Nick Szabo Profile picture
Aug 17, 2019 6 tweets 1 min read Read on X
Shallow safety vs. deep safety:

Shallow: estimated from volatility, assumes nothing goes wrong at lower layers of the protocol stack

Deep: what happens to your assets upon underlying failures? e.g. how would your digitally centralized assets fare against sanctions or cyberwar?
Digitally centralized assets have poor deep safety. They were designed in & only work in a legally stable environment.

Real estate & gold have deeper safety, assuming strong local security.

Trust-minimized Bitcoin uses computer science to achieve unprecedentedly deep safety.
Digital centralization has made it possible, for the first time in history, for authorities to routinely extract haircuts and "negative interest". Some countries in Europe have already used these techniques against digitally centralized cash balances.
At the behest of political activists, digitally centralized financial services have frozen accounts and cut off access to a wide variety of people based on their political views.
In a deep or prolonged recession, attacks by technocratic authorities & political activists against digitally centralized assets will increase in volume & scope. Other forms of political or legal instability could also lower the safety of digitally centralized assets.
One can think of shallow safety as the technical analysis of safety based on technical factors such as price volatility. Deep safety is a fundamental analysis of the underlying technological, political, and legal environments which actually control the assets.

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More from @NickSzabo4

Apr 5, 2020
Per fatality, the number of life-years lost is far lower for covid-19 than it was for the 2009 H1N1. In terms of life-years the latter may have been as severe in the U.S. as the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_…

statnews.com/2019/06/11/h1n…
Older people have weaker immune systems & more comorbidities, so tend to succumb disproportionately to pandemics. Covid-19 is an extreme example because 97-99% of the time it kills only people with comorbidities.
An exception, as with 2009 H1N1, happens when the older population experienced a similar virus in their younger years, gaining partial immunity. In that case young people disproportionately suffer and die, and far more years of life are lost per fatality.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 17, 2019
What do Brexit and Hong Kong separatism have in common? They are the latest manifestations of the deep, centuries-long separation between common law and Roman (civil) law.

swarajyamag.com/world/how-brex…
The EU and the Chinese Communist government operate under the civil law tradition, which included Prussian Law and the Code Napoleon. It originates in Roman imperial law, which included the maxim "the emperor's will is law."
British and Hong Kong law are based on the English common law system, where more of the law has been based on judicial precedent than the more legislatively-centered civil law countries.
Read 5 tweets
Aug 11, 2019
The exploration explosion took European navigation from the stay-on-known-routes affair common since ancient times to discovering new routes across the world's oceans & recording them for posterity.
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/10/dead-r…
It gave them access to almost every culture on earth.
Europe's advanced metallurgy, glass-making, and precision techniques allowed them to mass produce things that in most other cultures were far more scarce. Their tools and techniques would become even more advanced during the subsequent centuries of the industrial revolutions.
Traditional money & collectibles were valued for a supply curve secured by a costliness that was effectively unforgeable under traditional conditions. This allowed them to be used as stores & displays of wealth & media of wealth transfer.
nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
Read 18 tweets
Mar 14, 2019
The two main kinds of agriculture were grain-dominated stationary & nomadic pastoral. Over several centuries preceding & during the industrial revolution, some regions of northwestern Europe developed a third kind of ag that combined the best of each: stationary pastoralism. /1
This thread shows some of the results. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, city traffic in northwestern Europe was uniquely dominated by horses supplied by hay and grain fodder from stationary pastoral hinterlands:

/2
Hereford cattle, bred in the West Midlands, the hay hinterland of the earliest industrializing region in the world. The _bos taurus_ type of cattle, unique to Europe until the European diaspora, gave more beef & milk & facilitated making hard cheese.

/3 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereford_…
Image
Read 13 tweets
Mar 10, 2019
Principles of biological scalability, especially the principle of the minimum
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27…
along with principles of social scalability
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/07/hampto…
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-…
explain some of the most important patterns of history. /1
Applying the Sprengel/Liebig principle of the minimum to human food production & nutrition, a society can be protein-rich, and thus limited by its carbohydrate & fat intake (i.e. calorie-limited), or it can be rich in carbohydrates or fats, thus limited by its protein intake. /2
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had poor social scalability because they were roving bandits, frequently at war with each other. Their typical diets, compared to ours, were heavier in meat, & thus more limited in energy (carbohydrates & fats) and less limited in proteins. /3
Read 8 tweets
Mar 6, 2019
Economic history has been dominated by basics: growing food & fuel, mating & child rearing, fighting wars, clothing & shelter, worrying about afterlife. Occasionally there have been major agricultural surpluses, which have been spent in a bizarre variety of ways (thread) /1
Agricultural surpluses have been spent on military parades, crown jewels, tall cathedrals, vast priesthoods, gigantic tombs, arrays of monoliths, treasure fleets, moon shots, & a dizzying variety of other things. /2
These seem like irrational bubbles, yet in many cases persisted for or recurred across centuries or millennia. We moderns seem to be trending towards competitions for scholastic credentials & efforts at longer & healthier lives, each of which appeal to insatiable needs. /3
Read 5 tweets

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