2023-11-10 12:23:38
- reply
Working In Public by Nadia Eghbal (since married and name changed to Asparouhova) is pretty much the only resource on this Iāve ever been aware of (besides Bitcoin Is Venice, obvs š)
fun fact: Iāve had on my to-do list for a while - but also *to be done* in a while, so no rush - to reach out to her and offer to contract to do a deep dive for Axiom on the overlap of Bitcoin and FOSS, ideally as a follow-on to her great book.
I was thinking you could have distinct and interesting sections on Core, Lightning, BTCPayServer, LNBits, and Nostr ā¦
so Iām gathering my thoughts for Only The Strong Survive v2 - which may or may not ever actually happen, fyi - and I have a theory about crypto I wanna run past the good people of nostr.
in my mind the following explains a few things handily: i) why so many smart and seemingly well-intentioned people work in crypto; ii) the nature of the legitimate innovation to have come out of that ecosystem that the people in i) are attracted to; iii) why cryptobros are either mad or confused that bitcoiners donāt take i) and ii) more seriously, and; iv) why despite all the above, bitcoiners are basically *still right* to not take it seriously.
I really like this theory but tbh what worries me is that itās basically *too elegant*. Iām sure the reality is much messier so Iād appreciate picking holes in it. here goes:
***
there are 3 use cases for crypto: scams, stablecoins, and R&D.
- scams are scams, Iāve written literally hundreds of pages on this so I donāt feel like elaborating much here.
- everybody knows what stablecoins are but hereās where it gets interesting: I think they have no technical merit but they have massive commercial merit (Iāll elaborate on both shortly)
- by R&D I mostly mean the (truly!) cutting edge cryptography and distributed systems research going into zero-knowledge systems for āscaling.ā These have massive technical merit but no commercial merit.
***
now hereās what I mean by all that:
by āno technical meritā I mean that stablecoins have central issuers. you *can* issue them as blockchain tokens but you really donāt need to. the issuer could quite literally run a database with some straightforward public key signature schemes for transfers and it would make minimal operational difference. the fact Tron is the most heavily used for this is testament to this point: it is barely even pretending not to be a database. for whatever stupid reason, this works as regulatory arbitrage because regulators are retards and this is iNnOvAtIon that is spared their violence, but, again, it has no technical merit.
by ācommercial meritā I mean that this is *extremely widely used and valued* as a means of providing dollarized shadow banking to countries with absolute joke fiat currencies. while cryptobros love pointing to this and many bitcoiners tie themselves in knots explaining it away, I see it as essentially unrelated to bitcoin. clearly there is a superficial connection, but you could create any superficial connection you like by shoving a blockchain into somewhere it doesnāt belong, and regulatory-arbitrage-induced massive commercial success doesnāt change that more fundamental analysis one bit (fyi, highly recommend @npub185hā¦wrdpās take on this on recent(ish) TFTC - he goes into more detail than I have space to here)
ātechnical meritā is self-explanatory, but the circumstances are worth appreciating: currently itās only really in Ethereum that you can permissionlessly experiment with pretty much unboundedly computationally complex cryptographic schemes that operate on real value, which is attractive to (basically) academics if you want to try things out in the wild rather than just in papers on ArXiv.
buuuuuuut ā¦ by āno commercial meritā I, of course, mean that the āvalueā being played with is nonsense. there is tens/hundreds of billions of dollars (cycle-stage-dependent) of value at stake to play around with, but there shouldnāt be because the *underlying systems* make no technical or economic sense and the value is only sustained until there are no greater fools and/or the pump and dump funds at the root of it all reach the end of their lives.
***
finally, hereās how the contrasting attitudes break down:
cryptobros are mad bitcoiners donāt like stablecoins because they have clear commercial merit, so why would you ignore that? and they are mad bitcoiners donāt like the crypto R&D because it has clear technical merit so why would you ignore that? if you are happy with technical merit but no commercial merit, or vice versa, itās easy to convince yourselves bitcoiners are recalcitrant, closed-minded, tribal, dogmatic, or whatever else, and just kidding themselves about what has been achieved in ex-bitcoin crypto (and of course, they conveniently ignore the scams as something like ācollateral damageā or āusing this tool for evil rather than goodā or whatever, rather than actually pretty core to the whole thing)
buuuuuuuut ā¦ bitcoiners are either ambivalent on or outright reject both because they lack the half that makes it worthwhile. bitcoin has technical *and* commercial merit, therefore is worth working on.
