A Decentralized Approach to "Truth About" Presentations

[mgggb]

I have an idea that I need some collaborators for to do a trial run. I, like many of you, really enjoy the Truth About presentations that FDR does. They are a great resource for getting introduced to complex and challenging topics and I want to make some myself since there are so many interesting things that people I interact daily just have no idea about. However, there are two issues that I find myself running into--time and technical knowledge limitations--that both play off of each other. There are only so many hours in the day, and since I've got a day job, that eats up a significant amount of time for side projects. With little available time, I'm constrained by what I already have knowledge about because of how long it takes to do decent research. However, this only has to be a problem if I am the only variable here. I'm sure that many of you are in a similar situation where you have some knowledge about a topic that you'd like to share, but it is incomplete due to time demands. If we took a Wikipedia style approach to making a presentation, we could fill in the gaps of each other's knowledge.

For example, if I'm ever talking to people about cryptocurrency, it's mostly just a lot of explaining the basics since the average person has no idea about it other than the price. As for myself, I can explain its significance from a moral, political, and economic ground, but the technical aspects of blockchain are beyond me. If I tried to make a presentation, I could explain the first three, but the last one I could not. Since the goal would be to make a presentation so accessible that you'd be comfortable sharing it with your grandma, all aspects have to be covered to make a credible case. I can explain the economics behind why you want to own a deflationary asset, but if I tried to explain what ring signatures are or how your funds are protected from hackers, it would sound like voodoo because that's about my level of understanding. But, if someone here had that specific knowledge, we could fill in the gaps of each others knowledge and thereby make a much more credible and compelling presentation. However, this is just a one off example. The real significance here is as a platform. By using a reputation system, the thousands of us here collectively have a tremendous amount of untapped specific information that we can aggregate into something truly useful for spreading around the internet.

Just for example, during the last call in show, Stefan mentioned how most British sailor's died from scurvy and not battle. That seemed shocking so I put it into google to find out more. One of the first results I found was some statistics about the revolutionary war. Apparently, of the 18k British soldiers that died in the conflict, only about 1,000 were from actual combat, and the rest were from diseases like scurvy. That's completely mind blowing! In all the years that I've studied history, I've never heard anything about this. A truth about war presentation on this would be incredibly fascinating, and would be possible with a platform that collates people with niche information. 

So, if anyone is interested in testing this out, reply to this thread and we can get the ball rolling.

[RichardY]

Even Stefan said in his original Bitcoin presentation it does not meet the Aristotelian definition of money, it has no substance. I agree with the Billionaire Jewish guy Peter Schiff, that it is not viable or at least a good idea.  A Red Herring. Plato's Objective Idealism. Hasn't bitcoin crashed in proportion to the dollar since the beginning of the year? I don't agree bitcoin has a moral dimension to it.

"I see when a bubble develops, and I buy." George Soros. Cold blooded psychopath, procrastination be damned.
 

On 7/14/2018 at 2:39 PM, mgggb said:

Just for example, during the last call in show, Stefan mentioned how most British sailor's died from scurvy and not battle. That seemed shocking so I put it into google to find out more. One of the first results I found was some statistics about the revolutionary war. Apparently, of the 18k British soldiers that died in the conflict, only about 1,000 were from actual combat, and the rest were from diseases like scurvy. That's completely mind blowing! In all the years that I've studied history, I've never heard anything about this. A truth about war presentation on this would be incredibly fascinating, and would be possible with a platform that collates people with niche information. 

So, if anyone is interested in testing this out, reply to this thread and we can get the ball rolling.

Yeah doesn't sound very romantic to have the skill peel away from your gums and haemorrhage blood, develop the odd infection.

The Revolutionary War may have never occurred, if soldiers were not sent in. No one to fight against. The legitimacy of the revolutionaries would have been zero. However the Tory Party(King's Faction) dominated at the time, and were for sending in soldiers. Didn't help much that the Whig Faction leader committed suicide after being appointed Lord Chancellor, distantly related to the guy, the 1st Earl of Hardwicke was more successful, holding the office for 19 years before retiring and promoted to Earl.  Interesting that Whig means "cattle driver". 

[mgggb]

On 7/15/2018 at 1:24 PM, RichardY said:

Even Stefan said in his original Bitcoin presentation it does not meet the Aristotelian definition of money, it has no substance. I agree with the Billionaire Jewish guy Peter Schiff, that it is not viable or at least a good idea.  A Red Herring. Plato's Objective Idealism. Hasn't bitcoin crashed in proportion to the dollar since the beginning of the year? I don't agree bitcoin has a moral dimension to it.

Of course bitcoin is substantive. It's not something that you can hold in your hand, but neither are metaphysics.

[RichardY]

14 hours ago, mgggb said:

Of course bitcoin is substantive. It's not something that you can hold in your hand, but neither are metaphysics.

So what about it is substantive?

[mgggb]

8 hours ago, RichardY said:

So what about it is substantive?

Is something only real if you can hold it in your hand?

[barn]

Hi @mgggb

Good to see you back!

(not sure about the double post but I might be just nitpicking...)

I like the idea, the 'compartmentalised' approach to research in general (I'm understanding you right?!)

I was wondering,... with the multiplicity of participants (as in:arbitrars of value), how's accuracy not being affected negatively, get watered down? Is it like, all participants must adhere to a common principle and demonstrate proof for keeping to it... for example?

[RichardY]

10 hours ago, mgggb said:

Is something only real if you can hold it in your hand?

I would say real is what conforms to an established cultural framework or construct. Getting into to the Matrix territory. What can I purchase with Bitcoin that I can't purchase more easily or not all, with £ or $ and how do I do that?

