Ben Eng

In an economy where Bitcoin is the unit of account, does the sum of all assets necessarily equal 21 million BTC? I want to say no, as my explanation of how one person's ledger of business transactions works. The BTC blockchain tracks the money in existence, which is the liquidity. But it does not track the value of assets in the economy.
#nevent1q…dq6p

2025-11-16 15:30:03 CET

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I would say Bitcoin is capital but not productive. It stores value, but does not produce anything. Productive capital is factories, plants, property, equipment, and resources that are constructed to produce goods. It is the capacity to create future value.

2025-11-15 06:43:17 CET

Grok, Rewrite the song "Wanted Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi according to the new theme "Debt or Alive" about ending the Federal Reserve ("The Fed") and fiat currency in favor of sound money
Debt or Alive
It's all the same, only the rates will change
Every day, it seems our wealth's inflatin' away
Another bank where the printers run so cold
I'd fight all night just to bring back gold
[Chorus]
I'm a rebel, on a blockchain I ride
I'm wanted debt or alive
Wanted debt or alive
Sometimes I trade, sometimes it's not for days
The fiat I see always fades in separate ways
Sometimes you tell the crash by the bubble that you burst
And times when you're in debt, all you do is curse
[Chorus]
I'm a rebel, on a blockchain I ride
I'm wanted debt or alive
Wanted debt or alive
I walk these streets, a loaded ledger on my back
I hodl for keeps 'cause the Fed might strike back
I've been everywhere, still, I'm standing tall
I've audited a million books and I've crashed them all
[Chorus]
I'm a rebel, on a blockchain I ride
I'm wanted debt or alive
Wanted debt or alive
I'm a sound money fighter, with silver bullets I fire
I'm wanted debt or alive
Wanted debt or alive

2025-11-08 23:29:00 CET

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LCrR7qYUVORi8TJ2PCK3v?si=9Kkb9SgzTyKOWP1T7XyY6A&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A16c6WR2znCZM1wveeeJoSz

2025-11-08 23:28:11 CET

Guy poses a question: what would you take your $9B in Bitcoin exit to?
The answer cannot be to fiat currency, of course. The answer must be in productive capital, such as investing into building a company that expect to grow and succeed in the long term. Maybe an AI startup opportunity?

2025-11-04 03:42:12 CET

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Only spammers and scammers call.

2025-10-28 04:05:23 CET

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Works fine on Primal.

2025-10-18 20:58:17 CEST

What should my first Bitcoin hardware wallet be? I'm ready to purchase one to learn how to self-custody.

2025-10-01 01:14:44 CEST

If pkdns is meant to replace DNS, why not implement gethostbyname() and replace that in the operating system directly?

2025-09-21 22:05:27 CEST

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* I am likely wrong about economists mislabeling velocity --- they are using it correctly as a transaction rate, as I specified.

2025-09-21 21:43:59 CEST

As a long-time listener of @TomBilyeu and @nprofile…v947, I have a gentle criticism of how the fiat money and debt crisis is being explained. The explanation must be wrong, although the sentiment is directionally correct. As a side-topic, my realization has also allowed me to gain an appreciation for @EricRWeinstein's application of gauge theory to economics, which maybe would also align to how Jim Simons successfully applied math and science expertise to investing.
Tom and Guy both have explained how the money supply necessarily must inflate to enable debts to be paid, because the interest cannot be covered without creating money. That is, if the total money supply is $100, and you lend it all to Alice at 10% interest, Alice cannot pay back the loan with interest without printing an additional $10. On the surface, this seems correct, but it cannot be.
In Guy's episode "Chat_144" [open.spotify.com/episode/1HFORy…], the topic of using Bitcoin for collateralized loans is discussed. BTC is the perfect money, its supply being mathematically impossible to inflate. If the debt yields interest, the prior explanation making inflation necessary completely contradicts how interest-bearing loans of BTC could work.
The contradiction is resolved by fixing the prior explanation. Money supply inflation is NOT necessary to pay back the loan with interest, because of velocity. The borrower spends the $100 on goods to build his business. That money flows out to others. The borrower's business earns money back through sales by his growing business. That $100 of total money supply has exchanged hands a great many hands in numerous transactions throughout the economy. Presumably Alice's business has earned revenue and profits, and it is from this inflow of money, which can grow on the ledger to many times larger than the money supply, that $110 can be paid back to the lender.
However, the $100 money supply does limit the liquidity available to transactions being settled. The $110 repayment cannot happen in a single translation. There needs to be enough velocity to allow that money to circulate through the many hands, so that Alice can repay portions at a time until the full amount owed is repaid.
We can see from these dynamics that the economy has mass (money supply), velocity (rate of transactions), momentum (amount of money * transaction rate, which economists mislabel as 'velocity' of money). We also have conservation laws, such as the obvious money spent must equal money received per transaction; the total money supply remains constant absent the creation of new money. This is exactly the physics of this model of the universe. From this insight, we can easily take the leap that this universe can be modeled as a gauge theory.

