YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Lowery

lines on the record: 139
first: 2022-10-05
most recent: 2022-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Has no tie to physical reality that you can't see. So an easy way to think of it is remember all objects in software, there is no spoon. So stake does not physically exist. That means it's not verifiably physically decentralized. It's like physically impossible for it to be verifiably decentralized because it's not a real thing. So you can't, no one can prove.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's nothing physically preventing you from just printing all the money to buy all the steak to gain the control authority over the ledger. That's one of the dangers of coupling control authority over the ledger to something that doesn't physically exist.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, just to give them the benefit of the doubt, let's just assume that like everyone who owns coins is using it in a validator. Like all the honest people are putting up their biggest fight possible to try to resist. So you've got like 40% of all the coins being staked by honest people and then 60% of the coins being staked by dishonest people. In that situation, the whole point of bringing this up is in that situation because stake is bounded and zero sum, the honest people can't get more stake. They can't like simply regain control authority over the ledger by adding more stake because it's a zero-sum out. This isn't a problem in proof of work if you only have 40% of the hash if honest people only have 40% of the hash they can there's no limit to how much hash they can add back into the system there's no limit to how much computing resources they can get and electricity they can get but in state you're you're stuck”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there is a difference between the number of coins on the protocol and the number of coins that are parked in validators. But the worst case scenario is 60% of the stake is controlled by a single entity and they put all of that in validators. That would be like the worst case scenario. Or actually, that could be the best case scenario because you have to look specifically at the stake. And if someone controls 60% of all coins, they can have far more than 60% of the stake that's being used in validators.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“60% of all stake. If some single person controls 60% of all stake, they can split that stake across millions of validators. It would still be the same single entity. And then they could use those validators to start tactfully withholding specific transactions from the blockchain.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I can, yeah. What we're going after here, the main thing that's making this secure and insecure is control authority over the ledger. So validators have control authority over the ledger. They get to, they're essentially the gatekeepers. They get to choose which transactions get added to the ledger or which ones don't. So they have, but that is a double-edged sword because that also means they get to withhold transactions from the ledger, which technically means they're performing a denial service attack. So you have to protect yourself against that. Now, the way Bitcoin does that is the people who are validating or the people who are adding transactions to the ledger, if they start to be abusive, you can basically just hash them out of them out of their control authority. But with validators, you can't because stake itself is zero sum. Okay, so there's like, for example, let's just say there's a situation where some single entity can”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the idea behind slashing is we can impose cost by allowing honest people to quote unquote slash the stake of validators that might be abusing their control authority over the ledger.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What stake ostensibly does. And if I do that, can they thing which does not physically exist? Remember, there is no spoon, so stake is not real. State does not physically exist. Can a thing that does not physically exist achieve the same complex emergent behavior as a thing that does physically exist? So can a system that is defended through physical power have the same complex emergent properties as something that is defended through abstract power? And I don't, well,”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like when you start to look at the difference between proof of work and proof of stake, and if you're trying and you're like new to this and you're trying to really genuinely kind of understand the main systemic differences, it really just comes down to two different theories on how to secure your access to your property. The proof of work theory is you secure your access to your property by preserving your ability to impose severe physically prohibitive costs on anyone that would try to take it from you or deny your access to it or exploit your rules. Proof of stake says we can create some abstract form of power and then use that as the basis through which we defend ourselves. And so those are the two fundamentally different, like that's the main difference is can I design, can I use a general purpose state machine to design a program to create abstract power that does the same job as physical power?”