Implanted thoughts
My girlfriend and I were telekinetic individuals.
We were waiting at the bus station but the buses were running late. We were trying to plan something but that's not really important.
I got surgery and I had some sort of hearing aid implanted behind my ear which allowed me to read people's minds and even to control their thoughts.
Later we started going back to my home. I took a look at the building from the street and we entered it. We kept walking and took a right turn to enter a room with a big glass door. But it felt like we phased through the glass to enter that room.
While being there, we realized that a piano was playing by itself in another room (the living room on the left of the entrance). I started wondering if it was me who was playing it telekinetically.
"I'm not the one doing that!" I told my girlfriend.
We stood there, carefully watching that piano as it kept playing until, all of a sudden, a garage door behind it opened up by being ripped apart vertically down its middle.
We were both fixated at the open door, waiting to see who would come out of it. Nobody was coming out though and I started being fidgety. I made a chicken that was near the door explode, which spooked my girlfriend, in order to make the blood splatter on whoever was about to come out of the door. At last, some guy came out.
He had long hair and a long beard, and he came out sneaking. He looked threatening, as if he was about to draw a gun, which he did. I threw his gun away telekinetically and he kept drawing guns as I kept throwing them away from his hand. He must have had five or six guns on his person.
At that point I realized that we had switched positions with that guy. Now, he was the one standing near the entrance of the house and we were further away from it, probably near to the door that he came out of. But it was as if the floor was not flat. Instead the place he was standing at was a bit lower. Having taken a better look at him, I saw that he had darker skin than us and was wearing glasses.
I realized that I could mess up with his mind, so I implanted a thought in his mind that someone was standing behind him. Shocked, he instantly turned around. Then I implanted the thought that everything around him completely red. He started flailing around while laughing hysterically. He looked intoxicated. I told him (telepathically) that he would continue seeing red unless he threw away all his guns to which he complied.
P-jumping
I had entered multiple dreams for some kind of sleep study, conducted by a team of people including a colleague. They told me I had to wake up so I started exiting the layered dreams one by one, a total of 87 layered dreams (quite difficult a feat). I asked them how long did it take, to which they replied "not long" but gave no specific number.
All the while they were filling up a wiki page with all the things that I was doing. They wrote that I was a fast learner and a "P-jumper" (or was it a J-pumper?), something that would manifest when I was sad or I had lost some close relative.
After I woke up I was in my bedroom in my village. I felt happy and I tried to hug my colleague but she said that the room was untidy (yeah, it was chaotic). "Oh that's nothing" I told her, "I can tidy it up in an instant by putting everything in my bag and leaving".
The show
I met an anarchist girl on a bus who told me that she would bring me into contact with someone she knew that could hire me as a columnist in his magazine. I'm not sure why but she told me to start cleaning some windows. I thought that perhaps she meant I should write something on the window panes. I was talking about libertarianism in the bus and unbeknownst to me a friend of mine was sitting near the rear of the bus, watching me with a weird look in his eyes.
I went to the parking place where I was supposed to clean the windows with my girlfriend because we wanted to ride on some bumper cars. We went downstairs and found an underground room with arcade cabinets. There was a game there, that looked like a pinball machine but without the glass above it, no decorative painjob on it, just three holes near the center and a bunch of ping-pong balls that you had to hit from below and put them inside holes. Someone had put a egg between the balls though.
We left the arcade because we didn't like it, we saw some toilets and we kept going up to other floors. We were wearing some very tight tracksuits. We kept looking for a live show. My minimap was getting filled with map data of the area as we walked around searching.
We found a guy who had a laser which, if pointed at you, would do something, mark you and make you glow. He was pointing the laser at a fat guy who glowed purple.
We continued walking around and found a room that had a sign that read "Dress up". We looked in and there were a bunch of kids having a costume party. When we tried to look inside for a second time the kids told us "it's not worth the trouble" so we left.
Next we found a huge dinning hall. It had four huge tables placed in a circle around the hall. There were candles everywhere and everything was extravagantly decorated. We entered into the hall and some people started chasing us. "Like you, uncountably many other have entered this hall" said one of them implying we cannot catch him and he started running around the hall while counting the candles and finally run out of it.
We kept looking for the live show but the place was so crowded, especially the toilets which were full of kids for some reason. Also, the toilets didn't have doors in the stalls. Instead, they had curtains, like changing rooms.
Go BCH! We're finally closing that IFP chapter and moving forward again.
Ice resistant
We were pirates and we had founded a society in a cold place. Some aliens wanted to attack earth and they started freezing the planet over.