2025-09-11 06:05:25 CEST

What do people want to be built on Nostr that doesn't exist yet?

2025-08-28 21:54:08 CEST

Canada bans cash payments over $10,000. This seems like Bitcoin's time to shine.
https://blossom.primal.net/5c4135ec5a10a5a2d2ac05e60372054ae50d3034777215fd89dd21b0f6ad9b35.png

2025-08-24 17:50:28 CEST

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Banning from Telegram makes sense after its CEO Pavel Durov was arrested and detained by France on August 24, 2024. You can be sure that the terms of his release included compromising Telegram's privacy and content moderation (censorship) policies to comply with Europe's authoritarian control (digital services act).

2025-08-05 04:58:42 CEST

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The problem being solved is digital identity for authentication to access online services.

2025-08-05 00:21:43 CEST

If everything becomes unlocked by a block chain secured by cryptographic keys, people and everything we use must evolve to embrace cryptographic keys as digital identity.
Every time the topic of digital identity is raised, there is backlash. The reaction is ill founded. Resistance should be to digital identities that are issued, controlled, and revokable by centralized authorities (government, corporations); with authorization for services being programmable by authoritarians (i.e., social credit).
We need to embrace decentralized digital identity, which is what Bitcoin uses, where the end user arbitrarily issues their own keys, and then maintains custody and control over their keys, never relinquishing secrecy to anyone else. That is Self-Sovereign Identity.

2025-08-04 19:21:40 CEST

Today's lesson in Applied Cosmology: dimensions and degrees of freedom
In physics, Minkowski spacetime has 4 dimensions (3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension), expressed as X⁴. In curved spacetime, the number of degrees of freedom for X⁴ is the number of parameters to specify this model: fourteen (14).
🌐4 coordinates for identifying a point in spacetime (x, y, z, t)
📏3 rulers in the space dimensions to measure distance
⏱️1 clock in the time dimension to measure duration
📐3 protractors (x-y, y-z, z-x) to measure the angle of each space dimension with respect to the other space dimensions
📐3 protractors (x-t, y-t, z-t) to measure the angle of each space dimension with respect to the time dimension
In the same way, we wish to identify configuration dimensions with respect to separation of concerns. The number of separate concerns is the number of dimensions. Within each dimension, each concern has many parameters.
The number of dimensions is modest (fewer than a dozen?), while the total number of degrees of freedom (parameters) is large (hundreds?).
For example, the horizontal scaling dimension is parameterized for the platform and infrastructure by the number of worker nodes in a cluster. Within an application component (e.g., deployment or statefulset), horizontal scaling is parameterized by the replicaset scale.
The vertical scaling dimension is parameterized for the platform and infrastructure by the compute shape (cpu architecture, cpu, memory, boot volume) of each worker node. Within an application component, vertical scaling is parameterized by the cpu, memory, and storage requests and limits of each container within the pod template.
Other dimensions of interest are:
👉high availability
👉disaster recovery
👉workload complexity
👉workload scale
👉workload isolation
👉security isolation
(and many more)

2025-08-03 22:14:40 CEST

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Where will you be posting your keynote? Does Nostr support video?

2025-07-10 06:34:18 CEST

When BTC becomes the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value as the global reserve currency, its valuation should be equivalent to the total global wealth being convertible all at once to BTC.
USD$454.4T / 21M BTC = USD$21,638,095.24 per BTC
Is it coincidental that the square root of the total global wealth roughly equals the number of Bitcoin?

2025-06-27 23:23:42 CEST

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Over that period, how much purchasing power has been lost in the USD based on CPI?
Over that period, how much opportunity cost has been lost based on BTC as the unit of account?

2025-06-13 04:58:07 CEST

The increase in emissions and atmospheric particulates coming out of Iran recently is concerning.

2025-05-31 01:00:22 CEST

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That is a beautiful fat cap.

2025-05-24 16:56:42 CEST

Twitter is literally on fire.
https://blossom.primal.net/f1c0d85221d1155368ee0b53021b9b7c9b4fbfe344716bc181c36a54b7abfa13.png

2025-05-17 17:30:58 CEST

https://breez.technology/sdk/
@breez
Clicking on Build gives this error:
https://blossom.primal.net/a640ed64c290b91854cd93103a83841436666b45f6f77dd64e48b77783eda52e.png

2025-05-05 16:49:53 CEST

When we say "the economy", it sounds disconnected from our lives. I always refocus its meaning to "standard of living", which in this context means the productive activities that sustain our lives. Freezing the activities that sustain our lives focuses on the essential concern.

