stuff

libros/Digital Gold.md

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+---
+isbn: "9780062362513"
+author: Popper, Nathaniel
+title: Digital Gold
+---
+
+Funny. Hal Finney's wife is a physical therapist. That probably played a huge role in him enjoying a setup that allowed him to use his computer when he was in the advanced stages of ALS. And he had a little desk in the living room, just like I did. It's such a small world...
+
+

libros/Discourses and Selected Writings.md

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+---
+isbn: "9781101488201"
+author: Epictetus
+title: Discourses and Selected Writings
+---
+
+> - "Tell us your secrets."
+> - "I refuse, as this up to me."
+> - "I will put you in chains."
+> - "What's that you say, friend? It's only my leg you will chain, not even God can conquer my will."
+> - "I will throw you into prison."
+> - "Correction - it is my body you will throw there."
+> - "I will behead you."
+> - "Well, when did I ever claim that mine was the only neck that couldn't be severed?"
+> - That's the kind of attitude you need to cultivate if you would be a philosopher, the sort of sentiments you should write down every day and put in practice.
+
+Conclusiones que saco del fragmento anterior:
+- Epicteto es un chulo.
+- Alan Moore pudo perfectamente haberse leído esto para inspirarse en la penitencia de Evey en la falsa prisión. Aunque queda claro que V no es de ninguna forma un estoico. Teniendo en cuenta la voluntad que ponen los estoicos en limitar su rango de acción reconociendo que no controlan casi nada, un estoico jamás hubiese organizado tamaño pifostio como el que montó V.
+
+> Man, the rational animal, can put up with anything except what seems to him irrational; whatever is rational is tolerable. Physical hardships are not intolerable by nature. The Spartans, for instance, gladly submit to being whipped because they are taught that it is done for good reason. But what about being hanged - isn't that intolerable? Well, people frequently go and hang themselves, whenever they judge that it is a reasonable course of action.
+
+Me recuerda a cuando Reverte explicaba cómo educaba a sus hijas para entender el mundo, argumentando que entenderlo no iba a hacer que fuese mejor, pero iba a ayudarles a lidiar con él.
+
+> [...] education has no goal more important than bringing our preconception of what is reasonable and unreasonable in alignment with nature.
+
+> What would have become of Hercules, do you think, if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges? Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules. And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir him into action?
+
+It's the struggle that makes life worth, and not the reward.
+
+> "But I want my whishes realized, never mind the reason behind them."
+> Now, that's madness, that's insanity. Freedom is something good and valuable; to arbitrarily wish for things tohappen that arbitrarily seem to you best is not good, it's disgraceful.
+
+> If all this is true, then what grounds do we have for being angry with anyone? We labels like 'thief' and 'robber' in connection with them, but what do these words mean? They merely signify that people are confused about what is good and what is bad. So should we be angry with them, or should we pity them instead? Show them where they go wrong and you will find that they'll reform. But unless they see it, they are stuck with nothing better than their usual opinion as their practical guide.
+
+Aquí veo donde se inspiro Marco Aurelio. La ignorancia como origen de todos los males. Como se dice en inglés, "he doesn't know any better".