I was like Heisenberg (from Breaking Bad) and I had ordered some helicopters for me and my crew. But our helicopter, instead of being piloted to us by the pilot that we expected, was piloted by some woman. While she was piloting the helicopter, with us onboard, she quickly overtook some spaceship and one of the crew next to me took a photo of her which we proceeded to examine on the screen of his digital camera and we realized that she was a robot and that she was going to kill us. (she was probably related to these aliens)
We were now in my family's home and the pilot started shooting up the whole place. But I took everyone to my old room which was on the corner of the house thinking that she wouldn't fire so many bullets in that direction and that there was also a pillar in the way and some cupboards that would block any bullets.
A very quirky woman from the crew suddenly did something very heroic and took one of my guns and run towards the robot pilot. It looked destiny was at play, like she couldn't die and she said that she saw in a dream what she had to do, and that she knew she wouldn't die.
That woman then went downstairs and out to the street and started rallying a crowd to fight the aliens. A school parents association also joined her. Somehow they had all seen in their dreams what to do so they all confidently joined her.
I had my girlfriend with me and the aliens were trying to freeze her too. Their ships were flying in circles around us and were freezing the area around them. We were trying to defend ourselves but our technology was far inferior than the aliens'. Someone had given us some kind of oil that worked like a thermal insulator and kept the cold out. We also had some ships that worked with radioactive elements and water to heat up their surroundings, and we were enclosing these ships inside huge bubbles made out of that special oil.
The bubble around the ship I was on suddenly burst, and this allowed the freezing cold to hit us. A friend of mine was immediately frozen solid, others were also frozen solid near her, while I had my neck frozen and I couldn't turn my head at all. That's when we realized that we are loosing the battle with the aliens.
Realizing that was about to die, I went to look for my girlfriend who had stayed inside some nearby school. I reached the school and noticed that it wasn't cold as it was getting heated up by all the people that had found refuge in it. I found her and we were supposed to live in there for as long as we could even though earlier I was planning to go to a very nice place near the edge of the map. She told me that I looked strange, which I understood meant that she cannot see my username above me like you normally can in Minecraft. I was thinking that maybe I died when the oil bubble burst and maybe someone revived me but I couldn't remember anything like that happening, I could only remember the freezing of my neck and my leg which then thawed out again on their own by the time I reached the school.
AMΩK
[...] the races [...] with AMΩK [...] he was telling them; or they promised gold to them and they were fighting for him [...] I was thinking that perhaps they had no other job, that's why they were doing this [...] Later I was watching a story about a guy that [...] I started hearing the rules of various sports and one of them was they would mount horses. I suppose this would happen if they hadn't been killed in battle. They would mount hoses and they gave them something like wooden tridents. The horses would walk and parallel and distance themselves in "one unit of horse" as they called it [...] on separators made of wire [...] remote [...] they would usually leave or approach a bit and as they went ahead they had to kill each other. They would walk in parallel not like the medieval jousting where they were heading against each other. In parallel.
[...] I was watching a scene where some guy cheated and killed someone but he did it inside a huge church. Suddenly, he left ancient Greece [...] Ceasar was there [...] and Ceasar asked him "Why did you do that? Why did you trick him and kill him?". And he replied "But I'm not a member of the that fraternity" implying that he was fighting only because he liked it and not because he was part of some team [...] didn't have to follow rules. Caesar didn't do anything to him. So he stood up and started leaving. He took his trident [...] and he was waving at Caesar and he was exiting the church.
At the entrance of the church I was listening to another story about someone who had a trident (just the head of it) that had very old meat stuck on it. And he could remember at that time, and this was probably someone that had fought with the cheater in the past [...] won maybe and he wanted to fight with him again.
Powerless on a beach
My girlfriend, a friend and I were on a beach during a pitch black night. We had three tents, one of which contained a portable power generator. We were trying to kickstart it and then connect it to some lamps that were in another tent.
My friend and I had partially buried parts of the cabling that went from one tent to the other, and I remembered the advice that another friend of mine had given me on how to bury cables: for every 3 grams of cable, I should place 3 grams of dirt above it when burying it. I was worried though that the cables might get short-circuited if they get wet underground and that perhaps I should put plastic bags around them. Especially around that part of the buried circuit that looked like an Arduino or PIC programmer.
I used my father's analog multimeter to measure the voltage that the power generator was outputting and then me and my friend started experimenting to see if we could short-circuit three of the cables that were buried underground. We had moderate success, but, because there were no lights, it was very hard to see the needle of the multimeter. I was using a red flashlight to illuminate the multimeter but it had some problem and was flickering so I could only briefly see where the needle was pointing. Additionally even when the flashlight was lighting up, the needle, although red in color itself, seemed to absorb the light of the flashlight instead of reflecting it, which made it even harder to see where it was pointing. I started suspecting that perhaps the needle was absorbing the light that had a specific polarization so I started rotating the flashlight to try and find an angle of polarization (assuming that the flashlight was emitting polarized light for some reason) that would cause the needle to not absorb it, but that didn't seem to work either.
