Finally got around to start up Atlas Shrugged. Haven't gotten further than a couple chapters but I'm loving it!
Since I'm already a von-mises style libertarian crazy semi-anarchist, I look forward to this book turning me into an off the walls maniacally shrugging extremist who runs around town just saying the word bitcoin like a bitcoin-pokemon.
perhaps then my father will finally respect me
@arbedout is such a king -- that guy has the most eclectic reading taste and thoughtful takes. I recall once he alluded to the fact that he was working on a book, but I'm not on Twitter anymore so I lost track. Hopefully he finishes it, instabuy.
It examines what made the internet successful, its history, what prevents it from getting better, and how it could get better if it could get better ... as told by "The Architect of the Internet." It's an autobiography of the most significant and successful decentralized computer/communication system ever created.
I probably won't be able to load it from cold memory in detail for the next few hours but here's a google talk around the time of its release from Clark:
... which is probably a fuller vibe anyway.
We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code. - David Clark
he said to me, “the internet’s about routing money. Routing packets is a side effect, and you screwed up the money routing protocols.” And I said, “I didn’t design any money routing protocols…” And he said, “that’s what I said.”
True story: this book was recommended to me in a dream (which is a dumb title in isolation so I dismissed it). Then a week later I was researching system design and found it in a reference and it turned out to be amazing.
It could be a mind trick but if so my mind has an interest in making me believe this book is important.
"Social Justice Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell. This book was released this month. At 93 years old, he is one of the most respected economists, thinkers, and social commentators of our time, and is hated by only by those who like to substitute feelings for facts. Anything he writes is gold.
Great Jones Street, by Don Delillo. I'm a big DeLillo fan. This isn't his most popular book. I read it years ago and enjoyed it. Many, many years ago I used to hang out in a bar on Great Jones Street. Maybe that's why I enjoyed it so much the first time I read it.
In my opinion, everything from George Orwell is worth reading, not only the classics like 1984 and animal but also other less known books like Down and Out in Paris or London and Homage to Catalonia. Not only was Orwell so prescient about his prediction of the future of the world and understanding of deep human psychology but he was also a great writer very pleasant to read, highly recommended!
@siggy47 and I were discussing these books only the other day. Enjoy them all and also Road to Wigan Pier which is more reflective on his politics.
Must admit I have never read Animal Farm…
Store of Value The belief that resources are scarce and limited is a misunderstanding of the nature of scarcity, which is the key concept behind economics.
The absolute quantity of every raw material present in earth is too large for us as human beings to even measure or comprehend, and in no way constitutes a real limit to what we as humans can produce of it. We have barely scratched the surface of the earth in search of the minerals
we need, and the more we search, and the deeper we dig, the more resources we find. What constitutes the practical and realistic limit to the quantity of any resource is always the amount of human time that is directed toward producing it, as that is the only real scarce resource (until the creation of Bitcoin).
In his masterful book, The Ultimate Resource, the late economist Julian Simon explains how the only limited resource, and in fact the only thing for which the term resource actually applies, is human time. Each human has a limited time on earth, and that is the only scarcity we deal with as individuals. As a society, our only scarcity is in the total amount of time available to members of a society to produce different goods and services. More of any good can always be produced if human time goes toward it. The real cost of a good, then, is always its opportunity cost in terms of goods forgone to produce it.
In all human history, we have never run out of any single raw material or resource, and the price of virtually all resources is lower today than it was in past points in history, because our technological advancement allows us to produce them at a lower cost in terms of our time. Not only have we not run out of raw materials, the proven reserves that exist of each resource have only increased with time as our consumption has gone up. If resources are to be understood as being finite, then the existing stockpiles would decline with time as we consume more. But even as we are always consuming more, prices continue to drop, and the improvements in technology for finding and excavating resources allows us to find more and more.
Oil, the vital bloodline of modern economies, is the best example as it has fairly reliable statistics.
Securing bitcoin is challenging because bitcoin is not an abstract reference to value, like a balance in a bank account. Bitcoin is very much like digital cash or gold. You’ve probably heard the expression “Possession is nine tenths of the law”. Well, in bitcoin, possession is ten tenths of the law. Possession of the keys to unlock the bitcoin, is equivalent to possession of cash or a chunk of precious metal. You can lose it, misplace it, have it stolen or accidentally give the wrong amount to someone. In every one of those cases, the end-user would have no recourse, just as if they dropped cash on a public sidewalk.
