Why did I sign up for this book...with every post I feel the remnants of my socially acceptable opinions dwindle into nothingness. I WANT TO GET LAID AAAAARHHHHH
> Bitcoin at present is a state without a government.
This statement is nonsensical. A more common definition of a state involves it having control over a chunk of physical land & the people on it. Bitcoin has a moderate physical presence in the form of ASIC farms but doesn't have even a shadow of control over the land itself, let alone the people on it. If we're going to bend the word state into something unrecognizable, that's cool w me but we should be more explicit about it.
Either way, control over a global monetary standard is not something inherent to statehood, it's a rare treat that's only available to a slim minority of superpower states. Of course, any state can influence the local monetary system w/in it's boarders, but it will have likely inherited some global monetary standard (usually gold, sometime EUR, maybe BTC someday) & it's up to the state's leader to make it work for their subjects' import/export needs.
> Bitzion will never recognize these worthless ledgers. It condemns them. They will go to zero, become deadcoins, and be forgotten.
Idk how you missed the memo but blockchains are practically immortal. This is Bitcoin's greatest strength: even if the rest of the world gives up on BTC & the price plunges towards zero, any rando can single-handedly run a node & purchase every single BTC putting a non-zero floor on the minimum possible price.
That said, there is absolutely a winner-takes-all dynamic at play here. It's the classic rich-get-richer power-law-style dynamic that pops up naturally across many different disciplines: the Pareto Principle. 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. 80% of the earth-shaking breakthroughs will come from 20% of the crypto ledgers. Not 100% from 1. There is an extremely long tail of crypto ledger experiments and many of them will never go away and never make a noteworthy impact.
> Bitcoin’s serialization isn't perfect, either
Yea cool, nobody cares. If you want high-tech serialization, look into Ethereum which is better than Bitcoin in every way except for (1) it wasn't the first crypto ledger and (2) it doesn't have a hard cap on it's supply.
> Historically, Bitcoin has been extremely resistant to innovation in governance.
This is a feature not a bug. Any innovation in governance runs the risk of disturbing the supply cap which is the one thing that must not happen. The idea of "there will only ever be 21 Million BTC" is possibly the most virulent meme in the entire crypto space. You can't just brush this off is if it were a minor implementation detail.
Ultimately, what Bitzion is proposing, is that the Bitcoin community abandon it's most deeply held values (hard money is good, supply cap enforced by crypto is the hardest, therefore Bitcoin is the best) and replace them with nearly the opposite (elect humans to mint BTC as they see fit).
> Independence means the regime does not depend on the will of any outside power.
> It is a set of human beings with private keys, who all use a technical tool that lets them automatically agree on digital facts.
> We trust that Bitcoin is fair, reliable, and independent, because math proves that its decentralized protocol makes it so.
> Byzantine what? But we trust the nerds. Trust is beautiful.
All cryptocurrencies (proof-of-X) require majority consensus for the ledger (https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2020.2969706 and https://doi.org/10.1145/3149.214121). Majority consensus can be taken over by whoever controls the physical intranet infrastructure in any geographical area: DNS, ingress/egress, ISPs, app stores, fiber optic cables, etc. Control may be achieved either by the local law givers flexing their muscles to become the majority ("Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, we hereby commandeer your data centers for our war against Bitzoin"), or by brute force (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png). Control the law of the land and you control the ledger. This all comes back to physical property and who governs it. As you write, "Decentralized, untrusted serialization is hard."
How do you propose to control a sufficient amount of the physical infrastructure on which Bitzoin runs? What stops your local government from making Bitzoin illegal, removing wallet apps from the app stores, sending RST packets on its IPs, etc.; worse, from forking it and stuffing it down everyone's throats minus the benefits?
> What if the Western Internet became as well-controlled as China’s? Politically, this is not utterly implausible. Technically, it would involve Western governments being as competent as China’s. This couldn’t happen right away. There would be time to evade.
For those in the know. Where do you get the list of IPs to connect your wallet to and how do you update that list when an IP is compromised? How do you ensure your game of telephone of IP addresses isn't infiltrated by your local government? We're back to the physical world and underground networks and CJNG.
> Can anything that is not a physical state ever be impervious to state pressure?
> But a stronger fortress than Bitzion will be hard to build.