"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."

[RichardY]

.

[mgggb]

7 hours ago, barn said:

Hi @mgggb

Good to see you back!

(not sure about the double post but I might be just nitpicking...)

I like the idea, the 'compartmentalised' approach to research in general (I'm understanding you right?!)

I was wondering,... with the multiplicity of participants (as in:arbitrars of value), how's accuracy not being affected negatively, get watered down? Is it like, all participants must adhere to a common principle and demonstrate proof for keeping to it... for example?

Hey Barn. I posted in general and in listener projects because listener projects seemed kind of slow. Getting things accurate is a huge issue for something like this, but that's why I'm looking on FDR. My assumption is that we have a common basis here and that would make it easy to trust each other. Just for a trial run to see if this is something anyone is even interested in doing, we'd just have to manually check edits--but if this is going to scale there would have to be an actual reputation system to incentivize good info.

[barn]

35 minutes ago, mgggb said:

Hey Barn. I posted in... [...]

Ah, ok... gotcha

35 minutes ago, mgggb said:

Getting things accurate is a huge issue for something like this, but that's why I'm looking on FDR. My assumption is that we have a common basis here and that would make it easy to trust each other. 

Agreed. May I suggest it should be a 'scientific method based' term with an example for 'how to' and proofs/refs. , all whom that wish to post must agree to it prior... or something similar?

(I'm sure, for the most of us here, it'll be just a friendly reminder, a reassuring guideline & clear boundary from the get go... as you may suspect it'll certainly attract less preferable standards too once it takes off, see my suggestion as an insurance type 'caveat', 'forward thinking'.

... Hold on, it does sound almost exactly how this forum operates, or at least what my own perception of it is, in general terms. Anyway, you get me.)

35 minutes ago, mgggb said:

there would have to be an actual reputation system to incentivize good info. 

This, I'm not sure about. It doesn't mean it can't be a great addition, only my understanding of it limited and have doubts.

a. Shouldn't the fact that a topic evolves and people are happy about it, chime back with gratitude should be enough on its own?

b. I understand the opposite arguments I believe... , just as greed or laziness can be fantastic motivators (pulley, automatisation... etc.) , reputation can be 'overdosed' too, falsely (not for the good reasons) inflated, only to observe those that were once 'cutting edge', slowly draw back and fade... because of relatively lessened 'rain of rep. droplets'. Like I said, probably I don't fully understand the proper mechanisms in reputation systems

c. My favourite, and I quote:

"It takes two numbers to measure your own ass, but only one to measure my kid's future."

Interstellar, 'Cooper', Mathew McMemmmecConaughey

caveat: I'd be wrong to assume the parallel if people in general saw rep. numbers not very 'telling' and weighed it less importantly than how they in general do, now-a-days. (besides, I might be comparing inaccurately my small pool of experiences, perhaps even projecting... dunno.)

[mgggb]

3 minutes ago, barn said:

a. Shouldn't the fact that a topic evolves and people are happy about it, chime back with gratitude should be enough on its own?

b. I understand the opposite arguments I believe... , just as greed or laziness can be fantastic motivators (pulley, automatisation... etc.) , reputation can be 'overdosed' too, falsely (not for the good reasons) inflated, only to observe those that were once 'cutting edge', slowly draw back and fade... because of relatively lessened 'rain of rep. droplets'. Like I said, probably I don't fully understand the proper mechanisms in reputation systems

It's one thing to understand an opposing argument, but another to actually believe it. How would you set up an incentive structure for good information if not by a rep system? Are there alternatives that I am not aware of?

[barn]

6 minutes ago, mgggb said:

It's one thing to understand an opposing argument, but another to actually believe it. How would you set up an incentive structure for good information if not by a rep system? Are there alternatives that I am not aware of?

Yes, 'walk the walk vs. talk the...' sure. And I know ppl respond to (+/-) incentives.

How about 'thanks/no thanks' based rep system where in one sentence the donator would have to say a few words of the 'why'? (no links, images, yes to templates, integrated translator)

[barn]

... hi @mgggb

(+1...there's aaaalways a +1)

...if you cared to take a look, read the back and forth, I'd appreciate your input/feedback on it. (I think it is rather pertinent.) / (tl;dr, meh, no worries)

 

[mgggb]

5 hours ago, barn said:

... hi @mgggb

(+1...there's aaaalways a +1)

...if you cared to take a look, read the back and forth, I'd appreciate your input/feedback on it. (I think it is rather pertinent.) / (tl;dr, meh, no worries)

 

Interesting... I missed that update because I usually skip videos titled like that because I've already donated so requests to do so seem less relevant. I'll pay more attention going forward.

That convo thread kind of summed up the current situation I am in. I don't agree with your argument that if commenters want to be heard on a larger scale that they should put in the work of content creators. Being a content creator is a full time job, which I am realizing as I am now trying to produce content. I already have a full time job that takes up a ton of my time, leaving little for side projects. These are things I would like to do full time, but it is kind of a catch 22. I don't have enough time to make my side projects profitable which means I have to spend more time working, but that means I have less time to make content. So I'll definitely have to look into steemit.

I've recently finished some other projects that have taken up an inordinate amount of my spare time, so please don't misunderstand me and think that I believe it "should" be easy to make a difference in the world. Running something like FDR seems like a dream to many, but only if you ignore the responsibility of being your own boss. I don't think steemit allows for collaboration, but if it did that would be exactly what I described in my op.

But do you think something like that has a future? I see your point that paying people to make content could perverse the incentives so that people only make content that will get liked. But how else could that be done? At the very least, it seems like that site makes it so people don't have to work full time at creating but can still influence things.