so the bitcoinerās attitude (also mine, hence the above is obviously going to be biased in this direction) is, roughly: you can work on stablecoin and stablecoin-adjacent tech and finance if you like, but, even if itās massively commercially successful, itās kinda LARPy because it doesnāt even really have anything to do with āblockchainsā and, once the state catches on to the larpiness of the iNnOvAtIoN, it lacks the technical merit to resist that obvious attack. likewise you can work on crypto R&D if you want, but if you are building it all on a self-referential house of sand (/cards? not sure which metaphor I prefer) you are likely wasting your time in the long-run. you are building ways of manipulating value that we can say with near certainty will no longer exist on a long-enough time horizon. maybe youāre okay with that but probably you just havenāt thought it through carefully enough.
***
there are interesting follow-ups here as to whether either stablecoins or R&D (i.e the stuff with partial but incomplete merit) could or should be brought to bitcoin, but this note is long enough and, besides, Iām aiming at an accurate analysis rather than a normatively motivated prescription, so maybe some other time.
Iāll note before ceding the floor to questions or comments that I arrived at this by pattern recognition from a shockingly large number of the founders I speak to in my day job. Iād guesstimate 1/3 of them came from crypto, and 90% of *them* gave some variation of one of the two explanations above as to what was lacking and why they moved, all of which they independently realized after working on [whatever] for long enough. Iām open to there being some massive sampling bias in that source of info, but I thought it was worth throwing in by way of justifying that I didnāt just make all this up. I mostly just observed and codified ā¦
Iāve engaged with enough professional shitcoiners, or shitcoin-adjacent tradfi deliquents, to have noticed a hilarious pattern to their butthurt reaction to nobody really caring about ordinals, BRC20, or whatever they are migrating to of late.
keep in mind what a monster breakthrough shitcoining on bitcoin would be to their business models, btw (which I may or may not get around to writing up soon - this isnāt it, fyi). given shitcoinery at large is finally fading away, this spins up another 5+ years of complete and utter nonsense marketing and the FOMOing management fees that follow spouting this bullshit confidently enough.
what theyāve converged on to explain resistance - apathy, even, given I wouldnāt say I care one way or the other. yay fees! - is the idea that bitcoin development works in a top-down manner and has āpriestsā (they like this kind of religious vernacular, which Iāll come back to) who decree what projects will and wonāt be worked on.
the level of projection here is astounding. itās an open network. you can work on whatever you want. we are talking about ordinals NFTs in the first place because you already did it! you ran the scam! you got out with the money! and youāre upset that ā¦ you werenāt congratulated for it more?!?
itās completely insane. contrast that to the alternative: they fucking despise lightning and there is no end of deliberate misrepresentations they wonāt tell about it to aggrieve how hurt their butts are. obviously lightning isnāt perfect (nothing is perfect - itās engineering, not art or, as they are more used to, performance art) but notice that isnāt their object level complaint because they donāt have the technical understanding to frame it that way. they describe their complaint as if it were anthropological, something like: the āpriestsā decreed all scaling efforts will focus on lightning, and lo, it was so.
again, itās an open network (this time on top of another open network). I canāt tell you how many times Iāve spoken to founders who are building on lightning because, unlike whatever crypto ecosystem they already spent 3 years toiling away in achieving nothing of practical value but doing free marketing to unscrupulous financiers, lightning actually works. they appreciate the design methodology. they *choose* to work on it. it is as bottom up a phenomenon as could be imagined and yet to the reactionary shitcoiner, it must be top down. how can it be explained any other way? what else could make people want to work on an ecosystem with no money printing if not central and ideological coordination? iT dOeSnT mAkE aNy SeNsE!
