Empact

There's a big difference between a solution which requires you to use a custodial service, and one which gives you the option of non-custodial service - the latter allows for a much greater ability to hold custodial services accountable, by opting to self-custody, without forcing you to change your payment medium in the process.

"a Frankenstein's monster created by mating civil libertarianism with austerity."

— UC San Diego sociologist Neil Gong

They manage to name the two contingents that are out of power and have nothing to do with the crisis, libertarians and advocates of austerity, while leaving aside those who created the situation: progressives.

As for policy consequences, how about this one:

The United States directly and indirectly funded the Wuhan laboratory, and so bears some responsibility for the virus. It also appears Fauci and others were aware of the deficiencies of the institution. The US should end its support for dangerous research in institutions outside of its purview.

Fyi, it was predicted very early on. The first reply to Satoshi’s announcement email to the cypherpunks mailing list criticized the idea as unscalable. Satoshi implemented an early version of payment channels in Bitcoin Core around version 0.1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels

Finally, some $49B was transacted yesterday on Bitcoin. Whether billions is virtually zero is a matter of interpretation. https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/

Why the bitterness? You could blame the politicians just as well for the climate disaster, or the corporations, why the wealthy?[1] What do you know of their family life or love of dogs?

I think the rich are not who you think - if you put less energy into hating them you may have more time to improve your own life, e.g. by studying personal finance or investing: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

https://www.joshuakennon.com/add-jack-macdonald-list-secret-...

[1] Incidentally, one of the best climate mitigations, a source fuels carbon tax, has been blocked not because the wealthy but because its supposed impact on the poor (limiting travel & commuting). One hopes the Carbon Tax & Dividend proposals will gain traction, but how can they, when they pay out to the people, instead of the special interests? https://citizensclimatelobby.org

Examples of common causes left out: nephritis, stroke, diabetes, alzheimer’s, septicemia.

Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P5b9GdVsNx3DPywLluwE...

I disagree. Consider the housing bubble - it was tipped off by the response to the internet bubble, low rates from the fed so that people would borrow to get the economy moving again, e.g. by buying housing. Low rates result in more lending and buying, more lending and buying leads to price appreciation (pay attention, as this sequence is playing out again now), and eventually enough price appreciation and easy money leads to irresponsible lending and mania. The depreciation of the dollar through easy money lending has indirectly caused the bubble through the practices it encouraged.

I expect economics textbooks in the future will refer to this time as the time this question was settled: were shells and gold money because of their intrinsic ability to be used as jewelry etc., or was it jewelry because their other properties (particularly scarcity / unforgeable costliness) made them natural monies?

Hard money advocates have been arguing this point recently, and IMO it can only be settled by the market and observation. Only if the latter is true, does Bitcoin have a valid claim to become money.

The bubbles I've observed have been a product of or exacerbated by artificially low interest rates and the money printing that enables them. If Bitcoin achieves its goal, it will remove or reduce the power of the government to print money and otherwise set interest rates, which will enable market-based interest rates to emerge.

It's funny to me that deflation being bad is an orthodoxy despite the paucity of evidence for this. Can you point to a deflationary episode that was harmful? Japan had the "lost decade" of slow growth, but is slow growth bad? Is the absence of conspicuous consumption lamentable? In comparison, people starve and flee, and societies collapse under episodes of hyperinflation.

The classic example of functional deflation is in technology: computers have been under substantial deflationary pressure from the increase in performance year over year, yet people still have bought computers, and the industry has still prospered despite this.

Likewise, civilization was largely built on hard money economies, and prospered, despite the difficulty of debasing within them. It has largely fallen under soft money conditions, as in the the Weimar Republic, or the debasement of the late Roman Empire.

Note that this "deflation is bad" orthodoxy is propagated by the same economic regime that embraces inflation as beneficial, and profits from the printing of money.

> There is no single reason for bitcoin to exist

Just from my lifetime: Hyperinflation in Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Inflation in Argentina. The housing bubble. The internet bubble. Banker bailouts. Our current everything bubble.

I think your definition is faulty: are you aware of shell money? This served as money enabling international trade for thousands of years[1], and can you say these shells have intrinsic uses?[2] These shells had value because of their properties: compact, scarce, unforgeable.

In contrast, fiat value is held because an authoritative party says value is held, e.g. Chucky Cheese tokens, or the USD. Fiat requires this authority, as in its definition: “An arbitrary order or decree.”

There are no authoritative parties declaring that Bitcoin has value, rather the market is arriving at that conclusion through decentralized operation, just as has occurred for thousands of years with gold, shells, etc.

[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

[2] To say that a store of wealth also has uses as jewelry is redundant, IMO - storing and displaying wealth are age-old desires.

