Chile with 1:3 ratio of liver to ground beef 😋

When newbies ask about the difference between bitcoin and everything else, give them this well-known line by Stephen Covey: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” In this case, the main thing is censorship resistance. Those who follow Covey’s advice are bitcoiners. And then there’s everyone else.

One way to describe the goal of the decentralized web is that we want to provide communities with communications tools (platforms, protocols, etc) that are powerful, nimble, dynamic — but LEADERLESS. Open source is a step in the right direction, bc if you don’t like the leadership of some project, you can fork the repo. Replace the leaders with new ones. But have we figured out how to make platforms, protocols, etc truly leaderless? Nope. Not yet. How to do that remains an open question.

Anyone else getting a flurry of random zaps over the past 1-2 days that are showing up in your wallet but not on nostr?

Anyone know of a good article that summarizes how and why ethereum is prone to centralization? A friend of mine has a son who’s asking me my general opinion on ethereum. College age, open minded, intelligent, knows a little about bitcoin but not a lot. Not exactly a techie although he is involved in a research project on AI. I’ve told him that it’s overly complex and that PoS is a bad thing and he’s interested in a deeper dive.

In addition to avoiding “processed” food, it’s probably a good rule of thumb to avoid consuming anything that’s heavily advertised and branded. Come to think of it, that should probably apply to pretty much everything, not just food.

Great discussion on BRICS on today’s All In Podcast. Very informative and complementary perspectives by Chamath and Sacks. They mention bitcoin (in a positive manner) just briefly, then seem to forget about it even as they proceed to make a powerful case that BRICS should adopt bitcoin.

I like that status on Damus can be set to expire 👍🏻

Are there any bitcoiners who have written about the abstract concept of proof of work as a central component of human interactions? Example: conspicuous spending as a signal of one's wealth. Or advanced degrees as a signal of one's intelligence and abilities. One might argue to categorize these somewhat differently, perhaps proof of "burn" rather than work, but there is a unifying something going on here. The challenge is to figure out what exactly the unifying concept is and how to put it into words. The purpose of PoW, or proof of burn or whatever, is to signal something to somebody. To signal what? For the sake of this post let's just call it "virtue." Virtue signaling, by its inherent nature, perhaps by definition, must incur some sort of expense. When we look at it that way, our usual reaction is to deem it a fundamentally wasteful thing. But perhaps the desire to obviate the need for virtue signaling is inherently misguided, in the same sense that the desire to replace PoW with proof of stake is misguided. It's like trying to make a perpetual motion machine: it simply goes against the laws of physics. But perhaps what can be done, and what should be pursued, is the "optimization" of virtue signaling. What does that mean? I would argue that sub-optimized virtue signaling means work (or effort, or burn, or whatever) that is intended to prove something, but which is done in a way that is not perfectly provable. Maybe only a small fraction of the work is provable. Or maybe it's provable, but inconsistently so. Or perhaps the intended recipients of the signal simply don't know how to interpret the signal, i.e. don't know how to verify the proof; like using a language the recipient does not understand. Arguably, this is what bitcoin achieves: an optimization of PoW. Perhaps in the broader perspective, it is "virtue signaling" in its purest form. It may still have stuff to teach us about the human condition from a broader perspective.

The thing that troubles me about things like Popular Posts, Trending, etc is the unstated presumption of a single frame of reference, one that represents “the community.” We need to reject this presumption. Every user is a unique frame of reference. And we need to do it explicitly, in a way that users can feel the difference.