libros/Manna.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+isbn: "9781544526478"
+author: Marshall, Brian
+title: Manna
+---
+
+The book is an easy, interesting read. But it's completely fails to describe anything close to reality. Let me explain myself.
+
+The book presents AI, software and robotics in a super advanced state. Let's not question this bit. The failure of the author is not in dreaming the technological development (it's sci-fi after all, he has a wildcard to do whatever he wants). The failure is on understanding economics.
+
+In the Manna world:
+- Robots can do any menial, physical job. But nothing related to art, creativity and many other areas where humans can still work. Still, the author proposes that people are doomed to joblessness. If there is an infinite demand for art, creativity and yadayada, how can people be out of jobs? I would understand if the wage for these things would be low, but to go as far as too ignore is just ridiculous.
+- The "super-rich" can buy wonderful robots that do all of these productive tasks. Why can't normal people? You would assume that the lowering of material costs because of all the automation would actually democratize the access to these tools, hence lifting everyone up. You can only escape this idea by somehow giving the "super-rich" some crazily insane control over the robotic resources.
+
+In the Australia world:
+- You have a budget. But people will inevitably want more than the budget. So picturing zero conflict around this is just wishful thinking.
+- I think there is a very optimistic view around people pursuing intelectual and professional endeavors just for the sake of it. I think many professional tasks are enjoyable because of the struggle and because of the pleasure of being better off after the struggle. Like, I enjoy chopping wood and lightning a fire in my fireplaces because I'm freezing my ass and then I'm cozy and warm. If I could already be cozy and warm before doing the work, I wouldn't enjoy chopping the wood and lightning the fire.
+- There is no explanation as to how the productive means organize themselves. Central planning is assumed. But, we know from Austrian economics that such planning always fails. How would the robot army overcome this? Who invests in capital? Who anticipates infrastructure? Who decides how much to save and how much to spend? Even worse. Is the central planner a guy with a job? If everyone gets everything for free... why would he take that responsibility anyways? 
+
+I could probably think of more stuff. But basically, the author has 0 clue on economics. The books is a fun read, but when I read the post-script where he takes a serious note and asks the reader to do his part so that we reach Australia, I got worried: if intelligent people are so wrong about how the world works as to even picture that this "utopia" is possible, desirable and pursue-able, we are royally screwed.

libros/Principles of Economics.md

@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+---
+isbn: "979-8-9879755-1-0"
+author: Ammous, Saifedean
+title: Principles of Economics
+---
+
+I should definitely show this paragraph to all economics students that pass through my courses:
+
+	The vast majority of textbooks taught in universities today are in the mainstream Keynesian-Samuelsonian economic tradition, which confuses students more than it informs them. I have taught these university textbooks for years and witnessed droves of intelligent students leave class with more questions than they entered it with, struggling to understand the significance of the obscure equations they studied, or to see any convincing reason to believe their outputs. Over the years, I have spoken to dozens of highly intelligent students and graduates who report a similar experience: They did what they had to do to get the grade they wanted, but none of the material made sense to them. They incredulously try to convince themselves to undertake the astounding leaps of logic necessary to make sense out of the irrelevant equations in order to pass exams, never to consider the ideas of the course again. If students learn from the mainstream textbook, they learn to understand theoretical models with only a tenuous link to reality. Success in the courses consists of understanding the models, not reality.
+
+When discussing minimum wage and its effects:
+
+	Prices are a reflection of underlying market reality driven by human action. Attempting to alter the underlying market reality by altering its reflection is unworkable.
+
+Continue on chapter 2.

