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Matt
90d9080b825ff98e9bb60f5735ff7ee5c5db6267ab93a3ec7b1d5d30374bba8a

Dude Orion is fantastic. I didn’t know about it

Replying to Avatar Roland

Today I tried a new product by nostr:npub12u7xgzak939jlap3fnev05eky6d4ntwr4lrs03kgnnfd9njmtvrsr9jjmt which allows you to create your own ecash mint powered by a nostr:npub19hg5pj5qmd3teumh6ld7drfz49d65sw3n3d5jud8sgz27avkq5dqm7yv9p NWC connection. I made a mint connected to my self-custodial Alby Hub wallet in a few seconds and then connected it to boardwalkcash.com with a new nostr+mintconnect (NMC?) connection. My head is exploding right now 🤯

Whoa

Price stability is a scam

If only they didn’t have all the shitcoins

Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

Some people have grown cynical with democracy (and various types of representative government broadly, e.g. including constitutional democratic republics that enshrine certain rights to protect liberty against the masses), viewing this method as promoting short-term leadership with bad incentives.

I have a different take.

Prior to the printing press and then the telegraph and radio, running a democratic society over long distances wasn’t even feasible. The concept of having people democratically participate in their government relies on people being relatively connected information-wise so that they can use their access to information to know what’s happening and to then select between different options, which you couldn’t do across the entirety of a country before people were literate and election materials or other publications could be mass produced. In the pre-press age of handwritten books, making written documents was expensive, and so literacy was a niche skill.

So, that era was ruled by kings and queens, council oligopolies, and so forth. Representative government, to the extent that it existed, only applied to small city states where people could literally gather in a town square, or to “elites” in a capital. There was literally no way to run an election over very broad distances on a regular basis. The printing press helped change that, and then the telegraph, radio, and other tech further reinforced it.

But ironically, as I discuss in Broken Money, those technologies also started to break our money. The printing press and telegraph allowed the transaction layer (the movement of IOUs between individuals and entities) to grow exponentially more efficient both domestically and globally, while our settlement layer (gold) remained basically unchanged. This broadening gap between fast transactions and slow settlements was increasingly bridged with centralization and credit, and the gap eventually became so wide that every nation dropped the settlement layer of gold almost entirely, except as a reserve asset.

So the same technologies that enabled widespread representative government also enabled the proliferation of softer money. Prior to these technologies, broad democracy wasn’t possible. And after these technologies, sound money was too slow to keep up. Oof.

But over a long enough timeframe, our technology became good enough that we finally figured out how to do fast settlements as well. Bitcoin. People can send value to each other quickly over long distances, in ways that no central entity can prevent or reverse, and with a unit that no central entity can debase. The first sound money of the Information Age.

If Bitcoin is successful over the coming decades and becomes a much larger and less volatile money, than it is now, fully entrenched in society, then that would be the first era where technology is at such a state where broad democracy and fast sound money can coexist. Or put more universally, it will be the first era where information spreads quickly without breaking the money, and thus both fast information and good money could coexist.

I, for one, would be curious to see how that develops.

Bullish

Yeah, I’m halfway through. Author fails to understand Bitcoin, that was a little disappointing