In short, the idle thoughts of an idle fellow.

Here's last week's release which has a bit more explanation; and through which you can follow the chain back to #1 because there's something wrong with you and you want that.

Note: I'm moving this to Thursday AM, in concession to @davidw's data about when posts get more attention. Although I wonder if this might usher in Goodhart's law and david's data will stop being true?

This post is a decent stand-in for the general protest made by early members of a sub-culture when the latter arrivals to that sub-culture start to ruin it for them.

In this partiuclar case, the early members are anarcho-capitalist types who have utopian visions where btc makes all the bad people poor and all the good people rich, ends the state and its incompetant and lecherous bureaucrats, and ushers in the glorious after-time populated with steely-eyed sovereign carnivores.

But really, what this post is describing is a thing that happens everywhere and always. Scott Alexander has a nice writeup of the process that includes links to other writeups. (Cyclical theories of history are also relevant, though in my opinion the subculture lens is the better one.)

The point is, while btc is uniquely interesting, it's also pretty typical as a social phenomenon, at least as far as I've been able to determine. It's natural for people who felt that something was theirs -- that it reflected their values and their ethos and their preferred cultural practices, and provided a sheltered cul-de-sac where they built identities and maybe achieved some measure of social prominance -- would get salty as it oozes toward something else, as all living things do.

There's nothing any of us can do about this, so I suggest that we prepare our hearts, because change is coming. Either btc really is for everyone, or else it fails. Full stop.

(Notably, this will be true of SN, too. We've discussed the possibility before)

Some good inflation talk, looking for parallels between what happened in the Weimar republic, post-WW1, and what's happening now.

I'll probably eventually get bored w/ MSTR, but as much as we talk about it, I think what Saylor's doing w/ the company is one of the most interesting things going on in the whole btc space, and even (dare I say) in the world.

The nutty histrionics MSTR is doing in order to buy btc may distract you from the fundamental truth that this is basically a single dude playing a geo-political game at the highest possible level, in an environment that's never existed before, and in a manner that's never been tried before. Saylor has been like a meteor crashing into the earth.

If his gambit works out, he'll wind up as the wealthiest person in the world, and one of the most powerful. Like it or not, what Saylor's doing will have much to do with how btc evolves, how the world orients to it, and the timescale on which everything happens.

You read about things like this, but it's such a privilege to see it unfolding before your eyes in a domain where you have enough expertise to understand it.

What can you even say.

Just as MSTR and Saylor fascinate me endlessly, Craig Wright does too. Not so much CW, who is clearly both a narcissist and mentally ill; but what all this portends for btc. And in particular, these three things:

Some cool btc history is buried in all the reportage also, which is linked in the post. Satoshi letters, tales from the early days by Adam Back and Martti Malmi, etc.

My main interest in btc is not btc itself, or overthrowing the government, or whatever, but the more general question of systems and how they operate in complex environments. You can't get much more interesting from a complex systems perspective than the de novo birth of a non-state money in a fiat world.

Another system worthy of interest is how you create circumstances for far-flung people who don't know each other to pursue a common end that they didn't even have a moment ago. This is, of course, the problem money is meant to solve, but even though it might make economists sad, there's so much more to this collaboration / coordination endeavor than just a price signal; and even though it might make bitcoiners sad, centralization and leadership are incredibly important in what is undertaken and how it proceeds. Or how it doesn't proceed, and instead runs into a tree.

Case in point: in the linked post, @k00b is putting out feelers for technologies and strategies to help bootstrap SN development. Imagine if he could make it really convenient for people to contribute to the SN codebase? The post discusses the tech side of that -- what tech is available, what are the tradeoffs, etc. But the cultural piece is at least as important -- what norms, habits, behaviors, institutions are available to transform an outsider into an insider? That's a worthy thing to think about. Not sure it's been posted about, though.

In a way, this same issue threads through all the aforementioned topics.

Big-picture thoughts on btc's role in living a good life. This is an example of what you can get in an actual community, vs what you'd get on a news site.

I guess some people have no interest in an actual community, and that's fine, each to their own. But I do. What a great post.