The Standford Alpaca 7B large language model they released last week seems like a big deal. It points to the near-term possibility of running an LLM of similar power to ChatGPT offline -- on your phone or laptop, without the need for a cloud.

Suggests there's going to be ways to use these models and get utility ... and do it in a decentralized way, that doesn't involve surveillance capitalism!

The journey of shifting perspectives and editing original assumptions is a whole story in and of itself. I look forward to reading your work.

Are you happy with Scrivener?

Looking forward to seeing your thoughts when the writing comes together.

Enjoyed your interview with #[2], especially discussion of logical fallacies of black or white thinking, "What is The State?", "What is Freedom?", and heard another in the subtext of latter minutes surrounding Layer 3...."What is Trust?".

Curious if you'll incorporate some of those ideas into your manuscript. Indeed one could argue that trust is necessary to "Live the good life".

You say the foundation of your argument shifted. Tech moves fast. Maybe your original case still makes sense under the original framework you considered? This might even lead you to question "What is Truth?"

I feel like much less of an idiot most of the time if I operate on the assumption I’m frequently wrong. I’m also willing to change my opinion when presented with new information. Also the older I get the more I know, I don’t know. Though damn do I sometimes miss the certainty I felt in my late teens/ early twenties. Even though looking back I was objectively such an idiot.

The cost in the case of an economy is by removing the ability to fail, incentives become broken, sending a signal to ensure that you get big enough to warrant a socialization of losses at the taxpayers expense….leading to a far bigger collapse later.

“False” stability leads to greater instability.

Good quote.

“This paired with the high likelihood that ION DIDs will almost always be resolved by ION nodes instead of clients/light wallets manually doing what an ION node does for you sort of nullifies / diminishes the censorship resistance provided by the anchor to Bitcoin.”

Thanks Moe.

We cannot rely on a prevalence of honest ION nodes as a form of security because it creates the risk of an ION Sybil attack. The proof a user receives must prove that the URL is not registered to anyone else, like it does in ENS.

Unlike ENS, an ION node could omit previous registrations of a custom URL and deliver valid proofs of a new on-chain registration. This means an attacker could perform URL spoofing on users with a mere ION node Sybil attack and a few bitcoin transactions, unlike the extremely costly 51% attack required for URL spoofing in ENS.

In ENS, full-nodes can’t perform this trick without launching a 51% attack because users receive a Patricia-Merkle proof from full-nodes that verifies the current state of the domain registry. ION trade-offs aren’t worth the risks.

Not really what I was saying; economic growth through technological progress is awesome, but as you mention the expectation of every public company is that it must always grow, beat last quarter’s numbers, etc without any regard to the first rule of economics - that scarcity is real and informs everything else that happens in the world as a result.

No amount of profit is ‘enough’, no amount of production is what’s best for the world, no market share or TAM is ‘sufficient’ - there always has to be more, it just is what it is. Even tho it’s known at some point that at some point this has to end when resources run out.

It’s just interesting as a foundational principle built on top of the opposite axiom in this example.

For the fiat example, it’s more glaring imo because fiat is perhaps one of the only things that actually disproves the other principle in the opposite manner.

Fiat definitionally is not scarce, rather it is infinitely summonable into the world on a whim, which is why the system collapses the second that it stops expanding.

I largely agree with what you're saying -- I think. And also relates to why as a former anarcho-capitalist, I'm a born against liberal democracy guy. Because I think the best solution is how we mediate the existence of structure through the interface with authority in an organized society. It's really about the management of incentives towards what one might describe is trying to maximize the subjective experience of the "good life" amongst as many people as possible.

Which sounds utilitarian -- and is, to a certain extent. But alas, I'm a moral constructionist, and I have epistemological objections to taking even that construct too far beyond the surface-level point.

I largely agree with what you're saying -- I think. And also relates to why as a former anarcho-capitalist, I'm a born against liberal democracy guy. Because I think the best solution is how we mediate the existence of structure through the interface with authority in an organized society. It's really about the management of incentives towards what one might describe is trying to maximize the subjective experience of the "good life" amongst as many people as possible.

Which sounds utilitarian -- and is, to a certain extent. But alas, I'm a moral constructionist, and I have epistemological objections to taking even that construct too far beyond the surface-level point.

I don’t think such an all satisfying circumstance exists even in theory.

Take the poor libertarian, a true libertarian must be content to live under a none libertarian system because their countrymen don’t want libertarianism and it’s anti libertarian to make non libertarians live in a libertarian system.

