Nick Szabo  🔑

I'm sorry, Nick, but HODLers aren't exempted from the normal rules of civility, which are not, despite what they may think, peculiar to DC (quite the contrary!). And I deal with it by refusing to put up with it, as I would with any other persons.

There's a pathological one-way version of these "rules" where authority figures in mass media and at DC "think" tanks get to ridicule the unwashed masses ("deplorables"), but the unwashed masses must be "civil" (i.e. servile). We don't play by those "rules". Deal with it.

I don't expect everyone to be civil, Nick. I know better. I do expect civility from well-known experts, like yourself and Saifedean, who hardly qualify as part of the "unwashed masses." I also expect them not to encourage or apologize for incivility in others.

Some of the most well-known "experts", better known and with much better pseudo-scientific credentials (e.g. "Nobel" prizes) than Saf or I, have treated Bitcoin people with great incivility. Who knows what these "rules" actually are since your own peers do not abide by them.

Shame on them. But what does it mean to call them my "peers"? I'm a free agent. I don't belong to any school or movement. I am probably closer in many of my fundamental beliefs to Bitcoiners than I am to many of them.

You are a professional economist, no? Fellow professionals are often called "peers". As for "free agent" -- you work at the DC area Cato Institute, yes or no? You have a boss there, yes or no? And a paycheck that depends on keeping that boss happy, yes or no?

People with bosses don’t like admitting that their actions are influenced by their boss, even if it’s only subconscious. I say this as a person with a boss, unfortunately.

It's very obvious that people with bosses are highly influenced and constrained by said bosses. Especially true for political or economic opinions of people working at political or economic think tanks. Yet the preposterous pretense that they are "free agents".