(fun fact: now they are learning what nostr is, they recycle all these same patterns of thought. "why would you work on decentralized social media? donāt you know we tried that in crypto? donāt you know you can issue tokens on bitcoin now?!?ā)
so people arenāt using one free and open tool because theyāve been told not to by their church, but they are using another because they have been told to by their church. it couldnāt possibly be that theyāve decided to work on one and not the other because they *understand how they work and what potential value they will have long term, not to their unscrupulous financiers, but to their users and to the world.* nope, couldnāt possibly be that. must be the religious dogma.
now obviously we can expect object level discourse agitating for defi, DAOs, and all that kind of nonsensical bullshit. but, again, itās frankly a more anthropological examination that fascinates me. what is it they are saying about the people involved? is there a social analysis rather than a (quick and boring) technical one?
self-congratulatory as this unavoidably is, what they hate is the raw meritocracy. money means nothing, reputation means *something*, but by and large ideas stand on their own. there is a fascinating subtlety here around the human (i.e. anthropological) response: because this stuff is technical and has to *actually work*; because it isnāt just aesthetic; because it serves a purpose and is validated in the real world; there is some objectivity to what is and is not a good idea. now, you canāt deduce it. it isnāt math. there will always be pros and cons. but it isnāt just taste either. some things *objectively* work better than others. there is nothing āopen mindedā about praising poor engineering.
honest, intelligent people attracted to the intellectual meritocracy will, therefore, on a long-enough time horizon to allow for battle testing the ideas, for teasing out pros and cons to a satisfactory degree, tend to agree on which are the best.
now, these people have bad ideas and get mad they canāt buy or shame or whatever else the meritocracy into getting onboard, so they project all this crap about āclergyā, āanointedā, and whatever other religious vernacular fits their cargo cultish misunderstanding of what it is they are looking at in the first place. heathens to this church are treated as brave, independent trailblazers, fighting back against an intolerant majority (by freely building one kind of free stuff over another š). that almost everybody independently concludes that these ideas are bad, because they proudly have rigorous standards for evaluating merit, BECAUSE THIS STUFF MATTERS AND IS BIGGER THAN YOU ā¦ they see as groupthink; as monotonicity; as the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.
and by the way, build to your heartās content. as mentioned above, I donāt particularly care, and I think most people are the same. just donāt demand I like whatever bad idea you are working on. the problem is not āthe buildersā of reformist lore, it is their financial exploiters, of whom this is all downstream ā¦
they all come from a world in which bullshitting hard enough will tend to yield a positive return in the end. obviously, in such an environment, everybodyās bullshit contradicts everybody elseās and yet everybody still wins. the idea of meticulously working to weed out bullshit and narrowing in on the actual truth is extremely uncomfortable if this is all you have ever known, and what you now expect to find.
as alluded to above, the funniest part is the projection. everything Iāve just sarcastically outlined is in fact its very own meme. it circulates in these cliques and infects any host susceptible to non-explanation for this culture shock. *it is not arrived at independently via rigorous reasoning*. it literally is the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.
and itās ramping up for another 5+ year wave. enjoy! šš„³
Iāve engaged with enough professional shitcoiners, or shitcoin-adjacent tradfi deliquents, to have noticed a hilarious pattern to their butthurt reaction to nobody really caring about ordinals, BRC20, or whatever they are migrating to of late.
keep in mind what a monster breakthrough shitcoining on bitcoin would be to their business models, btw (which I may or may not get around to writing up soon - this isnāt it, fyi). given shitcoinery at large is finally fading away, this spins up another 5+ years of complete and utter nonsense marketing and the FOMOing management fees that follow spouting this bullshit confidently enough.
what theyāve converged on to explain resistance - apathy, even, given I wouldnāt say I care one way or the other. yay fees! - is the idea that bitcoin development works in a top-down manner and has āpriestsā (they like this kind of religious vernacular, which Iāll come back to) who decree what projects will and wonāt be worked on.
the level of projection here is astounding. itās an open network. you can work on whatever you want. we are talking about ordinals NFTs in the first place because you already did it! you ran the scam! you got out with the money! and youāre upset that ā¦ you werenāt congratulated for it more?!?
itās completely insane. contrast that to the alternative: they fucking despise lightning and there is no end of deliberate misrepresentations they wonāt tell about it to aggrieve how hurt their butts are. obviously lightning isnāt perfect (nothing is perfect - itās engineering, not art or, as they are more used to, performance art) but notice that isnāt their object level complaint because they donāt have the technical understanding to frame it that way. they describe their complaint as if it were anthropological, something like: the āpriestsā decreed all scaling efforts will focus on lightning, and lo, it was so.
again, itās an open network (this time on top of another open network). I canāt tell you how many times Iāve spoken to founders who are building on lightning because, unlike whatever crypto ecosystem they already spent 3 years toiling away in achieving nothing of practical value but doing free marketing to unscrupulous financiers, lightning actually works. they appreciate the design methodology. they *choose* to work on it. it is as bottom up a phenomenon as could be imagined and yet to the reactionary shitcoiner, it must be top down. how can it be explained any other way? what else could make people want to work on an ecosystem with no money printing if not central and ideological coordination? iT dOeSnT mAkE aNy SeNsE!
