Andrew Stone

The problem is there is no supply/demand curve, or more accurately the supply curve goes vertical at 1MB (there is no more supply irrespective of demand). The solution, that I proposed years ago, is to have a nominal size and allow higher fees to buy extra space beyond that (make the supply curve make sense!).

@Bart_Mol In the end blockspace demand must exceed blockspace supply. It must be a scarce commodity for the game theory to play out in Bitcoin’s favor. The good news is that adoption will still grow and supply will naturally tighten as transaction size increases (ex. QR addresses).

This is not the flex he thinks it is. The big-block argument was: bitcoin needs more on-chain capacity so transactions stay cheap and fast. The small-block argument was: don’t guarantee cheap on-chain fees by making bitcoin harder for ordinary users to verify. Both sides agreed on one thing: on-chain adoption of bitcoin would continue to rise. The current state of the mempool proves only one thing: the big blockers were wrong that bitcoin would quickly become unusable without bigger blocks. It does not prove that low fees were the small-block vision. If anything, you could argue the opposite. Small blockers accepted that a fee market would emerge with adoption, and that everyday payments would be pushed off-chain. Here we are, 10 years later. The market values blockspace, as Saylor proudly states, at 1 sat per vByte. The lowest value possible. This situation is the worst of both worlds. On-chain adoption stalled, and even the small blocks we kept aren’t filling up. And Saylor is telling us this was the plan all along. It's like in 1984: "We have always been at war with Eastasia."

"Both sides agreed on one thing: on-chain adoption of bitcoin would continue to rise." No. Our argument is and was that the limited blocksize would drive services away. The limited block size puts a low cap on every business model, making it a bad choice. Better to go elsewhere. It is completely unsurprising that bitcoin is having trouble filling its blocks. The short period of larger fees was due to the friction of change.

@hodlonaut I guess you are simply stupid then, having witnessed it in the scaling wars.

Never would I have believed five years ago that I would be attacked, smeared and harassed by Adam Back, Shinobi, MrHodl and others for publishing a fully sourced investigation article about Bitcoin Core governance. It doesn't quite feel compatible with the whole "don't trust, verify" and decentralization mantras. It really is an unbelievable state of affairs. Appeals to authority, shaming, ad hominems, smears.... Zero engagement with the imo shocking revelations of the articles.

@dmweisberger @RobertKennedyJr Did you sit in a chair for 8-12 hours day in italy wiggling your fingers for exercise?

I just spent 2 incredible weeks in Italy and it is so frustrating to come back to the U.S… How is it possible @RobertKennedyJr that the Italian food supply is so vastly superior. I literally ate bread at every meal, dessert multiple times per day, and generally ate way more than I do in the U.S. Not once did I have acid reflux. Not one headache, no digestive problems, and I didn’t gain any weight. If I ate the same way in the U.S. (I used to at times) I would have gone through a full bottle of Tums and Advil just to get through the day… WHY does the U.S. allow glyphosate in wheat, high fructose corn syrup in food and who knows what in our milk products? The difference in quality of life in Italy vs the U.S. is staggering from their common sense (anti corporate) food regulation. WHY aren’t more people upset about this? The U.S. is the richest country in the world and we eat like one of the poorest.

@evefairbanks "a cavernous hangar bay" LOL. First using the article "a" as if they randomly happened upon it, like you see a store walking down the street. Then the adjective cavernous on a ship, lol.

Take this post. Tone is uncannily obsequious. Rhythm is artificial, droning. Individual words—"electric," "self-conscious"—are meaningless in context. The structure doesn't proceed normally; the hangar bit is a jarring detour. Facts are wrong: Colby doesn't have a Ph.D. (4/7)

This is the most perfectly uncanny piece of AI-assisted writing I've seen--and a great tutorial on how to identify AI text. The OP is a captain! But the tell for AI isn't rhythm, wording, or fact errors. It’s that problems with *all these elements* exist equally & at once. (1/7)

@beefington420 I'm that guy! I dont want to use anything that cant be dishwashed any longer except my knives. Just get a cheap ceramic coated pan and in 2 years when its ruined by the dishwasher spend $15 and get a new one. Your time is more valuable!

