Chapter Four: Honesty, Almost

After twitching for a couple hours and rolling over a few times, I heard Rod come back. He asked if I really trusted them.

"You're the only one I've met.  I do trust you.  Maybe I'll trust more people as I meet them?'  I started worrying because of his question.  It seemed remarkably easy to hide that I was worried, but then I started worrying that things may not be the way they seem.

"Well, thanks," he said, "Did you sleep?"

I was trapped.  If they knew that the machine wouldn't twitch if I were asleep, then my plan would prove that I am willing to lie to them.  Since I was willing to lie and my best chance of getting away with it was not to ever let them have any idea that I was willing, I decided I better not lie.  Honesty turns out to be the best policy.

"I didn't.  I just don't feel tired at all."

"Do you know that you were twitching, as if you were asleep?" he asked.

"Yeah... I was wondering if pretending I was asleep would help me actually go to sleep.  It didn't work as far as I can tell."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, maybe I did sleep, but I don't think so."

"Okay.  I'm on my way home now, but I wanted to show you how to use your remote to see the video from the other four tries to bring you back."

I grabbed the remote and looked it over while he listed off the functions and pointed to the buttons.

"Tomorrow morning, Dr. Sloane will interview you.  While you didn't sleep, she interviewed your wife.  She has requested to interview the two of you together after your interview in the morning so that's scheduled too.  Do you have any questions?"

"A lot, but I want to try to find the answers myself.  I'm basically living in a machine and I'd like to know how the machine works.  Like you said new memories are formed in here," pointing to my chest, "so can I get blueprints, schematics, design docs... ?"

"I'll ask our night tech to set that up for you, and if you hit the menu button and he gets it set up, you'll have access to a lot of that material."

"Great.  Thanks!" I reached out to offer him my hand, we shook, and he left me alone.  I started watching the videos.

Chapter Three
Chapter Five

Raising the Baby Lightning Network

One of the key developments in modern technological advancement has been the ability to transfer important information between automated systems.  The systems that motivated this post are Lightning Network Clients ("LNCs").  I run two flavors of such clients, Lnd and Eclair.  Both of these software programs implement the "BOLT Protocol" ("Basis Of Lightning Technology") and so each of them must store some information.

These two flavors of LNC are already able to transfer some information between each other because BOLT requires them to have that ability.  That's the only way they can participate in the Lightning Network.  There is also information which the software cannot transfer from one flavor to the other, and that information represents, at a minimum, the secret information that each LNC must hold in order to protect itself and be able to manage "Lightning" channels.

I'm writing this post to motivate myself and interested readers to help to create a standard way to represent all the information that LNCs must hold in order to function.  Once such a standard is in place, anyone can write a program to read the information from their favorite LNC and save it in the standard format, or read the information from the standard format and write it into their favorite LNC.  This solves a problem I have, which is that I have channels on my Eclair node that I would like to run from my Lnd node.

The next step for me is to examine the structure of the backups that Lnd and Eclair make.  These backups necessarily hold all the information required.  It's entirely possible to use the code and the structure of the backups to write a program that will convert between Eclair backups and Lnd backups.  However, such software will only work for the specific versions and flavors of LNCs for which it is written.  I'd prefer to see a common format for the backup to make it easy for Lightning Network Enthusiasts to switch between LNCs.

Multiplier: Take the Advice You Have for Others

Whenever you notice that you have some advice for someone, look for ways you can take that advice yourself. I wrote about this before but I want to address it specifically. There are benefits to this that take some consideration to recognize. 

Imagine that you have already found a way to put into practice the advice you'd like to offer your friend. Do you think there is much difference between telling the story of going that way (whether you imagine it* or already did it) and offering the advice directly? I think one would be far more effective and I see two reasons for that. 

When I hear a story, I like to draw my own lessons from it. Those lessons are mine, not anyone else's, even if they are exactly the lessons that the author of the story was trying to teach. The author reached me in a meaningful and intimate way, obviously.  This often happens without me even being aware that I learned something. 

If all I read was the author's description of the lesson (without any personal story), I can imagine writing it off as obvious, or finding ways to challenge it. Of course, I can also imagine taking the lesson to heart, but the chances of that seem way lower than if I derived the lesson from his or her personal story instead. 

