Bitcoin Tech Talk #433
Interesting Stuff
Against Over-Optimization - We all want to squeeze a little more juice out of our life, and unfortunately, this has led to the phenomenon of optimizing. Much of that is good, of course, but there’s a point at which where we get to over-optimizing, where there’s no slack left in the system. As the article points out, optimizing is often just really boring and the quest for better numbers as soulless as homo economicus. The relentless pressure of inflation makes it so that debt-ridden entities cannot survive without optimizing as much as possible, but it unfortunately also causes a deep fragility throughout the system, which, when broken, lead to the bailouts that ultimately worsen the inflation which started it.
Why We Don’t Have Revolution - Young men have been doing pretty badly lately, and in any society where this happens, you get many of them causing a lot of trouble, often leading to revolution. This is particularly the case when they have no prospects for work, marriage and children, which for a lot of young men is certainly the case. So why don’t we have revolution yet? As this post points out, it’s video games and porn that’s acted like a digital version of fentanyl to essentially render them harmless. Bread and circuses are funded by fiat money, and it’s an effective way to keep declining instead of reforming.
Effeminacy - Speaking of which, this is an article about how Thomas Aquinas defined effeminacy, specifically, a lack of willingness to suffer because of an attachment to comfort. The aforementioned porn and video games are two ways in which many men get attached to comfort, but the main three in the article are surprising. They are all status-related and speak to an unwillingness to challenge, which is, of course, a traditionally masculine trait. What’s particularly difficult in these fiat-driven times is that reputation and status figure so deeply into how people make money, and in that sense, there’s a natural drift toward effeminacy.
FenBen and Ivermectin for Cancer - This is one of those stories that makes my blood boil. What seems to be at worst a promising research avenue to at best an effective cure for cancer has more or less been shut out of the medical community because there’s no money to be made with it. As you might be aware from COVID, Ivermectin is an out-of-patent anti-parasitic drug that’s been shown to be effective against a lot of different ailments. FenBen is similar. What’s crazy is that they’ve been used by many cancer patients over the years and have been effective. Yet because there’s almost no money to be made for pharmaceutical companies, little is known about it among most oncologists. While I do blame Big Pharma to a degree, the real villian is the monetary incentives of the screwed up health care system.
The Case for Inheritances - The topic of how much to leave to my children is something I’ve been pondering for some time. I’ve been convinced that leaving large amounts of highly liquid assets is probably not a good idea as the possibility of it being squandered looms large. But as the article points out, giving to charity is not a great idea either, and in a sense, doing so is a cop-out for your failure to raise your kids properly. The argument in the article is to leave them something like land that they can be attached to and generate income from. For hundreds of years, this was how the rich passed down their wealth. I suspect fiat money has devalued real estate in weird ways (inheritance tax, real estate tax, inflation) where this is no longer the preferred path, but it may become so again under a Bitcoin standard.
What I'm up to
Building a Product - After a bit of a break, I’m back with the next in the series of building a product. Will takes us through what we did in making the family bank app and why we made the decisions we did. Largely, we cut down the scope of the product to make it easy to launch and took out features that we didn’t think would be that useful. The fact that we did this without having written any permanent code was the important thing.
Plan B Forum San Salvador - I’ll be speaking at this conference later this week. I’ll also be at Bitcoin Office event on the 29th with Max and Stacy. Come hang out if you’re in town and learn about how El Salvador is Bitcoin-only.
Programming Blockchain - I will be running the 2-day seminar for the final time on March 31 - April 1 2025, or in about 2 months. I will not be teaching in this format going forward, so this will be your last chance. The cost is $4000, but you can get a $1000 discount if you apply a month ahead of time. Seats are limited, and you will need to pass a coding test to get in.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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