The Godless Existential Burden
--------------------------------
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”

Thus wrote Nietzche in The Gay Science. The character making this statement is known as the Nietzchean madman. What he talks about in the dialogue is replacing the meaning that God provided. The consequences of eliminating God, in Nietzche’s view, are pervasive and not easily dealt with.

This is in contrast to Humanist philosophers from the Enlightenment like Rousseau and Spinosa who removed God, but kept Christian morality. They claimed reason as their foundation for their morals instead of God. The scene takes place in a bar with Humanists, so they make fun of the madman who keeps saying “I seek God.”

The smart-alecky people in the bar, representing Enlightenment thinkers, suggest God is hiding, or is afraid or that He’s lost. They insult God since they don’t believe in Him. The madman’s answer, that God is dead, is the apex.

Base Layer Belief
------------------
"You have unchained the earth from the sun, a move of incalculable significance."

The madman’s lament is really about how God is a foundational belief. Removing God removes a whole host of beliefs which depend on God. If God doesn’t exist, what does morality look like? What gives life meaning? For what purpose does anyone do anything? To remove God is to remove the basis for all of those things, as Nietzche recognized, but Enlightenment thinkers did not. Philosophically, there was a gaping hole left by removing God.

Let’s look at morality, for example. In a philosophy that has no God in it, how do you determine what is a good or bad action? Can you go from descriptive statements like “all men are mortal” to imperative statements like “thou shalt not murder”? In philosophy, this is known as the is-to-ought problem and there aren’t any good solutions. The intellectually honest solution, according to Nietche and many others, like Hume, is that such a derivation doesn’t exist.

In other words, without God, there is no basis for moral imperatives. The very concept of good and evil requires re-examination, which is what Nietche considered in his books. Even seemingly obvious moral imperatives like “we should not torture children” or “we should not commit genocide” need to be questioned once you remove God from the equation.

Nietzche argued that the Enlightenment thinkers were wrong in keeping Christian morals. They couldn’t logically generate morality, or meaning or purpose through facts, because of the is-to-ought problem. Therefore, the morality they espoused was intellectual cowardice. They wanted the comfort of a Christian world view while rejecting the God that undergirds it all. With God, the oughts come naturally. Without God, there requires a whole new set of justifications for any sort of ethics.

The madman was pointing out that they had killed not just God, but all the things dependent on God, including morality, meaning and purpose.

Will-to-power
--------------
Nietche’s conclusion was that if you really removed God and all the morals, meaning and purpose that depend on God, then you are left with strength. The philosophy he espoused is one of being honest about that massive metaphysical hole and facing it with courage.

If God is dead, one has the daunting task of filling that hole, of creating meaning, purpose and ethics. If you reject God, you must also reject everything built on God and come up with another way to live, wholly different from how Theists live.

For many, removing God from their lives is an attractive proposition. They have the freedom to change morals to suit their needs. Indeed, humanism, a child of the Enlightenment, has very similar morals as Christianity, except a few changes, mostly around sex. Yet as Nietzche points out, such arbitrary tweaking is cowardly and intellectually lazy because it doesn’t go far enough. All morals have to be thrown out with the denial of God and a brand new form of godless morality, one that is philosophically consistent, has to take its place.

Nietzche’s morality comes down to the strong ruling over the weak, a might-makes-right philosophy. It can only be described as sociopathic, where anything is permissible and nobody has any inherent worth.

Burden of Meaning
--------------------
Few people have sociopathic morals, but the influence of Nietzche continues to the present day. The default societal assumption is godlessness and each person has the burden of finding meaning.

For example, modern people see jobs as the source of meaning. They are presumed to be where individuals can find self-actualization and metaphysical fulfillment. Jobs have taken on an additional burden and are no longer a place to just make money.

Without God in the picture, each person has to find meaning and many try to do so through their jobs. Success in a job takes on existential significance and there are two godless ways to measure it.

The first way is essentially some sort of status game where doing better than others is the metric. This could be salary, honors, recognition or something else. The meaning comes from others’ approval, which is not easily earned and is at best temporary even when you get it.

The second is a subjective metric based on internal feeling. Being subjective, the metric can and does change and is like a compass pointed in towards yourself. There’s no real direction or progress and a lot of meandering. A subjective measurement is unstable because what makes you happy one day might not the next.

Neither of these measurements are ultimately satisfactory.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Removing God means having to define meaning ourselves. Defining meaning for ourselves is an enormous burden, a gargantuan task and is a heavy existential load to bear. The ubiquitous questions of moderns like “What should I do with my life?” and “How can I be happy?” are really presenting symptoms of this underlying philosophical disconnect.

The madman’s question shines a light on the gaping hole of godless meaninglessness. How shall we comfort ourselves?


Bitcoin moderates are fame maximalists. So are most altcoiners and fiat people.

We are not the same.