Without dollars there is: advocacy, open source contributions, and sweat equity - as many ways to participate as there are social and creative avenues. Incidentally, some but not all of these are vaunted as the noble ways to participate in politics, including the voice you so celebrate.

Is democracy better? Why did our founders have such a negative opinion of it? The history of unrestrained Democracy is one of failure, e.g. voting oneself into poverty via socialism, or a French-style democratic revolution in which heads roll. So yeah, maybe take your notion of democracy down a notch, it's not so noble.

That’s strange because I see it essentially in reverse of that:

To change the Bitcoin price, vote with your dollars, going long or shorting. You will materially impact the order book and resulting price. Other ways exist: starting a company like the ones mentioned in the article.

In contrast, in federal elections you have a vanishingly small chance of casting a deciding vote between two participants in an actual oligopoly (more specifically, a duopoly), who are themselves primarily allied with powerful interests which include the banking sector. Does anyone really believe their reps are responsive to them on issues like monetary policy?

Bitcoin is an asset that is designed to become a currency.

For those looking to avoid alzheimer’s / dementia, there’s evidence linking it to metabolic dysfunction, and intermittent fasting has been shown to help in mice. https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-growing-science-...

> commodities in general check the same boxes without the awkwardness of Bitcoin

To name a few properties, commodities can not be transferred anywhere in the world quickly and at low cost in a censor-less fashion, can not be transported in an immaterial form (e.g. a "brain wallet").

> when you say "better money" you mean for this specific use case right?

I mean better at exhibiting the properties of money (originally articulated by Aristotle): durability, divisibility, portability, etc.

Fiat fails at durability, through ongoing inflation. Art fails at: divisibility, etc.

https://hangthebankers.com/aristotle-and-the-definition-of-m...

https://omniequivalence.com/monetary-properties/

https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/money/top-8-qualities-of...

It’s an incorrect assumption that mining follows the local energy mix:

Electricity is the main cost of mining, so miners compete in minimizing their electricity costs in order to maintain profitability, including by co-locating mining facilities with point sources of underutilized power (e.g. remote dams). The sources like this, hydroelectric and natural gas flares, the profitable mining electricity rate is regularly competed below the fuel cost of e.g. coal power. So anyone buying coal to mine Bitcoin is losing rather than making money.

E.g. in this example it’s currently hovering around the cost of natural gas: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertanzalone/2020/08/13/bitco...

> As both the cryptocurrency markets and the power markets are constantly fluctuating, we do whichever is more profitable at any given time - either sell the generated power or mine crypto with that power.

> At the risk of sounding a big tinfoil...

What you describe is how assets acquire monetary value: people start buying them not because they want them but because other people will want them. Then they don’t sell them because they know other people will want them in the future. Thus they develop a “monetary premium” from that additional demand, and become “stores of value” from the general market behavior.

The theory inside Bitcoin circles is that rich people have been buying up art, unproductive real estate, etc., not because they are good money but because they do not have access to good money, i.e. long-term deflationary, fungible, divisible, portable stores of value, because of our current regime of inflationary fiat money.

In seeking to preserve their wealth, they acquire collectibles, which then become monetary due to scarcity and expectation of future demand. It may be the very same impulse and process that led to the emergence of money in the first place, in the form of shells. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/

If Bitcoin demonstrates itself to be “better money,” it should absorb some of the monetary premium of these other goods, as people will have less need to allocate their resources into paintings no one will see and houses no one will live in.

Tax carbon, and you’ll influence all industries broadly and fairly, rather than taking on the venal task of searching out who doesn’t deserve or make good use of their emissions, according to us. https://citizensclimatelobby.org/

D3 is also stored in fat, and released as fat is metabolized.

As a Bitcoin Core contributor[1] and recent Ham radio adopter, the author mistakes a key point:

> This lack of a gate keeper means that there is no one to soften the user experience.

This is true of Ham radio[2], but it is not the case with Bitcoin. Like the internet, and unlike Ham radio, Bitcoin as a system/protocol is open to people creating centralized resources atop it and serving as gatekeepers.

The fact is that today a significant amount[3] of Bitcoin is stored in centralized exchange accounts, controlled by gatekeepers by way of hosted exchange wallets. Likewise, hosted web and mobile wallets are a significant element of the ecosystem, for example, while work on refining self-sovereign/non-custodial lightning network wallets continues, hosted/custodial mobile lightning network wallets are simpler to use, because the hosted gatekeeper can obviate concerns such as opening channels and managing liquidity. Several of the top lightning network wallets[4] are custodial gatekeepers.

Yes, Bitcoin enthusiasts are often hobbyist tinkerers of the sort you might see in Ham radio. At the same time the broader community is served via institutional exchanges and custodial wallets with no such effort required. Often it's the tinkerers who end up running the service providers.

