#[2]

okay so basically money is ecash, all N banks are guardians in a 1 of N multisig fedimint, and the fedimint has no actual reserves except some of its own tokens 🤣

I find it useful to think of "credit creation" as banks giving businesses and individuals authority to devalue everyone else's money a little bit. The actual transfer of value is from the entire population to loan recipient, the bank are just a routing node.

I just realised something fascinating in arguing with normies on the bird app. “credit creation” is talked about like it’s totally normal but it literally makes no sense. you can’t “create credit”. you either have credit or you do not. you can extend your own credit to others, but you cannot “create” it. you have to build it yourself and then transfer it. there is quite literally an element of proof of work involved. people only trust you because you have demonstrated your trustworthiness. it’s a fiat fantasy that you can just whip up (i.e. “print”) credit.

what “create credit” has to be taken to mean is just seigniorage. it’s fascinating to me that this is true by mapping to how fractional reserve and central banking actually works in the real world, but also in the linguistic scheme of the euphemism. by failing to extend *your own* credit, you are necessarily extending that of absolutely everybody else - without their consent, of course. it is blatantly fraud when framed this way (it’s blatantly fraud anyway, but I like how this framing forces the issue).

I realise this is just semantics but it’s fun when you catch them in these little traps that reveal they are just repeating things they’ve never actually thought about. next time somebody says “credit creation,” make sure you snap at them and explain what credit really is 😉

The Case for Apprenticeships

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The classroom setting is very unnatural. You sit there for an hour or two and just listen to someone talk while you dutifully take notes, or more likely, doom scroll your social media feed and maybe check your email. Learning by just sitting there and absorbing is against everything that we are as human beings. We are built for action. Moving our bodies around and imitating what others are doing is a much more natural way to learn.

The traditional way in which people learned was through apprenticeships. You went to train with another person that was an expert in their craft and you did what they did and learned through imitation. Instead of watching them for hours and then maybe practicing some of it at home right before an exam, you watched and did what they did with a much faster iterative loop. You got feedback and corrected and tried again.

The only thing that's like that in school today is with sports, where the movement of bodies and trial and error are unavoidable. They're also highly competitive with an objective metric of wins and losses, so they trend toward doing what works in practice rather than what should work in theory.

Theory versus Practice

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And indeed, that's what we're talking about, the difference between theory and practice. Lectures and classrooms are all theory. There's way too little practice.

This is why theory has such pitiful production. Social sciences are pretty much all theory. They're usually some twisted rationalization of some political goal. Since it's not based on truth and has very little in terms of objective competition, it tends to stray far into political power games.

We've been seeing this trend in academia where even hard sciences get deep into theory with very little practice. For example, string theory has been around for over 20 years and hasn't produced any results. Yet it continues to be popular, largely because of the investments PhD's made decades ago that are being bailed out by universities. That is to say, it's a giant circle jerk subsidized by political power games.

The real work has always been done on the ground, by people who are building. And to learn what they do isn't easily taught in classrooms, it's taught in factories and garages and labs.

Unscaling Education

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So why isn't apprenticeship more popular? The main reason is that it doesn't scale very well. Apprenticeship was mostly practiced within families where a parent would teach a child their trade. They had a natural incentive to make sure the child learned what they needed to as they shared a last name and would carry on a legacy.

To do that in a modern setting would be prohibitively expensive. There are way more people that want to get into certain trades than are spots available, so how do you choose them? We can see how restrictive this requirement is when looking at medical doctors. Part of why there are so few spots for doctors is the requirement of doing a residency, which is a form of apprenticeship. Medical schools typically have 5% or below acceptance rates, showing that there are way more people that want to be doctors than are doctors. In other words, apprenticeship is very hard to scale.

But nonetheless, I think it needs to be brought back, because we're losing a lot by not doing so. The best in a given field rarely pass on all of their tricks of the trade and sadly, they're re-learned through painful experience by others in the same trade. Diffusing that knowledge and experience is a way to not lose the progress we've made.

How did Hal install the original

Bitcoin core on his computer?

How did you install it on your computer?

Writing complex software and then creating a seamless install method are both laborious. I think there’s over-trivialization of creating an installer/bundle/whatever in this thread.

(Didn’t get to finish comment earlier)

I also think this is a huge problem that developers overlook when it comes to users. I do get that there are probably things like you say that GitHub does well that are not obvious to non-devs, but essentially 99% of open source software says “Download it at GitHub (LINK)!”

I would like to have widespread adoption of open source software but as long as the UI complaints are answered with “GitHub isn’t for installing software,” that’s never going to happen.

I originally meant the OP to be funny, but it does actually matter. And unfortunately developers generally have a very terrible sense of the user perspective and I don’t think many realize how much that determines the success or failure of a piece of software - and often the cleanliness and security of its function is a distant second. I’ve seen really cool tools sit unused and I literally think it’s because there was no UI or visual design to get a user to understand their relationship to it.

In short: I think user design is a massive, unaddressed problem in open source software, & we should start thinking about it very hard, or we are going to lose to the same centralized, closed source crap for no other reason than we didn’t know how to communicate with normal humans 😆