My final article of the incentive series for Bitcoin Magazine looks at global level incentives of fiat money. The dollar hegemony has lots of second and third order effects from military adventurism of the US, the oppression of developing countries and much more. Excerpt after the link.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/fiat-money-has-broken-the-world

In the first three parts of this series, I examined the different ways that fiat money has led to terrible incentives at the individual, corporate and national levels. We are more isolated than ever, we are less satisfied with our work and we work under tyrannical, authoritarian governments as a result of fiat money. In this article, I go through the ways the entire world is incentivized by fiat money.

The previous articles spoke more generally about how individuals, companies and nations are affected by fiat money. This article will be a lot more specific as there's only the one world we live in and we don't need to speak generally. Thus, I will start this article with some historical context as that will give us a better understanding of why the financial incentives in the world are the way they are.

Bretton Woods
---------------

We start the analysis of global fiat money incentives with one of the major historical events that precipitated the world we live in today and that's the Bretton Woods Agreement from 1944.


The Antidote to Nihilistic Narcissism
-------------------------------------

“He’ll have a long life as long as he doesn’t know himself.”

In Greek mythology, this was the prophecy concerning Narcissus. Narcissus is better known for how the myth ends. He falls in love with his own reflection, which is where we get the word narcissistic. The ending refers back to the initial prophecy. When he saw his own reflection, he didn’t recognize it because he didn’t know himself.

In the middle of the myth is Narcissus rejecting the love of everyone else. The order matters. Narcissus only fell in love with himself after rejecting everyone. He didn’t reject everyone because he was in love with himself, but rather he fell in love with himself because he rejected everyone. His only target for love was himself.

I bring up this myth because this is the intellectual path that so many people take. They cynically reject belief systems one by one until they are left with nothing else. Lacking anything else to believe in, they turn to themselves and become completely self-centered. They become nihilistic narcissists.

Bad Parenting
---------------
Look at the prophecy again. Narcissus will have a long life as long as he doesn’t know himself. Presumably, his parents made sure he didn’t know himself because Narcissus didn’t even recognize his own reflection. They did this with the best of intentions, to ensure he had a long life, yet clearly, a life staring into your own reflection is not exactly meaningful.

Think about what we tell our kids: “You can be anything you want to be.” “Go find what you’re passionate about.”

These platitudes specifically avoid giving children an identity. More subtly, not giving them an identity makes it harder for them to get attacked. We do this with the best of intentions, yet is this really what parents should be doing? To define yourself is an enormous burden, especially for children.

Nihilism as Default
-------------------
Think about the myth again. Narcissus rejected all would-be lovers.

Why?

He didn’t know himself. He didn’t have any basis by which he could even evaluate their fit. How could he since he had no self-awareness or self-understanding? He couldn’t solve for love because he didn’t know half the equation.

Identity is the basis of evaluating everything. Without grounding, nothing can be built. Without identity, belief is impossible and nihilism becomes the default.

The Appeal of Narcissism
--------------------------
Nihilistic narcissism is a safe position. Because you never have to stand for anything and never take a risk, you can preserve your own ego, preserve your intellectual life as in the prophecy. The appeal is in preserving what you have, your own self, however empty and senseless you become.

But nihilistic narcissism completely strips meaning from life. You may live a long life staring into your own reflection, but it’s not a very fulfilling one. Lacking any sort of external north star, you are left with an internal north star, which if you follow, becomes navel-gazing. Ironically, narcissism is the end state of not knowing yourself.

Such a place is one of profound despair. There is no meaning and all you have to live for is yourself. Is it any wonder so many people are depressed?

Parents, give your kids the gift of identity. Your job is to help them know who they are. This should be natural, since the kids come from you. By knowing you, they learn to know themselves. By showing them who you are, you are really showing them who they are. By participating with them in community you are showing them who they are. By telling them your family history you are showing them who they are. Tether them to your identity so they can find meaning. Give them the solid foundation of knowing themselves.

Because identity is necessary to a meaningful life.


I, for one, would love a curated relay that gives high quality "global" content


Centralization incentivizes will to power.

Decentralization incentivizes competition*and* cooperation.


Free issue for the first Monday of the month!

China's view of USD, Nation level incentives, RBF deanonymization, LSP ROI, Why Nostr and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #334

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-334


Is there a way to have a Multisig root key like FROST that lets you delegate private keys?


Dr Evil: 100 billion dollars
WEF: ok, we just need your address, passport, phone number and full frontal selfie.


Do you realize just how much of a bargain Nostr is? You pay relays a one time fee and never see ads, there is no risk of your email or phone number leaking and you can't get cancelled.

Way better deal than being the product.


Case in point, many 2x'ers still haven't apologized 6 years later. What's worse, they become worse over time and give themselves over to more and more shitcoining. I suspect that we'll see something similar from the Bitcoin Moderate crowd as well.