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of work because of the energy that it expends. This happened. This happened with agrarian society, and this is how most kings rise to power, right? They say, okay, use of physical power to establish control authority over resources is morally bad. We should use rank to do it. Proof of stake is effectively proof of rank. It's people saying, okay, we should forfeit our capacity to project physical power to defend ourselves and go back to go rewind ourselves 25 years back in the history and progression of computer science and go back to abstract power hierarchies. It's important to note the primary design concept of proof of stake existed before proof of work came out. People were already using and designing abstract power hierarchies to manage control over randomly thing like coins that they abstracted. That was already being done. Proof of stake goes back to that. And so the easy way to simply compare”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so just like it in the birth of agrarian society, where people start condemning the use of physical power as the basis through which they settle disputes over property or determine control authority over property or achieve consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of property, people started to condemn the use of physical power for theological reasons because it's energy intensive or injury or prone to causing injury. In the case of proof of work, obviously it doesn't cause injury because it's electric, it's non-kinetic, but it is energy intensive. So once again, you have these abstract power hierarchies emerging where people are making the claim that it is for on some ideological basis, not on any meaningful, systemic basis, especially meaningful from the point of view of systemic security. They're claiming that it is quote unquote ideologically bad to use”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To defend it. And it's clear that Satoshi was concerned about this because in eight pages he mentions the word attack 25 times. He talks about people attacking with the same protocol more than any other word. And this whole thing is like, okay, listen, if you use physical power, if you make it so that you can achieve control of authority over the ledger unless you solve the hash function, that gives honest people the ability, the unbounded ability to impose physically prohibitive costs. So their benefit to cost ratio now can plummet because there's no limit to how much they can cost they can impose on anyone trying to gain 51% of the control. And that's where decentralization really comes from. There's obviously decentralization in the nodes and everything, but really it's the decentralization of the control authority over the ledger achieved through using physical power as the basis through which you can have control authority over the ledger. And there's no substitute for physical power for doing that.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's say if someone uses someone starts gaining a lot of control authority over this ledger, well, because you're using Watts power as the basis through which you achieve control authority over the ledger, that means there is no theoretically, just like there was no theoretical limit to the amount of kinetic power that people can use to defend their access to their property in the real world. There is no physical limit there is no theoretical limit to how many watts honest people can summon to impose severe physically prohibitive costs on anyone who tries to gain and exploit centralized control authority over the ledger. And so that's the primary basis through which this system is secured is there's no limit to how many watts that people can summon.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“centralized there's watts all over the world you can pull watts out of the air you out of the wind out of the water out of natural gas out of solar so this power is available everywhere exogenously systemically exogenously so there's no way that you can like code a systemically exploitable piece of software that like prevents people from using their real world watts it's fully inclusive so everyone can have access to these watts But the big one is it's unbounded.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone that has the authority, the abstract control authority to write the ledger, they have enormous abstract power because they can control which transactions get added. And they can also withhold transactions. So whoever's in charge, whatever entity is allowed to add or withhold transactions of this cyberpower token has enormous abstract power. And so Satoshi, the beauty of Bitcoin is it's like, okay, well, how do you decentralize that control authority over that ledger? Well, how do you do it? You make the people who solve the hash cost function, the people who get to write the ledger. So by doing that, you impose a real world physically prohibited cost on people who attempt to control the ledger. And then boom, right there, now you have a proof of power system, just like natural selection is vetted, right? You have people who have the means, who have physical powers fully inclusive. Everyone has access to watts. Physical power is physically.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Control that because whoever can control that is now, once again, another God king, right? And so that's where Satoshi comes in because he figured out a way to make it so that the protocol which controls this reusable proof of work token itself is secured by its own hash cost function. So it's like recursive, it's like a self-enforcing self-securing reusable proof of work token protocol. So the easy way to think of it is really what you want to do is if you're going to demand this cyberpower token as collateral to execute a sensitive command action or send information, then you have to have some way to track its position in cyberspace essentially. And so you need a ledger of some kind. You need someone to record where it is and have verifiable ownership of it at all times, which means you have to have someone to write that ledger, okay? But if you have”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“important thing about hash cost function and proof of work. It had nothing to do. I mean, you could choose to call it a way to systemically secure money, but it's like, that's not really what it is. It's a whole new transformational way of cybersecurity and people are just happen to be using it for a piece of software that would instantiate something that we could call money and monetize. But on its own by itself, proof of work is a major leap in cyber security and computer science, even if it has nothing to do with money whatsoever. But the big question hanging over that was, okay, wow, this is pretty insane. We've created a way to impose physically prohibitive costs on people using this tokenized form of cyberpower, this like reverse hypostatized thing where we've taken