Not partying exactly (played a lot of sports and was pretty involved in my Christian fellowship), but I wasn't disciplined in most other areas of my life. I was obsessed with math but treated other subjects as an annoyance, which understandably upset those professors and TAs. I did have a lot of fun, though.

For a large part of high school and college, my dream was to become a math professor. I loved math, particularly discrete math, like combinatorics, probability and graph theory. There's something about solving, or even understanding a problem that you noodle over for days, usually at the end of many hours of frustration. There's something about developing intuition for certain concepts, seeing patterns that was really attractive.

But I didn't go. I've told myself in the past that it was because I didn't want to and that the life of a professor seemed too grueling and lonely, but if I'm honest, it's because my grades weren't good enough. I goofed off too much in college and coasted through a too many classes.

But looking back, it was a blessing to not have that option. Academia in general and grad school in particular suck. It's a difficult life of moving to where the jobs are, of debasing yourself to fit the mold of the powers that be, full of egos, red tape and politics. And the type of people that graduate PhD programs come out a particular way. You can see it in their eyes. It's like they've lost a bit of their soul.

Academia, like most fiat institutions has that effect on people. It's driven by a zero-sum game of status, where demand remains high despite the economic prospects getting worse and worse.

I bring this up because apparently, the Brown shooter was a grad student. And like many grad students, the system broke him. It's a reminder that as much as it would be nice to have a chance at high status professions like the ones offered in grad school, there's a lot of risk as well, particularly to your soul.

Back in 2019, I got to teach a graduate class at the University of Texas on Bitcoin. I hold no graduate degrees, so the only reason I got to do this was because a couple of the professors there recognized that I was an expert. Sometimes the road less traveled still takes you to where you wanted to go.

At some point, we're going to see a lot more luxury brands market to us here.

I would honestly be a bit more inclined to listen than the cheap slop they sell on FB or X or YouTube.

From here: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

Peer review is a scam.

There are always unintended consequences of new tech.

If you haven't gone down the parasite rabbit hole... Let's just say it explains way too many things, particularly the morality around food and sexual mores of past societies.

I like that Trump is considering pardoning the Samourai devs, but we're trending to be dependent on centralization to solve problems.

For free subscribers: USA Caste System, Defanging Bigotry Accusations, China Rising, Elon's SpaceX Management, 1980's AI Bubble and more!

For paid subscribers: The CAT, FROSTR, Neutrino, Perpetual Futures, Do Kwon Sentencing and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #479

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-479

So many bad decisions are cope for middle school/high school trauma.

@nevent1qvz...

Solving a small problem for a lot of people is generally going to be more impactful than solving a big problem for a few people.

The former is usually the better fit for decentralized systems, anyway.

Threshold signatures over Nostr!

Now organizations can have a single account that requires threshold (k-of-n) approval to post.

Easy to compromise one person, hard to compromise a bunch.

@nevent1qvz...