In this episode, I explore investment strategies amid rising inflation, advocating for tangible assets over traditional ones like cash. I reflect on how my philosophy has influenced listeners' views on atheism and parenting.
We discuss Solana and my skepticism about its efficiency, focusing on the trade-offs between decentralization and centralization in tech. I highlight the importance of recognizing both advantages and disadvantages in all decisions and urge listeners to engage with credible sources that acknowledge inherent complexities.
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We discuss Solana and my skepticism about its efficiency, focusing on the trade-offs between decentralization and centralization in tech. I highlight the importance of recognizing both advantages and disadvantages in all decisions and urge listeners to engage with credible sources that acknowledge inherent complexities.
GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND AUDIOBOOK!
https://peacefulparenting.com/
Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!
Also get the Truth About the French Revolution, the interactive multi-lingual philosophy AI trained on thousands of hours of my material, private livestreams, premium call in shows, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!
See you soon!
https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
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LearningTranscript
00:00Yo, good evening everybody, Stephen Mollen here from Free Domain.
00:03So a couple of last questions from Facebook.
00:07Don't forget to join the great community at freedomain.locals.com or subscribe to starr.com
00:13slash free domain.
00:14Donations of course always welcome, very, very gratefully accepted at freedomain.com
00:19slash donate.
00:20All right, somebody says, I'm an uneducated 33 year old, some of the most reasonable men
00:26in my opinion are Ron Paul, Thomas Sowell, and you.
00:30Well, that's really elevated company, I appreciate that, thank you.
00:33Do you believe gold, silver, Bitcoin, and real estate are how to combat inflation?
00:38Yeah, I would say the only thing that, I mean, I can't give anyone investment advice, of
00:45course, right?
00:46But I can just talk about my own sort of thoughts on this, that currency dissolves in the bank.
00:53So you want to try and get, I think, your currency into hard assets, limited assets,
01:00and portable assets.
01:01Bitcoin, of course, is volatile, but it's portable.
01:06Gold is less volatile, but it's less portable as is silver.
01:10And real estate, well, the only way that real estate maintains its value is if more and
01:16more people keep coming to the country, which causes a whole bunch of other problems that
01:20may have you not enjoy the country so much.
01:23So real estate has its limits.
01:25All right.
01:26Somebody says, I know this is about questions, but I'll take this moment to thank you because
01:28your work gave me the effective and philosophical case for atheism and for peaceful parenting.
01:33And while I'm not an atheist, it did certainly give me the tools to better assess any God
01:37claims that are made and therefore investigate as opposed to believe.
01:41I've had four children since I started listening to your work in 2013, and they're all very
01:46cooperative and well mannered.
01:48And I certainly have to attribute that to having attributed personhood to them as you
01:52admonished to do so in the early days.
01:53Salute to you, sir.
01:55I hope you're doing well.
01:57Oh, thank you.
01:59I obviously appreciate your kindness and massive congratulations to you and your family.
02:04That is beautiful and wonderful and lovely to hear.
02:07So I really, really appreciate that update.
02:09Wonderful.
02:10Why don't you ever mention Solana when it's not only solved the coffee and donuts problem,
02:15but is absolutely killing it in the crypto space right now.
02:18Also your main gripe with Ethereum NFTs was the gas fees, which are also solved with Solana.
02:24Well I'm obviously happy to learn more about various cryptos, I suppose.
02:31The major question I would have with Solana is that everything seems efficient until you
02:38get a lot of users, right?
02:41So one of the things that I know from my early days as a database programmer is my code ran
02:51absolutely beautifully and lightning fast, as long as I was the only user.
02:59Now even if you threw in another user, it wasn't so bad.
03:03But of course, when another user is editing the record, you need to lock it and notify
03:08them when it's released, and so it's fine when you have a small number of users.
03:14I remember writing code for a major multinational organization.
03:21It was on just about every continent except the icebound ones, and it just didn't work
03:28fast.
03:29It just did not work fast enough.
03:31So we had to have local copies, which then synchronized overnight local copies of the
03:37database to each continent, which then synchronized overnight, which has all of the exciting challenges
03:41of which dataset wins if someone changes, two people change the same record, right?
03:47So everything is fine when it's small.
03:52Everything becomes a real challenge when it becomes large.
03:56In general, in tech, and again, I have a fair amount of experience of this, so I hope you'll
04:02bear with me, but in general, things are faster when they're decentralized, but then
04:09they're more difficult to merge.
