I think China's debt diplomacy is already in the advanced stages of backfiring. 60%+ of these loans are basically in default right now.
I'm glad you brought up "IMF unicoin", because I actually think of the dollar were to collapse in short order, the likelihood that most of the world would immediately switch to the IMF SDR as the emergency backup reserve currency is about 95% likely.
Case in point: Germany had hyperinflation as its currency collapsed. But in a relatively short period of time later, with the rise of Nazism, Germany rose to have the most powerful Leviathan in the world. Thinking US power is on its last legs, and that the dollar collapsing would be some amazing celebratory moment, as opposed to a dark moment with potentially dark and existential consequences to the whole world is another wacky article of faith.
The reality is this: Leviathan exists. The weird article of faith that exists amongst these people that Leviathan's internal contradictions mean it's going to unravel and an anarchistic capitalist society will rise from the ashes is bordering on religion. It's "Book of Revelations"-like thinking.
Personally, I think freedom minded people should be pretty focused on keeping the leash on Leviathan. Which is why I support things like Bitcoin and Nostr to begin with.
Vacating the arena and waiting for the fall is a bit crazy to me. The risk that authoritarians and totalitarians take the reigns of Leviathan, is very high. But these people have convinced themselves after reading a few fantastical books, that they will be inoculated from Leviathan's power. The risk of being wrong here is an unbounded risk. To have such overwhelming confidence this isn't going to happen is wacky to me.
It’s funny, because they are often fans of Bastiat and the lesson of the seen and the unseen as it pertains to narrow economic arguments. But if they applied this epistemic lesson more broadly, they might be a little more modest in their pronouncements about the arc of liberal democracy being a complete failure, and maybe consider the unseen — in the form of their complete lack of imagination and counterfactual reasoning — might be leading them somewhat astray.
Well, we can. But the chances of our premature extinction go way up in that scenario.
I generally agree with both Musk and Robert Zubrin that a positive future for humanity will require human expansion into space.
I think that's basically arguing to go back to Hobbes' state of nature. And I don't think that's how it's going to play out.
The good news is, you can believe in bitcoin, nostr and the goodness of decentralized protocols, and not feel like you have to adopt kooky ideological positions!
They think they're going to be feudal lords in this society.
At the end of the day, power comes down to violence in the world. Our entire civilization is based on our relationship to it. I continue to believe that regulating our relationship to it, is best done through liberal democratic institutions. This nonsense that's becoming on trend in some corners of the internet, that we ought prefer absolute monarchies, is a deluded fairytale.
Not to mention the information security issues we are about to see. We are going to see catastrophic data breaches all over the world. Things like AutoGPT will become common black hat tools, that will be unleashed into corporate networks once they've penetrated in. Obviously, AI will be used as part of the defenses and countermeasures. But those tools seems to be lagging very far behind.
A lot (if not almost all) emphasis on financial privacy in the bitcoin community is focused on privacy-from-government as the core concern. For good reason. Particularly those using bitcoin to avoid political repression. It's life and death. I know some of these people personally.
This completely ignores the more proximate concerns of the need for financial privacy that emerge from the private sphere. If we don't have privacy, it puts a target on our back from bad, private actors. Fraudsters, thieves, or worse.
Privacy is fundamentally important within our personal lives, even if you take the government out of it the picture. State abuse of power is surely a critical concern. But so is private abuses of power -- such as in the phenomenon of "surveillance capitalism". The full-throated defense of privacy does not start and end with concerns about the state.
It's because many people are using a a anthropomorphic standard to try and measure the danger. This is silly and wrong. Whether an large language model is conscious or not, or self-aware is completely orthogonal to the potential risks it can pose.
Yeah, I'm far more on the concerned side of the equation than most people I know. I hope I'm wrong. And I'd rather be wrong about it being dangerous than wrong about it being safe.