After we succesfuly started the generator and we had power in the tent, my girlfriend took off her shirt for some reason in front of everyone inside one of the tents. She initially covered herself with her hands but eventually just lied down naked saying she wants to lie down and relax. She was now lying outside of the tent near the sea and the sun was dawning. The waves of water got her slightly wet and she withdrew away from the sea.
Movie night
I was in my family's house and my father gave me a new Sony Ericsson M111 which he got from his job. I started trying out the phone to see if I wanted to keep it or not but we started watching a movie in the TV.
In the movie, there were meteorites falling from space, deploying legs and hands and transforming into humanoid monsters that could jump from building to building with ease. They would attack women to steal their hormones by consuming them or sucking their blood. I now was Halle Berry and I was kicking and fighting these humanoids inside a house.
After kicked the butts of these humanoids I wanted to blow up the whole house with them so we rigged all the light bulb sockets in the house with explosives. We switched on the first set of light switches and something exploded in a different room. We switched on another set of light switches and something else exploded. But for some reason I did not turn on the third and final set of light switches. Instead I let the humanoids survive a little longer so that I could take a better look at them and describe them to a friend of mine over my handheld radio. My father exclaimed "Doh, are they really going to show us how the monsters looks now??".
The monster looked like a regular human. It looked a bit like G-Man from Half-Life. Another monster looked a bit like Steve Carell. Sometime earlier I had also seen someone who had removed his scrotum and replaced it with a pretzel but this was something like an advertisement which claimed that you could then put your hands through the pretzel to lift your testicles whenever you want.
Because I didn't kill these humanoids when I had the chance, they recovered, became aggressive again, pulled me into a room and I couldn't escape. I was able to mimic their ability to jump from wall to wall and I did that to escape their grasp as they were trying to kill me. Eventually I was high up in one of the walls while the humanoid monsters were standing below me, holding one laptop each, and making hormone-related puns and jokes. One of the humanoids tried to spit on me a very big lump of snot that he called "big ball" (and yes this was a horrible testicle joke) but missed he me.
After a while I managed to escape by breaking the screen of Steve Carell's laptop. "And what did you achieve by that?" he said but once he saw that the screen was broken, he froze for a moment, and I used the opportunity to try to escape the house. Once I reached and opened the main door of the house, a very strong stream of air started flowing into the house, pushing me back inside but I did manage to overcome it and closed the door behind me.
Once outside, I was in my grandfather's birthplace. I started running down the road (and even crawled part of the way) while trying to look back to the door of the house to see if the humanoids were after me. I had trouble seeing the door and eventually I saw them coming out of it. I thought of entering a nearby house but decided against it because that was the house of some really old ladies and I felt like it would turn this into a nightmare.
I kept running down the road until I looked up: A new, huge, dense swarm of meteorites covered the whole sky and was falling towards the earth. I could already hear the thuds of some of the meteorites as they impacted the earth while women were running in panic everywhere around me trying to escape the new humanoids that these meteorites were turning into.
It was nighttime. The humanoids had now lost all their non-human characteristics, and looked almost like regular humans with slightly pointy ears and a little bit vampiric. As I looked uphill, I saw inside the dark the black shape one of the humanoids jumping from lamp post to lamppost coming towards me along the road. I realized that I did not have enough time to enter a house to protect myself. So I decided to lie down on the road and close my eyes and hope that the humanoid would ignore me and chase some other woman. The last thing I saw was the humanoid jumping right above me and landing 1 meter away from me. But I knew he noticed me and that he had now turned towards me. I felt him come over me and grab my hands (which I was using to cover my face) and he tried to pry them apart so that he could bite me and drink my blood.
3 rules for changing the rules
Now that people seem to be discussing alternatives to the developer fund solution, may I suggest a few rules to follow in the future so that we don't end up in the same, admittedly *creative,* mess.
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1) If it is technically possible, chose to hard-fork instead of soft-fork
If you think there a rule change is valuable, own up to it, convince everyone it's good, and do it as a hard fork. Soft-forks can be unavoidable by others if you want them to be unavoidable, because your blocks will be valid according to the old rules as well. Even if someone like BU tries to manually invalidate the donating blocks, (and correct me here if I am wrong) you just have to hide the fact that you are donating in this block. For example you could use spendable-by-all addresses to receive funds while refusing to accept blocks that spend from these addresses unless they spend to some hidden set of addresses that your fund committee has decided. (SegWit also does something similar with spendable-by-all addresses to confuse old clients to view segwit transactions as valid while not allowing anyone to spend them by orphaning blocks that do so, but again, I may be wrong on this one, if you know more please tell me in the comments) In the end the only way to avoid the soft fork is having some observer looking for blocks to that are orphaning non-donating blocks after an unjustified-by-lag delay, which seems messy and sounds like an even more extreme version of the rolling checkpoints that ABC implemented and which caused quite a backlash.