My husband the other day was like “can we stop having dishes we can’t put in the dishwasher?” Which I think is a very innocent completely masculine practical notion. And like, no I’m not getting rid of all my wooden cutting boards and spoons and also, hello, all knives, but

@DesheShai Possibly obvious but another requirement is that we (the analysts) know what each players' "well defined utility" is. And it ought to be defined within the context under analysis. It can't be "I want to mess up a game theory analysis, at any cost to myself"

True, but with a very meaningful caveat. A player is "rational" in the game theoretic sense if they have a well defined utility they are trying to maximize. That's it. In everyday speech, calling someone "(ir)rational" typically carries strong judgement towards the utility itself, which is very unlike the game theoretic concept of rationality. For example, consider a crazy stock broker who tries to lose as much money as possible. You might call such a person "irrational", but in game theory parlance the crazy broker has a well defined utility so she is as "rational" as any other broker. The game theoretic assumption about "rationality" is not "we agree with their policy" but "they agree with their own policy". To be game theoretically irrational it's not enough to have a policy that someone personally deems "irrational". Irrationality is a self contradictory state where every attempt to understand the player utility will eventually fail, because however you define it, the player will eventually act against it. The uninitiated reader might read OP as "game theory only works if we assume all players act "reasonably"", but the more accurate impression is "game theory only works if we assume all players have a well defined goal, but without making further assumption about what these goals might be." Which makes sense, because games are all about reaching one's goals, whatever they are. But we do need a goal to exist so we could research what strategies satisfy it. This is a *much* broader concept of rationality that encompasses many sorts of "unreasonable" players (e.g. eccentric billionaires that are willing to lose heaps money to watch the world burn). That being said, there are some contexts where even this weakest possible concept of rationality is too limited. This is researched in e.g. noisy game theory.

People require energy to meet basic needs like heat and getting to work. If the state wants to tax optional luxury/recreational activities like alcohol consumption, betting, hunting/fishing on public lands or visiting a state park, then that's basically the fantasy of an optional tax, but it actually works! Although the best solution is to reduce govt spend and increase effeciency for necessary spending, a tax on comsumption of luxury entertainment seems to me like a much better alternative than taxing production. If you reduced the tax, you'd either increase the odds, making betting more attractive or you'd put more revenue into the hands of the facilitator, which can and will be plowed into more advertising. If you want to reduce gambling facilitated by a 3rd party, increase the tax on it.

@aakashgupta The wildest part is watching states that screamed about a two cent gas tax hike quietly build billion dollar revenue streams by turning every phone into a slot machine.

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right. Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025. They lost $16 billion of that. FanDuel pulled $6 billion of the losses. DraftKings pulled $5.3 billion. Every state with legal mobile sports betting collected a tax on the bettor side. New York alone took in over $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax revenue. Layer the lottery on top. State lotteries generate over $90 billion a year. The bottom half of income earners account for roughly 70% of total spend. The average lottery player makes $38,000. A household earning $20,000 spends three times more on tickets than one earning $30,000. The implicit tax rate, meaning whatever the state keeps after prizes, runs 30 to 50% depending on the game. No other revenue source in America has that base and that rate. The structural design is the engine. A single straight sports bet carries a hold of 4 to 5%. A four-leg parlay carries a hold above 30%. FanDuel and DraftKings spent five years rebuilding their apps to make parlays the default product. FanDuel's blended hold rate hit 11.4% in 2025, up from roughly 7% in 2022. The product got worse for the customer and the customer wagered more anyway. Now look at the substitution. Nine US states have no state income tax. Seven of those nine run state lotteries. Seven of those nine have legalized sports betting. The states most committed to never taxing wealth are the same states running the largest extraction machines on people who cannot afford to lose. Read it as policy. Here is what Buffett is actually pointing at. The state needs revenue. It can raise income tax on the top decile, or it can run a lottery plus a sports betting tax. The second option raises the money from the people who can least afford it. The first option becomes politically optional. New York's $1.2 billion in 2025 sports betting tax is $1.2 billion the state did not have to ask of someone earning $5 million. DraftKings and FanDuel sell a privatized collection mechanism for a regressive tax that the state never has to defend at the ballot box again. Voters approve legalization once. Collection runs forever. The state takes a cut. The wealthy get a quieter top bracket. The bettor's cut shrinks every quarter as the parlay menu gets pushed harder. The function of a government, Buffett said, is not to play its people for suckers. Thirty-nine state governments now do.

@satofishi OP should PUSH that into a UI bug report since its not part of the text.

This was once a question I used when interviewing programmer candidates. Why is there a letter “E” before “The”? Is it part of the coinbase message, and what significance does it have?

