Bitcoin Tech Talk #341
Interesting Stuff
Last Vestiges of Merit - The article is about the SATs and how they help identify talent. The fact that 80% of colleges no longer require them speaks to how they really want to determine who gets in, not based on merit, but based on politics. As readers of this newsletter probably know, that means that what they really want to do is add more rent-seeking cronyism. A fiat society will deprecate merit in favor of subjective criteria that can always be fudged.
Predicting Revolution - An article on the pre-conditions of revolution and what sort of societal conditions need to exist before revolution foments. The main conditions seem to be related to income inequality, which naturally comes from rent-seeking and the argument in this article is that we seem to have the right pre-conditions in the US. I would say that this may not be the most accurate gauge as income inequality in 1900 meant people that were literally starving on the bottom whereas even the poorest in America are at risk of obesity.
Suppliers to Customers - Interesting way to look at the way that the internet changed commerce. Previously, the big advantage companies had was in access to suppliers. For example, book publishers had access to authors and had a gate-keeping function. Companies won by controlling access to supply and having large distribution networks. Now that the internet has greatly reduced distribution costs, owning customers is now much more important. Hence, the winning formulas of Google, Facebook, etc where you are the product.
Inflation Reduction Act - The article in the Economist is written as a way to show what opportunities now exist as a result of this legislation, but I kept reading it as a massive growth of the bureaucratic state and rent-seeking industries. The article surveys who is now “in demand” as a result of all the environmental subsidies in the bill and it’s an enormous list. What I found striking is that these are all people that add no value to civilization and are experts at compliance or getting on the good side of government regulators. $800B monetary expansion to fund all this…
What I'm up to
Zion - I talked to Justin Rezvani about Bitcoin. Zion is the decentralized Facebook alternative and this interview was about introducing Bitcoin to his audience. A lot of the interview was talking about the basics of fiat money and why it’s evil. We also talked about thinking for yourself and taking initiative vs comfort in trusting authorities and being passive.
Krypto Seoul Writeup - This is an article written by a CoinDesk Korea reporter about my appearance at the altcoin meetup where I trashed both fiat and altcoins. The article is in Korean, but there’s a video coming for those that don’t understand Korean. It was interesting since the reporter seemed to lean socialist when she asked a bit of a loaded question about how what I blame on rent-seeking within fiat is really attributable to capitalism. Anyway, this is my general strategy in dealing with altcoiners, which is to talk about the evils of fiat money and letting them make the obvious connections to altcoins which have very similar properties.
Seoul, DMZ, etc - I’m staying Seoul another week and enjoying the many sites and museums. One place that I got to visit was the DMZ, which was absolutely unreal. I did not know this, but there’s a village within the DMZ, which is managed by the UN. The people there don’t pay any taxes and the men don’t have to serve in the Korean military, which other South Korean men all have to do. The more I study the Korean War, the more I’m convinced that UN intervention made things much more difficult.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Shilling
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