If it has the seeds of its own destruction, what's the point? Are you saying no other ideas are worth considering? I get that this is fun to pontificate about in a dark and smoky underground jazz bar, and it might even be fun to be part of an illegal underground digital institution, but it just seems like mental masturbation, as most of the cryptocurrency field is. It's a way for people to believe they're fighting the system and protecting their assets (which, in a narrow sense they might be for some time... as long as they're in just the right Telegram group). Worse, they may be inadvertently setting up the greatest tyranny ever imagined: full and utter control of all economic transactions by a dystopian, technocratic, Kawaii-decorated disaster.
> In practice, it can easily verify that most of its serializers are independent from most others.
How?
> At this point we imagine a genuine conflict between virtual and physical power—but this is probably a good stopping point for today.
Ok, but this seems to me like someone proposing to set up an independent court house next to the government's court house, and a question cuts through the jazz, and the smoke, and the whiskey, and asks, "What do we do when the cops knock?"
> I already warned you that it is impossible. If it becomes possible, it will not become possible easily.
If it's theoretically impossible, then it can't become possible. I'm sure you mean something else, but I think you're being too cute here for us mere average metaphor-blooded people to understand.
Several of the UR links seem to be broken. ("stable bubble" and "right theory")
Two other thoughts. One, hippos are way more dangerous than sharks. I've swum with reef sharks, I'd never swim with a hippo. Two, I wonder if there is still room for freedom for masons, like the Gothic sculptors who all added their own artistic flourishes to the statues and friezes.
Yarvin starting urbit in 2002, saying things like "Classical international law, while never perfect, was simply a beautiful piece of engineering. It solved, not perfectly but quite effectively, a problem that today strikes us as unsolvable: enforcing good behavior among sovereign nations, without a central enforcer. You might call it a peer-to-peer architecture for world peace..." in open letter to open-minded progressives, and his article in 2006 titled "Why the Global Financial System is About to Collapse" sure makes you wonder.
Even the things I didnt like about Craig Wright (his want to do everything legal and comply instead of subvert in favor of ancapistan) sound like they come from the same place as Moldbug. And boy would I love to see them in a room together.
I'm on my nth pass through the writings on Zion's Best, and I hear echos of your writing and the things I've heard you say in everything I read on there. I've never been a Mormon, but I like them a lot, in large part for their very competent governance (in general, I've long seen corporations, of which organized religion is a subset, as a kind of state). One of my favorite things on the Internet is this talk in particular: <http://www.zionsbest.com/face.html>. The table of contents that links to it calls it "absolutely polarizing". I think of the three ingredients of sovereignty it speaks mostly on how to maintain coherence. This talk by the same author is on the subject of legitimacy: <http://www.zionsbest.com/unwritten.html>. I do wonder about the independence.
Quite interesting take. Here is one point I can't wrap my head around:
>This mining leakage gets heavier as the price rises—a vicious stabilization loop which tends to cap the price.
How so? Assuming the cost of electricity is more or less the same over a 5 year period, how does an increase in the fiat valuation of Bitcoin cause more bitcoins to be sold (that is, converted into fiat)? So, isn't it the opposite, indeed, as the bitcoins get more valuable with respect to fiat currencies, this leakage gets diminished, and less and less amount of bitcoins are converted into fiat?
—this danger is biggest when it starts becoming technically more difficult for them to do, has not been enough value for them to try it but we have to start talking about how we would detect this in time to react successfully
The “vanity problem” is the best illustration I’ve seen of when IQ becomes maladaptive. But as BTC becomes more mainstream, hodlers will be more like corporate shareholders.
Vanity is only truly poisonous when there is a high dissonance between the viewer and the viewer's view of themselves. You can reduce this dissonance by calibrating the viewer to the view, or the view to the viewer. Telling architects they're better off as masons is the former, giving lost young men in Jalisco a snazzy uniform and letting them march in a cool parade is the latter (and it has señoritas!). Hopefully GM addresses the Loyal Servitude Gap by understanding what the CJNG does on the matter.
Why did I sign up for this book...with every post I feel the remnants of my socially acceptable opinions dwindle into nothingness. I WANT TO GET LAID AAAAARHHHHH
Just be yourself.
well there's another red pill for that
The blue pill has also been known to help
"Political engineer" is an excellent term, although its value depends on knowing the difference between pure science and engineering.
> Bitcoin at present is a state without a government.
This statement is nonsensical. A more common definition of a state involves it having control over a chunk of physical land & the people on it. Bitcoin has a moderate physical presence in the form of ASIC farms but doesn't have even a shadow of control over the land itself, let alone the people on it. If we're going to bend the word state into something unrecognizable, that's cool w me but we should be more explicit about it.
