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yasbxxgie · 6 years

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“Music is a cutthroat, disrespectful, low-life, motherfucking, crab-ass, lyin’, deceivin’, stab-you-in-the-back type of business, and that’s just the good part of it!” Darryl “DMC” McDaniels laughs (perhaps channeling Hunter S Thompson’s famous line about the record business). We’re discussing the Devastating Mic Controller’s autobiography Ten Ways Not to Kill Yourself, which he has also forcefully voiced as an audiobook.

It is a raw, revealing memoir which bleeds like a stab wound. “I’m an addict,” writes DMC, the man who rhymed so enduringly about the crack epidemic on Mary, Mary. “For most of my early life, I smoked and snorted and guzzled my way through almost every day.”

Lowering his booming voice a little, he adds: “If your soul is not right with what you’re doing, you will fall apart, like I did.”

When Eminem inducted Run-DMC into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009, the second hip-hop group to make it after Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, he called them “something tough. Something dangerous. Something beautiful and something unique. They were the first movie stars of rap … they are the Beatles”.

“That’s crazy,” DMC tells me, friendly and loquacious, sitting in his New Jersey home. “Busta Rhymes said, ‘Run-DMC didn’t change music, they changed everything’.”

DMC, Joe “Run” Simmons and their DJ Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell were hip-hop’s first superstars. Between 1983 and 1988 the albums Run-DMC, King of Rock, Raising Hell and Tougher Than Leather unleashed classic tracks such as Hard Times, It’s Tricky, Proud to Be Black, Mary, Mary, and Walk This Way. (Later highlights include Ghostbusters and Bounce.) “Run-DMC were so exciting live,” Jurassic 5’s Chali 2na told me.

Despite all Run-DMC’s success, after Tougher Than Leather DMC collapsed into alcoholism, depression and OCD, as he increasingly lost his voice to spasmodic dysphonia, in which the larynx spasms during speech. For years, he recalls, he suffered suicidal thoughts. He had rising creative and personal conflicts with producer Russell Simmons, Jay and, especially, Run (“anal as hell”). His childhood friendship with Run degenerated into a dysfunctional business relationship. DMC felt hustled by Run’s pastor E Bernard Jordan. By 1997, he “avoided Run like a virus”. In Japan later that year, hawking remixes (one of which, Jason Nevins’s take on It’s Like That, was nevertheless an international smash, selling 5m copies), DMC “felt used, pimped and dirty … Milk this cow till there’s powdered music coming out the udders.”

When Ice-T asked Run how it was being top of the rap game, Run famously recalled an epiphany on excess – consuming the best of everything: presidential suites, women and drugs: “The ho’s knocking at the door. Rolling Stone’s behind the ho … I’m fuckin’ out of control.” DMC demurs: “I was never on it like him … Run and Jay smoked more weed than a Rastafarian god could grow.”

Around 2002 things came to a head when Jay was murdered in his Hollis recording studio, DMC discovered he was adopted, and his father died. Despite a serious bout of alcohol-induced pancreatitis years earlier, DMC surrendered to industrial-scale drinking, downing “case of 40s every day”. He had a fridge in his SUV. Even when walking anywhere, a guy in his crew carried around beer in a portable chiller.

DMC realised he had to get real about rehab. He also found counselling helpful. “Therapy is the most gangsta thing you can do,” he says. His ultimate salvation, though, was his wife Zury and his son Dson.

Raised Catholic but “enjoying a wild time on the road rather than worrying about my eternal soul”, DMC now believes a higher, personal power lives within all of us. “I don’t care what you wanna call god: Yahweh, Buddha, Almighty, Allah, whatever you wanna call her. I think God’s a woman ’cause my wife and mother are so cool.”

DMC is a Hillary Clinton supporter. “I’ve seen her, working in the community for foster kids. I fell in love with her ’cause she really cares about young people.” Clinton also reminds him of his mum. “Your mother can read bullshit, knows how to bring shit to order.”

He believes Run DMC’s last three albums were “really awful” – and The School of Old, featuring Kid Rock, on 2001’s Crown Royal certainly was – in striking contrast to the previous quartet, dedicated to uplifting America. This year DMC put out a single Flames (Unnecessary Bullets), a call to stop all the violence. Did he draw on Fred Hampton Jr’s message that “we don’t fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity”? “Oh for sure. That’s absolutely what Flames is about.”

