A Contrarion view (challenge what you know about Bitcoin) \ stacker news ~bitcoin

A Contrarion view (challenge what you know about Bitcoin)

13k sats \ 15 comments \ @muteness11 5 Nov 2023 bitcoin

I stopped listening to BTC Maxis as pretty much there wasnt anything new for me to learn and I have decided to go down the Eric Voskuil rabbit hole after reading his book (Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin)

For those who are interested I've compiled below list

https://www.listennotes.com/top-podcasts/eric-voskuil/

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820 sats \ 11 replies \ @nerd2ninja 5 Nov 2023

Ugh I can't stand listening to people repeat things I've verified are incorrect especially for a whole hour and that is exactly the problem with listening to shitcoin shills.

I will at least give you that the first one looks interesting enough, the second one looks like absolute clownery (I mean its fucking Litecoin), and the third one just doesn't have a very good attention getter.

As for the interesting one tho, the open verifiability of Bitcoin is about detecting inflation bugs should one occur. Its unfortunate that Chris Belcher is suffering from long Covid, but if someone were to pick up on his teleports project, we could ramp up privacy immensely.

Annoyingly though, you don't sound like you come in good faith. We talk about problems with Bitcoin all the time. I mean we have a mitigated by not patched LN routing bug right now that'll require a complete protocol rewrite to fully fix. To bring shitcoins into the discussion just makes you look like you're shitting on Bitcoin for the purpose of shilling a shitcoin. It makes it more difficult to take seriously.

429 sats \ 10 replies \ @elvismercury 5 Nov 2023

Eric Voskuil is a treasure. A true OG. It's interesting to see how the current wave of bitcoiners are souring on him, I suppose because he's more committed to tryng to understand reality than parrot the orthodoxy or pump his bags.

But as @harr said, this is a lot of videos. What about these particular videos piqued your interest? The Monero interview makes sense, but I'm esp interested in why the Litecoin podcast had him on -- I listened to 20 minutes of it, and it was solid, but didn't strike me as too different from any podcast.

(I'm also mildly interested in why anybody cares enough to make a Litecoin podcast, but not enough to put in the work. Thoughts welcome on that, too.)

417 sats \ 8 replies \ @nerd2ninja 5 Nov 2023

Eric Voskuil is a treasure. A true OG. It's interesting to see how the current wave of bitcoiners are souring on him, I suppose because he's more committed to tryng to understand reality than parrot the orthodoxy or pump his bags.

I didn't watch the videos. My comment is only my impression of it. I need a lot more encouragement to actually sink the time into it. Doesn't help that it looks like I'm being invited to swim in a dumpster, but if you say he's good, I suppose I could listen to 20 minutes of it. Point me at the best 20 minutes

671 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 5 Nov 2023

First: whoops, wasn't meant to be replying to you, it was supposed to be top-level, to @muteness11. I gathered that you hadn't watched the videos.

To your question: I just had it playing in the background so don't have the best answer. But relatively early on in the Litecoin pod (around the 15 minute mark) he's talking about what is a very deep issue of what it means for btc's supply to be limited. He discusses this in terms of substitution. (In his book this has its own section at p. 291 in the pdf.)

This is the kind of thing EV fixates on that's almost never discussed. When it is discussed, it's discussed in terms that suggest the people discussing it haven't thought about it in any depth at all. What it means for something to be scarce when it is an informational good that can be infinitely replicated for no marginal cost, and the consequences of that scarcity as other market pressures come to dominate, is tied up with whether 1 btc comes to be worth $0 or $1m. You'd think people would want to thoroughly understand the issue. But nope.

We touch on many aspects of this in part 1 of the book club although not exactly in those terms.

644 sats \ 4 replies \ @nerd2ninja 5 Nov 2023

What it means for something to be scarce when it is an informational good that can be infinitely replicated for no marginal cost

Okay, so does he figure out that its a social construct that can't be replaced without generational overturn? Because that's what it means. That's the reason its dismissed as the people discussing it having not thought enough about it.

I suppose we ought to be more patient about this, but also it kinda feels like one of those things you get or you don't get. Either you adopt the social construct or you reject it and that doesn't really happen by being convinced that you should.