If the author's intended lesson reflects some poor analysis, the story still provides fuel for some kind of lesson. The naked advice doesn't. Instead, it just suggests something that is a bad idea,  after all. You don't lose points for telling a story in which you took some bad advice unless you explicitly endorse the bad advice. This holds true even when you don't realize it's bad advice. It could even give your audience a chance to see how to handle your role in the story in a more effective way. 

*If you have only imagined taking the advice you're thinking of offering, and you can't remember ever following it yourself, consider switching directions.  Lay out the situation of your imagined story for your friend and ask if they have ideas on in how to handle it. Think of your conversation as a cooperative search for truth instead of you offering them a solution. In fact, that approach is nearly always better than trying to convince someone of something you already assume (or "know").

Solidifying the Future

Knowing, or at least having a working assumption about, what other people are going to do nearly always enhances your life. Inverted, this means that you can enhance the lives of others by planning and sticking to your plan, or promising, and keeping your promise. Aside from sharing an intention, this two-way sharing of future behavior (and sharing its description, which is the promise) is the essence of cooperation.

This shows up as advertising ("We will trade away our product for your money"), agreements ("You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours"), contracts (written agreements that can be published to punish a party who breaks one), promises, plans, group discounts, limit orders, vows, etc.

The benefits of sticking to what you said you'd do include benefits to yourself.  For example, there will be some positive chemical change in your brain if you decide that after reading this paragraph, you will do something, like maybe get up and stretch, and then, when you're done reading this paragraph, you actually do that thing.  It will increase your self-esteem, at least a little bit, in addition to positively altering your brain chemistry.  You may have been too excited to make that decision before reading this far, but if not, consider this the end.  If so, here are a few extra filler sentences for you so you have time to decide.  Oh, and a call out to ask why you're still reading and not taking a moment to consider doing what I proposed.  Plus this funny reprimand to myself for ending the paragraph with two sentence fragments before the final instruction.  Don't forget to do that thing you decided to do after checking that this instruction was preceded by two sentence fragments!

Feel better?  I do.  I was actually hungry and made myself a smoothie and I've been kind of giddy ever since.  Let's solidify the future a bit more, or at least examine the benefits of planning things and then doing what you said you'd do, or at least letting those you believe might be affected by your not doing those things know that you might not be following through, if, in fact, there's a chance you won't be following through.  If you can't keep your word, at least honor it.

I have another exercise for you now, if you're game.  If not, at least, since you're still reading, it'll be in your memory so you can try it later.  You have to have a dollar.  A five works, but that makes it more difficult and reduces the return on your investment.  Take your bill to someone, a stranger or someone you know, it doesn't matter.  Ask them if they would like a dollar.  You may have to explain what you're doing, so tell them, and I will absolutely appreciate it if you tell them to check out litmocracy.blogspot.com because that's where you got the idea.  If it turns out that they would like a dollar, give it to them.  If not, thank them for entertaining your offer.

I just did that and ended up giving my youngest daughter and her boyfriend each a dollar.  Then I told them, "This cost me two dollars, but what did I get from it?"  Brennan said "Ooh, that's deep," which made it a little deeper for me. He also mentioned reading my June 11th post in which I mentioned writing about how I floss without providing a link to it.  I was lazy then, but A) I just updated the post to B) add this link which you can read without going to the other post, but if you haven't read the other post, maybe you'll check that out too.  And thanks for reading!

When we're young, we learn the value of making promises and usually don't notice the consequences of being sloppy with them.  This is why asking for forgiveness is recommended over asking for permission.  If you meet awesome enough people, they will help you understand that it's good general advice, but not with them.  An awesome person will expect you to make up for all the problems you caused by doing something you should not have done without first getting permission.  They will also nearly always grant you permission.

As we evolve, we will get better at recognizing the two sets of consequences that result from making promises.  Our brains currently only handle the first set because we so recently developed language and the ability to communicate with many people we don't know.  We evolved in tribes where saying you'd do something generally put you in a position where you had to do it, and most people who tried getting the benefits of promising without having to pay the price of delivering could not get away with it.  That's not true any more, but our cognitive evolution hasn't yet caught up.  Oops!  There I go saying things as if I know they are true when I don't actually know it.  It's my best guess and I'd LOVE it if you add comments that might refute that guess.  The first set of consequences from a promise are the benefits that come from the people who want you to keep your word, who will feel and show gratitude even if you haven't yet done it.

