not in my right mind. It doesn't matter though, most people in that situation, would have ended up getting shot. In fact I do believe that shots were fired at me, and of course I can't blame the guys who were shooting at me, I could have easily killed many people that day. So unfortunately I can't blame them. It basically makes sense. You know, in order to keep people safe, shoot the crazy guy who stole the truck.

Now, it is 3 years later And I'm not only alive, I am doing well. I'm not in jail, because the truck driver or truck owner not sure which, told the police that I had clearly suffered enough and I was clearly crazy and that he wasn't going to press charges. What a guy! I'm going to find him and I'm going to do something really nice for him and his family. I would probably be sitting in a jail cell in Cambodia right now if it wasn't for him.

can you look at this situation And tell me that I haven't been granted something truly special by some God somewhere?

I can't. I am quite sure that right now I am in my second life.

I absolutely refuse to waste such a precious gift working on software that has such a hostile "community". I won't do it.

Migration to Cosmos

I am reviewing strategies for moving blurt to the cosmos SDK. I don't really know what the right migration strategy is, but I'll find it and I will share that with you.

At some point, we will have to make a really difficult decision as to whether or not to allow blurt to keep operating It has a graphene and chain, or to stop the current chain of cryptographically linked blocks, and move to another chain.

We also have to figure out what to do with the content that is on this chain currently. If we are unable to migrate the content cleanly, I personally commit to hosting every single word that has been posted to blurt for the next century.

I think that basically the way that that works is putting aside some money for the hosting, that won't actually cost much at all, and creating some kind of an organization to ensure that the hosting remains live, even in the event of my death. I figure that shouldn't be too difficult.

So what I'm saying about that is just that In the event that we cannot cleanly migrate the content, I will ensure one century's worth of hosting for the content that has been posted to blurt already.

I don't think that it's going to be possible or wise to create some kind of unified front end, that connects to graphene blurt and to cosmos blurt. So if we as a community, choose to keep graphene alert going, graphene blurt is going to have certain needs, maintenance, hosting, things like that.

The chain has been able to pay for its own operational expenses so far. It may be able to do so in the future. If you are passionate about graphene blurt, and want to help with its administration, please reply to this post and let me know. We can make arrangements.

I will make some additional code commits in the coming week or two, about two weeks ago, I broke the master branch of condenser, I'll certainly be fixing that.

I also commit to ensuring stable operation of the chain until we are able to go through with the cosmos migration. I expect that the attackers are going to try and find other ways to attack blurt in the meantime. They are scared sad little men, and instead of talking to me about collaboration, which I very much wanted, collaboration between hive and blurt specifically, they chose to attack.

I have full faith and confidence that the attack was planned carefully and executed at Christmas time, to cause maximum pain and chaos.

Please look at Blurt's current witness set. all of those people made significant sacrifices over the holiday season to ensure that we would be able to get blurt back up and running. Please show them your gratitude.

Finally, Sweet Brown, a philosopher for our times has some closing words on on this situation and on the graphene ecosystem:

What did she do after she recorded her bizarre news interview and was made into a YouTube celebrity?

Yep, she started a music career.

She contracts out as a kind of backup singer or what have you.

Folks here seemed to like my raise your fees song.

Well I have more stories than just that to tell, and I decided you know why not I might as well tell them musically, and target the first song at the Khmer market so that when I am allowed to return to Cambodia in 2023-4, and live in the pink house that I own in a small village in Cambodia with my relatives, the people who saved my life, I'm all primed up.

Q3 2021: music is coming.

Might it come with a private community for musicians? Who knows.

Might blurt holders being able to opt into this community?

Damn straight.

Will blurt holders, subject to my approval of their account not being used for bullshittery, be able to claim stakes on every single one of the increasingly advanced and interesting chains that we put together without a single penny of venture capital in conjunction with our partners and witnesses over the next two years?

Yes

Will custom hardware including a router, launch sometime in 2021?

absolutely

That's what's up.

PS:

shout out to @megadrive for awesomeness and consistency and for his initiative to help with my personal business billing processes in the coming year.

Shout out to the witnesses for their hard work.

Shout out to @double-u, @rychrade, @offgridlife, @afrog @angelica7 for steadfast support in trying times.