a physically real thing but then transferred it into cyberspace as an abstract thing, but it can still impose real world physical costs. The like, you know, million dollar question was to”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're talking, this is like the real world. Like you can now, you figure it out a way to essentially countervail the abstract power of software, of the people who code software because it's like your software is not allowed to execute a control action or send any information unless you present proof of real to me and by demanding that receipt, you've technically imposed a real world physically prohibitive cost on them. And so Finney took that and he was like, okay, that's pretty sweet. Let's make that a transferable or a reusable proof of work. So like Adam Bach just, it was like kind of a stamp, like, you know, you just stamp an email. Okay, this has imposed specifically prohibitive costs on someone. But with reusable proofs of work, then now you have enabled this system where you can impose physically prohibitive costs on people for anything that you want because these proofs of work can be applied to emails. They could be applied to like anything. And so that was the original.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Demand that someone essentially collateralize or present proof of work in order to send you an email in the case of that and backs hash cash or to do anything to execute any action or to send any bit of information, then what you have technically done in the non-abstract reality of shared objective reality is impose a physically prohibitive cost on them.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's a lot of different ways that you could design a physical cost function atom back just seems to have just nailed it. There are several other people trying to solve this problem, but the beauty of Adam Bax is that it appears to be perfectly fair. Like there's no advantage gained by anyone. You just have to brute force it. You just have to randomly guess and then you're just randomly lucky. And so it imposes physically prohibitive costs evenly to anyone who tries to solve it. It has no favorites, essentially, but it is, it's important to emphasize that a proof of work hash cost function is a physical cost function. Its sole purpose is to impose a real world physically prohibitive cost on the people who try to solve it. And that's huge because if you”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perspective, it's also a big deal because it's kind of creating this gateway between worlds. That you can then abstract as an object and then pass around, or in his case it wasn't transferable. But the point is, instead of like most things in computer science where you hypostatize an abstract thing as a concretely real thing, proof of work does the exact opposite. It's reverse hypostatization where you take a real world thing, electricity watts, and then you treat it as an abstract receipt. And so that's huge because now in cyberspace or on your computer, if you see that proof of work receipt, you see proof of real. You see proof of something that physically exists. That's not true for anything else that you see.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And so Adam, the point of hashing is to impose a real world physically prohibitive cost on people who are spamming or otherwise systemically exploiting the abstract power hierarchies instantiated by your software. And that's a big deal, right? That's a big leap in terms of, because once again, you have like 7,000 years ago, you've got God kings exploiting people through their abstract power. Eventually, the slaves figure out we can impose a physically prohibitive cost on our God kings and they'll stop exploiting us. Fast forward to 1997, you've got people abusing their abstract power hierarchies. And Adam Back comes up with a mechanism through which you can impose physically prohibitive costs on people exploiting you and it issues a receipt and it's a proof of work receipt. But it doesn't really matter what it's called because it's all abstract anyways. The point is you're imposing physically prohibitive costs on people, not in abstract reality, but through shared objective reality. That's a big deal. And from a computer science,”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In other words, I have proven real world power. Like I have proven that I have been imposed by real world physical costs. And so there's a very subtle but important implication of that from the perspective of cybersecurity because in the case of Adam Back, the reason why it created this was to defend against systemic abuse. It's literally called a countermeasure denial service countermeasure. So an easy way to systemically abuse people is to spam them through email, right? Because there's no marginal cost to just pound.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From through cyberspace, at least not until out of back. And so that's why the hash, when you think of the hash cost function, that's why it's such a big deal, is because what he did was he created a program whose sole purpose is to impose a real world physically prohibitive cost on people and programs on other computers. So to solve a hash function, you have to use brute force physical power. You have to use just electricity and just guess a bunch. So the only point of solving a hash function is to impose an electricity CASA, a physical cost, and watts, a non-kinetic, so a non-lethal physical cost, but still a severe physically prohibited cost on solving the hash function. And then in return for solving the hash function in case of like out of back subvention with hash cash, you get like a receipt. You say, okay, I have proven that I have done this work or”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now let's fast forward. So like for 60 years, we once again have another honeypop problem where you have these massive data repositories, you have this capacity to control a bunch of people's computers all across the world, but you have no capacity to impose physically prohibitive costs on the abuse of that information, that data, or the abuse of that abstract power. And you