The whole concept of “legitimate” is normative, by definition.

Yes, the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. The point of this is to create dispute resolutions that do not require everyone resort to physical violence.

Liberal democracies have decreased their sizes, however. In fact, the size of government in the US, UK and Canada, relative to the private sector has still not overtaken the previous maximums we saw in the New Deal and post-war period, after the reforms of the neoliberal era in the 1980s and 1990s. There has been some mean reversion, but people greatly overstate this point.

It’s still all normative. Nothing you said changes my point in the slightest.

This is one area where I just feel like I’m in such a minority within the bitcoin world. Like, at the end of the day, debt is a time preference arbitrage. The arguments that people make against it, for example, that fractional reserve banking is fraudulent, is an NORMATIVE STATEMENT.

Some will go further and try to connect back to natural rights theories, such as that of Rothbard and Hoppe. These arguments are trying to argue there’s a universal ethical truth about the immorality of such arrangements, and seem to believe that everyone will one day come to realize this.

I think natural rights theories like this are completely out-to-lunch. If these natural laws were operative at all, then why doesn’t it seem to inform human behavior, in aggregate *at all*?

We’ve been arbitraging time preference for thousands of years. It’s been banned in religion, such as in Abrahamic religions and their orthodox prohibitions on usury. But this just proves my point: these things are normative statements. People want to do it, and authority structures, either in the form of religion or in the form of states are required to prohibit the behavior, that incentives tend to tilt heavily towards doing.

People just say these things out loud, and people cheer and nod along, as if these things are self-evident truths that can tell us about the shape of the world to come.

The system is changing. It’s always been changing. It will change again. And then it will change again. Our world looks nothing like it did 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. The idea we’re ossified into a rigid, broken system, rather one that is simply evolving and renegotiating relationships and connections between subsystems within the greater whole is a form of misleading vividness that too many people suffer from. It causes them to predict scenarios that underestimate recursion effects, threshold effects and self-limiting feedback loops within the broader systems.

No, you can say whatever you want. But there’s plenty of things I think have a current magnitude of importance in the world than anything we’re talking about here, such as say, the risk of nuclear war. But I’m not calling out people for talking about other things that are not that. This is not a very good way to go about pursuing productive dialogue and fueling truth discovery.

You’re saying “if people knew what I knew” they will come to agree with me. But there’s plenty of people who understand things like the natural of fractional reserve banking, credit multipliers, the Cantillon effect in the financial system and the more broader wealth effects, and they don’t come to the same conclusion. They choose other policy approaches, such as wealth taxes, things like the Volcker Rule, taxes on stock trades.

The idea that everyone would be a capitalism maximalist “if they only knew the truth” is completely and utter nonsense, and it’s a huge distraction to the narrative of bitcoin, quite frankly.

My meta point here, is those who think that the vast majority of people are going to support the dissolution of the modern welfare state, and embrace radical self-sovereignty, once they understand the truths of the fiat system or bitcoin, is just a crazy narrative that is ultimately just bereft of anything resembling critical thinking about the motivations and behavior that large social groups exhibit.

Even if, hyperbitcoinization were to happen, which it very well may not, I would not bet on sufficient numbers of people participating in the dissolution of the nation states in which they reside.

To the extent people look at this and say, it’s inevitable, given what they perceive as contradictions in the system, I would suggest they’re not looking at the whole system at all. They’re focused on this narrow slice of reality, and what they view as the basis of the state — money. Money and the state are certainly related concepts, and bitcoin challenges the nature of that relationship. But states exist because most people want them to.

The CFA is shameful, and should end. It’s a disgusting vestige of French colonialism. But has nothing to do with my point, here.

Yeah, they want to be able to retire earlier, and have taxpayers support that retirement! They’re not protesting the fiat system and demanding the embrace of radical self-reliance. They’re literally protesting for the exact opposite thing! Yet some people in this conversation will warp EVERYTHING to serve a ridiculously cultish narrative.

Seeing some people casually connect the protests in France to evidence that the system is coming crashing down, and that we are on the precipice of a widespread embrace of market maximalism, just causes me to tune out. The people in France are literally protesting for BIGGER GOVERNMENT.

People are not awakening to anarchist and capitalist maximalist values. Do some people hear themselves speaking? Everything just confirms some people’s biases, no matter what. Even when it contradicts them.

Birthdays are always days of reflection for me. They remind me of my mortality and whether the things I’m doing in life are benefiting or hurting my posterity.

So um, I think I understand what you’re trying to say. While I would agree that abstract mathematical entities are not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, and indeed, many people would argue that these structures exist independent of the physical world (also referred to as mathematical platonism), I would also caution you that, computation is very much a physical process, on which bitcoin is based.

It relies purely on a physical substrate, and its value and utility is derived from social trust and interaction within domains that are fully constrained by these physical laws. In fact, these systems would not and could not exist if not for entropic processes, which give rise to the concept of useful energy to begin with.

The mere fact that bitcoin can be described in terms of of pure mathematics, does not overcome the problems that such abstractions cannot account for the problems of coordination, and the massive amount of normative dynamics that govern the relationship of these things with a society.

Not sure I’d go that far quite yet, but your enthusiasm is palpable.

I think you have me confused with someone else. As much as I’d love to have been at Nostrica, I am not. I would suggest that someone else is deserving of your praise.

I am not currently planning on attending. But I’d be open to dropping by, if I can make some time.

No system in the universe has zero entropy. Including bitcoin.

Would love to meet up while you’re in LA!

Every time I use Bitcoin Lightning, it’s hard to escape the sense it’s one of the most important technologies today, that is going to change the world..