2025-05-05 16:49:36 CEST

We must recognize that history serves a purpose. Its purpose is not to log a series of events. It is to provide an explanation that teaches us lessons toward strategically guiding our future with ideological and moral clarity. Clarity comes from romanticizing good and evil, separating heroes from villains. Without essentializing in this way, history is noise with no signal.
Signal is discerned from recognizing essential characteristics and filtering out the noise. Thus, history must be mythologized to be useful toward its purpose. The history of America's founding was drowned by noise (slavery, colonialism), and its essential lessons (secession, rights, liberty, protection against government tyranny) were muddied. So too has the Renaissance. The noise now overwhelms the signal, as the mythology is lost to the noise-makers.

2025-05-03 15:01:12 CEST

On Android, Primal has one major advantage over Amethyst. Primal presents a thread in a proper tree, while Amethyst does not.

2025-04-30 18:45:55 CEST

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GDP is an aggregation of productive economic activity and parasitic government waste. If GDP contraction takes place due to reduction in the latter, so much the better.

2025-04-19 02:11:42 CEST

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Sorry, I removed my lightning address from my Nostr profile, so don't try to zap me. The reason being I was using Wallet of Satoshi which just worked. When that got taken away, I never found another free lightning wallet that worked as easily. I mean, do I need to pay for Primal to make zaps work? This illustrates exactly the point of my original post. It's not obvious to a noob how to easily get equipped to make Bigcoin and Lightning work according to best practices.

2025-04-18 17:44:29 CEST

I feel like the Bitcoin ecosystem is missing a go-to library of procedures and practices. That is, a collection of how-tos. For example, how to setup a wallet to self-custody keys. How to buy Bitcoin using fiat. How to protect against losing your keys. How to protect against losing Bitcoin on death. How to setup a wallet to enable Lightning transactions. How to setup a digital service to take Lightning payments.

2025-04-15 04:30:43 CEST

Without scarcity and deprivation of use, there is no concept of property. Ideas have no scarcity. When someone applies your idea, it does not deprive you from using that idea. Therefore, ideas are not property.
https://mises.org/library/book/against-intellectual-property

2025-04-01 14:59:09 CEST

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I was surprised how simple the recipe is for mayo. Now I need to learn to make ranch from scratch.

2025-03-30 22:53:56 CEST

One of the greatest movements in the 1990s was patterns (design patterns, architectural patterns, stereotypes, archetypes). Pioneers like the Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides), Martin Fowler, and Douglas Schmidt wrote books and wikis to capture patterns.
The truth of a pattern was obvious. The explicit and precise specification in human language enables immediate affirmation, because the reader recognizes it as being not novel. The reader has seen it many times before, so the pattern communicates no new knowledge. This is a key characteristic. It is important to say a true thing that is obvious to everyone when expressed explicitly, especially when it has never been said explicitly before.
The utility is that a pattern formalizes a term of art. It establishes a word or phrase as referring to a specification that details its meaning. Knowing the name of the pattern, the listener can immediately reify a mental model, and know that everyone hearing the same name will share that mental model. That is powerful.
Through patterns, coders effectively changed natural language within the domain of software development to be "English as code". When communicating with English in other contexts, there is a high degree of imprecision. We have to account for ambiguity with more or less generous interpretations. However, with patterns we can be more confident in what we say and what we hear from others who speak in those terms.
I feel like in our journey toward Humanity as Code to enable AI functions that can subsume human toil, we should be specifying patterns as formally as possible across all domains. Perhaps AI models can be doing exactly this on our behalf by distilling our writings into pattern specifications, which can then be verified and cleaned up. This would form a reliable repository of truth, which can then be used for training.

2025-03-30 22:53:33 CEST

«Money is backed by purchasing power. That in turn is backed by productive capital.»
I gained that insight today, so I share it with you. I feel like my superpower is distilling masses of cross-disciplinary information as a generalist into compact precise expressions that capture the essence. (Fewer words, more punch.) I feel like this skill is important toward being able to compactify knowledge into a tweet or a meme. I've said for decades: use simple messages.
Now, as to the substance of the insight, I feel like the goldbugs got it wrong. Money backed by gold's intrinsic value can only be assured to hold up to the gold's utility value. My insight is obvious once said aloud, so I claim no brilliance to have said it. I am a little resentful that Austrians didn't say it ubiquitously before me, so that public discourse would not be filled with idiocy like "Bitcoin is backed by nothing" or even "fiat money is backed by nothing". Both statements can now be seen as untrue.
A resource view (a non-monetary view) helps to understand the value of things, so that we are not confused by the obfuscation of value in monetary terms. Which seems strange if one purpose of money is as a unit of account for a common way to assess value across all domains. Where money fails in that purpose is in assessing itself.