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DMC is angry about police killing black people. “Those bullets should not have left the chambers.” He was moved by Dallas police chief David Brown’s “I’ll be loving you always” eulogy for his five murdered cops. “That was incredible!” he exclaims. He’s also impressed with Brown’s community policing approach, and that he has fired more than 70 sub-standard officers. “We’ve got to go through all of America’s precincts, one by one, and weed out all the bad weeds.”

He raises murders within African American communities, recounting a recent forum. “A young girl gets up and says: ‘Here’s the truth, DMC: when a white cop shoots a black kid that’s wrong, but when a black kid shoots another black kid that’s how it is in the hood.’ That hit me in the gut. I said ‘Damn, that’s the fight right there’. It goes deep: I remember when Jay got shot …”

Jay’s murder remains unsolved. Does DMC think anyone will ever be charged? “Nope. I really, really don’t think so,” he sighs. A 2012 New York Daily Newsarticle alleged people in Hollis know who did it, but are too scared to tell the police. “Yes, too scared.” He quotes the perspective of someone living in Hollis. “‘Jay travelled and they got Jay. I’ve got to live here everyday. I’ve got my wife and kids.’” DMC believes in an afterlife. “You will see Jay again,” he says, quoting the last line of Run-DMC’s Peter Piper. “You will. Right now he’s jamming in heaven with Biggie and Kurt Cobain.”

DMC says contemporary hip-hop is overwhelmed by mediocre rap. “So illiterate, so disrespectful, so negative. Here in America, you can be a motherfuckin’ fool, as long as you’re making money. If you get a young positive brother talking like a Chuck D or a KRS-One or a Rakim, America don’t want to hear from you. We need to go to these radio stations and say we don’t wanna just hear these same 10 records about sipping syrup, having sex and shooting motherfuckers.”

DMC argues that hip-hop should be more about self-esteem, self-respect and “the force of education”. As he does frequently during our interview, he busts out a burst of verse, words from Raising Hell’s closing track: “I’m proud to be black yo.”

He would love to see Public Enemy’s Chuck D shaking things up as a producer industry-wide. “A lot of motherfuckers would be fired. It would be a total re-haul in this music business. Ninety-nine percent of rap today is bad demos. It’s about responsibility. It’s not about censorship and freedom of speech. We let corporate America come in and exploit us, tell us how to do our own hip-hop. You get more money if you’re a knucklehead … In the 80s we challenged Reaganomics.”

Today, DMC is enjoying making music again. “I don’t need no substances.” He’s working on Coming Like a Rhino, a new track with Chuck D, which aims to cross Rebel Without a Pause and Time Bomb. “We’re about to put the foot of God in the ass of the industry, in all rappers to come, the rappers that are still in their fathers’ nuts. Let ’em know they don’t call Chuck the hard rhymer and DMC the King of Rock for nothing. I’m just 52. I’m not a fuckin’ senior citizen. Coming Like a Rhino’s not for recognition; not for sales. Just dope ass beats and dope ass rhymes. Ain’t nothing better than that.”

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toomanysinks · 5 years

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The social layer is ironically key to Bitcoin’s security

A funny thing happened in the second half of 2018. At some moment, all the people active in crypto looked around and realized there weren’t very many of us. The friends we’d convinced during the last holiday season were no longer speaking to us. They had stopped checking their Coinbase accounts. The tide had gone out from the beach. Tokens and blockchains were supposed to change the world; how come nobody was using them?

In most cases, still, nobody is using them. In this respect, many crypto projects have succeeded admirably. Cryptocurrency’s appeal is understood by many as freedom from human fallibility. There is no central banker, playing politics with the money supply. There is no lawyer, overseeing the contract. Sometimes it feels like crypto developers adopted the defense mechanism of the skunk. It’s working: they are succeeding at keeping people away.

Some now acknowledge the need for human users, the so-called “social layer,” of Bitcoin and other crypto networks. That human component is still regarded as its weakest link. I’m writing to propose that crypto’s human component is its strongest link. For the builders of crypto networks, how to attract the right users is a question that should come before how to defend against attackers (aka, the wrong users). Contrary to what you might hear on Twitter, when evaluating a crypto network, the demographics and ideologies of its users do matter. They are the ultimate line of defense, and the ultimate decision-maker on direction and narrative.