If others are willing to hard-fork away from your soft-fork and you are willing to allow them to do so, why soft-fork instead of hard-forking in the first place? So don't soft-fork unless you are willing to play this cat and mouse game of trying to hide your soft-forked blocks to make it impossible for others (like BU) to try and hard fork away from you.
2) Do not try to force changes that entail risks that *you* would be unwilling to take
So many people have been calling miners selfish for not wanting to help fund the development of the coin that gives them their income. They were (still are) trying to portray the donation as a wise investement that the stupid selfish miners do not understand.
Lets assume that you are right. That this is indeed a wise donation. Would you be willing to take a loan in your name and pay the miners that currently refuse to invest their 12.5%, all the money that they will lose in the next 6 months by being forced to donate, if in six months they paid you back the money you gave them plus interest at an interest rate equal to the percentile increase of their profits after 6 months compared to the amount they expected to earn if the dev fund did not exist? If your donation plan is such a great investment opportunity, then you should expect to earn money by doing what I suggested above. If it is not a good plan, then you will lose money. Are you willing to take that risk with your own money? If not, then you are just as selfish as those miners are and you shouldn't be trying to force them to take the risk of investing in development just like the miners are not forcing you to do anything.
Put your money where your mouth is or stop trying to guilt trip people, in other words.
3) Suggest soft-forks only when they *clearly* do not violate the spirit of the whitepaper
As I said in my previous article, there are soft-forks that are reasonable because there is no way to implement them as a hard-fork and because they are not going against what Bitcoin has been all this time.
Avalance is one example of a good idea for a soft-fork. It cannot really be hard-forked because the voting process about which transactions should go into the next block happens after the previous block is published and before the new block is mined, and therefore cannot be deduced by looking at the previous block or the history of the blockchain. The Avalanche state is at least partially "outside" the blockchain and thus cannot be enforced by hard-forking new rules. Once more, correct me if I am wrong in the comments. Avalanche also does not go against the spirit of what Bitcoin is supposed to be. The purpose of Avalanche is to help oust miners who break the "first-seen" rule. It is purpose is to give confidence that once you see an unconfirmed transaction in your wallet, there is very little chance of a miner including a different transaction, and the one you see disappearing from your wallet along with the coins it brought. Avalance helps BCH be more like real cash. And it is clear as day that it does so.
The only people that would be pissed by Avalanche that would either be some sort of purists *coughBSVcough* or they people who are interested in helping thieves get away with theft.
Contrast Avalanche with the dev fund plan. The only people who would be pissed by the dev fund plan are people who think that they would rather spend their money ("their" according to the whitepaper mind you) on more mining equipment to further secure the network. Or people who want to fund only one of the developers that the fund would like to fund. Or people who think that such a scheme will become corrupted. Or people who think that this looks like Dash. Or people who think it's better to invest in better wallets or marketing. There are way too many people that will get pissed by a committee forcing them to donate to some cause.
I think that following the above three rules would make the next proposal more acceptable. Can you think of any example where some change violated one of the above but it was still "good"? (whatever "good" means for you)
Hard fork it
There is a plan to create a fund for BCH implementation developers (eg Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin Unlimited) which will be funded by donating 12.5% of the coinbase (i.e. the BCH minted in each mined block) to it, as well as orphaning blocks from miners that refuse to donate (i.e. refusing to build upon these blocks, building upon a previous block and effectively invalidating the non-donating one). Four mining pools (at least?) are currently in support of this plan. It is also currently supported by the main developer of Bitcoin ABC (the first node implementation of BCH) and the developer of Electron Cash (the amazing wallet implementing CashFusion and CashShuffle). On reddit, the community is split: some think it is the best thing since sliced bread and Dash, others think it is a very ironic joke.
I will start with a tl;dr and I will then detail my thoughts on the matter.
**tl;dr: The miners have every right to do this 51% attack on BCH but it will probably end up being really bad.**
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This is technically a 51% attack
A group of miners has declared that they intend to orphan perfectly valid, according to the protocol, blocks, in order to affect the flow of coins. Technically, this is a 51% attack. One can argue that 51% "attacks" are not necessarily bad, and they would probably be right. But this one is ambiguous at best and bad at worst.
There are legitimate reasons for orphaning valid blocks
Recently miners colluded to 51% "attack" the BCH network and revert valid transactions made by a thief (https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-cash-miners-undo-attackers-transactions-with-51-attack). Most people will consider this a legitimate application of a miner's power to orphan perfectly valid blocks, because it was done in order to revert theft.
But even for something so obviously right, many people considered what the miners did to be a bad idea. The arguments ranged from slippery slope arguments ("What if the miners start doing this to revert transactions for other things that are not always universally considered crimes, like selling drugs to a 17 year old, or funding a guerilla force that goes against some government") to arguments related to what "cash" is supposed to be and whether " smart cash" which is can magically disappear from someone's pocket is better than "dumb" cash which is just what we had for millenia and doesn't have an opinion about being stolen from someone.