have all these people that are designing systemically exploitative abstract power hierarchies through their software. It's very obvious. And then you also have all the just massive levels of hacks and everything. A hack is just people taking advantage of the rules of the system. Nothing breaks in a hack. It's just systemic exploitation. So this like big problem with hacking is just essentially a big problem of people systemically exploiting abstract power hierarchies. And of main challenge of all this is just the fact that you cannot impose physically prohibitive costs on people in”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's on a plot of land and it's got a probably got a big old fence with a bunch of barbed wire around it. Like it's being physically defended. So they have control authority over that. And I guess the physical power of their fence and they probably have armed guards. In fact, I know they do have armed guards. That is a form of physical power. But like that is that pales in comparison to the amount of abstract power and resource control authority they have and through cyberspace.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I guess you could say it's a mix. There's two different realities to keep track, and this will be helpful when we talk about proof of work. There's abstract reality. So there's all that data on a server. again, it is symbolic meaning that we assign to electrons in a floating gate transistor. It's not actual data. There's not actual ones and zeros. We choose to say this switch and this position is a one and this one is a zero. And through extraordinarily complex semantic and syntactic language, we get Romeo and Juliet or information out of it. So there's shared abstract reality. And then in shared objective reality, there's the actual physical hardware of the systems. And yeah, I guess you could say they have like physical control over that physical hardware. But that has defended the good old fashioned way. So like.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And in cyberspace, you've got all these God kings emerging. And so you kind of see them kind of duking it out. And so it's in this migration of human society now. We've once again using abstract power hierarchies to manage our resources, but now we're doing it in cyberspace, managing things like information. But if you have abstract power over machines and people become increasingly more dependent on those machines, then that translates to power over people too. For example, like Weaponize Misinformation, if people get all their information from social media and then you're in charge of social media, like if you're the person, head honcho at Facebook or whatever, you get to control the information that people see that affects their behavior. So it is enormous like they have like people today in cyberspace have levels of abstract power that would make the pharaohs blush.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Effectively functions as the God king and gives themselves the most abstract power, therefore the most control authority over whatever resources that software manages. So like Mark Zuckerberg and all these big time, they're God kings, they wield these enormous amount of abstract power. They have control over millions and billions of people's computers and the information on those computers and they have control authority over resources for no other reason than they're the highest ranking person on Facebook.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can access more information or they can do more dangerous commands. And the way you keep your software secure, at least in the old way, is by these abstract power hierarchies. Of course, since everything in software is abstract, then the basis through which you choose to determine resource control authority within your software instantiated system or the basis through which you choose to achieve consensus on whatever the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of whatever abstraction you've created in software, you have to use an abstract power hierarchy to do it because there is no alternative, not until we get to hashing. But that's why it's just important. There is no spoon. We arbitrarily choose to describe software as objects that make it easier to understand their complex emergent behavior. And for the purposes of system security, technically all software is an abstract power hierarchy where usually the developers, the one”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it does exactly as it's designed. So if there's ever a hack or if there's ever something bad that happens, nothing was broken. People are just taking advantage of the rules of the system. And so how do people make software more secure, especially if it's in charge of sensitive information or it has sensitive commands? Like sometimes software runs major weapon systems. The way that most software security is done is by creating an abstract power hierarchy where you assign rank to certain positions. So like admin privileges or admin rights, right? These people hire up in the ranks have more control.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reminds you of Yeah, I know And so that's another, that's really important when it comes to the field of software system security because it's important to recognize that like software doesn't break, it can't break. Software just does exactly as it's told.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the story of Neo is, hey, once you realize that software is just an abstraction, then you can figure out how to exploit it. And then that's how Neo gets his power, is because by just simply realizing that nothing in the matrix is real. Therefore, there's technically no restrictions, no physical restrictions to limits to his power. And so, like software.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's too hard to program computers, but more importantly, it's too hard to explain your design to other people unless you explain it in terms that they understand. And since all humans live in a three-dimensional reality where objects are oriented around themselves, we are choose to describe the complex emergent behavior of these machines as objects. But the objects are not real. The spoon is not there. There is no spoon.