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@kepford
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 3h \ parent \ on: Apathy, Indifference, Disillusion... Gilded Rust without a Foundation bitcoin
Not the first time. Many reasons I bet. Lightning really limits my need to use onchain transactions personally.
Smart move. She is one of the sharpest business people in music. Or she listens to smart people. My guess is it's both. I've never cared for her music and personally I still can't see her being so popular but clearly she's figured it out and poeple love her. I respect her skill.
There's a good documentary on Sweden that talks about this. About when they went socialist and it didn't work. Then they reformed into a capitalist country with high taxes and a welfare state.
The TLDR is that it works better when you have a smaller scale state and more of a shared cultural heritage. The message the guy sends is that over time people move from feeling ownership of their system and not feeling entitled to more entitlement from those using the system. This breeds resentment for the higher taxes.
Its a few years old but is interesting.
Sweden: Lessons for America?
I tend to agree with this general thought. Unless you have a more monolithic culture welfare systems really slowly stop working. The thing I take away from this is if you have a culture that values the welfare of others why do you need force to help those in need? I don't think the issue is the tax rate but the perceived value of what people get for those taxes and sense of leadership listening to the people. That tends to break down as governance scales to large. I think this is a thing that can happen in private governance as well. But private governance doesn't have a monopoly on violence like a state does. Easier to kick the leadership out or the entire system.
I've come around to thinking shitcoins will always be with us. They will change and the scams with evolve but humans are greedy and slow to learn on mass. But some of us learn and avoid it. Others are ahead of us and scam the masses. It is what it is. I'm not gonna cheer lead scammers though.
Its not good for bitcoin. Its hard to measure the impact though. Political shitcoining seems to be the new shitcoining this cycle. It does seem like it's more of a way to fund Trump and his machine though. A new grift for sure.
Let me ask you a question. If you are really disappointed by all the chearl-eading for the suits and government shills entering the bitcoin space how exactly did you think bitcoin becoming used more widely would go?
- Did you think people would suddenly start valuing hard money?
- Did you think people would just stop believing in political power systems?
- Did you think suits would suddenly care about sovereignty?
- Did you expect greed to lose to moral purity?
I'm not trying to pick any fights. I just never hear many principled bitcoiners outline how they think bitcoin becomes the standard money for the world.
There's a lot of "bitcoin fixes this" but little on what the middle stages look like.
My answer is I have no clue. But I can tell you I don't see people suddenly becoming skeptical of the existing system and open to bitcoin. Greed and the utility of it as a savings vehicle seems far more likely for the US. Those in more oppressed places likely value the peer to peer aspects of it more.
Interesting... I am not sure I share the article's seeming concern about this affecting Strategy negatively. That is, if they aren't lying. I also don't trust Arkham Intelligence very much. Its just interesting.
Honestly, it would be pretty difficult to hide that much bitcoin being bought by a public company.
What changes to bitcoin have these people made? I don't see any honestly. It's in people's heads. I mean that is important but isn't really something code can influence.
I agree with you one the delusion of the term bitcoiner. But when you think it through no one was a gold bug when it was dominant. As bitcoin grows in use it will be used by people that have no interest in other than utility. As I see it that is the only way it beats fiat. On utility.
Thanks for sharing your notes and thoughts. Its appreciated. Here are some of mine in response for what its worth. Probably not much :)
Neha doubts that lightning is able to scale to a billion users because it’s difficult to fund channels as a brand new user and remain online if your use case is small payments.
I don't think lightning scales to billions either but I can't prove that. More importantly I don't think it needs to. It just needs to be able to support those that value sovereignty over convenience. I think most people will be perfectly fine using custodians. They do today and most people are more afraid of themselves than a third party with a decent rep. Also, we are talking about day to day spending not your egg. Most people don't carry their life savings around in the pocket. Even cards have limits. Debit cards are connected to checking accounts that are usually not massive.
For now I think lightning will meet our needs as we grow. The promising tech that while it is custodial protect privacy is eCash. I think this helps with small payments a ton. It is mile better than Strike or CashApp at least.
we can’t ignore the numbers of people using stablecoins.