2025-03-28 02:33:49 CET

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These people are going to feel it in the rekt 'em.

2025-03-27 13:50:16 CET

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YES!

2025-03-25 04:25:42 CET

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On other platforms, bots and intelligence agencies generate most of the mindless engagement, noise in the form of substance-free reactions or talking points in support of narrative control.

2025-03-21 20:06:16 CET

The biggest tragedy of modern corporations is that division of labor (benefiting from comparative advantage among individual workers and job roles) leads to fragmentation of responsibilities such that catastrophic inefficiencies arise. These manifest in the form of "above my pay grade" (vertical) and "not my job" (horizontal) deference. The shedding of responsibility and narrowing of scope per worker leads to few (if any) responsibilities taken on to bring everything together.
To mitigate the fragmentation of responsibility, the modern corporation generally thinks of the roles for "bringing everything together" in the following ways:
1. Team Managers - supervises people, time/effort, cost, performance
2. Project Managers - oversees plans, schedules, deliverables, coordination
3. Product Managers - gathers requirements, analyzes the problem domain, understands the market, shapes the product vision, specifies the commercial terms, coordinates how to go to market
4. Architect - precisely specifies the problem domain and designs the solution approach, enables the work breakdown for planning
The biggest problem with this view is the incoherence of the following principles that most people who build products are well-versed in.
A. Architecture is everyone's responsibility.
B. Security is everyone's responsibility.
C. Performance is everyone's responsibility.
D. Quality is everyone's responsibility.
These things being everyone's responsibility actually become either no one's responsibility or someone's responsibility. That someone will have neither the power to oversee nor the capacity to deliver, because indeed these are shared (team) responsibilities for which a designated leader can only serve as a champion and cheerleader and/or an annoying nag.
A professionally managed organization, especially at large industrial scale, solves these problems with a matrix. While people management is hierarchical (Team Managers), work is managed through "dotted line" reporting structures that cross functions. A RACI matrix specifies this precisely. Every job role/responsibility and its relationships to all others is defined in terms of Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. This form of professionalism is what breeds the "above my pay grade" and "not my job" mentality.
Professional management is what kills "CEO mentality", which is the founder mode entrepreneurial spirit instilled throughout an entrepreneurially managed organization.
The problem is how do you scale founder mode beyond the founders? How do you scale CEO mentality beyond the CEO? How do you assign responsibility without breeding irresponsibility elsewhere?

2025-03-17 19:45:42 CET

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Links or patties?

2025-03-07 19:26:37 CET

Perhaps we should expect applications to evolve to become AI-enabled by embedding small local models that are specialized to each application. However, such models would have enough agency to reach out to services enabled by large models, whenever the local small model needs expertise that falls outside its own. Just like how the model should know when it should perform Web browsing to fetch the most up-to-date information; or it should invoke a calculator to do arithmetic; or it should invoke Mathematica to solve differential equations analytically; or it should generate Python and execute it to perform computations; or it should use online services for payments, commerce, and logistics; similarly, it should know what online services (large models) to collaborate with to take advantage of expertise beyond its own limited capabilities.

2025-03-03 19:45:30 CET

Bitcoin priced in fiat is more volatile than Zelenskyy's butthurt.

2025-02-25 14:18:02 CET

Web of Trust is not. It should be a Web of Authenticity and a Web of Integrity. It is NOT a Web of Authorization.

2025-01-28 15:05:49 CET

Intelligence metric: epistemological dynamic range. Measure how far a person can understand the world in terms of abstractions, while also grounding such knowledge in terms of concretes. The metric is not scalar. One dimension is in the meta direction. Another is breadth across domains (analogs).

2025-01-27 15:08:24 CET

@nprofile…5aad topic suggestion: for the many types of wallets and devices that you talk about, what is the role or function each of them plays in terms of the uses cases and journeys that a typical person would experience? Jade, Bitkit, Fold, Nunchuk, etc. It's hard to understand how each of them fits with the other, and why you'd use them in conjunction.

2025-01-16 23:31:17 CET

Fiat slogan: fux the money, fux the world.

2024-12-30 00:03:01 CET

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Or does a Cashapp lnbc address never expire, even though I get a new unique address every time I click to see it in the app? That is what is incredibly confusing. Meanwhile, everyone in Nostr has LN addresses that look email-like.

