There is a dis-ease in every government making people believe that more money fixes any problem. And nothing could be further from the truth. - xh3b4sd

Families, tribes and states are the three main collective structures in which humans organize as social groups. I was wondering how to formulate those relationships and found it interesting that the concept of the family and the concept of the tribe are evolutionary ingredients to the well being of many different forms of social animals. There is a very strong case to be made for the biological component of the family and the tribe as a tool for survival. We as humans separated from the animal kingdom in many important ways. And if I had to summarize those differences conceptually, then I think the essence that sets us apart from other animals is the ability and the extend of abstraction in our thinking. Our minds evolved to formulate generic mental models, which in turn allowed us to transfer domain specific knowledge from one problem domain to another. Abstraction allowed us to communicate via language. It allowed us to invent property rights and money. And abstraction allowed us to not only conquer this planet, but soon will also allow us to explore other planets out there in the dark. Where is the powerlaw you may ask, dear reader? It is right in front of your eyes, because when you read this Powerlaw memo, then you will read it on a display of some digital device. And just as we discussed religion as coordination technology in the last Powerlaw memo, we look at nation states today as the natural abstract progression of ordinary tribes amidst the animal kingdom. Our ability to abstract, allowed us to plan, to reach for power and to hold onto it by wit, stick and ruse. And what all the fuzz was all about? Property rights. The "right" to own treasures and women and land. Often the right to Right itself, whether that was right or wrong. The nation state was a logical conclusion of an evolutionary process that gave power to those who could will the future into existence, by abstraction. The future did always belong to those who were able to imagine a tomorrow far greater than the lines of their horizons. And those who thought that the nation state was the final piece of the puzzle will rather sooner than later learn to which extend our coordination technologies reach the next evolutionary stage. We are going from physical power structures to digital hyper structures. We are going from nation states to network states. And contrary to popular belief, I do not think that network states have to occupy one, or even any geographic territory. Just like there is no fire in the lightbulb, there is no land in the network state. And yet, the lightbulb creates light, and the network state secures property rights. Just like we went from arrows to bullets, and from horses to cars, we are going to go from states to networks. From something that can be locally targeted, so something that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And nobody today can fathom what that actually means. What I would wish to the world is the trustless execution of property rights for all mankind, free from the arbitrary judgement of compromised middlemen. What I would wish to the world, are hyper structures freeing us from bloated governments that have long forgotten what their actual mandate looks like. For the people.

The difference between the National Weather Service and the Internal Revenue Service is that one of these institutions helps people every day and the other gets in the way on a regular basis. The mandate of any government ought to be "for the people". And it seems to me that having an institution for providing weather forecasts and weather warnings is a wildly useful concept. Everyone uses weather reports all the time and nobody is complaining about them. Nobody is out there on social media parroting conspiracy theories about the rogue scientists at the National Weather Service. Might there be something in the bushes? Maybe. Could it be better somehow? Yes, always. Just compared in the grander scheme of things, it appears like nothing of relevance and livelihood goes horribly awry in the realm of weather forecasting on an institutional level today. So what is the difference between the National Weather Service and the Internal Revenue Service? Well, the National Weather Service is unanimously useful, while the Internal Revenue Service annoys people. Maybe one way to look at it is that one gives and the other takes away. I want to clearly state that I always thought paying taxes is useful and necessary. I am not against paying taxes. I am against a rotten system that drains the life out of its citizens for no reason whatsoever. I am against the abuse of power, which happens inside the IRS and on the side of tax payers alike. And we can see that all the time when the system gets exploited through legal loop holes in the most obscure ways, so obscure that only psychopaths would choose to spend a lifetime dealing with this mess. Psychopaths, enabled by notoriously psychopathic systems. And one day, those rotten pieces will upend the entire system all together, if we are not careful. I cannot really quantify the amount of resources that nation states waste away by trying to collect legitimate tax burdens. We have no idea how much joy and how much lifetime certain institutions drain out of us every day and every year. Just when I see once more that the government employed another 80,000 human beings only to collect taxes within a vastly automated world, then it looks to me as if the whole thing is already coming apart. As of Q4 2024 there are roughly 25 million people employed by the government of the United States, which is about 7.5% of the entire US population. Why on earth would you want to bloat the government even further, and why on earth would you want to expose human beings to soul crushing occupations, if we could simply automate the task of tax collection and allow those human resources to roam free in the world instead? I tell you why. Because of complacency and utter incompetence. Those are skill issues, on a national level. I have a sense that there are rather simple alternatives to some of our current problems. Alternatives that would actually make life better for basically everyone on this planet, while being orders of magnitude more efficient and easy to implement at the same time. The simplest thing that we can do from here on out would be to delete the entire tax code and apply a flat tax for everything that enters your bank account. We could say that the bank account is an inalienable public good and force all purchases above a certain threshold through those digital pipelines. And with those digital pipelines we could still decentralize banking infrastructure on top of blockchain networks, and do away with all the madness in the background of today's private business banking.