[barn]

On 07/20/2018 at 4:54 AM, mgggb said:

Interesting... I missed that update because I usually skip videos titled like that because I've already donated so requests to do so seem less relevant. I'll pay more attention going forward. 

Sounds like a good idea.

On 07/20/2018 at 4:54 AM, mgggb said:

That convo thread kind of summed up the current situation I am in. I don't agree with your argument that if commenters want to be heard on a larger scale that they should put in the work of content creators. Being a content creator is a full time job, which I am realizing as I am now trying to produce content. 

For the sake of accuracy: 

@Chauncey Tinker

-> said:

"I don't think this divide between content creators and consumers is healthy, it creates an artificial divide and I think that a lot of good voices are not being heard.  People might start commenting in their spare time and find they are receiving enough rewards to make a career out of it, so it could create an easy avenue for the best voices to rise to the surface.  Their rewards could enable them to start new ventures and invest in projects that they could only have dreamed of doing otherwise.  The number of content creators currently is very limited, I would like to se e thousands and thousands of people doing this sort of work (and it is work, believe me). "

to which I responded by saying

@barn

"Well , there's a reason why content creators are generally more ambitious, conscientious, productive. The fact that many people are too lazy to put in the effort... If a commenter wanted to be heard on a larger scale, they should do what the content creators had done... most of the times that's not happening because once they realise the effort behind such outcomes, the weasel out. I completely agree with Mike Cernovich's breakdown of how success is usually only seen as a sudden streak of luck, planets being align... when it's in reality couldn't be f arther from the truth. (i.e. Katy Perry, Queen, J. K. Rowling, Game of Throne's writer... etc.)

I believe, it's very important to have difficulties especially when starting out. I see aiding some groups of people detrimental to their learning of survival skills on the long run. What is it, Cambridge University now gives extra time for women on their exams?... How's that treating them with respect? I guess you get my analogy, where I'm going with this.

Failing is good. Challenge builds character and teaches people about thei r dedication/abilities/strength-weaknesses. "

-

Eeeverybody and their dogs want to be heard, which is fine.

People (including myself at times of course) think like, they're the main characters in the movie and want to be treated that way. Especially when the level of entry is free... Look at YT comments...

Basically, I was trying to highlight that 'piggybacking' isn't fair (less preferable) , people who don't do the required effort to produce quality content shouldn't be incentivised to 'piggyback' more.

Furthermore, a great deal of the cash being sucked up by subpar contributors, won't go to quality creators

It would be analogous to promoting fat people to be the dietitians in hospitals because occasionally they have a few good ideas, repeat certain advice they read in a diet book, heard from a fit and healthy dietary consultant. (a broken clock is showing the right time twice a day, nevertheless people shouldn't treat them as true timekeeping devices, engage in promoting them as equals to actual working clocks)

And I empathise with your struggles...

On 07/20/2018 at 4:54 AM, mgggb said:

Being a content creator is a full time job, which I am realizing as I am now trying to produce content. I already have a full time job that takes up a ton of my time, leaving little for side projects. These are things I would like to do full time, but it is kind of a catch 22. I don't have enough time to make my side projects profitable which means I have to spend more time working, but that means I have less time to make content.

Prioritisation.

Does it ever happen to you that you are full but your 'eyes hunger for more'?

Think of the devoted professional vs. good parent dichotomy. Either, or.

Think of the companies that haven't yet narrowed down their niche focus group, or they just want to be a 'be all, good for all' type dream, illusory provider. Can't and won't work. The reason why prioritisation is so important, so that you are utilising your opportunity costs at near peek efficiency.

Think of the illusion of human multitasking. That humans have a pool of resources that when they split into several groups, only their number grows but their total sum will never grow greater than the starting amount... (or the law of energy conservation... etc.)

[mgggb]

5 hours ago, barn said:

Eeeverybody and their dogs want to be heard, which is fine.

People (including myself at times of course) think like, they're the main characters in the movie and want to be treated that way. Especially when the level of entry is free... Look at YT comments...

Basically, I was trying to highlight that 'piggybacking' isn't fair (less preferable) , people who don't do the required effort to produce quality content shouldn't be incentivised to 'piggyback' more.

Furthermore, a great deal of the cash being sucked up by subpar contributors, won't go to quality creators

It would be analogous to promoting fat people to be the dietitians in hospitals because occasionally they have a few good ideas, repeat certain advice they read in a diet book, heard from a fit and healthy dietary consultant. (a broken clock is showing the right time twice a day, nevertheless people shouldn't treat them as true timekeeping devices, engage in promoting them as equals to actual working clocks)

And I empathise with your struggles...

 

5 hours ago, barn said:

Prioritisation.

Does it ever happen to you that you are full but your 'eyes hunger for more'?

Think of the devoted professional vs. good parent dichotomy. Either, or.

Think of the companies that haven't yet narrowed down their niche focus group, or they just want to be a 'be all, good for all' type dream, illusory provider. Can't and won't work. The reason why prioritisation is so important, so that you are utilising your opportunity costs at near peek efficiency.

Think of the illusion of human multitasking. That humans have a pool of resources that when they split into several groups, only their number grows but their total sum will never grow greater than the starting amount... (or the law of energy conservation... etc.)

I'll respond to the last point of yours later.

Is it possible to both strongly agree and disagree with you at the same time? I forget in which book, but what you said reminded me about something Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the internet making it really profitable to go after the long tail. In essence, traditional bookstores wanted to carry only the most popular books because there is a high cost to store them, so they only wanted things that would sell quickly. But with the internet, sites like amazon are actually rewarded for niche content. When books are just stored in a warehouse or especially digitally, overhead is much less of an issue, so they can make a tonne of money by having a million different books that sell 2 or 3 copies. That variety is the "long tail" of the distribution curve.

