Cryptaury

Really helpless feeling about where we're at. There's a historic (by American standards) level of corruption and looting going on right now and the party that could stop it is fine with it. And since it is cult of personality his supporters cheer it! nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world…

Z is trading crypto again recovery is possibru

1. Smart people are often, if not usually, very irrational. I grew up with a mid-140s-IQ-tested dad who believed in Biblical literalism. Intelligence is just a powerful engine, it says very little about your ability to steer. 2. Most prestige in our civilization is built around powerful engines. You get good test scores, pass hard classes, you are 'smart', and we stamp you with phDs and titles like Economist or whatever. 3. (Having well-rounded skills can help but does not save you. You can be a charming top-tier artist who still falls for a crypto scam). 4. Our civilization has very little explicit study into being *rational* - which is, imo, something like 'holding true beliefs'. You might be like 'well 'true' is relative', it's people just disagreeing about values all the way down - but I think this is wrong! There *is* such a thing as 'correct' - you can do things like cure cancer or lift people out of poverty, those are real things! 5. If we want to optimize for people steering in correct directions, we might do things like "have them make predictions about the way things will go, and then track how accurate they are." We might force them to "make beliefs pay rent", where you regularly put your beliefs into positions with high stakes so you can't just conveniently 'not notice' when you're wrong. There's a *ton* of stuff to do in this domain that is completely abandoned by people in academia (though you can find it in stuff like investment funds where they actually end up hurting if they're wrong). 5. When I say smart *and* rational, I mean people who are very good at steering in correct directions, with enough power to get there. I don't think most people in this culture even have a conception of these as meaningfully different!

Do not forget that Elon fired 80% of Twitter prior to strong AI tooling When they fire you, it’s a pretense. It was always available to them. They just have cover now. We are losing a piece of social technology: the fake job

Secure people date each other and disappear from the dating pool quickly. The market gets saturated with avoidant and anxious people cycling through each other.

When a seasoned founder sells their company, they are transformed from a highly productive member of society into a depressed money manager. Meanwhile, the goods and services of their former company are degraded by the loss of its most effective employee. The former founder is deterred from starting a new business by the seemingly high returns generated by their money, which will for years dwarf the cash flows created by the new business. The founder is only snapped out of this stupor by the realization that the person who founds a successful company will never be satisfied only by watching numbers going up and down on a computer screen.

Recently I have been starting to worry about the state of prediction markets, in their current form. They have achieved a certain level of success: market volume is high enough to make meaningful bets and have a full-time job as a trader, and they often prove useful as a supplement to other forms of news media. But also, they seem to be over-converging to an unhealthy product market fit: embracing short-term cryptocurrency price bets, sports betting, and other similar things that have dopamine value but not any kind of long-term fulfillment or societal information value. My guess is that teams feel motivated to capitulate to these things because they bring in large revenue during a bear market where people are desperate - an understandable motive, but one that leads to corposlop. I have been thinking about how we can help get prediction markets out of this rut. My current view is that we should try harder to push them into a totally different use case: hedging, in a very generalized sense (TLDR: we're gonna replace fiat currency) Prediction markets have two types of actors: (i) "smart traders" who provide information to the market, and earn money, and necessarily (ii) some kind of actor who loses money. But who would be willing to lose money and keep coming back? There are basically three answers to this question: 1. "Naive traders": people with dumb opinions who bet on totally wrong things 2. "Info buyers": people who set up money-losing automated market makers, to motivate people to trade on markets to help the info buyer learn information they do not know. 3. "Hedgers": people who are -EV in a linear sense, but who use the market as insurance, reducing their risk. (1) is where we are today. IMO there is nothing fundamentally morally wrong with taking money from people with dumb opinions. But there still is something fundamentally "cursed" about relying on this too much. It gives the platform the incentive to seek out traders with dumb opinions, and create a public brand and community that encourages dumb opinions to get more people to come in. This is the slide to corposlop. (2) has always been the idealistic hope of people like Robin Hanson. However, info buying has a public goods problem: you pay for the info, but everyone in the world gets it, including those who don't pay. There are limited cases where it makes sense for one org to pay (esp. decision markets), but even there, it seems likely that the market volumes achieved with that strategy will not be too high. This gets us to (3). Suppose that you have shares in a biotech company. It's public knowledge that the Purple Party is better for biotech than the Yellow Party. So if you buy a prediction market share betting that the Yellow Party will win the next election, on average, you are reducing your risk. Mathematical example: suppose that if Purple wins, the share price will be a dice roll between [80...120], and if Yellow wins, it's between [60...100]. If you make a size $10 bet that Yellow will win, your earnings become equivalent to a dice roll between [70...110] in both cases. Taking a logarithmic model of utility, this risk reduction is worth $0.58. Now, let's get to a more fascinating example. What do people who want stablecoins ultimately want? They want price stability. They have some future expenses in mind, and they want a guarantee that will be able to pay those expenses. But if crypto grows on top of USD-backed stablecoins, crypto is ultimately not truly decentralized. Furthermore, different people have different types of expenses. There has been lots of thinking about making an "ideal stablecoin" that is based on some decentralized global price index, but what if the real solution is to go a step further, and get rid of the concept of currency altogether? Here's the idea. You have price indices on all major categories of goods and services that people buy (treating physical goods/services in different regions as different categories), and prediction markets on each category. Each user (individual or business) has a local LLM that understands that user's expenses, and offers the user a personalized basket of prediction market shares, representing "N days of that user's expected future expenses". Now, we do not need fiat currency at all! People can hold stocks, ETH, or whatever else to grow wealth, and personalized prediction market shares when they want stability. Both of these examples require prediction markets denominated in an asset people want to hold, whether interest-bearing fiat, wrapped stocks, or ETH. Non-interest-bearing fiat has too-high opportunity cost, that overwhelms the hedging value. But if we can make it work, it's much more sustainable than the status quo, because both sides of the equation are likely to be long-term happy with the product that they are buying, and very large volumes of sophisticated capital will be willing to participate. Build the next generation of finance, not corposlop.

ct’s biggest issue is that it’s become infested with spiteful people who don’t want to see others achieve anything (i don’t even own zro i’m just observing the reaction to a team who has been building for years & is excited about something that should grow the pie)

Much of the right’s inability to admit that it got Trump wrong comes down to sunk cost. There’s often more, like professional, social, and financial networks at stake. But psychologically, it is very hard for these people to admit Trump has always been a fraud, and that the last decade of right-wing populism has been a disaster for America. So they’ll keep to the path, forcing the rest of the country to suffer because pride prevents them from admitting that they were wrong.

BTC branding needs some urgent work though f.k.a. digital gold now known as the trump/epstein asset waiting around to get cracked by quantum computers

The capitalist mode can create so much abundance that everyone can use delivery services for every meal if they so choose. No one should feel bad for spending money on convenience. Policy makers should feel bad when they block companies from lowering the cost of convenience.