Then there is Avalanche, a system proposed to make zero-confirmation transactions safe, which is based on the same premise: Miners collude to orphan perfectly valid (by the rules) blocks if these blocks try to validate a double spend. Once more, even for such an obviously useful and rightful case, people are reacting against it. This time I cannot relay their arguments to you because I don't really understand them.
If it is so controversial for miners to collude in order to revert or prevent actual theft, imagine how controversial it is for miners to collude not in order to prevent damage but in order to force people to donate to some cause, whether the cause is good or not.
It is controversial for a reason
Anyone saying that this is an insignificant experiment is lying, either to themselves or to everyone else. It is a very bold move, even supporters of it recognize it as an important turning point for BCH. "Miners finally awakening" they say.
Does anyone remember why people were pissed at SegWit and soft-forks in general? It was because you could not avoid them.
Suppose I am a miner, and I love BCH but I think that this force-donation plan will either cause a catastrophe, or it will set a catastrophic precedent about what miners are supposed to do. Well I have an option: I can hard fork away from it. Or can I??
I can't. You see, the blocks that contain the donations, are valid blocks according to the old rules, so I have no way to refuse to build upon them and I can't even detect them as the forced-donation plan could be set up in such a way that the donation doesn't need to come from the coinbase. The implementers of the plan could force miners to mine blocks only if they send at least X amount of BCH to the fund's address (from any address they own, not necessarily from the coinbase).
Hell, even if I do some other change to my node that makes me incompatible with the current chain (like changing the magic number of my blocks) so that I forcefully fork myself away from the "donating" blockchain, the colluding miners could easily come to my new chain and enforce their soft-fork there as well. Once more, I can't really escape it, because they are 51% attacking the chain when they chose to invalidate perfectly valid blocks, and there is, and technically cannot be, any rule that makes their fund-donating blocks invalid.
That's why soft-forks suck. That's one of the reasons why we do hard-forks in BCH all this time, because we don't want new rules and features to be imposed upon anyone. We want people to be able to refuse to upgrade, and stay with their old rules and features. Religiously following this devotion to hard-forks will help us avoid another SegWit and it will show that we do not accept a majority of miners on the chain forcing their will upon the minory. The rules for a miner change only when they decide to follow the new rules. And we let the market decide which side of the fork it wants to follow.
Just hard fork it then
Lets change the rules so that the protocol itself demands payment to the developer fund. That way whoever doesn't want to donate can fork off and follow the current chain. The problem with that is that the fork that forces donations, can hardly claim to be Bitcoin anymore. Most people don't even believe BCH is Bitcoin, imagine how hard it will be to convince anyone if you alter the protocol that much.
The whole soft-fork for 6 months instead of owning up to it and doing a hard fork sounds like some miners and developers trying to get their way without jeopardising BCH's bitcoin-ness. But we all know that soft-forks are even worse, we've been saying that since the creation of BCH. So let's stop pretending that this somehow doesn't alter the properties of the coin.
And it is fine to alter the properties of the coin in ways that align with what Bitcoin is supposed to be. Avalanche is trying to fix a technical problem in Bitcoin: the fact that the first-seen rule, is not really a rule (but most of us would love it to be as it enabled secure zero-confirmation transactions). But forcing other miners to give money to a committee that will fund the developement of the coin?
Developement is important
Other things are also important. Chain security is important, and pushing non donating miners away is bad for it. Marketing is important so why don't we make a fund for advertising BCH? Privacy is important, lets make another fund to develop CashFusion further. Making Monero work more efficiently may actually be even more important, make a fund. According to some, maybe DDoSing Blockstream's servers is important, #fundtheddos. In fact all of the above are probably way too important to devote only 12.5% of the coinbase. Lets force donations of 30% to make things go faster.
12.5%
I don't know when BCH went from "1MB is just an arbitrary limit, you should be allowed to mine bigger blocks and let the market decide what's the right size" to "Not donating at least 12.5% of your coinbase should orphan your block and we will not even let you set a different limit because we'll do it as a soft-fork". Stalin's six month plan.
When did we start trusting people to come up with arbitrary numbers that will alter the rules of the network? It would be nice if we could get rid of the democracy in mining where 51% of the miners get to decide what the other 49% of the miners ought to donate.
No word about China?
I avoided talking about this one till now because it's a cheap shot. To add insult to injury the fund will be managed by some Chinese company. I don't know if giving control of the fund to some Chinese company is worse than the suggestion of the main developer of ABC to give control of the fund to himself and some other (anonymous as far as I know) developers (which while I trust to not run away with the funds but I do not trust enough to know how to protect themselves from a triple letter agency knocking on their door to take the funds).
