Bitcoin Tech Talk #392
Interesting Stuff
Centralizing/Decentralizing Cycles - Fair warning: this article is easily as long as a novella, perhaps even a short book (my browser says 70 minutes), but it’s definitely worth a read. The basic premise is that there are periods of history when things centralize (Romans conquering Europe) and other periods of history when things decentralize (Same Roman collapsing and giving way to lots of smaller states). The post argues that we’re in for an imminent decentralizing and goes through the chaos that will come to pass. The most interesting bits for me were how the bureaucracy has become the tail that wags the dog and why there’s little hope of it getting fixed. There’s nothing really about Bitcoin in the article, but you can easily figure out how it would fit into the scenario laid out.
Credit Card Reward Programs - This is an article on how credit cards fund the reward programs that have become so ubiquitous. The economics are fascinating and the behavior patterns determine how the programs get designed. Essentially, credit cards have been able to snipe 1-2% of every transaction done with them, allowing them to rent-seek in deep and pervasive ways. There are also all kinds of safety controls to make sure these programs don’t lose money which many people spend unbelievable amounts of time trying to game. This is the fiat system gone digital and it’s everything you’d expect, with kickbacks on kickbacks, rent-seeking taken to the nth level.
Do Incentives Really Work? - Of course they do, would be my answer, but here’s an article about why this may not be true. There’s a lot of good nuggets in here, including the Jukebox theory of human behavior and the Secret Criminal assumption of other people. The main argument is that when you design an incentive system a particular way, the people attracted to that system are generally people motivated by the incentives you put in place, hence there’s something of a self-selection problem which ends in a self-fulfilling prophesy. I think the author has found something about intrinsic motivation that’s very interesting, but I suspect that for the mass of Nihilistic people, incentives or carrot and stick stuff work pretty much as expected. The real question is about the decline of morals which allow people to live above the incentives given to them.
Lenocracy - I’ve called the concept here rent-seeking for the longest time, and I’m glad that the concept is solid enough for there to be other names for it. The author here goes through all the different ways in which useless rent-seeking causes pain for good economic activity and how it’s essentially made the world that we see today, where even producing weapons and ammunition for a relatively small conflict in Ukraine is straining the defense contracting industry. Contrast that with WW2 and it’s clear that all the rent-seeking has severely degraded production capacity. As with the first article in this section, the article predicts some sort of reckoning, though it’s not clear when or how it will happen.
What I'm up to
The Two Stewards Show - I talked with these guys about Bitcoin and Christianity and we talked for almost 2 hours! We covered Natural Law vs Positivism and how Christian niceness is used against them to impose positivism. We talked about the way that the fiat monetary system is used to deputize enforcement of the state’s mandates and techniques for orange pilling people and its parallel to Christian evangelism. And finally, I talked about how fiat money has ruined churches.
Bitcoin Seoul - I will be at this conference in late May as the premiere Bitcoin-only event in Asia. The star-studded lineup is a first in that part of the world and it’s going to be a great event in one of the most interesting cities in the world. It’s one of the easiest cities to get to in Asia and flights are extremely affordable if you already live there. You can get a 10% discount if you pay using Bitcoin. Hope to see you there!
Oslo Freedom Forum - I will be in Norway just a few days later to talk about the importance of Bitcoin to human rights activists all around the world. It’s one of the most surreal places to be in June as the sun does not set until 11:30pm! This is one of the more unique experiences you’ll get if you’re looking for Bitcoin content as it’s so focused on human rights.
Nostr Note of the Week
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