Lies have a way of corrupting character. That's the real punishment.


Multisig Nostr client I'd like to see:

FROST-based k-of-n group account on Nostr with PSNN (partially signed Nostr notes).

I think you could potentially lose up to k-1 keys and still have a Nostr account that the attacker doesn't  know the aggregated pubkey to.


We're so used to getting permission for everything because of fiat money.

Nostr is what permissionless innovation looks like.


I need a new cowboy hat for the Vietnam Lightning conference on March 23-24. I would like to pay someone to bring me one. It needs to be a white or beige straw hat Stetson size 7 1/4.

I will pay the cost plus $20 in Lightning on delivery in person. Who can fulfill this task? DM me if you can do this with your conference ticket screenshot of you would like to do this.


I don't remember, but Nostr is a new place.
Comment away.


If you want more thoughtful replies to your notes, zap the best ones.

Sounds obvious, but I just figured that out.


My latest article for @BitcoinMagazine is about the nation-state level incentives of fiat money. Excerpt below.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/fiat-money-funds-government-corruption

Fixing The Incentives: How Fiat Funds National Corruption

In the first two parts of this series, I wrote about the individual-level incentives and company-level incentives of fiat money. The individual-level incentives made personal lives have much higher time preferences through ubiquitous debt and lack of savings vehicles. The company-level incentives made communal life much more zombie-like and artificial through unnaturally-large companies that have replaced our families.

In this essay, I'm exploring the incentives at the nation-state level, where fiat money has perhaps its greatest effect. The power of fiat money gives governments the ability to become more authoritarian. Not only do we get a welfare/warfare state, but we also get a surveillance state, a police state and militaristic, corrupt tyrannies. The siren song of Marxism, of positivist law and an authoritarian vision are some of its rotten fruits. The unprecedented destructive power of governments in the last 100 years can be laid squarely at the feet of fiat money. Government authority and power have expanded more than the average American's waistline and the consequences have been just as deadly.


Also I visited Korea 3 years later and people were going nuts about pizza hut, which was the first pizza there. By then bananas were being sold on the street. Things used to progress a lot faster back then.


Yea, it balances the crushing conformity and groupthink


There's about 30 generations of breeding for a specific outcome, so it's hard to see it going away in a single generation. Maybe 5 to 10? Depends on cultural context and what's prioritized instead.


Parental guilt tripping is an excellent means of producing the desired end, yes.


Politically incorrect thought of the day: East Asians are good at academic tests because we were bred for them.


Interesting perspective! I will note, though, that Korean is only about 800 years old, or younger than a lot of languages around the world. That said, many of the cultural assumptions come from Chinese culture whose language is older.


Great question. I actually think the hierarchy makes it easier to individuate. Your role in any situation is more easily slotted based on age or position and that helps clarify yourself socially.


Nope. I still remember people talking about bananas when I was little as if they were some sort of amazingly delicious thing that you can get in America. This was before global shipping of fruits year round were a thing.


How Language Shapes Culture
--------------------------------------

I’m 8 years old. Seoul is all I’ve ever known, but I’m traveling to northern New Jersey, my new home. I don’t know English, I have never tasted a banana or a pizza. I’m about to make a major transition to a new culture as an immigrant, having to absorb a brand new perspective, having to understand my own cultural assumptions…

I’m now 9 years old. I have a good command of English, but I’m still getting used to subtle cultural things like leaving the bathroom open when you’re done and using a shower instead of a bath ladle. Culture is taking longer to adjust to, but in a sense, I’m absorbing a lot of culture as I’m learning English.

For example, the word uncle reflects four different relationships: your father's brother, your father's sister's husband, your mother's brother and your mother’s sister’s husband. Those are four different relationships that are compressed into a single word in English.

Korean, by contrast, has words for each of these 4 different relationships, but subdivides even further. Your father's brother who is older than your father is a different word than your father’s brother who is younger than your father. English is coarse when it comes to relationships. Korean is granular.

The difference reflects a cultural difference of these relationships. In Korean, blood relation is a stronger bond so it’s important to distinguish which are in-laws versus not. The father’s side is also more important because that’s the family that you belong to. So the level of humiliation about your weird uncle is dependent on which side of your family and whether there’s an actual blood relation. In western culture, it doesn’t really matter which older male relative is the cool uncle that keeps getting your nose.

Language Differences
----------------------------
Korean and English emphasize different values. In Korean, family names come first.  Family name being first emphasizes the family of origin. In English, personal names come first. Personal name being first emphasizes individualism. Individualism is built into how names are used in English and filial piety is built into how names are used in Korean.

Korean has a whole way of speaking called the honorific, which is used for people who are older or have a higher position. Honorifics are also considered more polite. Polite and honoring language exists in English, but it's not a whole different set of grammar rules. A sentence in Korean spoken to an elder has different endings. In other words, politeness and respect for elders is built into the Korean language, which isn’t built into English. Elders are addressed with respect by default which doesn’t happen in English.

