Bitcoin Tech Talk #485
Interesting Stuff
Text is Lindy - Adam Mastroianni examines the doomer claim that reading is going extinct. As he points out, this is neither a new panic nor an original one. People have been saying that books are dying since the invention of the things that were supposed to displace it, like radio, movies, television, the internet, YouTube and Social Media. Yet books persist, not because it has more and better features, but because books do what they do very well. Part of that is articulating ideas and compressing them in understandable chunks. But to be truthful, we don’t fully understand their function in the grand sweep of history. It was a reminder to me that features are not what makes something last. Something we should be mindful about with respect to Bitcoin.
Giving to Kids - Aaron M. Renn has a guest post about when people should be giving wealth to their children. The current model is to give to your kids upon death, which, because of longer lifespans, is typically when the kids are in their 50’s and 60’s. As the article points out, this is usually way too late and largely after life trajectories have mostly been set. The better model, in his articulation, is to give to your children in their 20’s when the money matters a lot more and has more impact. There’s a lot of wisdom in this idea, that the timing is as or more important than the amount, which as any fight fan will tell you, is true of many other areas of life.
MLK Jr’s Theology - Virgil Walker has this eye-opening piece about the Reverend’s theological beliefs. As he shows with full receipts, MLK Jr was not what you would call a conventional Christian, denying, among other things, the divinity of Christ, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. I had never heard of this until this article, but in a sense I’m not that surprised. His well-known philandering, for example, is very difficult to square with Christian beliefs, but is not nearly as hard in the context of the “social gospel” or liberal theology. As with many powerful men, I suspect that the temptation he succumbed to changed his beliefs rather than the other way around.
Chesterton’s Microscope - Russell Walter writes about this useful heuristic, that of looking at the local and not the global. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that stood out to me was his contention that depression is ultimately a form of learned helplessness and that learned helplessness is exacerbated by looking too much at global or macro trends that you can’t control. This struck home with me and showed, for me, why the Bitcoin community has such a different feel. People have way more agency due to focusing on the local and controlling what they can control.
Visualizing the Past - The American Tribune has this article on looking at pictures and videos of the past and how they are triggering to modern people. The visuals in the post are stunning. The beauty of the architecture, the elegance of the people and the general overall wholesomeness of everything is unmistakable. For me, the lesson of seeing these is that this focus on beauty was taken away from us through the debasement of the money. Sadly, the debasement continues unabated for most of society, though perhaps some of that is coming back with Bitcoin.
What I'm up to
Core v Knots Part VIII - Tone and I talked to reardencode, who is a Core supporter, despite not being enamored of their work. We talked about the wallet bug, glozow’s X hack and whether the difference between relay policy and consensus is a bug or not. He also had some thoughts on BIP-110 and soft forks in general.
Core v. Knots Part IX - We also talked to Chris Guida, who is a Knots supporter and is advocating for BIP-110. This was a bit more contentious with competing claims on what the results of the soft fork would be should it be successful. We also talked about what sort of node runners we want on the network and the utility of long-term permanent data storage and whether that will compete with monetary transactions.
Plan B San Salvador - I will be at this conference later this week and going on a panel on whether Treasury Companies are good for Bitcoin. Sneak preview: I’ll be arguing more about whether they’re good for Bitcoiners, rather than the abstract entity Bitcoin.
Nostr Note of the Week
