While on my walk I was thinking about Bitcoin's biggest strength being decentralization and what parallels could exist in nature. I think its quite fascinating that Bitcoin is the invention of a top-down run species that is known for abusing control at points of centralization of power.
What other species exist out there where decentralization is the defining characteristic of how their members organize and act? Just speaking out of observation and not from any background in biology, I'd say ants and bees. Any more?
This is a little outside my wheelhouse. I know it's an issue that experimental economists (major overlap with behavioral) always have to deal with. Oftentimes, they're trying get subjects to jump through some pretty complicated hoops, so they need the UX to be as intuitive as possible.
I'm not aware of one canonical treatment of the subject, though. It seems like individual experimentalists largely navigate it on their own, while borrowing heavily from each other.
It is mechanism design, but mechanism design is generally more theoretical and would tell you about the incentives created by the system you're studying and what it's equilibrium conditions are. I'm sure there's a bunch of work on applied mechanism design, though.
Laxitive pills -- gradually, then suddenly 🤣
Just tried it with my team - we do typically have network problems with video calls.
The quality for one2one was great, but then it's the same with Matrix (which is also peer to peer).
For group calls (for which matrix uses Jitsi) was also very high quality - however, there were some issues:
Summary - the technology seems to have great promise. It's an alpha release so bugs like the above are likely quite normal. We were using mac and linux clients.
While I'm sympathetic to the idea that things should be as intuitive as possible, it is pretty impressive what humans will learn how to do when they have an incentive.
Think of all the crazy weird things we do to be able to drive a car (multiple foot pedals, controls of many sorts, an entire genre of laws, insurance costs and fine print, gassing it up, tire pressure, oil changes, roads, signage...). If you presented a new tech and told an investor these were the things that needed building out, no one would go for it. But people wanted to go faster.
Lightning and bitcoin in general just have to keep being useful enough that users have a reason to figure it out. We need to keep plugging bitcoin use-cases into the wider world and people will figure out channel management if they need it to do what they want.
For me, the focus is on what bitcoin and lightning let people do that they couldnt before and really want.
Quality content, have 1k sats from someone less likely to make it to that destination. Embarrassed to see the post hasn't earned more yet.
Love the paragraph ending in "douchebags", made me chuckle.