Episode notes
This seminar discusses the problems of economic modeling, using examples from environmental, energy, and macro economics. Saifedean explains how his graduate school experience trying to model energy markets led him to appreciate Mises' calculation problem and the problems of complex quantitative predictive models. What are the problems with attempting to quantify economic and environmental impacts of different fuels? Are the models being applied to bitcoin mining useful? As these absurd models bring fear-mongering to bitcoin mining, will they change bitcoin, or will their flimsy foundations be exposed by the kind of people who like to use a technology built on 100% verification and 0% trust?
Links referenced:
- The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg
- Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter: @BjornLomborg
- The Bitcoin Standard Podcast episode Allen Farringdon’s Adventures with Fiat Intellectuals
- Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modelling on the short-term impact of a vote to leave the European Union by HM Treasury
- Article explaining forecast failures by the Spectator
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I believe it is really important to run a node, but I don’t recommend running it on your work or personal computer, as it can compromise the performance of your computer and, more importantly, the security and privacy of your bitcoin node. A far better solution is to buy a dedicated hardware node, and for that, I highly recommend Nodl.
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Coldcard is basically a small computer that can only do bitcoin, which makes securing it more straight-forward. Use the code BITCOINSTANDARD on coldcardwallet.com to get a 5% discount.
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