About 200,000 USD in rent has been paid to Ethereum L1 every day over the past week by all L2 rollups. That rent is mainly paid for data availability, coming in the shapes of blobs and calldata. I wanted to mention the amount of rent paid here because that value quadrupled now based on the average amount of rent paid over the past couple of months. "Rent Paid" as a concept is important for public blockchains because it will become the only metric that actually matters. Because Rent Paid describes exactly how much the free market is willing to pay for premium block space at any given moment in time. Today I can already say with confidence that Ethereum is scaling and that the rollup centric roadmap is working, while the entire ecosystem is firing on all cylinders. Nobody is paying attention to the network effects of the Ethereum ecosystem today and nobody understands the monumental shifts ahead of us that trustless property rights are going to bring to the world. We have truly be given the opportunity of a lifetime here, while history is being made in front of our eyes. Every. Single. Day. And then, in other news, all ETH ETFs had net inflows of about 700 million USD this past week, which is also greatly reflected in the ETH price action these days. Just bull market things.

There is a dis-ease in every government making people believe that more money fixes any problem. And nothing could be further from the truth. - xh3b4sd

Families, tribes and states are the three main collective structures in which humans organize as social groups. I was wondering how to formulate those relationships and found it interesting that the concept of the family and the concept of the tribe are evolutionary ingredients to the well being of many different forms of social animals. There is a very strong case to be made for the biological component of the family and the tribe as a tool for survival. We as humans separated from the animal kingdom in many important ways. And if I had to summarize those differences conceptually, then I think the essence that sets us apart from other animals is the ability and the extend of abstraction in our thinking. Our minds evolved to formulate generic mental models, which in turn allowed us to transfer domain specific knowledge from one problem domain to another. Abstraction allowed us to communicate via language. It allowed us to invent property rights and money. And abstraction allowed us to not only conquer this planet, but soon will also allow us to explore other planets out there in the dark. Where is the powerlaw you may ask, dear reader? It is right in front of your eyes, because when you read this Powerlaw memo, then you will read it on a display of some digital device. And just as we discussed religion as coordination technology in the last Powerlaw memo, we look at nation states today as the natural abstract progression of ordinary tribes amidst the animal kingdom. Our ability to abstract, allowed us to plan, to reach for power and to hold onto it by wit, stick and ruse. And what all the fuzz was all about? Property rights. The "right" to own treasures and women and land. Often the right to Right itself, whether that was right or wrong. The nation state was a logical conclusion of an evolutionary process that gave power to those who could will the future into existence, by abstraction. The future did always belong to those who were able to imagine a tomorrow far greater than the lines of their horizons. And those who thought that the nation state was the final piece of the puzzle will rather sooner than later learn to which extend our coordination technologies reach the next evolutionary stage. We are going from physical power structures to digital hyper structures. We are going from nation states to network states. And contrary to popular belief, I do not think that network states have to occupy one, or even any geographic territory. Just like there is no fire in the lightbulb, there is no land in the network state. And yet, the lightbulb creates light, and the network state secures property rights. Just like we went from arrows to bullets, and from horses to cars, we are going to go from states to networks. From something that can be locally targeted, so something that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And nobody today can fathom what that actually means. What I would wish to the world is the trustless execution of property rights for all mankind, free from the arbitrary judgement of compromised middlemen. What I would wish to the world, are hyper structures freeing us from bloated governments that have long forgotten what their actual mandate looks like. For the people.

