Dave owns a software company in silicon valley and has a popular youtube show on investing and is an active invester. He is also trying to understand bitcoin and some other crypto projects. He has quite a network of friends on the youtube circuit and goes on other youtubr shows. Also he able to get CEOs on to talk talk with him. What I like about Dave- he’s a good and tenacious interviewer- like Russel Roberts of econ talk. He is also able to make very clear explainations.
And he reads a ton apparently. He’s been skeptical of crypto and in response ARK invest sent their analyst to discuss it with him.
I’d like to see SAFE on his show and on Russel Robert’s Econ talk (actually have to check to see if econ talk is still up after seeming decades of shows) As far as Dave an interview, it might be as easy as reaching out on Twitter. I don’t know him and have no contact so I can’t help beyond this suggestion.
Don’t you think we should get Fleming out first?
I do.
Point but I still have the sense that SAFE is no longer a proof of concept issue or even proof of practicality issue. After the refactor and with recent results it seems like SAFE is also practical. But just because something is proven to work and can be shown to be practical doesn’t mean it will be the solution that wins out. The marketing fight is now because other systems are gaining momentum. Maybe David and crew will take it as far as they can and it will be left for another group to perfect it? We don’t know. But right now especially in the investor community (I know- who needs these rent seekers?) that there is an alternative to block chain. Maybe you’re right, maybe now isn’t the time for more mind share. But maybe presenting an alternative would help temper dangerous expectations for the block chain.
Mr. Lee said things in his interview on the nature of government debt that led me to think that he doesn’t understand it yet (not that I understand it perfectly) and is still working from old models. It is interesting to me that those in the crypto-currency space often hold up Hayek but don’t get he was in favor of a safety net. Or they are libertarian and generally in favor of Milton Friedman’s take on things but may not know that Friedman proposed holding the fed to an algorithm and then backed out of that position in favor of manipulated fiat. And yet this non arbitrariness is essentially close to the core of the bit coin argument as I understand it. They will say as long as a government can inflate money (as Hayek did prior to formal sovereign fiat which predated him) there can be no equity and stability. But they don’t see how dependent even prior to sovereign fiat going all the way back how totally dependent business and trade have always been on state spending- and are even in principle which is surely why in the light of true sovereign fiat released from gold thar Friedman backed away from wanting to go all algorythmic. Or they see this only selectively. Scotland tried total free market banking and so have some other countries- no interventionist banking but the wealthy (business couldn’t stand it.) So I can understand that they don’ want the human centipede of trickle down where its all grants at the top and rent seeking at the bottom and no one owns anything and there is no real sense of independence or security. But I think that has to be balanced by the understanding of how radical truly sovereign fiat is without any ball and chain of metal money and while they are afraid it reduces the economic to the political they have to understand ‘there is no free lunch’ with either and they have to be part of the political process minding the store, it can’t be automated away. They have to do one to one face to face conversations with a civic, skeptical but non cynical mind and be part of the process. So yes lets cut all he cords and pump hoses and lets have more of a homestead and decentralize and empower average individuals but unless its a matter of calling undue attention to SAFE too early (I think all the dangerous attention is already fully aware) the SAFE voice is missing to an extent from the discussions (even as I admittedly know almost nothing here) of BT and Etherium and now Solid (different but related even as SAFE and Solid have affiliation of sorts.)
I think of SAFE more in terms of truth matching and a universal speech commons and facilitator of real physical proximity face to face communication but I think so many of those in the crypto coin sector think in terms of dis-engagement and escapism through get rich quick and tax evasion. I like that Dave is skeptical of all of that with BT but fascinated. I also like that he is always trying to learn but certainly don’t always agree with him, he doesn’t seem to see the problems with sponsorship or a theft based attention economy or the aggregate, cumulative ill of that. And on government debt I wish he’d read Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth.” Without that peace provided by Kelton and Mosler how can anyone understand what they are doing with crypto money. I’ll readily admit I don’t understand crypto money but I think the crypto people in general (surely with some exceptions) despite being generally very intelligent and aware don’t understand even fundamentally government debt or really grasp fiat- how the hell can they replace it when they don’t get what every fed board member understands and Greespan demonstrated that he surely understood. I get that the current system isn’t great but I understand fiat better than I understand crypto currency and its promises seem far greater than anything the crypto currency world has been thinking of and I think crypto will get co-opted for this lack of understanding.
But then again I am very biased, I don’t care about SAFE coin or supply side pay the producer schemes very much, I just want the underlying network to scale. However the tiny bit I’ve understood suggests a SAFE based currency doesn’t have block chain tech’s drawbacks and people should know about the alternative. What if SAFE had received the support the block chain has so far?
Think I’ve formed an opinion on Bitcoin and Etherium before even getting started but strong enough of an opinion to lose interest and write it off.