However, bitcoin has capabilities that cash, gold and bank accounts do not. A bitcoin wallet, containing your keys, can be backed up like any file. It can be stored in multiple copies, even printed on paper for hard-copy backup. You can’t “backup” cash, gold or bank accounts. Bitcoin is different enough from anything that has come before that we need to think about bitcoin security in a novel way too.
Security principles
The core principle in bitcoin is decentralization and it has important implications for security. A centralized model, such as a traditional bank or payment network, depends on access control and vetting to keep bad actors out of the system. By comparison, a decentralized system like bitcoin pushes the responsibility and control to the end-users.
Since security of the network is based on Proof-of-Work, not access control, the network can be open and no encryption is required for bitcoin traffic. On a traditional payment network, such a credit card system, the “payment” is really open-ended because it contains the user’s private identifier (the credit card number).
After the initial charge, anyone with access to the identifier can “pull” funds and charge the owner again and again. Thus, the payment network has to be secured end-to-end with encryption and must ensure that no eavesdroppers or intermediaries can compromise the payment traffic, in transit or when it is stored (at rest).
If a bad actor gains access to the system, they can compromise current transactions and payment tokens that can be used to create new transactions. Worse, when customer data is compromised, the customers are exposed to identity theft and must take action to prevent fraudulent use of the compromised accounts.
Bitcoin is dramatically different. A bitcoin transaction authorizes only a specific value to a specific recipient and cannot be forged or modified. It does not reveal any private information, such as the identities of the parties and cannot be used to authorize additional payments. Therefore, a bitcoin payment network does not need to be encrypted or protected from eavesdropping. In fact, you can broadcast bitcoin transactions over an open public channel, such as unsecured Wifi or Bluetooth, with no loss of security.
Bitcoin’s decentralized security model puts a lot of power in the hands of the end-users. With that power comes responsibility for maintaining the secrecy of the keys. For most users that is not easy to do, especially on general purpose computing devices, such as Internet-connected smartphones or laptops. Whereas bitcoin’s decentralized model prevents the type of mass compromise seen with credit cards, many end-users are not
able to adequately secure their keys and get hacked one by one.
Satoshi makes a reference to the ability of
governments to shut down any centralized system. Pure peer-to-peer
network systems like the Bitcoin and the Nostr, have been demonstrated to be more
resilient.
Satoshi Nakamoto Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:30:360800
[Lengthy exposition of vulnerability of a
system to use-of-force monopolies ellided.]
You will not find a solution to political
problems in cryptography.
Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race
and gain a new territory of freedom for several
years.
Several questions and answers were covered in
this post. Hal Finney, the first recipient of a bitcoin
transaction, posed the questions.
In the first part, Satoshi explains how miners
retain transactions until they form them into a block.
In the second, he explains how double spending
cannot occur on the Bitcoin Blockchain and how only
one blockchain will prevail given that two miners
solve their blocks simultaneously.
To the third question, he describes what an
attacker would have to do to “rewrite history”, i.e.,
reconstruct and change the blockchain. To add or
remove transactions in prior past blocks would require
rewriting them faster than all miners on the network
still working on the existing blockchain.
Reading some Orwell essays. Written 80ish years ago, 100% as applicable now as then. Such a clear writer and thinker. Man, would be so interested to hear that guy's perspective on the modern moment. I expect it would be complex and nuanced and probably unpopular for those reasons.
This is the third Matt Haig book I read this year, so his writing prowess has got to count for something. He wrote this - a delightfully eclectic mish-mash of lists and reflections - to help himself cope when he was depressed. It’s an easy book to read; I sometimes read several pages in the middle of the school day, to the chagrin of one boy who called me a nerd. But his protests were ignored as I absorbed myself in his philosophical thoughts that were sometimes astutely analytical and other times whimsical.
This was an especially satisfying read because I now understand how his interest in philosophy enriched his depiction of the main character, Nora, in his “The Midnight Library”. As an author, you have to take an intimate interest in a subject in order to make your character sound convincing.
And it seems that Matt had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things quirky, including animals and historical figures. It’s darn cool reading how he made connections to his own state of mind from such seemingly disparate topics.
The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole, by Roland Huntsford, is a great adventure read. Amundsen was Norwegian, and studied and absorbed the methods of the Eskimos in arctic living and travel. Scott, British, was basically in it just for career advancement. Amundsen's expedition was running on a shoestring, at high efficiency. Scott was publicly funded by the British Army.
Must admit I have never read Animal Farm…