If you are going to do this, do it as hard fork and do it with a pre-agreed list of recipients to send funds to (which will contain different development teams) in pre-agreed ratios between them. Oh, and with the 6-month duration also hardcoded in the fork upgrade.
(I would suggest to let the miners decide the ratios in each block but that would probably end up with a lot of under the table payments until the system would collapse)
It's only for 6 months
I could just say "Nothing is more permanent than the temporary" but it's too cliche. Still, I doubt anyone who thinks this is a bad idea is somehow feeling reassured by a promise to end it in 6 months. Anyone who is against this plan would be equally against it whether it's for 1 day or 10 years. The problem is in principle, not in magnitude. You could argue that if the tax was 0.01% it would be practically non-existent but the problem in principle would be exactly the same. Although a longer duration could increase the chances for the system to become corrupt in the distribution of the funds.
This is needed to avoid the tragedy of the commons
This implies that development is not fast enough. "Fast enough" according to who? Open source projects like Linux have undeniably progressed. Did they progress fast enough? I don't know, that's very subjective. It seems to me that in terms of scalability we are quite ahead. If anything, we need more users, so for me, a fund for marketing the coin would be actually more useful but it would also be an equally bad idea for the reasons I mentioned above.
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I'm not sure how to end this article. I guess I will honestly wish the miners best of luck, whatever their decision is. I hope they can make this a better currency for all of us. If they think that funding for development is right now SO important that they are willing to introduce things that go so much against the spirit of BCH (like supporting soft-forks and reorganizing the chain for victim-less crimes) then they should go ahead with it.
Please excuse any typos, I'll go over it again later if I find some time.
Useless spooks
I was in a private school for foreign languages with two unknown men and a girl that I used to work with. We looked creepy and mentally disturbed, each in our own way, kind of like the Adams family. There was an upcoming holiday soon so we used a system with numbers to randomly chose whom each of us would serve and who would serve us.
Later I tried to go out through a window and to enter through another one in order to go to a different room. Once I was through the first window, I shouted to my servant to close the window but, perhaps in order to take revenge on me, he and the others closed both windows: he first closed the first one, told me that something had fallen to the floor to make me look down, and when I looked back up they were closing the second window as well and, like that, I was locked outside the school.
I thought that I shouldn't get back in immediately, perhaps I can play a prank on them when they come out to see what I am doing. So I sat on a corner in a very dark corridor near the entrance of the school. Eventually some black guy passed by me but was not scared at all although I was expecting anyone seeing me to be scared shitless.
I moved pass the fact that I wasn't as scary as I thought and started walking inside the school again. Suddenly I started screaming for no apparent reason, as if I stumbled upon or saw something but there was absolutely nothing visible in front of me, just air. A narrator started talking and saying that the other guy must have been equally scared as I was. Then some weird overlay statistics screen appeared over what I was seeing that had details about how much me and the other guy (which was apparently invisible?) got scared of each other. According to the stats I was slightly more scared than he was and I thought that they must have made some mistake, there's no way that this was true.
Struggling Santa
It was carnival season and we dressed up in costumes. I was dressing up as Santa Claus when I saw three nerdy guys also dressing up as Santas but their costumes were comically huge for them, they almost looked like an inflatable carnival effigy of Santa Claus.
We were in a bus taking us to a different city. I had forgotten my Swiss army knife in a small building days ago but I was very happy that nobody had stolen it, so I was going there. There were two ball chains attached to the knife, one thicker than the other. They let me take my knife and I thanked them.
wewerechasedaround
Near that small building was my university. It was my first day in the university although the building did not look familiar and the whole event looked like the welcome day in Hogwarts.
I was looking through someone else's eyes, probably through a classmate's that had the same name as me. I was sitting in a group of people that were mocking me (a little bit, but I didn't take it seriously because I didn't want to make a scene). They were coming up with nicknames for different people, including me but I tried to nudge them towards making a nickname for the real me (and not the one whose eyes I was looking through) in order to see what they think of the real me. Unfortunately, I became more lucid and this caused me somehow to be unable to hear what they were saying either because it would be "unfair", or because it did not make sense to be able to hear that and this world was suddenly trying to become more logical.
I had the power to telekinetically lift and throw objects but I could not really control it properly.
It was raining and I wanted to run away but, first, I wanted to return some pens back to a guy. I lifted them in the air to send them to him and managed to do so for the pens but the caps of the pens were not so lucky. I accidentally sent them flying very fast at a wall and they disappeared. "Hey, where the hell did you throw them?" they told me. I tried to think where they could have disappeared to and I concluded that they went inside the wall, either because they glitched due to their great speed (as if in a video game) or because the wall had a balcony and some other stuff drawn on it, so the caps went into the drawing.
