Bitcoin is social consensus around the idea of following a default rule (heaviest chain) to keep agreement around something (a global ledger of value) for which there would normally be very little agreement. It's just a default rule, that can be overridden at any time when there is social consensus around something else. If there was social consensus for deleting bitcoin, it would be gone in a split second and it would be hard to prove it ever existed. In the early days, in presence of a catastrophic bug and with the full agreement of the very few participants, the rule was neglected, and patched. It's a human tool after all, therefore human agreement is always king, when it exists. However, despite being just a default rule, it can become an incredibly sticky one, because of the well known difficulty of humans to take any kind of coherent and durable collective decisions, especially at a global scale. Newspapers contain very little traces of social consensus. And when alternatives are shaky and not immediate, the default rule easily becomes the only rule. So while it may sound like a contradiction, I think bitcoin exists thanks to a form of social consensus, but is also nourished by a total lack of it.

So this Navier-Stokes OAI saga has so far 1) sparked an entire new interest for mathematics by the general public, and 2) triggered experts to ask even more research questions (such as "is this external-force solution the only possible blow-up?") Not bad for something that was supposed to destroy the field.

You can either think that mathematics is completely useless, or that it solves real problems. If you think it solves real problems (maybe not every single theorem, maybe not immediately, but still), then there seems to be no reason to slow it down, provided it's even possible.

I think a token being on L1 vs L2 is not a binary thing, it comes in shades. Relevant questions are: a) do all txs go through the L1? b) does the L1 validate all the business logic? c) can I instantly verify what an indexer tells me? d) if all indexers suddenly disappear, do I lose my tokens? The more answers are yes, the closer you are to the L1.

Who was keeping money in Liquid, and why? Like what's the point. I can understand keeping some change in Lightning, as some rare merchants accept it. But Liquid? Ever seen a "Liquid accepted here" sign?

After sending some BTC to @coinbase they flagged the tx and asked me to prove I own the wallet by sending a specific amount from the same address. But the tx came from 3 different addresses that no longer exist (cause they are now spent, of course, and wallets never reuse addresses). Spoke to customer support who has no idea what I'm talking about. @coinbase do you know how bitcoin works?

It's interesting that even very knowledgeable figures have important misconceptions about bitcoin's fee market. In particular, they believe that it somehow self corrects towards the security desired by its users.

Isn't it mind blowing that you can throw a dice a few hundred times and almost certainly generate a sequence that's never be found anywhere in the universe since its inception and possibly till its end? And it only took you a couple minutes??

When you reject tail emissions on bitcoin, you should also explain how it remains secure with exponentially decreasing subsidies and 0 sat/vB.

Money is a coordination game. Coordinating around the best technology makes little sense cause that's partly subjective and changes every year and tech rarely holds monetary value over time. Coordinating around social criteria such as "the first cryptocurrency" has worked slightly better, cause even with AI you can't easily create more of that. But that destroys innovation and leads to civil wars over trivialities. Coordination markets such as @hashdag's staghunt idea might help us adopt better money faster. Although the sudden migrations that it might trigger could increase volatility and leave many people behind.

A few weeks ago I proposed to the Kas-Smiths community the design of a completely decentralized L1 prediction market, where anybody can open a new market and no special entity is required to resolve it. Now I've refined it and added a proof of why it could actually work: drive.google.com/file/d/1uUC…

I just realized that you can't simply generate a seed by picking random words using a dice. The BIP39 standard imposes a checksum constraint, so you always need to rely on some firmware, unless you can compute SHA256 with pen and paper.

Imagine flexing a metric that is highest when your product goes to zero.

They say Strategy can't be liquidated, in reality it just slowly liquidates itself, sending bitcoin further down every week. Interests due are perpetual so this is just the beginning, much worse than a single FTX-style explosion which would attract fresh capital right after.

This summarizes the state of American culture. 1) they see no problem with a president picking up the phone and changing the course of a tournament. 2) they believe the world of football is scared of "Belogun", someone they've probably heard about today for the first time.

If you guys don't like binary rules, then make it smooth with fractional scores. If only 10% of your body was offside then your goal will count as 0.9.