Derek Magill

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Taleb is wrong about Bitcoin’s track record

Nassim Nicholas Taleb published an advance forward to a new book on Bitcoin today that is worth a read. It’s nothing particularly new, but it’s good.

This is the most highlighted passage on the Medium article:

Which is why Bitcoin is an excellent idea. It fulfills the needs of the complex system, not because it is a cryptocurrency, but precisely because it has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it has now a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right.

The claim Taleb makes in the last sentence is one that is mentioned often by Bitcoin Core [1] supporters: Bitcoin has a several year long track record of success. It seems so obvious that the answer is yes that few people give it a second thought. But does Bitcoin Core actually have a several year long track record of success?

A version of the Ship of Theseus tale can help us understand that it does not.

Suppose that the ship returns home to Athens after years at sea. Sailors tell stories of how the ship held together during battles, storms, and all matter of hells the world threw at them. The ship, everyone says, has a track record for success.

But what if some citizens of Athens decided that they wanted to start replacing certain parts of the ship? What if they decided to add a new type of wood to replace the old, or oars of a different design to replace the old ones. Could we say the ship in its new form has a “track record for success” in any meaningful sense? Sure, it’s still the same ship, but certain foundational components of that ship have been changed forever.

This is exactly what happened with Bitcoin Core. For most of its history, Bitcoin functioned as fast, low fee, and decentralized digital cash. You could send money to anyone in the world cheaper and more quickly than any form of money and you knew it was secure and trustworthy. Bitcoin was able to accomplish this because it processed transactions “on-chain” and it never experienced full blocks. Because it was so spectacularly useful, Bitcoin gained rapid adoption from merchants and users around the world and over time it became a “store of value.”

Then recently things started to change. Bitcoin began experiencing full 1mb blocks and developers refused to raise the block size. Fees went through the roof and transaction speeds slowed daily. In order to help fix this, developers pushed through a soft fork called Segwit and began working on the Lightning Network project. These two projects fundamentally altered Bitcoin forever. Bitcoin would no longer be digital cash. It would be a digital gold settlement layer and transactions would happen off-chain.

It is this version of Bitcoin that we have today, not the one of yesterday that was fast, low fee, on-chain, and usable around the world on transactions small and large and that achieved such incredible success.

This version of Bitcoin is very new. We have absolutely no proof that a high fee coin that sometimes takes days to confirm can last long term just as the citizens of Athens in our story had no proof that ship would still sail so well after changing its core materials. We have no proof off-chain transactions can scale effectively or responsibly.

Fortunately for Taleb and the rest of us who care about the original function and purpose of Bitcoin, there is still a version of Bitcoin that does have a track record for success: Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin Core that shares the same chain but preserves Bitcoin as digital cash by scaling the block size as Satoshi Nakamoto originally intended. It is the version of Bitcoin that was so successful these past 10 or so years and if by Taleb’s own admission, that should mean it is “an animal in its own right.”

Taleb jokes at the end of his forward that:

In its present state, it [Bitcoin] may not be convenient for transactions, not good enough to buy your decaffeinated expresso macchiato at your local virtue-signaling coffee chain.

He’s right. Bitcoin Core is no longer useful for daily transactions, and that should make Bitcoin Core users very, very uncertain about the future.

[1] I’m using the term Bitcoin Core instead of Bitcoin like Taleb does in his article because there are two versions of Bitcoin now, Core and Cash.

Art will shape your values

I was talking to my friend T.K. Coleman today about the role art plays in shaping your values. Ayn Rand has a great quote on this in The Romantic Manifesto that get’s at what we were talking about:

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal . . . This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder . . .

It’s my belief that you can tell very quickly the kind of art a person grew up consuming. If you grew up watching old western movies, I think it’s easy to tell. If you grew up consuming post modern trash, I think it’s easy to tell. If you grew up watching movies that told you that you must choose between your career and your family, that will probably affect how you view the world.

Once you know the signs to look for, you can start to become a sort of “art detective” and uncover the kind of artistic tastes people have before they tell you.

So if this all happens to be true, if art holds this power over us, what do we do? The obvious answer is to consume good art. What’s more, you should regularly consume art that reflects your highest ideals because that will get you closer to achieving those ideals.

But there’s another responsibility that is less obvious but maybe more important: make your own art. If the process of consuming art provides you with, as Ayn Rand said, a “model” for a “moral ideal,” then creating art is that and more. I know of no better way to understand yourself and how you view your place in the world than this process.

Be more interesting than your grades

I got great grades through most of my years in public school. During my junior year of high school, I had a 4.8 GPA and was on track to be a valedictorian.

Then one day at a family party I had this realization that the only thing people cared to ask me about were my academic “achievements.” And while I was mad about it, I couldn’t quite blame them. What could I say about myself? Very little. And yes, there was a girl or two I wanted to impress.

I let my grades slip as much as possible during my final year of high school and it was one of the most liberating, intellectually stimulating periods of my life. I read almost all the books on the University of Michigan Classical Studies Ph.D. reading list. I started doing customer service and order processing at my family’s business. I worked for the Ron Paul campaign and attended lectures from the Ayn Rand Institute. I started my first blog, “Return to Reason.”

I was happy in a way I’d never been before because I was focusing on things that mattered to me instead of checking academic boxes. And by the end of that year I could look back and proudly say that academics were the least interesting part about me.

In college I spent all my time hosting events with speakers I thought were interesting, reading, running my campus club, selling tee shirts and making graphics for social media on Adobe Creative Cloud. When I finally left college, I skipped my finals entirely and got something like a 0.0 GPA.

I don’t regret it.

To create, first collect

My most creative work nearly always emerges, ironically enough, from collections of the creative work of other people.

The new website design for Praxis done by Rafal Tomal began in my head from a collection of dozens of my favorite startup sites around the world. Much of my writing clearly comes from years of reading and saving passages from some of my favorite writers and thinkers.

Though the goal is to be original, I’ve learned that originality does not arise in a vacuum. You cannot simply “will yourself” into creativity in the moment. So what do we do in the absence of creative inspiration? Collect.

Most of the best artists and the best creators are collectors and curators of work from other people. Montaigne famously surrounded himself with quotes from the classics in his tower while he wrote. Many of America’s founders kept commonplace books filled with passages from literature they read. Renaissance painters studied the works of their “competitors” as if they were their own, often repainting them entirely. Today, a startup marketer might keep a swipe file of his favorite marketing emails and develop new and better emails from them.

I’m often asked how to become a better writer and I like to take the standard response “read more,” and add “and save great pieces of writing in a file.” I’ve turned this into a bit of an obsession with the unfortunate consequence that whenever I read, I find myself wanting to write.

Likewise, I have thousands and thousands of online book marks of articles, sites, landing pages, ads, Tweets, images, and art that I can return to if I’m ever starting to feel stale.

And through this process of collecting, and collecting, and collecting, something truly creative emerges,