I was looking at a wall that had some balcony balusters drawn on it. The drawn baluster had snow on it. I thought the pen cap might be somewhere behind the wall. I pressed my fingers on the baluster to heat it up and cause the snow to melt, so that I can see the drawn background behind it. The snow melted off very unnaturally: it was simply fading out around the area that I was touching, and once I removed my hand it would again slowly fade in. Behind the snow I could see a drawn kindergarten and I kept heating up different parts of the snow to look for the cap in the drawing behind it, sort of like playing "Where is Waldo" but with snow hidding the drawing and looking for a pen cap.
In the end I found the pens and caps and I was trying to give them to a duckling that was taking refuge from the rain under a tree. I was trying to convince the duckling to take the pens to the guy that owned them but it was complaining that it was raining and refused. I then picked up the duckling, because it also belonged to the same guy and I threw it inside a pool that was near the walls with the drawings. There were also many students and tables around the pool, attending some event or party.
The place looked like an open space under a bus station near my university that had an overhead ceiling but only one wall to support it. But in general it did not remind me of any place I knew.
There was also a student that had a weird multimeter with 3 probes which was used a bit differently: You would connect it to a voltage or current source and then you would turn it off and disconnect the prongs and it would still show the measurement for a little while. He was inserting the prongs of the probes inside the soft skin between my upper gums and my lips (on the top front side of my mouth) because I wanted to measure something about my telekinetic power. But when we removed the probes I started bleeding in my mouth and I could taste it.
Later, when everyone had left the area, I was listening to a small portable radio while spitting blood on a handkerchief and there was a medium who said that "if you tell me something stupid, I may speak harshly to you". The medium had a radio show that was famous for insulting the listeners that called in. There was an advertisement for the mediums show which contained a clip from a past broadcast where the medium was telling someone "No! It's not a good idea to have a kid! Because..." and then started psychoanalyzing the listener that had called in. While the medium was doing that I walked above a trashcan to spit the blood from my mouth which was getting pretty bad, but I actually spit which caused me to escape from this world.
The blood pump
I was hospitalized. My grandfather and a friend was there and my grandmother's brother had brought me some amazing fried shrimp to eat. I was not sure if it was OK to eat fried food, so I thought I'd ask someone if I could, otherwise I would give it to my friend. I was supposed to have a needle in me, through which I was receiving blood, and there were also a bunch of other tubes near me. A nurse came to check these after I woke up. For quite some time I was fiddling with them until I noticed that the one delivering blood had a broken needle and was not actually connected on me but for quite some time it seemed like it was not spewing out any blood, perhaps it had air in the tube that had to get out first. When the blood reached the end of the tube, it was coming out in pulses as if it was coming from an artery. I sprayed blood on the bedside table which was full of small tin trays and cans, some filled with purchase receipts. I made a big mess.
I pulled a cord above me to notify a nurse to come check it out (again) and also explain to me what exactly these tubes are. It took her quite some time to come. While waiting I started wondering why my girlfriend was nowhere around, she couldn't be so unconcerned, so maybe they forgot to notify her that I am here or maybe she's still on her way.
Finally a doctor and a nurse came. The doctor was loud and quite full of himself and was talking to everyone in the room. The he turned to me, "Did you, sir, have any other similar cases of food intolerance?". "What is food intolerance?", I asked. "It's what you have right now, sir", he replied, "Last week, last Sunday, you suffered from food intolerance". "I am here for a whole week??", I exclaimed and he replied positively. That when I realized that there is no way that my girl would not be here after a whole week, this must be a different world for sure. I then tried and managed to escape from this world.
Near that avenue
I was running, almost flying, in the night, through some alleys near a big avenue. I could see small shops in the alleys, street food canteens, and an empty super-market that still had its lights on.
I got out of a building to the big avenue outside it which had a 6th lane that I did not remember existing but the lane was leading to a dead-end. I waited on that lane, trying to think how to make a driver stop to pick me up. I thought that just waving my hands would not work, so I contemplated just dropping my pants and showing them my butt. I assumed that the sight would shock them enough to step on the brakes. But in the end an ex-colleague picked me up with his car before I put my plan into action.
You see, I was invited to visit a former employer to speak with my manager from back when I worked there but, after waking up at 6am to go there, he was not there. I saw another ex-colleague who was asking me about some code and whether I can receive emails. I saw many new faces, who seemed to recognize me, which made me doubt whether they were actually new or whether I was forgetting who they were.
Later, during night-time, I was walking in a big avenue outside the premises of the company, searching for a card. I bought a Vodafone top up card but I had never seen a card that looked like this one. It was actually composed of two cards: The first one looked like a fake/sample/demonstration card and the second one looked like a thin transparent nylon card that when put on top of the first one would make the real top-up code show up.