I'm not sure to what extent that can be extrapolated to people, but I thought you would find it interesting.

[barn]

20 minutes ago, mgggb said:

 

Is it possible to both strongly agree and disagree with you at the same time? I forget in which book, but what you said reminded me about something Nassim Nicholas Taleb about the internet making it really profitable to go after the long tail. In essence, traditional bookstores wanted to carry only the most popular books because there is a high cost to store them, so they only wanted things that would sell quickly. But with the internet, sites like amazon are actually rewarded for niche content. When books are just stored in a warehouse or especially digitally, overhead is much less of an issue, so they can make a tonne of money by having a million different books that sell 2 or 3 copies. That variety is the "long tail" of the distribution curve.

I'm not sure to what extent that can be extrapolated to people, but I thought you would find it interesting.

May I suggest thinking in 'practical' terms?

"Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one"

Robert Greene, referring to some William named bloke I suppose out of envy.

Dude! Focusing your shining intellect on much less things would allow you to advance faster, more in depth and with a smart strategy a midterm plan could be completed ahead of schedule while sacrificing a few 'could've, would've' - s. Then, with new and solidly acquired skillets you'd be able to unleash an even greater potential on what you now only hope to be doing one day... What do you think? Am I way off?

[barn]

I did find what you contributed interesting...

I usually do, hence my inital :

On 07/19/2018 at 10:52 AM, barn said:

Hi @mgggb

Good to see you back! 

 

[mgggb]

On 7/19/2018 at 7:52 AM, RichardY said:

I would say real is what conforms to an established cultural framework or construct. Getting into to the Matrix territory. What can I purchase with Bitcoin that I can't purchase more easily or not all, with £ or $ and how do I do that?

"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."

Okay, so if I understand you correctly, real and useful are almost synonyms to you? If we're being strictly pragmatic here, then no bitcoin is not more useful than dollars currently. Almost no one accepts it as payment, transactions can be slow and expensive, and it is a tax nightmare. But, what drives me to it is precisely the moral dimension of it. Decentralization has become kind of a buzz word, but what it really means is free from coercion. There is not a central bank that can print more bitcoins to fund their political machinations. There are no middle men who you need to get approval from to use your own money. And there is no third party that you have to trust for the security of your funds.

I really like Peter Schiff. It was through his content that I found FDR. But what he gets so wrong is the idea that you need to choose between owning crypto or precious metals. Owning both is something I'm in favor of (silver as superior to gold, but that's a whole other issue), but that's because they do different things. The most concise way I can think of putting it is that PMs is betting on the badness of people and crypto is betting of the goodness of people. If everything goes to hell and society unwinds, then PMs will save you in whatever comes next. But if we are able to get society back on course, then crypto will be the backbone of ancapistan. It's sort of like buying oil fields before the car has been invented--it only makes sense to buy if you can envision a future with cars parked outside of every home.

While the moral component is the most important consideration imo, it is not the only one though. The technology is still in it's infancy, but the potential for business makes it an incredible investment opportunity. Smart contracts aim to do what bitcoin does for payments for contracts. Currently, they are limited by what's known as the oracle problem. Essentially, if you want to use data that is not currently on the blockchain for SC inputs, you have to rely on a trusted third party, known as an oracle, to make the data readable. Since that creates a central point of failure and potential for corruption, it defeats the entire purpose of using the technology. But once that problem is solved, businesses will have no choice but to adopt the technology. This is akin to when computers were massive expensive calculators that took up an entire room. Then, there was very little use case for them. But after someone made a decent gui, businesses had no choice but to adopt the technology because of the increase in efficiency, or more precisely, if their competitors adopted the tech and they didn't, they'd be out of business.

However, there is also the issue of timing. I'm a firm believer that there are no bad times to buy bitcoin et al, only bad times to sell. But since most do not buy based on the principles I outlined (or any principles for that matter), that is a profoundly unsatisfying answer. There are people who bought bitcoin during peak mania of December 2017 only to watch it crash 75% over the next couple months. In a sense, I can only be confident that the crash of 2018 will be as much of a blip on the linear chart as the crash of 2014 is today because I didn't buy at the very top. That's not to say that you can only know something based on lived experience (I'm not a leftist after all), but that negative experiences dampen one's conviction in the rightness of their judgment.

Humanity's capacity for rationality is matched only by it's capacity for irrationality. The general sentiment in the crypto community around mid December after seeing the greatest year in nearly half a decade, where the price when from sub $1k to $10k, and then doubled yet again to $20k was that this was a new paradigm. To many it looked like there was no rhyme or reason, so reason went out the window. People said "hell, if it hit $20k so easily $100k or $1m isn't that far off," and they really believed it. But did that confidence stick around when people started taking profits? Of course not! As the price quickly declined, so to did the sentiment of the community. Now, as the price sits somewhere around $8k, there is an unrelenting depression and """predictions""" ranging from sub $4K to sub $1k. And this is because most investors here don't buy based on principles, but instead base their value as an investor on the value of their portfolio. I can unironically say that I see a future in which bitcoin is worth $1b, but I couldn't possibly tell you when that will be or if that will just be caused by inflation rather than a legitimate increase in purchasing power. But people don't, in general, actually want a real analysis based on principles, they just want me or whoever to sooth their anxiety by telling them they made the right decision. In December I would say exactly that about the price being $1b with my reasoning and people would generally agree. They might say I was being too optimistic, but that I was still directionally true. Now, I'll say the same thing with the same reasons and get laughed at. This is because in December they wanted someone to justify their irrational emotional buying decisions by saying "don't worry, you bought at the peak of the most massive bull run ever, but it's okay because there's still so much more to go up". Now they want someone to justify their irrational emotional selling decisions by saying "don't worry, you sold at a massive loss at the bottom of the bear market, but it's okay because it'll go down further and you can double your position".

