“Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal and Redemption” by Ben Mezrich

March 30, 2021

Fungible name, non fungible sentence #

March 30, 2021

From Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

“Dread Pirate Roberts was the online name Ulbricht had given himself, after the Cary Elwes character in the movie The Princess Bride. In the movie, he’s a mythic character who, it turned out, is actually multiple pirates, the name being handed down from generation to generation.”

Haven’t thought of anything beyond pointing out that NFTs are non-fungible and some of the history of early applications of cryptocurrency involved a site run by someone claiming that he was just the latest iteration of a fungible character.

Though now I realize I have no understanding of the nuance of the word ‘fungible’. I basically think of it as not tradeable or swappable 1 for 1 but I’m guessing there’s more to it than that.

Anyway, a couple other things that came to mind.

1. Is James Bond the same James Bond across all the movies? It is across movies of the same actor but it’s not clear if it’s across all the movies. (Chuck Klosterman has talked about whether movies exist in movies. Conclusion: some movies yes, some movies no.)
2. What if Fake Diesel and Fake Razor Ramon worked? When Kevin Nash and Scott Hall went to WCW, the WWF still owned their actual characters so they brought them back out with different wrestlers.

Anyway, Bitcoin Billionaires has been fun to listen to so far. Pairs well with American Kingpin. They’ve given me not much more understanding of the underlying technology (Tor is explained in a paragraph) but they’ve given a good glimpse into characters involved.

Which, of course, is usually what makes things fun.