GOOD MORNING NOSTR, LEAD BY EXAMPLE 🫡

GOOD MORNING NOSTR, FREEDOM TECH IS HOPE 🫡

Currently diving into this edict from the EIA against bitcoin mining operations in the US. It is extremely Orwellian.

It seems like they are trying to create a hyper-detailed registry of miners in the US down to particular ASICs.

GOOD MORNING NOSTR, OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTORS SAID THEY WERE HAVING TROUBLE FINDING RELIABLE NO STRINGS ATTACHED SUPPORT FOR THEIR WORK.

TEN31 PROVIDES GRANTS TO OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTORS AND PROVIDED AN EARLY DONATION TO OPENSATS.

EVERY PROFITABLE BITCOIN BUSINESS SHOULD HELP SUPPORT THE MAINTAINERS OF THE PROTOCOLS THEY RELY ON.

WHEN WILL MICROSTRATEGY, ARK, AND FIDELITY DO THE SAME?

On Providing Value

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How can we tell if transactions "provide value"?

The assumption from an Austrian economics standpoint is that any voluntary transaction is value-providing because each party believes the trade will satisfy some subjective need or want. So for example, OnlyFans is a value-providing transaction because both parties do what they do willingly and do so in the belief that they will get value.

Yet practically speaking, there's something weird about this. There are lots of voluntary transactions that don't provide value, perhaps significantly subtract value. Gambling, for example or other addictions (drugs, porn, etc) where one party is making a lot of money from the addicted person does not seem value-adding at all. How do we account for this? Is there some hidden fraud in these transactions? Or can we add some other principle by which we can tell if a transaction is value-providing?

The first thing to notice about these transactions is that they have high time preference behavior around them. There's at least one party that's being especially impulsive. A lot of mobile games, for example, rely on addictive, impulsive behavior to make money and they have more of the sucker-swindler relationship. The dynamic shares much more with rent-seeking or fraud than, say, someone paying for an Uber ride.

Yet the libertarian norm is considering anything voluntary to be value-adding. But is trading of fentanyl by an addict and dealer really a value-providing transaction? Common sense says no, yet subjectively, both parties wanted to do the transaction, so what's the problem? Is subjective evaluation of the benefits of trade enough to determine whether it's value-adding?

This is not an idle question. The British got a lot of resources from China by getting them addicted to opium. That would seem at some level nasty and unfair, that people were in some way tricked.

In other words, there has to be some expansion of the definition of fraud to align our definition of providing value to practical experience. Does selling drugs to an addict provide value? Subjective value says if it's done voluntarily it is. Can fraud be defined precisely enough that we can align our intuition that such trades don't provide value? This is the gap through which much evil is justified. We seek here to close that gap.

What's the character of these problematic trades? First, the person buying doesn't have self-control. There's little personal responsibility and the trade is made under some personal distress. Clearly, such buyers don't have low enough time preference and we could leave it at that, but it's unsatisfactory because these people are hurting themselves. Many such actions like that are clearly detrimental and value-subtracting. Suicide is clearly detrimental, for example, and is essentially a transaction with yourself.

And this is where we get a little more intuition about what's value-adding. The obviously bad transactions are done by people committing violence to themselves.

Please don't misunderstand where I'm going with this. I'm not using some concept of violence against ourselves as the justification for government tyranny, by saying that they are protecting you from yourself. I'm only saying that we should acknowledge that some people do commit violence to themselves and that this is not a good thing or a value-adding thing.

Should we be preventing people from committing violence to themselves? That's a much harder question, because doing so may infringe on their human rights. But you can condemn the people selling this stuff as if it's something good. They are committing fraud in how they present their goods and/or services.

Indeed, that's what's been happening. The people with the profit motive are getting angry, because they don't like other people interfering with their sales with moral condemnation which is really bad publicity. But this is the normal consequence of bad behavior. You get condemnation by third parties. That doesn't mean third parties should now suddenly be trusted, but we need more information in the market, not less.

Now, some behavior that is condemned by one group may not be considered bad by another. This is where we get some subjectiveness to morality. And this is where we also get a lot of righteous indignation. But there is another dimension, particularly of violence to yourself that need explaining. Not everything voluntary provides value.

I still don't understand the anarchist position. Do they want all the rights and no government? If so, who would protect their rights? Mafia?

ossification is a terrifying thing if you’re young and view it as the old guard shutting out a path for you to take to make a mark on the world

What's the libertarian / ancap solution to scammers?

Yelling and pointing them out is only partially effective because it's not possible to warn (or even convince) the whole world.

Ostracizing has the same issue - there are always more fools in the sea for scammers to harvest.

Civil lawsuits are similarly flawed because the successful scammer will be better funded than the victims.

Seems like an opportunity for a̶s̶s̶a̶s̶s̶i̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ prediction markets...

Hello all…