What I'm getting at in regard to timing is that there are short term price movements that have a huge impact on your psychology. This is especially true if you don't invest based on principles, but still applies to those that do invest based on principles. As absolutely certain as I am about the impact crypto will have on the future, I still think it is foolish to put all your eggs into one basket if only for the fact that it limits your potential to take advantage of market fluctuations. Even if you are 100% certain of the future for PM's, if you were 100% in PMs for 2017 you'd have missed an incredible opportunity to increase your stack. Even if you are 100% certain of the future for crypto, if you were 100% in crypto for 2017 you made some incredible gains, but lost most of them in January and are stuck watching an incredible buying opportunity with no liquidity to take advantage of it. But if you were half and half (not a ratio I necessarily advocate for, just for the sake of making the math easier), it gives you much more options. Let's say you bought 1 oz of gold and 1 bitcoin in Jan 2017 when they were roughly equal in price, you could have potentially sold the bitcoin in December 2017 for ~20 oz of gold. But since that relies on timing unpredictable and highly volatile markets, lets say that you didn't. Even if you just sat on both until today, you have the option to sell the oz of gold to take advantage of the price collapse in bitcoin which you could sell back for even more gold when the price recovers more.

If you want to get more into the strategic side of investing, I'd highly highly highly recommend reading the books Antifragile and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Those are where I've derived a lot of my ideas about investing from. His idea that your investments should look like a dumbbell is essentially what I described. Basically, on one end of your portfolio you have highly stable investments that act as an anchor--here it is gold--and on the other end you have high risk investments that massively outpace the market--here it is bitcoin. The benefit is that you limit your potential for losses significantly while having room to take advantage of significant upsides. I think in the book he used a 90/10 split for his examples. The ratio isn't super important for understanding the concept, but in the the example I gave of buying 1 oz of gold and 1 bitcoin, your potential for taking losses is only 50%. This is because bitcoin could potentially go to zero for one reason or another, but an oz of gold will pretty much always be worth somewhere around $1.2k adjusted for inflation. In other words, you could take a massive loss but still be in the game because half of your portfolio will be unaffected. The reason why this strategy is superior imo to the strategy that gets advocated by people like Shiff, that you should pick between PMs or crypto, is that you and I don't know what the future holds. If I had a crystal ball and could say for certain what will happen AND when (so I could time it right), I'd say sure go all in on x or y. But since I don't have one (please lend me yours if you do), I can't make the best possible choice, but I can make my decisions based on the best possible system.

That is precisely why I am so fond of doing a crypto/PM split. It has all the benefits of Taleb's barbell system and one extra. If crypto takes off and does to finance what the car did to travel, I have massive exposure to the parabolic gains that will result. If crypto fails completely, much of my investments will remain unaffected, so I wont be utterly ruined. But here's the part that I like so very much about the crypto/PM split: when the fiat based pyramid scheme that we call the modern economy inevitably collapses like a house of cards, and we are in great depression 2.0, BOTH asset classes will massively outperform the market. We saw this during the financial turmoil in Greece and during the peak of the 2008 recession. When the Greeks implemented currency controls and it looked like they were going to confiscate the funds of depositors to pay their debts, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed. Likewise, silver shot up to nearly $50/oz during a similar time period in the US.

So, I guess to answer your question as to if bitcoin is real or not, I'd have to say that is the wrong question to ask. Rather, is it useful? It is difficult to actually spend bitcoin right now because people still have faith in dollars. But will they always? Certainly not. As long as the underlying code remains provably secure, debating whether or not it is real, if it meets the Aristotelian definition of money, or has "intrinsic" value is only a luxury we have right now. Does bitcoin have intrinsic value? I don't know. I'd say that its scarcity, security, lack of counter party risk, and liquidity is intrinsic value compared to PMs, but that's not always accepted. But will it be used as money when everything goes south? Absolutely.

There are certainly problems with the technology to be sure, but this is only a problem if you look at bitcoin in a vacuum and disregard all the rest. The decentralized and open source/royalty free nature of the tech ensures that the best currencies rise to the top and their protocols are adopted by others. Bitcoin has issues because transactions can be slow and expensive and the public ledger makes it so there is no fungibility in real terms. It's not a good thing that it can take an hour or more for a transaction to confirm, or that it could cost between $50-$100 if the network is congested, or that a government agency can trace a transaction back to you and everyone who ever had that bitcoin in their wallet. But these are known problems. People like speedy transactions, low fees, and privacy, which is why there are so many competitors trying different things to get it right. Cryptocurrencies like litecoin, nano, or even dogecoin for that matter have much faster transaction speeds and much lower fees. Cryptocurrencies like monero have essentially completely private transactions.

However, each of those cryptocurrencies have their own problems because of their deviations. Most are less secure because their networks have a lower hashrate than bitcoin, are more prone to double spends, or just haven't stood the test of time, but most importantly because they have more centralized control by the developers. Bitcoin had a huge kerfuffle over an upgrade last year that split the community. To make a long story short, they were trying to scale the network so that transactions were faster and cheaper and there was a lot of disagreement over the best way to do that. This concluded with bitcoin forking into bitcoin cash. What this means is that there are two bitcoins now competing for the same network resources from miners. Most would say that they are two distinct projects now, but, without digressing too much, this is not the case. It all has to do with consensus, or in other words, one of them will become bitcoin over time as they compete.