2024-12-29 22:19:35 CET

I think I must be a total LN dumbass. When Satoshi Wallet was working, everything was flawlessly easy. It gave me an email-like address, and zaps to it just worked. When it was shut down, I started using Cashapp, it shows a bc1q address and a lnbc address for receiving BTC. However, I just realized the lnbc address changes with every transaction for privacy, and maybe it even expires after some time. Cashapp doesn't give me an email-like address for LN. Or does it? This is so confusing.

2024-12-25 19:46:43 CET

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Most charity is a scam to fund the administrative staff to control the organization that operates the charity. The purported beneficiaries are decoys.

2024-12-25 17:17:07 CET

Is Primal superior to Amethyst on Android? I should give it a try.

2024-12-24 18:30:23 CET

I'm not a proponent of Apple iPhone. However, as an Android user while the rest of the family uses iPhones, I feel like I have a much higher rate of fat-fingering when using GBoard. Apple's virtual keyboard accuracy is far superior.

2024-12-22 21:41:18 CET

Worth contemplating: what 'checks and balances' exist in our system of government to counter abusing classification of data to hide wrongdoing?

2024-12-16 17:16:20 CET

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Having heard about Primal on Bitcoin Audible, it sounds interesting. But then exploring primal.net I can't see any information about how to on-board.

2024-12-03 03:27:15 CET

«One day you discovered you'd learned a cartoon version of Lincoln in school. Not the man who favored an amendment to the Constitution forever preventing the federal government from abolishing slavery» https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/20243-9250479?e=8be05b6441
Our culture and societal cohesion relies on a shared understanding of history as a collection of false but believable myths. Myths are formed from idealized stories retold to essentialize some moral principle or some virtuous characteristics that inspire us. Of course, the noble goal of freeing the slaves motivated our nation to transform itself. This is one element that binds us proudly in fraternity, because we are a part of a great improvement in society. We are built on myths to fuel our virtues, such as courage and valor. We look back to the precursors to our society, such as the 300 Spartans who stood bravely against the vast Persian army of Xerces. Their battle cry Molṑn Labé defied the enemy to come take their cannons and semiautomatic rifles, as it does today for us.

2024-12-01 03:59:05 CET

Did the value of all NFTs crash to zero yet? And everyone moved on without anyone noticing?

2024-11-24 23:51:55 CET

If there was ever any doubt that Jack was in favor or tolerant of establishment censorship and narrative control using Twitter, we now see that Bluesky is in full-on censorship mode to suppress such opinions as "trans-women are men" and to suspend accounts who engage in such speech.

2024-11-22 15:49:59 CET

@nprofile…t7a0 I just heard your rant about Pear Drive. A quick search failed to find any trace of the project and its source repository. Is it not open source?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3sYh4nnRSodyFj5L5306Jz?si=JYZQiJZhSnmxRB2abwF8cQ&t=4253

2024-11-10 16:49:24 CET

In today's climate of lawfare and the routine weaponization of “Show me the man and I'll show you the crime” (Beria's law), one should judge defendants accordingly. If someone is charged or convicted of crimes, ask who was the victim and what rights were violated? The state or a state agency or office has no legitimate standing to be a victim, because the state has no rights (only enumerated powers).
The corollary to this is that unjust and immoral laws are also illegitimate. It is our duty to violate them. This includes laws that violate free speech, free expression, free association, privacy, and private property. This includes KYC, AML, surveillance, and lawful intercept.

2024-11-10 16:30:36 CET

Are there independent journalists on Nostr publishing current events and breaking news? To me that is the next gap to fill for Nostr to actually replace Twitter as the primary social media site, next to having a friends network that includes one's favorite people to follow.

2024-11-10 16:10:02 CET

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I see that you already said the exact same thing in your follow-on episode. Good job.

2024-11-10 15:13:59 CET

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Compare: https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2021/05/09/future-distributed-applications/

2024-11-10 15:11:56 CET

@nprofile…6425 Maybe good idea to purchase a cheap GoPro-like device that you can covertly record the activity at the hotel room entry, while you are not present. Then, you never need to rely solely on hotel security cams.

2024-11-10 14:49:34 CET

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Correction: link to the full article
https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a

2024-11-10 14:45:27 CET

I would like to see Gordon Brander's article reframed in terms of Consistency Availability Partitioning tolerance (CAP theorem = Brewer's theorem).
Article: https://www.myhub.ai/items/natures-many-attempts-to-evolve-a-nostr
Guy's Read: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNxe5YsvaDpKvojJGfusZ?si=OS44QukFTT265Mbhn-TMrg&t=1846

2024-11-09 15:51:26 CET

"AI is going to replace your job" is equivalent to saying "power tools are going to replace your job".