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“virtual reality. And so everything in cyberspace does not physically exist. The only thing that really physically exists is all the machines and all the computer screens that we use to basically role play. And it's like the, so like, you know, the famous like line from the matrix when Neo is like visiting the Oracle and he sees that little boy monk and he's like, you know, instead of trying to bend the spoon, only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. That's actually a legitimate computer science principle. There is no spoon. We use things like object-oriented design as a technique to manage the complexity of programming. And so we arbitrarily choose to describe the complex emergent behavior of the machines that we program as if it were an object or an orientation of objects.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With computer science, the last thing I'll leave is it's so complex that we just pile on different abstract ideas to make it simpler for us to comprehend what is way more complex than we comprehend. So over the four decades following the development of stored program computers where you can apply symbolic meanings to the states of state machines and all this trippy stuff, that's when you get like assembly language and then eventually higher order languages like we used today like C or in Bitcoin's case C++ or Python and all these other things these are these are just languages that make it easier to communicate to these machines and specifically to communicate our abstract ideas that we design in our brains and then we get our computers to role play back to us. Cyberspace, this idea of cyberspace is virtual obviously.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They invented a new logic Boolean logic. So they're implying symbolic meaning to binary states that are then physically input into a computer. And it's just, it's mind-blowing. It's way more complex than any human can really understand. So maybe Von Neumann could.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't physically exist. They're just figments of our imagination, and it makes it way easier to handle what is an extreme leap in abstract thinking that humans only recently discovered, 80 years ago, through stored programs, general-purpose computers with Von Neumann and his buddies. That is like so complex. Machine code is so complex.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“as if they were concretely reeled just for simplicity. So we just like talk like a program is a physically real thing that is quote unquote loaded onto a machine just like people talk about the fictional story of Romeo and Juliet is loaded into the pages of the Script, right? We just say that it's a”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're making a false correlation between your abstract ideas and this symbolic meaning and the thing that you see in front of you. But there are actually two completely separate things. A program is just an idea floating in abstract reality, virtual reality. That's why it's called virtual reality and a machine, a general purpose state machine is what physically exists in shared objective reality. So why do we say that? That is an extremely trippy way. Like that's extremely hard thing to wrap your head around that we have invented essentially a symbolic language to speak to machines who then speak back to us and that what we're effectively doing is showing each other what's only in our imaginations through the machines that we program through this virtual reality. That's really hard to understand. So what people do to make it simpler to understand is they do something called hypostatization where they treat these abstract things.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like 20 years in the future, it might not be so easy. And so everything that you see on a computer screen is a symbolic representation of what's in someone's brain. That state machine is acting out for you and making a very convincing thing. And then you false equivalent or you falsely, you think that it's real because the physical medium through which it's communicated to you is real”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“meaning that you apply to the state change of the state machine. And that's like because humans effectively figured out a way to apply symbolic meanings to circuits. And then they get those circuits to repeat that symbolic meaning back to them. So a painter thinks of a scene and he paints, he uses physical paint and canvas to depict that scene. Of course, the scene isn't real, just the paint and the canvas is real. And so that's what we do with computers. So technically, Preston, technically you have no experiential knowledge of me whatsoever. Everything that you are seeing is an abstraction right now. You are not looking at me. You are looking at light emitting diodes in an array on a plane controlled by a general purpose state machine. You just know based off of kind of where we are, a technology that I'm probably real. I'm probably not like, you know, an AI talking to you. I don't know. Wow.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at no point did the program actually physically exist, just the medium through which it was transferred to the machine. So like if you took my computer right here, this general purpose date machine, right? It is a bunch of circuitry. It's a bunch of like floating gate transistors with electrons on them. Okay, so that exists right now. As soon as I quote unquote load a program on it, nothing's changed. It's still the exact same circuitry. It's still the exact same electron stored in floating gate transistors. And if I remove quote unquote remove or delete that program, nothing physically like the circuits and the floating gate transistors with the electrons in them are still there. The only thing that has physically changed is the state of the machine, not the state itself. So this is like usually trips people out when you explain it, but programming or a program that you have loaded or the piece of software that you have loaded is just the symbolic”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just because actors can act it out and have like an emotionally moving performance that people think is real doesn't mean Romeo and Juliet is anything but a fictional story. She's still just a figment in this guy's imagination that he's communicating through a physical medium. Computer programming is effectively the same way. Computer programmers think of fictional designs in their brain, fictional stories. They write those down on scripts using a newly invented symbolic language called machine code. And then they hand those scripts to machines and then machines can actually read those and then the machines act like they basically roleplay. These general purpose state machines roleplay according to the instructions that they receive.