I really want Argentina to succeed. It's such a wonderful country and the people there are friendly and entrpreneurial. It's a shame their government has been stealing from them for so long. But in a sense, if they succeed, everyone else is going to follow suit. And I don't think the globalists are going to like that. Then again, the globalists have a little too much on their plate. They want more war, and Gaza isn't quite turning out to be the major thing that they want it to be and Ukraine is discussing peace. They also want to keep pushing the climate change agenda as a cover for everything else, like demonizing meat and gas-powered cars. There's also the whole depopulation thing that worked a bit during COVID, but needs way more destruction to really make a dent. Maybe Bitcoin can slip through in the meantime. It would just be nice if we can avoid a head-on confrontation because that's likely to be very painful.

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Bitcoin Tech Talk #374

Interesting Stuff

What's a conspiracy that you believe now that you didn't before March 2020?

How to deal with smart people that don't know about Bitcoin It can be intimidating to talk to someone that's smart that spouts nonsense about Bitcoin. Arguing with them is going to be difficult because they likely have flawed economic thinking that is at the core of their beliefs. If you're arguing with a socialist, for example, they're likely to have some form of class struggle or oppressor/oppressed paradigms that guide all their thinking. If you're arguing with a mainstream economist, they're likely to view centralized monetary control as a good thing. If you're arguing with a gold bug, they're likely to deny the value of digital things. It's a pretty heavy lift to argue with these people, because, most likely, they haven't studied Bitcoin in any depth. But if you want engagement, start with their assumptions about the current system. Do they know how it works? Do they understand that all money comes from loans? Do they get that inflation destroys savings and that it's a stealth taxation? At the very least, this should get them on a field that's a little more neutral and fact based. But it's also possible that they may understand all these things and still be against Bitcoin. What then? You can move from there to whether freedom, particularly property rights are a good thing. Even the most ardent socialists don't like having property taken away from them. And really, this is a moral issue that's very intuitive. Usually, you can make headway that property rights, especially over savings is a good thing. Finally, you can move to Bitcoin. Do they understand that it's decentralized? That it's digital and that digital things can have value? This is where you need to avoid the stupid economics of the mainstream, who like talking about velocity and unemployment and so on. Those are all irrelevant to the fact that Bitcoin is good money.