2024-10-22 22:09:06 CEST

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If only 21,000,000 BTC can ever exist, these valuations are impossible.

2024-10-09 04:42:02 CEST

Censorship resistance is necessarily traded off with privacy? You cannot have both? This is the first I've heard of this.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Sc0UuIhoD8YefMHor6C13?si=QwM9S-IRSuKjYLwecHtdlw&t=1360&pi=1mR5ieKxRFmmw

2024-09-09 23:19:16 CEST

On a Bitcoin standard, the volatility is always zero. One BTC is always valued at one BTC. That will never change.

2024-09-07 19:54:52 CEST

The more times that I revisit my formulation of rights, the more confident I am in it. I truly believe I have added an essential component to this understanding, which was missing previously. That element is 'mutual recognition', a specialization of 'reciprocity'. The latter concept is also helpful in understanding the proper response to violation of rights.
https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2023/01/23/revisiting-the-definition-of-rights/

2024-09-07 16:12:48 CEST

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NAK?

2024-09-02 22:17:08 CEST

I use Signal to chat with some acquaintances. I don't really believe it is secure in terms of privacy. It may implement some form of encryption. It may offer some form of authentication and data integrity. These measures may be an improvement over other messaging technologies.
However, I don't remember ever generating a private key to use in Signal. I don't have custody of a private key that I control and keep safe and private. Therefore, I can only assume, not my keys, not my privacy.

2024-09-02 21:45:54 CEST

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I'm the same. I can't play music and don't understand where to begin. I've even read books on music theory recently. After reading about the circle of fifths and not understanding (unable to see the pattern), music feels further out of reach than ever. If music is an art, it is a black art.

2024-09-02 21:33:07 CEST

We have come to understand, chiefly through the teachings of government education, that 'science' means the expert opinions espoused by an authority with more clout than you.
I wonder if the style of how science is taught plays a role. Every science course spends a lot of time on the history and the scientists credited with discoveries. This puts the focus on persons more so than the method and the substance of each discovery. Putting aside shoulders and giants that are disregarded by venerating specific individuals, this style of teaching conditions the mind to believe what is told by people anointed with special mystique. In this way, we train a society of non-player characters.
To train scientific minds, we must not tell them to believe what they are told. It is not even enough to demonstrate and have students reproduce well-known experiments. When we teach Newton, we need to finish with an apology that although he got it mostly right, his understanding was incomplete, and thus ultimately not entirely correct. Same for Einstein. Same for Bohr. Same for Schrodinger. Same for everyone and everything we know today. Everything we think we know in science today is in fact incorrect at the extreme limits of our understanding. Observations disagree with our best theories, and our best scientists cannot yet explain them. The emphasis of our training must be to teach scientists to not be married to our incomplete and incorrect knowledge passed on to us by our predecessors and the current crop of experts. Science is about seeking the truth, not about being told the truth.
One of the most valuable ideas I didn't fully appreciate until only a few years ago listening to Sean Carroll's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe" series of videos was the distinction between an "effective theory" and a "fundamental theory". Almost everything we know is an effective theory. This means the theory is only useful within some narrow range of conditions. To teach the theory without that caveat is to lie by omission. Almost everything science students are taught suffers from lying by omission. That's why I often quip that everything we know today is wrong or everything we know today is a lie.
I'd like to take the formal definition of "effective theory" and dress it down to business casual.
I am reminded of second and third year in engineering Skule™, where most students learn for the first time the real-world relationship between theory and practice. First year is occupied entirely by maths-and-sciences 101. Most students have not ever built anything of their own design (without someone telling them how) at that point in their life.
Even during first year, students start to see a difference in mentality between professors from math and science faculties as compared to engineering faculties. It was my first exposure to the routine application of "first order approximation", whenever any calculation became difficult. Engineering profs literally did this at every turn, and the 'good enough' quality of this spun my head. It was quick and dirty, and yet presented with the same mathematical formalism and rigor. Most importantly it was effective. Engineering is all about applying theory, but knowing when and how to apply rules of thumb for practical work.
Eye opening was digital circuits. One would imagine that logic gates that only compute based on 1 (5v) and 0 (ground) are pretty well-behaved. A student naively building circuits will quickly realize that this so-called digital world is a mess of analog madness. WTF are capacitance, resistance, and inductance doing in this binary world? What do you mean I have to put a capacitor across the ground and 5v pin? Madness!
Holy shit did the theory ever lie by omission. Reality is 'complicated'.

