Showing posts with label Daniel Krawisz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daniel Krawisz. Show all posts
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
Bitcoin Developers Must Do What Investors Want, Long-Term or Short
There are snotty people who claim to be long-term thinkers and want me to treat their plans seriously. The problem with long-term thinkers is that there is an ambiguity between them and people who are living in a fantasy. For you cannot plan beyond your ability to survive, and no one really knows how long their current investment strategy will keep them alive. If you are planning beyond your ability to survive, then you are not a long-term thinker. You are a person in a fantasy world.
Also read: Your Stupidity, Your Responsibility
Long-Term Fantasy
The first step to convincing me that you are a long-term thinker is to convince me that you can survive long enough for your plan to be realized. Furthermore, you must learn to survive for five minutes before you can learn to survive for ten years, so I will first look at your short-term thinking before I would even bother to listen to your long-term plans. Long-term thinking is built on top of short-term thinking, so short-term thinking is more fundamental.
That’s not to say short-term thinking is inherently better than long-term, but if you cannot handle short-term plans, you might as well not bother with long-term plans. If I could only take one person with me on an adventure, I would choose a person who knows how to survive for the next five minutes over one who has long-term plans but does not know how to survive. I would need to have room for two companions if I wanted to bring the long-term thinker.
In order to convince me that you are a survivor, you must prove to me that you have a good investment strategy. People who think strategically think of the future as something chaotic that could throw anything at them. They have made abstract decisions about their behavior so as to promote their own safety under a wide variety possible futures. When they predict the future, they do not choose lightly.
Order Out of Chaos
Survival is a matter of creating order out of chaos. Thus, when I am looking for long-term thinkers, I begin with those who can maintain homeostasis in the short-term. Not all of these people will be long-term thinkers, but they are the only ones who can plan ahead without living in a fantasy. Everyone else is a mayfly.
The second step to convincing me that you are a long-term thinker is to show me that your plan is actually good. Of course, we cannot really know the future without waiting to see what happens, but there is something that you can do today, and that is to put your head on the chopping block! You make a bet and you say, “I think the future will look like my plan and I lose bitcoins if it does not.”
Now you are committed! Maybe you are still in a fantasy, but if you are then at least I won’t have to deal with you anymore once your plans fail. If you are willing to put your survival on the line for your plan, then you are either someone good enough at surviving you can afford to take the risk, or someone who will not make bets in the future.
My assessment of you as a long-term thinker has nothing to do with your skills as a programmer or cryptographer. It has everything to do with your skills as an investor. Someone who thinks that Bitcoin developers don’t have to do what the investors want is someone who does not know that survivors must come first in order for any plan to be enacted reliably.
But anybody can make bets. So if you want to be a long-term thinker, you can compete with everyone else willing to make bets. If you do not want to do this, then I don’t believe you are a long-term thinker. If you don’t want to, then I think you look like a mayfly to me. You look like someone who is distracting yourself with a fantasy instead of learning how to survive.
What are your thoughts about long-term thinking? Tell us in the comments!
Images courtesy of Pixabay.
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The post Bitcoin Developers Must Do What Investors Want, Long-Term or Short appeared first on Bitcoin News.
via Daniel Krawisz
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Your Stupidity, Your Responsibility
One way of looking at the title of this article is that I am proposing a harsh world in which fools are triumphantly preyed upon by unabashed predators, but another way of looking at it is that creativity cannot occur in an environment in which stupidity is restrained.
Also read: Japan Increases Lead – Approves Another Four New Cryptocurrency Exchanges
Creativity itself is nothing more than controlled stupidity. To be creative you must generate lots of ideas and be prepared to discard most of them. If you can do many mental experiments quickly then you can be creative because eventually you will accidentally make a new idea that you like. The initial spark of inspiration looks like stupidity to other people at first because the value of the idea cannot be understood according to the conventional wisdom. Thus, any attempt to protect people from their own stupidity will also restrain genuine creativity and will prevent good ideas from emerging.