That point is important because this is not the case for a cryptocurrency like litcoin for instance. Without much debate, the developers upgraded the code to support segwit transactions. It seems like a pragmatic action on their part, but it is a crack in the edifice. There is only one litecoin which means that the users are at the mercy of the developers. They may have gotten a good upgrade today, but will they tomorrow? Possibly then too. But if a government wanted to force the developers to make an upgrade favorable to their aims, they are a central target that does not exist with bitcoin.

Privacy coins like monero have that problem too and two more. Privacy means having the currency do redundant things for the sake of obfuscation, which causes transactions to cost more by default compared to coins that don't have privacy. But the worst problem is that even if your transaction is private today, it might not be tomorrow because of advances in technology. People who bought drugs and other contraband off of the deepweb a few years ago with monero are probably losing sleep over the fact that new technology is allowing those old transactions to be de-anonymized. This begs the question that if it is more than likely that transactions today wont be private in the future, why bother at all with privacy features?

It really seems like a monkeys paw here. You can get your features, cheap transactions, and privacy, but it ain't gonna be free of negatives. Even higher order changes like changing the way networks are secured adheres to the law of unintended consequences. The bitcoin network is secured through mining. Essentially, you give over computing power to solve problems and to be used by the network, and in return you mine some coins. Since the downside to this is massive electricity costs which many see as unnecessary, the proposed solution is switching to a staking model where you lock up x amount of coins and receive some in return. While this looks like a way to secure a network without high electricity usage, it has costs in other ways. The first is that the new coins have to be minted and sold initially by a third party. This is a huge problem because it massively rewards people that happened to be born at just the right time, are already independently wealthy, and implies the ownership of the original developer is disproportionate to everyone else. This seems like a who cares kind of issue that a leftist would bring up, but bear with me. If you want to go out and mine some gold, you can totally do it. It wont be as easy as it was say during the gold rush, but there's nothing stopping you from buying the equipment and doing it, and there still wont be in 100 or 1000 years because we're constantly developing new technology to dig it up in harder to reach places. The same is true for bitcoin. It wont be as easy in 100 years, but with increases in computing power it will still be possible. But with a staking system it is one and done, so if you buy up a ton now a huge part of that is because you happened to be born at the right time, in the right place. You might get wealthy and pass it on to your children, but this will create a new aristocracy because wealth wont be something that is created anymore.

This is further amplified by the second problem. The more coins that you stake, the higher your reward will be. Over time this will lead to a massive centralization of power. If you're already wealthy enough to buy up say 10% of the coin supply, you're probably wealthy enough that you don't need to spend any of the coins and can just let them sit there to increase your stack. It wouldn't take long until there are only a few people at the top with 99% of the coins. I'm not a communist, so I don't favor any kind of confiscatory policies, but what I'm getting at is that this kind of incentive structure would create a class of people who not only have more money than they could spend in 1000 life times, but also that their descendants do too. If you inherited 1m bitcoins in the future, they're yours to do with as you please, but if you're not prudent you balance could go to zero in a heart beat and your children would be back at square one. However, if you inherited 1m coins that increase lets say 1% per year, there is almost no amount of financial ineptitude that could ruin you. Before, if you wasted half of your fortune before passing it on to your children, they did the same, and so on, it wouldn't be more than a few generations before someone had to start over. But with this way, the base amount of wealth could hardly be touched if you tried, meaning that the least deserving people will be the wealthiest over time.

Take Trump for example, he's built a massive fortune over his lifetime. His children might be able to grow his empire a bit because they got a lot of experience being raised by him, but they probably wont do nearly as well and his empire will be divided between them, watering down the fortune. His grandchildren will still be unimaginably wealthy, but they wont have the same experience with him as their parents did and will inherit less than their parents if they have more than one child. After enough divisions of the fortune, someone will inevitably have to start from square one. This is a good thing because money is flowing towards those who can use it best. As a society we don't need people who spend more than they contribute, we need people who create (need is sort of a fuzzy word here, so you could replace it with "want", "are bettered by", etc.). And in a free market wealth flows to people who actually do need it because of prodigality. But just imagine if Trump's great great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren were all just as wealthy as he is today. They would literally be a new aristocracy. They would essentially be the gatekeepers of creation because their money would be needed for any kind of new research, so if they don't like something it in a sense coudn't be researched.

I've digressed quite a bit, but my point here is that the crypto industry is a true free market for currencies. There is massive profit to be made by creating the true "currency of the future". It might not be bitcoin, but the best will rise to the top. There is so much a/b testing going on right now and all of it open source. Gold is just gold, it always has been and always will be. I will certainly continue to be a store of wealth, but only just that. It's very unlikely to increase in value, just maintain. Cryptocurrencies do everything gold does but better, will continue to get better over time, and are a significant opportunity to make an immense profit. It's not likely that governments will implement a gold standard again because it puts limits on their power to abuse the currency, but if they did, the value of gold isn't going parabolic. In this scenario it would have incredible gains, but it will be nothing compared to bitcoin. In the next financial crash, people will run to PMs and bitcoin, but the difference is that if $10T flooded into gold its market cap would do a bit more than double, but if that same $10T flooded into bitcoin its market cap would double 70 times.

I think I've ranted on for long enough, so I'll end with a few questions to hopefully keep us on topic.

