2023 Feb 03

• Watched Ray Dalio’s 30-minute summary on economics.

  • Lovely animations.

  • Super interesting how he defined settlement - when you buy credit (debt), and then pay it back. Good definition imo.

  • Good note on how credit is good when it can finance a business expense that leads to higher productivity, bad when it leads to overconsumption that you can’t pay back.

    • Which one do we have more of in our country? (consumption) Does one require the other? (no!)

  • The way the central bank was described: it controls the economy. Yikes.

  • The way that credit/debt is used in order to reduce uncertainty in the future, i.e. when you spend more now, you must produce more later. I can sort of understand that you could say it’s good to influence people into making themselves produce more, but it sounds sort of manipulative in my opinion. Don’t know if it’s a problem with education, and/or a problem with top-down normalization of economic behavior, but it seems manipulative in how this trend is imposed on people today. Personally feel like producing up front and saving leads to more freedom/well-being..

  • It honestly just seemed like all of the ways the economy is manipulated aren’t that necessary. Accumulating tons of debt leading to increased spending and income, and then having to very carefully manage the recession sounds like unnecessary indulgence leading to risk of serious economic suffering. Like it sounds like the government is eating a bunch of candy, getting diabetes, then supplementing insulin. What I mean is it’s causing its own problems. It seems like debt doesn’t even necessary lead to productivity growth, it just leads to fluctuation and risk.

  • You can have productivity growth without debt cycles.

• Went through OptionalField vs Option again. Found where many different types implement the Writeable/ Readable serialization traits which brought some clarity. Kinda confused with how the spec differs from the LDK implementation in that in open_channel, accept_channel and I think one other message, the spec makes it look like the way shutdown_script is serialized has changed, but LDK does not reflect that. Asked this in response to a comment on Github so hopefully I’ll get the answer.

• Ended up cleaning up a script for the Illini Blockchain developer take home. console.table is pretty nice.

• Didn’t get to much today, sigh.