The second set of consequences from a promise are the results produced when it's clear to others whether or not you've kept the promise.  Since we like to be positive and avoid being judgmental, these results are often hidden if the fact is that you didn't keep your promise.  People will trust you less, without saying so. When you are less trusted, you will have less opportunity, fewer friends, and less joy.  We often don't notice this kind of downtrend in our lives, but in many cases it can be traced to some past failure to keep a promise, even a promise to oneself.

Go ask someone you know if there's any promise you made that they feel you haven't kept, and be open to fixing whatever they come up with.  I'm going to go do that now because it will solidify my future and my wife's future a little bit, and we'll both be happier for it.  Even if she doesn't come up with anything, it will enhance the trust she puts in me, and perhaps the inverse will happen too.

Balancing the Present

We all have at least as much as we need of each resource we need to be alive, and most of us have some extra of each one. "Successful" people generally have a lot of extra of those resources associated with success, like money and property. Sometimes we feel the threat implied by being close to the minimum necessary, dying of thirst (water), suffocating (oxygen), destitute (money), or desperate (hope).  Everyone feels that sometimes.  Give yourself a moment if you'd like to ponder it.  I could cry if I think about it long enough.

For a bigger picture than I intended to cover in this post, check out Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and feel free to disagree with parts of it. I'm going to address the balance of assets in what you think of as your savings, which is a very narrow application of the general and very useful idea of balance.

First, let's get the numeraire out of the way. If you think of the value of something in terms of price then you will think of a number and a unit. Most people reading this blog use the dollar as the unit because that is their numeraire. While it's healthy and smart to imagine using other numeraires, I'll use the dollar here.

To be in balance with your investments, you decide what portion of your investments should be in investment classes, like stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, real estate, business ventures, cash, cars, toys, precious metals, etc.  Let's take a simple example for someone who agrees with me that keeping all of your savings in dollars is not a great idea. I know someone like that, me!  Let's say bitcoin will also be part of my savings and that I choose to do 50% bitcoin and 50% cash, and that my savings is $2000 (all dollars!  Oh no! What do I do?).  My next move is to implement balance.  To keep it simple, let's say it costs $10 to do a trade, so I can buy $995 worth of bitcoin for $1005 and have $995 left in my USD savings.

A lot of people love to speculate, and they will point out that if bitcoin is going up, I'm going to miss out on half the gain they will get. I'll most likely point out that if it goes down, I will miss out on half the loss.  "But bitcoin will go to the moon!"  Okay, you win, friend, go all in.  I'll be happy with my peace of mind and half as much gain as you.  However, most of the time bitcoin does go to the moon, it also comes down.  I prefer to be balanced and I want to describe the benefit of that other than my peace of mind.  However, at some point, hyperinflation will make "the price of bitcoin" meaningless.  No one will care.  No one will use the dollar as their numeraire any more.  I expect cash won't be in my list of assets any more at that point.

Let's say Bitcoin doubles (it just did, from 4000 to 8000 between March 27th and May 12th). I will have $995 in cash and $1990 in BTC.  Friend will have $3980 in BTC.  Friend will sit on the gains and hope it's not yet time to sell.  I will regain my balance by selling about $495 worth of bitcoin.  Then I'll have $1490 in cash and about $1490 in BTC. On May 16th, the price drops back down under 7000, and I regain my balance again, spending some of my profits to add to my position. Friend bites his nails and curses, perhaps even figuring that he waited too long already and he better just bite the bullet and sell.  Now he has $3500 in cash.  He's still ahead of me. We both bought at the right time, I sold a little away from the $6200 bottom, and he sold... too early.  Selling bitcoin will probably always be selling it too early.  Friend is kind of unmoored, floating along not really knowing what to do or even if what he already did was for the best.  In fact, we both bought and sold at the same times.  I have peace of mind, and we can say it cost me $500 or so.  Is it worth it?  This was an idealized example. So let's make it a little more real.

