_7fvc

I agree that Bitcoin remains volatile. It will never stabilize. But there's a misunderstanding that Bitcoin will replace fiat. It doesn't have to compete directly. Bitcoin is an alternative money. It's volatile but predictable issuance. Fiat is stable but has unpredictable inflation (debasement). They co-exist. From a philosophical perspective, Bitcoin and fiat are the two extremes of Yin and Yang. They're both necessary for a functional money system.

https://bitflate.org/post/2020/08/24/yi-ching-and-cryptocurr...

I think Satoshi didn't know that Bitcoin would not be a medium of exchange. It will remain digital gold. Bitcoin cannot fulfill its original promise to be electronic cash. This is the hardest hurdle for bitcoiners to understand. They think that sky high value of Bitcoin would transform it into a medium of exchange. But I think it's a false promise from Satoshi.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/24/bitcoin-will-not-be-a-m...

The biggest hurdle for cryptocurrency adoption is a medium of exchange. Most investors waste their time playing around with buzzwords like DeFi.

I'm not sure when Ethereum supporters would wake up. Ethereum's design creates this kind of Dark Forest problem. When it is programmable, you are at risk of being overpowered by bots. Computers are far more efficient than humans. Smart contracts are not smart. If they're too complicated (smart), humans can't comprehend them. So they're mostly dumb. Bots will overrun humans. With Ethereum, you know you're entering a digital Dark Forest. But you still want to explore it. You venture into the Dark Forest and got attacked. It does make an interesting story. But it's a fairly useless system.

With cryptocurrencies, you want to "slow" the system down. You want more redundancy. You want less efficiency. It's the only way to fight the automation monsters. Bitcoin is money. Ethereum is a fun and experimental Dark Forest.

The problem with gold is not unlimited supply. Humans have mostly colonized planet Earth. It has become increasingly difficult to mine gold. Average Joe can no longer mine gold with a pickaxe. Gold mining now requires large capital expenditure. Space mining also requires large capital investment.

The problem with gold is centralization. Large capital investment prevents smaller players to participate. Nation states also monopolize the existing gold supply. New gold from space is likely going to end up in central banks' reserve.

Bitcoin faces the same problem with centralization. The hard cap makes Bitcoin even easier to manipulate. Nation states can pump and dump retail investors out of the game. Don't fight the Fed. If the Fed decides to enter the Bitcoin game, investors are going to lose. Once nation states monopolize the Bitcoin supply, we're back to the same situation like gold. Making decentralized money is not that easy. Bitcoin alone cannot fix everything.

LOL. :) Sometimes I wonder what happens if humans go extinct. There may be a new civilization by ants, spiders, or insect descendants. Or there could be another reptilian domination.

I think the most "successful" people are the people I would not hear about. Likely, some mid-level executives, engineers, professionals. They have enough. They don't need to "move up". They're happy. They don't need to tell people about their stories. So we never hear about them.

Schools are closed. We have a sky high unemployment rate. A raging pandemic across the world with no end in sight. We want things to be normal. The Fed is doing its best at pumping money to keep the market afloat. So we have some weird things in the market like Apple reaching 2T within 3 years, Tesla going 5x within a year.

These things are normal given actions from central banks. The market is rational. We're not rational for wanting things to be normal.

I think some investors are naive about the food cultures. Here's some advice for you. Food is personal. It's extremely hard to change the way people eat. Most of you are busy changing the world. You like the convenience of tapping a button and get what you want in a few minutes. You'd think that everyone would like to enjoy the same convenience.

Food is personal. Name a favorite dish. You'd not know who invented it. Nobody knows how we got Chicken Tikka Masala. Food is decentralized. Attempts to centralize food cultures will fail. Conscious people are careful about what they eat. They'll end up cooking their own food. They're suspicious of the big food companies.

Don't think about simplifying food, cutting down time. If you go down that path, you'd end up with another junk food company. Think about how to get people to eat healthier. That's the only thing I care about. I think many people will eventually realize this.

I think paper money is a novelty. It's a good invention. It detaches the concept of money from gold. It makes money easily transported. But that can run amok. The Gold Standard was in place to protect societies from detaching too far from physical reality. "Good" paper money should be backed by physical reality. The US has a large gold reserve, education, research, military etc. But we're now at the verge of running amok with paper money.

Harari sees history as fiction. But I think we need to make a distinction between fiction and physical reality. Gold is a physical reality that got married into human's fiction.

DEC technologies are still around. They just got replicated and extended into other technology stacks. It's not easy to replicate gold. The easy way is to mine more gold. Technologies are ideas. Gold is physical.

Bronze and iron became less popular after BC. Will steel go away any time soon? No. Humans have worked with gold much longer. Gold has had its ups and downs. It has always come back for thousands of years. This suggests it's not going away (Lindy effect).

