How ‘inconvenient’ WeatherSV app is useless for climate debate history

The other day I was on twitter and innocently see all sorts of praise for an article on CoinGeek which heaped praise about weatherSV app. Personally I think the app is useless and a waste of (block) space so thought I’d give it a read. I also often find myself on the opposite side of debates with Kurt….I was intrigued to see what he had to say, apparently more people listen to him as he writes for CoinGeek — I’m BitcoinNobody — you’re reading this, you’re my audience, that’s all that matters to me.

So let’s go over this piece and see if Kurt is worth his weight in (digital) gold.

The article is short as shit and doesn’t say much, it really doesn’t even make a cohesive argument — so let’s summarise:

Paragraphs 1–6 doesn’t say much and isn’t worth your time. Apparently everyone is lying and no one trusts each other. We need a source of truth (the lead up)

Parapgraph 7–8 WeatherSV is the answer! A source of truth! Immutable ledger on BitcoinSV! Problem Solved!!

I want to start by pointing out something sort of funny — all of Kurt’s ‘sources’ are sourced from cei.org. Really Kurt? One website? What’s worse is you’re referring to screenshots from a website instead of the primary source!

Data

The biggest fallacy that Kurt makes is that we have a problem with data being incorrectly read and interpreted, and the solution is an immutable ledger.

Now I’m not sure if you caught the nuance there, the problem with his logic. An immutable ledger does nothing to stop the problem of misinterpretation of data, there is still a physical sensor that can be manipulated, an interpreter who will read the sensor, something which will aggregate data from multiple sources, finally some method of writing to the blockchain. Writing the data to the blockchain is equivalent to publishing findings in a journal.

So all weatherSV does is take data some scientist was going to write in a journal and instead write it to the BitcoinSV blockchain. I don’t know about you but the last time I heard of a government going back and rewriting a scientific america article and reprinting for the archives to change weather data was like fucking never. What they challenge is the political position of the scientist who is the interpreter of the data, how they measured it, his bias, what he didn’t measure.

So what did weatherSV do? Well they are the interpreters of the data. They sample sources which they choose they believe, they apply a mathematical formula to that data (average?) — an algorithm they control I might add, then they have the process in place to write to the blockchain. So what if they have a political agenda to fudge those numbers? Well gee I guess Kurt didn’t think about that, like morons who think “it must be true, it’s on the internet” Kurt modernises that simple mindedness to “it’s on the blockchain therefore it must be true”.

So the inherent problem of data measurement, followed by data interpretation, followed by data manipulation, followed by translation, followed finally by writing to the blockchain are all ignored, and are all the real problems which we need to find a way to solve…..not a useless blockchain.

Second point on data. WeatherSV measures temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed, cloudiness. Not once have I ever heard anywhere about how a scientist is lying about the temperature on June 16 1980. They don’t give a shit about that. What do people care about? Ocean temperatures, ice thickness, green houses gases. And even there no one ever debates the underlying data — they debate what it means and how it’s extrapolated to predict the future. That’s what each other are arguing about, not what the sunrise or due point was in 1999!

Censorship resistance

Kurt makes it seem like the problem in the debate is data censorship, data manipulation, and therefore the solution is an immutable blockchain since it will force parties to be honest. Aside from the fact there’s nothing stopping emperor Xi from cooking the books (so to speak) before data is written to the chain — there are other issues with his assertion.

Kurt doesn’t understand Bitcoin.

The tool used to achieve censorship resistance in Bitcoin is decentralisation — which is exactly why Bitcoin strives for it with smaller blocks. Today the climate debate is a ironically censorship resistant because the process is decentralised. There are many independent sensors, read by many independent entities, and published by many papers/sites, etc. One person can take the entirety of all of these publishers and find what the truth is. If one party manages to censor 51% of the sources then they’ve achieved a 51% attack and rewritten history. One could argue that papers and journals are becoming more centralised, controlling the data — which is a bad thing, a bad thing that is not solved by Bitcoin. In fact it would be made infinitely worse by being stored on a blockchain, because one source of truth is ultimate centralisation of information, one source to manipulate.

Kurt doesn’t even understand Bitcoin SV.

This became clear to me at the end of Kurt’s article where he states “and distributed across a global ledger for the world!”. According to Kurt he thinks that SV is a global distributed ledger, but he hasn’t been listening. The ledger lives and is validated on a node. If only mining nodes matter (which is the thesis of BSV advocates) then only miners hold the ledger. If there are only 8 miners then there are 8 copies of the ledger….not global, not decentralized. You get the priveledge to ask the miner for information and he may or may not be honest. Further to that it must be noted that larger and larger blocks encourage centralisation within the mining community both in terms of # players but also geography. Sync’ing a 1TB block across the globe is risky, so it makes more sense to keep all miners in the same geo…not global. Sorry that’s just not hygge.

Kurt doesn’t read his fearless leader’s rantings.

FauxToshi wants to introduce censorship to BitcoinSV — he wants lawful modification of the ledger if there is a court order. The courts can issue an order to send to miners to rewrite history is what he wants. So what’s to stop a government to pass a law that makes them the source of truth? Then the court sends a notice to the miners that it’s time to align the immutable ledger to the government sanctioned truth? This “feature” of Craig’s has always puzzled me because a non jurisdictional blockchain will be controlled by a jurisdictional court? #CraigIsAFraud

On this point. If a blockchain should be reversible by court order then you essentially prefer proof of stake. Where all it takes is a court order to rewrite the chain in seconds instead of miners needing to forfeit all coins back to the chain fork. The economics of Bitcoin are strongly out of favor with censorship, but I sm forced to say “ok boomer” to Craig here.

Final thought

I don’t think the SV crowd understand the dystopian future that’s in the cards if their coin succeeds to its aims. There is a reason I hate the coin so much, there is a reason I so badly want it to fail and fucking burn, it represents everything that we’ve feared of government being able to assert total control over the people. BitcoinSV is the vision of what Stalin would have wanted to have, full control over money and information.

Fortunately BSV really is shit, it has no following (outside of non-critical thinkers), and fake satoshi just can’t stop lying so it really screws his case. This is how I sleep at night.

Conclusion

The article sucks, fails miserably to make its point — and is quite simply just trying to toute BitcoinSV regardless of the crappy datapoint used to do it. The BitcoinSV crowd all want to encourage everything that pumps their shitcoin — they won’t critically think about how useless some of these ‘inventions’ are.

Sorry Kurt.