Bitcoin Tech Talk #514
Interesting Stuff
Incentives are for Losers - Adam Mastroianni makes the provocative case that people who need incentives to behave well are morally weak. The thrust of the article is that real integrity means doing the right thing regardless of the reward structure. Unfortunately, most people never develop actual convictions, just what he calls “moralistic therapeutic deism” they absorbed by osmosis. He's onto something that is extremely fiat, which is that incentive-talk is really an excuse to sin by blaming the economic system. Fiat money trains us to see monetary incentives as the be-all, end-all of market decisions, which is often just high-time-preference behavior. But a meaningful life requires conviction that holds firm through inconvenience and even suffering. The simplistic model of human behavior, so commonly assumed by economists is the lowest and most base one.
Young adults are Poor - Johann Kurtz documents how the social capital that previous generations got for free like trust, community, mutual obligation through church, union hall, and neighborhood, all collapsed starting in the 1950s-70s. This has forced young adults to buy individually what used to come at low cost through community, which is why they feel poor despite rosy GDP statistics. Tellingly, he notes that wages parted from productivity after 1973, which any Bitcoiner will recognize as two years after Nixon closed the gold window. Financialization didn't just hollow out our economy, it hollowed out our parishes and bowling leagues too. Fiat money let everyone exit their obligations and buy substitutes from strangers, which made everything good cost much more for worse quality. Only now are people realizing that this was a terrible trade.
Fertility and Currency - Dave argues that baby bonuses fail because money is fungible. The bonuses compete with every other consumer desire, whereas children historically earned parents non-fungible rewards like status, community prestige, and old-age security. He illustrates the point with everything from Taiwanese lottery winners to Diablo III's economy-destroying real-money auction house. The returns on baby bonuses are abysmal and ultimately don’t make much sense as being richer doesn’t make people want to have kids. The deeper problem is the same as the previous story in that everything in a fiat economy now has a price, which means that resource allocation, and more obliquely, status, is almost entirely decided on financial terms. And if children don’t bring status, then it’s no wonder people avoid having them.
The Perfect Recipe - Raw Egg Nationalist argues that learning to cook from whole ingredients is the single most transformative health intervention available even more important than lifting. He argues that Kraft-Heinz and General Mills have weaponized food science to make hyperpalatable slop while the FDA's GRAS loophole waves through some 10,000 additives that Europe would never allow. This debased, engineered for addiction, and profitable fiat food has had enormous cost in debased health. Cooking your own dinner is the culinary equivalent of running your own node. Food sovereignty starts in the kitchen, and the fact that 70% of Americans are overweight tells you exactly how much it’s been outsourced.
A New Revolution - John Carter argues that the racial spoils system baked into our Civil Rights legal framework can't be voted away, and explores what sort of revolution would work in this environment. He concludes that a decentralized, leaderless swarm with clear, achievable goals much like the Canadian trucker convoy would be the way. Reading this as a Bitcoiner, I couldn’t help but see how much Bitcoin itself was in alignment with his framework. The trigger in this case would be some sort of financial crisis, which we have seen every 8-10 years in the US. I know he’s a fan of Bitcoin, so it was a bit strange that he didn’t see this at all, but he makes some insightful points about what capitulation of the current regime might look like.
What I'm up to
BIP110 Split Stream - I was on Tone Vays’s live stream during the BIP110 split as we observed some entertaining dynamics. BIP110 chain did not win through game theory and many miners outright refused to signal as the BIP110 soft fork required. My main takeaway is that the proponents have the chain that they want. Even now, it would be difficult for a rando to get in a large spam transaction simply because the miners on that chain are not public and the nodes on that network enforce spam filters.
Mr. M Podcast - I was on this podcast to talk about recent Bitcoin events like the aforementioned BIP110 split and the ColdCard hack. We talked a bit more philosophically about life and bear markets and things like that as well.
Nostr Note of the Week
