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Mike Brock
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Unfashionable.

There's just no such thing as a "solid foundation" in complex systems. Even trying to reason ontologically and create a cardinality of concepts in that way, when you're dealing with non-reducible emergent properties within that system interacting, is a much harder problem than people intuit. In fact, there's a whole field of study on this problem, around complexity and emergence. Santa Fe Institute specializes in this research.

You don't win popularity contests by insisting things are hard. You win popularity contests by insisting things are easy, even when they're hard. This dynamic tends to lead to bad outcomes.

Would you buy a diamond ring from an anonymous merchant, in a no-recourse economic transaction, where you and the seller did not reveal personal identifying information about each other? I think such a transaction would be extremely risky.

Replying to Avatar Mike Brock

Keeping any complex system stable requires continuous adaptation to its environment. Even our bodies, whose phase space of stability, which we describe as homeostasis, is a series of complex feedback mechanisms to cope with environmental changes in temperatures, threats, injury, infectious pathogens, changes in availability of energy inputs (food availability, etc), and if all of these feedback mechanisms were not constantly changing to adjust for all these stresses, we could die very quickly.

This all adds up to your own metabolic processes being “metastable”. They are stable given a certain set of parameters. But there is not set of parameters that is universally stable. There is no arrangement of these systems that could so be devised as to make us immortal in the face of an unbounded set of temperature ranges (because the behavior of chemical processes that keep us alive are temperature-dependent, which is why our body must maintain a constant temperature internally), nor could our body isolate itself from the entropy, or be able to survive below a certain minimum energy input.

Society and economic systems are exactly like this. Believing that we can formulate a perfectly stable economic system and set of norms and values that tracks close to some normative ideal, and this solution can be distilled down to a set of specific rules and abstractions (represented by some monetary theory, conception fo property rights, or some natural law concept of how to achieve optimal cooperation) is really, in my opinion, a fool’s errand. And I recognize I’m indicting a lot of people’s closely held political and economic beliefs when I say that. But I just happen to believe it’s true.

I also believe this kind of thinking can be outright dangerous, because it enhances people confidence that “burning it all down” is a safe and/or desirable thing to do, because they are so certain of their solutions, and they are so certain they know what the problems are, that they’re not even open to the possibility that they could be wrong. So they’d be willing to take these giant risks for millions, if not billions of people — believing they’re emancipating them — without considering for a brief moment, that maybe their capacity to understand the equities of human interest, in aggregate, are not cognizable by any one political or economic theory.

This is why I never jump on any “maximalist” bandwagons in really anything in my life, to the great frustration of many in these conversations.

Yes. This was a point I made yesterday. #[5]

Humans are titled very heavily towards low time preference behaviors. And I don't think you breed that out of people simply by dreaming up normative ethical systems, and selling them as moral truths.

I just don't think there's going to be a great awakening, here, where everyone's priority becomes to be as self-sovereign as possible. Back in my AnCap days, I convinced myself that people would all reach this conclusion once the contradictions of the system played out. I no longer think that. I think the modern state can exist in a state of contradictions, adapting to shocks and cultural changes, in perpetuity. It doesn't ever have to reconcile down to a self-consistent model. It just has to maintain an ability to adapt.

It's weird to me that people think the average person is going to demand anonymity from first-principles. What about the behavior of the average person leads people to think that incentives tilt so heavily in that direction?

Correct. At TBD, we are prioritizing self-custody solutions.

Also, the mere existence of easily accessible self-custody, changes the incentive structures of custodial solutions pretty dramatically, and makes breaches of trust, existential reputational risks.

Security is always going to be inversely proportional to convenience. The need for security is proportional to social trust. In low stakes, high trust environments, low friction solutions will flourish. In high stakes, low trust environments, self-custody will be the default.

I say this all the time. But I think one of the problems is a lot of bitcoiners are in a low trust, high stakes mindset at all times, and believe everyone else should be to. This leads to a bit of confusion to how things are going to play out, in aggregate.

AnCap bitcoiners often appear to.

I find it amusing that people think FRB is merely a creature of the state, and that a stateless market maximalist society would collective come to understand it is fraud through universally accepted ethics, in the vein of Rothbard or Hoppe. I think FRB would not only exist, but there'd be even more extreme versions of it.