- Mask-wearing as a cultural shift: participants debate whether widespread face-covering normalizes anonymity, reduces objectification (“my face is up here”), or re-introduces Victorian taboos about visible skin.  
- Early-COVID context noted: only days earlier wearing a mask in public was socially unacceptable; the pandemic is forcing a rapid re-evaluation of personal protective gear and its aesthetics.  
- Tangential speculation on “ninja economy” and mecha-style personal armor as long-term extensions of mask culture, blending cosplay, fashion, and functional protection.  
- Academic-integrity economics: a contractor asks how to price ghost-writing graduate coursework (≈8–10 h of differential-equation coding); discussion ranges from minimum-wage anchoring to high-end programmer-plus-mathematician rates, with side debates on blackmail vs. repeat-business game theory.  
- Consensus that hourly billing undervalues intellectual work and that first-offer anchoring strongly shapes future negotiations.  
- Numerai skepticism: one member questions whether the decentralized prediction-market platform can prevent operators from silently expropriating uploaded models while still enforcing opaque “originality” and “consistency” criteria.  
- Call for a fully decentralized, commit-reveal marketplace where participants hash-and-stake their predictions or trades, revealing keys only after a round to guarantee fairness and prevent front-running.  
- Pointers to further resources: Paul Sztorc’s Truthcoin writings, Bryan Bishop’s Bitcoin vault prototype for secure on-chain storage, and a Bitcoin Core GitHub issue (#9197) on authenticated database state using Merkle chains.