Yes! I read a book a week, so many good ones. I wish I could read more.

I love to cook food. Eating out can be exquisite, but some of my favorite meals have been cooking together with friends. For example, whipping up some tamales with friends -- mmm, scrumptious!

Death is a state of mind. You aren't your body, you are your mental states. If you let your mental states perish, you perish.

Yes, thank you! I will check that out. I just found "Choice in Currency" and "Denationalization of Currency" by Hayek.

I also found "The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative" by Vera Smith, one of Hayek's students. It seems good - putting even more meat on the proposal.

Yes, I think we are actually in agreement - your final line suggests that we are.


I had, for the sake of speculation, assumed away all competing/existing national currencies. But, I am very interested in the tradeoff you are asking about. It seems possible that both national currencies and cryptocurrencies can both be used to finance war and their dual existence might actually make it more possible for tge creative financing that could mobilize military resources.

Nothing in my original post posited that existing blockchain implementations are currently capable of the kind of political hand-binding that I was speculating on. Of course what I was talking about is a wish -- the original poster's question was 'could,' not 'can they currently.' The root of my idea is that blockchain, as an algorithm, creates the potential for transparent protocols for transferring value. Wars, coups, insurgencies -- all of these are made possible through creative financing, i.e. the ability to funnel money toward (or away from) violence specialists. Thus, cryptocurrencies -- programmable money -- could be programmed to freeze, siphon, or otherwise act as a barrier to war.

Of course, the last half of your post is true - that we should focus on the potential for abuse. Yes, everything I've said means that nefarious or well-intentioned actors could very well create a new tyrannical world order because the are able to protocolize coercion.

Which actually isn't a critique of my argument - it strikes at a more profound question: is war always bad? is it sometimes justified? As in, 'peace' might simply mean the oppressed continuing to be oppressed. War might be liberation. To me, one thing is clear: cryptocurrencies and blockchain do are algorithms that yes, can be wielded as a shield against oppression or, maybe more likely, as tool toward hyperefficient oppression. 

Yes, actually. There is a profound potential in cryptocurrencies: the ability to bind our hands to something that no one can change. Normally, when we talk of diplomacy and war between countries, political philosophy has always faced the same problem: who guards the guardians? As in, who is powerful enough to hold the major powers accountable? In the current system, the U.N. is the most global political body, but it doesn't have binding power against the security council.

But now, imagine every nation's bank account was held in cryptocurrency. Now, further, imagine all countries agreed that if another nation launched a war, their military accounts would automatically be frozen or drained. Sort of like how NATO created an umbrella defense system from "an attack against one is an attack against all." Similarly, an attack anywhere could be "an attack against all," and the punishment could be automatically enforced, even against major world powers.

Obviously, this doesn't eliminate the "root cause of war," nor is it especially plausible in the near future, nor does it show how it would be politically viable to transition to such a world (why would the U.S. or China or Russia relinquish their power?). But -- it at least presents a plausible, albeit simplified, logic behind how cryptocurrency and blockchain could be foundational in political institutions which could mitigate if not altogether eliminate the ability for nation's to wage war.

My constructive hobby is to make board games. I love designing, tuning, and playing games for and with my friends. The latest one I made was a game where you competitively sell food.

Most virtual reality was awful for quite a while. The early oculus -- it was nauseating and unimmersive. Now, VR has come a long way. You take off the goggles and feel like you dropped out of the clouds. I'm into it.

For real, I watched my roommate eat an entire bag of halloween candy for dinner the other night. Today, he at 4 hot dogs for breakfast. Business as usual for him, but hole mother of moses - I'm not even mad, I'm impressed by the amazing adaptability of humans.

No. Definitely not. I have too much regret.

When I'm speaking with my father or mother, every second counts. I know I won't have too many left, and so I try and relish them. Great question!

I just saw the new movie, Bohemian Rhapsody, about Freddie Mercury and Queen. Twas a great time, highly recommend it. I also really enjoyed Hidden Figures, I watched it on a plane from NY to LA the other week, very good.