Oh!, more real, and more exciting - say I had $20,000 instead of $2000. Let's say the two of us decide that we'll trade whenever the price has changed by $1000.  At $4000, we both bought.  Because friend's strategy is "Bitcoin will moon!," he's not going to sell unless he needs cash.  That doesn't happen to me because I always have cash.  That's a perk of being in balance (when one of your assets is cash). When it hits $5000, My gain is $2500 (I bought 2.5 BTC at $4k), so I sell $1250 of it for cash. At $6k, 7k, and 8k, I do it again but each time my gain is a little less than $2500 because I keep pulling out bits of cash. When Bitcoin falls back to 7k, I spend some of that cash, buying back a bit more bitcoin than I had sold. Then it goes back to 8k and I sell a little less than I bought. On each cycle, I end up with a little more cash and a little more BTC than I had last time we were at that price.  It's fun, it's profitable, and it gives me peace of mind.

If you trade on smaller moves, you'll be trading more often so watch out for what you spend in transaction fees.  I don't actually use $1000 moves.  I consider whether or not I'd be happy if I buy and then it falls, or if I sell and then it goes up. If it's not a big move, it's not going to be a big trade, so if it does keep going up after I sell, the gain I will miss will be the gain on the small amount I sold, so no big deal.  Likewise if I buy a little and then it drops, no big deal.  If it drops enough, I can buy some more.  If the price goes back and forth* I gain a little bit of profit each time.  Friend just gets to sweat, or, perhaps, read the charts and make a ton more money than I can, but sweating more, or maybe losing money and sweating.  The sweating is what I like to avoid.

There is another benefit to balancing, which is the same effect that all trading profit has.  Trading profit reduces volatility.  Making a profit means that you sold when the price was higher than when you bought.  Selling pushes the price down and buying pushes it up, so since the sell is at a higher price than the buy, they are both pushing toward a price between the two.  Balancing has this effect and that is very good for whatever asset you're doing it with.  Price stability leads to healthy economies by enhancing the ability to plan.

I use a spreadsheet to tell me when the precious metals and cryptocurrencies I hold have values that are not in balance (more than 2% away from the target percentage of my savings).  I have target percentages for gold, silver, cash, bitcoin, dash, ethereum, litecoin, bitcoin cash, eos, and monero.  I get to trade a lot, but I don't have to if I don't want to.  I might miss a move here or there. I might buy or sell when the price move is just starting, but it doesn't bother me.  It feels good to be pushing the prices back toward some average, especially while I don't even know what that average is.

Here's a step-by-step guide to follow if you want to use a spreadsheet to have a balanced savings strategy:

1. Identify the assets you want to have in your savings, and include cash if you dip into savings often.
2. Assign percentages to each asset so they add up to 100%.
3. Make a spreadsheet with a table with the headings Asset, Units, Price, Value, Actual, Target, and Trade!.
4. Add each asset to the list (for example ["Gold",# ounces you have, PriceOfGold, (Units * Price) = same formula for every asset, (blank1), Target % from step 2], (blank2)).
5. Add a row at the bottom for the totals. The total of the Value Column in the spreadsheet is what your savings is worth.
6. In the Actual column ("blank1" in my example), put a formula that divides the value of that asset by the total of that column (In Excel, F4 toggles the $ on the row/column references so that copying a formula into a different row or column won't affect the row/column selection for that item in the formula) and format it as a percentage and copy it down the column for all the assets.  It's the "actual percentage" of each asset in your savings.
7. In the Trade! column, use the formula (Target - Actual)*Value.  You'll get negative values for assets that are over-represented in your savings, meaning you should sell some of it to raise that much money.  The positive values tell you to spend money.  You can reverse the polarity if you want, but be careful.  I can see it both ways, but it gets confusing when I actually do see it both ways.
8. A good sanity check is that the total for the Trade! column should be zero, and the Target and Actual columns should each be 1 (or 100%).
9. Examine the values in the Trade! column to see if there is some trading to do.  If the numbers on two assets are large but one is negative and the other positive, consider trading one for the other to get closer to balance.

