Bitcoin Tech Talk #328
Interesting Stuff
Failure of Peer Review - Fiat makes everything a status game, including science, which is supposed to be evidence based. There are so many problems with it and this academic argues that science historically didn’t progress due to peer review and instead encouraged fellow academics to publish pdfs online. The response he got was very telling. A lot of defensiveness, a lot of whataboutism and mostly trying to protect the investment that a lot of academics have made into this very costly status game. After reading this, I’m ready to say that peer review is a scam.
Financial Nihilism - Luke Burgis is a talented writer and he explains how financial nihilism is a symptom of a much deeper nihilism that pervades society. It’s a wonderful long-read and if you’re curious about why meme stocks seem to do well, and how Dogecoin and profane NFTs have any value at all, this is well worth reading. I wrote something like this a while back about the Christian perspective on investing, but his cuts deeper and asks more questions of the reader. I don’t think he sees that fiat money’s role in the problem, and that might be a fruitful essay for me to write.
Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring - The articles I post on how quantum computing is BS seem to be popular and believe me, there’s a lot more where that came from. Scott Aaronson here points out that the algorithm about RSA being sub-linear is a really deceptive paper indeed. The main thing here is that Shor’s algorithm is not Schnorr’s algorithm, which is what the paper talks about and it’s extremely unlikely that quantum computers help at all in the latter. Quantum Computing is just a deceptive academic talking point and the press release can rightly be called fake news.
What I'm up to
Hal Finney Retrospective - I went on CoinDesk to reflect on the significance of Hal Finney’s transaction with Satoshi Nakamoto 14 years ago. The main takeaway for me is that Hal was really interested in private digital money and had enough reputation with the cypherpunk community to really vouch for it. He did and while not every cypherpunk has adopted Bitcoin, his endorsement helped in the adoption.
Istanbul Bitcoin Meetup - I will be giving a presentation at the Istanbul Bitcoin Meetup this week to talk about the various methods of doing Multisig on Taproot. I’m also really looking forward to exploring the city as it’s been a place I’ve been wanting to go to for some time. It’ll be interesting to see if the inflation there is noticable and see how it’s affecting people.
Egypt was low time preference - I’ve spent the last week in Egypt going around and seeing many of the sites. What has struck me is that so much of what was built there was meant to last. Though not always successful, many of the buildings managed to last through a deep desire to create something that wouldn’t go away. This is in sharp contrast to modern construction which sadly doesn’t last more than 30 years or so.
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What I’m Shilling
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