The difference between the National Weather Service and the Internal Revenue Service is that one of these institutions helps people every day and the other gets in the way on a regular basis. The mandate of any government ought to be "for the people". And it seems to me that having an institution for providing weather forecasts and weather warnings is a wildly useful concept. Everyone uses weather reports all the time and nobody is complaining about them. Nobody is out there on social media parroting conspiracy theories about the rogue scientists at the National Weather Service. Might there be something in the bushes? Maybe. Could it be better somehow? Yes, always. Just compared in the grander scheme of things, it appears like nothing of relevance and livelihood goes horribly awry in the realm of weather forecasting on an institutional level today. So what is the difference between the National Weather Service and the Internal Revenue Service? Well, the National Weather Service is unanimously useful, while the Internal Revenue Service annoys people. Maybe one way to look at it is that one gives and the other takes away. I want to clearly state that I always thought paying taxes is useful and necessary. I am not against paying taxes. I am against a rotten system that drains the life out of its citizens for no reason whatsoever. I am against the abuse of power, which happens inside the IRS and on the side of tax payers alike. And we can see that all the time when the system gets exploited through legal loop holes in the most obscure ways, so obscure that only psychopaths would choose to spend a lifetime dealing with this mess. Psychopaths, enabled by notoriously psychopathic systems. And one day, those rotten pieces will upend the entire system all together, if we are not careful. I cannot really quantify the amount of resources that nation states waste away by trying to collect legitimate tax burdens. We have no idea how much joy and how much lifetime certain institutions drain out of us every day and every year. Just when I see once more that the government employed another 80,000 human beings only to collect taxes within a vastly automated world, then it looks to me as if the whole thing is already coming apart. As of Q4 2024 there are roughly 25 million people employed by the government of the United States, which is about 7.5% of the entire US population. Why on earth would you want to bloat the government even further, and why on earth would you want to expose human beings to soul crushing occupations, if we could simply automate the task of tax collection and allow those human resources to roam free in the world instead? I tell you why. Because of complacency and utter incompetence. Those are skill issues, on a national level. I have a sense that there are rather simple alternatives to some of our current problems. Alternatives that would actually make life better for basically everyone on this planet, while being orders of magnitude more efficient and easy to implement at the same time. The simplest thing that we can do from here on out would be to delete the entire tax code and apply a flat tax for everything that enters your bank account. We could say that the bank account is an inalienable public good and force all purchases above a certain threshold through those digital pipelines. And with those digital pipelines we could still decentralize banking infrastructure on top of blockchain networks, and do away with all the madness in the background of today's private business banking.

About 200,000 USD in rent has been paid to Ethereum L1 every day over the past week by all L2 rollups. That rent is mainly paid for data availability, coming in the shapes of blobs and calldata. I wanted to mention the amount of rent paid here because that value quadrupled now based on the average amount of rent paid over the past couple of months. "Rent Paid" as a concept is important for public blockchains because it will become the only metric that actually matters. Because Rent Paid describes exactly how much the free market is willing to pay for premium block space at any given moment in time. Today I can already say with confidence that Ethereum is scaling and that the rollup centric roadmap is working, while the entire ecosystem is firing on all cylinders. Nobody is paying attention to the network effects of the Ethereum ecosystem today and nobody understands the monumental shifts ahead of us that trustless property rights are going to bring to the world. We have truly be given the opportunity of a lifetime here, while history is being made in front of our eyes. Every. Single. Day. And then, in other news, all ETH ETFs had net inflows of about 700 million USD this past week, which is also greatly reflected in the ETH price action these days. Just bull market things.