Spent a bit of time yesterday arguing with obnoxious bitcoiners. I learned a few things.

1) all their schooling on bitcoin has been propaganda

2) they're psychologically *unrecognisable* compared to crypto people 5 years ago

It's a totally new kind of person, with a new story.
What's interesting about that is the sheer cultic emotional intensity that bitcoin has attracted. These people are nuts!

All they know is that bitcoin wins, and anybody who says different is THE ENEMY.

But *they do not even know what bitcoin is* - "cap theorem?" "byzantine?"
And this, this is super dangerous: to have a cult loyalty to something you do not truly understand makes one into a monster. There's simply no other way to defend a thing you don't know, other than blind force and yelling.

This is going to have to be corrected: teach the people.
Whether they're right or wrong about bitcoin's eventual destiny, the fact they're fighting for a thing they don't understand makes them uniquely dangerous: the marching morons have arrived in technology, and tech is NO place for the marching morons. It's the worst possible place.
You just can't do the Marching Morons thing in STEM fields: the plane must fly, the wings will not fall off but the only way you get that result is by knowing the truth.

"The underlying crypto will be broken in 10 to 20 years" is almost certainly a statement of fact. "Now what?"
Old school bitcoiners, the people who understood the technology, would argue (rightly) that bitcoin could move to a quantum-resistant public key algorithm, at some cost in efficiency, and that hash power would continue to be a valid metric of PoW.

Right or wrong, that's reasoned
Now I find myself wondering if the same kind of rot has set into the Ethereum community, or if we spend too much time *actually building stuff* that the STEM style of communication still wins out: is Ethereum still engineering, or has it too become religion.

I *think* we're OK?
I did a talk about how the kind of people involved in Ethereum would *radically* transform every time the community grew by a factor of 100x - "success means constant cultural dilution" at DevCon0 back in 2014.

how right I was, how right I was.

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More from @leashless

31 May
For 20 years, I've only measured myself against actually saving the world.

Wasn't that way before 2001. It just clicked one day ("the paperwork" - if you know that story).

It just dawned on me how odd this is, and how different my life would be if many more people did it too.
I am right royally tired of people refusing to do the simple first principles math:

[sustainable harvest of the earth each year] divided by [eight billion people]

Now we design a lifestyle which works within, say, 2/3 of that limit so there is room for planetary regeneration.
Every single idiot who talks about "regenerative community" or "circular economy" without CALCULATING WHAT THE NATURAL RESOURCE BUDGET IS FIRST is living in a total dreamworld.

Numbers are everything in sustainability. Do the math or get out of the way: we need plans not fables.
Read 4 tweets
23 May
I don't normally discuss the price of crypto.

I need to discuss the price of crypto.

Depending on how response is to this thread, I may write a longer-form piece for the @Mattereum blog tomorrow, so lets see how it goes.

A mix of hard truths and bright horizons. Here goes.
So I joined the story way off to the left of this graph. Two years to the left of it. Bitcoin was $500 or so in 2014.

This is *prehistory*. At the time, I was working in a military think tank on managing natural disasters and cyber risk. files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/Defense_… from those days.
Now, why does a medium-grade defense intellectual quit to go into crypto. The short answer is "I needed a job that paid better than think tanks" but why did I take *that* job, with the Ethereum Foundation? blog.ethereum.org/2015/03/03/eth…

The answer is, I wanted to change the world.
Read 57 tweets
11 May
Urgh. So many ducks to get in rows. So much to do, so much I would have done differently. Still butting up against capacity limits of various kinds. But people are starting to get it, starting to grasp what the @Mattereum game plan really is.

That #AhaMoment "any physical thing"
It's funny watching the penny drop for people: it starts with "ok, so the stuff is in a vault" followed by "wait... how do I know what's in the vault is real? I can't even inspect it!"

Well, that's right. And you've already paid in crypto, so you can't get the money back. Right?
Once people get that insight, "oh you have to prove what is in the vault!" everything else pops into place neatly. One short socratic dialogue later, the wonder is clearly perceived: "the NFT is a financial instrument which may happen to contain a physical item, plus arbitration"
Read 8 tweets
22 Feb
I am about to tell you clearly and plainly, in four-ish tweets, what #metamodernism is and how to fix it.

This article and the ones linked from it is a fair summary of the critical state of play. Let us begin.

1) metamodernism is a philosophical stance with political aspects.
2) metamodernism falsely claims all the action is in the space between *modernism and **post-modernism.

* myth of progress
** myth, because progress towards what?

Progress requires goals. Pomo argues successfully there are no clearly defined goals without totalitarian aspects.
3) the “goal crisis” causes political shattering among the deep readers. A similar crisis to the 1950s aeon.co/ideas/how-camu… related to nihilism and existentialism: “now that we are free, what do I do?”

In our times, this goalless shattering results in intersectional politics.
Read 8 tweets
23 Dec 20
I'm about to describe how the @Mattereum system integrates into Rarible and the rest of the NFT ecosystem, and how we're going to get gold bars online in Jan 2021, barring unforseen problems.

Here's the technical backgrounder thread if you're wondering...
So now we've got this handy Asset - a web of Fiat Contracts which take your money in exchange for the ability to enforce legally if this object is wrong.

*Now* we can mint an ERC721 for the object.

Here's the NFT. Here's the Asset Passport which defines the NFT. Can you buy it?
And let's be clear here: we're talking about *physical* delivery of a *physical* valuable asset, defined by *fiat* contracts, enforceable all over the world, off an ERC721.

This is deep, deep uncharted territory. This has never really been done before, not in a functional way.
Read 14 tweets
23 Dec 20
Alright. Let's talk about what's going to happen next with @mattereum.

Things are about to get really interesting. I'd liken what we're about to do to the invention of e-commerce. We are about to do the first sale of physical assets on Web3 which fundamentally improves on Web2.
The first thing you're going to notice: we have very poor language for talking about this innovation.

Why? It's new-new. So new we don't know how to talk about it.

Imagine trying to explain what a "domain name server" is to somebody who has never seen a web page.

We are here.
Right now there is an almost metaphysical separation between the world of "crypto" property rights, where code is law, and "fiat" property rights, where law is law.

Crypto property is global property, its jurisdiction is (roughly) "The Internet". Fiat property is in countries.
Read 26 tweets

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