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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules 4h \ parent \ on: What will governments look like when the world is on a Bitcoin standard? AskSN
The incentive is that the cost of their debt increases if they don't have sovereign assets. As they sell off their capital infrastructure and their tax base diminishes because they are squeezing the economy to pay debt interest payments people will move out of real estate and equities into assets that they can't tax, resulting in a large subset of the population playing kingmaker in elections, like the greens in Europe, or the ultra orthodox in Israel, who then push for a favourable environment for bitcoin. Other countries will have kingmakers from the dispossessed, whose assets and job security and social status are plummeting, but who resent Bitcoiners as "hoarders", and from those countries Bitcoiners (and the wealthy in general) will flee, taking their capital to favourable environments (Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, any country that offers them tax sanctuary and freedom of movement).
How should we decide interest rates? Should central banks be independent?
Its a stupid question, you're holding the spear at the wrong end.
Its so ironic because the reason we're all here is because someone decided to take the shaft and throw it properly.
You might think you're being practical but you're really being naive, wholly underappreciating the scale and breath of the problem.
The entire scientific academy, including theoretical physics, journalism, politics, any technical field that doesn't touch grass and is deeply and directly consequential for a dependent public, is plagued by the same structural collapse in social consensus. They are running on pure inertia and the prestige built my men long dead (even bitcoin falls in that camp).
Yes, it's a big problem, but "given tools" aren't fit for purpose, and it's a waste of time to intellect to pretend otherwise.
Its existential. Bitcoin is a financial prepper's bunker in a age of entropy, of decay, of collapse. Core's conflict with users is a symptom of that disease.
You can't cure cancer with the pills you have in your medicine cabinet. You cannot throw a spear by putting two fingers on the tip and guiding towards your target.
I think it's a broader problem with social consensus that plagues everything, because we live in an engagement based paradigm for social media (ad funded optimised for time on device) based upon the bunk idea of "revealed preferences", which is just a terrible idea that pervades everything.
The downstream effects of this in discourse, politics, and civil integration are myriad, but for the purposes of your question it has the unfortunate effect siloing for the sake of security through obscurity. Groups below the Dunbar number where it's possible to have repeat interactions with identifiable individuals segregate to avoid the noise of platforms like twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or whatever bullshit platform captures the broader communities attention. In dance communities they might balkanise into WhatsApp, which makes promoting what they want to get out into the public sphere really difficult. The same effect exists in technical communities. Technically anyone may be able to post, but the discourse happens in places where there is a technical or other hurdle, meaning public discourse is meaningfully segregated from technical discourse, and because the environments have different models for amplifying and suppressing voices (not necessarily better, different) they come to intractably different conclusions.
The segregation of networks below the Dunbar number also creates in-group team dynamics, and if a member of the in-group sides with "the mob" they get excommunicated for introducing "noise", even if the mob is right on that occasion (even if they are right for the wrong reasons), reinforcing friend-enemy distinctions. One hierarchy cannot abide the conclusions of another, one power center cannot abide the mandate of another.
Twitter is indeed a terrible place for discourse, but technical discourse has to happen meaningfully in public, not segregated and balkanised, or decisions like that made on OP_RETURN will feel to the public like something out of the blue, an attack.
Anything that works, anything robust against entropy, stable, reliable, trustworthy, is built on proof of work, even if bitcoin's is the most efficient. Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
Social media should be built on a Pagerank-like paradigm, shirking revealed preferences in favour of optimising for consensus, and applying the perfectly aligned business model of Substack or Patreon. A follow would be contextual, not general. You should follow people for a specific key word, not all of their content, and this would be a sort of weak endorsement. Build more explicit endorsements on top of that, and explicit references ("I stayed with this guy during a #bitcoin conference in New York and he was a great host" or "this guy is my #bitcoin development mentor" or "she has been my #salsa dance teacher for 5 years and is the best"). The highest reference I can think of is a monthly donation, and that is where the platform can take a cut for development funding. Build this around real world events because repeat interactions help to build integration and supports good behaviour, weeding out (decreasing amplification) the awful behaviour of people who hide behind keyboards.