Good investors know that it is their responsibility to understand what they are buying because no one can be relied on to serve their own interests better than they. A good investor must be intelligent. But he does not need to reveal his intelligence to anybody. The only way to make money is to know something that other people don’t. A good strategy, if you have a good secret, is to draw attention away from yourself. So “your stupidity, your responsibility” means that I’m not after your secrets and I don’t expect you to reveal them until you’re ready. You are free to act like a moron around me. Maybe I’ll tell you if I think you’re doing something stupid, but I don’t stop you from destroying yourself. Maybe you really know what you’re doing and I just don’t understand it.
Now if you create something that you want me to buy, then you must be intelligent and impressive and you must open yourself up to my inspection and satisfy my demand for utter perfection. I do not have to do anything to impress you at all. If you are expecting me to make an investment decision in your favor, I expect to be able to act as stupid as I want without feeling like you are attempting to take advantage me. An intelligent investor reveals his knowledge when he is ready and not before.
One very offensive thing I saw which motivated me to become more involved in the scaling debate was when I saw my friends try to dismiss Roger Ver by saying that he is stupid. I have no particular opinion on whether Roger Ver is stupid, but he has the power to sell, and that is the ultimate power. You have to build something that investors like or else. Investors do not have to prove themselves to be intelligent. The ultimate determination of whether Bitcoin is successful is whether people want to buy it, and that means the investors have the final say. If you are trying to sell me something and you treat me like you don’t take me seriously just because I’m acting stupid, then I don’t think you know what you’re doing.
I was with this indignation, that I was inspired to appear in a debate with Richard Heart and act like I didn’t care about what happened. I did not prepare at all and I got high just before it started just to make it as dumb as possible. I know this video may not appear to be all that interesting but it was kind of a big day for me because it was the day that I just decided that it was fine for me to go out in public and act totally unimpressive. I do not need to win debates. If you want me to invest my bitcoins in your plan, then you must be intelligent and impressive whereas I do not. The person who owns the bitcoins is the one with the power and it is pointless to debate with someone who is pretending that he has power because he can appear intelligent in a debate.
If you are a Bitcoin investor and you feel like you are sick of being treated like a baby and you want to feel more powerful, I would encourage you to go out and act like a complete idiot at the next Bitcoin meetup you attend. That will liberate you. You will then feel free to demand to be listened to without having to measure up to anybody’s standards.
What do you think about the idea that your stupidity is your responsibility? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay and New Line Cinema’s Farrelly brothers film ‘Dumb and Dumber.’
At news.Bitcoin.com all comments containing links are automatically held up for moderation in the Disqus system. That means an editor has to take a look at the comment to approve it. This is due to the many, repetitive, spam and scam links people post under our articles. We do not censor any comment content based on politics or personal opinions. So, please be patient. Your comment will be published.
The post Your Stupidity, Your Responsibility appeared first on Bitcoin News.
via Daniel Krawisz
Your Stupidity, Your Responsibility
One way of looking at the title of this article is that I am proposing a harsh world in which fools are triumphantly preyed upon by unabashed predators, but another way of looking at it is that creativity cannot occur in an environment in which stupidity is restrained.
Also read: Japan Increases Lead – Approves Another Four New Cryptocurrency Exchanges
Creativity itself is nothing more than controlled stupidity. To be creative you must generate lots of ideas and be prepared to discard most of them. If you can do many mental experiments quickly then you can be creative because eventually you will accidentally make a new idea that you like. The initial spark of inspiration looks like stupidity to other people at first because the value of the idea cannot be understood according to the conventional wisdom. Thus, any attempt to protect people from their own stupidity will also restrain genuine creativity and will prevent good ideas from emerging.
Good investors know that it is their responsibility to understand what they are buying because no one can be relied on to serve their own interests better than they. A good investor must be intelligent. But he does not need to reveal his intelligence to anybody. The only way to make money is to know something that other people don’t. A good strategy, if you have a good secret, is to draw attention away from yourself. So “your stupidity, your responsibility” means that I’m not after your secrets and I don’t expect you to reveal them until you’re ready. You are free to act like a moron around me. Maybe I’ll tell you if I think you’re doing something stupid, but I don’t stop you from destroying yourself. Maybe you really know what you’re doing and I just don’t understand it.