Gold is not simply a shiny metal or a collective fiction. I think many historians (e.g. Harari) got this wrong. Humans first learned how to manipulate metal through gold around 40k years ago. It sparked the metal industries that advanced human civilizations. Humans progressed through Bronze Age, Iron Age. Gold was an icon of metal technologies. Its use as money probably predated written history.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/29/how-gold-became-money.h...

I think Harari is wrong when he suggested gold is a collective fiction. The first metal humans worked with was gold. This happened 40k years ago. Through gold, humans accumulated knowledge and invented metal technologies. We then progressed through metal ages, e.g., Bronze Age, Iron Age. Gold was an icon of metal technologies. It's not just a fiction.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/29/how-gold-became-money.h...

Gold probably started out as a toy. Humans learned to manipulate metal with gold around 40k years ago. It sparked metallurgy industries (e.g. Bronze Age, Iron Age). They advanced human civilizations. Gold use as money probably predated any written history. It's likely making a comeback after a 30-year recession.

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/29/how-gold-became-money.h...

I used to hunt for music and movies. I was an enthusiastic movie and music fan. But these days, I mostly give up. I listen to underground/indie artists and some classical music. I ignore popular music and movies, especially those promoted on big platforms like Spotify.

It's sad that many talented artists are brainwashed by these big platforms. They chase after big money. They don't produce anything original.

I think the same thing is happening to software.

"Software isn't our product, software is our marketing"

I think this is fairly accurate. In software, you can write some for marketing, but keep some proprietary.

I see learning to play an instrument as a self improvement exercise. It's a process. There's a lag between our hands and our ears. It's easy for the ears to know a "good" song. It's hard for the hands to play a good song. To play a song well is to bridge the skill gap of the hands. When you can play a song well, you "complete" a task. The process improves our skills and our cognition. We can recognize "good" from "not so good". Overtime, it can improve our baloney detector. It improves self awareness. You know when you suck. And you know if you work diligently, you'd be able to improve. I think it's a valuable skill. It's more important than high SAT or IQ scores.

I clarify my point about sushi going through China. In the Takamiya's paper, one of the links above, the author discussed the Ocean Road hypothesis. I agree with this hypothesis. It'd be difficult for the food culture to propagate through land. It'd have to pass Northern China which is not much of a rice culture. Japan likely traded with Southern China and South East Asia through sea routes.

Rice arrived to Japan thousands of years ago. At the time, Southern China is not part of present day China. The Baiyue people were good naval navigators. They probably traded with Japan and South East Asia. Saying sushi got to Japan through China is misleading. People would think that sushi travelled through China land to Japan.

This sushi article is an example of SCMP smearing history.

> By the 12th century, this method of fermenting fish had travelled from the Mekong to China, and then on to Japan, where it was called narezushi.

It's a substantial claim that fermented fish and rice travelled through China to Japan. Food travels very slowly. If it travelled by land, it'll morphed with local ingredients. South China has more rice based dish. North China has less rice and more wheat in their cuisines. If fermented fish and rice travelled that far through land. It'll leave lots of traces in Chinese cuisines.

It's likely that Japanese got fermented fish and rice directly from South East Asia, without going through China. Japan has been trading with SE Asia region for centuries. Hội An is a city port in Vietnam with Japanese remnants.

Fish sauce travelled from Rome to Vietnam, through China.

Sushi travelled from SE Asia to Japan, through China.

I'd make the case that fish sauces were independently developed by different cultures. I think historians are overly trying to make connections in this case.

Fish sauce is very simple. You only need two ingredients: fish and salt. Any cultures living near an ocean can independently develop some version of fish sauce.

If there's any link between Vietnam and Rome, we'd have found traces of them along the Silk Road or maritime routes.

In Vietnam, besides fish sauce, there are other sauces "mam" made from different fishes and seafoods. Vietnamese people may have developed these "mam" before they developed the current fish sauce. Their fish sauce may have come from other "mam" than Rome.

Side note: The article appears on South China Morning Post. China often sees Vietnam as barbaric, inferior. Maybe, they couldn't see how Vietnamese could invent such a good sauce. :)

I follow COVID-19 data. I notice an interesting trend: Cases increase. Deaths and hospitalizations have not increased much.

It seems the US has come up with good enough cures for COVID-19. The cost of shutdown is high. The trend is reopening.

https://vida.io/dashboards/ckbk04mht00000ul63lr6m53w

I see this news as a loss for the US. It has to resort to regulations to stop TSMC from doing business with Huawei. When you can't incentivize your ally, that means your opponent's business is still very attractive. Regulations will only cripple your ally. Taiwan may comply on the outside. But inside, they'll cut under-the-table deals with China. They'll find loop holes to skirt regulations.

Taiwan seems to be heading to be the next Hong Kong. Their political class is still publicly resistant. But their business leaders are slowly surrendering. At some point, the political class will follow. The US will then need to rely on the activism of the young renegade "colonels" like Joshua Wong. Crippling an ally can buy the US some time. But it is losing ground.

