671 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 5 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: A Contrarion view (challenge what you know about Bitcoin) bitcoin
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.
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.
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
Which other guy? If you're talking about Voskuil, you do realize that he's the Libbitcoin guy, right?
No I didn't lmao. Alright alright fine, I'll watch the videos. I think that's enough to motivate me to watch them. I was worried it was gonna be nothing but shitcoin propaganda lmao
reply