I think it more happens by either adopting the idea that we need a better money and getting burnt over and over again by shitcoins or by being involved in a network of people that use it as money and sort of adopting that social construct by proxy. There's probably more ways it happens though.

417 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 5 Nov 2023

Okay, so does he figure out that its a social construct that can't be replaced without generational overturn?

This is my biggest beef with his take, I think, though I can't recall him addressing it directly. It makes sense to talk about substitutes when it's your apple vs my apple. It's less clear what it means when we're comparing one cardboard picture of Michael Jordan from 1983 vs another; or this painting by a French dude in 1877 vs another. In one way these distinctions are as real as a frying pan to the face. In another they're the vespers of dreams that melt away at sunrise.

People are generally, imo, waaaaaay too quick to declare victory based on what they see as social trends playing out. Given that btc is a pure abstraction, and its coordination power exclusively in the realm of human belief, I can't abide the triumphalism. History doesn't warrant it. When you're using a commodity money with an abstract commodity, you're in uncharted waters.

I suppose we ought to be more patient about this, but also it kinda feels like one of those things you get or you don't get. [...] I think it more happens by [...] being involved in a network of people that use it as money and sort of adopting that social construct by proxy.

I agree that if btc becomes credible global money, this is how it will happen. But also, social constructs are fickle. Things come and go out of style, as the collectibles examples I gave suggest. Moral and legal trends ebb and flow: once upon a time it was fine to own another human being as property, now it's not. Even things that you would think could never, ever be altered by something as flimsy as the change of fashion -- like whether we believe, officially as a culture, that men and women are biologically different -- are proving to be more pliable than anyone ever would have imagined just a decade ago.

How anyone feels certain about anything in this space is beyond me. I appreciate how EV is rigorous in how he formulates the issues, which lets him talk about them very crisply. It's a great service to forming an educated opinion.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @nerd2ninja 5 Nov 2023

Moral and legal trends ebb and flow: once upon a time it was fine to own another human being as property, now it's not. Even things that you would think could never, ever be altered by something as flimsy as the change of fashion -- like whether we believe, officially as a culture, that men and women are biologically different -- are proving to be more pliable than anyone ever would have imagined just a decade ago.

But I just said

without generational overturn

All of your examples were overturned with generational change (Save for fashion to an extent). Bitcoin may not have won as money on a global scale this generation, but it has certainly won over everything known as "crypto" this generation. Sure, while I can appreciate the "don't feel so certain" attitude, at the same time, when its getting hotter, just call it summer even if you get a cold snap soon after.

Will the next generation adopt Bitcoin? That I don't think we can know for certain, but Bitcoin is not as flimsy as fashion, that we do know.

I would think this generational overturn would involve keeping the name Bitcoin but just under a different ruleset (a softfork or a hardfork of sorts), but it is possible it could be a completely new social construct, however, not without some kind of benefit in doing so. The hype trends of crypto and fashion alike don't allow for anything to be established, but Bitcoin is, even if we did have a cold snap in the "blockchain not bitcoin" trend. People aren't going to just switch on the basis on hype. There has to be some much deeper need being met with it.

I'll let Libbitcoin's Social Network Principle take this the rest of the way, but I could expand upon it: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Social-Network-Principle

In the terminology of Paul Baran's 1964 paper on distributed networks the importance of topology in network design is the ability of communications to withstand the loss of a certain number of nodes. A centralized (star) network will fail with the loss of one node. A distributed (mesh) network is more resilient. A hybrid of these systems is considered decentralized.

As a money Bitcoin forms a social graph. Only a person can decide to accept one money or another in trade. A set of people sharing the same definition for a money is referred to as a consensus. Authority in a monetary system is the power to define the money. Bitcoin is a tool that people can use to defend against the tendency toward authority, in order to preserve their agreement and therefore utility in the money.

In distributed systems terminology a Bitcoin "node" is a person and the system is money. It does not matter how many machines the person controls, the loss of that person is a loss of a node in the system (including all of the person's machines). A centralized money cannot withstand the loss of one person. If that one person changes their rules, the original money ceases to exist. As shown in Risk Sharing Principle, Bitcoin relies on decentralization to allow people to resist authority. This decentralization makes the money more able to withstand the loss of more people when faced with state attacks. A loss in this sense is the refusal of the person to trade in the money.

