MarkPNeyer

What you are drafting is the difference between private ownership (ie the company is owned by current a former employees who have an incentive to keep a watchful eye for long term risks) and public ownership (ie the company is owned by anyone who either buys a share or has money with a fund manager who buys the shares), where no single person has any long term incentives.

That someone is you, you are the one to mention it.

If you think racism can’t be applied to some people because they have magical immunity due to their skin color, you’re a racist.

Do you think it’s OK for the FBI to go work with massive corporations to try and “manage” a public conversation?

Completely agree! A world with lots of private property that people can enter and exit freely is one compatible with liberalism. A giant privately owned public square is a terrible idea.

The “moderate politics” community has has to stop debating certain contentious topics because the Reddit rules don’t allow one side, held by the majority of Americans, to express their view.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/29/1107484965/transgender-athlet...

If you like the idea of a decnrelized network but think mastodon has problems (ie attaching your identity and friend graph to a single server) Check out nostr:

https://github.com/nostr-protocol

This is the entire concept behind private property.

Mastodon instances are all private property. They are clubs that can be run according to the wishes of the owners.

Twitter had said the exact same thing.

Would you be OK if Twitter just said, “all legal speech can be up, even doxxing since that’s not illegal?”

Note that FTX didn’t own a single bitcoin. They had lots of knockoffs, but no bitcoin.

Lots of people i think would happily accept a global authoritarian regime as long as it told the right stories about how it was Making The World Better For Everyone <3

What are the things that “break” if the axiom of choice is false?

I’ve been wondering if the axiom of choice has some relationship to an argument for the existence of free will. Not just because they share a name, but because you can think of physics as being a multiplayer game.

Long term price stability.

I'm a bitcoin maxi.

> there is nothing “good” about this.

There totally is, but the good is only apparent to people with the perspective of most of our ancestors. Nixon took us off the gold standard in 71', and yet he lied at the time and said it was 'temporary'. Why was that? We grew up in school being told that the gold standard was a janky old technology that failed leading to the great depression. If that's true, why did we stay on the gold standard until 1971 and why did Nixon lie when he took us off of it?

All of history, property rights have been workable only with armies to enforce them. And what inevitably happens is that the armies will end up stealing from the people whose property rights they are ostensibly protecting.

The existence of property that, in the hands of a skilled user, _cannot_ be stolen, is, indeed revolutionary.

I agree that this system is far too complex for most people. Most people will probably just end up using federated chaumian mints. "All" they will get is the benefit of a currency that doesn't depreciate, year after year, and the resulting cultural shift that arises when people don't need to participate in complex mechanisms they don't understand, just to save for the future.

I think we are likely to see the rise of a technobrahmin class that understands both crypography and ML, and uses this knowledge in the service of tiny micro-tribes of people they grew up with. Civilization has long required specialization, and i think we're about to see a migration of 'trusted information authorities' from places like the New York Times, all the way down the social hierarchy to, 'a guy i went to grade school with that i know is honest'.

Nothing in life is risk free.

The phrase "land of the free, home of the brave" has to be read as "land of the free, because we are brave enough to take personal responsibility for our freedoms, rather than entrusting powerful authorities to safeguard them for us."

2) You can't have power without responsibility.

If you want money that can be 'fixed' for you by the authorities, well, that's what you'll get. They'll fix it for you real good.

I would be much more worried about the future if not for bitcoin.

It’s the “distributed remainder” you are taking about, and what we are betting one is for the governments of the world to print so much money that everyone loses faith in them. That will act as a check on their power and they’ll need to start earning trust and support rather than taking it for granted.

People have been doing cancel culture from time immemorial. It seems to be a default in human behavior unless there are ideas specially saying, “don’t do this.” These ideas used to be called “liberalism.”

What seems to have changed, from my perspective, is that liberalism has stopped being the values system championed by the left, and instead what we have are two different visions that are both more or less authoritarian.

This is the best argument for bitcoin.

Even Democratic “rule of law” places like Canada can seize your funds for engaging in “politically incorrect” behavior.

I recently read and have very much enjoyed a book called “stop fixing yourself.” It pointed out that the best way to improve yourself is to learn to understand yourself better. When I stop judging myself, it’s easier to understand the cause and effect nature of my behavior, which then automatically leads to improvements.

Can you name some notion of “good” that doesn’t run the risk of going into “ends justify the means” territory?

This is a first world perspective.

You clearly live with a political stable government you can trust not to steal from you or imprison you for engaging in political protests.

People in such places are using decentralized assets to protect themselves. What do you think they should do instead?

On the contrary, they were being touted as a shining example of responsible crypto. They paid for a good reputation by donating to the “correct” causes and politicians.

This quote is very interesting because he seems to try and argue for its legitimacy at the end. “Is that even wrong,” he asks. You get the impression that he believes in something like a postmodern theory of value that says, you need nothing fundamental for a thing to have value. Mass appeal is sufficient. So he looks at dogecoin and thinks, like many of us: this serves no purpose and makes no sense. He simply concludes its nonzero price is evidence against prices being real, rather than a prediction of dogecoin’s future value.

What percentage of the internet consists of pornography and scams?

I’m sure the AOL walled garden had much higher quality content than the internet at large.

Why would you use anything but a logarithmic scale to understand an asset over long periods of time?

When money can be printed, you should expect most wealth to flow to people who get closer to the money printer.

When money can’t be stolen and can only be created by means of enormous effort, money should flow to those capable of maximally converting human effort into positive emotional responses.

Here’s SBF describing that he totally understood the ponzi nature of these coins but that he basically didn’t expect there to be “people calling bullshit in a coordinated manner.”

https://nitter.it/coryklippsten/status/1546902114550439936#m

My own experience as an amateur writer is that my writing is now far better because I can add relevant images much more easily.

The author doesn’t understand bitcoin; The pie chart is misleading. All you have to do to see that it is wrong is see how the chart has changed over time. Why isn’t one big mining pool taking all the others? Why did the miners lose the block-size wars?

Substack has been great for this. Lots of long-form blogs, some of which readers pay directly. Journalists like Matt Taibbi and Matt Yglesias are there.