Which covenants proposal, if any, do you prefer?

It's so hard to get Grok to help simplify even reasonable math equations. I've gotten pretty frustrated at trying to get AI to help, so something better would very much be welcome. I remain a bit skeptical, but something like this would be really fun to play with and use.

The main reason this would cause unrest is if people are using loans to fund their activities. This was a major reason why bimetallism gained traction in the late 19th century, because farmers needed to pay loans back but their goods that they were selling to the market kept getting cheaper due to deflation, making it harder and harder for them to pay the loans back. Solution here is that they need to be zero-interest loans (Saifedean has an interesting theory on why this would be the case in a hard money economy eventually) or fewer loans and much more savings. I personally think the latter is much more realistic given that in a deflationary economy, savings is deeply incentivized.

The solution to not cutting wages, though, is to increase productivity of each worker. This requires near-constant innovation, which most companies in a functioning economy do. Of course, this might mean not as many jobs, but then, those people are freed up to do other more productive activities. The main flaw here is assuming jobs are for life.

Meat-za

Have you seen Emin Gun Sirer on campus and though he's not a professor there anymore, is he still influencing the CS program?

I saw the title and thought it was about the bits BIP I authored years back: BIP-0176

The answer to almost all of these if we're answering honestly is that we don't know. We have no idea because Bitcoin is not a centralized system and that's a good thing. We want people to make decisions based on their own values and profit calculations, and not on centralized dictates.

We have incentive guidelines based on economics. We know lowering the price means more people buy. We know that friction and bad user experience prevent people from adoption. But ultimately, playing with incentives to try to get a particular result is technocratic hubris. Particularly for the reason you point out. We really don't know what the second and third order effects will be. This is the main failure of central planning.

That said, I think the way to solve this is more decentralization. We should be encouraging nodes to be more self-sovereign and decide for themselves what they relay and encourage hashers to decide for themselves what they mine. Power to the people, I say.

I'm not sure it can be measured at all and at the very least, there are lots of of outputs that are functionally the same in the form of lost private keys. And if they can't be measured, it's futile to make concessions to them, no? Imagine if a mafia don came to your place of business and started extorting you. You have to pay some amount that he says each month. If he suddenly says, if you do X for me, I'll knock of $50 from what you owe next month, you have no idea if he'll actually knock off $50 because he determines the amount each month anyway. That's what this seems like to me.

As far as I can tell, this is the argument that if you give them OP_RETURN, perhaps the bad guys will put stuff there instead of where it hurts. I don't trust the bad guys and have no interest in conceding anything to them, especially when there's nothing stopping them from doing what you're trying to prevent them from doing anyway.

What we know from the data is that non-standard OP_RETURN is cumbersome and costly compared to normal transactions. You have to wait longer and pay more. If you make the wait shorter and the cost less, it'll naturally mean more people will use it, not just the bad guys, but lots of people that weren't even thinking about using it.

There was a show called Extracted, which was a lot like what you described, but people were pissed off at the ending.

Being famous, writing a book, being really good at an instrument, getting fit and healthy, being in charge of a large organization