04:11The more centralized things are, the faster they are, but the more vulnerable they are
04:17to the problems of centralization.
04:21So for instance, when I was doing my database coding, if we had a database in, let's say
04:27we had 20 databases in 20 different countries, every person working locally, okay, well,
04:34those databases were thus a lot faster because it was decentralized, but then we had the
04:39problem of merging all the files together into one, all the data together into one big
04:43database for worldwide corporate reporting.
04:47So decentralized had its advantages, which was faster local access, but it was not decentralized.
04:54Now when we had things centralized, it was great because if I was working on a record,
05:00you would be informed that the record was locked and you wouldn't be able to work on
05:03it, and it was all great, except it was gruesomely slow.
05:08So centralization solved problems and caused problems, and decentralization solved problems
05:15and caused problems.
05:17So Visa, of course, is much faster because the database is centralized, but then of course,
05:23it being centralized, it's not doing exactly what Bitcoin is supposed to do, which is to
05:28require no centralized authority to control it, right?
05:34Decentralized blockchains are wonderful in terms of there's no central authority that
05:39could be hacked or controlled or corrupted or managed or grabbed or subverted, right?
05:44So you have the decentralization.
05:47With the decentralization comes the coffee and donuts problem, which is can it be used
05:52to pay for a coffee and donuts?
05:54And again, I understand the lightning layer with a sort of accumulated bar tab approach
05:58is a way of trying to solve that and seems to have some success.
06:03But I've worked enough tech for enough years in enough places to know that anyone, you
06:12know, present company included, anyone who says my tech solves all of these problems
06:18is full of absolute, complete, and total crap.
06:22The only way, and again, I'm on a limb here, I haven't researched this, but based upon,
06:28you know, 15 years as a coder and dealing with the problems of centralization versus
06:36decentralization, anyone who says I can give you all of the advantages of decentralization
06:45and all of the advantages of centralization with none of the disadvantages of either is
06:50just full of crap.
06:52It's just not true, at least in technology as it stands.
06:56So Selena may have particular advantages and those particular advantages are going to create
07:02other disadvantages.
07:05It is unfair to compare any particular crypto with the possible exception of Ethereum.
07:12It is impossible to compare any crypto to Bitcoin since Bitcoin is the king of crypto
07:20and has by far the largest user base and is the most accessed and transferred and used
07:26and updated of all of the other cryptos.
07:30The market cap is massive, the number of users is immense, and the number of transactions
07:35is enormous and it's decentralized.
07:38The decentralization problem may be solved in the long run with even faster internet.
07:42There was an internet download speed achieved in Japan from a remote server that downloaded
07:50the entire hundred gigs of the installed files for Baldur's Gate 3 in less than half a second.
07:58I believe it was less than a quarter of a second.
08:01Now you start to get that stuff cooking, you start to get internet speeds that fast or
08:08even if they're a hundred times slower or maybe ten times slower would be more accurate.
08:13Then you're starting to look at being able to close the gaps in trade-offs between centralization
08:20and decentralization.
08:22But if I were to look at, I'm doing this without research, so again I'm out on a limb, I could
08:26be wrong, but if I were to do the research on Selena, they would say, oh my gosh, it
08:31works so much faster than Bitcoin.
08:36A Bitcoin transaction takes this amount of time, yet a Selena transaction is one hundredth
08:43the time.
08:44It's a hundred times faster than Bitcoin, which to me is about as intelligent, honestly,
08:48and I don't mean to be insulting, but I'm just telling you my perspective.
08:52All of that is about as intelligent as saying, well you know, it takes me an hour and a half
08:58to drive to work at 7.30 in the morning.
09:02But holy crap, at 3.30 a.m. I could do it in 20 minutes.
09:06It's like, well, yes, I understand that, but that's only because the road has far fewer
09:15cars on it and very few trucks.
09:19So saying that when the number of users is far lower, it's far faster, it's not important
09:27and it's not intelligent and it's scammy.
09:31Frankly, I'm not calling you a scammer, I'm just saying that making the claims that a
09:36lot of cryptos make, hey, it's way faster, it's like, well, yeah, because there's less
09:41traffic.
09:42Right?
09:43If it had the same number of users and the same number of transactions as Bitcoin, it
09:48would be the same kind of situation.