libros/The Fiat Standard.md

@@ -0,0 +1,263 @@
+---
+isbn: "9781544526478"
+author: Ammous, Saifedean
+title: The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization
+---
+
+
+	If you have read the Bitcoin Standard and enjoyed my exploration of
+	bitcoin, I hope you will enjoy this exploration of the operation of fiat.
+	Perhaps counter-intuitively, I believe that by first understanding the
+	operation of bitcoin, you can then better understand the equivalent
+	operations in fiat. It is easier to explain an abacus to a computer user than
+	it is to explain a computer to an abacus user.
+
+
+	More than any conspiracy, the
+	limited spatial salability of gold as global trade advanced allowed the
+	survival of the fiat standard for so long, making its low temporal salability
+	a tolerable problem, and allowing governments worldwide tremendous
+	leeway to bribe their current citizens at the expense of their future citizens
+	by creating the easy fiat tokens that operate their payment networks. As
+	we take stock of a whole century of operation for this monetary system, a
+	sober and nuanced assessment can appreciate the significance of this
+	solution for facilitating global trade, while also understanding how it has
+	allowed the inflation that benefited governments at the expense of their
+	future citizens. Fiat may have been a huge step backward in terms of its
+	salability across time, but it was a substantial leap forward in terms of
+	salability across space.
+
+Es divertido ver a Saif confesar como durante la redacción de The Fiat Standard pasó de un repudio visceral al diseño y las propiedades del sistema fiat a comprender como la "salability" (surprise: salability no tiene traducción al castellano) a través del espacio genera valor y defiende la sensatez del sistema fiat en un business case contra el oro.
+
+	With less gold in the hands of the people and more notes, the Bank had
+	succeeded in protecting the official exchange value at the same price set
+	in 1717 by Master of the Royal Mint, Sir Isaac Newton, £4.25 per troy
+	ounce of gold. The Bank of England's reliable record in redeeming its
+	notes at this rate for two centuries, interrupted only by the Napoleonic Wars, was a matter of national pride and global renown which not only
+	gave the sterling pound its legendary reputation of being as good as gold,
+	but also turned the phrase 'gold standard' into the proverbial benchmark
+	and paradigm for excellence, predictability, and reliability--a linguistic truth
+	that has survived a century of the fiat standard.
+
+
+	The depression and the inflation to counter it made the pressure on the
+	pound unbearable. The last pretense of maintaining the prewar gold parity
+	was finally dropped in 1931, as the pound was devalued by 25%. One
+	wonders just how different history would have been had the bank
+	performed this devaluation in 1920, allowing the British market to return to
+	the solid gold footing and full redemption with stricter limits on inflation.
+
+La cita anterior me hace pensar y me da una cierta pena. Los maximalistas morimos de ganas de que el Bitcoin triunfe y el mundo pueda disfrutar de las ventajas del sound money. Y creo que a veces, al dejarnos llevar por este ardor, nos irrita la idea de que las monedas fiat se vuelvan mas sound. Un poco como el "cuanto peor, mejor" del conflicto nacionalista español-catalan. Creo que deberiamos ser maś ecuanimes y admitir que, por más enamorados que estemos del Bitcoin, hubiese sido mucho mejor para nuestras sociedades que las monedas nacionales hubiesen mantenido un patrón oro decente. Por supuesto, el Bitcoin habría sido de todas formas una mejora sustancial con respecto a esta versión no degenerada de las monedas nacionales y probablemente hubiesemos acabado en él de todas formas. Pero el cambio hubiese sido una mejora incremental, en lugar del salto del Titanic que se hunde al bote salvavidas que estamos viviendo por el derrumbe del sistema fiat. Y al final del día, generaciones enteras habrían llevado mejores vidas. Que es lo realmente importante. No?
+
+
+After describing the fiat process of a typical mortgage with three parties: the bank, the buyer and the seller:
+
+	All three parties involved in this transaction are happy, so can such a
+	system survive on the free market? This system appears favorable for the
+	buyer, who is able to buy a home without having to pay the full price
+	upfront. It appears favorable to the seller because it finances more
+	potential buyers and bids up the price of their home. It also appears
+	favorable to the bank, which can mine new fiat tokens at roughly zero
+	marginal cost every time a new lender wants to buy a house. But it only
+	works by externalizing the risk to society at large, protecting the buyer,
+	seller, and bank from default by having the government currency holders
+	effectively take the loss through the inflation of the money supply. The
+	sacrifice of the present good that allows both to spend can only come at
+	the expense of the currency being devalued.
+
+
+A mitad del capítulo cuatro, una afirmación de Saif me capta la atención por no entender cómo se justifica: 
+
+	Given that all banks are operating under the
+	same monetary policy set by the same central bank, there is no escape
+	for healthy businesses who want to use banks for payments and have no
+	interest in engaging in inflationary fiat shenanigans. It is not legal to set up
+	a healthy bank with 100% reserves, as will be discussed in Chapter 6.
+	You may only use the payment system of banks engaged in fraudulent
+	inflation underwritten by the central bank.
+
+Porqué no es legal gestionar un banco con unas reservas de capital del 100%?
+
+
+	The devaluation of money does not magically increase the
+	amount of capital and resources available for production. However, it
+	does lead to the perverse scenario in which projects earning even a
+	negative return in real terms are profitable in nominal terms, making them