(fun fact: now they are learning what nostr is, they recycle all these same patterns of thought. "why would you work on decentralized social media? donāt you know we tried that in crypto? donāt you know you can issue tokens on bitcoin now?!?ā)
so people arenāt using one free and open tool because theyāve been told not to by their church, but they are using another because they have been told to by their church. it couldnāt possibly be that theyāve decided to work on one and not the other because they *understand how they work and what potential value they will have long term, not to their unscrupulous financiers, but to their users and to the world.* nope, couldnāt possibly be that. must be the religious dogma.
now obviously we can expect object level discourse agitating for defi, DAOs, and all that kind of nonsensical bullshit. but, again, itās frankly a more anthropological examination that fascinates me. what is it they are saying about the people involved? is there a social analysis rather than a (quick and boring) technical one?
self-congratulatory as this unavoidably is, what they hate is the raw meritocracy. money means nothing, reputation means *something*, but by and large ideas stand on their own. there is a fascinating subtlety here around the human (i.e. anthropological) response: because this stuff is technical and has to *actually work*; because it isnāt just aesthetic; because it serves a purpose and is validated in the real world; there is some objectivity to what is and is not a good idea. now, you canāt deduce it. it isnāt math. there will always be pros and cons. but it isnāt just taste either. some things *objectively* work better than others. there is nothing āopen mindedā about praising poor engineering.
honest, intelligent people attracted to the intellectual meritocracy will, therefore, on a long-enough time horizon to allow for battle testing the ideas, for teasing out pros and cons to a satisfactory degree, tend to agree on which are the best.
now, these people have bad ideas and get mad they canāt buy or shame or whatever else the meritocracy into getting onboard, so they project all this crap about āclergyā, āanointedā, and whatever other religious vernacular fits their cargo cultish misunderstanding of what it is they are looking at in the first place. heathens to this church are treated as brave, independent trailblazers, fighting back against an intolerant majority (by freely building one kind of free stuff over another š). that almost everybody independently concludes that these ideas are bad, because they proudly have rigorous standards for evaluating merit, BECAUSE THIS STUFF MATTERS AND IS BIGGER THAN YOU ā¦ they see as groupthink; as monotonicity; as the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.
and by the way, build to your heartās content. as mentioned above, I donāt particularly care, and I think most people are the same. just donāt demand I like whatever bad idea you are working on. the problem is not āthe buildersā of reformist lore, it is their financial exploiters, of whom this is all downstream ā¦
they all come from a world in which bullshitting hard enough will tend to yield a positive return in the end. obviously, in such an environment, everybodyās bullshit contradicts everybody elseās and yet everybody still wins. the idea of meticulously working to weed out bullshit and narrowing in on the actual truth is extremely uncomfortable if this is all you have ever known, and what you now expect to find.
as alluded to above, the funniest part is the projection. everything Iāve just sarcastically outlined is in fact its very own meme. it circulates in these cliques and infects any host susceptible to non-explanation for this culture shock. *it is not arrived at independently via rigorous reasoning*. it literally is the hierarchical broadcast of dogma.
and itās ramping up for another 5+ year wave. enjoy! šš„³
I feel like I get the *idea* behind SHA256 but holding it all in your mind at once - correctly writing out the entire algorithm, for example - is so friggin hard.
does anybody know of any resources that help explain either i) the intuition behind these *kind* of operations, without getting bogged down in exactly which are used, or, relatedly, ii) why certain constants and variables were chosen and what effect they have over other, seemingly arbitrary, candidates?
I feel like what would be really cool, and would tie together a lot of this, would be a split screen video with 3 sections in which 2 very similar inputs - say, with 1 character difference - are run through the algorithm at the same time, and the third section shows what operation is happening at that moment.
that way youād be able to āwatchā the āscramblingā and get a better visual intuition for the mechanics rather than just believing it has certain properties.
I wanna be able to explain *why* it has those properties. Currently I only feel like I kinda can ā¦
