thinking about the function of law in the field between materiality and language

Last Notes

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The SEC would have to get on nostr, and then get its nostr account hacked before announcing, before it can approve. Those are the rules.

2024-01-03 18:18:42 CET

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Classic NFT cycle—Come in for community and miss out on generational wealth due to irony poisoning.

2023-12-21 00:40:43 CET

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Likewise! Glad to see nostr hasn’t been devoid of rizz in my absence 🤙

2023-12-20 21:29:40 CET

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I see where you’re coming from—but I think the problem is that too much gets lost in the gap between people’s inherent conception of rights and the reasons why those rights should or should not be infringed. Even if it’s the case nothing is owed to explain why a right should exist, there has to be an articulable reason why it shouldn’t be taken away if there’s a belief that doing so is necessary for some higher-order reason (e.g., national security).
My fear is that when lawmakers go into the chasm to learn about crypto, they leave without having anything concrete to assuage these higher-order concerns. E.g., if a politician goes in to learn about crypto with the belief it can be used to fund terrorism, but is willing to be persuaded otherwise, it is going to be tough to move their position when most of the readily-accessible knowledge base they can draw from is comprised of middling statements like “it’s not that widespread,” or “it’s not as bad as banking.”
I’m not saying they can’t also weigh those alongside the other positive benefits crypto can offer, but that those benefits are easier to dismiss or devalue in the absence of other positions that directly clash with the specific issue—especially one where the consequences under consideration (e.g. terrorism) are taken so seriously by those in government.

2023-12-20 00:52:16 CET

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@npub164q…2rl3 - Should have tagged you in this too. Just got back to Nostr after listening. Thanks for the great and thoughtful content!

2023-12-20 00:47:19 CET

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Don’t disagree with your sentiment. One general problem I see in the counter-messaging to Warren’s bill/views (and others like it) is too much emphasis on the principles behind crypto, and not enough on the reality of what can be done to address the bill’s concerns.
Government tries to solve problems (real or imaginary) that it believes (rightly, wrongly, or duplicitously) the public is incapable of solving itself. I want to see more messaging and discussion that is literally as direct as possible—e.g. “How Bitcoin stops terrorist financing” or “Why crypto is a better alternative to eliminate terrorist financing than the government and big banks.” Even the Blockchain Association’s November 15 letter to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee was lukewarm—only stating that proposed regulations would be “counter productive” to national security interests with a citation to a single WSJ letter to the editor from a different crypto lobbyist that effectively said “blockchains are public, so terrorists don’t like using them.” True or not, it’s too abstract.
Legislators that barely know how to use google need to be persuaded by offensive messaging and education that is tangible, which means discussing and demonstrating the utility of solutions to the problem they’re confronting. It’s against these concrete backdrops that the more ethereal appeals to freedom, equality, etc., can be contextualized—and against which the government’s alternatives can be evaluated.

2023-12-20 00:05:35 CET

@npub1hyq…k7cp - Just listened to The Progressive Bitcoiner episode you were on. Your discussion of meme culture made me think of this other podcast episode you might find interesting: https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/checkpoints-ruby-justice-thelot-third-spaces
TLDL: The podcast presents Ruby Justice Thelot’s case study on how communicative “third spaces” can exist on internet platforms (in this case, tens of thousands of YouTube comments accumulating over almost a decade under a video for the soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest)—and some of the challenges censorship or centralized platforms may pose to those structures. It dovetails into a discussion of what that means for the “Balkanization & Babelification of the Internet,” which is just a more academic way of saying “how online echo chambers are created.”
I find it to be a pretty compelling anecdote for thinking through the value of things like censorship-resistance, accessibility, and the role of media and platforms generally.

2023-01-20 05:13:42 CET

Here's a bit of a meta question for those out there on nostr who are more savvy than me: What would be the best way to conduct a poll on nostr without having to worry about creating a massive reply chain? Thought about using some sort of "1 sat payment = vote yes / 2 sat payment = vote no," but that seems a bit hectic.