I love sleep, but like any good thing, I don't let myself have too much of it. If I slept 10+ hours every day, insomnia would subdue me. But, I also need it - if I get less than 6 hours of sleep for an extended period, I start to go loopy. So, 6-8 hours of sleep every night, plus little siestas every now and then.

I'm only opposed to the artificial aspect of this moon. I want to launch an all-natural, non-GMO, organic, locally sourced, whole-motherfriggen-wheat Moon. It's just wrong to launch that kind of chem-trail leaking piece of plastic. Think of the children.

I don't buy either of the two arguments: that our 'intrinsic creativity' will, on its own, sufficiently demarcate man vs. machine or that our creativity will be our obvious comparative advantage to machines.

If, for example, a person announced that they had actually created the painting that just sold for $432,500 -- what would you say? Is it all of a sudden art - the same image - because it was associated with a person?

Personhood is a status - it's a designation for individuals we believe are part of our moral communities, worthy of inclusion. Take any atrocity, or look to our treatment of animals, and you will see how fluid this status is. Social groups can easily slide into states that deny others their status as persons -- dehumanization.

I think we will increasingly come to recognize the personhood of certain machines as they take on increasing characteristics of people -- creating art, telling stories, managing their own money (a possibility raised through blockchain), and solving problems. And, some - the horror! - might even be better at art, stories, managing money, and solving problems.

Further, it's likely we are moving into a post-capital world. A world where we already know how to produce 10 x as much food as we need and where we know how to cure the deadliest and most pervasive diseases. Working as stewards of capital will most likely come to an end, partially as a result of automation, partially as a result of no longer needed our efforts placed there. So work will be replaced by something else -- perhaps we will be put to use solving the next major problems: how to make us happy, how to make us immortal, and how to bring us closer to divinity.

Try staring at a beautiful landscape, the Rock Mountains, the structure of a leaf. Even nature itself can be art, without human intention or creativity. I don't see anything wild or bewildering in calling the result of AI decisions art.

Further, if you think that art is a mirror of the age, then there is nothing more art than AI produced images -- it speaks to the blurring between human and machine that defines the zeitgeist of our age.

I'm all for the future of decentralized governance. But, what needs to happen right now is a global experiment which breaks out of niche crypto communities and proves it's possible.

Therefore, I propose the creation of the Intergalactic Space Council. It will be a one year experiment in decentralized governance that allows anyone, anywhere to run for the first ever, truly cosmopolitan office. It can create an environment to test new ideas in voting institutions -- like 'quadratic voting' -- with real people so that we can better understand the full dynamics of this kind of system to prevent a new, tyrannical order from rising in place of the existing one.  The council will, as part of its constitutional premise, launch a satellite into space streamed via Twitch. The members of the council will be able to vote on moral resolutions that are broadcasted down.


Who's on board to help make this happen? 

Definition of Feudalism: serfs perform labor on land owned by and profited from nobility in exchange for in-kind goods, like protection.

Technofeudalism: millions of people performing data-labor on websites owned by and profited from corporations like Facebook in exchange for in-kind goods, like social media.

Extending your farm metaphor, these major corporations essentially presume a property right in user data on their platforms -- user data that is immensely valuable in training machine learning and AI algorithms. They have produced data farms with grass they attract us with and they harvest our outputs.

So, how do we do something about this?

First, we need to understand this phenomena and articulate in compelling ways -- as I think your conversation is beginning.
Second, we need to identify ways to reinstate our property rights in our own data -- through both political action and technology (like blockchain)
Third, we need economic models which use blockchain to reward the marginal contributions of data along the entire supply chain towards valuable algorithms (rewarding people for their data labor instead of just extracting it, which would actually lead to higher quality data contributions instead of the flimsy, not-quality controlled ways data is currently collected..)

Great question though all around, what I've added is just a small slice of the pie!

Hey! When I'm really stressed I take a shower, throw my phone across the room, read a short story, then write short fiction. Something about this process fully relaxes my mind and allows a total reset. Good luck!