+	better than holding cash.
+
+Y es por esto último que, incluso si la clínica de Eli no gana dinero, al ser un negocio que puede actualizarse con facilidad a la inflación es un buen almacen de valor (siempre y cuando, la venta sea posible cuando se quiera salir).
+
+	Gold's inability to cross
+	international borders in any significant quantity without the approval of
+	government authorities rendered it increasingly expensive to the
+	increasingly-distant economic transactions taking place, compared to the
+	banks and settlement networks holding the gold and crediting the
+	accounts of holders. As central banks were the only ones that could settle
+	trades across distances and international borders, while gold couldn't,
+	their fiat and political decrees came to play the role of money, allowing
+	governments unprecedented power in shaping society.
+
+Vivimos en una dictadura económica. 
+
+
+Saif dándole guantazos al Banco Mundial.
+
+	Like any bureaucracy isolated from the
+	healthy feedback of the free market, the organization does not exist to
+	serve its customers, but rather its insiders. Failed policies can continue for
+	decades as long as they are financed. The International Financial
+	Institutions' access to a line of credit from the Federal Reserve grants
+	them immunity from failure on the market. It’s worth remembering the
+	crucial fact that they face no opportunity cost to their lending, since they
+	do not incur a loss if their investments are unprofitable. After seven
+	decades, their budgets and staff have continued to grow each year,
+	irrespective of performance. This growth shows no sign of abating.
+
+La primera frase es brillante. Aplica también en tantos casos. Por ejemplo, en la universidad pública: el claustro de profesores está forrado de mea tintas escondidos detrás de normas absurdas, tradiciones institucionales y ese aura de autoridad ridicula que envuelve al profesor universitario. Pero nada de ser útiles. Nada de satisfacer clientes. Para qué? No les hace falta. El dinero seguirá llegando. No sobrevivirían en el mercado ni cinco minutos. Cómo puede esta gente preparar a nadie?
+
+	
+	Successful researchers are those who get their papers published in the most important journals, and university funding came to heavily reflect that. Consequently, academics' career prospects became increasingly tied to publication in academic journals, to the point where teaching skills are an afterthought in hiring decisions. Students the world
+	over complain about professors who are unable and unwilling to put effort
+	into teaching, but most universities do not and cannot care about this,
+	because the students are not the customer they are seeking to please
+	here, for as long as government grant money and subsidized student
+	loans continue.
+
+Me recuerda a como Iván e Iker, de mi asignatura, me explicarón que el otro profesor que explicaba cosas de ML era un genio que había sido candidato a Premio Nobel, pero en sus clases no se entendía una mierda.
+
+
+	All along, the content of the journals has continued to deteriorate to the
+	point where it is predominantly, if not entirely, unreadable academic
+	masturbation with no link to the real world, which nonetheless adheres to
+	the correct political, grammatical, and methodological guidelines needed
+	to keep up the pretense that actual scholarship is taking place. Almost
+	nobody normal or productive in the real world ever bothers reading
+	academic journal articles, and nor do they have any reason to. The only
+	real readership of most journals consists of the academics in the very
+	narrow field looking to respond to the papers in it so they can get
+	published. Rather than communicate important ideas to the world and
+	advance society's understanding of the state of the art in modern fields of
+	research, academic publication has been reduced to a circle jerk which
+	only has consequences for the academic careers of the participants.
+
+Acabo de darme cuenta de lo estúpido que me siento por haber caído preso en el pasado del glamour de que mi investigación fuese publicada en un Journal. A pesar de nadie lo haya leído jamas.
+
+
+	Anyone who reads an academic's
+	article does so in the same way a parent goes to their child's soccer
+	game.
+
+JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA
+
+
+
+	As the value of the
+	transaction rises, the transaction fee constitutes a progressively smaller
+	fraction of the value of the transaction. This means bitcoin's salability
+	across space increases the larger the value of transaction, which is
+	another way of understanding one of the central points of The Bitcoin
+	Standard: bitcoin will scale through an increase in the value of
+	transactions conducted on its base layer, not with an increase in the
+	number of transactions it conducts.
+
+Algun día, la cadena solo se usará para lo gordo y lo importante. El día a día será a través de Lightning o de servicios custodial. Llegaremos a ver un mundo donde la mayor parte de la población jamás haya hecho una tranasacción on-chain?
+
+
+	Imagine a money that can do an infinitely high number of on-chain
+	transactions every day, at an infinitely low transaction fee, why would
+	anyone ever need to centralize their holdings with a payment processor
+	when they can just transact themselves on-chain? How could anyone
+	engage in fractional reserve banking when a bank run is very cheap and
+	quick? Bitcoin is not this money, and there are hard limits to its scaling
+	with on-chain transaction, as discussed in chapter 15, as well as in The
+	Bitcoin Standard. While we are likely to develop financial intermediaries in
+	bitcoin, the superior salability across space means we can have many
+	thousands, or maybe even millions of banks able to perform cross-border
+	final settlement on-chain. The equivalent in a gold standard was few
+	dozen central banks, and under fiat it is under two hundred central banks
