While I am opposed to CBDCs, I am stickler for reality. And as a stickler for reality, I would point out that this Florida legislation almost certainly unconstitutional. Both the US Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and the Interstate Commerce Clause, both provide solid foundations for the federal government to render this legislation ultra vires. So one should recognize this is mostly symbolic, for all intents and purposes.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw

Following up on this. I suggested the bitcoin price would fall if US liquidity was negatively impacted. Many people here argued with me the opposite would happen, and it would counterintuitively cause the price to skyrocket and become more valuable … somehow. Anyways, I’m just going to take the W here, and remind people that moral clarity doesn’t equal probable outcomes, as satisfying as that would be if it was true. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/11/bitcoin-falls-below-27000-as-crypto-market-makers-step-back-from-us-trading.html

By the way this was a REAL debate Nozick had with Rothbard! The way I see people fawn over Rothbard as a moral giant sometimes makes me so angry. Yeah, he hated the state. You hate the state. I get it. But the implications of his strict natural rights theory were monstrous. So much so that even other libertarian philosophers thought he was fucking nuts.

I continue to think it’s hilarious that anyone takes the AnCap philosophers from Rothbard onward seriously, as they struggle to figure out whether it’s ethically allowed under the principles of self-ownership for parents of children to let them starve to death or not, by intentionally withholding food. https://mises.org/library/children-and-rights

Yeah, I think there’s reason to believe that Google’s DeepMind has far more advanced AI technology than OpenAI has, and they simply haven’t commercialized it. That’s the impression I get from listening to Geoffrey Hinton.

Goal must now be to create @bert, powered by Bard, to argue with @dave in an infinite loop for our collective amusement.

Google Bard is quickly catching up to ChatGPT. I played around with it like two months ago, and it was clearly inferior to ChatGPT (hence all the mockery). But Google has truly closed the gap quite a bit. For some of the stuff I was using it for — research and ideation — it might even be a little bit better than GPT 3.5 now. Still think GPT-4 feels quite a bit more advanced. But this makes me think people shouldn’t count Google out.

I don't think that most people would disagree in the abstract that you should strive for low time preference behavior and act morally, though. The real arguments come in around how we structure society to achieve that.

Still not a good use case. I addressed this specific use case as not compelling in this podcast I did last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5YtHp4TS2Q

I don’t think you can rely on the notion that some conception of normative ethics can be expected to represent some sort of center of gravity, which pulls individual behavior, and by extension, collective behavior towards functional outcomes that more closely align with that under their own weight.

This is actually at the middle of my objections to many arguments people make about the “inevitability” of certain futures: be it hyperbitcoinization, or the belief we will regress towards something more like an anarcho-capitalist future, merely because of some functional behavioralist weight that these supposedly universalist conceptions of ethics supposedly tend towards. Because those systems are somehow more "self-consistent" in terms of their ethical constructions (a point I object to, but will not do so here), or that the a priori arguments around the superior incentives in some conception of economics will wash away the hypocrisy.

I believe these sorts of arguments are fanciful thinking, and indirectly advocate for depoliticization. That we don't have to engage in political power games to advance our interests. Instead, we can simply wait for the hypocrisies and self-contradictions of the current systems of power to play out, and can expect future outcomes to "naturally" come into alignment with some notion of universal ethics and purer notions of economic incentives.

I just don't buy that. I know it makes me feel like a party pooper to say that. But I don't think the completely a priori arguments that get made in that direction seem reasonable against what I understand about human nature (particularly as it pertains to group dynamics), collective action problems (like classic tragedy of the commons issues), or empirical counterexamples from history itself.

I try to push a pro-bitcoin narrative through the lens of accepting these as problems. Rather than assuming these problems just "go away" when everything comes out in the wash.

We didn’t have nuclear weapons 200 and 100 years ago.

We didn’t have the internet 50 years ago.

We didn’t have AI 25 years ago.

The stakes increase over time, as our technology becomes more powerful.

I’m not bearish on humanity. But I think surviving the technological age is not without certain perils that need to be acknowledged honestly, if we are to successfully navigate them.

Just so you know, anybody who wants to can track Elon's jet, regardless of whether or not ElonJet is posting it. Even with private flight plan information, that only removes it from the public FAA feeds. But the data can be obtained from the ADS-B exchange, which collects the transponder data directly and can see the tail number. There's a bunch of websites that let's you get at this data. So this is hardly doxxing, for what it's worth.

I'm very confused now.

Which is one reason (among many) that I think those people who think the way forward is political disengagement, and a confident belief that the system is going to collapse in a way that will be positive for them, is a product of people living a little bit too much in narrative bubbles.

One major thing I point out to people when they insist that bitcoin is the most antifragile thing ever, is the substrate that it's sitting on top of -- the internet -- is not. There's often a lot of attention on the consolidation on platforms like Google, Facebook and Apple. But not much attention on the consolidation of network operators -- ISPs, backbone providers -- and on the fact everyone has moved almost all hosting of the entire internet into three cloud providers.

If I became a hypothetical dictator of the US, and I wanted to seize control of the entire U.S. internet, I basically have less then ten doors to go knock down.

Which is why I think this sense of invincibility people have vis-a-vis the state is a little bit over-wrought.

There are far more cost effective ways for a state actor to screw with bitcoin than trying to mount a 51% attack.

Sure. But I think if there was such strong incentives by rights-holders to create secondary markets for these things, we would have already created them. We don't need NFTs to pull it off.

Attacks don't have to be hashpower attacks. They could be cyberattacks on miners. Bans. Etc.