Bitcoin Tech Talk #458
Interesting Stuff
Epstein Theories - The pivot on Jeffrey Epstein by the Trump administration is one of the strangest, gaslighting events in recent memory (though COVID still trumps it), and there are many theories as to what’s actually happening behind the scenes. This post goes through the various possibilities, most of which sound delusional and stupid. It also offers up another possibility that hasn’t been widely discussed, which is that perhaps Trump is afraid of the mutually assured destruction craziness that’s about to explode with AI-generated videos should the Epstein thing come to light. It’s a fun theory, but I’m still of the opinion that he’s either protecting himself or someone close to him that he can’t afford to lose.
Tourism, the Red Herring - The article is about making tourism the center of an economy and the futility of using it to create prosperity. I’ve been traveling a good bit the last few years and this is one of the more obvious conclusions that I’ve drawn from having been at a lot of different places. The essential point of the piece is that there’s no labor productivity in tourism and it really reduces the local jobs to fairly non-productive work like serving food or cleaning rooms rather than the force multipliers like manufacturing. As the article states, tourism is not just a red herring for economic growth, but a red flag. An economy depending on tourism is generally not going to be able to sustain itself for long. In a sense, tourism is a zero-sum game where the goal is to extract money from people visiting from other places, and while fun for the participants, it’s not sustainable for most places.
Democracy, the Red Herring - Similar to the last story, this article examines the centrality of democracy to economic prosperity, and once again, comes to the conclusion that democracy is usually found near the end, not at the beginning of a society’s development. As the article suggests, the correct path seems to be to introduce democracy slowly, not suddenly as so many western initiated regime changes have tended to do. I do wonder how much the introduction of a central bank affects economic development of a country, but I would suspect that this is a much more useful data point than the particular form of government.
LLM Similarity - This article introduces an intriguing hypothesis about why LLMs work and how they all seem to converge into similar models. The name of the hypothesis is the Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH), which essentially says that there’s an ideal underlying representation of the training data, or a statistical model that gives the best answers, which models converge to as they get “better.” They seem to converge on the same concepts and essentially end up giving the same answers. If the hypothesis is true, then the end state of every LLM model will be the same suggesting that there’s a deeper reality that the models are accessing through the statistical learning.
YIMBY LARPing - YIMBY is in theory a good movement. The idea is to let people build things, like residential homes, useful services and whatnot, and not let the neighbors determine what is or is not allowed to be built. Yet, what happens in practice is that few projects end up getting built as most of the economic incentive to build gets destroyed by amendments by the people the YIMBYists are aligned with. It suffers from what the article calls the Palestinian Syndrome, which is that while many on the left are for Palestine, they’re just making demands without any real teeth behind it to get their government to take corrective action. Such posturing is sadly too common in any political sphere, where you get credit for taking a position rather than real actions.
What I'm up to
Brian Paik’s Podcast - I did this podcast while I was still in Korea to talk about all things Bitcoin, including Tether, treasury companies, the viability of a Won stablecoin and much more. A lot of my observations were about how Korea seems to be suffering from inflation and the distinction between an attack on the Korean Central Bank vs the Korean people. Most governments conflate the two, which is absolutely, demonstrably incorrect.
Korean TGFB Book Launch Part 2 - This is part two of the Korean edition of Thank God for Bitcoin launch. We talked about how this book is different than other Bitcoin books, why it hits differently, the US church perspective on Bitcoin and the impact this book may have going forward.
Tokyo Bitcoin Base - I will be at this meetup in Tokyo at the new Bitcoin Base on July 28, 7pm. There’s only a limited number of spots, so please register early!
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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