We are living through the times when risk-free rate is return-free risk.

When it comes to Bitcoin and Monero, it is assumed these two are complimentary: Monero being fungibility tool for #BTC and Bitcoin being liquidity tool for #XMR. Building towards self-custodial swaps between the two is unavoidable.

Rome didn’t “run on hard money” while funding endless wars. They hollowed out the denarius until it was basically tin. Ancient version of money-printing. Instead of clipping coins, we click the mouse. The claim is embarrassing. View quoted note →

#Bitcoin is: · globally permissionless; · censorship-resistant at the protocol layer; · immutable without social consensus. These guarantees cannot be removed. But user behavior can be nudged into rails that undermine those guarantees for most people. This is not “Bitcoin being captured.” This is Bitcoin users being captured. Two very different things.

Self-custody is the immune system of #Bitcoin.

I’d love to see someone ship “open hardware” without dragging along the TrustZone black box — but on ARM, that’s just not how the game is played. Cool project riding the #privacy train; open hardware in the brochure sense. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mecha-systems/mecha-comet-modular-linux-handheld-computer

China isn’t dumping Treasuries out of spite — they’ve quietly cut holdings to ~20-year lows and are gorging on gold instead. They’re cashing out of U.S. paper and buying hard assets, mines, and leverage while exporting junk that Americans buy up like there is no tomorrow. Meanwhile the U.S. is stuck in a fiscal chokehold: Lower rates = inflation Higher rates = debt-service spiral A monetary Catch-22 with no clean exit — except tighter domestic control. Cue the CBDC debates, where negative real rates and direct Fed accounts become the new “stability tool". China’s stacking gold and real assets; America’s juggling debt thermite. The old "Chimerica" loop of export dollars is breaking. A boss move by #China.

It’s funny how the moment you touch an uncomfortable technical truth, people drop the argument and go straight to this. View quoted note →

Everyone screams about “privacy” but nobody wants to look under the motherboard. The real jailers live in the firmware — ME, PSP, TrustZone — the silicon gods quietly running the show while people cosplay sovereignty. And then the #Monero crowd shows up, waving ring signatures like holy water, insisting they’ve broken the panopticon. It’s hilarious. You can’t preach freedom on hardware that still owns you.

Monero makes you a ghost on-chain, sure — but you’re still running it on hardware that reports to its own invisible gods. Privacy in software, surveillance in silicon. The whole thing’s a magic trick where the rabbit escapes but the cage remembers. View quoted note →

For everyday consumers, all the privacy theater is just lotion on the tech-industrial burn — sleek brochures, cute padlocks in the UI, security-as-a-service sold like vitamins. But the second you cross into territory where the establishment actually cares, the mask drops. Suddenly the “safety features” look like containment measures, the firmware looks like a warden, and the only sane move is to flee into Coreboot, Qubes, and verifiable reality. #Privacy isn’t a lifestyle accessory — it’s a line in the sand, and most people never realize it’s there.

If you’re being hunted by nation-states, forget the smartphone — it's a pocket-sized confession booth wired straight into the silicon priesthood. The only sane refuge left is a Dasharo-flashed, Coreboot-purified laptop running Qubes, sealed with Heads like a digital chastity belt. One machine, one bunker, one verifiable universe. Everything else is just praying to the surveillance gods that they don’t notice you today.

Every device runs a tiny god under the motherboard — ME, PSP, TrustZone — a silent priesthood baked into the silicon. It sees your RAM, your keys, your wallets, your thoughts if you type them. And the industry hands you a lullaby: “Relax, it’s for security.” Sure. The architecture is indistinguishable from a perfect universal backdoor, but we call it “trusted computing” because the alternative can’t be proven and the machine won’t boot without its ghost king in the basement. #Bitcoin, #Monero, all the encryption cults chanting about sovereignty and privacy — they’re all praying their math outweighs the plausible deniability of the hardware that runs it. Faith masquerading as cryptography. Modern computing is a cathedral built on a crack in the altar.

TrustZone is the hidden “god-mode” throne room inside every ARM phone — the place no user, no custom ROM, no hacker messiah ever gets to touch. And we walk around pretending our GrapheneOS slabs are Fort Knox. They’re not. They’re just bulletproof vests strapped onto a reactor core we can’t inspect. GrapheneOS absolutely hardens the hell out of the layers above that black box — sandboxing, memory safety, verified boot, app isolation — all top-tier. But against a state-level adversary who can slip into Secure World? That’s like locking your apartment door while the landlord keeps a master key and sometimes sleepwalks with it. Use #GrapheneOS because it’s the best we’ve got. Just don’t hallucinate that it outruns the hardware’s built-in gods.