Starbucks, Nordstrom And Whole Foods Now Accept Bitcoin. Just Don’t Ask Them.

BTC was overvalued relative to the USD in 2017 and the USD was overvalued relative to BTC in 2018. We’re seeing a delayed return to equilibrium as folks watch the USD unravel in slow motion and wait for the Fed to print more money to soak up Trump’s China mess #politics

“Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy”, but also “the trend is your friend”. No wonder so many people don’t bother investing because educational institutions almost universally fail to teach us how to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time

I think you’re right. Market value is an average of subjective estimates, and is relative to who gets to participate. There will always be cases when the crowd gets it wrong, but *hopefully* with more information, and more diverse eyes looking at it, the better the estimates

The Charlottesville riots in the U.S. were people on the right violently fighting for who they consider ordinary people, which was to say white people. On the left, there are the yellow vest riots in France, which are still ongoing #politics

Sadly, the consolidation of corporate power continues to create situations like these. I still drink Coca-Cola and shop at retailers that use sweat shops. It’s silly to try to make individuals feel bad for participating because every supply chain is interconnected #politics

If you’re willing to bite the bullet on that then I suppose you also support the violent reappropriation of land stolen from indigenous peoples and would have supported John Brown’s use of violence to free slaves #politics

I don’t think that business, exchange, or commerce is in any way the problem. Leveraging comparative advantage and encouraging mutually beneficial trade is good. That’s why I care about crypto and decentralized economies. Centralized corporations and states are violent #politics

Rad, I had no idea those were originally from the 70’s!

@blacque What is your profile pic? It looks like a toy I had as a kid 🤔

Sorry, I keep forgetting to tag things with #politics! It's one of my favorite features of Peepeth, so I really must get better about this

Consider people who are forced to sell food that they produce, on land expropriated by the state and sold to corporations, under threat of physical harm instead of consuming it themselves. Which is more violent, eating what "isn't yours" or beating someone for doing it? #politics

Taking advantage is beneficial so long as it is sustainable. Income inequity is unsustainable and is leading to a surge of violent populism worldwide. As non wage-based alternatives become more prevalent, giving workers real choice, what you're saying will become more true

Until people value human equity (which is necessary for the long-term health and well-being of society) over one-day shipping, it isn't a matter of disrupting Amazon, but rather disrupting the media and propaganda that actively shields us from our own history of theft

Jeff Bezos is only one concrete example. We all exist on a spectrum of privilege. I don't think it's envious for folks to criticize my relative affluence. I also wouldn't be envious of people at the top because they are least able to change the system that got them where they are

Trying to Understand Merkle Trees: https://beta.cent.co/+27wqz5 #memes

Necessary reading for any crypto-activist

I'm a fan of the idea of a holocracy vs a state: overlapping opt-in districts of governance and insurance vs one monolithic government per polity. I think state-level UBIs are unavoidable in the mid-term, but I tend to agree that more fine-grained solutions will be more effective

I love Peepeth so much, but I keep accidentally replying and offering Enso to the wrong parts of threads because of the way replies are nested. Maybe they should just appear sequentially in a list? Anyone have examples of UIs that avoid this, or am I just too hasty?

Thank you for reading 😄

Jeff Bezos himself isn’t out there personally harming or exploiting anyone, just focusing on creating value, which necessarily means ignoring inconvenient problems. The same goes for execs at Coca-Cola ignoring water pollution in India or Apple ignoring factory suicides in China

He was also not alone in building Amazon. He has not put in the majority of hours worked developing the software, legal framework, cutting deals, or shipping packages. Most of those people are paid an hourly wage that is not proportional to their contribution. That’s exploitation

Consider this: Jeff Bezos had a good idea, but his controlling an inordinate amount of wealth means there are people who can’t afford to eat, and starve. With each passing generation it becomes more statistically certain that one of those people had a better idea. That’s violence

I think bounty and open-source compensation systems like Gitcoin and Utopian.io are the best models currently because they minimize training costs and theft of surplus labor. They leave us with a training problem though, which is what my proposal is aimed at solving