Later, I left that place along with my girl. I made huge jump while holding hands with her. The jump was called "Jaguar" but I shouldn't have and didn't say the name to anyone back then (It was named after the brand of the boots that I was wearing). I had two cellphones with me and, during the jump, I was trying to pull my emails on them from the mail server. Afterwards we landed on the pavement, near the entrance to some tunnels.
Later we were exploring those underground tunnels in order to mine and collect a material. We had a machine working in front of us that was grinding down the material so that we could collect it.
We found some glass rods, each surrounded by metallic screw-like threads, and we proceeded to break them apart and to collect them. I was worried that I may cut myself on the really sharp edges. Because of the rods the tunnel was becoming very cramped and tight and we could see that it was ending a bit further ahead. "Anyway, let's just go till the end", I said, "since we're that close to it, we can take a look at what it is".
When we arrived at the end, my girl asked me if she should get down there. I looked to see what she meant and saw a tiny hole, filled with water that would barely fit her head but she somehow fitted through it legs-first. I knew (or rather hoped) that she would simply escape from this world if she were to drown in there, but I got really worried because she would have to go through the experience of drowning. I watched her as she dove deep enough to disappear but the next moment she started swimming really quickly back up. She got her head out of the tiny hole and took a huge breath of air and at the exact same moment, an extremely load alarm sounded from outside this world, like a horrible human scream in the tunnel and sent my heart racing.
Secret blinking
I was with a girl I used to like and also with my girlfriend.
There was a secret organization searching for supernatural people by testing their blood for unusually high PH because of a virus. The virus initially gave you a fever and also infected trees, completely destroying them. A year after the infection you would completely recover and acquire that heightened PH in your blood.
At the stairs of the main square, in front of the Parliament, there was a shop where various sellers were peddling their stuff. I was looking at the colors of their goods from above, in my minimap. The receptionist of the secret organization remembered me because I had bought a strange backgammon set with colors and she wanted to play with me. I had bought the backgammon for my girlfriend but we hadn't played yet and I still hadn't unwrapped it. I was wearing heavy clothing even though it was summer.
I had also been infected by that virus. A year after my infection I got visited by members of this organization which took me with them. They tested me but, strangely, nothing weird came up regarding my PH. In the meantime they executed anyone causing trouble for them in a pretty much standard way: they took the trouble-maker in a room, they closed the doors and one of the older members shot him.
Even though I didn't have the special PH they were looking for, they kept me in the organization and even bought me a very rare comic (the first volume of Spiderman specifically) but someone tried to tear it and I got angry at him. In the end I managed to take it back but the organization didn't like my behavior during the incident so while I was putting my comic back at its place two people grabbed me by my arms gently trying to drag me into a room (obviously to kill me).
While they were pushing me into the "kill" room the receptionist asked for my name. I was feeling lost and I didn't answer. One of the guys that were dragging me looked at her like he wanted to tell her "Why are you asking? There is no need to record anything, he will soon be dead". "Oh never mind", she said, "It's OK". The room they took me in had eight people in it, all ready to execute me. They closed the door behind me.
I had already knew that I had full control over the world. "Whatever", I thought, "I'll just kill them all and do what the fuck I want". I didn't have anything to kill them with so I started blinking, each blink demolishing more parts of the room. In the end nothing remained, the ceiling had fallen, squashing everyone in the room and the door had opened. Everything was silent.
Suddenly a scientist appeared almost out of nowhere. He started yelling at me "What do you think you have accomplished here? You destroyed everything. Look at this mess". Not knowing how he survived my wrath, I grabbed his wrist and try to show to him that he shouldn't be shouting at me because he stands no chance. He starts threatening that he will kill me and draws a knife. I start squishing his wrist, which felt like play-doh, between my index finger and my thumb till I had almost cut his hand off. The scientist kept trying to kill me while I kept trying to somehow neutralize him without killing him. I tried to reason with him telling him that they were trying to destroy my comic book. I didn't kill him.
Fighting a barcode
A friend of mine was working with children with Down syndrome and he told me that I might have that syndrome and that I should be tested for that and another similar disease. It turned out that the test results were positive.
Someone was chasing me and my girlfriend. We hid in my grandma's bedroom. We got into the room because we found some people in mussels that were trying to fight and we were investigating who did this to them. I told my girlfriend that our pursuers will soon reach us and that we should lock the door and call someone to help us. I picked up the phone and started dialing. I then grabbed the door and tried to shut it but at the same time someone was coming behind that door and tried to keep it open. We were both pulling the door against each other. I was also trying to pull the door upwards which got the door out of its frame and started getting slowly pulled upwards into the air while we still struggled. I turned to my girlfriend who, up until now, was panicking, but she now looked drunk and was laughing on her own. I turned back to the door and now I could see who was behind the door pulling it. It wasn't a man, it was a huge barcode, something like Missingno but black and white. I tried to escape from that world by slapping myself which partially worked.
@ZeusOnPills
