Humans are, perhaps above all things, storytellers. And one thing that makes an interesting story is shared context. All things being equal, a story about Thor or Horus or Coyote or Jupiter is more interesting than a story about this guy you don’t know named Roger.

If you’re a skilled storyteller you can make a story about Roger interesting, but a story about someone people know will always be more interesting, because it connects to something they’ve already got with them. In a sense, they’re part of the story, because they have a kind of relationship with the subject, even if it is parasocial. And the more people I know know this subject, the more broadly applicable I know this story to be, and that gives it power in a sense.

So celebrities are just that. If I tell you I met this guy Dave that’s boring. If I tell you I met this guy Dave from your work, that’s more interesting because you know Dave. If I tell you I met the mayor of your town Dave that’s prominent, and might be interesting to many people in your town, but not super interesting outside that. If I tell you I met this guy named Dave who used to host a late night TV show watched by tens of millions of people, that’s more interesting because he’s known by lots of people. The story isn’t different, but more people have context on it, they know the guy, and that gives it a different kind of value.

Note I’m not saying it’s more interesting to more people because more people know him. I’m saying it’s more interesting to each person I tell it to, because they know this guy is known by more people. It’s the prominence that gives it currency. And probably in no small part because now they can tell a guy at work they have a buddy who met Dave the late night guy, and that guy will know who that is too. It’s now their semi-interesting story.

Of course this doesn’t apply to all people and I’m sure you’re immune. And sometimes people hate the subjects of the story enough to not care about them. And some people don’t care about movie stars at all, but care about comic book authors because that’s what has currency in their communities, etc.

Sorry, did you mean a lifetime membership to Jellyfin? Because I don’t think there is such a thing…

The tailscale clients are, I believe, open source. It’s just the server that’s not, and you can run the unofficial but well supported “headscale” as a server if you want. But this requires you to run this somewhere publicly accessible, like a VPS, for coordination and NAT-punching purposes.

But! I’m pretty sure as the business operates right now, that tailscale doesn’t have access to the actual data connections or anything, it’s all encrypted, they’re basically just there for simplicity and coordination. And their business model is to offer simple things for free, like small numbers of devices, with the hope that you like the service and convince your business to pay for the fancy version for money. So I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the typical “free because I’m harvesting your data” models.

That all having been said, I run headscale 😛

I’m not 100% deep on the crypto, but my understanding is they use blind signatures (which have been around for a long time) to do their issuing. If you’re unfamiliar, these are kinda like an envelope with a hole cut in it, so you can put a document in it with a hidden unique key, and they can see some info through the hole, and can stamp their signature through the hole to validate that it’s legit without knowing the hidden info.

Then the user can remove it from the envelope (unblind) and now have a certified valid coin without the issuer knowing which coin is theirs.

So in the context of an ATM, the ATM wouldn’t “issue” coins, it would be given a request for coins from your wallet, it would certify the validity of that request, and then give your wallet back that certification in such a way that the wallet could unblind it and have the anonymous secret. So ultimately your wallet is the one that’s in charge of producing the unique parts.

It seems there’s also a system for making sure you don’t produce bad transactions by asking you to generate N, promping you to unwrap a bunch of them to prove there’s nothing weird about them, and then signing one of the remaining ones under the assumption it’s also legit. At least it sounds like it, but I’m even less familiar with that part. But even if you did spoof someone else’s secrets… it doesn’t allow you to steal their money I don’t think… because in order to have your transaction validated in the first place you had to truly give the ATM your money… so you could I guess pay $10 to screw over your friend for $10 because it’ll look like they spent money they didn’t… but you still spent $10… so it’s less like stealing their money and more like paying to throw their wallet off a bridge? You don’t gain anything, but they lose something? Maybe there’s another exploit I don’t know about in the like “renewal” or “refund” or “transfer” protocols that make that more important.

Anyway, I’m still not a Taler fan, but in this case I think it’s possible to do what they claim. Now, if the bank or ATM or whatever asks for ID or an account to use their services, they could track that you withdrew money, and how much. That’s data they can collect. The anonymous buyer part just means they can’t tie the coin they issued you to a spent deposit they receive later. So they know you got $10 out, and they can assume you probably spent it, but they can’t know what you spent it on.

You might actually like Taler, it’s fundamentally different from blockchain based systems, to the point of being a cryptocurrency only in the technical sense, but not having any of the properties people associate with that word culturally.

Taler doesn’t use any kind of proof of work, and so doesn’t consume excess power or other resources, at least not more than, like, visiting any normal webpage. It’s also not decentralized, and only partially anonymous, so I can acquire money anonymously and no one can trace the money I got to a particular spend, but the only place I can reasonably spend it has to be registered to the centralized issuer and is firmly not anonymous. And the only things they can do with the tokens they receive is redeem them, which means there’s no place for tax evasion because the issuing authority can track every dollar the registered vendors redeem with them. And you can’t really transfer money from random person to person, so there’s no black market opportunity, etc.

So basically the only thing Taler “protects” is that the buyer’s identity can be anonymous, but any vendor accepting Taler must not be and are highly trackable.

These are things I actually don’t like about Taler, but we may be on opposite sides of a few issues, which is fair.