But hot damn is this conversation in any case WAY more interesting than what you described this other guy talking about.

825 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 5 Nov 2023

All of your examples were overturned with generational change (Save for fashion to an extent).

I noted that, and almost said something, but didn't in the interest of time. I think this is a very important idea -- I'm not in love with the idea of "generations" bc there's a bunch of stuff packed in there that complicate it, but broadly I think I know what you mean, and broadly I agree with you.

Will the next generation adopt Bitcoin? That I don't think we can know for certain, but Bitcoin is not as flimsy as fashion, that we do know.

We've got some strong signals so far, I agree with that. Fifteen years is a hell of a thing. I try to pinch myself sometimes and remind myself that this thing that seemed so dumb a decade ago is now being discussed all the time on MSM, and is viewed by some as part of a strategic position for a Presidential platform. Insane.

I also try to keep in mind that having x years of history, where .8x years were spent where almost nobody outside of a tiny sect knew or cared, can be misleading. For some amount of time now, btc has been in The League. The years when they were playing D3 college basketball are not irrelevant, but nor are they decisive.

I would think this generational overturn would involve keeping the name Bitcoin but just under a different ruleset (a softfork or a hardfork of sorts), but it is possible it could be a completely new social construct, however, not without some kind of benefit in doing so.

I think this idea is my literal favorite meta-topic in all of btc. Voskuil mentioned it toward the tail of the part of the pod I listened to (somewhere btwn 20-30 minutes).

But hot damn is this conversation in any case WAY more interesting than what you described this other guy talking about.

Which other guy? If you're talking about Voskuil, you do realize that he's the Libbitcoin guy, right? Or maybe you're making fun of me, I'm not sure.

Either way, I agree the conversation is interesting -- I think this is the real heart of it, the nuances of the social game we play together when we decide something is money. And the generational idea, and the intersection of the two, amid the broader cataclysms.

I mentioned somewhere recently that this is the topic I want to take on for the next book-club-like thing, after Broken Money. I'll tag you when I do it, I hope you'll share your thinking there, it would be awesome if we could get broader interest on it.

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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @muteness11 OP 5 Nov 2023

you didnt watch the videos and instead you decided to attack my intentions ... buddy that is a poor take :)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 5 Nov 2023

Well dude, look at the framing you decided to present this with

"challenge what you know about Bitcoin" Not bad in and of itself

"I stopped listening to BTC Maxis" Now okay this is because you felt you could learn more elsewhere but my guy, if behavioral based anti-virus had to identify when people were trying to do psyops with their post, it would pick this up

And then you linked 2 podcasts that were about other coins.

I attacked your intentions, because that's what kept me from watching the videos. Are you seriously expecting me to go through 9 hours of what looks like bullshit because of how your presented it? I wanted you to come down here and tell me it wasn't true.

"Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states the following:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @muteness11 OP 5 Nov 2023

his arguments resonate with the way I think (he is simply not married to his own ideas and is open to change them) .....

my fav. piece is his book, as for the litecoin or monero pod or else .... Its better than focusing on the gist .... as for why? simply, humans are tribal and some chose Litecoin/Monero as their tribe for reasons of their own

672 sats \ 0 replies \ @harrr 5 Nov 2023

That's like nine hours of video... so which new things did you learn there?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @2bithits 5 Nov 2023

Why did you pick these monero/litecoin pods? He's done heaps of other podcasts, the most recent being Nostrica.

I think I'm starting to understand his thesis more. Would love to hear a short summary though.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @muteness11 OP 5 Nov 2023

The one with GSovereignty (nostrovia pod) is a good one .... both (the host and Eric) are free thinkers and I learned a lot

As for why Monero/Litecoin pods, I just did a quick search and these were the latest I could find -I dont know anything about Monero/Litecoin and dont care about them :)

As for short summary, that is very hard as there are many many things to cover, personally read his book twice (I feel i need to do it again) and since morning I have been listening to the pods ive shared (some for the 2nd time)

Note: I met Max (wasabi wallet founder) last week in Bali who is knowledgeable on Austrian Economics & is a philosophiser and he told me Eric's knowledge on Austrian Economics & his technical knowledge of Bitcoin is one of the best, if not the best.... i was intrigued and wanted to know more on his thoughts and ideas