Very true. I think we could tweak the current market-based approach so that it is: 1) an ongoing negotiation process per project; and 2) proportional to the market value of the product or service, not wage-based

Did someone say my name? I confuse myself sometimes. I look like Socrates but my name’s Galois? What a weirdo

IQ, physical ability, disease restistance, etc. all come with hidden genetic trade-offs that are only worth the cost given the context of a particular environment. Remember that the dinosaurs were apex predators. Someday we will learn the true value of a diversified population

The question isn’t whether every human being has something meaningful to contribute, but whether we can convince them of this fact in time for them to learn how to put it to use

3) Wealth is not meritocratic, it is the result of generations of violence and exploitation. Wells are owned by the people with the bigger stick, not the people that dug them. UBIs benefit entrepreneurs and people in between jobs, which is good but won’t prevent mass depopulation

2) UBIs will disproportionately benefit the middle and upper-middle classes, no different than social security. It will be a marginal improvement, but not enough to prevent the deaths of millions due to the effects of global warming and housing scarcity. All part of the plan tho

1) UBIs will continue to become more prevalent. Water and land scarcity will become exponentially more problematic. In order to quell violence it will be more expedient for the ultra-wealthy to throw the plebes a few $ than abolish fundamentally flawed institutions

We also create a lot of unnecessary challenges for ourselves. We must accept them only in the sense of recognizing that they are our own doing so that we might avoid them in the future, not merely accept them as unavoidable obstacles to be overcome

3) If it’s a bad fit, the investor loses the stake and the organization is compensated for training costs; else, the investor receives a fee proportional to the added productivity of the new worker. Continue reading on Cent: https://beta.cent.co/+lx3x5e

2) Instead of assuming infinite resources, what if we had a marketplace where investors could stake collateral on individual résumés?

1) Modern education is a system for credentialing labor. If organizations had infinite resources they could train anyone who was interested in working in a particular role, and if it turned out to be a bad fit then the worker could just move on to another role or organization.

7) When I finally got it, when it eventually clicked, I remembered all these moments in my life and it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world: unstoppable money to fund unstoppable code to build unstoppable social change. That finally motivated me to get involved

6) I’m not alone here. There are people way smarter and further ahead of the curve than I am, equally obsessed with formal methods and verification, effectively predicting the applications of DLT, who still don’t see it happening in real time; blinded by conditioning/propaganda

5) When I went to college, as the 2008/2009 collapse unfolded, I started to meet other like-minded people for the first time in my life. We constantly talked about the failings of monetary policy. In 2010, one friend started getting Bitcoin from a faucet...and then sold it at $1

4) When I was a teenager I realized that privacy and identity management had to happen at the protocol level to offer any meaningful guarantees. I realized that all governance needed to happen at the protocol level. Still, I didn’t get Ethereum over a decade later

3) When I was a little older, 10 or 11, I started learning about cryptography, networking, the structure of the web, TCP, HTTP.... I had conversations with my mom’s boyfriend about the arbitrariness of fiat currency and rising U.S. debt to China. Never motivated me to buy crypto

2) Some of my earliest memories are of being alone thinking about technological alternatives to the current social order. Will we automate caregiving? Obviate financial dependence on our families? Still, it never occurred to me to actually buy crypto

1) Being poor has a tendency to make you think about money...a lot. I thought about money a lot as a kid. I had all the same questions that kids tend to have about money. Despite this, it took me the better part of a decade to think to invest in crypto, much less earn it. Why?

Because language is “fucking” arbitrary 😉

My monkey brain is still conditioned to salivate at the mention of a Big Mac

Best peeps I’ve seen. I like the cut of your jib

This is the education everyone new to crypto needs in a nutshell

For example, the U.S. stock market atm as the Fed shorts the Vix to artificially reduce the appearance of risk and induce more investment

Just noticed there’s a middle finger emoji (on iOS at least, don’t know if it’s a standard), which is fine with me...except I just know I’m eventually going to flip someone off on Peepeth accidentally instead of giving them a thumbs up and it’ll be on the chain forever 🤣