09:51Now they say, ah yes, but this one's much faster.
09:54Okay, well then how have you achieved that speed?
09:56Well, through centralization.
09:57There's one big central data, it's like, okay, but then that's fine.
10:02But you've lost one of the advantages of Bitcoin, which is the decentralization, which is really
10:09part of the foundational ideology to have a system that cannot be controlled by any
10:15central entity.
10:17It's a big thing in life to understand.
10:20The most honest people will always tell you there are advantages and disadvantages, always.
10:30The least honest people will always tell you that there are only strengths and no weaknesses,
10:39there are only advantages, no trade-offs and no compromise.
10:44So people will tell you that having kids is just purely wonderful and no trade-offs, but
10:50there are trade-offs, of course, there's time, expense, sleep and so on.
10:54There are trade-offs.
10:55People who tell you, well, going to the gym is just all plus, all plus, all great, there's
11:00no...
11:01Well, no, there's massive trade-offs.
11:04In particular, you know, when you see those guys with the really ripped physiques, you
11:08know, even assume that they're full natty, like even assume that they're not riding up
11:12the planet.
11:13I mean, that's two, two and a half hours a day in the gym.
11:18That's like a part-time job and it costs them a lot of money because you can't make
11:22money at the gym.
11:25You're spending a lot on supplements, a lot on protein shakes, a lot on... and that's
11:30just the time in the gym.
11:31You also have to spend time learning about how to do all of this stuff and bro-max your
11:35muscles and all that kind of stuff.
11:37So it's just a massive amount.
11:39It's a part-time job and hey, I've got no issue if that's what you want to do, but let's
11:44not pretend that it... let's not pretend that it doesn't come without a cost.
11:49And I have been, I will say this as with all the humility of being a far from perfect person,
11:57but I said this from the very beginning of this show.
12:01Philosophy is great, but it's going to suck ass on a regular basis.
12:06Philosophy is fantastic, but it is going to make you unhappy from time to time.
12:12And the beginning is really tough.
12:15My very first book, On Truth, the Tyranny Evolution, you can get it free at freedemand.com
12:20slash books.
12:21Very first book.
12:23It's rough, man.
12:24It's difficult.
12:25It's tough.
12:26I didn't say to you that it's all sunshine and roses and a life of integrity is wonderful
12:31and perfect.
12:32There's no downside, no problems because that's just false, right?
12:37It's like the spending versus saving or the renting versus buying.
12:42People will say, oh, but if you rent, you're just throwing money away.
12:45And it's like, no, you're not.
12:47Because if you have to cough up 50 to $100,000 for a down payment on a house, well, you could
12:53have thrown that into crypto and it could have turned into millions and millions and
12:57millions of dollars.
12:58Well, you're not throwing money away then, you threw your money away.
13:02Let's say you bought a house in 2006, God help you, and then your house value crashed,
13:09right?
13:10Well, that's not good.
13:13All the pluses, all the minuses.
13:15I mean, there are pluses even to addictions.
13:19Nicotine raises testosterone.
13:21Nicotine focuses the mind.
13:23Nicotine can unleash significant creativity.
13:25And there are some people in this world who are probably better off because they smoked,
13:30right?
13:32There are people who are writers or creators who managed to get a particular, I'm not recommending
13:36it.
13:37I'm just saying that there are people without a doubt who are better off because they smoked.
13:42They were more creative, more focused.
13:44Yeah, maybe they died five years earlier, but they also achieved immortal art.
13:51Maybe it's worth it.
13:52It's not worth it for me, but maybe it's worth it for some.
13:56So I think it's interesting.
13:58I'll have a look into it.
14:00About anyone who says, all of these problems have been solved with absolutely no downside
14:05and have not talked about the downsides.
14:08If they say it's all benefits, no trade-offs, that's got a scammy feel to me.
14:15And I'm always, I generally dismiss such claims.
14:19People who don't talk about strength weaknesses are not credible to me.
14:24And I would suggest that if you want to be around intelligent people capable of rational
14:29discrimination, don't pump things as if there's no downside.
14:34There's always a downside.
14:36There's always a downside.
14:38And if you want to have intelligent people around you, don't say things are all positive
14:44with no negatives because those intelligent people will do their very best to avoid you
14:49because of that scammy feel.
14:51Hope that helps.
14:52Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
14:54Lots of love.
14:55Talk to you soon.
14:56Bye.