Let's say it is a valid heuristic. Somebody having posted frequently but not getting followers is either very niche or very low signal. The beauty of social media is that you can find your flock even if you are very niche, so for his followers he might still be very high signal.

That said, I wish we could make this tangible. Why are people following me? Which of my followers will unfollow me over this or that post I'm about to hit send on? AI will get us there and I'm not sure it's good. Feeding the algorithm.

I don't understand all this hate against the SBR, especially if you're American. Do you care about the United States? Do you care about your neighbors? Every organization is incentivized to own Bitcoin, including governments. Would you rather that much worse governments get Bitcoin?

Your ideal of "only ideologically pure people should own Bitcoin" was never going to be the case and if you think that, you have authoritarian tendencies and do not understand what decentralization means.

GM, except to all the black-pilled people who do nothing but complain.

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

— Alan Watts, The Book

Yeah, I’m not interested in monarchy, so. ..

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time time.” - Winston Churchill

It’s no surprise that all of the technologies you reference, including Bitcoin, emerged from democratic republics.

I've never seen someone getting into altcoins, start getting fit, becoming more disciplined, having lots of children. They mostly seem to have and up drinking a lot and getting fat.

altcoins are fiat 2.0

I did, but overall I think many of the shortcomings of democracy are more-so shortcomings of soft money.

I suspect hard money would make democracies better than their current form, and I think many people who favor non-democratic forms of government do so because they themselves expect to be part of the small elite that runs things or they otherwise have power in those non-democratic systems.

The problem is, military power does scale.

So to the extent that this is true, some governments are likely to become and remain quite big, and thus we have the question: do we want them democratic or authoritarian? I’d pick democratic and with a division of powers (and limited by a constitution to protect bedrock liberties).

Some people have grown cynical with democracy (and various types of representative government broadly, e.g. including constitutional democratic republics that enshrine certain rights to protect liberty against the masses), viewing this method as promoting short-term leadership with bad incentives.

I have a different take.

Prior to the printing press and then the telegraph and radio, running a democratic society over long distances wasn’t even feasible. The concept of having people democratically participate in their government relies on people being relatively connected information-wise so that they can use their access to information to know what’s happening and to then select between different options, which you couldn’t do across the entirety of a country before people were literate and election materials or other publications could be mass produced. In the pre-press age of handwritten books, making written documents was expensive, and so literacy was a niche skill.

So, that era was ruled by kings and queens, council oligopolies, and so forth. Representative government, to the extent that it existed, only applied to small city states where people could literally gather in a town square, or to “elites” in a capital. There was literally no way to run an election over very broad distances on a regular basis. The printing press helped change that, and then the telegraph, radio, and other tech further reinforced it.

But ironically, as I discuss in Broken Money, those technologies also started to break our money. The printing press and telegraph allowed the transaction layer (the movement of IOUs between individuals and entities) to grow exponentially more efficient both domestically and globally, while our settlement layer (gold) remained basically unchanged. This broadening gap between fast transactions and slow settlements was increasingly bridged with centralization and credit, and the gap eventually became so wide that every nation dropped the settlement layer of gold almost entirely, except as a reserve asset.

So the same technologies that enabled widespread representative government also enabled the proliferation of softer money. Prior to these technologies, broad democracy wasn’t possible. And after these technologies, sound money was too slow to keep up. Oof.

But over a long enough timeframe, our technology became good enough that we finally figured out how to do fast settlements as well. Bitcoin. People can send value to each other quickly over long distances, in ways that no central entity can prevent or reverse, and with a unit that no central entity can debase. The first sound money of the Information Age.

If Bitcoin is successful over the coming decades and becomes a much larger and less volatile money, than it is now, fully entrenched in society, then that would be the first era where technology is at such a state where broad democracy and fast sound money can coexist. Or put more universally, it will be the first era where information spreads quickly without breaking the money, and thus both fast information and good money could coexist.

I, for one, would be curious to see how that develops.

I'm recording a bitcoin.review episode about OP_CAT today, drop your questions and comments below 👇

🎤