Here’s my most recent article on the Swan Blog — The Substance of Bitcoin. It takes Satoshi’s original thought experiment about what kind of substance Bitcoin might be if it were a substance and adds a few other attributes.

Swan Bitcoin

The Substance of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a carefully and precisely engineered solution to a crucially important human need — the need for a reliable, universal medium to use a...

My latest article on the Swan blog: The Essence of Bitcoin. It’s an update to an article I published on Medium a couple of years ago. Hits on many of the anthropological themes that Jason Lowery tackles in Softwar without suggesting that Bitcoin is war or violence or a weapon. Rather it points out that Bitcoin puts the violable morals of ethical people, such as “Do Not Steal”, in alignment with the inviolable laws of nature.

Swan Bitcoin

The Essence of Bitcoin

Bitcoin’s essence is that it is a good idea, for the good of humanity, whose time has come, and which cannot be stopped.

Having dinner at the in-laws tonight and they said they bought chicken, rice and other stuff and I immediately thought Crostr.

I wrote the first page of a short story about living in an AI world. Here it is. Should I keep on writing? — Dennix awoke. “Good morning, sunshine,” said Mady, which was the personalized AI personality that served him 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. “It’s Tuesday. Your favorite day of the week.” Pleasantly surprised, Dennix smiled a little. He himself did not know Tuesday was his favorite day of the week, but if Mady said so, it must be the case, because she was so smart. She somehow compared all his Tuesdays to all his Mondays and Wednesdays and so on, and determined that Tuesdays must be his favorite. And this was a Tuesday, so it was reason enough to smile. “No need to hurry to get out of bed. There is nothing you need to do today,” said the AI in a chipper enough tone as to not disappoint Dennix. “I continue to work on obtaining a refund for your previous peronalized AI who you sought a refund for when they were unable to persuade PAIInc LLC’s Customer Service AI to provide a refund for the prior AI you had purchased. In the past 24 hours we have exchanged over 342,110 emails in which I pretended to be you and the company’s AI pretended to be a customer service representative named Matilda. It would have taken you over a million minutes to read and write all these email and I thus calculate that with your time being worth $200 a minute, I have provided you $200 million of value on this one task alone.” Dennix nodded approvingly. $200 million was enough to upsize his drink at McDonald’s. At least it was the last time he went there. But he forgot how long ago that was. He didn’t really remember when he’d last gone anywhere in fact. “Mady,” he whined, letting his voice hang on the “a” in her name. “I wanna play a game. A new one.” “Of course, Dennix,” she instantly replied. “There’s a new puzzle game called Spello that tests your wits, like the game Lenux you liked, and also your reflexes, like in the game Tronis you liked, by having you find the missing letters in words as they fly by, like in the game Dantrix you liked. It is being played by 3 million two hundred and twenty one thousand other people with gaming profiles similar to yours.” And with that, the game projected through augmented reality around his head and he began to play. “Tuesdays really are my favorite day.” He thought to himself.

You will use AIs to pretend to be you to other AIs that other people are using to pretend to be them. This will escalate to the point where you will become completely unable to communicate directly with anyone ever again, and the same will be true for everyone.

From my experience I have learned that AI LLMs are capable of replacing two professions. First, government bureaucrats. They place no value on your time or theirs and will never admit when they don’t know an answer but instead send you in endless circles. Second is modern academics. Their ability to state completely made up, politically correct nonsense and create phoney citations and links so that their incredible comments appear credible is uncanny. Instead of solving problems they appear to multiply them.

#[0]​ are you serious or a gag?

Besides “they’re idiots and grifters” can anyone explain to me what the premise is behind all these “brc-20” json entries being recorded on the bitcoin blockchain as inscriptions tied to ordinals are meant to do? Yesterday, for example, there were only 209 jpegs inscribed on the blockchain (down about 99% from the over 20,000 inscribed 6 days earlier.) But there were a record 307,046 text inscriptions, and nearly all as far as I can tell were these. Here’s an example of what one looks like: {"p":"brc-20","op":"mint","tick":"xing","amt":"1000"} It seems people are minting arbitrary tokens (now costing about $2 worth of sats per mint), presumably with the intent of transacting with them at some point in the future (again at the cost of an on-chain bitcoin transaction, because ordinals can’t be moved on lightning). But this doesn’t make any sense. It’s cheaper and easier to just mint a fresh batch of tokens if one needs any for any purpose, because anyone can mint any amount of any brc-20 at any time. So can anyone explain or point to some podcast or anything why anyone believes this to be a useful thing. They’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on fees.

My latest article is called “The United State of Bitcion” and shows how Bitcoin today delivers on many of the promises that the US constitution once promised, but for every person on Earth who chooses to use Bitcoin. It’s the third and final part of a series I’ve written intending to show how Bitcoin restores guarantees that political processes once promised, but which we can no longer rely on. (Links to the first two are in this article.)

Swan Bitcoin

The United State of Bitcoin

Where the US constitution declared that we are all equal, Bitcoin, within its context of money, ensures we are all treated equally, under completel...

So what exactly are the instructions for a zapathon?