I don’t know much about Brazilian politics, and I don’t have anything technical to contribute to help our Brazilian friends get onto #nostr . But I do love Brazilian music. So I’ll be sharing it all day in solidarity with our brothers and sisters from #brazil. Next up, for those of you trying to feel some feelings, Gal Costa:

I don’t know much about Brazilian politics, and I don’t have anything technical to contribute to help our Brazilian friends get onto #nostr . But I do love tropicalia and Brazilian music. So I’ll be sharing Brazilian music all day in solidarity with our brothers and sisters from #brazil. Next up is a banger from Tom Zé:

I don’t know much about Brazilian politics, and I don’t have anything technical to contribute to help our Brazilian friends get onto #nostr. But I do love tropicalia and Brazilian music. So I’ll be sharing Brazilian music all day in solidarity with our brothers and sisters from #brazil. Beginning with an all-time classic:

As a not-especially technical guy, transitioning fully to #nostr is continuously humbling. Grateful to all of you who have posted (and continue to post) so much good educational material. Grateful to all the generosity in this space. I’ve never shared so much of my non-Bitcoin interests on any platform before, and it’s been immensely fun talking about books and films, poetry and art with all of you. Have an inspired day everyone.

Gm #nostr

Absolute 🔥 lineup at the 1973 New York Film Festival:

#coffeechain

Gm #nostr

Gn #nostr

“If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.” -Pablo Neruda View quoted note →

Consumerism is a value of the fiat system. It is both literally a value, since we measure economic health in large part by measuring consumption, and also an ingrained mode of behavior. By disincentivizing mindless, reflexive consumption and incentivizing a lower time preference, #Bitcoin, if it continues to grow in adoption, offers the promise of a cultural foregrounding of deeper things, like fulfilling pursuits, relationships, creativity, contribution to community, presence, etc. #Bitcoin is money that, through its soundness, will hopefully allow us to actually get past thinking about money all the time so that we can make room for life’s important things - which tend to get lost, neglected, and/or sacrificed in consumption and the systemically coerced pursuit of more and more money. We spend so much time thinking about money (how to get it, how to get more of it, how to make it grow, how to keep up with inflation, how to invest it, how to spend it, what to spend it on, how to get rich quick, how to pay the bills, etc). And to a certain extent this will always be true. But when money does not hold its value, when it is continuously debased, when the sovereign debt is so massive it must be inflated away, and when the economic health of a country is measured by how much it consumes, it creates an environment in which money is practically all we think about. Looking forward to a world in which this is no longer the case.

Gm #nostr

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” -Jorge Luis Borges Gn #nostr

I will simply never vote for a candidate who proposes taxing unrealized gains. On this issue I think slippery slope arguments are valid and historically grounded. I also think it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding and economic illiteracy. More troublingly, it indicates a perspective on the relationship between government and citizen that I think is anti-American. View quoted note →

The mass adoption of #Bitcoin will make a more creative world. It will unleash reservoirs of untapped creativity AND, perhaps most importantly, it will restore the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift. In other words, it will transform art’s role in culture and society. It will take back some of the ground ceded (and surrendered) to the forces of commodification and financialization. Here’s how: In his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde described art as existing (with friction) in two economies: the gift economy and the market economy. “A work of art can survive without the market,” he wrote, “but where there is no gift, there is no art.” He’s referring both to the way art is created and the way it’s received by the audience. Art is the “emanation of its maker’s gift,” which is to say both the maker’s talent and his/her intuition, neither of which can be bought. With respect to the audience, “art that moves us is received by us as a gift is received,” which is to say “when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.” #Bitcoin improves the environment on both sides of this gift equation. A lot of people allow their creativity muscles to atrophy in the daily relentless pursuit of sustenance and getting by, a pursuit that is increasingly difficult when you are running uphill against inflation. More people getting on a bitcoin standard will gradually allow would-be creators to buy back more time, giving them room to breathe artistically. It’s almost like being able to give yourself a grant that vests in the future. I also think we will see a boom in artistic patronage, as newly wealthy bitcoiners look to facilitate the creation of great works, support artists they love, commission and finance projects that take long periods of time to complete, etc. On the audience side, the fiat system has gradually degraded the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift. We are working longer hours for less purchasing power, while things like houses, higher education, and healthcare grow comically unaffordable for most. Our money loses value so, rather than save, we are incentivized to spend, invest, or speculate. We are also the most advertised-to humans to ever walk the earth. Not exactly the ideal environment for tackling a long novel, listening to a record front-to-back, memorizing a poem, staring at a painting, or watching a serious film. Bitcoin, I believe, can help facilitate a return of the gift exchange ethos, in the Lewis Hyde sense, to creators and, more importantly, to the audience. Bitcoin, by instilling a low time preference culture, restores the audience’s capacity to receive art as a gift, a capacity which fiat currency’s high time preference culture has broken. As a lover of the arts, this gets me really excited.

Gm Gm

On a day in which #nostr seems to be trending and getting (very deservedly) more attention, I think it’s worth thinking about some of the ways in which traditional social media has rapidly diminished our capacity for citizenship. The very deliberately addictive design of big social media is and has been a nuclear assault on the collective attention span of the populace. Combine this with all the other millions of available distractions on the devices we all walk around with and you basically have a ubiquitous ocean of noise, of pings and dopamine hits, of quick answers and short form content . We live in inside this. And in here it’s very hard, and very time-consuming, to constantly parse what is real or not, what’s signal and what’s not, what’s manipulated and what’s not, what has a factual basis and what does not. Bad policies and malevolent actors thrive in this environment. Nuanced policies struggle to find air, to find space on the blanketed jungle floor to grow. It’s gets hard to pursue things that require sustained attention span, which is most things worth doing. It’s hard to be perform the basic responsibilities/diligence of citizenship well in an environment like this. And by responsibilities of citizenship I mean being informed, seeing through BS, developing thoughtful views, standing on your values, distinguishing sincerity from charlatanism, between propaganda and information, etc. Which probably plays some role in the diminishing quality of our political candidates. A clouded citizenry doesn’t deliberate and decide - it lurches violently and unpredictably. I fear this will only get worse with AI and augmented realities.