Either way, control over a global monetary standard is not something inherent to statehood, it's a rare treat that's only available to a slim minority of superpower states. Of course, any state can influence the local monetary system w/in it's boarders, but it will have likely inherited some global monetary standard (usually gold, sometime EUR, maybe BTC someday) & it's up to the state's leader to make it work for their subjects' import/export needs.
> Bitzion will never recognize these worthless ledgers. It condemns them. They will go to zero, become deadcoins, and be forgotten.
Idk how you missed the memo but blockchains are practically immortal. This is Bitcoin's greatest strength: even if the rest of the world gives up on BTC & the price plunges towards zero, any rando can single-handedly run a node & purchase every single BTC putting a non-zero floor on the minimum possible price.
That said, there is absolutely a winner-takes-all dynamic at play here. It's the classic rich-get-richer power-law-style dynamic that pops up naturally across many different disciplines: the Pareto Principle. 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. 80% of the earth-shaking breakthroughs will come from 20% of the crypto ledgers. Not 100% from 1. There is an extremely long tail of crypto ledger experiments and many of them will never go away and never make a noteworthy impact.
> Bitcoin’s serialization isn't perfect, either
Yea cool, nobody cares. If you want high-tech serialization, look into Ethereum which is better than Bitcoin in every way except for (1) it wasn't the first crypto ledger and (2) it doesn't have a hard cap on it's supply.
> Historically, Bitcoin has been extremely resistant to innovation in governance.
This is a feature not a bug. Any innovation in governance runs the risk of disturbing the supply cap which is the one thing that must not happen. The idea of "there will only ever be 21 Million BTC" is possibly the most virulent meme in the entire crypto space. You can't just brush this off is if it were a minor implementation detail.
Ultimately, what Bitzion is proposing, is that the Bitcoin community abandon it's most deeply held values (hard money is good, supply cap enforced by crypto is the hardest, therefore Bitcoin is the best) and replace them with nearly the opposite (elect humans to mint BTC as they see fit).
Which is why on this, despite his other technological and political theory genius, Curtis is dead wrong about Cryptocurrency.
So August came and went
He kept saying he was a grifter. Should have listened
What the hell are you people talking about?
> Independence means the regime does not depend on the will of any outside power.
> It is a set of human beings with private keys, who all use a technical tool that lets them automatically agree on digital facts.
> We trust that Bitcoin is fair, reliable, and independent, because math proves that its decentralized protocol makes it so.
> Byzantine what? But we trust the nerds. Trust is beautiful.
All cryptocurrencies (proof-of-X) require majority consensus for the ledger (https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2020.2969706 and https://doi.org/10.1145/3149.214121). Majority consensus can be taken over by whoever controls the physical intranet infrastructure in any geographical area: DNS, ingress/egress, ISPs, app stores, fiber optic cables, etc. Control may be achieved either by the local law givers flexing their muscles to become the majority ("Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, we hereby commandeer your data centers for our war against Bitzoin"), or by brute force (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png). Control the law of the land and you control the ledger. This all comes back to physical property and who governs it. As you write, "Decentralized, untrusted serialization is hard."
How do you propose to control a sufficient amount of the physical infrastructure on which Bitzoin runs? What stops your local government from making Bitzoin illegal, removing wallet apps from the app stores, sending RST packets on its IPs, etc.; worse, from forking it and stuffing it down everyone's throats minus the benefits?
> What if the Western Internet became as well-controlled as China’s? Politically, this is not utterly implausible. Technically, it would involve Western governments being as competent as China’s. This couldn’t happen right away. There would be time to evade.
For those in the know. Where do you get the list of IPs to connect your wallet to and how do you update that list when an IP is compromised? How do you ensure your game of telephone of IP addresses isn't infiltrated by your local government? We're back to the physical world and underground networks and CJNG.
> Can anything that is not a physical state ever be impervious to state pressure?
> But a stronger fortress than Bitzion will be hard to build.
If it has the seeds of its own destruction, what's the point? Are you saying no other ideas are worth considering? I get that this is fun to pontificate about in a dark and smoky underground jazz bar, and it might even be fun to be part of an illegal underground digital institution, but it just seems like mental masturbation, as most of the cryptocurrency field is. It's a way for people to believe they're fighting the system and protecting their assets (which, in a narrow sense they might be for some time... as long as they're in just the right Telegram group). Worse, they may be inadvertently setting up the greatest tyranny ever imagined: full and utter control of all economic transactions by a dystopian, technocratic, Kawaii-decorated disaster.
> In practice, it can easily verify that most of its serializers are independent from most others.
How?