Granularity Within Relationships
------------------------------------------
The differences in values make translating very difficult.

One of the most frustrating experiences for me is watching Korean movies be made into western versions. My Sassy Girl and The Lake House are two such Korean movies which Hollywood also made. The two Hollywood versions miss so much in the relationship at the heart of both movies, largely due to language.

When I watched the Korean version of My Sassy Girl, I enjoyed how the relationship progressed slowly, deliciously, going through the many different stages where the couple’s romance develops. When I watched the Hollywood version, I thought it had all the subtlety of a homeless person asking for change at a busy intersection. The language to describe what’s going on just doesn’t exist in English and the progression doesn’t feel believable. I suspect most people watching the Hollywood version are wondering when the couple is going to sleep together. The main character just feels like a loser who’s doing everything for the girl while the girl strings him along. The Korean version shows a much more subtle give and take in the relationship. The Hollywood movie felt off because the language and culture didn’t translate very well to a western setting.

To explain what I mean, there’s an untranslatable word in Korean (정 - pronounced “juhng”) which means something like affection. It encompasses this idea that someone can grow on you and through the process of getting to know that person, you can see what’s good about them and want them in your presence. In Korean dramas, a character uses this word to say that they have feelings for someone which is not quite as strong as love, but not as weak as like. It’s an in-between state with room for subtlety and nuance, something not normally seen in Hollywood movies because the language isn’t there. That nuance and subtlety around relationships, by the way, is why Korean dramas are so popular around the world.

There’s a larger variety of relationships that can be described in Korean than in English. Relationships in English tend to be amorphous and not defined very well. In Korean, relationships are defined and there are a lot more archetypes or templates for how they should be.

When two Korean people first meet and know that the relationship will last, they’ll spend several minutes figuring out what the relationship is, through what titles they’ll use for each other. In English, you just learn the other person’s name and that’s it. In Korean, you have to figure out what your relationship is with that person and use the proper title. If you know somebody from church, the title might be Deacon. If you know somebody from work, it might be Vice-President. Korean has literally hundreds of titles, many of which don’t have accurate, single-word translations into English.

In other words, Korean has a much larger menu of relationships.

Societal Structure
------------------------
Why are Korean relationships so precisely defined? What is the purpose of having so many titles? The reason is because Korean culture is very hierarchical. The Korean language reinforces a culture of a highly ordered society. Relationships are precisely defined so each person can know exactly where they are in the hierarchy.

By contrast, the English language reinforces a culture of a more individualist, a more nominally egalitarian society where everybody calls each other by their personal names. There are relatively few titles because western society is flat and isn’t nearly as rigid or hierarchical. By not having certain words, certain concepts become difficult to explain or hold in mind. In that sense, language is a subtle enforcement mechanism for preserving the values and morals of the culture.

We can see this even in the way language is diverging within English. There’s a study out of Stanford which shows that there’s a real and persistent difference between the language used by Democrats and Republicans. Language is being used to reinforce the culture within these groups. In other words, embedded deep within words and language are the values of the community. By using the same language, we are absorbing a community’s values, sometimes without much reflection of what those values are.

This is why you should talk to people outside your own circles and engage with different perspectives. You’ll quickly learn the cultural assumptions that you have and adjust your perspective accordingly. And you don’t have to be an immigrant to do so.


For Free Subscribers: Programming Culture, Colonialism, Company Level Incentives and more!

For Paid Subscribers: TX Pusher, Instant Channels, Monstr and more!

Bitcoin Tech Talk #333

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-333


Is there some sort of backup tool for your own notes?


Nostr is fighting for promotion. Twitter will soon be fighting a relegation battle.


I'm traveling. I get a 1GB sim card every week or so.


I have another essay on exactly that, Maybe I'll post it in a few days.


LLPSI, Dowling Method and reading the Latin Vulgate every day


Learning Latin
------------------
For the past 2 years, I've been learning Latin. I’m reading, I’m memorizing, and I’m writing down noun declensions like a madman.

I'm 46 years old, way past the age when people normally learn new languages. I’m also not one of those polyglots that learns a new language every couple of years. Nor am I a masochist who enjoys reading slowly, so why am I doing it?

There are three reasons I am learning Latin.

Becoming a Respectable Intellectual
----------------------------------------------
The first reason is that I have a bit of intellectual snobbery that I’m trying to reclaim. Back in high school, I desperately wanted to learn Latin because it was the language of science. Being the math geek that I am, I wanted to learn something that would help me understand fancy Latin phrases like a priori and Carthago delenda est. Sure, I wouldn’t be any more popular, but at least I could pretend to have some superiority over the actual popular kids.

