im gonna be real i don't understand mega backdoor roth things

nvm it was cooking maybe

i needed something softer yknow

okay ts is so boring i gave it a shot

problematic charisma gap

since im not sleeping anyway i read pauls "practical decentralization" and like i get that it's necessary for them to do political philosophy i wish they were better at it

its a good piece for its own merits of contrast and disambiguation and the espoused philosophy may even be accurate to what they're doing, but yknow it's kind of worse for that. ill probably read the info civics things next

just so im not vagueposting: here are some lowlights. * interesting that the purpose of protocols and decentralization are both the same thing? i feel like the relation between them deserves a lot more elaboration because primae facie that is actually very surprising co-incidence, absent explanation

like you can say one is an instantiation of another but it's not actually clear to me which way the abstraction goes, especially with the extra "on the internet" clause. and they could both be related to some larger ethical structure that binds them to the same telos, but what is that structure and

why are those concepts appropriate to it? paul could likely confidently discuss how the purpose arises historically and for whom it operates on his view somewhat painlessly, but that story doesn't fulfill the philosophical justificatory task

* this is not an entailment, but an extension, as he says, but uh, it's a pretty drastic extension. and it's discussed with like some aspirational tone but it personally sounds nightmarish. again no gesture at rigor on personal computing and while it's understandable in a piece like this,

it's also the kind of thing you'd like to see developed somewhere. minimally, a supporting reference would be beneficial. otherwise it just seems like personal impression (which it is)

* by "ideological angles" we mean "vibes" * "rights", if you wish to call them this, work very differently in a protocol context than in the context of a state. it would actually be interesting to see your breakout of what you take rights to be for each protocol respectively because it would

circle the drain on what you're getting at when you use the term (and it would probably be more approachable for you than the more abstract work arriving from the opposite end of things)

to draw out the above prompt: "assignment" is a key term in the above. who whom? with a state it's fairly clear, with a protocol it's more interesting

paulfrazee.medium.com/the-rules-to... okay wait this is basically engagement with many of the points i brought up above on the more practical side (not rights though, other political concepts), but it's all the more frustrating lol

first of all the maddening cup-shuffle game of "where does Power REALLY reside?" miners, validators, clients, oh my

the section "blockchains as state" was so funny because we flip flopped from state as in stateful to state as in nation state, i had to bewilderedly re-read it a few times. i'd have to think more from a philosophy of law pov if i agree property ledger maintenance is such a core function of states

but then he seems a little lost, "power" is kind of a meaningless buzzword here but "monopoly of violence" not so much, and is not synonymous with violence simpliciter

we correctly identify legitimacy as the proper concept under discussion at the end but we're still oscillating between multiple senses of the term and it still feels colloquial. legitimacy in the eyes of public discourse is different than protocol-level legitimacy.

membership in the political community of a blockchain also works differently than in the nation state metaphor. we buzzword "consent of the governed" but is that actually the general theory of legitimacy you're operating under? and what would it mean for a validator or miner to consent?

the reason it matters is that i predict you'll run into the same mess that liberal statists run into when trodding that line, and that you can't have the intuitive pleasantries and full moral force of consent while connecting that to the discrete actions that actually drive things

the closing paragraphs make rhetorical sense, and rhetorical sense alone. which is kind of how i feel reading these political-philosophy-as-metaphor type posts always are. very little substance it's just gestures at familiar things

like highkey hobbes would be killer here!! don't just say 'leviathan' and smugly walk away!!

oh god im getting baited into reading more cryptobro articles someone stop me

okay but credit where it's due this one was more well-cited and raised considerations that weren't objectionable on their face (they go hand in hand, naturally)

btw he actually handles a description of rights here to my pleasant surprise. of course it falls apart a bit when trying invoke the normative force but the thin descriptive attempt is something i suppose

i can see a vision for how you get to something useful with architectural rights though, you'd just have to be fastidious and consistent in its use. something like: [constitutional networking] protocols define a set of actions a user* is able to perform to interact with the network.

this definition is codified through the code that everyone actually runs, and is purely descriptive. it is not based on an actual constitutional document or written specification (the implementations are more authoritative than the spec!)

these set of actions one can perform are called architectural rights. btw this also means that anything malicious one is capable of doing is a right, which is fine! i just thought i'd point that out. it also means no one can really complain about their rights being violated, unless in case of an

attempt to change what code everyone runs, which would tautologically be true. updates would be about what rights you get swapped out.

so you have to catch yourself when you try to use rights like this, because there is no such thing as a basic right to infringe upon, because if you can infringe upon it in that protocol, it's not a right

you *could* try to lay out "here's my favorite pet rights" and then design a protocol that meets those criteria, but if they're abstract pet rights it's likely to be a failure, because that's not what rights are on this model. "data portability" is not a right, but

the ability to swap pds is a right

the * on users is really important and a little underdeveloped, because this is also going to be users in the broadest sense, as in any entity that interacts. differentiation seems pretty important but it's also not quite so clear how to actually divvy it up

each protocol might have some place it seems natural to carve nature at its joints and say here's a user tm and here's a feed operator and here's a pds operator and here's a... and that's okay, but im skeptical at the delimiting you can actually do while maintaining clearsightedness

tldr i like the above rendition as a philosopher for the same reason any political moralist will dislike it: it is theoretically tidy but practically completely toothless any time you try to extend it to achieve any of the original motivating goals of its invention

i still think it can accomplish a whole lot, just different things than originally envisioned

eek late for work

note to self: it was not the answer it's never the answer you FOOL

i had tea yesterday morning at like 9am and it left me so wired i ended up falling asleep in the middle of reading the "infocivics" github page at 6am

my body just tanked the sleeptime prog and interpreted the measly couple hours of sleep as a post-vc nap

kinda crazy how this account is like 20% of everything ive ever posted on bsky

on one hand it doesn't feel like it's been that long so that many posts is surprising. on the other hand, ive posted here so much how is it possible it's only 20%

it's also funny that like, other accounts at least had the excuse of replying to a variety of people, but here i just entertain myself endlessly

had a good thinkfeel for a couple hours, hopefully i sleep now

woke up at 1am dehydrated and lightheaded with this strange familiar feeling. i know i just have danii on my brain but it reminded me of the night we started talking

okay wait are we counting std tests as "protected" because like yeah duh. i interpreted it as condoms

(i haven't had penetrative sex since college so there hasn't been much point in using them, unless you're really paranoid)