+	in principle, although de facto, only one of them is really able to perform
+	and validate final settlement, and that is the US Federal Reserve.
+
+No vamos a eliminar completamente a los bancos y a las redes de pago intermediarias. Pero, con Bitcoin y Lightning, introducimos un competidor honesto, neutral, imperturbable. Los incumbents se verán obligados a proporcionar un valor superior al nuevo sistema, y a no tocarle los cojones a sus clientes, que ahora serán capaces de dejarlos tirados sin miramientos en cualquier momento.
+
+Paradojicamente, puede que estos nuevos bancos sean mejores incluso que el mismo Bitcoin en todos los aspectos excepto la neutralidad. Quizás el gran regalo del bitcoin no sea el propio sistema, sino ser la semilla que obligó al sistema financiero a volver a estar al servicio de la gente y lo convirtió en una maravilla.
+
+
+	[...] second layer solutions will
+	make bitcoin more predictable, faster, and cheaper, but in the process
+	incur a trade-off of security, liquidity, and censorship-resistance.
+	While the purists will complain that these kinds of transactions will never
+	have the same level of security as real bitcoin transactions, they cannot
+	do anything to stop the economic reality of individuals preferring these
+	second layer payments with hard money as the base layer to second
+	layer payments on easy money.
+
+Un fantástico ejemplo de que lo que cuenta no son las ideas ni los valores ni lo que uno cree que deberían ser las cosas, sino la acción. Si usamos custodials, aprobamos los custodials. Si no, no.
+
+
+	Demand for legitimate banking services will
+	likely continue to exist under a bitcoin standard, just as it has existed
+	under other forms of money. Bitcoin block space does not replace the
+	essential functions of banking. There is a lot that is wrong with crony
+	262capitalist modern banking, but this is primarily the result of government
+	protection of banks that allows them to profit from unproductive practices
+	and offload the downside risk of their activities to taxpayers.
+
+Parece que Saifedean está conmigo en ésta.
+
+
+	Monetary status is an emergent outcome of market choice for monetary
+	assets, and not a result of an appraisal of theoretical monetary properties
+	by economists. Modern economists have never contemplated the
+	possibility that free market competition could apply to money, the holiest
+	of perogatives for the modern fiat governments that pay their salaries.
+	With every passing day in which it operates to the satisfaction of its
+	millions of users, the full-time detractors and government-paid economists
+	who are constantly attacking bitcoin begin to sound like deranged
+	conspiracy theorists who have very weird reasons for being obsessed
+	with stopping happy customers from wearing a shoe brand they like.
+
+Saif going full Don't tread on me right here.
+
+
+	The previous section leads to a very important realization: bitcoin does
+	not just reduce demand for fiat money, it also reduces the incentive
+	and mechanisms for creating new bitcoin supply. Rather than a threat
+	that can destroy fiat money, bitcoin may turn out to be the neat
+	technological solution that allows fiat to unwind peacefully. If the fiat
+	monetary system was a house of cards, bitcoin's reduction of demand for
+	fiat, and of the incentive for the creation of the fiat supply can be likened
+	to someone skillfully and neatly unwinding the house of cards into a deck
+	of cards by removing two cards leaning on each other at the same time:
+	the card of fiat demand and the card of fiat supply.
+
+Esto es muy interesante. Si Saifedean está en lo cierto, Bitcoin no causaría un colapso repentino e hiperinflacionario de las monedas fiat, si no un descenso tranquilo de la burbuja de crédito. Es un escenario mucho más alentador que la amenaza de un colapso de todas las monedas globales, y desde luego mucho más fácil de vender a no-coiners desde un punto de vista moral.
+
+
+	A counter-point to consider to the preceding two sections' analysis is the
+	impact of the strategy of borrowing dollars to buy bitcoin. While many
+	people would be tempted to exit fiat debt entirely and shift to holding hard
+	bitcoin savings, the continued existence and wide availability of fiat debt
+	will offer a strong incentive to borrow fiat and use it to accumulate bitcoin.
+	One of the smartest and most far-seeing analysts of bitcoin, Pierre
+	Rochard, had identified this phenomenon as early as 2013, outlining how
+	bitcoin allows investors worldwide to carry out a speculative attack on all
+	national currencies similar to what George Soros and beneficiaries of low
+	interest rate lending have been doing to weak national currencies for
+	decades, with spectacular success. The speculative attack strategy is to
+	borrow the weak currency, and use the proceeds to buy the stronger
+	currency. As the borrowing of the weak currency causes an increase in its
+	supply, selling it to buy the strong currency causes a decrease in demand
+	for it, and results in the decline of its value next to the stronger currency.
+	This reduces the value of the loan the attacker owes, and increases the
+	value of the currency he holds, a highly lucrative combination. With bitcoin
+	a harder currency than all national currencies, it could serve as the perfect
+	launchpad for attacks against national currencies. It is a natural evolution
+	of the interaction between the two forms of money: hard bitcoin is
+	optimized for appreciating as it is held, while fiat is optimized for devaluing
+	as it is inflated and lent. The likelihood of speculative attacks casts doubt
+	on the monetary upgrade scenario discussed above. How long can fiat
+	survive if people can keep inflating its supply by borrowing it to buy harder
+	bitcoin? We have never seen a similar situation and it is hard to estimate how this will unfold.
+
+Woops. Are we the baddies?

