Brian Armstrong

Tyler Cowen writes [0] that the most important question in economics, to him, is

> how do differences of culture — however defined — interact with traditional economic mechanisms involving prices, incomes, and simple comparative statics? Are those competing explanations, namely cultural vs. economic?

Richie's answers are mostly focused on changing the culture of science, and while there are lots of ways we could change the incentives, none of them would be pretty.

Example: let's say we want to more closely align research and actionable results, e.g., a product a company can use (Brian Armstrong argues for something like this [1]).

Solution: radically reduce public funding for scientific research and for university education as a whole (in line with Bryan Caplan's arguments in "The Case Against Education" [2]). Academics, who would be many fewer in number, would then have to get more of their funding from companies, who (presumably) would:

A) guide them towards asking market-relevant questions, and

B) have a clear incentive to check the data, re-run the code, etc. -- so that the product they built based on that research didn't flop.

I think most people would recoil at this proposal. But that's what comes to mind when I think about fixing the incentives rather than the culture.

P.S. Small nitpick: Richie gives an _example_ of a perverse incentive in lieu of a definition.

[0]…

Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, wrote a blog post [0] today that gives a very different take on things. He criticized Bitcoin Core's development team for their poor communication with the community, for their inhospitality to new contributors, and for their repeated rejection of practical and simple solutions to Bitcoin's immediate scaling problem. He advocated adopting Bitcoin Classic's short-term fix for full transaction blocks and wrote that it is vital in the long term to foster an environment in which multiple development teams can compete to introduce new features and improvements to the protocol.

There are many people in the Bitcoin ecosystem who, like Brian, feel strongly that if Bitcoin is to survive and thrive, then not only must the blocksize-limit be increased, but the exclusive power to decide the future of Bitcoin must be taken out of the hands of the Bitcoin Core team.

0. https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf#.xw7emyjhh

So this is #3 of the Satoshi Roundtable notes and opinions that have made it to HN, as far as I can tell (I was initially confused and thought this was a re-submission of Brian Armstrong's notes https://medium.com/@barmstrong/what-happened-at-the-satoshi-roundtable-6c11a10d8cdf).

As someone who has dabbled into the bitcoin and block chain area but never seriously, all of these reports and the constant reporting of the serious issues facing bitcoin with little to no consensus about what's going to be done to scale it just scares me away from touching it.

Maybe I'm just not understanding the issue in its entirety but many of the opinions just keep talking about how uncooperative everyone is, how wrong or right one group is versus another and no solutions are really being worked on that expect to be accepted. Blockchain is cool tech but bitcoin itself seems like a horribly immature place to ever put real money into.