Michael Matulef
MichaelMatulef@nostrplebs.com
npub1t42g...87qz
Know Thyself | Everything Voluntary✌️ | Follow the Tao
Responding to Bryan Caplan's Continued Critique of the Austrians
Fountain
The Human Action Podcast • Responding to Bryan Caplan's Continued Critique of the Austrians • Listen on Fountain
In 1997, Bryan Caplan wrote an essay explaining why he was no longer a self-described Austrian. Recently, a reader asked him to comment on that ess...
@Guy Swann' Roundtable - November 2024 - w/ @Jeff Swann, @npub1pldg...5nc9, & @npub1wnlu...n3wr
Fountain
Bitcoin Audible • Roundtable_004 - Nov 2024 - Trump, Hash Collisions, Court Rulings, Covenants, All Time Highs, and What We Don't Know • Listen on Fountain
Guy's Roundtable gets together for another awesome breakdown. Covering all the happenings this month: Trump wins the election, new bitcoin innovati...
At a time when belief in collectivism and paternalistic government is threatening to diminish even more of our shrinking freedom, we need to recall that this has all been tried before. And how it is the free individual, secure in his right to life, liberty, and honestly acquired property that is the basis of any and all the prosperity that we have in America and around the world.
The Pilgrim Fathers came to colonial America to escape religious persecution in Great Britain, but also to establish a new type of society in the wilderness. They were determined to follow Plato’s model in “The Republic,” and create a communist utopia.
It lead to economic disaster, which was only overcome through the Plymouth Colony elders admitting their error, and instead “privatizing” the colony’s property. By doing so they set loose individual initiative and market-based incentives. The result: a bounty in the wilderness rather than starvation.
In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims had progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism. At a time of economic uncertainty, it is worthwhile recalling this beginning of the American experiment and experience with freedom.
This is the lesson of the First Thanksgiving. This year, when we, Americans sit around our dining table with family and friends, we should also remember that what we are really celebrating is the birth of free men and free enterprise in that New World of America.
The true meaning of Thanksgiving, in other words, is the triumph of Capitalism over the failure of Collectivism in all its forms.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/first-thanksgiving-and-birth-free-enterprise-america
Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.
- Ayn Rand
Debunking Climate Myths with Tom Nelson
@Stephan Livera
Stephan Livera Podcast • Debunking Climate Myths with Tom Nelson | SLP618 • Listen on Fountain
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
-Henry Ford
"We should only make changes to Bitcoin that are absolutely necessary."
This is pushing the goalpost to an absurdly insurmountable threshold. Almost nothing is "necessary."
Take SegWit / time locks / taproot for example. It's hard to argue that they have significantly increased adoption in recent years - we'd likely be at a similar place without them. Lightning felt necessary at the time due to the scaling debate, but we haven't achieved mass adoption due to it.
However, it's very good that we have those functions available to build on top of! For example, now we have developers working on using Lightning to "glue" together different layers to effectively make them interoperable. Nobody was envisioning doing that 7 years ago.
The narrative that we shouldn't make "unnecessary" changes without "clear market demand" seems to be one made by folks who aren't willing to admit that there is always fog ahead when it comes to exploring the design space of what can be built.
We should not fear venturing forth into the unknown; that attitude would have prevented us from ever journeying this far.
- @Jameson Lopp
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Jameson Lopp (@lopp) on X
"We should only make changes to Bitcoin that are absolutely necessary."
This is pushing the goalpost to an absurdly insurmountable threshold. Almo...
BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS
The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective
By @jamesob
Almost universally, Core and "graybeard" devs are not focusing on _the_ fundamental problem in bitcoin: preserving trustless UTXO ownership.
Instead they are distracted with valuable but secondary issues like mempool policy, Core code architecture, and minor IBD performance. These things are important in their own right, but they fundamentally don't matter if in times of trouble most users can't take possession of their own coins.
Core devs are exceptionally talented people. The brightest engineers. But the priorities of the project are out of whack.
The aggregate focus does not reflect the thing that makes bitcoin a unique asset: trustless custody.
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Given the current limits of bitcoin, even upper-middle class Americans will not be able to self-custody, let alone the rest of the world.
If bitcoin doesn't figure out how to ensure that most users have a trustless way of owning and sometimes moving coins, it will become basically indistinguishable from a gold ETF. A row in some OFAC-compliant database. Another financial widget that is subject to the regulatory dictates of government.
In fact, if bitcoin does not scale UTXO ownership, gold will have the advantage that at least small amounts of it *can* be self-custodied and traded peer-to-peer. The same won't be able to be said for bitcoin. In a world where on-chain fees are in the thousands of dollars and there is not a workable, trustless layer two, most coins will be stuck with custodians.
Forget payments. I'm talking about savings. I'm talking about less than checking-account volume. 1-2 transactions a month.
If you think that most people should be able to DCA and withdrawal to self-custody once a month, maybe spend once every few years for big purchases, I've got news for you:
Given bitcoin's current limitations, only 18 million users can do that. A little over 5% of Americans.
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Right now, the chain capacity is able to meet demand for self-custody because we are in a time of relative peace.
Most don't feel at risk keeping their bitcoin with a custodian. That can change very rapidly.