2023-01-08 19:51:19 CET

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HFT's current stage is a point on a really interesting through-line of how systems align themselves to push information exchange to its limits. We've gone from shouting hawkers bartering in open-air markets to skyscrapers filled with floors of traders shouting into phones to 5 quants doing math in a basement server room.

2023-01-06 22:53:44 CET

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Thanks both! I'll check each of these out. I've had a tendency to come at this sort of stuff from what I guess I'd say is a more speculative point of view, but I think we're seeing complexity getting directly injected into people's realities at a time that's faster and more palpable now than I've ever felt before (not that I've been around that long...). Hence the ask -- I've been looking to dig even further into more "rigorously analytical" approaches like the ones you've each cited.

2023-01-06 05:32:17 CET

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Who/what have you been reading that you’ve found to be the most interesting fuel to keep propelling you down the rabbit hole?

2023-01-05 15:20:11 CET

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It can have beefy nodes to scale, but it can also follow (and should follow) a rhizomatic distribution to scale.
Decentralization in communication doesn’t necessarily need to create some monolithic way for information to be immediately apparent to everyone, everywhere—it just needs to make sure that the value behind the information can be reliably distributed and accessed with as little friction as possible. If the tendency of that process is toward including beefier nodes, then it’s probably an indication that, at this point in history, more centralized nodules within the network are just an inherent part of the decentralization process.
But history also shows us that we tend toward decentralization as technology reduces the barriers to processing and transmitting information. So while there might be some nodes/systems that play a more centralized role now, if the trend towards innovating more connective frameworks like nostr continues, the importance of any one node to the network will continue to diminish.

2023-01-02 21:06:23 CET

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So now we're at the endgame and all the land on earth/the moon/mars has been transformed, and the only un-transformed acreage capable of supporting human life is 2 billion lightyears away on Planet 281AC. No one will let the tenant onto their acreage for free because the tenant always smells bad and needs to shower constantly. All the rockets on earth are owned by the Musk family. The tenant would love to build their own, but unfortunately all the materials needed to do so are on other peoples' lands. Either the Musk family lets the tenant use a rocket, or people pitch in to get the tenant the resources needed to make one. In either scenario the tenant's ability to escape coercion is dependent on others, but self-ownership means no one has to help the tenant out. It's not clear why they would help the tenant out either. It's much cheaper and easier to just let the tenant work to stay on your land (where they can shower) than it is to build a starship, and so the feudal model remains.

2023-01-02 19:09:25 CET

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Makes sense, I don't think it should be an issue either because obviously nostr is just the delivery mechanism for the invoice and not where funds transfer, but the fact Apple is trying to take 30% of gas fees paid through a Coinbase wallet always has me concerned about in-app purchase mission creep.

2023-01-02 19:01:36 CET

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Any concern about Apple trying to restrict invoicing for SATs over nostr through Damus (I missed the beta by two days so not sure how it works in the app)? Not saying they're in-app purchases, but I was curious given its earlier attempt at getting coinbase to pay up for gas fees.

2022-12-31 22:02:45 CET

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When I think social media balkanization I think demarcation, along echo chambers like Parler, Truth Social, etc. Idk if that is good - but I don't think that's what's you're getting at. The creation of those channels highlights how information follows entropic forces more than just sociopolitical ones. Information, whether true/fake/political/etc. just wants somewhere to go. From that perspective, scale within a closed system is inherently unstable because entropy augers toward chaos. The fragility of those systems is exacerbated by forces like profit interests, political interests, safety concerns, etc. What's going on right now feels to me like a way to allow information to be channeled in a more stable way without the fragility created by the weight of those centralized interests. In the aggregate, these more balkanized platforms are still creating the infrastructure for information/media to scale as much as it is allowed.
Sociopolitically speaking, I think efforts to do things that further decentralize social media access are good for people who live in worlds where these more fragile systems distort reality (however you want to define that, but basically I'm just saying people should be on the same page), or where they're dispossessed of the information or means to really live in an equitable and free society.
But if my original assumption about information entropy is correct, continued balkanization toward individual sovereignty over information isn't really a question of good or bad, because it feels like it's inevitable. What's good or bad is going to be determined by what people do with the freedom to create information, and that's a much bigger discussion imo.