2024-09-01 22:53:28 CEST

This is an interesting perspective: "Is illegal Bitcoin a good thing?" Legitimization of Bitcoin allows tentacles of regulatory capture and state involvement to infiltrate the ecosystem. When BTC is illegal, state influence is excluded, and BTC participant are properly incentivized to build resilience and protect the network.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1knFLL9TPuLtGVdSRtDEF7?si=xPM_jnwIRUqZ4du4cWIdqQ&t=3839&pi=-VAnffLERDa94

2024-08-26 03:54:23 CEST

Seeing a sudden surge of interest in Nostr as Twitter users are posting their npubs. Is the Telegram CEO arrest opening eyes to the vulnerability of centralized platforms?

2024-08-11 21:44:27 CEST

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What is the current bubble? I think it was the zirp-induced real estate bubble, where people locked into low interest rate mortgages saw their property values skyrocket as covid refugees fled New York and California. Now with higher interest rates, homeowners cannot afford to sell their homes or move elsewhere, so we see stagnation due to paralysis, as inventory remains near zero while demand cannot be satisfied.

2024-06-30 19:23:43 CEST

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I'm guessing, as fees rise due to increased demand for settling on chain and due to the reward disappearing for miners, the fee for spending might exceed the value of the UTXO.

2024-06-13 07:28:16 CEST

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I always imagined the asteroid belt in an elliptical orbit between Mars and Jupiter, but it's actually almost triangular connecting Jupiter's Lagrange points L3, L4, and L5.

2024-06-11 16:57:30 CEST

@npub1h8n…rpev the point of disagreement with Rand on the topic of faith actually pertain to a concept called Benevolent Universe Premise. Rational optimism is BUP: the belief without needing proof that the universe is available to be understood by our reasoning minds; and beneficial to us to the extent that we are able to control it according to such understanding.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/68Lu0Al64awfUNpXbpHu0p?si=E3Rk5O46Tx-RtjAr8I7X9A

2024-06-10 00:36:36 CEST

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"far right" is only used as an epithet by those among the far wrong.

2024-05-26 15:47:29 CEST

I google-searched "holesail peer to peer" and it found nothing relevant. Using brave search found it as the first result along with holepunch-related pages. Looks like Google is down-ranking or censoring this.

2024-05-26 15:07:32 CEST

Does keet have a directory of rooms for users to find interesting rooms to join?

2024-05-16 00:23:35 CEST

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Windows Task Manager shows two pear-runtime.exe processes doing nothing. After killing them and retrying, a window opened and the user interface appeared. Seems to be working fine now.

2024-05-16 00:03:49 CEST

When I do `pear run pear://keet` on windows, it just sits there forever making no progress.
Is it supposed to do something???
https://docs.pears.com/guides/getting-started

2024-05-05 23:20:49 CEST

I feel like I wrote the summary for this episode on personal AI in 2022, before @npub1h8n…rpev published this episode.
https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2022/06/10/revisiting-personal-assistant/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2E8aBjyILy0pgPF9dPRyME?si=KHEKje2BScSjVDiXDXOwYQ

2024-04-28 17:55:39 CEST

Bitcoiners want Bitcoin to become the new de facto money. They do NOT want the government to treat Bitcoin as money. Otherwise, financial regulations like KYC/AML and money transmitter licensing will be enforced, which no Bitcoiner should build technology to comply with.
Florida appellate court rules that Bitcoin is money. https://www.klgates.com/Trouble-in-Paradise-Florida-Court-Rules-that-Selling-Bitcoin-is-Money-Transmission-02-13-2019

2024-04-24 23:32:21 CEST

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We anticipate that any form of mixing transactions to hide the parties conducting that transaction from government surveillance is being targeted. Privacy is illegal, apparently.

2024-04-24 23:23:50 CEST

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Asked GPT-4 to fact check. It was pedantic. Essentially confirmed.
https://files.sovbit.host/media/0b1e11c0406b6f929dd3c9c21e5a2930527d327912ef6dff13a64ad2d3c6aeea/a81bc752809c3b6778c44f7314bb4b356adb612f2aabbace7bfe4c5ecc9a5ed7.webp

2024-04-24 23:17:52 CEST

@npub1kzu…rf4g the term you are looking for is "embedding" in AI Unchained for inserting a block of content into a context window so that you can submit a prompt to operate on that content.

2024-04-22 01:19:51 CEST

Fuck that Ben guy.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6fayedwePqCWpmIRt6ipH6?si=ElGxpDHWRjek8bVZYStxYA

2024-04-08 17:09:15 CEST

My internal communication just now.
«Following up on the topic of autonomous operations, AO roughly refers to a service running mostly without human intervention. [MyProduct] can push this envelope further by setting a more ambitious goal. By standardizing the patterns for SOPs and interfaces (workflows, observability), and by formalizing them toward machine precision, we can enable the next generation. It becomes trainable for an LLM. First, gen AI can assist SRE to answer questions. Then, it can do the SRE's job almost completely, once given sufficient agency. That should be our end-point to set a vision that can excite.»