Libertarianism is trapped in a paradox and can’t win, which is why it never has.

Similarly anarchocapitalism lacks the organising structures necessary to protect its anarchocapitalism state from any emergent government. Anarchocapitalism is extremely vulnerable to any kind of emergent government, it is to submit all the necessary tools to defeat the one thing you seek to defeat. It’s another paradox and again is why anarchy never lasts long. Someone always fills the vacuum even if by accident.

These are just two examples, but communism too has its own paradoxes that make it unattainable. Communism with no democracy and no free market has no means whatsoever of determining the desires or the will of the people it purposes to represent so perfectly. A paradox that makes functional communism unattainable.

Monarchy actually does what it says, as do dictatorships, whereas democracies usually morph into stable oligopolies which sounds bad but is probably the cleanest dirty shirt.

For me the structure of government and the policies and strategies of a government are two completely different things. These are just various structures and in theory they could all implement the same policies.

Anarchism is zero government, no rule of law.

Plenty of Westerners take their libertarianism to this extreme, but I saw the Iraq war and I never, ever want to experience anything like civil collapse. Ever.

As the Iraqi’s used to say to news crews… When you lose security you have lost everything, all of your freedoms are worth nil. They actually wanted to bring back Saddam and his murderous police squads because anarchy was worse.

In reality anarchism means fighting off gangs of armed rapists and child traffickers every time the sun goes down. I’m too old for that, and I’m not that old.

So long as there are parents, there will be government. Social orders weren’t created by megalomaniacs seeking to enslave people, they were set up by parents wanting to protect their kids. Villages, elders, kings, federations, governments. It’s just the necessary math to protect kids from bad people. Once you have that apparatus in place it can get Co-opted by politics, but if any government ever waivers in keeping kids safe parents storm the palace.

Law and order is a huge improvement over uncontrolled malevolence.

Ideologically this is much messier and fuzzy than the simplicity of anarchocapitalism, but it’s probably right that we have some kind of incompetent muddling class v’s 2003 Iraq.

Bitcoin is just better money. It can’t be compromised, nobody can pressure their own bailout. It’s beyond corruption. It forces proper behaviour, because there is no second chance, no extra life. That means no screwing over working families every 15 years to keep some sleazy banking class afloat. Eventually parents will want Bitcoin and that will be that.

I must confess, I knew that would be the nature of your answer before I even asked it. So I must apologize for the implosion. We certainly suffer from serious metaphysical and ethical disagreements at a very foundational level that give rise to the emergent daylight between us on this issue.

Anarchism describes my view set, and I’m around that age cohort.

My Bitcoin maximalism isn’t about me though, it’s not about my finances - I’m doing quite well in fiat and whilst yes property is ridiculous now and an impossibility for many of my friends, it’s not for me.

My maximalism comes from a desire to separate money and state. I see that as the only means to end the excesses of big government (authoritarianism), severely restrict war, and force economic behaviour to return to productive ends rather than rampant speculation and leeching. For me, this is the epoch defining goal of this time (on par with separating church and state) where multiple cycles are colliding and new order is being born.

I also don’t expect I’m going to find myself in some anarchist state. Quite the contrary, I expect we’re going to see more authoritarianism generally so I’m seeking to geoarbitrage not just my money, but the legal systems and policing that I’m going to be subjected to under no illusion that I’m going to change these things. Ironically the supposed “free” western liberal democracies are likely to be the worst locations, I see more freedom in communist Vietnam or Bukele’s totalitarian El Salvador than I do in my home country of Australia where they’ve become so nanny statist and so fascistic that they’re using the countries wealth specifically to restrict personal liberties now.

Nor do I see this as inevitable in Mike’s frame. What is inevitable is this current unipolar system will die and a multipolar order will replace it, todays fiat currencies will consolidate and I see Bitcoin emerging as a supranational economic pole in this new order.

Your country mix is maybe 25% of how this is likely to go, game theory dictates those who *need* bitcoin will adopt it differently than those who opportunistically adopt it for diversification / economic growth. Throw in nostr as the bitcoin economy and it could go in a ton of different directions but if you work off the idea of polarities and also understand the current order of nation states is highly unlikely to be the status quo in 20 years much less 50 or 100, this view point will make more sense than Mike’s projected “Anarchists Anonymous” nonsense.

Have you tried to use ChatGPT to help with the writer’s block?

The main thing i’d be curious to know is - would you consider yourself a practitioner of “the good life” or is it something you aspire to ?