These are unbelievably nitpicky examples. Lots of people are not native English speakers and don't listen to podcasts all day to know little details like that. To use this as evidence that a whole group of people is retarded is itself retarded.

If anything that shows me that these people get information primarily from reading which is a lot more thoughtful and indicates a deeper engagement with the material than someone who pronounces words correctly but parrots establishment opinion on everything.

What's retarded is going along with COVID lockdowns, or supporting a stupid war or going along with trans men playing women's sports. It's the people unwilling to question main narratives that have the deeper intellectual flaw.

Ask @CJWracing

Which covenants proposal, if any, do you prefer?

It's so hard to get Grok to help simplify even reasonable math equations. I've gotten pretty frustrated at trying to get AI to help, so something better would very much be welcome. I remain a bit skeptical, but something like this would be really fun to play with and use.

The main reason this would cause unrest is if people are using loans to fund their activities. This was a major reason why bimetallism gained traction in the late 19th century, because farmers needed to pay loans back but their goods that they were selling to the market kept getting cheaper due to deflation, making it harder and harder for them to pay the loans back. Solution here is that they need to be zero-interest loans (Saifedean has an interesting theory on why this would be the case in a hard money economy eventually) or fewer loans and much more savings. I personally think the latter is much more realistic given that in a deflationary economy, savings is deeply incentivized.

The solution to not cutting wages, though, is to increase productivity of each worker. This requires near-constant innovation, which most companies in a functioning economy do. Of course, this might mean not as many jobs, but then, those people are freed up to do other more productive activities. The main flaw here is assuming jobs are for life.

Meat-za

Have you seen Emin Gun Sirer on campus and though he's not a professor there anymore, is he still influencing the CS program?

I saw the title and thought it was about the bits BIP I authored years back: BIP-0176

The answer to almost all of these if we're answering honestly is that we don't know. We have no idea because Bitcoin is not a centralized system and that's a good thing. We want people to make decisions based on their own values and profit calculations, and not on centralized dictates.

We have incentive guidelines based on economics. We know lowering the price means more people buy. We know that friction and bad user experience prevent people from adoption. But ultimately, playing with incentives to try to get a particular result is technocratic hubris. Particularly for the reason you point out. We really don't know what the second and third order effects will be. This is the main failure of central planning.

That said, I think the way to solve this is more decentralization. We should be encouraging nodes to be more self-sovereign and decide for themselves what they relay and encourage hashers to decide for themselves what they mine. Power to the people, I say.