RESIST GOVERNMENT

“And the question is, to what or to whom should the AIs be aligned? In what situation should the AI defer to the model company versus the end user versus the law versus to its own sense of morality. This is maybe the most important question about what happens in the future with powerful AI systems, and we barely talk about it. And it's understandable why, because if you're a model company, you don't really wanna be advertising the fact that you have complete control over the preferences and the character of the entire future labor force.”

“if you are willing to change your node, because you fear that the government will persecute you for storing illegal content, you will be willing to change your node, because you are fearing government persecuting you for enforcing 21 million Bitcoins kept. If the government says, okay, whoever runs Bitcoin node, which enforces the 21 million kept will be jailed. So either run our hard fork that removes the kept or go to jail. What will you do? Based on the current situation, there will be IPv110. Supporters will probably change their node.”

“Rather, it is more like the process of industrialization itself, which is a general purpose transformation of the whole economy with thousands of applications across every single sector. If you applied Ben Thompson or Leopold Lash and Bender's logic to the industrial revolution, which is also world historically important, it would imply the government had the right to requisition any factory it wanted or destroy any business it wanted, and punish and coerce anybody who refused to comply. But this is just not how free societies handle the process of industrialization, and it's also not how they should handle AI.”

“Now I cannot imagine how a regulatory framework built around the kinds of concepts that are used in the AI risk discourse will not be used and abused by a wannabe despot. The underlying terms here, like catastrophic risk or threats to national security or autonomy risk, are so vague and so open to interpretation that you're just handing a fully loaded bazooka to a future power hungry leader. These terms can mean whatever the government wants them to mean. Have you built a model that will tell users that the government's policy on tariffs is misguided? Well, that's a deceptive model. It's a manipulative model. You can't deploy it.”

“if we want to decrease spam, then the only option is to decrease the block size. I wouldn't decrease the witness discount that some people proposed because the witness discount is still important to avoid people from making too many outputs. It might make sense to reduce the segment discount if combined with something like cross-input signature aggregation or something else.”

“if you are using some alternative opcode. So let's say hypothetically, even if BIP 110 were to be activated on the heaviest chain, and it was, you know, everyone was using Bitcoin with BIP 110, spammers who want to economize on their cost could use an alternate inscription method, and they would be only paying 0.4% more. It's actually a bit less than that, but let's say 0.4%. Right, so listen, think about that. Do you believe that if someone is spamming the chain today, that you are going to deter that person by making them pay 0.4% more?”

“There is no way it can do that. There will always be many ways of doing it. It's funny because the first programming project for Bitcoin that I ever made that had anything to do with Bitcoin was specifically to steganographically put messages into the Bitcoin blockchain as a series of valid and they are not even fake, like completely valid addresses that you have private keys to so you can spend from them. So it's absolutely indistinguishable. And without the knowledge where to find it, nobody can find it.”

“But that's not what the government did. Instead, the government has threatened to destroy Anthropic as a private business, because Anthropic refuses to sell to the government on terms that the government commands. Now if upheld, the supply chain restriction would mean that companies like Amazon and NVIDIA and Google and Palantir would need to ensure that Anthropic is not touching any of their Pentagon work.”

“Maybe the best example of this is Stanislav Petrov, who was a Soviet lieutenant colonel stationed on duty at a nuclear early warning system. And his sensors said that The United States had launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles at the Soviet Union. But he judged it to be a false alarm, and so he refused to alert his higher ups and broke protocol. If he hadn't, Soviet high command would probably have retaliated, and hundreds of millions of people would have died. Of course, the problem is that one person's virtue is another person's misalignment.”

“And what happens if Lightning Network breaks? All the coffee transactions suddenly go to the chain. Suddenly you have like maybe thousand times, 10,000 times more spam in the chain from the transactions that would have otherwise been on Lightning. So like, you know, like the biggest optimization and the biggest anti-spam. That's a funny thing. Like Lightning Network is the biggest anti-spam technology in Bitcoin, because like if you are putting stuff on like, if you are transacting over Lightning Network is so much cheaper that then it makes economic sense to pay higher fees on the channel opening and closing transactions, and those can then drive out the spam.”

“Recently, I have calculated that the transaction I put into the Bitcoin chain costed me 9 million times more than monthly subscription to a cloud service I pay for.”

“And unfortunately, it's for this reason that I don't think that individual acts of corporate courage solve the problem. And the problem is this, that structurally, AI favors many authoritarian applications, mass surveillance being one of them. Even if Anthropic refused to sell its models to the government to enable mass surveillance, and even if the next two companies after Anthropic did the same, in twelve months, everybody and their mother will be able to train a model as good as the current frontier. And at that point, there will be some vendor who is willing and able to help the government enforce mass surveillance.”

“There are a 100,000,000 CCTV cameras in America, and you can get pretty good open source multimodal models for 10¢ per million input tokens. So if you process a frame every ten seconds, and if each frame is, say, a thousand tokens, then for $30,000,000,000, you can process every single camera in America. And remember that a given level of AI capability gets 10 x cheaper every single year. So while this year might cost $30,000,000,000, next year it'll cost $3,000,000,000, the year after that, $300,000,000. And by 2030, it'll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House.”

“the thing was like, you know, probably everyone heard about the BIP 110 discussion and people were making various really weird claims around it. And one of those claims was that the data in the transaction, like if it's contiguous, then there could be legal issues stemming from it. And I thought that this is really a weird argument because like if you are some sort of criminal that splits your files into different chunks, then of course you wouldn't be deemed not guilty just because you split the files. That doesn't make any sense.”

“If the data is in between, then this is super harmful for network because the public key gets stored into the UTXO set. And this can never be pruned from the node, ever. Because if someone did prune it, that could become a huge chain split or network split. So people would see different versions of transactions. And this would be completely catastrophic and kill Bitcoin, basically, probably.”

“I think Shesic ran the number. He actually ran the numbers. I've posted this. I've been sharing it as well for people. He ran the numbers on what difference did Taproot make. And that number is like 12%. Okay, so basically, even without Taproot, you're paying 12% more. And even without the current inscription envelope, people are just going to be paying 0.4% more. So even if we took away Taproot, we took away Op-Eve. You're forcing the spammers to pay 12.4% more. Is that really going to move the needle?”