Bitcoin Tech Talk #497
Interesting Stuff
Hacker Mindset - Henrik Karlsson makes the case that what looks like genius is really just seeing past the "proper" path and considering tasks from first principles, or what he calls the "hacker mindset." The poster boy for this is Robert Rodriguez who made the film "El Mariachi" for $7,000. This is common for the fiat system, where credentialism and bureaucracy inflate the cost of everything and innovations are often made illegal or at least discriminated against if they threaten the current order. They are conventions masquerading as laws of nature, and while you can route around them entirely and tinker your way to competence, the fiat mentality is pervasive and going around it creates a significant amount of anxiety due to structural bias.
Real Collapse - Kaiser Von Lohengramm makes the somewhat obvious but unintuitive point that broken systems like communism or our current fiat regime never simply collapse. Our fantasy is that they self-destruct under their own weight without anyone lifting a finger, but even the Soviet Union required specific actors to actually pull the plug. Dysfunction can find equilibrium and can last a lot longer without some real alternatives. In other words, waiting might not be enough, and if you want a different system you have to actively build and fight for it.
Zio-Evangelicalism - The New Christian Right takes a hard look at the bad theology of Zionist-Evangelical pastors such as Franklin Graham. The article begins with Tucker Carlson's critique of Franklin Graham for offering a foreign policy briefing disguised as prayer, blessing potential military action against Iran by ripping the Book of Esther out of its context. It documents the litany of prominent evangelicals providing theological cover for American wars in the Middle East on behalf of the Netanyahu's government. Dispensationalism has always been a pretty odd theological stance, and the more wars we have, the more we're finding out why.
AI and Bullshit Jobs - Alex McCann looks back on David Graeber's framework and catalogs the five flavors of rent-seeking which he labels flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. The categorization by itself is very useful for figuring out how rent-seeking positions stick around, but more than that, the piece attempts to predict the role of AI in eliminating such roles. The conventional wisdom is that rent-seeking is where AI will disrupt jobs the most, but the article argues that it will for some, but not all and there will even be some rent-seeking roles that are going to expand as a result of AI (like goons).
Gambling - James Lavish, CFA traces how the 2018 Supreme Court ruling turned sports betting from a Vegas trip into a $167 billion annual habit. Perhaps the most insightful part of the article was that at least in the past, gambling had a natural friction that kept it in check. Yet now, people spend more on just lottery tickets than movies, concerts and books combined. What struck me is that the current system is desperately lacking in hope, and people turn to speculation and gambling as their only perceived path to getting ahead. The explosion of sports betting apps is an expansion of what we've been seeing in altcoins for years, and may perhaps be the reason why the last bull market wasn't quite so frothy as the past.
What I'm up to
The Third Way - I wrote this article to make the argument that a third way is a structural improvement over one and two implementations, respectively. I also made the point that an implementation from scratch has historically not gotten traction despite ample opportunity, and that new implementations are likely to suffer the same fate.
Bitcoin Infinity Show - I was on Knut's show with Samson to talk about ProductionReady and argue for why we need something between Core and Knots. I made the point, for example, that a third implementation is actually taking some of the enormous burden off of the current Core devs, who all know that their screwup could potentially destroy billions or even trillions of value.
Bitcoin 2026 - I will be at this conference at the end of the month to be in the Open Source Lounge on behalf of Production Ready. It looks like I don't have any speaking obligations, but stop by if you're going to be in Las Vegas!
Nostr Note of the Week
#Bitcoin Tech Talk #497