Sadly, my high school didn't offer Latin, and my dreams of being that annoying geek wielding Latin would have to be set aside. Instead, I had to settle for being that annoying geek wielding a chess board, a keyboard, and Magic the Gathering cards. Lacking the option of learning Latin, I spent 4 years learning Spanish and settled for learning pop culture phrases like gordito and la vida loca.

Frankly, I don’t remember much of it because the motivation to learn Spanish just wasn't there. I was a geek that dreamed of getting into MIT! I wanted to be a math professor or a computer programmer. Spanish just didn’t feel like something I needed as it didn’t give me any advantage in what I wanted to do. Latin, on the other hand, was something I could use! Everyone knows that the winner of any philosophical argument is the one using the cooler Latin phrase.

Absorbing Ancient Wisdom
-----------------------------------
The second reason is because Latin is the language of the Romans. These were some badass people who came, saw and conquered (veni, vedi, vici). They were also Stoics, whose motto was memento mori, or remember that you will die. They had courage, enjoyed life and kicked ass. Who wouldn’t want to be like them? Yet learning to be like them is not so easy, especially since so many of their works are ancient and their mentality is so foreign to the modern mind. Learning Latin is a way into that mentality. To understand why, indulge me in a brief digression.

I'm a Korean-American immigrant and that means I know two languages… sort of. I immigrated when I was 8 years old, so my Korean is still that of a second grader. I’m pretty embarrassed to speak it, but I have some familiarity with a language quite different than English.

The weird thing is, I think very differently when I think in Korean. It’s especially true when I interact with older Korean people. I suddenly defer to elders, take care of anyone younger and politely but firmly fight for the restaurant check. None of this is normal when I’m thinking in English. Language shapes mentality.

Latin has been the language of intellectual culture for the better part of the last 2000 years. Some of the greatest thinkers thought in Latin. Translated works are notorious for their awkward phrasing. Historical works are also pretty hard to read because they’re written with unfamiliar words. Trying to understand a historical translated work is like trying to understand that guy on Zoom who’s driving through a tunnel. How am I supposed to be a badass Stoic if their words come through garbled?

An Alternative to Pop Culture
--------------------------------------
The third reason that I want to learn Latin is because I’m tired of pop culture. Yea, yea, it’s such a hipster thing to say, but hear me out. Pop culture is getting really preachy. Every time I watch a movie or listen to a song, I feel like a racist, homophobic, misogynist pig.

Pop culture has a lot of assumptions baked into it about what the right thing to think is, and to be quite frank, I don’t agree with all of it. I want art that’s more aligned with my values. I’m a Christian, so you may think that I listen to contemporary Christian music or watch Christian movies. I don’t, because they (mostly) suck. Okay, that’s harsh and not very charitable of me, but I just don’t enjoy them the way someone into electronic dance music enjoys a rave. Trying to find art to consume in today’s culture is mulgere hircum or milking a male goat.

Latin gives me access to classics that have withstood the test of time. Most pop stuff will not be popular in 5 years, let alone 50. With Latin, I can access books, music, and art that are hundreds of years old. There’s timeless wisdom in something that’s managed to last that long. Latin is a gateway to another culture, one whose values more closely align with mine and I can bathe in its ancient riches like Scrooge McDuck.

At least that’s the hope. And that makes memorizing noun declensions worthwhile.


#[6] vs Paul Szctorc
#[7] vs CSW
Samurai wallet guys vs Wasabi wallet guys
BOLT12 vs LNURL
Cory Klippsten vs Plan B


Despotic Niceness
-----------------------
Nice guys are famous for their failures in dating. They spend a lot of money to show their generosity, they will agree to almost everything women ask and of course, they never get the girl. They get frustratingly friendzoned. They fantasize that their crush will come back miraculously, like in a romantic comedy. As they grow old, they grow bitter, angry that women don’t know what’s good for them as they drown their wrath and despair in porn.

Why don’t nice guys get the girl? What’s so incredibly unattractive about them?

They’re agreeable and give the girl everything she wants. Yet they’re also indecisive, preferring others make decisions so they can absolve themselves of responsibility. They’re also boring. They’re as bland as a slice of Wonder Bread and about as creative. Lacking a strong and grounded identity, they are nice in the hopes that girls will reciprocate. They exude sliminess as they try to hack into the position of boyfriend.

They are using despotic niceness.

Manipulation
-----------------
Despotic niceness is a form of manipulation. It’s using the norms around niceness to get what you want. Despotic niceness is passive-aggressive quid pro quo. Nice guys are waiting for girls to reciprocate like a charity that gives you pre-printed return labels. The norms of niceness demand that nice people reciprocate. Anyone that doesn’t reciprocate is considered a jerk.

Many women also use despotic niceness. They’ll be friendly to a guy that clearly wants to date them and count on his reciprocating niceness. They’ll get help moving, get rescued financially and use him as an emotional crutch. The guy reciprocates the very mild niceness to signal that they’re nice. The women use the guy’s hope of further reciprocation to string the guy along.

