YouSaid · the spoken record

Nic Carter

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158
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2021-04-01
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2021-04-01
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podcast

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  1. “Well, Bitcoin, the term I think refers to two things specifically. So one is the protocol for conveying value through communications channel. So just a set of rules that we collectively opt into in order to transact online or just at a distance. And then the other thing is the name of the asset, the sort of monetary unit, which circulates within the system. And that always confused people a lot because it's like, well, you've got uppercase Bitcoin, lowercase Bitcoin. Why didn't Satoshi just give them different names? Like in Ethereum, you've got Ethereum system and then Ether, although people don't really talk about Ether very much, but they chose to distinguish them. In Bitcoin, for whatever reason, they're not distinct. So the two Bitcoins got commingled all the time in the explanations.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Course. I'm glad you didn't pose me the question. I mean, I think maybe not the left-right axiom isn't, the disjunction isn't the way I would sort of put it. To me, it's just if you reason in a consequentialist way, that lends itself to authoritarianism Whereby you think you can shape society and only you can shape society in a positive direction, according to your, you know, specific objectives.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Variables and tinker society into a state that is desirable or good. And that's what they're trying to do. And I think the consequences of that can be pretty bad. But no, I don't think it's born out of malevolence.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I mean, I don't villainize those people. I think everyone is the hero of their own story, right? So they all believe that their force are good in the world. You have to. Are there any true villains? I don't think so. I think they get socialized into a world where they believe there are particular skills and their mandate is what they should be doing. I think they might be presumptuous or arrogant in some cases. And, you know, I think it's more of a systemic issue where you have a small handful of very homogenous types of people with PhDs from the same institutions that are brought up in the same cultural context that set policy and wield a tremendous amount of control over society. And I think they have this notion that you can tinker society. You can play with a few key.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Think what we don't understand are the long term consequences of our structures. So, like the Fed's mandate to target unemployment and steady exchange rates or low inflation, what we don't understand is, okay, what is the result of doing that continuously for 40 years? Is that effect of that? What is the consequence of the long term accumulation of debt and basement interest rates? What is the net effect of that on society? We might understand much short term features of the system, but I think it's the longer-term features we don't understand.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Who truly understands the dollar system? I mean, the totality of it, the euro dollar system, the way that monetary policy interacts with the economy, is monetary issuance inflationary. What's the relationship between unemployment and inflation, even policymakers don't understand these things? Economists don't seem to understand them. What is inflation? How do you define inflation? None of these things are really known or knowable.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, I think that's the conceit of economics thinking that you can model human behavior in these unbelievably complex systems. Then I think that's the modern critique of economics, like the sort of Telebian critique is that you can't have true knowledge and they're much less predictable than we think they are. And we behave according to our accumulated assumptions and we're using tiny sort of data sets trained on the last 50, 100 years. And they turn out to be horribly askew. And that's when we have our grace swans and our black swans. I'm much more on the sort of, you know, reality is much less knowable than we think side of things. But it is nice to have very concrete things like Bitcoin, that's for sure.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I did. I majored in philosophy. I didn't know what to do with my life, and my parents said, do whatever you find interesting. It's like, okay, philosophy, great. Mind that interesting. And it had way more of an impact on my career, actually, than I thought it might. You know, typically, I guess if you do philosophy, go into law or finance. So it sort of makes sense. There are a number of philosophers I really admire. One of my favorites would be Descartes, probably the notion of skepticism. It's sort of a rabbit hole. It's kind of hard to pull yourself out of it. Basically, the brain and the vat theory, pulling yourself out of that. But yeah, I really like epistemology. You know, questioning what it is to have knowledge. So Descartes was one of my gateways to that.”

    2021-04-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #173 – Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source