I am almost beginning to pity Taleb. Doesn’t he realize that giving a keynote for a swindler who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto makes him look like either a fool, a lunatic, or a liar? What’s next? Will Taleb endorse a psychic medium who claims to be channelling the ghost of
Grand Duchess Anastasia? Will Taleb announce that Uri Geller really can bend spoons with the power of his mind?
It is a good analogy, and it will probably be the subject of an Anastasia-style thread after I gather sufficient information on this. A few decades ago, some credentialed “scientists” suffered severe embarrassment after they endorsed some of Geller’s claims. A quotable new nullianism:
Bitcoin needs a James Randi moment! If and when the public, and
especially the intellectual press realize how ridiculous Taleb made himself here, Taleb will be a laughingstock.
Thanks for the information, bitmover. I will need to look into this more, a bit later. (Lulz, Youtube videos are inconvenient for me to watch in my high-security setup.)
I don’t want to base an argument on one slide here; but pending whenever I get around to watching the video, I must make a general remark:
A philosopher examines the unexamined assumptions that form the premises and the framing of arguments.
Satoshi invented Bitcoin as a decentralized system, for reasons that can be best understood and interpreted objectively by knowing the history of Cypherpunks, and of prior cryptographic money projects. (Subjectively, the people who most intuitively understand this tend to be those who have been personally harmed by banks and by the “mainstream” financial system.) Now that it’s here, people tend to apply to Bitcoin whatever interpretation they desire. The result is often an intellectual sleight-of-hand.
For instance, I was recently disturbed at an argument amongst some security professionals and academic cryptographers which reframes Bitcoin in terms of building a better payment system. Thesis: Cryptocurrency is evil, and it is useless as a payment system, because Bitcoin transactions are irrevocable, and there is no lawful override to freeze money. Rebuttal in “defense” of cryptocurrency: Cryptocurrency transactions can be made revocable, and can even be designed to give governments lawful access to freeze transactions. See, we can have all the benefits of cryptocurrency as a payment system without Bitcoin’s flaw of irrevocable, unstoppable transactions! Oh, and by the way, POS is great.
Palm, meet forehead.In the above-depicted slide, Taleb is obviously seeking some objective, “transactional flexibility”, which was not the principal purpose of Bitcoin’s decentralization. (That is putting it charitably; the slide makes it look like Taleb just doesn’t know what he is talking about.) Whatever argument he thereupon raises is irrelevant: He is standing on premises that disagree with Bitcoin’s premises, seeking ends that are not Bitcoin’s ends.
If someone chooses willingly to associate with Coingeek, then I will accept as authoritative Coingeek’s quotes of whatever that person said. So—Taleb really is promoting BSV, in the sense of at least tacitly endorsing BSV. The gravamen here is unmistakable: In that quote, in substantial essence, Taleb claims that BSV has the potential to replace BTC.