BenBowden.eth (e/acc)
@BenBowden72
Followers
449
Following
12K
Media
64
Statuses
3K
Lawyer but not yours, etc. Hot takes probably wrong.
Barcelona, Spain
Joined March 2020
The Canton governance model described by Yuval here isn't new, it's the same model as every privately-owned payment and clearing system in TradFi. It's also why finance is stuck in the dark ages, why you can get a couch delivered faster than a wire, and how the Too Big to Fail
When I interviewed Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz for The Defiant podcast recently, he wouldn't say “Canton is permissioned,” but I think his answer made it clear. tldr: to become a Canton super validator, you submit a business proposal to the existing validator set explaining the
14
24
141
Yes please.
New, from the Adam Smith Institute: A FREE SPEECH BILL FOR THE UNITED KINGDOM. A legislative vision for getting the British state out of the business of censoring opinions, forever. https://t.co/nmivFwutz6
0
0
0
Censorship is not the natural, settled order of British life. Censorship is a choice, and Britain can say "no." But what replaces the censorship state if Britain decides to tear it down? There's a better way. The Free Speech Bill. https://t.co/nmivFwutz6
adamsmith.org
By Preston Byrne, Michael Reiners, and Elijah Granet There is rarely a liberty more important than that of speech - Thomas Paine, the great contemporary of Adam Smith, wrote “he who dares not offend,...
6
82
360
Very apt discussion by the inimitable @DrNickA about the specific features that make a network an actual *blockchain* versus a permissioned database -- especially good read given the timeline rn ⬇️
7
18
126
Convincing.
III. The Specific Structure of the AGI Unemployment Argument and Where It Goes Wrong The AGI catastrophist argument typically runs like this: 1.AGI will be capable of performing any cognitive task a human can perform. 2.Cognitive tasks constitute the majority of employment in
0
0
0
YES! “Without an available exemption, investment contract status triggers registration obligations under the Securities Act, and token projects that cannot determine whether their marketing materials constitute representations or promises face meaningful legal uncertainty as
0
1
1
Also yes: “What has changed, however, is the novel position that the investment contract resulting from the initial sale of a non-security crypto asset can “attach” to the asset in a way that causes secondary market activity in that asset also to fall within federal securities
1
1
1
Crypto Winter reflections I've been in crypto since 2013, so quite a few years by now. I co-founded @Zcash, then moved on and co-founded @StarkWareLtd. In short, I've been here for a while. By now I've passed quite a few winters, so many, that I've stopped counting. I do notice
78
51
581
🤣
Asked the AI to make a fun slide about potential de-skilling from AI use. Need to specify more clearly what I mean by "fun".
0
0
0
"It's to protect the children" "It's to stop the AI slop bots" "It's to help law enforcement catch criminals" Authoritarians will never run out of reasons why we should give up our privacy. Don't cede an inch of ground. https://t.co/jm57sCWOM3
58
2K
6K
“using hash functions and cryptography won't make a corporate database a blockchain. It won’t make the entries in that database tokens, or the code it operates smart contracts. It will make it a bad database.” 💯💯💯
0
0
3
😂
people misunderstand the icarus story. the problem was not that he flew too high. it's that the wings were made of beeswax, which offered very little resistance to heating. with modern materials he would have had no problems. we can fly as close to the sun as we want now
0
0
1
Paul Ehrlich provides us with staggeringly certain, practically dispositive evidence that peer review allows basic, critical mistakes to be published with the imprimatur of the establishment.
This from Paul Ehrlich will make you think "If I'm always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I've gotten virtually every scientific honor." Link in reply
79
544
4K
Preston Byrne doing the Lord’s work for freedom. Now in the UK too. Which really needs it.
The UK Free Speech Act 2026 - a model bill implementing my "UK Free Speech Act 2021" proposal - is very nearly done. Three drafters, 24 pages, 6,709 words, repeals 8 Acts of Parliament in their entirety and significant repeals of 7 more.
1
7
27
Paul Ehrlich influenced Deng Xiaopeng to panic about China's population growth in the 70s, and to impose the One Child Policy. Result: more than 200 million abortions in China in the 80s & 90s -- often late term, often coerced by the state. He has rivers of blood on his hands.
Population doomster Paul Ehrlich dies at age 93. For six decades he was never right, but he was never in doubt that the world was coming to an end soon.
78
403
3K
Worth reading this whole thread. They’re often held by people with good intentions, but Ehrlich’s ideas and their modern day descendants really are terrible. “While reading Ehrlich today, know that he has intellectual descendants in the form of degrowthers and other
Paul Ehrlich has passed away, and I wanted to see whether he was as bad as his quotes and short clips suggest. Surely, there might be some nuance or careful thought in his worldview. Nobody is that purely evil. So I picked up The Population Bomb and started reading. It turns
0
0
0
“he couldn't see that people can invent new things to fix the current problems.” True of Ehrlich and all Doomers.
I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but I also don't want to miss the opportunity to make an important point. It is Ehrlich's refusal to address his massive and anti-human errors, and the culture's less-than-tacit perpetuation of them, that make it important to try to correct
0
0
1
This is an example of why the UK shouldn’t be fucking with Internet access / VPNs etc.
Russians will now need a license from the FSB to use VPN services, said Andrey Svintsov, the deputy chairman of the State Duma's Committee on Information Policy.
13
140
1K
The ethereum people and the Solana people agree on this.
Blockchains are tech for finance. The moonshot that Bitcoin originally proposed, that many of us came to build, has gone by many characterizations over the last decade: open finance, decentralized finance, internet of money, tcp/ip for money to name a few. All point to the
0
0
0