[NoLimit]

Here are Riks emails today:
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Hello All,



At the bottom of this note I indicated that I will be at the bar at Bahrs at 530 tomorrow evening. Since that time, there have been various developments and I will not be at Bahrs in response to requests to be extra cautious at maintaining the general peace and quiet.



At this stage I am between a rock and a hard place to further the discussion on the subject. It appears that, for the time being, I will have to take the discussion of the proposal out of the public sphere. Too many supporting stakeholders feel restrained in speaking out on this matter, and that results in an asymmetric debate. This bums me out because I believe that vigorous but courteous public debate allows faster progress than back room sausage making, but it appears that public debate has been forced off the table by a small group of very vocal opponents of the idea. I suspect that from now on we will need to have smaller working groups, with policy positions for various stake holders, etc.



This is frustrating. The truly discourteous opponents are a very small minority, but they have chosen to destroy their opportunity to be engaged in this effort. For the time being, the discourteous opponents will be exempted from the discussion and I hope the courteous opponents will fairly and ably represent them. At this stage, my personal count indicates that the proponents of the concept outweigh the sum of courteous and discourteous opponents. However, I would certainly note that the opponents appear to have a stronger aversion than the strength of the attraction of the concept shown by the proponents. This, by itself, introduces an interesting dynamic. Do 150,000 moderately positive votes balance against 50,000 strongly negative votes?



Meanwhile, I have also received so much feedback at this stage that I probably need to engage in a swampdrain to develop NMS V2.0 at which time we can run another test.



Updates will follow, please do not hesitate to contact me if you have questions or comments.



Best,



Rik van Hemmen