I'm speaking more generally about the state of the "browsing the web" ecosystem, where browser privacy, fingerprinting, network spying, surveillance by god and man, the whole fucking mess is so confusing and complicated and full of claims from a zillion different parties, e.g., on one of the podcasts on that same site is a story about why Mullvad is apparently also bad for some reason I can't ascertain.

I have ample education in these areas and it's overwhelming and disheartening. I weep to consider the normies. I just want to use the fucking web and not give up the entire game to a million different parties who want to harvest my identity and my organs. I would like to just pay money and be the customer and go about my business god damn it.

Argh this shit is so annoying, I feel like I have to devote myself to full-time study to understand wtf the story is.

The original statement is about the tie between money and reputation. In the pure state, when things are working cleanly, money is analogous to a type of reputation: it's the score for how much service your actions have rendered to the world, in aggregate. If you read Mises, that's what you will take away.

If you're a mostly sane person living in actual reality who is not totally deluded by some kind of ideological bagholding, you will also recognize many ways in which this formulation goes obviously wrong, at least for any semantics meaningful for normal life. But that doesn't mean there's no signal in it.

Careful not to overextend the message. People can be amazing or shitty regardless of money, even regardless of reputation. But both are signals worth attending to, so long as you're aware of the nature of those signals, their generative story, and where they can mislead.

The bidrectional connection between money and speech -- and speech and transaction -- is very useful to contextualize this. Here is one of my favorite narratives on the topic.

You might not have. I expressed it poorly, but:

Reputation -> money: if you are known to work hard, be honest, and do a good job, you'll have a good reputation and can leverage it to make money.

Money -> reputation: the getting of money confers a reputation, based on the nearly subconscious idea that people get money when they're of service to others, when "of service" is distributed across the entire universe of human interaction. It's highly but not completely untrue. Probably the more relevant one is that reputation accrues from power, and power and money are much more tightly inter-related.

Here's the privacy notice where the assorted terms are spelled out.

It might not be a problem in practice -- scammers may have little incentive to apply for the kinds of jobs that low-income folks would be qualified for. Not sure what is to be gained by applying for a job that requires you to show up in person at a gas station or loading dock or whatever.

Yes, that's a drawback of this method. There's no free lunch.

Makes sense. There is a game and they've done well playing it. Upending that game is not an appealing option.

Certainly it's more nuts than our modern default way of believing is, where the nepotistic strategy seems totally bonkers, and the "merit-based" way seems without drawbacks.

Makes me think of SN a little differently, something like: an honest general marketplace. The current SN is an honest marketplace of ideas, or at least, it has the tools to support evolution in that direction. But you could do a two-sided one for jobs and job-seekers, too.

Once you have something money-like, you have the possibility for reputation. (And, I suppose, vice-versa.)

It's interesting that nepotism is not a bad solution in some ways, although we can all readily think of its shortcomings. There's a reputation to maintain by both parties, there's identity to individuate, etc. We discount those forces, but they're very powerful, and have offsetting virtues than does "merit".

Crap, hadn't even considered that angle.

Great post.

I'm interested in this as a gauge of how receptive "people like" your students are to the ideas needed for interest in btc to take hold. I scare-quoted because I realize that it's very complicated and difficult to group people in a complex semantic space like this. And yet it can be done to some degree, as common sense will dictate.

In a completely pulling-it-out-of-your-ass fashion, care to advance an opinion about how generalizeable this phenomenon is? Are the students in your class at this non-notable college similar to people their age? Would you take their awareness as typical? Would you expect their response to be typical?

Was wondering how long it would be.

Swan are my favorite low-character ecosystem grifters who call out other ecosystem grifters.

"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?