Ricky Zhang | Age of Abundance

$35 million was spent to unseat @RepThomasMassie in one Kentucky primary... Half the country never heard about it. The other half only hears 'right wing Nazi.' Two Americans, two completely different countries.

You can't keep trade secrets in AI. Anthropic can't stop Alibaba from copying Claude through its outputs - the model itself is the leak. No frontier lab gets a lasting moat on a technology this fluid.

Does abundance sound crazy to you? Then look at what's already normal. We all work harder every year. The money supply must keep expanding, by design. Answer: the lunacy isn't the abundance.

AI Takes Our Jobs. What Comes Next? x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Kyle @thekylehuber went to Kibera. Five years ago the river was choked with trash. Now it's flowing again. On camera a man walked up and threw a bag right in. The river came back before he did.

"Permissionless" used to mean anyone can use Bitcoin as money. Now it's being used to argue anyone can put anything on the blockchain. Same word. Different Bitcoin.

Ricky gets it 💪🏼

You trade your hours for dollars. You spend those dollars just to eat and pay rent. And the work you do to earn them, you hate. Sunday night dread isn't adulthood. It's the trade.

For any given mining pool, below 55%, signalling early has zero upside and only political cost, so it's rational to wait until the last minute To be fair it's also possible - likely even - they have no intention to signal as of today. As @ts_hodl said But that could change later too. The point is it isn't knowable from the outset today.

@ts_hodl @realricky @bramk @V4BTC when they clearly have a huge incentive to minimize disruption

Some will flame me but whatever. I put BIP110 in Claude and am asking it to answer my questions and help me understand it. 2 important findings: 1. It basically agrees with it technically. And when I read it I am ok with a temporary (this is important) period of this soft fork to have time to "figure out something sustainable" (against spam). Ok I am on board conceptually. 2. Spammers will adapt. There are other technical ways to spam. This starts an arms race, cat/mouse game. Visible/invisible spam makes it harder and harder to detect... the blockchain size keeps rising despite these efforts. We stay in a perpetual trap and discussion and strife that asks for an extension of the "temporary" soft fork. Hold up. Bitcoin's whole value proposition rests on the idea that its rules are extraordinarily hard to change. Not impossible, but hard enough that you can build a hundred-year savings plan on top of them. So every activation mechanism is implicitly answering the question: how hard should it be to change Bitcoin And 95% versus 55% are two very different answers. It said: "the activation mechanics (55%, mandatory signaling) are where I'd expect the fiercest fight, because that's not just about spam anymore. That's about how Bitcoin changes itself." ... "The justification given (for 55% signaling) is that it's temporary and urgent. But you can see why this is the part people fight about, right? The threshold isn't just a technical parameter, it's a statement about how much agreement you need before changing Bitcoin's rules." 2 things I see: 55% is not 51% (attack), but boy is that close? What happens to an emergent money that is engineered truth of which it's most important task is to stay consistent, constant, predictable, immutable, and thus trustworthy when it is in a perpetual fight? Is that positive? Many wanted me to think. Here's my thinking. Maybe I am too rational. Maybe I am an idiot. I have another positive/negative read attached. "imagine the same playbook used for something else: a "temporary emergency" fork for compliance reasons, or transaction filtering that a slim majority supports under regulatory pressure. "It's temporary, it's urgent, we only need 55%, non-signalers get orphaned" is a template, and templates get reused." Please share your thoughts. Thank you.

@SpaceXEduX @ts_hodl @bramk @V4BTC There isn't really an incentive to. BIP-110 observers may find it suspenseful but miners don't really care until it's nearing mandatory activation time

@realricky @ts_hodl @bramk @V4BTC But why would miners not signal a month out ? Why the suspense ?

@ts_hodl @bramk @V4BTC Yeah I get that argument. To me the interesting question isn’t about hashrate now, but in the lead-up to / during signaling period

@realricky @bramk @V4BTC You don’t need a URSF if there is next to zero hash power enforcing it.

@thekylehuber had given up on filmmaking. Started a supplement company, bounced through startups. Then Bitcoin pulled him back to the camera. Sound money doesn't just fix prices - it gives people permission to do the work they were made for.

@bramk @V4BTC ❤️

@realricky If any, by @V4BTC

@bramk But aren't you a captured podcaster??? 😂😂😂

@realricky I think so

@bramk Which leads to the question, if there's no URSF in this case, what is the most likely outcome? Does the game theory indeed cascade as described? Time will tell.

@realricky yeah that last part is most always the end result. there is not even place for "rough consensus". It's consensus or not

@derekmross Part of why I like Nostr long term 🟣🟠

We shouldn't be surprised by online polarization. It's the natural outcome of the incentive to maximize engagement. Outrage pays. Division pays. Nuance doesn't. The incentives are broken.

If your Bitcoin lives in an ETF or on an exchange: Wall Street can swing the price short term. Self-custody is the way out. You hold the coins yourself. Nobody can take them. That option never closes.

@volpeLP Appreciate that my friend 🙏

@realricky I've been checking some of your videos lately. Highly underrated content. Keep up the great work!

Who's in charge of Bitcoin? Nobody. The rules come from which node software each person chooses to run: consensus is the sum of those choices. Humans have never decided anything this way before.

Proof-of-work at the human level (with Kyle Huber) x.com/i/broadcasts/1…