libros/The Price of Tomorrow.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+isbn: "978-1-9992574-0-8"
+author: Booth, Jeff
+title: The Price of Tomorrow
+---
+
+	“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
+
+*John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)*
+
+El jodido Keynes strikes again.
+
+
+
+	That is where we are in the world today, and even if most people don’t realize why, discontent is rising. Owners of assets and those who have access to debt and leverage have been tremendous winners.
+
+Woopsie. Are we the baddies?
+
+
+Página 51.5

libros/The internet of money.md

@@ -0,0 +1,6 @@
+
+Andreas talks about how we are still thinking about Bitcoin through incremental innovation lens, not realizing that the big deal is how am entire world of complete unpredictable applications will suddenly appear as adoption grows. 
+
+One example of the pillars that will support this is the removal of personhood as a pre requisite to being a financial agent. That software agents can hold money and transact with it independently, without the need for human interaction, representation or even ownership is a completely new idea.
+
+For example: you can now build a pool table where games can be bought with satoshis, and it doesn't need to have a human handling it. You could configure it to send its revenue to a Bitcoin address, leave it out in the wild and let it be. 

libros/When Money Dies.md

@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+> Nevertheless, it was the natural reaction of most Germans, or Austrians, or Hungarians - indeed, as for any victims of inflation - to assume not so much that their money was falling in value as that the goods which it bought were becoming more expensive in absolute terms; not that their currency was depreciating, but - especially in the beginning - that other currencies were unfairly rising, so pushing up the price of every necessity of life. It reflected the point of view of those who believe the sun, the planets and the stars revolve with the moon around the earth.
+
+Sounds like the world in 2022. Or like all the no-coiners when they become shocked and confused by Bitcoin's monstrous increases in value. They don't realize it's not Bitcoin rising, but rather their currencies falling.