Now if you create something that you want me to buy, then you must be intelligent and impressive and you must open yourself up to my inspection and satisfy my demand for utter perfection. I do not have to do anything to impress you at all. If you are expecting me to make an investment decision in your favor, I expect to be able to act as stupid as I want without feeling like you are attempting to take advantage me. An intelligent investor reveals his knowledge when he is ready and not before.
One very offensive thing I saw which motivated me to become more involved in the scaling debate was when I saw my friends try to dismiss Roger Ver by saying that he is stupid. I have no particular opinion on whether Roger Ver is stupid, but he has the power to sell, and that is the ultimate power. You have to build something that investors like or else. Investors do not have to prove themselves to be intelligent. The ultimate determination of whether Bitcoin is successful is whether people want to buy it, and that means the investors have the final say. If you are trying to sell me something and you treat me like you don’t take me seriously just because I’m acting stupid, then I don’t think you know what you’re doing.
I was with this indignation, that I was inspired to appear in a debate with Richard Heart and act like I didn’t care about what happened. I did not prepare at all and I got high just before it started just to make it as dumb as possible. I know this video may not appear to be all that interesting but it was kind of a big day for me because it was the day that I just decided that it was fine for me to go out in public and act totally unimpressive. I do not need to win debates. If you want me to invest my bitcoins in your plan, then you must be intelligent and impressive whereas I do not. The person who owns the bitcoins is the one with the power and it is pointless to debate with someone who is pretending that he has power because he can appear intelligent in a debate.
If you are a Bitcoin investor and you feel like you are sick of being treated like a baby and you want to feel more powerful, I would encourage you to go out and act like a complete idiot at the next Bitcoin meetup you attend. That will liberate you. You will then feel free to demand to be listened to without having to measure up to anybody’s standards.
What do you think about the idea that your stupidity is your responsibility? Let us know your opinions in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay and New Line Cinema’s Farrelly brothers film ‘Dumb and Dumber.’
At news.Bitcoin.com all comments containing links are automatically held up for moderation in the Disqus system. That means an editor has to take a look at the comment to approve it. This is due to the many, repetitive, spam and scam links people post under our articles. We do not censor any comment content based on politics or personal opinions. So, please be patient. Your comment will be published.
The post Your Stupidity, Your Responsibility appeared first on Bitcoin News.
via Daniel Krawisz
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Daniel Krawisz on Governance – ”The Invisible Bitcoin Leaders: Insights of Don Quixote and Tom Bombadil”
Daniel Krawisz is cofounder of Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, a consistently great repository for thoughts on Bitcoin as a network and bitcoin as a currency. Mr. Krawisz is a well-known personality in the ecosystem, routinely sought for his independent voice. This is his first Opinion Editorial for news.bitcoin.com, part of which was delivered at this year’s Texas Bitcoin Conference.
Also read: The Satoshi Revolution: A Revolution of Rising Expectations
The Best Leader in Bitcoin is an Investor
What kind of person would make the best leader in Bitcoin? The best leader is the person with the greatest foresight and best imagination. He doesn’t need to know crypto. He is an investor. He is simply the one with the best idea of how Bitcoin will be used in the future. This person is the best leader because he would know best how to use resources today so as to reach the highest value for Bitcoin most easily. He would be someone who bought in early, and who treated his bitcoins as if they were worth a lot more than they were at the time.
However, someone with foresight would have also avoided drawing attention to himself. He would have known that Bitcoin would become an adversarial environment. He would have predicted that other people would do just about anything to get what he got effortlessly. He would want to be unobtrusive.
The person with the greatest foresight, the one I want as a leader, would have been smart enough not to distinguish himself, and he would know how to act dumb whenever eyes were upon him.
Anyone who really knew how to make Bitcoin more valuable would be smart enough not to tell anybody about it. He knows that secrets are the most valuable thing in the market. He would want to tell no one, and position himself best in anticipation of its discovery by other people. The best leader must put his knowledge to the test without drawing attention to himself or even hinting that he knows anything.
In fact, I would consider someone who distinguished himself by his intelligence or foresight as second-rate at best. I am writing now with hindsight. I have had foresight, but I didn’t think far enough. If I had been really smart, I would never have written a single article because I would have realized everything that I wrote about here.
