Archive for September, 2018

Kevin Pham is Wrong

Monday, September 3rd, 2018

Kevin Pham is a crypto twitter personality who is known as one of the most maximalist of the maximalists. Prior to his focus on Bitcoin, Kevin was known as a whistleblower from within Wells Fargo bank (from the linked article it appears he went public after quitting his job there) on issues related to taking advantage of vulnerable customers by coercing them into opening up accounts that they didn’t actually need and incurring additional fees.

At this point I can’t remember why I started reading Kevin on twitter - other than that I agreed mostly with his maximalist philosophy and that he was active in attacking Ethereum, which itself is an attack on Bitcoin. He does have a talent for tweeting simple restatements of maximalist principles in relation to whatever nonsense the crypto crowd is currently pursuing.

Recently he as shifted his focus somewhat towards Cody Wilson’s 3d printable gun/free speech thing. This is the wrong way to go. Firstly, this gun is worthless, as are most guns, in any sort of drawn out conflict with a tyrannical government since the chokepoint is not guns but bullets, which cannot yet be manufactured at scale in a way that isn’t fatally vulnerable to traditional ground and air forces.

The most serious problem facing those who would be sovereign is the lack of any sort of modern secure computer - that is to say a computer that is not designed to be infiltrated by intelligence agencies (and thus anyone else with enough resources, really).

He is wasting his time with this freedom of speech/2nd amendment bs instead of focusing attention on the real problem. This bad turn might be due to a general lack of knowledge about history, or perhaps technology, but in any case it’s bad.