jimmysong

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #523

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-523

So all software is becoming open-source through decompilers and LLMs. I did not see that coming.

I honestly wonder what an AI trained without guardrails would look, sound and act like. Perhaps way more based and way less conformist?

All these new securities that are supposedly Bitcoin-backed are a race to the bottom. If you have one equity that's doing well at 15%, then someone else will offer 16% and someone else will offer 17% and so on. I can't see this ending well.

Kinda amazed that there are still people getting COVID boosters.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #522

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-522

You can explain much of human behavior by the fact that most people will do almost everything in their power to not think.

Unpopular Opinion: "Bitcoin" jobs are really risky and usually don't last more than a few years.

I find the new trend of single people meeting in run clubs fascinating.

Ostentatious shows of wealth like at night clubs are no longer the signal that they once were because it's easy to fake with debt. People trust the proof of work around physical fitness more reliable an indicator of character now.

Most people think the modern world is the result of WWII.

The more educated people know that WWII is really the result of WWI.

The economically literate people know that WWI is really the result of fiat money.

Poker players know that the most profitable choice you make is what table you sit at.

Choose the game you play carefully.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #521

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-521

By far, the best ROI I've gotten in my life is Christ.

According to Girard, your greatest enemy is probably very similar to you.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but betting incentivizes cheating.

This is a good companion piece to read about how welding is completely changing:

https://blog.humbaventures.com/p/hand-held-laser-welders

I'm guessing that this robot takes advantage of the efficiencies of laser-based welding.

The crazy thing is that this innovation wouldn't have come to market nearly as fast without SpaceX and Elon Musk.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #520

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-520

I'm starting to think insurance is a form of debt.

You will never have the conviction to convince anyone by talking "number go up" or "savings vehicle."

The only real conviction comes from a moral high ground. And until you live consistently with the ethos that the fiat monetary system is theft, and that every loan is printing money, you will only be LARPing and not living the truth of what Bitcoin really is.

Prolonging life with money is a modern phenomenon. It's a very strange tradeoff and one that prices life itself. There's something metaphysically unsettling about this.

This is a freedom that is only available if you're not employed by someone.

But man, what an awesome freedom this is. Generally more people will hate you, but more people will love you. And you start thinking a lot more clearly.

It's a good trade, IMO.

Debugging sucks, AI debugging sucks less, but still sucks.

Socialism is an attempt at changing human nature without recognizing the spiritual reality of souls.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #519

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-519

Beware of people selling things you don't understand

If you have an espresso machine with a foamer, try milk and cacao powder. For me, it's like liquid dark chocolate.

I still don't get how so many Bitcoin devs don't have much Bitcoin.

But in a sense, I suppose if they had some Bitcoin to start, they'd be tempted to retire, so maybe there's a selection effect there.

You can respect the fight while still criticizing the tactics.

Communism is popular because if you're getting screwed, you.might as well make it so everyone gets screwed

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #518

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-518

The market for treasuries is degrading gradually. The suddenly is inevitable.

Centralized identity became a thing because it was so hard to establish identity back in the day.

Cryptography makes denectralized identity possible again.

Discipline leads to wisdom

Software has always been and continues to be the biggest security vulnerability in almost every modern thing.

Status drives almost all social dynamics. And make no mistake there are status hierarchies in Bitcoin.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #517

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-517

1% is not bad

Ideology shouldn't define you.

Fiat money, preventing creative destruction since 1913

The more you understand savings, the harder you look for quality over the long term. This is how civilization builds.

Everything that needs your attention can be seen as time debt.

Better to let your enies die in obscurity than to pay them.mind when they lose.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #516

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-516

Debt is a form of slavery. And by that metric just about everyone is a slave.

Predictions on the price of eCash fork coins?

Maybe we should start calling layer 2s that depend on lightning layer 3s.

You almost always pay with time what you don't pay with money.

The only real flex is a legacy.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #515

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-515

Bitcoin jobs are more volatile than Bitcoin.

Hell hath no fury like a VC scorned.

Unpopular opinion: In 3 weeks, it'll be clear this was the fairly common bear market head fake.

AI needs constant investment to improve. Bitcoin improves as more people put their wealth in it.

I thank God every day that I'm a Christian and a Bitcoiner.

Insurance may or may not be prudent, depending on how well capitalized you believe the insurance company to be.

Forcing people into an insurance agreement is tyranny, and backing it with fiat money is subsidizing a giant rent-seeking class, that is, straight up mafia tactics.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #514

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-514

Parting with something scarce should hurt. That puts the brakes on consumption.

Bear markets are like discipline. Hurts while you're in the middle of it, but pays off in the long run.

Fiat money turned real estate into a consumption good, where most people just live in it. A bit ironic since most people treat it as an investment, but most real estate doesn't generate any cash flow and degrades over time.

Forks change the dynamic in such unpredictable ways

We would know so much more if we had prices. Economically, prices are critical information.

Funny how the BIP110 PoW selection is running into the non-corrupt entropy problem that we all saw with ColdCard.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #513

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-513

What I learned from yesterday is that game theory doesn't work without prices to help all the actors assess the risk.

Bitcoin is being hit with third order effects of being able to scale developers

Once we have self sovereign AI maybe self custody can be for normies

Bitcoin software should have:

open source code Reproducible builds Security bounties A warrant canary

What else?

