What is this, part deux
In addition to what I said last week, I'm now linking posts using my own description (vs the post title) to show how they sit in my mind -- since the whole point is that this is my own synthesis, vs a summary, that approach seems more consistent.
The basics of pseudonymity by @satoshiplanet
We're all using nyms, but I've been getting uncomfortable with the chain of opsec violations on the road to this one, and to the others I've built up over the years. (My recent post on cloud storage stems from this growing discomfort.) It's like buying a house where you have a sneaking suspicion that there's something wrong with the foundation.
The strategies described in the linked guide aren't magic, you can't just check a handful of boxes and then be free to interact however you like online (or irl) without consequence. The contortions you'll need to perform to stay safe vary in proportion to the severity of your activity: if you're just trying to not get doxxed by assholes, that's one thing; if you're attempting to steal billions of dollars from the Israeli government, that's something else.
That said, this guide is a beautiful starting point to take a harder look at this topic. In my experience, most bitcoiners haven't done even the bare minimum of threat modeling aside from feeling a vague paranoia, so there's some low-hanging fruit to be plucked. (Note also that Christopher Allen / Blockchain Commons is the author of my favorite technical bitcoin introduction.)
Also: this makes me think, again, of the conversation I had w/ @nemo and others about ephemerality and online threat models. If I were doing it over again, part of me thinks all my SN participation is a mistake, because a motivated attacker could figure out my identity. But another part of me is like: basically everything I value about being here is a function of building actual relationships and feeling like this is a real place that I care about. Having some Batman-like identity that doesn't reflect actual-me would be ... sad. Is that really how you want to live?
Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.
Microstrategy at it again by @IgnaciobTato
Here's the deal: Saylor has been good for btc in innumerable ways. It's also obvious [1] that one company owning so much btc is bad for btc. Oh wait, I hear you saying, how can it be both good and bad for btc at the same time? To which I respond: welcome to the world, things are complicated here.
You know what would be great? If Saylor, who loves nothing more than to talk for three straight hours without interruption and almost without taking a breath, would address this issue head-on. The guy is a fucking genius, you can bet that he has spent scores of hours ruminating on it. If I got one shot with him, here's what I would ask:
What can you do in service of the btc ecosystem, other than simply buying and holding, now that you have almost 1% of the supply?
How to be dumb by @k00b
K00b has established just how not-dumb he is with this exploration of how we know things, and even, what it means to know anything -- what are the ingredients of knowing? Maybe those emotions and instincts and gut-feelings actually come from somewhere?
Of course, it's worth noting that the wisdom in @k00b's observation is in a tug of war with people being really dumb, and uncritically following whatever self-soothing biases they're carrying around. It's so much nicer to envelop yourself in a worldview where you are awesome! It's so much easier to interpret ambiguity in a way that lets you be right!
I do this exercise: when I'm really worked up about something, I look inward and ask:
Q: How much of this is me being an asshole because I'm squirming out from under some uncomfortable truth?
And then, inevitably:
A: A lot.
SN analytics by @davidw
David, after some unknown number of proddings and goadings, made good on an earlier promise to reveal the secrets to SN success. As you'd expect if you've been around here very long, it's thorough and super interesting. If you want to give yourself the best chance of posting when you're likely to earn more sats, the charts in this post are your cheat code.
(I'd be interested in any additional thoughts on my generous stacker hypothesis, btw.)
Games for grokking bitcoin by @DarthCoin
We've talked before about the conceptual underpinnings needed to make btc comprehensible to people in the world.
But that's so abstract. What visceral conceptual understanding is needed? How might a person acquire that?
This game is an example of one interesting way to realize this goal. It makes me wonder: what are others? Useful strategies for establishing these conceptual primitives might not look like the education strategies we normally think of. They might look like play.
10k infected github repos by @0xbitcoiner
Surely I am tedious in infinite ways, but one of them that I'm also self-aware about is the idea of trustlessness. Any time I hear someone use the term I mentally adjust my estimate of their IQ down by twenty points.
I don't want to be that guy, but really, there is no trustlessness. The closest substitute is to understand the trust dependency graph and to allocate your attention judiciously. The linked article is another vivid example of this truth.
In addition to the mythical status of trustlessness and Santa, the idea of DYOR is also extraordinarily weaker than people pretend. I mean, you can DYOR, and you should, but it's important to be honest about what that's getting you. Have you ever compiled code from Github? I did. Did you go through it line by line to make sure there's not an evil payload in there someplace? I didn't. Are you confident you'd even be able to recognize it if you saw it? I'm not.
Update: Here's another post linking to a better Ars Technica writeup of the affair.
Fred Krueger's btc perspective by @siggy47
Normally somebody's hot takes on the future of btc is yawn-inducing and I don't even read it unless the person has a background that implies un-correlated information with my usual info diet; and this finance guy, or whatever he is, doesn't make the cut according to that standard. But Siggy's recs mean a lot, so I listened, and I'm glad I did.
If you spend most of your time soaking in the warm bath of maxi narratives, this podcast will probably be unpleasant for you, for a host of reasons I won't enumerate. But what a good angle. My .02 is that he's more right than wrong.
In particular, there's one hard truth I think he's locked in on, which is that, while there's probably another 10x in btc/USD price, and maybe even 100x (if you're willing to wait 30 years), this has an implication that lots of btc peeps are deluding themselves about: the days of putting in pocket change, and getting life-altering returns out the other side, are over. Like: if you put in $10k, which is a lot, and 30 years from now have a million dollars of purchasing power? Like, great, but I regret to inform you that you will not be living the High Life.
I mean, it gives me no joy to say this. I wish I was class of 2011 and writing this from my mega-yacht while being fanned with giant palm leaves by women wearing leather bikinis; but I'm not, and I won't be, and probably you're not and won't be, and we should calibrate our expectations accordingly, if we haven't already. (I already have.)
Again: hope I'm wrong! Hope we run into each other at the private airport! I will buy you a steak to apologize for my short-sightedness.
Update: A related post by @Undisciplined getting at the same stuff. Much elaborated in the comments. Many people disagree with me forcefully.
Thoughts on justice by @Scoresby
What's the purpose of justice? Is justice the highest good? What is it trading off against? How does this change when you're the arbiter of justice, and trying to raise your kids to not grow up to be dicks?
This post made me super happy, not bc the topic is a feel-good topic, but bc we're talking about it here! How great. What a fucking beautiful development.
Notes
[1] Well, it's obvious to me. Is it not obvious to you?
Update: Oh, well, apparently it's not obvious to @DarthCoin.