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called, like, what's the famous one? Romeo and Juliet. Okay, so Romeo and Juliet is just a fictional story. It does not physically exist. It's a figment of his imagination. And then Shakespeare converts that from an imaginary story that's only in his brain. And he writes it down. So he uses a symbolic language, a syntactically and semantically complex language to translate the fictional story in his head onto a script. And then he hands that script to an actor. And then the actors give a performance. So in that sequence of events, Romeo and Juliet is still just an abstract story. Like it still only exists an abstract reality. It doesn't physically exist just because the medium through which it's communicated, the script Physically exists doesn't mean Romeo and Juliet exists.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that now the act of programming and designing a special state machine, special purpose state machine to do your computation, became an abstract idea. So you actually didn't need to build anything. You just needed to think of a good, like a design and then figure out how to translate what was in your brain into instructions for a machine. So for example, the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, her program was for a machine that didn't even exist. Babbage's analytical engine in the 1830s was never built because it was too expensive to use. But she could still program it. She could still conceive of the sequence of operations that that general purpose state machine would need in order to act like a special purpose state machine. Okay, so the easy way to think about like what programming represents is kind of to think about Shakespeare. Shakespeare comes up with a story, an abstract fictional story.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“future to compute whatever. And so these computers, these state machines have existed for 2000 years, but only a little over 150 years ago, I guess maybe 100 years ago now, 200 years ago, yeah, 200 years. They have been general purpose. So like for 2000 years, state machines were special purpose state machines. So you could like, if you wanted to compete something, you had to build a dedicated machine to compute that. Babbage and his friends in the 1830s start conceiving of this idea called a general purpose state machine. And the reason why that was such a big deal is because you no longer had to build a special purpose machine to do a compute that you needed. You could just program this general purpose machine to do it. But the act of programming was the act of giving this thing instructions manually by pressing buttons or turning dial or pulling a lever. And also the big leap there.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is really helpful if you just have kind of a quick crash course on computer science because it'll make arguments about the difference between proof of work and proof of stake a lot simpler to understand. So at the end of the day, a computer is simply a general purpose state machine. So it's a machine where you can change its state. And so back in the day, like 2,000 years ago, the Greeks had astrolabes. And you could, you know, you could calculate where the stars are going to be in the future, where the heavenly bodies are going to be in the future. And the state machine programmer would change its state by pulling a lever or pushing a button or turning a dial in some cases. You're like changing the state of this machine. And these state machines are named after their function, not their form. So the main function of a state machine is to compute something, to compute the position of the heavy and lowly bodies and the”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Attacking you is high. The cost of attacking you is low. You're going to get Sargon, the Conqueror, or Charlemagne or Napoleon or all these other economists that have ever lived, they're going to take advantage of your high benefit to cost ratio. And this is how it works in nature too. So it's not like it's like a sapien thing.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Easy and simple way to think about it is everything has a benefit to cost ratio of attacking or being attacked. There's some benefit of attacking someone and there's some cost of attacking someone. And so if you want to be systemically secure, you need the cost of attacking you to be as high as possible. And you need to strive to keep it high in order to keep your benefit to cost ratio as low as possible. And you can never know how much is enough cost. Like you don't know how much ability to impose physically severe physically prohibitive costs you need to ensure that you're quote unquote secure. So you just have to be able to ensure that you have that ability and strive to do it as much as possible and kind of manage it. You don't want to get like when you use abstract power hierarchies and you get like enormous amounts of resource abundance, but you don't have a military to protect it. So you have all this freshly irrigated land, all this freshly irrigated farmland, but you have no soldiers to protect it. Your benefit to cost ratio is extremely high.”
2022-10-05 · We Study Billionaires · BTC098: Proof of Stake (PoS) Versus Proof of Work (PoW) w/ Jason Lowery (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT