Max's Blog

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I've been focusing on philosophy more lately. During late January I decided to post my self-unendorsement video. I've been adding to my curi.us microblog regularly. That is where you should go to find my latest work. I post almost everything I produce to that thread. For the past few days I have been doing making daily updates to my makeup vlog and will continue doing that for the next week and a bit. I've also created a vanity URL for the playlist: https://xk.io/muv. I link the playlist for these videos (and most videos individually) in my microblog, too. I will continue posting to my microblog. I consider my blog at xk.io mostly deprecated -- I don't anticipate posting much here until I find a new blog system.

<p This is post-dated to when I posted the video.</p <p In Jan 2021 I unendorsed all my past work and ideas. There are details in the video, but basically it's an FYI that I have changed my mind on some important things, and I'm not sure that I believe the things I used to (but revisiting all those things takes energy, so that won't necessarily happen soon/ever).</p <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ Hd1AmLPEyA" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen </iframe

I've been doing a lot of work on philosophy recently. Public work takes two main forms: the tutorials are all up on youtube, and a site where I've been publishing related work. I've hired Elliot Temple to tutor me with the ultimate goal of improving my writing. We discuss a lot of things in the tutorials; topics so far include grammar, text analysis, controlling and directing one's habits, time and energy managements, epistemology (including one of Elliot's most significant contributions: Yes/No Philosophy (1) (2)) I am regularly updating <https://xertrov.github.io/fi/ with notes and things I'm writing or thinking about. I've come to realise the current site I have is pretty bad for higher volume stuff, and jekyll is bad in general for maintaining a library of criticism. So I'm thinking about potential new things to use for a site. I want to migrate everything, have a large amount of customizability WRT…

Edit 2020-08-03: I don't stand by this article. I think it's poorly written, and on a subject I don't know enough about. I'm glad I wrote it because it's been part of my progression to taking ideas (and seeking their improvement) more seriously. I've left it basically untouched besides these edits for posterity's sake. Edit (June): this isn't written well enough, and I intend to move this to a category off the main page in the near future. I could be wrong, but if I am I don't know why, so please enlighten me. As it stands, this feels robust to me atm. Comments/discussion: <https://github.com/xk-io/xk-io.github.io/issues/5 (FI link once posted) Alternative: Since GitHub is not great for discussion, if you – for whatever reason – do not think it's a good enough makeshift-forum: please post on Curi’s open discussion, and if possible please post a link in the github thread or…

<p <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1J7U-rcoRBMYnLxKRJq5OaRuLa5r mCDx B4kPCwZiIo" Slides</a </p <p <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwDANKTgc c" title="Max Kaye | BLOCKWALKS" <img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/nwDANKTgc c/0.jpg" alt="Max Kaye | BLOCKWALKS" </a </p

Legend: \<date consumed\ - \<title\ , \<author\ (\<publication year\ ) \<link\ commentry (optional) update \<date\ : some update (optional) tags: thing one, thing two, another thing really good stuff 2015-ish - The Beginning of Infinity , David Deutsch (2011) http://beginningofinfinity.com/ update 2018-06-12 : best book ever written. incredibly consistent. breathtakingly profound. tags: philosophy, epistemology, AI, quantum physics, morality, general science, memes, society, political philosophy, aesthetics, environmental philosophy 2017-late - The Fountainhead , Ayn Rand (1943) https://www.aynrand.org/novels/the-fountainhead update 2018-06-12 : deep book on the nature of integrity, relationships with others, the meaning and purpose of one's actions (in the service of oneself and in the service of greater ideas / greatness). i've thought about this book quite a bit over the last 6 months, not only is there more to learn, but it's a source of great ideas to build on (esp with harder questions re: integrity). tags: integrity, society, purpose,…

I've long thought about compiling and documenting things I find that I think are worth watching / consuming I'm starting to do that here: https://xk.io/stuff-worth-watching (includes more than just videos)

Here's a guessing game that I believe is secure. Setup You want people to guess the answer to some question. The answer is in ASCII, and all lowercase. Additionally, you want automatic (though not instant) payout for correct answers. Fully trustless, though. That question could be anything with a certain answer. Example: "Who wrote Macbeth? (canonical full name)". To do it, this is what's required of the winning guesser. (this example is written in the context of a trustless host network like Ethereum) . Winning Players Actions: Step 1 Come up with the answer. Got it? Great. Step 2 Publish to the contract: Where (Keep these details private for the moment) Aside Why should we commit this collection of things, and why do we have ? Does mean proof of work? Step 3 After some time (set by the contract), publish this transaction: Wait some more time (set by the…

<p <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15swVdZGsLpBT1AaUf8psFfu-2YboD3-N2sv4xl5edOU/edit?usp=sharing" Slides</a </p <p <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc1dY0jGYSw" title="CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, TRUMP & BREXIT - Max Kaye - 19/10/17" <img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/Oc1dY0jGYSw/0.jpg" alt="CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA, TRUMP & BREXIT - Max Kaye - 19/10/17" </a </p

In 1960 Popper published his paper Knowledge without Authority where he conjectured that the central question of political theory should not be "Who should rule?" but something entirely different. What he put forward has become known as Popper's Criterion - a criterion I believe IBDD satisfies with flying colours. Popper's Criterion In response to the "who should rule?" question, Popper writes: This political question is wrongly put and the answers which it elicits are paradoxical. It should be replaced by a completely different question such as 'How can we organise our political institutions so that bad or incompetent rulers cannot do too much damage?' . I believe that only by changing our question in this way can we hope to proceed towards a reasonable theory of political institutions. The question about the sources of our knowledge can be replaced in a similar way. It has been asked in the spirit…

I recently wrote the following in a correspondence with a colleague. It was too good not to post, so I hope the following helps you gain a grasp of why Flux and IBDD exist, and their founding philosophy. -------- The Flux Movement is founded on (what I now call) Deutschian Fallibilism. It's an evolution of Popperian Fallibilism and David Deutsch's book  The Beginning of Infinity  does a great job of explaining both the theory and exploring the breathtakingly profound consequences. In one light it's a book about epistemology, but the consequences are far-reaching. In essence the book's thesis is that explanations are the basis of human knowledge, new knowledge can always be created, that all evils are due to a lack of knowledge (at a fundamental level: how to rearrange the atoms around us to alleviate some problem), and thus that the progress of people (and prosperity linked to that)…

Summary: Early December I travelled to Brazil to present this at the Wired Festival. In this 30 minute reproduction I talk about how political power and fallibilism interact and how we can take advantage of that to produce far superior policy. <p <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fLVYiF1vjtvXJkdDN4J-zE6C QqBdIkwrMZkx-ay5k/edit?usp=sharing" Slides</a </p <p <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPdOQapyTXE" title="Disrupting Democracy for Good" <img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/QPdOQapyTXE/0.jpg" alt="Disrupting Democracy for Good" </a </p

Except from The Flux Guide. Most democracy systems judge themselves by a criterion like “how well does this system represent the preference of the people”. We don’t think that’s a very good thing to measure against, though. Sometimes the preference of the people is evil (Hitler was voted in, remember), or maybe it’s just bad for them (even if they think otherwise), or maybe the outcome is very sensitive to change (like Colombia's peace referendum at 50.2% to 49.8%). A fundamental background assumption is that the best form of democracy is comparatively better to other forms of democracy. This means that two (or two hundred) countries using different forms of democracy can be measured against one another, and the one with the better form of democracy will, over a long period, end up better off economically and socially. Because we’re talking about long term challenges and improvements we go beyond…

Background: we (Nathan and I) built a political party in 3 weeks on FB via ads. Cost about $3500 or so. The biggest thing I learnt was to try as many things as possible via split tests, and if possible try them quickly. We used https://adespresso.com and I can't recommend it highly enough. If you're going to spend more than a few hundred dollars it's well worth it (basic is $50/month and it's not on a contract or anything - maybe even has a free trial). Particularly a few words can make a HUGE difference (like 30%+ clickthrough rates). An example of that was the following two: "Representative Democracy has failed us" and "Representative Democracy has failed us, time to do something about it" (much better clickthroughs). Particularly I'd suggest split testing images and headlines, since they're the bits that grab people. We noticed a smaller difference with the descriptions/wordy…

Introduction Development of Bitcoin has become dysfunctional. This post isn't about either side of the block size debate, though the debate itself is the inspiration for this post. While the correct course of action may not be apparent, the divide in the community (and corresponding lack of direction) is apparent. Despite this, some of the community seems stead fast in finding a solution and moving forward in particular directions against the advice of some core developers. Unfortunately, we currently lack the ability to determine who truly has the most support in the public debate, or even if it is one sided. Herein I propose a way to: Fund core development, and Determine the source code used for compilation in a decentralized manner All of this occurs on-blockchain where needed, and there are no trusted entities besides the compiler-maintainers, which can again be chosen in a similar decentralized manner. In the…

Responding to: Is Democracy in Trouble? Hi John, I think you make some excellent points and your suggestions are certainly sensible, but I also think there is a bigger beast to slay. The problems we have now are no more 'wicked' than any we have had in the past, however, we certainly need to adopt more modern explanations so that we can navigate their 'complex interdependencies'. I suggest the root of the problem comes from our obsession with the who-should-rule question, and our lack of innovation in policy-making, which can be improved once we understand a little more about where policy comes from. Furthermore it does no more good to lament the issues we face: there will always be problems, and we will always have to solve them, and because of that we will always have such 'wicked' problems of increasing complexity, and 'contradictory ... requirements'. These point to nothing…

A few days ago a [Junkee article by Jane Gilmore][1] of a similar title was [posted to /r/Australia][2], and although Gilmore's heart was in the right place, the solution to just replace bad politicians with good independent politicians is no solution at all. However, there is still hope, as I shall explain. Here's the crux of my argument: replacing party-politicians with independent-politicians will not work well. Without infrastructure to prevent re-party-fication and factionalization there is no reason to believe that independents can provide a long term solution, or will avoid joining new or existing parties, or that they will be any more effective than current representatives. Ignoring the lack of Gilmore's plan working en mass anywhere else in the world, the problem lies with a common obsession in democracies: "who should rule?" It is a toxic question that leads to faulty reasoning. It is epistemologically analogous to "who is the…

NB: This document is better read from github, due to fomatting issues with the code. So, I recently wanted to broadcast a nonstandard tx and didn't want to wait for full blockchain sync on my dev machine. I knew that Eligius supports the Free Tx Relay Policy, and that I'd sent them nonstandard txs before, but all the IPs I could find weren't accepting connections. Finally I found and was able to connect and broadcast the message. Later I realised you can search getaddr.bitnodes.io for 'eligius' to find nodes. This is a great start, but we still need to send the transaction. By default Bitcoin Core does not relay transactions that: Are nonstandard Contain outputs not in the current UTXO set At this point we are going to need to compile a version of Bitcoin Core. We will need to address the above two problems to broadcast a transaction. The…

It occured to me that there is an unsolved problem with the NVB: death. When a voter dies, if there is no connection between their physical death and their cryptographic identity; it continues to live on. This brings up a new-ish toxic market: dead people's ID. In short, since they don't expire they essentially become a 'vote for hire' if they can be recovered. Artificially inflating the voting pool in this way would almost certainly be to the long term detriment of the quality of governance we are obliged to accept (or is it? I presume yes for the moment). So, one way to address this is for votes to 'time out'. Let's take a situation like the following: Voters are empowered once every three months, and many at once. The empowerment of their ID only lasts 1 year at a time (or w/e). During that 1 year they are…

Introduction The Australian Senate uses an unintuitive system of preference voting. Due to the low barrier to appearing on the ballot there are sometimes many persons and parties vying for the six senate seats per state up for election. To help provide a reasonable and quick voting experience for voters, they have the option of voting 'above the line' where they select just one party (or group) to support and allow that party or group to set the list of preferences for them. In this way they vote with the party. The seats themselves and the process of filling them is based on a quota system. This means that once a party has secured enough votes to guarantee them a seat, the number of votes dictated by the quota are removed, though all preferences continue to be counted using a weighting system (to account for the already elected candidate). Usually…

Originally written some time around 2 July, 2014. If you are interested in becoming a founding member of the NVB you can do so at our site: nvbloc.org. Governance is currently a centralized endeavour in most developed nations, and inefficiencies arise in the modern age due to design assumptions made (typically) in the 17th through 20th centuries. Assumptions like speed of communication (snail mail), the ability of constituents to understand policy (non-universal education), travel time (days to weeks), and magnitude of population (orders less than today), among others. Since nearly all of these assumptions are now wrong, we expect that more efficient and just systems must now be possible. Furthermore, we expect there to exist some incremental solution by which a smooth transition into a new political and societal structure so that the transition can occur over decades (slowly and steady) instead of days (hasty revolution). A potential solution — a neutral…

Bio <img src="https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9e9fdbd02d59a6f9410d4a563393ed29?s=1600" class="left" style="width: 25%; padding: 0px 2rem 1rem 0;" I am an amateur philosopher practicing the school of Critical Fallibilsm. My favorite philosophy topics are: epistemology, learning, systems design, communication, morality, project planning and business, and general life skills and attitudes. I spent the last half of 2020 improving my thinking methods via (commercial) one-on-one philosophy tutoring from Elliot Temple. Those 52 tutorials ( 100 hrs) are available free on YouTube and you can read my "learning FI" site and my microblog to see the philosophy work I was doing at that time. The tutorials started with my goal of improving my writing quality, but they covered a very wide range of topics, like grammar, procrastination, social dynamics (e.g. analysing + understanding lies and dishonesty), yes/no philosophy (epistemology), learning methods, and having successful discussions. As a result of the improvements to my thinking methods, in January 2021 I…