In retrospect, there were a multitude of failures at many different levels.

I never took any sponsorship money, but I did say good things about ColdCard. For that I'm sorry.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #512

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-512

No doubt ColdCard screwed up massively. Hopefully they open source their software and hardware so multiple vendors can improve on their software and hardware. I don't see any other way the project survives.

Generating true entropy is really, really painful. Rolling dice 100 times, or flipping coins 256 times is not easy. It also doesn't help that most people have the attention span of insects.

I've argued in the past that the easiest entropy is very thoroughly shuffling a deck of cards and using the first 40 or so cards. I actually coded this feature into Armory back in the day. The problem with that one is it's not so easy to convert those cards to a seed phrase, at least without some hardware device. Still, it's better than the hardware generating the seed phrase on your behalf.

If you're going to do dicerolling and creating your own seedphrase, go the whole way and do it in a room with no windows and no recording devices (including phones) and back up straight to metal plates.

If you want to be taken seriously, make serious predictions and own up to the predictions you got wrong.

It's amazing how few people do this.

Talk is so incredibly cheap now and debased to the point of near-irrelevance.

Make talk great again.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #511

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-511

The problem with extremes is that the middle, which is most likely to happen, rarely gets explored.

The weirdest game theory incentive for BIP110 is that the more people want to dump BIP110 coins, the more transactions they'll add to the BIP110-chain which presumably will have much lower hash rate. Eventually, the large backlog of transactions will cause higher fees and with it, more incentive for miners to mine that chain.

Depending on the price ratio, this still requires a huge amount of fees to motivate miners to switch. For example, if the price ratio is 10:1, then fees will have to take up 28.125 BTC (28.125 + 3.125~31.25) on the BIP110 chain for similar profits. Which is 28125 sats/vbyte average for the block, which is really, really high, but that's what it'll cost to dump coins at that ratio. Higher ratios require even more fees and lower ratios require less.

tl;dr The more people dump BIP110 coins the more miners are incentivized to mine the BIP110 chain.

I honestly wonder how exchanges will handle things come BIP110. I suspect most of them will do nothing, but there's a non-zero chance of some serious headaches in that case.

Waiting is hard, especially when there are lots of people shouting at how important it is to act now.

That's basically what holding is like and it's not so easy.

Here's a pathological scenario:

Let's call the BIP110 enforcing chain Coin A and the non-enforcing chain, which very well may be longer, Coin B

The two chains split. Coin A trades at 100:1 Coin B. Miner buys 1000 Coin A for 10 Coin B and then starts mining on the BIP110-enforcing chain afterwards. Coin B chain get wiped out when enough miners do this and the BIP110-enforcing chain gets longer than the non-enforcing chain. Not only did the miner gain 1000 BTC on the now single chain, the 10 BTC that was spent is returned because it's no longer a valid tx on the now-single chain!

Game-theory wise, this is extremely profitable, depending on the price ratio. For me, this will be a test of how optimized for game theory miners are.

Don't trust, verify is easy to say, hard to practice.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #510

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-510

They need to have more games like that 3rd place game. Maybe the offsides rule should be only be about the feet or something.

If people can bully you into a position, that position isn't really yours is it?

Gambling is fun and games until someone decides to cheat.

Fun requires some level of trust.

There is no freedom without virtue.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #509

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-509

Fights have a way of tiring people out. It's not all bad.

Argument from authority ceases to work where there is no trust of that authority.

Exposure to Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin.

We're not going into a bull market until this lesson is learned.

Sorry, I don't make the rules.

The deeper the belief, the longer you stay engaged.

Good thing the Bitcoin rabbit hole is deep.

Ultimately, the circular economy will emerge to get around fiat chokepoints.

People secretly like centralization because it gives them someone to blame if things go wrong. Girardian scapegoats are preferred to taking responsibility.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #508

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-508

I tell founders that preparing for success is much harder than preparing for failure, because most people think that success will be easy. It isn't. The more resources you have, the more choices you have to make and the more such choices matter. And those choices have to be made wisely.

An abundant future is at hand. The question is, are you prepared for it?

If you're doing drugs, you're not valuing your mind and body enough.

If you're scamming people, you're not valuing your soul enough.

Loyalty is admirable. But it is possible to overindex on it.

I suspect a lot of people choose sides not because they believe the side to be true, but because they want to win and increase their status.

Love stories like this. Understand that Bitcoin is savings and Family is the investment.

I'd hate to say it but a lot of people in Bitcoin still have the fiat mentality of "if enough people believe something, then it'll become true"

Reality doesn't care about majority preference.

I wrote on why the neutral position on BIP110 is the right one:

https://primal.net/jimmysong/on-overconfidence

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #507

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-507

You can just say things.

Understanding intentions is usually pretty straightforward. Understanding consequences, that requires serious wisdom.

We don't do enough reflection about the consequences of the choices we've made.

Sw conflict in a community is healthy

Still confused by how certain people are about the success or failure of BIP110. For me, it's anything but settled.

The real virtue of decentralized systems is that it's very hard to compel others to do anything.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #506

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-506

Is Nostr getting brigaded?

Opt out of the rigged games.

Do not despair about that which you cannot control.

GBTC has multiplied and mutated into many products in the stock market.

I suspect they'll all suffer similar fates.

We really need open source hardware for AI.

Remember, in a fiat world, the stock market is a Keynesian beauty contest.