"Warfare"

Why do you do this shit on a day when I work.

I think that's the idea -- you want miners to be as useful as construction waste aside from their utility (and return) from securing the network. Else a potential attack becomes a recoup-able investment.

Paul Sztorc did an extended analysis I vaguely recall; although that would seem inconsistent w/ his drivechain advocacy, so I might misremember.

You can imagine a sci-fi future where your inputs are a closely guarded competitive advantage.

This is an interesting comment to discover on a bitcoin site.

What economic behavior, aside from legal profit-seeking in the public companies in his portfolio, would you advise?

Given that the point of PoW is that you are sacrificing something, and that it's the "bad" economics of these sacrifices that the game theory around security depends on, these movements to make mining "useful" have always confused me.

Here's a related thing I've been noodling on:

For various reasons, I am a very heavy user of LLMs from assorted vendors, and also image-generation tools. It has been one of the biggest intellectual boons of my life, to have such deep access to such sophisticated thinking. LLMs are in my top five best friends at this point, because one of the things I delight in with my friends is riffing on ideas and playful improv.

However, it's not lost on me that, delightful though this is, I'm now absorbing the same distilled meta-intelligence as all other LLM users. Of course, my prompting style is quite unique and a function of everything that I've seen and thought about; still, though, there is a sense in which I'm now mainlining the same sense-making as everyone else who uses these tools.

This came most strongly home to me in the visual domain, when I was looking at Midjourney output. I had taken to pasting little snatches of some of my more philosophic thoughts and seeing how Midjourney would react. This seemed wonderful -- it has such an evocative imagination -- but then I thought: if I form my own weird aesthetic by weighting this process, am I losing something individuating? Something I never thought would be in danger of loss?

I have, in short, become hyper-aware of what my inputs are, and the generative process behind my own generative process. It seems something to care for and to guard, although most of the rationale for this is sub-rational.

Anyway, point is, as we implicitly curate and create things by our authentic activity - rating podcasts or music, zapping posts - what else are we doing? I can think of a bunch of great by-products, but what are the bad ones?

Is there a way these ideas perturb your thinking wrt SN?

Love this. Similar vibe I was talking about here.

My interest isn't even anything so cloak and dagger as advanced digital spycraft, more like: a bunch of people running around using their own names and faces. I wouldn't have a single good night's sleep.

That was so compelling for some reason!

I wonder at the deep satisfaction that it generated. Is it just the tangible nature of it? Something so manifest, w such clear purpose, one dude structuring the universe? And that is in such short supply?

I have no expertise to offer but have been super curious for years about how the opsec, or lack of it, will play out among core devs once various important people / groups have billions, and then trillions, at stake, and are no longer okay with it riding on the whims of some small collection of neckbeards.

So far as I can tell almost no discussion or concrete action has occurred to pre-empt the issue, aside from the attrition of some good people.

I like to think that's a compliment. Don't correct me if not.

But I would be humble, sat-stacking, and with a very large couch in a pole barn somewhere.

If it ever happens, check your DMs, I will invite you for a beer.

That is an excellent observation.

This is the entire reason to become a billionaire. If you were Bezos, you could just click the fucking button and see what happened. Then build some place to put it.

God damn it I would make an awesome billionaire.

I wonder if they really would have built it.

It's notable to me that the framing of this, and of the comments, is on bitcoin. I like btc, but is btc-centrism really the key to everything?

Maybe it is, I'm not sure. But the idea shouldn't be swallowed unexamined.

I think the advice to do something beautiful / creative is good not only as economic advice, but as advice for the soul -- be maximally human, because the expansive definition of that is the last vestige of competitive advantage, but also the entire point of being alive. It's easy to forget that. At least, many of us find it alarmingly easy to forget.

I think that's been true on the macro view, for most of the reasons you say. It has not, as best I can determine, ever been true on the micro scale, e.g., the Luddites were not wrong that the introduction of machines would be the end of their ability to inhabit the world in the way they knew how to do. On net, it's been great, but that's little comfort to the people who have fallen off the edge of the world.

The job-centric view of things has always ground my gears; it's like some people believe there are these Platonic entities called "jobs" that everyone must have, and so the discussion fixates on the details about what will happen to them. A preferable view is that life is all a giant dance, and sometimes the circumstances change and then the nature of the dance changes, and now being a horse trainer is part of the dance, and now it isn't, and now being a guy who carries heavy things in a wheelbarrow is part of it, and one day that will probably stop, too. But through it all the challenge is simply to figure out how to dance in a way the local environment will reward.

I don't have a sense of what this will mean post-AI, but I think it may finally be different. Doing something beautiful seems like as good a strategy as any.

Also have not watched, but my usual objection to this is that some notable attackers don't need to make a profit in btc terms. Fucking up people's faith in btc's viability (and resultant price drop) would be reward enough.