2024-03-20 01:14:13 CET

Everyone on Nostr are excited about Blossom Drive. It's a minimalist in every way. Entirely different than what I envisioned as the basis for decentralized storage. Perhaps this basic building block is what we need at the base layer. Torrents above it?

2024-03-10 00:25:49 CET

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HP-28S https://files.sovbit.host/media/0b1e11c0406b6f929dd3c9c21e5a2930527d327912ef6dff13a64ad2d3c6aeea/cc327c6d0109478976150d75e7e0663e3463a52881162e85a23f903245a77b09.webp

2024-03-02 20:22:01 CET

Because of the friction of integrating digital services to fiat payment systems, including PCI-DSS and KYC/AML, the ease of integrating to Lightning might be what pushes Bitcoin into the mainstream. Unleashed.chat is the first service that only accepts Bitcoin/Lightning because of this ease of integration.

2024-03-02 20:14:30 CET

I asked Unleashed.chat about what topics I talk about. That is not me. Do I have a doppelganger?
https://files.sovbit.host/media/public/7197c3e0b8008668165cda66dc3eadd2cdd0532175f3a7dfb5d00488e8420ac3.webp

2024-02-26 17:41:56 CET

Bookmarking this ep on executive function using the prefrontal cortex for how to evolve toward AGI.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0c8DWcNAFHioywGxC9rjwN?si=XXGiAMTNQj2UJhW8kIGjSQ

2024-02-26 03:49:42 CET

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Expanding on foundational technology for distributed data for decentralized apps, we must recognize the separation of concerns between an app's data versus the user's data.
If someone offers an AI image generator as a service, the app's own data includes the model weights. This is distinct from the end user's preferences, prompts, and generated images. We would want to enable the end user to own his data, so that he can control the access (privacy, sharing) and he can take his data to other services. For data to be as censorship-resistant as identity (SSI), we introduce the concept of self-sovereign data (SSD). The user's data can be scattered and replicated throughout the Internet, served by diverse storage services without any one platform having control over availability. Think of this being enabled by a contemporary bittorrents protocol, because we want to preserve a p2p approach for censorship-resistance.
Through this separation of app data and end user data (SSD), we would design every app to honor this bring your own data (BYOD) approach. This becomes the norm for the future decentralized Internet. Every app must support bring your own identity and bring your own data, so that end users can never be locked in (and rug-pulled) by the service provider.
#nevent1q…5hkm

2024-02-26 03:46:38 CET

Centralized control through government tyranny, cronyism, and corporate monopolization are the underlying dynamics that must be mitigated through decentralization, but we are falling behind. Foundational technologies are lacking.
First we need identity. Id must be self-sovereign, so that the individual controls their own private keys, sharing them with no one, holding custody securely with unbreakable secrecy. Everything else is built on SSI as a foundation, because we need ownership, privacy, authenticity, integrity, and access control---all dependent on identity.
Next, we need dis-intermediated communication. Individuals need to be able to exchange messages reliably without being tied irreplaceably to a third party. This includes being able to identify, find, and address each other according to their identity.
Over top of p2p comms, we need censorship-resistant apps that are capable of interacting with one's social network. This includes commerce, so Bitcoin for store of value and for payments is a foundational element of the architecture.
For apps and the services that individuals can offer for commerce to be censorship-proof, we need for hosting of logic on compute to be distributed, and we need the data that is processed to be distributed.
Here is the point where the analysis necessarily veers away from the simple explanation that I've tried to stick to, so I'll stop this thread here, and I'll start exploring the details in separate threads as my wandering mind spontaneously gets to them, as I did in this thread.

2024-02-10 19:09:26 CET

The danger of quantum computing growing capable of factoring large numbers is not only that public key cryptography that enables private communications, data privacy, data integrity, and Bitcoin transaction verification. It is that replacing the cryptographic algorithm in Bitcoin would require a hard fork. Once Bitcoin becomes the dominant money, such an event would provide an opportunity to change the rules encoded into the protocol. The enemy class would seek to inject authoritarian controls (KYC, AML, lawful intercept) into the protocol at that opportunity.
This thought arose while listening to this podcast.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0IIp1LOwQg1pNpiNxTDrUp?si=ws9HStHLQPavQ2T77U08Cw

2024-02-03 20:17:57 CET

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I'm guessing the 10 min per block rate plus the bandwidth needed for the block size places a constraint on the latency and throughput needed by a miner.