On Ocean Mining Pool, Inscriptions and Luke ——————————————— There's been a pretty big flare up in the Bitcoin community about Ocean Mining's two recent blocks. Namely, that they didn't include certain transactions designed to use the block space for something other than its monetary transactional uses. Indeed, many influencers, especially those that are pro-BRC20 and Ordinals, are condemning this course of action as censorship. In a sense, this is exactly what all pools do. They create a block template for everyone else to mine. In that sense, each miner to a pool is really renting the pool hash rate and the pool does the work of using that hash rate to create blocks, whatever they may be. But it's a bit disingenuous to complain specifically about Ocean, since lots of pools have made blocks that didn't create the optimal profit-driven block. Not every pool makes the maximal amount of fees for a block, whether because they have bad software, certain policies or just because the block was found before a block template could be constructed. The optimum is an ideal and though the modern economic assumption of idealized homo economicus would create these blocks each time, we don't have a steady-state mining economy so not everyone mines the theoretic optimum. In a sense, the analysis of pools and the block templates these critics make is flawed because they assume some optimized economy. Given ideal conditions, of course, there is an optimal set of transactions you accept to increase fees. Over a long enough time period, those should result in more profit which get spread over the participants which should make the pool more popular, making those that don't perform the optimum lose profit and eventually bankrupt. But that's a very narrow analysis based purely on monetary incentives. We don't live in under ideal conditions and situations change all the time. Basic things, like getting a block template ready quickly after a block is found is an optimization that's difficult and still not completely solved. But there's also the opinions of the miners themselves. Are they all strictly profit driven? Think about normal businesses. Why do they offer fair trade coffee? From a purely monetary perspective, fair trade coffee doesn't make any sense. They're more expensive for the same good. From a profit-maximizing analysis that MBAs are so fond of, the non-fair trade coffee would put the fair trade coffee out of business. But yet, in the real world, they do not because people care more than just the good itself, but what it took to make the good. In other words, the homo economicus analysis of economic situations rarely is the optimum for the real world. There are other considerations other than profit that go into any business. And that's really at the heart of what's being argued here. Luke believes that inscriptions are a waste of block space, a public nuisance and that even if his pool participants have to take a loss, that it's worthwhile because of the public good that it does. In other words, he sees these inscriptions as *immoral* and that the price he's willing to pay is fees that he would otherwise have gotten. People are acting like this is some sort of affront to market forces or game theory and that the only consideration he should have is like that of homo economicus, whether he makes more profit or less. But this is a very fiat/Keynesian way of looking at the whole picture. People are more than just profit-maximalization machines and mining pool participants are no different. Indeed, that's the impression I got from the Ocean Mining Pool summit I went to a few weeks ago. They are that response to the many mining pools that are doing unethical things like not paying out their participants for fees that come in off band. The calculation that Luke has made is that being moral, that is not polluting blocks, is worth the 1% loss in fees. Given what I know about Luke, even a 90% loss in fees is unlikely to sway him. Morals have a place in any ecosystem because they, too, have value. A mining pool that doesn't burdens nodes with extra data that they have to persist has positive communal value. A mining pool that does the opposite has detrimental communal value. And from Luke's perspective, not burdening nodes is important enough that he chooses not to include them in his block templates. This moral reasoning is not something that is welcomed by a lot of people and it's hard to miss that many of the critics are creating ordinals, BRC-20 and so on. They want to run this centralized scheme over Bitcoin and make money. In other words, they have a strong economic interest in getting their transactions included and shout censorship whenever they're not. But we must be careful, because this is not the same as, say, the OFAC prohibition list. And this is where things become a little harder to explain because most people have no sense of the difference between centralized rules being enforced under threat of violence and bottom-up moral behavior slowly adopted. But what Luke is doing is very much bottom up. He's specifically doing something out of moral conviction. Whether you agree with him or not, you can understand why he's doing it, particularly the moral reasoning. This is different than a centralized mandate with threats of violence against those that don't comply. I believe that what Luke is doing is a good thing. He's showing his convictions and reasoning about why inscriptions are bad through these templates. The participants are free to move if they disagree. I suspect, though, that there are many that agree with him and they'll vote with their hash rate. For homo economicus, something like fair trade coffee does not make sense. Yet people gladly pay a little more for it because they believe that it ultimately helps those people produce and live a better life. I believe what Luke and Ocean are doing is similar. They're offering less-bloated blocks even at the cost of some fees.

We don't have to aggressively increase Bitcoin adoption. We just have to survive until fiat money inevitably collapses.

Savings. Think about that word. Savings rescues people from a plight or a pickle. It's preparation for the unknown. It's a way to account for the bad things that may happen. Savings is also a way to prepare for something you *do* want. It's capital accumulation and funding for your goals. Too many people don't know the power of savings. But really, it's about having a purpose, a dream. A goal has no power if you're not working toward it. And savings is a measure of how close you are to that goal. The depressing thing about fiat money is that it inflates, debasing your savings, moving you further away from your goals. A third party called the central bank has the ability to steal from your dreams and purpose. And what is life without some purpose? It's a zombie existence where the goal is to stay alive, at whatever cost. In a very real sense, fiat money debases your life. So we invest, trying to clear that ever-present monetary expansion/hurdle rate that will offset the theft from inflation. But that's a job onto itself. Managing money is a cesspool of rent-seeking and unless you do it yourself, a lot of the value you accumulate leaks to the Cantillionaires. Bitcoin is freedom from this system. But more importantly, Bitcoin gives you back your savings, gives you back your goals, dreams and purpose because it doesn't leak. Save and build your character so that when you have enough to pursue your dreams, you have the courage to jump.

Man, it is really sad to walk around Vegas.

CBDCs are a central banker's wet dream. They can control the supply of money very finely and control behavior in ways that are impossible right now. They can, for example, eliminate the black market. This is why we need to resist.

Announcing my new class! Programming Taproot. Learn: * Schnorr Signatures * Merklized Abstract Syntax Trees * Taproot KeyPath/ScriptPath spends * Signature and Pubkey Aggregation (MuSig2) * Threshold Signatures (FROST) The seminar is on January 8 in Austin. Apply today! https://programmingbitcoin.com/programming-taproot/