In this transaction, there's only 0.00291948 BTC sent to the scamming address: bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh.

It's time to learn more about Bitcoin. :)

We're in the middle of a pandemic with no end in sight. We're having a high unemployment rate. The stock market is also at all time high. That's something terrible about this economy. Bitcoiners assign the cause to the monetary system. I think that's reasonable.

DAI is made by pegging on Ethereum. Ethereum is a volatile asset due to its limited supply. DAI is inherently volatile. Its peg can fail. No amount of algorithm and automation can fix the problem. To be digital native, you need to accept some level of volatility. DAI promises the impossible. I wrote about this issue.

https://bitflate.org/post/2020/03/14/the-problem-with-dai.ht...

Bitcoin volatility has not decreased. There was a big drop in March 2020. Bitcoin's limited supply makes its price volatile. I don't think volatility will ever go away. It's a property. I chart some data from BitMex here:

https://vida.io/dashboards/ckamz2w9n00000vkzp471j0md

I think there will be centralization on 2nd layers like the Lightning Network. Bitcoin's mainchain is slow. Running full node is expensive. Decentralization comes with tradeoffs.

Lightning tries to live up with Bitcoin's ethos. It's designed with decentralized nodes. We end up with 2 decentralized networks trying to talk to each other. The result is a very complicated 2nd layer. I think centralization can simplify a lot of things. As a user, I don't have a problem with it. Exchanges are already centralized. We just need more options to choose.

I'm excited about 2nd layers. I think they would enable Bitcoin to interact with other technologies. I created Bitflate based on Bitcoin. We can mix Bitflate and Bitcoin to create hybrid coins. Some level of centralization is fine. It's a tradeoff for lower cost and better UX.

> What's Bitcoin's excuse?

Bitcoin has already worked as a Store of Value. It can survive on this narrative without other use cases. I think of Bitcoin is a piece in the future money puzzle. We need to find the other missing pieces. One of the missing pieces is inflation. I wrote an article on this:

https://bitflate.org/post/2019/08/26/bitcoin-missing-link-to...

Not all bitcoiners are crazy. The crazy ones will eventually leave Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin can succeed without world collapse. Bitcoin has been a niche currency. The missing piece is adoption. There're proposals to address this problem. Lightning Network is one. But the hype dies down quite a bit.

I think one missing piece is inflation. I focus my effort in this direction. Check out my project:

https://bitflate.org/

Bitcoin is an incredible technology. It can survive on its own. Bitcoin is an important piece of future money. Bitcoin is not the new internet protocol. The system is slow moving and hard to change. Bitcoin can be compared to ham radio. But it can interact with other systems. This is how Bitcoin is different from ham radio.

I see Bitcoin as the first puzzle piece. We're searching for more pieces to construct the future of money puzzle. I think a missing piece is a crypto with inflation. I started a project to explore this:

https://bitflate.org/

I think the homeschool movement has become too extreme. You can do homeschool if you want. But you also need to learn from others. The school system does help. I went to a 4-year university. I got a degree in Computer Science. I think it's very valuable. It helped me build a good career. I would say half of the professors were solid.

At school, after lectures, we have to do homework. It's a practice to get a deeper understanding of the knowledge. Then we have to take test. It's a validation of our understanding. People certainly cheat their ways through college. But if you are into learning, you can learn a lot.

Laura Deming mentioned that she had a hard time with entropy. I think this is because of not having a formal education. Entropy is an overloaded term. It means different things in different fields. In physics, it means one thing. In information theory, it means another thing. If Laura had gone to a university to study the concepts in different classes, she would have grasped the concepts. Laura is likely a generalist thinker, polymath. That's why she has a hard time digging into deep concepts. To really understand them, you need to practice (homework) and validate (test).

I work in cryptocurrency space. Vitalik is another generalist, polymath thinker. He makes some wild claims like quantum computer can break Proof of Work. If you study Computer Science, you'd see how dubious this claim is.

You don't know what you don't know.

Schools are good for teaching you what you don't know. Both Vitalik and Laura come out of the Thiel Fellowship. When you are young and got chosen by a billionaire, it may have gotten you hype up about your intellect. You buy into your billionaire's view. You think professors are idiots. Nowadays, social media give people a microphone. So they get even more indulgence. They see themselves already successful.

I think the young generation, like Laura and Vitalik, is talented. But they live in the fame bubble too early. Albert Einstein had this problem. He was an early achiever. He made his important discoveries when he was young. Those achievements became burden. He had a hard time with quantum mechanics. He spent endless time with the theory of everything. He was miserable in his later life.

I teach my kids at home after their public school time. When they grow up, I hope there're still good universities for them to go. Go to school, take some test, you'd see how much you really understand.

Hospitalized Increase is being tracked. The good news is it hasn't increased with positive cases. That is likely because the younger infected cases.

https://vida.io/dashboards/ckbk04mht00000ul63lr6m53w