Despotic niceness is not only a weapon in dating, however. At work, a nice boss will ask you to do something unpleasant as “a team player.” Your family member who keeps screwing up will keep getting bailed out as a “loving” relative. Even the government tells you that as a citizen, you should support war because it’s “patriotic”. The truth is that nice people manipulate and aren’t so virtuous as they seem.

Not a Virtue
---------------
Nice comes from the Latin word nescire, which means to not know, to be ignorant. Over the centuries, the word evolved to mean agreeable because ignorant people are easily manipulated. In modern parlance, niceness means being purposefully ignorant. We pretend that a hideous haircut looks good because we are nice. We pretend that we like our boss’s joke because we are nice. Niceness is a dishonest public persona, a fakeness for the sake of fitting in.

How did we end up here? Why are we purposefully ignorant for the sake of agreeableness?

Tool of Compliance
------------------------
Think about the structure of society. Overseers of any classroom, company or government organization need a way to keep order. One way to keep order is to get everyone disciplined, like in an army. The other way is through a cultural norm of niceness. Niceness lets overseers keep order through expected reciprocation. The hard work of discipline can be avoided if each person identifies as being nice.

Such an environment becomes despotic because it limits the realm of thought. Nice people don’t offend, so it’s difficult for them to even think certain thoughts. What’s inoffensive becomes the acceptable range of possible thoughts and that defines the Overton Window. Niceness as an identity trait means a very limited palette of thoughts from which new thoughts emerge. Creative thoughts are hard because they might be offensive. It wouldn’t be nice.

This is why nice guys are boring. They are predictably bland because their range of thought is limited.

Kind and Honest, not Boring and Cowardly
------------------------------------------------------
Stop being nice. Be honest and kind instead. Nice is not being honest nor kind because neither of those expects reciprocation. Real honesty and real kindness require virtues like courage, love and justice. Niceness is not only fake, manipulative and despotic but also dull, limiting and cowardly.

Be honest. Don’t be purposefully ignorant indulging in polite fictions. Tell the truth, even when it’s going to be offensive. Especially when it’s offensive. It’s okay if they get upset. Sometimes that rage is a form of despotic niceness coming out. Other times, it’s despair. In a society full of niceness, honesty is rare and valued by mature people.

Be kind. Telling the truth is brutally difficult, especially when the norm is niceness. Kindness is telling the truth in a loving way. It’s not minimizing the brutality of the truth. That’s niceness sneaking back in. Kindness is doing so gently and in a way the other person can receive it.

Ground yourself in truth and love, not in fitting in by being nice. To be honest and kind requires character, maturity and grounding.

You’ll need to work on yourself instead of relying on others’ reciprocation. You’re going to grow up. And it’ll get you more dates than being a nice guy.


I have a lot of essays I've written that never saw the light of day because they're not about Bitcoin.

Should I post them here?


Writing is a habit. It takes a lot of practice to get good at and as with every discipline, if you don't use it, you lose it.

It's still a little weird for me to think of myself as a writer. I'm a technical guy. I've been obsessed with computers since I was 8 years old. I've been programming since I was 9. I've been paid for providing programming services for over 20 years.

Yet looking back, it's obvious that writing was a big part of what I was doing. Explaining what needs to be done or how I did something, turned out to have value. I was a math major and writing up proofs is essentially that, it's explaining why something is true in a step-by-step, logical way. This is why so many math and physics people eventually find their place in industry as programmers.

There's also the advent of email, which came at the right time for me. I was in college when the World Wide Web exploded, in 1994. Around that time, the big thing for everyone was email, how you could send letters to people quickly and efficiently. No more waiting for a week or more to receive a reply from someone. I was an email junkie, keeping up with high school friends and writing letters to other people I had kept in touch with. Email for a few years there was a real repository of good letter writing.

Even coding itself was a form of writing. There's beauty in it if you care to look. One of my good friends, Ken Liu is an amazing coder and also an amazing writer. There's something about crafting words that lends itself to a creativity found in coding.

And yes, there is documentation, which unfortunately is very lacking in most programming environments. But the actual code writing really is a form of explaining. It's just to a computer and not to another human being.

In a way, the practice of coding, of being precise about your instructions, carries over to writing. Of course, English isn't nearly as precise as Rust, but we should still be as clear as possible. Perhaps this is why I focus so much on clarity in my writing, rather than in ideas that can be interpreted many different ways.

Still, try as I might, people interpret my writing in their own way. It's like we have different execution environments that we call our brains and the words will never execute quite the same way.

Writing to people helps me see the different ways in which people interpret my words and I can use that to debug my writing, which hopefully improves as a result over time. People are not just execution environments of my writing, but also test harnesses. And Twitter/Nostr are ways to unit test different snippets.