• Bitcoin might not be tangible but are PMs? If I want to keep a sizable amount of wealth in bitcoin its off somewhere in cyberspace and I can rest easy if I trust the security of the cryptography. But if I want to keep a sizable amount of wealth in PMs it is going to be stored somewhere in a vault that I have very little access to. Kind of a joke here because obviously a gold coin is a thing that I can hold in my hand, but I'm sure as hell not going to sleep with $1m of gold under my bed, so is it really physical if its in a vault 100 miles away?
• Do you think tangibility matters? Or is it counter party risk that matters more? I almost never use cash, but I'm still confident I have $1k of spending power if that's how much it says I have in my bank account. I think it would be similar with bitcoin except that I don't have the counter party risk from dealing with a bank or inflation.
• I know I said a lot all at once, but were any parts not clear? I have a problem where I'll have a conversation assuming we have the same or similar understanding of an issue, only to find out we're at different points. I don't know how to ask that without sounding incredibly condescending, but trust me I'm not, I just want to be able to better express myself.
• Is it worth debating "intrinsic value"? Seems rather subjective to me.

[RichardY]

 

Quote

Okay, so if I understand you correctly, real and useful are almost synonyms to you?

Yes that would accurate, almost. Where useful and real collide and one takes precedent, I think you have either a "Brute" force Will to Power(useful) or a Psychopath(real).

Overhead:  Yeah the reliance on centralised banking and financial institutions, just seems insane to me. Have a cousin who works on designing transaction software for a bank. I think of all the large institutions in London and plethora of offices & servers, and think of how wasteful to have all that stuff. I mean probably a lot of it is bleed over from the inefficiency and corruption of the state. If things were still largely done on paper record, Armageddon.

-------------------

Unit of Account. I mean there was Goldcoin or something but it got shutdown very quickly, would have thought merchants would be pretty quick to try and stabilise price fluctuations against a tangible asset. My knowledge of finance is pretty limited, but isn't a big problem with the current fiat system that derivatives are used to try and stabilise rates. Perhaps this is where Bitcoin can be useful as a "deflationary asset" as you said. However, why wouldn't someone subdivide a bitcoin? Wouldn't that effectively nullify the deflation. It would have to takeover completely as THE unit of account?

Projection Yeah I would say Bitcoin is real, even though it's perhaps the wrong question to ask. I think what puts me off is despite the various innovations in finance. It relies on projection, not good or bad in itself. Into the psychological domain, which will make or break bitcoin/Civilization. I think this area is key, hardly have any understanding.

The mechanism. Maybe if bitcoin helps make processing real quick, everyone can use non propriety applications and formats an open style version of excel! I saw a documentary on Google once that they were doing a lot of their information keeping on Excel, before they got a CEO. I mean they use linux a lot on airplanes when watching movies. I guess a lot of it has to do with the sweet deal Oracle has got going with state contracts?

Nassim Taleb. I listened to his book "Skin in the Game". a while a go, after I heard it recommended listening to another book "Thinking Fast & Slow". (Daniel Kahemann, a friend or something of Nassim). Was basically about inductive and deductive thinking. System one (inductive) Thinking Fast. System Two (deductive) Thinking slow. To further elaborate on my own inductions. I think System Two (Extroverted) is Executive and objective thinking revolving around certainty, but also collectivist in nature. High Conscientiousness. Low Neural activity with potential to ramp up. Extreme case Psychopath.  Where as System One (Introverted) the older system is subjective thinking and individualistic, survival orientated, Low Conscientiousness. High Neural Activity. Extreme case Schizophrenic. Personally more system one dominant. However given the present overwhelming advantage of executive thinking for the last several hundred years. As technology has advanced and been widely recorded. Makes more sense evolutionary to slave greater numbers of minds together (System 2) for the gain in processing power, even if they maybe in error or depraved, unless it ends up in resulting in a catastrophic crash.   

Was thinking about listening to "Black Swan" so I think I'll probably do that sometime. I thought his critique of Kant was interesting in "Skin in the Game" and I agree with the sentiment of the book.

Buying Bitcoin Makes sense that another crash or the crash has been only temporarily postponed the way things continue to go. That Bitcoin may have more practical & psychological interest relative to the dollar. Although if Trump is successful in re-negoitating with the Chinese, perhaps a soft landing rather than a hard one. I guess if society were more stable the dollar would be doomed as an alternative to Bitcoin. But if society were stable, I think alternatives such as energy as currency would be more widely considered.

Bitcoin Plutocracy- I would agree with Aristotle that an Aristocracy is based on education. If Bitcoin were to lead to a Plutocracy instead of Aristocracy, through market share, that would be much worse than the current financial situation, imo for everyone. Personally I don't mind having a budget utilitarian smartphone and various other possessions. Although some have to have the latest apple iphone or Samsung Galaxy etc Primarily for the status symbol. What experiences could someone have with a billion dollars that they can't have with a million or far far less? My point being that relative abundance  and availability of wealth that has increased massively, nullifies a Plutocracy, which can only be maintained by the infliction of various kinds of suffering and/or a general deprivation of goods.

 

On 7/31/2018 at 6:57 PM, mgggb said:

I think I've ranted on for long enough, so I'll end with a few questions to hopefully keep us on topic.

• Bitcoin might not be tangible but are PMs? If I want to keep a sizable amount of wealth in bitcoin its off somewhere in cyberspace and I can rest easy if I trust the security of the cryptography. But if I want to keep a sizable amount of wealth in PMs it is going to be stored somewhere in a vault that I have very little access to. Kind of a joke here because obviously a gold coin is a thing that I can hold in my hand, but I'm sure as hell not going to sleep with $1m of gold under my bed, so is it really physical if its in a vault 100 miles away?
• Do you think tangibility matters? Or is it counter party risk that matters more? I almost never use cash, but I'm still confident I have $1k of spending power if that's how much it says I have in my bank account. I think it would be similar with bitcoin except that I don't have the counter party risk from dealing with a bank or inflation.
• I know I said a lot all at once, but were any parts not clear? I have a problem where I'll have a conversation assuming we have the same or similar understanding of an issue, only to find out we're at different points. I don't know how to ask that without sounding incredibly condescending, but trust me I'm not, I just want to be able to better express myself.
• Is it worth debating "intrinsic value"? Seems rather subjective to me.