What Ethereum got right

Since the collapse of The DAO, no one in crypto should be allowed to say “code is law” with a straight face. The DAO was a decentralized venture fund that boldly claimed pure governance through code, then imploded when someone found a loophole. Ethereum, a crypto protocol on which The DAO was built, erased this fiasco with a hard fork, walking back the ledger of transactions to the moment before disaster struck. Dissenters from this social-layer intervention kept going on Ethereum’s original, unforked protocol, calling it Ethereum Classic. To so-called “Bitcoin maximalists,” the DAO fork is emblematic of Ethereum’s trust-dependency, and therefore its weakness.

There’s irony, then, in maximalists’ current enthusiasm for narratives describing Bitcoin’s social-layer resiliency. The story goes: in the event of a security failure, Bitcoin’s community of developers, investors, miners and users are an ultimate layer of defense. We, Bitcoin’s community, have the option to fork the protocol—to port our investment of time, capital and computing power onto a new version of Bitcoin. It’s our collective commitment to a trust-minimized monetary system that makes Bitcoin strong. (Disclosure: I hold bitcoin and ether.)

Even this narrative implies trust—in the people who make up that crowd. Historically, Bitcoin Core developers, who maintain the Bitcoin network’s dominant client software, have also exerted influence, shaping Bitcoin’s road map and the story of its use cases. Ethereum’s flavor of minimal trust is different, having a public-facing leadership group whose word is widely imbibed. In either model, the social layer abides. When they forked away The DAO, Ethereum’s leaders had to convince a community to come along.

You can’t believe in the wisdom of the crowd and discount its ability to see through an illegitimate power grab, orchestrated from the outside. When people criticize Ethereum or Bitcoin, they are really criticizing this crowd, accusing it of a propensity to fall for false narratives.

How do you protect Bitcoin’s codebase?

In September, Bitcoin Core developers patched and disclosed a vulnerability that would have enabled an attacker to crash the Bitcoin network. That vulnerability originated in March, 2017, with Bitcoin Core 0.14. It sat there for 18 months until it was discovered.

There’s no doubt Bitcoin Core attracts some of the best and brightest developers in the world, but they are fallible and, importantly, some of them are pseudonymous. Could a state actor, working pseudonymously, produce code good enough to be accepted into Bitcoin’s protocol? Could he or she slip in another vulnerability, undetected, for later exploitation? The answer is undoubtedly yes, it is possible, and it would be naïve to believe otherwise. (I doubt Bitcoin Core developers themselves are so naïve.)

Why is it that no government has yet attempted to take down Bitcoin by exploiting such a weakness? Could it be that governments and other powerful potential attackers are, if not friendly, at least tolerant towards Bitcoin’s continued growth? There’s a strong narrative in Bitcoin culture of crypto persisting against hostility. Is that narrative even real?

The social layer is key to crypto success

Some argue that sexism and racism don’t matter to Bitcoin. They do. Bitcoin’s hodlers should think carefully about the books we recommend and the words we write and speak. If your social layer is full of assholes, your network is vulnerable. Not all hacks are technical. Societies can be hacked, too, with bad or unsecure ideas. (There are more and more numerous examples of this, outside of crypto.)

Not all white papers are as elegant as Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper. Many run over 50 pages, dedicating lengthy sections to imagining various potential attacks and how the network’s internal “crypto-economic” system of incentives and penalties would render them bootless. They remind me of the vast digital fortresses my eight-year-old son constructs in Minecraft, bristling with trap doors and turrets.

I love my son (and his Minecraft creations), but the question both he and crypto developers may be forgetting to ask is, why would anyone want to enter this forbidding fortress—let alone attack it? Who will enter, bearing talents, ETH or gold? Focusing on the user isn’t yak shaving, when the user is the ultimate security defense. I’m not suggesting security should be an afterthought, but perhaps a network should be built to bring people in, rather than shut them out.

The author thanks Tadge Dryja and Emin Gün Sirer, who provided feedback that helped hone some of the ideas in this article.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/19/bitcoin-social-layer/

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fmservers · 5 years