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.

The most predictable object in physics becomes completely unpredictable the moment you add a second joint. It's called a "double pendulum." This is why scientists still cannot predict the double pendulum exactly. A double pendulum with initial conditions measured to a trillionth of a degree will still become completely unpredictable within ten seconds. Think about what that sentence actually means. We have the full equations. Newton wrote them. Lagrange refined them. Every physics undergraduate can derive them on a napkin. There's no missing physics, no hidden variable, no quantum weirdness. Just two rods, two joints, gravity. That's it. And yet the system laughs at prediction. The reason lives in something called the Lyapunov exponent, a number that measures how fast two nearly-identical starting positions diverge from each other over time. For a double pendulum, that exponent sits around 3 to 5 per second, and in some experiments as high as 7.9. Translation: "any tiny uncertainty in your starting angle doubles roughly every fifth of a second. After one second, your error has grown by a factor of thousands. After five seconds, by a factor of billions. After ten, the two pendulums have nothing in common except the laws they obey." The deeper trap is philosophical. Classical mechanics was supposed to be the temple of determinism. Laplace famously claimed that a sufficiently powerful intelligence knowing every particle's position and velocity could predict the entire future of the universe. The double pendulum quietly destroys that dream using two sticks and a hinge. Determinism holds in theory, but predictability fails because measurements are never exact. You cannot know an angle to infinite decimal places. The universe doesn't hand you those digits. So even in a fully deterministic system, the future becomes practically unknowable the moment sensitivity to initial conditions outpaces your measurement resolution. This is why weather forecasts fail past two weeks. Why heart arrhythmias resist prediction. Why financial models built on smooth curves get shredded by reality. The double pendulum is the honest face of most complex systems in nature. Smooth predictability is the exception. Chaos is the default setting of anything with coupled nonlinear parts.

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…

After a lot of hard work, I'm glad to finally announce my new YouTube channel, Parallel Thoughts, and our inaugural video about Vladimir Arnold and the rainbow. piped.video/watch?v=ZJH-5LLw…

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.

My feed is full of Kaspa again, so I assume they fixed the algo (for now)... So if you can see this and you think this could be useful in the future to someone, please share it. There is no point in continuing using this app if nobody can find the info. github.com/kaspaFacts/kaspa-…

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.

Tough truths bitcoiners need to hear: There are no major issues with core Ordinals are not spam Proof of Work and a healthy fee marketplace sufficiently protect against spam transactions Our problem is too little on chain activity, not too much BIP 110 is technically stupid and a massive distraction All of Luke's beliefs are fringe. He's a good fringe thinker, but he does not build for mainstream adoption You don't know what's best for bitcoin. You only know what's best for yourself. Have some humility

Even though STRC is not designed in the same way as UST/Luna, one can prove that it can enter a similar downward spiral, due to the feedback loop between BTC/STRC price and the market risk premium. There's typically a relative stability around par, then a tipping point that triggers a self sustaining spiral stopping at a new stable equilibrium (potentially at zero under some configurations). The math is here: drive.google.com/file/d/1Pbw…