1. I think that would depend on if the "mint" premium of bitcoin, is sufficient compensation/reward to warrant the risk of a non secure asset.
2. I would say substance takes precedent over tangibility, gold certificates as more practical and substantive than physical gold. When you say dealing with inflation risk, how is subdividing a bitcoin not an inflation risk? And why wouldn't a bank carry on with fractional reserve banking in one form or another. The Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalist position requires 100% capital reserves. How is such a system possible with Bitcoin?
3. I would say your level of financial acumen is superior to mine. I don't think you are being condescending or in anyway unprofessional. Google helps with terminology. I've read Von Mises Human Action and some of a "theory of money and credit" a while a go. The rest of my knowledge various podcasts, videos, articles etc.
4. I would say no, it is subjective. In terms of extrinsic value of PM's I suppose you could make a mirror out of them, get a nice tan. However, bitcoin does rely on a collectivist mindset in order to succeed. Where as PM's have the sexual market magpie value usually, not to mention numerous technological uses, in addition to other qualities that make it useful as money. If there were a BitGold........, why wouldn't that take a precedent to a purely real solution.

Lot to take in and process, muse over, or not.

[barn]

Supplementary, to the benefit of all :

Daniel Kahneman

and

Dan Ariely

and a documentary called,

- (Dis)Honesty, the truth about lying -

plus the book called

- The Honest Truth About Dishonesty -

(btw, would love to see him / them appear on an interview with Stefan Molyneux and Vox Day)

ps. - for for those, unfamiliar with Vox Day, see podcasts 3714, 3573, 3522... etc.

[ofd]

There are two simple reasons why bitcoin won't replace anytime soon, but other cryptocurrencies might. One is the built in deflationary tendency. If all goes well, and bitcoin rises in prices compared to other forms of money (fiat, gold) only idiots will use bitcoin to make transactions. After all, why pay with one bitcoin if that one bitcoin will be worth more in say one month? You'd rather pay with fiat money that will lose value compared to your btc.

The other one is the technical aspect. My understanding is that the number of transcations is limited to 5 per seconds. Unless this changed by some vote or a fork, doing transactions is hazardous when a lot of people use it at the same time. There are about 50 million wallets, you can do the maths and see how long it will take if each of them does one transaction under the current limit.

Bitcoin is a great store of money, until people realize it can't subsitute money for transaction then it may become some collector's item.

[danuker]

On 8/9/2018 at 1:53 AM, ofd said:

If all goes well, and bitcoin rises in prices compared to other forms of money (fiat, gold) only idiots will use bitcoin to make transactions.

Computers fall in value by 50% every year. Do only idiots use them?
 

On 8/9/2018 at 1:53 AM, ofd said:

the number of transcations is limited to 5 per seconds

As per https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ : The average transaction size is about 225 bytes.
As per https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-size.html , a block can be up to 1MB in size.
Therefore it's limited to around 4444 transactions per block (10 minutes), or about 7.4 transactions per second, so I agree with you, that ain't much for a global currency.

This scalability is a big problem. It will result in higher transaction fees. But some other technologies are being developed:
- Bitcoin Cash - remove the 1MB block limit (and have a bigger blockchain, increasing the cost of mining)
- Proof of stake - much better performance, but higher risk of attack - see Cardano

[ofd]

Quote

Computers fall in value by 50% every year. Do only idiots use them?

The same model of a computer may fall by that percentage in a year, but the amount of money you have to pay for a certain performance remains the same, more or less. A top tier gaming rig (or a computer for video editing) cost $2000 10 years ago and that's also what you have to pay today for it, because the gains you make in processing speed are made up by more complex software.

Perhaps I wasn't clear with what I wrote. Here is a example that may help you understand. Suppose you have to pay some item that costs $100. You have that amount on your bank account and the equivalent of it in bitcoin. You can be reasonably sure that in 4 weeks, the amount in your bank account will be worth about the same, will bitcoin will have risen a bit (say to $105). Why would anyone use bitcoin as a process to pay?

If all goes well, bitcoin rises in price relative to other forms of money, it will be a storage of value rather than a method of payment. Except for extreme circumstances people will prefer other methods of payments which don't rise in value compared to bitcoin.

[RichardY]

Reference to Gresham's Law. Bad Money, drives out Good. Meaning people spend the declining value of the bad money first, holding on to the more valuable money, usually in anticipation of an "increasing money supply"(Inflation: classical definition). As long as Bitcoin is considered money it should be subject to this law.

Reading briefly that Bitcoin can be subdivded infintely in potentiality on consensus.  Perhaps for Bitcoin to be viable as it is mostly speculation(?) at this point it would have to represent shares of the total economy or be the unit of account?

Still has to be some level of transaction in bitcoin in which case it should receive a premium for it's use as money. For instance, various metals maybe rarer than gold, while having desireable qualities, however as they are not widely valued they do not have that additional premium.

[RichardY]

However I don't think Bitcoin will work, as if it represents shares as money or a form of accounting. It has been tried before by a Scottish Economist John Law in pre-revolutionary France. Although only Wikipedia level of knowledge here.