While this decentralized tinkering is an initial hurdle to overcome - it would certainly be easier to have a single company build out all of the initial infrastructure, rather than a host of companies - the result is much more robust against the single failure or control of any one participant. Bitcoin benefits from each service provider, but isn't dependent on any of them. Like the internet, and unlike Ham radio.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact

[2] Largely due to the peculiarities of antenna installation and frequency selection.

[3] https://news.bitcoin.com/new-list-claims-1-9-million-bitcoin...

[4] https://blog.bitrefill.com/top-11-lightning-network-wallets-...

Silver's scarcity is less than gold but its practical portability and exchangeability is a bit greater than gold, because typical units of exchange align with practical amounts of metal (coin-size, rather than gram-size).

However, now that a highly-scarce, highly-portable, and highly-divisible Bitcoin is on scene, silver is less useful as a monetary metal because it loses to gold and/or Bitcoin on each of these qualities.

In some cultures it's common to provide funerals for stillborn babies. Perhaps this part of the reason why.

https://americanpregnancy.org/pregnancy-loss/stillborn-survi...

Based on what I last heard from merchants that accept it (e.g. Bitrefill), it's about tied with Ethereum for second in payment volume, after Bitcoin.

Not having read the article but having participated in Bitcoin "production" a decent amount[1], I see a lot in common between Bitcoin and the organization of the intentionally non-hierarchical Quakers.

Quakers, despite being religiously-motivated to pursue non-hierarchical expression[2], necessarily adopt organizational structure: committees, clerks of committees, group decision-making about who will take certain roles, i.e. "meetings for worship with attention to business." There is some natural and arguably necessary inclination toward roles and authority for the sake of organizational clarity and efficiency.

What it does not have is empowered leaders with explicit authority, rather positions are cast as being in service of one another, in organizing groups of effort rather than controlling the outcome of the group, and thus tend toward eliciting the active participation of all. Care and attention are taken to minimize the gravitation toward arbitrary and unaccountable authority.

Bitcoin takes a similar approach - necessary roles expressed in service of one another / the general effort, with attention toward guarding against arbitrary or negative expression.

The other side of this relates to thought leadership - in some sense speakers naturally have authority via the Pareto Principle's natural tendency to distribute virtues unequally. However, by embracing a consensus-oriented development practice, the general perspectives are a check against individual mistakes or abuses by those empowered by position or circumstance.

I think maintaining the balance between the gravity of centralization vs the beauty and safety of decentralization requires a continuous effort. Thankfully, it is not solely up to the developers to ensure this - developers, node operators, and miners can each and all be active by refusing to upgrade or otherwise by forking the codebase. I would say that's the key ultimate check against the centralization, that every individual has the ability to vote with their node / personal activity. I'll be curious to hear if the article addressed any of that.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=Empact

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_equality

Key quotes for me:

> Dr. Woolf said one of the findings showed that the excess deaths were highly concentrated geographically, with fully a third of them in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana.

> “What’s not lost on us is what is going on in those states,” he said. “The history of when this health trend started happens to coincide with when these economic shifts began — the loss of manufacturing jobs and closure of steel mills and auto plants.”

> The increased deaths from drug overdoses reflected increased rates of addiction to opioids. But they have also risen because of changes in the drug supply in the East and Midwest. Over the last decade, the synthetic drug known as fentanyl has been mixed into heroin — or in some places has replaced it. That has made the drug supply more deadly, since it is difficult for users to know the dose they are taking.

> Life expectancy in the coastal metro areas — both east and west — has improved at roughly the same rate as in Canada.

These together point to me to local crises: people in hard times due to economic shifts turning to drugs, etc, as an outlet.

There are many ways to improve the lot of these people, but being blind to the cause does not help them. Also let’s be clear about the scale of the problem:

> While the total number of excess deaths — meaning the number of deaths that would not have happened if the mortality rate had continued to improve — is small, at 33,000

For context, total overdose deaths are ~70,000/year. https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/index.html

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” - intellectually lazy, or a claim whose verification or refutation is left to the reader?

Fair enough, it’s possible, but I maintain: the model proposed would have been operative always and everywhere, so would we not expect this to be occurring all of the time? Would history not be very different, with no middle class (our middle class has only recently declined)? Wouldn’t extended periods of broad prosperity would be an aberration, rather than the broad stroke of history?

According to the chart below, housing, food and beverage and other costs are up > 56% over the last 20 years. Granted, for many things in society, prices have declined thanks to manufacturing advances and trade, etc.

The difference is between those who held dollars and had a 56%+ loss of value over 20 years, vs those who held the same in assets which appreciated at the same rate as the general increase, and so did not lose value over time. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/