Bitcoin Tech Talk #459
Interesting Stuff
The Origin of Noblesse Oblige - This is a long read on the virtue of humility and what the implications of it are at a society wide scale. What was insightful was how opposed humility is to the equality doctrine, which essentially says anyone can do anything if they just put in enough effort. As anyone really good at anything knows, most people simply don’t have the tools to be a world class basketball player, or concert pianist, or mathematician. Yet the lie persists to make people feel better and it’s had some disastrous effects. Among other things, it’s destroyed the noblesse oblige of the people at the top because they believe they earned everything. It’s a fiat lie that keeps poor people down and makes exploitation much easier.
Don’t Trust LLMs - Apparently, there’s a way to integrate Claude so that it has access to your Stripe account and handle customer complaints and so on. These guys figured out a way to trick it to hand out $50,000 coupons. The problem is that the LLMs can’t tell when a user is trying to trick it to be from the actual owner of the business. As a software engineer, this is frightening because the attack surface is just so huge. As such, I expect that this is not a one-off, and as LLMs become a bigger part of the consumer experience, hacks like this are going to become more commonplace, which will lead to them being nerfed and eventually, you’ll need people again.
Current State of Middle School - This is a hilarious and frightening observation by a middle school dad about what he saw in a middle school classroom in California. As he states, it’s a middle school that has banned phones, but as he shows, the real problem in the classroom are the chromebook laptops that every kid has been issued. They are all watching videos, playing games and switching tabs when the teacher walks by. As the author notes, the bringing in of technology in the classroom may be the mistake. Unfortunately, given that we’re in a fiat system, the mistake is likely not going to be acknowledged until it’s hurt a lot more kids.
One Room Schoolhouse - Contrasting with the last story is this one about what used to be normal, the one-room schoolhouse in rural America. As the name implies, there was literally just one room for a bunch of kids from 5 to 16 in a community and a single teacher. You would think that such a setup wouldn’t work, but it actually worked very well. The article references a 1924 Texas study which compared one-room schools to more modern ones with age-based cohorts. The one-room schools had better outcomes. As usual in a fiat system, more money just means more bureaucracy and not better outcomes.
On Microcultures - This is an insightful read on how cultures differ as human groups grow. There’s a useful taxonomy of group sizes starting from a tribe, then a village, then a city and finally a nation. The thrust of the article is that each stage has different dynamics and different trust levels and the final level requires a monoculture to be sustainable. At least until the advent of the internet, the monoculture was possible due to the same mass media and shared cultural touchstones. But now, because of the internet, we have much smaller microcultures, but without the geographic proximity that those used to rely on. Hence we have people of many different microcultures living in close proximity that really have little in common. As the article implies, at some point, we’re going to get smaller geographic communities that support these microcultures, which for Bitcoin sounds a lot like those citadels.
What I'm up to
Long Term Security Budget - The debate I had with Knut against Peter Todd is now up. We discussed whether miners control Bitcoin or have significant influence, whether taxation is theft, whether there are social costs to re-orgs and so on. It was a lively debate and a bit unfortunate that Peter had to defend his position on his own. Still, it was fun to do and hopefully gives you a better idea of how economic analysis can be different given different assumptions.
Brian Paik - The second part of my interview with Brian is up, where we discussed a lot of the contemporary concerns around Bitcoin, including treasury companies, Knots vs Core, quantum computing and a bunch of other things. The Bitcoin maximalist community is really growing and content like this is finding an audience in Korea.
YAF - I’ll be speaking at this conservative college student conference about Bitcoin and the evil of fiat money, central banking and everything else around it. This is a growing group and generally battle-hardened, given how liberal colleges tend to be, so this will be a fun group to orange pill.
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