* BTC's price on Bitstamp went back and forth between 7700 and 8125 between 5/12 and 6/12 five times, a 5% gain each time, but that would be five 5% gains on 5% of your BTC holdings, so, from my example, on 5% of $1000, or $50. A 5% gain on $50 is $2.50, so $12.50 total. $12.50 in a month on $1000 is an annualized return of 16%.  The last move from 7700 to 8125 has still not been erased, so if we ignore the increase in bitcoin's price, we can say it's only an 11% annualized return.  Still pretty good.

Potpourri

Thank you, Carl Watner, owner of voluntaryist.com, for all the opportunity you've given me.  You're the one who taught me how to spell the title of this post.  I chose it because I didn't feel like deciding what to write, so I identified a few short draft emails that I've written over the past years that I can share.  And since I'm on gratitude...

Thank you, Telegram App developers, and members of the groups I'm in.  You have encouraged me and enlightened me.  Before I decided this post would be filled with "potpourri," I planned to read through the channels on there for inspiration.  That is what prompted Here's a Hopeful Prediction.

Untitled Poem:

Coercive imposition of public education
Kills differentiation all across the nation.
Rampant legislation encouraged by taxation
Produces the destruction of healthy competition.
So...
Insubordination represents my obligation
To fight indoctrination, enslavement and castration.

I'll Be Honest With You: I'm Gonna Lie

Trust me, you can't trust what other people tell you if you want to succeed.  Authorities release information every day about the worst kinds of deception.  You can rely on them to guide you through the complicated maze of claims made by your friends, financial advisors, lawyers, bosses, teachers, cops, and even your own research.  Don't trust your own conclusions, but instead, always run them by an authority to see if they will help maintain the status quo.

Just turn on CNN, CNBC, or MSNBC to find the latest helpful tips from your senator or representative.  If someone disagrees with someone else, don't bother thinking about it.  Instead, wait and see what the TV tells you.  Our personal capacity to reason things out has been severely damaged by school, and there is no recovering from that, so lay down your concerns and trust the mainstream media.

Some Welfare For You

If you really feel that welfare is a good idea, I have a plan.  Find one other person who agrees with you.  I will force you to give them $10, and I'll force them to give you $10. This way, both of you will have an extra $10, and from that, you can each pay me $2 for my service.

My Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to my wife and to the children for whom she's "mom," one family lovingly stuck to Earth under a blanket of oxygen for animals, CO2 for plants, and a self-regulating cycle of resources for all.

What I Started on Sunday

I didn't walk yesterday or the day before. I considered being very late to the Temecula Valley Voluntaryists meetup on Sunday so I could do my whole morning routine, but didn't pull the trigger. Most of what is written below is from Sunday...

I don't think any of that is particularly interesting, but I'm back from my meetup and I went on my walk and did half of my extra exercise. I meditated for a couple minutes after I wrote that first paragraph. 

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains that most of the use to which we put our frontal cortex processing power is post hoc rationalization. We think mostly to justify ourselves and maintain our reputation. Maybe that's what you see below, or maybe I worked it out subconsciously before seeing it while I meditated. Maybe those two options are not very different from each other. 

We are constantly presenting ourselves to others, so it's a good idea A) to be honest, respectful, and honorable and B) to make our intentions clear to others. Being on time is part of A. I'm pretty sure I have been conditioned and trained to feel like being on time is important, but I also agree that there are many situations in which it is, actually, important. I'm lucky that the training matches my analysis. Going to the meetup on time, I decided, is a good way to maintain my reputation. 

When I wrote "I didn't pull the trigger" above, it was because I decided to go, but the option was still there to be late and finish my routine. I can't remember whether or not that calculation about maintaining my reputation had happened yet, or if it only happened a few minutes later while I meditated.

Why have I decided this subject is fit for publication in my blog?  Honestly, it's because it's Tuesday and I haven't been inspired to write about anything else.  Introspection is valuable.  I think I over-represent its value specifically because I have the feeling and the belief that school damages the human tendency to introspect.  I'm pretty sure my writing is full of introspection.  I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world, as Gandhi suggested.  Healthy introspection will vastly improve the life of anyone who hasn't been engaging in it already.

For writing that is of higher quality, but without any effective way to interact with its author, check out The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden.  A lot of my writing reflects my efforts to exemplify the pillars he identifies.