> At this point we imagine a genuine conflict between virtual and physical power—but this is probably a good stopping point for today.
Ok, but this seems to me like someone proposing to set up an independent court house next to the government's court house, and a question cuts through the jazz, and the smoke, and the whiskey, and asks, "What do we do when the cops knock?"
> I already warned you that it is impossible. If it becomes possible, it will not become possible easily.
If it's theoretically impossible, then it can't become possible. I'm sure you mean something else, but I think you're being too cute here for us mere average metaphor-blooded people to understand.
Several of the UR links seem to be broken. ("stable bubble" and "right theory")
Two other thoughts. One, hippos are way more dangerous than sharks. I've swum with reef sharks, I'd never swim with a hippo. Two, I wonder if there is still room for freedom for masons, like the Gothic sculptors who all added their own artistic flourishes to the statues and friezes.
Also, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Land's Crypto-current: https://www.uf-blog.net/crypto-current-000/
Does anyone know when or if these will be released as a podcast?
Technical: both of the "Bitcoin is money, bitcoin is a bubble" links are slightly broken
My priors on Yarvin being Satoshi just got updated. Not even kidding.
Yarvin starting urbit in 2002, saying things like "Classical international law, while never perfect, was simply a beautiful piece of engineering. It solved, not perfectly but quite effectively, a problem that today strikes us as unsolvable: enforcing good behavior among sovereign nations, without a central enforcer. You might call it a peer-to-peer architecture for world peace..." in open letter to open-minded progressives, and his article in 2006 titled "Why the Global Financial System is About to Collapse" sure makes you wonder.
Even the things I didnt like about Craig Wright (his want to do everything legal and comply instead of subvert in favor of ancapistan) sound like they come from the same place as Moldbug. And boy would I love to see them in a room together.
He wouldn't've worked as a programmer saving up cash for so many years if he were as rich as Satoshi.
Do we really know that Satoshi is rich though?
I'm on my nth pass through the writings on Zion's Best, and I hear echos of your writing and the things I've heard you say in everything I read on there. I've never been a Mormon, but I like them a lot, in large part for their very competent governance (in general, I've long seen corporations, of which organized religion is a subset, as a kind of state). One of my favorite things on the Internet is this talk in particular: <http://www.zionsbest.com/face.html>. The table of contents that links to it calls it "absolutely polarizing". I think of the three ingredients of sovereignty it speaks mostly on how to maintain coherence. This talk by the same author is on the subject of legitimacy: <http://www.zionsbest.com/unwritten.html>. I do wonder about the independence.
Quite interesting take. Here is one point I can't wrap my head around:
>This mining leakage gets heavier as the price rises—a vicious stabilization loop which tends to cap the price.
How so? Assuming the cost of electricity is more or less the same over a 5 year period, how does an increase in the fiat valuation of Bitcoin cause more bitcoins to be sold (that is, converted into fiat)? So, isn't it the opposite, indeed, as the bitcoins get more valuable with respect to fiat currencies, this leakage gets diminished, and less and less amount of bitcoins are converted into fiat?
Great post!
Let’s look at Bitcoin’s biggest weaknesses in light of it.
1) requires worldwide internet to be up
—a problem for bitcoin’s value in a disaster compared to something like gold, not so relevant here
2) can be sanctioned or banned by world governments
—we have here the natural reaction to that, it’s fine
3) enormous waste of energy in mining
—recognized in this essay, addressed eventually by moving to POS structure, proximately by fiddling with parameters
4) no proof there isn’t a hole in the crypto
—don’t know if altcoins have better assurance, but I’ve posted a partial mitigation scheme here:
https://polymathblogger.wordpress.com/2017/12/21/proof-of-work-isnt-but-could-be/
5) China can do 51% attack
—this danger is biggest when it starts becoming technically more difficult for them to do, has not been enough value for them to try it but we have to start talking about how we would detect this in time to react successfully
The “vanity problem” is the best illustration I’ve seen of when IQ becomes maladaptive. But as BTC becomes more mainstream, hodlers will be more like corporate shareholders.
Vanity is only truly poisonous when there is a high dissonance between the viewer and the viewer's view of themselves. You can reduce this dissonance by calibrating the viewer to the view, or the view to the viewer. Telling architects they're better off as masons is the former, giving lost young men in Jalisco a snazzy uniform and letting them march in a cool parade is the latter (and it has señoritas!). Hopefully GM addresses the Loyal Servitude Gap by understanding what the CJNG does on the matter.
Well, I’m excited.
Dear Curtis, do you think the president of El Salvador is a subscriber?