<div class="row" <div class="span12" <h1 Slid.es</h1 <hr </div <div class="span8 offset2" <p <a href="http://slid.es/maxkaye/ethereum" Ethereum</a <br / A brief introduction to Ethereum. 20 min.</p <p <a href="http://slid.es/maxkaye/bitcoin-payment-protocol" Bitcoin - Payment Protocol</a <br / Technical overview of Bitcoin as a payment protocol and a look into Bitcoin's script system. </p </div </div <div class="conatiner-fluid" <div class="row-fluid" <div class="container" <h1 Watch?</strong </h1 <hr </div <!--<div class="span6 offset3" -- <div class="container" style="width:700px;" <div class="accordion" id="accordion-videos" <div class="accordion-group" <div class="accordion-heading" <a class="accordion-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-parent=" accordion-videos" href=" collapseVideo0" <h3 Making Money - Part 1 [Vimeo] (September 2012)</h3 </a <a class="accordion-toggle" href="https://vimeo.com/49171109" target=" blank" Direct Link</a <a class="accordion-toggle" href="making-money" Resources</a </div <div id="collapseVideo0" class="accordion-body collapse" <div class="accordion-inner" <p style="text-align:center" <iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/49171109" width="500" height="375" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen </iframe </p </div </div </div <!--<div class="accordion-group" </div -- </div </div </div </div <div class="row" <div class="span12" <h1 Resources</h1 <hr </div <div class="span8 offset2" <p <a href="making-money" <h3 Making…

The Ethereum devs have been mentioning microchains lately so I figured it was time to write up what my thoughts on this sort of thing have condensed into; they might differ from Gav Wood's thoughts. As a note, I didn't coin the term microchain, though I've heard Gavin Wood use it (and Stephan Tual). I didn't have a term and I think this is perfect. The point of a microchain is to provide a shared scalable PoW 'container' - a chain meant for nothing else but wrapping data in a PoW. Typically this has been done in a roundabout way (see AuxPoW or Mastercoin/Counterparty) that requires a lot of data, and is not efficient for any 'piggy-backing' chains hanging off the main chain. This isn't a huge issue; insofar as - in the case of AuxPoW - proofs just go from 80 bytes to 500 bytes (unless you're using P2Pool…

Originally published at eudemonia.io. Eleven months ago I started planning Marketcoin and since then I've not described the updated design. It has changed significantly since I first described it, and is far superior in many aspects. Herein I'll describe what Marketcoin is designed to do, sometimes with little or no justification to how it is achieved. The implementation is highly technical and does not belong in a general introduction. Marketcoin is an idea that manifests in a novel fashion. It's a bit like Bitcoin, and a bit like Mastercoin, and a bit like Ethereum, but also like none of them in many ways. It's not any one single network, but many that are able to communicate and transfer value from chain to chain. They're able to share a common unit of a consistent value across all chains supporting the correct standard. It is self pruning and selects on the most…

Every PoW driven cryptonet has a state. The state of Bitcoin (and forks) is the particular set of Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) at the time - essentially the set of all Bitcoin able to be spent. When a new block arrives, the usual process to update the state is simple: {% highlight text %} Start with S[n,0] (state at block n) Apply the first transaction from the new block (B[0]) to S S[n,k] + B[k] - S[n,k+1] for all k in B S[n+1,0] = S[n,max(k)+1] {% endhighlight %} However, what happens when a new block arrives causing a reorganisation of the main chain? {% highlight text %} . 3a← 4a <-- 3a and 4a are not in the main chain currently ↙ 1 ← 2 ← 3 ← 4 <-- 3 and 4 are in the main chain 5a arrives, causing the reorg: 1 ← 2 ← 3a← 4a← 5a…

Originally published in the Bitcoin Magazine on January 15th, 2014. Reposted here on 1st April, 2014. Proof of Work (PoW) is the only external method of powering the distributed consensus engine known as a blockchain. However, at least two alternatives have been proposed, and both are internal to the network (Proof of Stake (PoS), and Proof of Burn (PoB)). This is important as it uses virtual resources obtained within the network as a substitute for PoW, meaning they these methods consume virtually no energy, which has been a concern of late. The figures suggested will only occur in a system of absolute equilibrium (the market is saturated with the most efficient ASICs that are possible to produce), though even if the reality is one or two orders of magnitude lower than predicted, it is still alarming and still must be addressed. Proof of Stake and Proof of Burn Both PoS…

Bitcoin is a disruptive technology, and since time immemorial disruptive technologies have challenged our existing theories and demanded improvement. I'm not going to beat around the bush trying to make Bitcoin conform to our existing schemas. We need to rethink what makes types of money that particular type; not look into why Bitcoin can function as a currency - that is already well understood. I'll outline what I think are the important constituents of money that help differentiate them today. We'll then look into how Bitcoin fits in, hopefully in such a way that convinces you Bitcoin is truly novel. Broadly, the three well understood forms of money are as follows: fiat money, commodity money (CM), and commodity-backed money (CBM). People will often separate the former with the latter two based on the notion of 'intrinsic value'. While we can agree that all three have value , we also know…