@KevinLamb74 That's gonna raise a welt! :-)

Archers with the bowstring outside of their forearm is such a bizarre trend in current D&D art (all for the 2024 ruleset.) What is causing this? A staggering level of ignorance across multiple artists or an AI prompt that's stuck in a loop without anyone being the wiser?

@kevinvzb @AdamTornhill An indexed jump then immediate constant load was faster than the RAM accesses needed for a LUT, and few know how heavy an actual abstract data structure like that map is. Just jumping into the get function is the same cost as the whole other way.

@AdamTornhill recent models seem to be fond of that antipattern I wonder where they get it from

Ever seen code that is just data pretending to be logic? I’ve seen this pattern in more codebases than I can count.

@MarcDeMesel It needed to innovate rapidly with features that made a difference to users. Imagine the outcome if my proposed features, enabling assets and oracles, had gotten in in 2018!

Beautiful chart showing Bitcoin Cash $BCH prices since inception, including period pre split 2017 where it was called just Bitcoin. Price went sideways since 2014, almost 12 years now. Few still interested or hold it.

@zawy3 Its probably right on target. By approaching to the side you minimize the failures that lead to a putting a rocket sized hole in your boat.

Incredible recovery. It's strange their landing controls are so good but their approach controls are so bad. It saves a little fuel to come in so fast because air resistance stays higher for longer. It seems like a little parachute could save a lot on fuel.

@MercuriusFilius @vladlobachevsk2 Why are you copyrighting JPM interview questions? Hmm... oh yeah because they are fake!

The questions I post are copied from the pool of sample interview questions collected by a few prep firms. I copy them exactly, and I list which firm was noted as having asked the question. I take offense to your claim that I am telling lies, I am not. I am citing what is listed. Some questions are easy, others are more difficult. Some are logic, basic math, finance, etc. I tend to post mostly easy questions lately because they appeal to a wider audience, and are more entertaining. I am not telling lies — I present each question exactly as listed.

How would you answer this common J.P. Morgan interview question?

@DesheShai Wouldn't I just find that pair then and repeat it to defeat your puzzle? Perhaps in stating the puzzle you dont really mean that a human is picking (byzantine, accesses prior information). Maybe the picker is algorithmic or random?

That's only true if the winning probability is bounded away from 50%, not just above 50%. The order of quantifier here is that for any pair of numbers you choose the strategy wins better than guessing, but it is still possible for every e to find a pair of numbers such that it wins with probability < 0.5+e

It seems that I made a more of a mathy audience due to all the silly EML convo, so I'll take this opportunity to share one of my favorite puzzles. We are playing the following game: I'm writing two numbers on two pieces of paper. They could be any real numbers as long as they are different. I place them on the table face down. You choose one of the notes and look at the number, and then you need to tell me whether this number is smaller or larger than the other. Propose a strategy that wins with a probability higher than 50%.

Why in modern API design do the simplest, most common things have to have the longest names? kotlin.time.Clock.System.now().toEpochMilliseconds()

Normal statistics taught in classes does not cover changing knowledge. A good technique to understanding the problem is to exaggerate it. Let's say there were 1000 envelopes. You pick 1, interviewer shows you 998 rejection letters, should you switch to the final unopened one? When you picked you had 1/1000 chance of being right. The other pile had 999/1000. The interviewers actions effectively make you win if the acceptance was in any of those 999.

@ztwiig @MercuriusFilius Statistically, it doesn’t matter at all if it was random.

How would you answer this common Goldman Sachs interview question?

@silent_v @ztwiig @MercuriusFilius The unspecified portion of the algorithm has been avoided in the scenario described so the incomplete information is no longer relevant.

@ztwiig @MercuriusFilius Thank you. This question is the perfect midwit filter. Dumb people say it doesn’t matter. Midwits say you always switch. Smart people like you (and me!) say there’s not enough information to determine the answer.

Nope, you should switch. You can understand it by realising that the algorithm isn't specified for the case where the interviewer gets the acceptance letter (but given the scenario described those parts don't matter). Reasonable actions, like "do over" are effectively monty hall. Another way to think of it is that the interviewer got unlucky, and you are taking advantage of that. A more obvious example of this would be a game where 2 random numbers are picked between 1 and 100, and you choose if they'll add up > 100 or not. Then the 1st number is revealed and you have the opportunity to switch. Obviously if you picked "no" and the 1st num is 99 you should switch!

@MercuriusFilius This isn’t actually the Monty Hall problem unless we stipulate that the interviewer knows which envelope has the offer and deliberately opened an empty one. If they opened at random, and it happened to be empty, it’s still 50/50.