Writing helps coding and vice versa. Even in that last sentence I thought about saying instead "writing helps coding and coding helps writing." Which is clearer? Are there some non-English speakers that maybe don't understand "vice versa"? Does the latter flow a little better on the tongue? Is the user experience better on the former?

I write because I want to improve my craft, both as a writer and a coder.


Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Nostr is winning.


Not sure if you remember, but back in 2017-18, Brian Armstrong was teasing something new for Coinbase for several days. Everyone was excited and speculated on what it could be. Was it Lightning support? A token they were launching? Acquisition of a wallet company? Expansion into foreign markets?

It was an announcement that they're front end had migrated to react.js


On Nostr you please the market you get rewarded.

On Twitter you must also please Twitter, the CIA, some middling rent seeking trust and safety human rights personnel, some bureauxrat in San Francisco and whoever else in government cares to get in your business.

Centralization sucks for freedom.


On Twitter you play victim hoping the people in charge punish those you point to.

On Nostr you reward instead of punish.


Bitcoin "Moderate" logic:

"If you don't explicitly disavow what some internet rando says, then you're promoting what they're saying."

So fiat.


When will everyone come to Nostr? When there's a good reason.

Community is a good reason.
Knowledge is a good reason.
Making money is a great reason.

If kids can make money here, you'll see a flood like you wouldn't believe.


Bear market yadda yadda

https://i.imgur.com/81qZwTC.jpg


Challenge: Create an account with no email, phone number, address or any other identifying information somewhere and buy something also without giving any of this info.

The only two I know of are Nostr and Mullvad.


If Twitter went down, Nostr would still be up
If Gmail went down, Nostr would still be up
If WhatsApp went down, Nostr would still be up
If Telegram went down, Nostr would still be up


My article for @BitcoinMagazine continues the series on how fiat money changes incentives. This week, I look at company level incentives and how fiat money creates unnaturally large zombie companies.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/fiat-money-fuels-zombie-corporations


For free subscribers: Discipline, Science Attention Economy, LightningCon Vietnam, Dubai and more!

For paid subscribers: OP_VAULT, highly available LN nodes, mobile phone privacy and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #332

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-332


Bitcoin talk -> Reddit -> Twitter -> Nostr

Altcoiner/scammer proliferation is what causes Bitcoiner exodus. There will be a brand new round of scams for sure, but Nostr looks like a place that will be built by and made for Bitcoiners.


Matchmaking of all types (e.g. dating, recruiting, mentoring, etc.)
Any form of specialized labor (e.g. dentist, plumber, lawn care, etc.)
Custom made-to-order goods


I believe Nostr will enable way more self-employment and entrepreneurship.

Unscalable businesses, ones that require personal attention have a natural outlet here on Nostr. If you're using a platform to sell your services, you have to pay the platform and your work gets taxed. Building out via word of mouth, SEO and a website is a whole lot of work in of itself.

On Nostr, you can show endorsements. You have a natural network of people you know. There's an easy means of payment. And most importantly, you don't have to pay a tax to a platform. You can grow your own business without being dependent on some platform.


The most powerful thing about Nostr is that it reverses the server model of the last 25 years. Instead of users going to services and signing up for yet another account, services can now come to users.

Few.


thinking more about it, you can send the content to them as a direct message, which they could obviously post publicly, but it would probably be too much friction.


you're right. but i guess it'd be something more akin to patreon. the content goes to everyone, but it's funded by people that really want to support it and they get it first.


Title not finalized, but a book on how fiat ruins everything and bitcoin fixes many of those things.


And of course, my brain responds with: how about you release chapters to a paid relay (really, a publishing server) you run yourself? It's unending, really.


Gah, now I'm going to be thinking about how to do this. Maybe a Bitcoin Tech Talk account that you can follow and if the post gets a zap, the subscriber gets it in their messages? Now I want to make a newsletter bot.


Hm... There's got to be a way to distribute newsletters via Nostr and make it possible to pay via lightning to see the paid part.


Interesting Stuff

    People aren’t stupid - Sadly, it’s the elites that think the masses are dumb and that they can do much better by making choices for them. This is what has caused so much strife as authorities that get this control almost always make giant mistakes, moral or otherwise that lead to poverty, death or worse. The collective is smarter than the individual, almost always. The contempt that we see from the elites these days for collective opinion is the problem.

    Nuclear Waste - This is an article written by an environmentalist formerly against nuclear energy. He looks at the misconceptions around nuclear, particularly around waste and concludes that it’s some of the safest, especially when compared to the waste products of other energy sources. I think he’s being too harsh on coal and oil, but he’s honest about the waste generated by solar and wind. It’s criminal how little progress we’ve made with nuclear and how much regulation they’re under nearly everywhere.

    The Nature of Beauty - A very interesting first-principles based analysis of beauty. I really liked how the idea of desire was incorporated into his definition and how beauty is really a way to induce desire. I’m not sure I agree with the article exactly, but I always appreciate analysis like this that clearly outlines how a particular phenomenon works.

