I'm very bullish on federal democracies.
India is becoming less federal it feels like, but that's a temporary need for the country right now.
i do not think anyone has clocked in the slightest sense how insane it is that we have something like the internet
it's ridiculous
there is a collection of articles from alex b, j lopp, beautyon, allen f, mircea popescu and midnight which are must reads to understand bitcoin
i'm searching for similar reads about the internet and it's various protocols
There's something beautifully chaotic about the concept of hard forks and soft forks.
One of the main reasons why I'm so interested in all this.
Also one of the main reasons I think 'cryptocurrencies' are like, terrible, horrible, stupendously bad 'investments'.
I cannot speak for people in other countries, but I am vehemently against stablecoins backed by other sovereign currencies being adopted in India. I can only speak to that.
They are the worst kind of shitcoins, ever. Why?
1. The sovereignty of a country is determined by how sovereign the currency the populace uses is.
Letting an entity unaccountable to the citizenry determine the monetary policy and interest rates of the currency India uses is net bad.
They set the cost of credit. Banks cannot be kept accountable by the Central Bank, because they have a less degree of control over benchmark rates, reserve requirements, etc.
Supply and issuance is not controlled by any entity in the country. It can run wild. Inflation can be exported, and made worse.
Super bad over the long run.
2. Stablecoins are created with smart contracts.
Who are the owners of these contracts? They have veto over which fork you use.
What kind of ownership privileges have they granted themselves? They can freeze your address or deny your address access to the contract.
Do we expect people to understand the respective platform's smart contract languages to be able to verify this?
If yes, can they easily run their own nodes individually or collectively and verify the reliability of the contracts trustlessly, and also broadcast tx's directly from their nodes?
In the case of Ethereum, yes.
Other networks, no.
In the case of Ethereum's rollups, yes to validation, no to tx broadcasting, which brings me to the next problem.
3. How will stablecoins scale?
There will be people who use them on different networks. And in order to use them, they need to have the coin of those networks in their wallets, each with a variable or unpredictable monetary policy, which can lose value, adding an additional risk on top of accounting headaches.
If a merchant accepts stablecoins on Ethereum and I have it on Tron, I can't pay him.
To do so, we'll have to use a trusted bridge, and the merchant needs to obtain tron's trx to move the stablecoins he's received from me.
See what's going on with Multichain.
Even if it's done on one network's rollups, there are chances we use different rollups.
Rollups are not interoperable. Can't send value from one rollup to another. Again, need to use trusted bridges.
Moreover, there's no clear pathway towards decentralising how blocks are produced on Ethereum's rollups so far.
So using stablecoins backed by other sovereign currencies in India:
To transfer value internationally and immediately convert it to Rupees now, yes. They are useful.
But to actually use it as money, absolutely not. Big no from me. They solve problems now and create worse problems in the future for India.
The fact that the Indian Rupee's exchange rate against the dollar goes up or down is not something I care about at all. Because I measure the value of ₹1 based on personal yardsticks that I have in my mind sub-consciously.
The price of Bitcoin, as determined by speculators and market makers, can't inform me about its market value reliably.
If there are real-time market prices for goods and services priced in Bitcoin, then I can accurately measure if Bitcoin is a good store of value.
The attention economy is broken.
It misaligns incentives by optimising for people's attention to be a metric for measuring the performance of a particular piece of content.
Likes, retweets and views are inflatable shitcoins.
Zaps are not.
SPLICE SPLICE BABY
Bitcoin is not an investment. Market cap is a meaningless metric.
If it is not widely accepted in exchange for goods and services, it is useless.
Being able to curate what you watch, read and listen to online is possibly one of the most important skillsets today.
Social media and the internet in general are net good.
If you don't learn to use them in a way that will help you, you're going to keep arguing that they are net bad.
Seems like Covenants, Simplicity, drivechains and Anyprevout are the four upgrades that are being discussed most rn
1000000%
Zaps = Gamechanger in how the value of a piece of content is determined by the public
Sorting posts by most zapped on Primal every once in a while to test this
No likes or reposts here
Only zaps ⚡
My consumption of information is all over the place right now haha
Would start by listening to Jordan Peterson's recital of the story of Kane and Abel in a podcast episode, a pod about Stratum V2 after that, and then read about the story of Bretton Woods Agreement followed by how BIP39 seed words are mapped, then miniscript, Vladmir Putin's history, end it with a deep dive into PTLC's.
Can sound money improve the quality of content shared on a social media platform?
Nostr + LN Zaps is an evolving experiment that can answer this question.