I've been working on this since the block size wars, when I temporarily lost faith in bitcoin because I felt that it would eventually win but not within the current social media paradigm.
I wish I could build this on something that Bitcoiners would accept, but I don't know how to do it on something like Nostr, because private key literacy is still in its infancy.
I think we're just going to be plagued by these fork wars until Bitcoiners realise that we need to fix social discourse before bitcoin can break out, or it's fixed for them.
Once that problem is solved the business end, the thin end of the wedge, the tip of the spear that you're talking about resolves itself organically. Human beings are good at that part. The broader context is causing the problems.
In other words, you don't throw a spear by holding the pointy bit at the top.
Yes, rough consensus is a thing in development discussions, but not in the determination of what is and is not spam.
Neither of these discussions propose changing consensus rules, but only one discourse is allowed to have an influence on bitcoin development.
No, I don't. You're mischaracterising my position. I know some core developers don't believe spam exists, so they are the enemy, because that's insane. Just because something cannot be defined deterministically doesn't mean it doesn't exist and doesn't mean it cannot be fought.
If you say there is no such thing as spam, only consensus valid or not, then you're a liar.
We don't need more generals, we just need to get rid of some of the ones in core.
The irony is that they are using this quote as support for the idea that monetary transactions will outbid spam.
Which is it defer to expertise or the word of Satoshi?
Spam exists or it doesn't?
If spam is defined as the consensus layer then we can just change consensus to service more markets for distributed data storage, everybody wins!
But the reality is that bitcoin gets it's value from the fact that it is so hard to use it for anything other than money.
If you can just outbid the moneyness at the level of block space then bitcoin is nothing but a proof of stake shitcoin, where the people who control the chain are the people who pay the miners the most. But there is no reason to believe that those people would be people using bitcoin as money.
CoreCoin is just a "trust me bro" scam.
But the janitors are saying there is no such thing as litter!!!
To be clear, this was a statement from a younger core developer on a recent podcast who seems to have been one of the instigators of this ridiculous debate.
Wuille and Maxwell wouldn't have said there is no such thing as spam just because it cannot be defined deterministically.
The softer position of the spam-apologists is that it exists but will be tamed by fees, which is not a position based upon evidence given the amount of capital invested in shitcoins to date, and the intense historical pressure there has been for bitcoin to support spam as a serviceable market rather than maintaining hostility.
The distributed database on a Blockchain shitcoins only exist because bitcoin is hostile to them.
To hear so many so-called Bitcoiners, who want to be on the winning team but also the winning team has to do what they want, which always fails, to destroy the distinction between monetary and non-monetary transactions and just let the market sort it out.
Satoshi said "There are other things we can do if necessary"
But now Core Devs want to use that same quote out of context to suggest that there was never ever a plan to do anything other than let fees sort it out.
Bullshit!!!
Any Core developer or so-called Bitcoiner who denies the distinction monetary and non-monetary transactions, and therefore the existence of spam as a concept, should fork off, bow out, they are not Bitcoiners. Not because I said so, but because they don't understand bitcoin or want to change what it is against the will of everyone who has invested the 1000 hours to understand and invest in it, technically, financially, intellectually, reputationally, or in any other way.
Society succumbing to entropy because there are so few Satoshi's amongst us (I don't mean Bitcoiners, I mean people willing to make the right sacrifices and design the future without the need for personal gain).
Society grows strong when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.
In other words, fucking Boomers are dead weight.
Good idea or not, SOMEBODY will try to mess up the network (or co-opt it for their own use) sooner or later. They'll either hack the existing code or write their own version, and will be a menace to the network.
I admire the flexibility of the scripts-in-a-transaction scheme, but my evil little mind immediately starts to think of ways I might abuse it. I could encode all sorts of interesting information in the TxOut script, and if non-hacked clients validated-and-then-ignored those transactions it would be a useful covert broadcast communication channel.
That's a cool feature until it gets popular and somebody decides it would be fun to flood the payment network with millions of transactions to transfer the latest Lady Gaga video to all their friends...
That's one of the reasons for transaction fees. There are other things we can do if necessary.