I agree. I don't think stable coins are good just as I don't think fiat is good. I do use fiat though...
My opinion on stable coins on lightning is... I don't care. Same as my opinion on JPEGs on bitcoin. I don't care.
lightning is becoming corporate and this is a good thing.
That's interesting. Its different but the same man. I remember being involved in the early days with a technology community. When it started the conferences were very campy and organic. As the project grew in usage and popularity like the Internet it became more corporate. This is what I am seeing people say about the bitcoin conf. I think its just a part of the natural evolution of things. I don't like suits. I don't like corporate stuff but I'm pro freedom so if people like that I'm ok with it. Its just not for me. I doubt I'll ever go to the Bitcoin Conference. Not my kind of event.
Did you try pipelines, either between generic LLMs, retrained "experts", or even with NLP like spaCy? My "hobby" is making AI reason with AI and see who convinces who - I'll publish a demo today or tomorrow.
I haven't.
I think we are in very tight alignment. I don't think machines can be sentient, at least I've seen zero evidence that this is possible. What seems to be the case when people disagree on this is their definitions. People are the threat as you say. Same is true of most tech.
I'm a firm believer in history being a great tool to understand what will happen in the future. It does repeat but it rhymes.
The other thing that you likely get but I find a ton of people do not seem to get is this. Sam Altman and those like him are incentivized to over sell their stuff. He's a pitchman. That doesn't mean everything he says is a lie but most people that fear AI seem to just take this for granted.
The fact that we have a family and I work from how is a large factor. Being able to cook though.. is a skill everyone should learn for their own well being. It kinda blows my mind when I see people that almost treat it with disdain. Like it is beneath them or something.
Between my wife and I almost all meals. We do eat out on weekends maybe once or twice max on average. Why do you ask?
Do you feel like you have a good grasp on how LLM's work? If not I'd highly recommend you check out this video. Its not magic and I think its not going to happen as quickly as many think but yes plenty of jobs will be obsoleted. This has happened in the past and the transition periods are rough.
I agree with you about open source software (AI included). I actually think the Chinese are probably gonna break the closed source stuff wide open. We started to see this with DeepSeek. Not for any morally good reason but because they do not believe in IP. I don't either.
Widespread unemployment leads to increased crime and violence. Its a pretty bleak future if that happens. That said, I don't think advanced tech that obsoletes jobs is a bad thing in principle. I believe humans will find things to do as we have in the past.
Personally I have been getting my head around LLMs for a while now and the more I learn the less magical they seem. The biggest question I have for them now is how soon can they actually become sustainable. They are losing money like crazy currently and if the fiat money / debt / venture capital dries up we have another dot.com level crash on our hands. That would be my bet to happen before there is any AI revolution that leads to widespread job loses.
LLMs have improved a lot since I first tried them out but they still have a long way to go. You need experts that actually know things because they just make stuff up. They are remarkably good at guessing and get things correct a lot but they can't be trusted. The thing is, neither can humans. This is why you need to have multiple humans to really do work that is bullet proof.
I'll end with this. Be proactive but don't take the black pill. Its seductive as it allows one to just pretend that you don't have agency and you can just be lazy because working doesn't matter. Work still matters and we have so much more control over our destiny than we realize.
@SimpleStacker, thanks for posting this. I'm burned out on this take. He's not wrong but I guess I've been reading/hearing it a lot lately. Kinda done with it.
My TLDR is there are two types of bitcoiners. The vanguard that value sovereignty and those that simply want to pump their bags. I'm hoping my bags grow but that's not what gets me excited about bitcoin. The downstream effects are what get me excited. Bitcoin is not gonna make everyone a libertarian or anarchists. Or even a "conservative". As the tent grows the meaning of a "bitcoiner" really dies. Its probably already dead.
But we, those that get the why behind it all should keep using the tools, staking sats, and explaining it to those that have "ears to hear". The rest... well they have to find their own way.