The Paradox
Thus, the paradox of leadership in Bitcoin is that someone who is a good investor knows not to draw attention to himself or to his ideas. For Bitcoin is an adversarial environment in which all attention that one draws makes him vulnerable. The problem is to get good ideas from leaders who want to stay hidden, and distinguish them from bad ideas.
The way that we know this leader is that he is always in the right place at the right time and he avoids all traps that are set for him, but he never does anything that reveals him to be anything other than a lucky idiot. Someone who avoids a trap, and reveals that he was not fooled by it, has shown that he is intelligent, which means that he is too stupid to be a good leader. Same if he succeeds and shows that he knew what he was doing. The best leader would avoid traps and make successful bets without revealing that he has foresight. The leader must be someone who is either very good or very lucky, and nothing about him definitively establishes the difference.
In other words, the leader is invisible. If I can see him, then he is not good enough. If I look at him, I would want to dismiss him as a retarded person and move on without noticing his greatness. A good leader in Bitcoin must convince me that he has Bitcoin’s best interest in mind and that he is not trying to scam me instead. He must also convince me that his plan is actually good. And not just once either. He must convince me again every time he wants me to do anything.
The way he leads is by betting his own bitcoins on Bitcoin’s future. That is how he issues his commands. When he does this, he binds himself to Bitcoin’s success. He does not expect me to bet with him. He takes on the risk himself. He is either a fool who is eliminating himself from the betting pool or a genius who is doing something beyond my understanding. If I can tell the difference, then he is not my leader.
My friends and I had a joke a few years ago after an exchange with someone on reddit who said that the “bitcoin mafia” would never let an altcoin succeed, as if there was really a conspiracy among bitcoiners to suppress altcoins. The joke was that I was the leader of the Bitcoin mafia, and that I didn’t know whether it really existed, and I simply issued my commands to the four winds and was unaware of anyone listening. I did this by explaining that we we would systematically avoid risk by ignoring altcoins; a successful altcoin is therefore an uphill struggle to induce everyone to be more risky than necessary. That is the leader I want.
Tom and Don
I’ll conclude with two of my heroes from literature who I think are kind of like the leader I want for Bitcoin.
My first hero is Tom Bombadil, the nature spirit from Lord of the Rings. His section was removed from the movies because he is a moron who sings nonsensical songs and acts like he’s high all the time. However, the ring of power does not affect him and he does not wish to help destroy it. He appears to be older than anybody else in Middle Earth and, to him, the reign of Sauron would be a short-term kind of thing, and he does not want to risk himself to stop something that he knows he can endure.
Tom Bombadil is my hero because he avoids going along with the crowd and he does not take unnecessary risks when everyone else is. Is he really stupid or is he the true guardian of Middle Earth?
My second hero is Don Quixote, the madman from La Mancha. In book 1, Don Quixote goes mad and believes himself to be a knight and he leaves his job to go questing with his sidekick, Sancho Panza. He has a lot of imaginary adventures and hurts himself again and again. In book 2, Don Quixote goes on more adventures but this time, the people around him have read book 1, and they want to play along and indulge him in his fantasies. It is like his madness has gone out of him and he is now a real leader. Was he stupid or genius? Bitcoin in 2009 was like book 1 of Don Quixote because it was worthless and its future uses were simply the dream of those few involved with it. Bitcoin today is like Don Quixote in book 2.
Don Quixote is my hero because he takes risks on things that make no sense to other people, but which ultimately turn him into a leader. Is he really mad or does he know what he is doing?
My heroes are more like these people. They are nothing like the technocrats who have been attempting to lead Bitcoin recently. They are the ones who truly control Bitcoin’s future. They are the invisible leaders.
He asserts his leadership by showing us that he will lose money if his command is not obeyed. He can do this without revealing who he is. The contract is all I need to see of him because I would know that only a good leader could sustainably risk his money on it. Either he knows what he is talking about and will keep winning money in the future, or he does not and his behavior will be punished over time.
What do you think of Bitcoin leaders? Tell us in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Pixabay, mtgcardsmith
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The post Daniel Krawisz on Governance – ”The Invisible Bitcoin Leaders: Insights of Don Quixote and Tom Bombadil” appeared first on Bitcoin News.
via Daniel Krawisz