The problem here is that Core developers are actively stating that there is no such thing as spam, validity is the only criteria, which is a complete and explicit shift away from Satoshi's and the community's intention and understanding for 15 years.
Core developers are breaking the social contract, leading inevitably to the menace of multiple implementations.
The design supports a tremendous variety of possible transaction types that I designed years ago. Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature, etc.
Nowhere here does he include jpegs, runes, or short videos. He could have, but he didn't.
The problem is that Core developers and their advocates here are lying about the distinction between monetary and non-monetary transactions, because we have been infected by shitcoiners whose own projects failed in the shitcoin distributed database market.
And Core is playing brinkmanship, extorting the community. Anyone who cannot distinguish spam from monetary transactions should in good conscience walk away from the repo until other developers step up, let it sit, let it go through a dormant period, until the dust settles on this.
By forcing the idea that bitcoin is just a distributed database they are creating the scenario where people invested in a monetary network have to fight to protect their investment.
Fees on their own simply won't outcompete spam on fees, not when lightning and other means of transacting bitcoin exist on L2. When there is a scarce resource (block space) people will create all kinds of competitions to exhaust that resource, as a sort of prize, a sorting mechanism.
The problem with this argument is that it reeks of a lab experiment, like these complex dynamics exist in a vacuum and will play out entirely as predicted, and that there are no possible countermeasures that could be deployed that would satisfy node runners who don't want to relay non-monetary transactions and who want to influence the quantity of spam that gets validated.
Greg is the authoritarian tool. Always has been, since I was arguing with him on Reddit in 2015.
Its time for knots and other implementations to get in the way.
I think the low number is people is due to stigmatisation brought on by government propaganda and the reaction of people invested in property and other assets dependent upon government intervention for their security models (e.g. securities regulation, and police / nimby policies around housing and real estate, direct government liabilities like pensions).
There are many more people who are afraid of Bitcoin than there are who own it, and they use the media and government to make sure people who own it don't shout about it without social repercussions.
No, consensus is the wrong place to apply filters because you cannot define spam deterministically.
Be honest, do you think you can prevent spam without the policy layer? Or do you just not believe that spam is a thing?
Because if it's the latter then it just means the two camps are going to have to try to shout the loudest and convince enough nodes or Bitcoiners who might run a node that our ideas are better.
We're never going to agree on something that philosophically rooted.
Obviously they did. So why now is Greg freaking out about censorship and "theocratic authoritarianism"? Its ridiculous to suggest that filters for non-monetary transactions are a slippery slope towards censorship.
No, taxes and the fear that merchants have for the tax and regulatory regime, the propaganda campaign.
This was a really stupid comment from you, you know full well what I meant.
I use Bitcoin more than most, but I'm fully happy to wait for incumbent systems that put a social and economic cost on normie adoption to exhaust itself.
You've made these arguments many times and they are not convincing.
They are unsupported assertions not recognised by equally competent people.
If people have to pay higher fees (as your argument goes) then why would they choose bitcoin over another Blockchain or file sharing system?
Your argument suggests that their choice is between propagating the content or not, and that higher fees are a burden they are willing to bare to get the content on the bitcoin blockchain.
But that's not true, content that is too expensive (because they have to go out of hand) to propagate on bitcoin will go to a shitcoin or Google drive where it belongs.
I am not obliged to use the chain to secure the chain, that's ridiculous. Point at any historically authoritative source from Satoshi or anyone else that suggests that filling up blocks with fee baring transactions is part of the security mechanism.
The fact is that you are building your arguments on false premises, the idea that bitcoin will die if fees to miners are not high enough. Mining difficulty adjusts, and right now we are in a period where incumbents are preventing bitcoin from being used as a medium of exchange, but that dam will break and it won't be a problem eventually. Even if the hash rate goes into recession the hardware exists to support the network through difficulty adjustments for long enough to outlive the incumbent defenses.
The market for a distributed database is far smaller than that of a monetary network, but if you make bitcoin into a distributed database it won't be an effective neutral monetary network for everyone. You'll destroy by trying to save it.