428 sats \ 6 replies \ @elvismercury OP 15 Nov 2023 \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 4 bitcoin
“Since central banks operate the primary ledger systems that the world uses for domestic and international commerce, then of course they are going to actively manage them, and therefore of course they will make plenty of mistakes. All the incentives are aligned in that direction, and so that’s how it plays out in countries all around the world whether we like it or not. This is an inevitable condition that we find ourselves in, unless or until we develop and adopt a better ledger system.” (p. 227)
We've talked before about tech determinism. This seems another flavor of determinism -- call it 'incentive determinism'. But it makes me uneasy because, in the past, people have talked about how other macro systems have aligned incentives, e.g., people would vote for effective politicians who would compete with each other to lead effectively; the various branches of government would check each other's power; the wise philosophers will rule judiciously; etc.
The existing system rarely seem to work out to most people's satisfaction, for whichever system you might choose to talk about. Is bitcoin the perfect system, or will it, too, reveal pathological aspects that are impossible to predict in advance?
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304 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 16 Nov 2023
Incentive determinism is my favorite flavor of determinism because it's like the base flavor of all human action determinism - tech determinism included.
Is bitcoin the perfect system, or will it, too, reveal pathological aspects that are impossible to predict in advance?
Perfection is an asymptote. Perfect money is an exercise to define1, but it would probably be an incorruptible ledger that's also infinitely scalable, perfectly private, and free to transact in. Bitcoin may be incorruptible under most circumstances and closer to the asymptote of perfect money than all prior monies but it is not perfect money.
Do systems with bitcoin's complexity exist without exhibiting at least local pathologies? Best case for bitcoin is that its pathologies don't runaway to the point of undermining its purpose and value. If bitcoin's incentives simply don't lead to it killing itself then it's already better than every fiat ledger that's existed.
Footnotes
  1. It'd probably be a lot of worthwhile, hard fun. This tweet from Bryan Bishop is describing the asymptote. ↩
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100 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury OP 17 Nov 2023
It's funny to me that one of the elements of perfection in this space is 'how do we actually give the money to people in the first place?'
So many things I read that are written by smart people who haven't really thought about btc or money in general, talk about all these great monetary systems that could be built, but they just accept as an axiom that we have distributed the coins equally to everyone.
It takes a while to realize that distribution is basically the hardest problem, btc did it about as well as it can be done, and it will never be done again even that well.
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304 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 17 Nov 2023
how do we actually give the money to people in the first place?
For this reason I feel like sama's vision for WorldCoin wasn't wholly as evil as it manifested. He's guilty of recklessly executing big ambitions but it seems to be the manslaughter version of evil and not the premeditated kind.
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428 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 17 Nov 2023
Jesus Christ, these could go down in history as the most ill-timed comments ever.
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304 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 17 Nov 2023
I had the same thought. Ahhhhhhh
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428 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 17 Nov 2023
100%. I have thought the same thing exactly, but didn't have the energy to face the critics for not hating SA sufficiently. Thanks for being braver than I was.
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