As bitcoin grows in value and challenges fiat currency, governments will increasingly want to control it. They won't ban it, which is now obvious, but almost certainly they will impose OFAC-like restrictions and possible wealth taxes.
When the regulatory hammer comes down, tens of millions will look to withdrawal their coins into self-custody. But they may not be able to.
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Unfortunately this risk does not seem to be top of mind in the current Core culture.
One instance of a tone-deaf Core response to this kind of problem relates to CTV. As @JeremyRubin has been pointing out for years, CTV would be the most efficient way to guarantee that people can withdrawal coins from institutions in times of chain-panic and congestion, allowing exit to happen during crises without fully "unrolling" transactions. I wrote about this at length in 2023, and why it seems there is no more efficient way to do this (delvingbitcoin.org/t/thoughts-on-…).
And yet technical figureheads like @TheBlueMatt and @murchandamus downplay the value of CTV, claiming that it has no compelling uses.
CTV is one of the primitive building blocks that we need to figure out UTXO scaling solutions. (Not to mention its use in applications like vaults.)
Some Core devs might argue "well okay, maybe we need that functionality - but CTV isn't the right way to do it. We need to think harder!"
The problem is that time is running out. As nation-states begin to enter the technical ecosystem, soft forks that promote scaling and self-custody will be more difficult to deploy. Powerful actors will not want bitcoin to change - they're perfectly happy letting regulated custodians act as the L2.
As the market cap grows, the stakes of change go up, and it will be much harder to get economically relevant actors to run new consensus.
Because Core devs aren't paying close attention to the covenants conversation, they may not realize that CTV is upgradeable, simple, and well-tested. It's good enough.
This gap in understanding partially reveals that those devs prefer to work on more smaller self-contained puzzle problems that are more tractable. Maybe this is understandable given the fraught Core development process and historical drama of soft forks, but neither of those are an excuse for abandoning the core challenge of realizing bitcoin.
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Segwit and Taproot were massive changes, and I can almost understand why so much drama was spent on them. They both basically reinvented how locking scripts are stored and executed in bitcoin.
But to make significant headway on finding a scaling solution for self-custody, it may only take a few opcodes - much more narrowly scoped bits of functionality. Changes that are much easier to test and reason about, and don't reinvent the engine of bitcoin.
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As I continue campaigning for a renewed focus on scaling coin ownership, some may compare me to the "big blockers" of the 2017 scaling wars.
The big-blockers camp wanted to raise the blocksize for the sake of housing the world's P2P payments. They resisted the use of Lightning and other second layer solutions.
The reality is that they have been partially vindicated. Lightning has not solved our problems, and given the on-chain footprint that existing channel constructions require, it categorically cannot. Lightning certainly helps reduce on-chain payment volume once someone has opened a channel - but to do that for most people will require a layer 1 innovation.
I don't share the big blockers' objectives.
I don't think that trying to fit the world's P2P payments on the base chain is a reasonable target.
But the ability to resist near complete capture of UTXO custody by third-party financial institutions - *that* is intertwined with the core purpose of bitcoin.
In Satoshi's whitepaper, the first sentence claims
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
If most users become unable to even take possession of their own coins a few times a year, we have failed on the objective.
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I am not writing this out of any sense of antagonism. Yes, I am frustrated that after numerous attempts, Core devs are not engaging more productively with the few people trying to translate scaling strategies to the base layer.
But I'm hoping that by calling attention to this issue, we can get some of these great minds to refocus on bitcoin's critical mission, and to realize that ossification will come sooner than we thought.
The existing (and well-funded) power structures *want* stasis.
The recent show of rapid institutional affinity should make you suspicious that bitcoin in its current form isn't a threat to the fiat order.
The lack of "ivory tower" attendance in the recent OP_NEXT and the broader covenants discourse demonstrates that, like many of America's elite institutions, there has been mission drift in bitcoin's technical elite. I hope this changes.
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The risk of merging many of the opcodes proposed during the last few years is limited.
OP_CAT, OP_CTV, lnhance, probably OP_CCV, some others; they're all fine. If sufficiently tested, great additions to bitcoin.
We can pretty easily mitigate what risk there is with comprehensive testing and analysis, provided the focus is there.
The upside is almost infinite: a reasonable attempt to continue the preservation of bitcoin's unique function - trustless self-custody that is practically available to most.
X (formerly Twitter)
jamesob (@jamesob) on X
BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS
The legacy technical leadership in bitcoin is becoming increasingly less effective.
--
Almost universally, Core and...
A medium of exchange is any good acquired to facilitate future exchanges, regardless of when those exchanges occur. The time delay between Bitcoin exchanges doesn't change its essential nature - it simply reflects how people subjectively value and choose to use it.
Bitcoin Audible Chat_118 - Reviving Resiliency, Autonomy, and Masculinity with the @Bitcoin Veterans
@Guy Swann
@average_bitcoiner 🤙
Bitcoin Audible • Chat_118 - Reviving Resiliency, Autonomy, and Masculinity with the Bitcoin Vets • Listen on Fountain
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
- J. Krishnamurti
Ignore the New Dietary Guidelines (Of Course)
Fountain
The Tom Woods Show • Ep. 2569 Ignore the New Dietary Guidelines (Of Course) • Listen on Fountain
Nina Teicholz joins us to discuss the new dietary guidelines coming out of the USDA, the evidence against seed oils, and how there could be such sy...