What I'm up to

    Individual Incentives - My latest article for Bitcoin Magazine this week is the first of a 4-part series about incentives at various levels. The main point in this article is that there are no good savings vehicles, making nearly everything into crappy savings vehicles and encouraging lots of debt. The conspicuous consumption that we see every day is truly soul-crushing and meaningless, making the modern world so much more nihilistic. Thankfully, Bitcoin fixes this.

    Nostr - I've finally created a private key and have been playing with it this past week. My public key is npub10vlhsqm4qar0g42p8g3plqyktmktd8hnprew45w638xzezgja95qapsp42 if you want to follow me there. I posted a story there that I didn’t put anywhere else that hopefully is a fun read (doesn’t have to do with Bitcoin, but it does have to do with Trudeau). I’ve also been playing around with some of the protocol, seeing how easy it is to program. Let’s just say that it was pretty easy for me to get some code for.

    Yereven and Dubai - These are the next two cities on my itinerary and if you’re in either one, please drop me a line! There will be some sort of meetup in Dubai, though I don’t have the details yet. I’m hoping there’s some good steak. The interesting part about this region is that their currencies seem relatively stable, and requiring less cash. We’ll see if this changes as I make my way to southeast Asia.

What I’m Shilling

    Books

        Bitcoin and the American Dream

        Thank God for Bitcoin

        The Little Bitcoin Book

        Programming Bitcoin

    Unchained Capital is a sponsor of this newsletter. I am an advisor and proud to be a part of a company that’s enhancing security for Bitcoin holders. If you need multisig, collaborative custody or bitcoin native financial services, learn more here.


For free subscribers: Rethinking Nuclear Waste, First Principles analysis of Beauty, Fiat Individual Incentives and more!

For paid subscribers: FediPool, Full RBF, NIP-57, Miner Lending Economics and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #331

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-331


Here's an off-the-cuff idea. Before a peer-to-peer trade both Alice and Bob send a signed message to each other. Alice signing "I have initiated a trade X for Y with Bob". Then after the trade, Bob countersigns the message with "I successfully completed this trade with Alice" or "Alice didn't live up to her end of the bargain." These can be tallied up based on how close they are to you on the network for a score.


Haven't seen a NIP for this yet, but I'd love to see some proposal for reputation/web of trust. This could be very useful for and sort of peer-to-peer trading or interaction, especially if we can get different algorithms for figuring out how much to trust someone. Might need a different way to relate than follow, though.


Respectfully, I think you miss the point of the paintings of Jesus on the cross. For Christians, they are representations of what really happened and not some abstract symbolism. The point for Christians is to look at such paintings and reflect on Christ's sacrifice.

Similarly, paintings of Jesus as a baby are representations of what really happened and are invitations to reflect on how God came to earth.

A mishmash like this is meaningless and unrepresentative of the reality Christians reflect on daily because of the simple fact that it didn't happen and no one claims it did.


looks like a variation of fool's mate. nice job not panicking on the queen threat.


well, i guess that worked. whoever sent me 21 sats, thank you!


Linked my stacker.news lightning address to my nostr. Any clients that let you tip directly?


I've definitely seen a baby Jesus being crucified painting from irreverent modern artists, not from any respectful historical artists (the ones that matter).


Polls seem like something that would be hard to implement on nostr.


Goal: Run my own Nostr relay and then use Twitter to direct followers to Nostr.
Stretch goal: Code said Nostr relay and maybe even client.


Environmentalists should be outraged at the energy directed toward zero-sum and negative-sum games like politics, altcoins and fractional reserve banking.


The question you should ask to every altcoin apologist: why do you need a token? Why don't you just use Bitcoin?

They'll misdirect you and never give you the straight answer, which is: they need free money from a gullible public.


My latest article for @BitcoinMagazine is about fiat money incentives at the individual level and how that is destroying lives one at a time.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/fiat-breaks-individual-incentives


Financial self sovereignty vs subsidizing grifters... Tough call


Large companies are extensions of the state. Or conversely, the state is an extension of large companies.


The layoffs will continue until interest rates improve.


Listen to people that add value. Everyone else is a noisy rent seeker.


Free issue for the first week of the month!

Cultural Homogeneity, Nigeria and Oil, Fiat and Work, Handcrank, Layer 2.x, Petrodollar Collapse and much more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #330

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-330


Altcoins are an unmitigated evil.


a16z acting like the Cantillionaires they are. Was that really a surprise? Let this be a lesson to you.

Altcoins are controlled by people that don't give a crap about you or your wealth. They will sell out their own grandmothers if it'll make them money.


What's your view on inscriptions?


The "Bitcoin Moderates" are cheering the fact that the Bitcoin blockchain is getting bloated with nonsense jpegs, making it harder to run your own full, archival node. Still think these are benevolent people?