Testing an idea:

The freerider problem is a key reason why state power grows unchecked, because the ones who try to resist carry all the burden of fighting, while the benefits if they win are widely shared among the people, including those who just remained passive as the fight against those who used to be in power went on.

People understand this intuitively, something which gives most of them incentives to be freeriders and let others take care of the resistance.

I notice this all the time - as people come up to me and say:

"Rune, I'm so glad you speak out on our behalf and write books that are important for society, and I would like to support you publicly, but you know I have a job in X and a family, and blah, blah, blah."

which I really have mixed feelings about, although it's probably better than not getting any feedback at all.

However, what I'm slowly getting to, is that this situation and the incentives shift dramatically when people realize that the state has become corrupt through and through and that the economy has been turned into a pile of dung.

At that point the network effects of continuing to adapt to the state and follow the lead of the corrupt are negative and grow exponentially every day, while in contrast joining the few who are still uncorrupted at an earliest possible stage may offer exponentially positive network effects.

Meaning: If you wait long before you join the good citizens who want to resist and fight the usurpers, you lose out immensely on the positive network effects you could have enjoyed if you weren't such an effin coward.

Think of it - there are reasons why those who remain loyal to tyrants until the empire fall often find it quite challenging to make new friends, while those who resisted and fought bravely when the rebels were just a small group become heroes that parents tell stories about to their children.

If this idea is valid, it should provide sufficient reason for you to jump down from the pile of dung (because today it most definitely is a p. o. d. ), wave goodbye to any corrupt associates you have become involved with (oh, yeah, just look around you, they are everywhere and all over the place) and...

Rebel the f up.

The nice thing about being 100% allocated to #Bitcoin is you are immune to FOMO.

Sit back and relax. You did all that you could. You are on The Way.

One thing I’ve noticed about bitcoiners is that a majority are risk-takers!

So here is a test for you all….how many points do you add up 😂

I’m not as adventurous as most of you as mine add up to 6!

#playtime

#nostr

I'll be totally honest, I don't have much to contribute here. I'm not a coder, a builder, or an entrepreneur. I'm certainly no leader.

I don't have a newsletter or service to shill. I don't have any unique insights into politics, economics, Bitcoin, or Nostr that hasn't already been repeated as nauseum.

I'm just a guy who stumbled into all of this and was made a better person through the process.

Nostr is for builders, it it's also lurkers to plug directly into the signal, to help us stay humble.

Oh dear

Dan held has hurt his foot so can’t attend the panel tomorrow morning at Bitcoin Amsterdam

Get well soon and all but also I was well up for come cheeky virtue signalling.

Repost if you agree.

Hey guys, we need help!🙏

Can this platform do some magic and help us find translators for the following languages?🌍

We want to cover all major languages in Europe as soon as possible to allow everyone to stack sats p2p!🍑

We're offering a little bounty for each language, V4V🤝

Polish🇵🇱

Ukrainian🇺🇦

Romanian🇷🇴

Dutch🇳🇱

Serbian🇷🇸

Hungarian🇭🇺

Swedish🇸🇪

Czech🇨🇿

And let us know if you'd like to do another one too!🍻

Send us a DM 📥 if you'd like to help us translate.

Thank you!

zapping everyone who replies to this note for no particular reason

zapping everyone who replies to this note for no particular reason

“We should change Bitcoin now in a contentious way to fix the security budget” is basically the same tinkering mentality that central bankers have.

It begins with an overconfident assumption that they know fees won’t be sufficient in the future and that a certain “fix” is going to generate more fees. But some “fixes” could even backfire and create less fees, or introduce bugs, or damage the incentive structure.

The Bitcoin fee market a couple decades out will primarily be a function of adoption or lack thereof. In a world of eight billion people, only a couple hundred million can do an on chain transaction per year, or a bit more with maximal batching. The number of people who could do a monthly transaction is 1/12th of that number. In order to be concerned that bitcoin fees will be too low to prevent censorship in the future, we have to start with the assumption that not many people use bitcoin decades out.

Fedwire has about 100x the gross volume that Bitcoin currently does, with a similar number of transactions. What will Bitcoin’s fee market be if volumes go up 5x or 10x, let alone 50x or 100x? Who wants to raise their hand with a confident model of what bitcoin volumes will be in 2040?

What will someone pay to send a ten million dollar equivalent on chain settlement internationally? $100 in fees per million dollar settlement transaction would be .01%. $300 to get it in a quicker block would be 0.03%. That type of environment can generate tens of billions of dollars of fees annually. The fees that people pay to ship millions of dollars of gold long distances, or to perform a real estate transaction worth millions of dollars, are extremely high. Even if bitcoin is a fraction of that, it would be high by today’s standards. And in a world of billions of people, if nobody wants to pay $100 to send a million dollar settlement bearer asset transaction, then that’s a world where not many people use bitcoin period.

In some months the “security budget” concern trends. In other months, the “fees will be so high that only rich people can transact on chain” concern trends. These are so wildly contradictory and the fact that both are common concerns shows how little we know about the long term future.

I don’t think the fee market can be fixed by gimmicks. Either the network is desirable to use in a couple decades or it’s not. If 3 or 4 decades into bitcoin’s life it can’t generate significant settlement volumes, and gets easily censored due to low fees, then it’s just not a very desirable network at that point for one reason or another.

Some soft forks like covenants can be thoughtfully considered for scaling and fee density, and it’s good for smart developers to always be thinking about low risk improvements to the network that the node network and miners might have a high consensus positive view toward over time. But trying to rush VC-backed softforks, and using security budget FUD to push them, is pretty disingenuous imo.

Anyway, good morning.

#meme #memestr

That's what our law was until 1050. If it was practically possible to do it then, with the level of tech they had, then it's also practically possible today.

If I ran for office today, this would be my political platform:

1. Abolish the government's currency monopoly

2. Remove the capital gains tax

3. Cut taxes and public spending 10% per year, every year, in infinity