Starting to sense that bitcoin is really a kind of scam. Its origins are a clue. The guy who started it said it was a claissified (read US military) with Citibank (the bank that was all excited about plutocracy and plutonomy or over throwing US democracy and wanting to make it permanent- you can find that presentation if you look) and it was clearly developed during the Bush admin which had collapsed the economy over a ponzi of insuring permanently stranded fossil fuel liabilities pitched as assets called derivatives but blamed it on poor people through propagandists like Michael Bury and the big short film producers. Bitcoin would add another nation’s worth of demand (totally uneccesarily) for BS fossil fuels so was another damn bailout for garbage like natural gas- another Enron stunt because natural gas never gets better than Enron- look at its new hydrogen scam where 3x more bs inflated natural gas per unit energy consumed would be needed and more polution and CO2 than coal would result. This was a scam with a hilarious trojan horse built in the only semi anonymous block chain tracker ledger- which will of course be used by the USG. Open source as it may be it probably has some sort of back door hidden in plain site. It was also supposed to stop deficit spending which is code for people who don’t know its nonsense (in a soveriegn fiat context) for don’t spend my money on Brown people because they didn’t steal it or earn it! But Milton Friedman who first proposed taking away flexible fed interest rates and monetary policy backed away from it because he learned doing so would actually kill business and the ability to use the dollar as glue to hold Americanism together and made zero sense in terms of actual economic stability. We have ‘sequestering’ to hide the printing under fiat which while imperfect and trickle down shock absorbs all the little bumps of every kind that would always kill metal money based economies that the people who can’t understand markets don’t self regulate are always going on about. There is nothing more flexible than fiat but it will be digitized (is already) and every piece of decentralized tech and crypto will be used to perfect it- but that is something beyond bitcoin.
Cash of course is a good thing right? Stabil digital money is about more than allowing the paradox of thrift for cash under the matress. Its about more than being able to buy guns, drugs and hookers with some privacy. If it came to the petrol oligarchs they surely wanted a way to buy the equivalent of hooker congressional representatives and evade taxes. They got duped with bitcoin. Starting to think Etherium is even funnier than Bitcoin because it is money that can and will phone home on you and will get voucherized which is a Marxist strategy to prevent speculation and force equity. Bitcoin may be making some people well off for the moment but its not the equivalent of homesteads so that American’s can give Uncle Sam the finger on some useless shoe shine cannon fodder war. The USG had a period where it allowed private currencies but they were garbage and it shut them down. The idea that money is some investment (especially one that requires as much energy per transaction (and CO2 if you’re not using true green) as it takes to drive a Model 3 a few thousand miles) that can somehow get ahead of its use case as if it were aging fine wine or rare coins- seems like a pipe dream. BT doesn’t have the practicality necessary to be a true stable source of value and the lightning network hybrid doesn’t fix that. Other tech will be better suited like SAFE but whatever it is will be forked into the USD.
Money gets its value through mindshare from more than guns and butter. It gets
value from being able to be taxed away to stir the pot and spent in storms of money for stimulus. Yes, a bribery backed technocracy is a central point of failure, but the solution is to fix the democracy and get rid of bribery based enclosed systems of speech based on therft of attention and dishonest anti commons principles.
Thinking that bit coin will provide something where a government can’t just print to regressively tax but still hit the tax evasion schemes of the wealthy won’t work either. As Picketty said governments will just track better and tax at the point of consumption and tangibilty.
Bitcoin at this point seems like Covid 19- some of the same people give us both?
Turns out the reason for the anonimity of its birth was for a good reason, it was thr product a damn weapons lab produced during what may have been the most corrupt regime in US history- far more so than the Nixon or Trump eras. The coup came with the petrarchy and 911 and all the useless fossil fuel bailouts during Bush.
I may be clueless but Dave’s skepticism seems even more reasonable now. Wonder what he would make of SAFE. I think he should stop interviewing the coin people and try to talk to Vitalek if he is going to spend more time on it. Talk to the developers. He should also interview some MMT people like L. Randal Wray.
I asked a long time ago on this forum if Etherium could duplicate SAFE’s intended feature set. And while we can’t claim to with certainty the answer now in retrospect (even as a non technical person) is: of course not! But SAFE was always so much bigger than the coin. I think it could scale without it.
It is first time in human history people can own their own currency based on the most important reosurce without nation’s violence.
It is really huge and this is innovation.
@bridge Just like to note I wholly disagree with that characterization. But lets hope for the best in something that fills our voids coming soon.
Hilarious, Yellen anounced moves that seem to me to imply BitCoin was a honey pot all along. Just as expected they will use the pseudoanonymous block chain to get the toe in the water of the tax evaders. I expect the bitcoin bubble to pop now. They hid it under layers of obfuscation. First was citibank the pro overthrow democracy with plutonomy presentation. They used a mechanism that would prop fossil fuel (making it seem like more corporate welfare) they obfuscated the origins especially that it was a classified US defence project. It looks like an IRS sting now that will really reinforce the USD as soveriegn fiat. People sought BitCoin for peace of mind. Now they will have the opposite. What a surprise a USG state project would have tax enforcement and USD currency mindshare strengthening. So looks like BT will also fade as a mechanism of bribery and laundering as its blown. Now will come the blather about forking. If forking is the answer how did the USG’s honeypot become the most popular in the first place?