Bitcoin Tech Talk #462
Interesting Stuff
Lost Nuclear Knowledge - This is a pretty long read about nuclear power and specifically, about the lost US capacity for enriching uranium. If you’re not familiar, nuclear power plants require uranium that’s some significant percentage a uranium isotope. Indeed, this is also required for nuclear weapons, though the percentage is way higher (90% vs 20%). It’s also nominally the reason for Israel’s strike against Iran. But then to find out that the US hasn’t been able to enrich uranium since 2013 is a bit of a shock. As the article notes, enriched uranium is the one thing the US has been buying from Russia despite all the sanctions from the war in Ukraine. This is how civilization breaks down, in lost knowledge and capacity leading to reduced capabilities.
The Wrong Road for AI - LLMs have trillions of investment at this point and with the release of ChatGPT5, expectations are higher than ever, many people thinking that it will result in some sort of AGI. Yet as this article shows, LLMs cannot lead to AGI and that most engineers that actually make these systems already know this. What keeps the hype alive is all the money and bureaucracy that’s built up around it, which is not uncommon in a fiat system. What’s amazing isn’t that this process has happened, but that it’s happened so quickly. Time will tell whether the point of diminishing returns has been reached or not, but as the article argues, there’s almost certainly a significant amount of malinvestment in the space already.
Open Banking - This is another really informative post on the current banking system and the current kerfuffle over API access to banking infrastructure called Open Banking. The main financial incentive here is that ACH is orders of magnitude cheaper than credit or debit cards (2/100ths of a cent per transaction!) which is why you can Venmo or CashApp your friends for free but using your credit card costs 2%. The banks want to charge for Open Banking as it’s eating into their credit and debit card profits while all the businesses built on this API access don’t think it’s fair, especially since Open Banking has been used from 2009 or so. If this sounds familiar, it should. We’re likely to face the same sort of cartel behavior in Bitcoin with miners about lightning providers.
Profiles of Rent-Seekers - The article is nominally about how little most people work and the various explanations for why they’re allowed to get away with it. The possible explanations range from the oblivious 1000x employee to some sort of wealth distribution scheme implicitly for elitist beliefs, but the main one isn’t really explored much, which is that the availability of debt and regulations that prevent competition allows these firms to stay inefficient and over-hire. As one very cynical X post said recently, corporation jobs are a combination of adult daycare and UBI.
Misdiagnosing Boredom - Sometimes the history of a word and its various connotations that it’s gone through gives insight into the current cultural situation. The word boredom has a long history and the article looks at it as a way to diagnose our current societal complaint of being bored all the time. As the article shows, boredom used to signal a sort of refined upper class-ness. It’s now a feature of anhedonia, or the inability to really feel excited about much because of over-stimulation. In other words, the problem with boredom isn’t out there (as in not enough things excite us) but inside where we’ve been conditioned by the hedonic treadmill. If anything we need more time being bored than less.
What I'm up to
Young America’s Foundation Road to Freedom - I will be speaking at this conference in Raston, VA (alongside Yeonmi Park and EJ Antoni) to a bunch of college students October 3-4. I’ll speak about the trucker protests as a launching point for embracing non-governmental, politically neutral money.
Lugano Plan B Forum - A few weeks later October 24-25, I will be in Lugano for the Plan B Forum. It looks like I may be doing a debate and running a workshop for my open source project, the family Bitcoin banking app.
Nostr Note of the Week
What I’m Promoting
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