Best guess on how they built the pyramids? #asknostr

What surprises me about the tech and developer discussion around embedding data onchain (and OP_RETURN is just a corner of that), is how little of the discussion refers to the ethics.

There's an obvious point, and an obvious (in my opinion, incorrect) counterpoint.

The obvious point is that permissionlessness is central to Bitcoin's nature, and that implies *ethically* you cannot tell people what kinds of transactions are OK, and what are not. There are very substantial *technical* arguments as to why it can't really be prevented, but they are secondary to the ethical one: you don't have the *right* to tell people what transactions they can do.

The obvious counterpoint is that posting anything to the blockchain has a cost for *all* users. That's why we spent 4 years arguing about the limit on the size of blocks. I have no ethical right to tell someone not to publish or mine a block of size 10GB, but it doesn't take long to realize that the costs this imposes on other participants, is too large. In case you think, this argument was straightforward, the big blockers were wrong, don't forget that the resolution, for better or worse, was a compromise: average block size today is often 2x the size before. It was a really difficult argument.

So the counterpoint wins and we have to discuss whether embedding data should be allowed? I say, no, this a fundamentally different discussion. It is not a discussion of *how much computational resource is used in total*, but rather a discussion of *what individual users are using the computational resource FOR*, and that crosses the line into being ethically unacceptable, unequivocally.

I say that the technical awkwardness, or even impossibility, of restricting this behavior in the Bitcoin system is just a byproduct of trying to make Bitcoin do the opposite of what Bitcoin was designed for - censorship resistance.

People started losing the ability to use language when the internet gave them communication with pictures.

I thought that was bad; but I suspect that as AI continues to develop, people are going to lose the ability to think at all.

While I have nothing against short fiction, the reason I’m not drawn to it is that I want to get to know the characters. That takes time.

My sweet spot tends to be a long stand-alone novel or a duology/trilogy.

When you go longer than that, into some epic series, I’m skeptical. By default I view it as someone writing for a career rather than to tell their optimal story, with *very* limited exceptions.

Seems like most people do in fact like central planning, as long as their guy is doing the planning

This is what the peak male form looks like

Retweet is such an iconic word, repost and boost just don't hit the same

I see ancient wisdom (Stoicism, Taoism, etc) as the base layer of a particular protocol. We won't name the protocol, but it's something like "happiness and a good life".

I see modern religions (past couple thousand years) as alts/products/technologies. centralized alternative "improvements" that are incompatible with the original base layer. they don't add new properly-thin protocol layers to the base, they offer monolithic alternative stacks.

The reason I prefer Bitcoin and Lightning to Ethereum is the same reason I prefer stoicism and mindfulness to Christianity.

Keynesian economics makes absolutely no sense, how could so many people fall for it

#photography #newzealand #teararoa

camping is great, but a fire in a hut now and then is great too, especially when you can escape the sandflies!

Its possible to advocate for the withering of state power without also actively supporting the building of other systems of (private) control.

The problem with Starlink, for example, isn't that its privately-held or connected to Musk, it's that it isn't an open protocol. TCI/IP itself doesn't have this problem.

I generally agree that "cheering for privatization" is not the correct impulse for a libertarian, but "cheering for open protocols" is. And that move is tangential to whether the state or a private entity is the thing you're cheering.

Let’s make a deal.

You say something true below and I zap you 615 sats.