Data can be co-opted. Information can not. It takes a life to learn to be information sovereign in a world of co-opted data. Nostr doesn’t fix this. Neither does Bitcoin. They may be helpers. Learning and studying mathematics is the solution and the reason isn’t obvious. It’s along the lines of Plato’s proberb that one must conquer themselves before trying to conquer the world. Mathematics enables one to conquer themselves. This makes you an individual that is very difficult to conquer by others. It makes you strong and powerful resilient. It also build your trust in yourself. Your sovereignty is limited by the trust you are capable of having in yourself. Very few things build that trust, w.r.t. your mind and thoughts like studying math. Removing your ability to do this is how governments conquer you. Making education compulsory and making math excruciatingly painful has successfully deterred nearly 8 billion people from pursuing sovereignty. Once you regain your mind through the study of math, you can begin to learn to distinguish information from mere data, and fight the war against power on your own terms.

I travelled a little over an hour to a meet up last night. Only the organizer and one other person was there. You might think that’s lame but it was a great hang and a lot of ground was covered. In order to build a good meetup you gotta show up and make a good hang no matter if 1 person or 20 come. I credit the organizer for showing up and maintaining an interesting convo with me for 3.5 hours. This is the way.

Throughout my career as an actuary, my crusade has primarily been about the definition of “real money” My colleagues unanimously think that “real money” is what the regulatory capital models allow them to say they have in their holding companies. I have argued for years that P/L and cash are real money and that their paper mark-to-model results are bullshit. Let’s not even get into the fact that cash in dollars isn’t real money - but that’s there as well. Bottom line - insurance companies and pensions are standing on absolute shams of actuarial opinion. They are backed by assumptions and when they are lucky enough to realize them - they are exposed to the perpetual bleed of fiat currency.

GM Nostr. I’d like to explore how I can use Nostr to teach math. I feel like I can host problem sets here, as well as study groups. I don’t need the best UX - just the functionality and the immortality of the material on my server.

Why is it impossible to be sovereign if you add no value? Because others who also add no value will sell you out to save themselves - and nobody will stop them from doing so because if you don’t add value - Nobody really cares if you live or die, make it or don’t Only if you provide something that people couldn’t access without your existence - does your existence matter to anybody. The more value you add, the more people have your back, especially when you have to stand up for yourself, and the more sovereign you will be.

Sovereignty is only available to those who can earn Bitcoin. Earning Bitcoin is a proxy measure for your ability to add value. You’re only sovereign if you add value - period. You might have a big enough stack to be valuable as a buyer but the vast majority of people need to do more for people. There are only 2 ways to earn it: 1. Get someone who has it to trade it to you for a good or svc. 2. Run a miner and pay the elec nut Start with #2 until you have the skills to reliably do #1.

Why Financial Planners are fiat charlatans and you should eliminate them from your life if you’re a Bitcoiner: There are only 3 choices to make if you have savings: 1. Hold on cash and pray you don’t get heavily debased or confiscated. 2. Go all-in on debt and YOLO and pay back pennies on the dollar. This is the current Cantilonairre strategy and it’s not bad if you’re a Nihilist and know you’ll stay one forever. 3. Go all-in on Bitcoin and protect your savings from debasement and confiscation. The only allocation choice is between 1 & 3 or all in #2. You don’t need a planner to do this for you. The mere suggestion that another can do this for you makes them liars and frauds. If you can’t do your own financial planning under these scenarios, you may as well enjoy life and go with #2 but not pay 2% or more for the privilege.

When you tell a doctor you don’t take any medication and they try to tell you how lucky you are - The scam is revealed. They don’t even know. They think it’s luck. This disqualifies them from diagnosing anything I care about.

The ETF is irrelevant to Bitcoin but will begin the demise of Blackrock. No centralized entity can maintain itself while also holding Bitcoin for its stakeholders. Greyscale was discounted to zero. Micro strategy had their founder step down as CEO. The state we used to know as El Salvador is being dismantled before our eyes. Elon let go of the bitcoin before he allowed this rate on his institutions. The list is already large. It’s only a matter of time before millions of people realize that a few thousand real sats in their custody is more valuable than the sum of all the IOUs they hold. Bitcoin is for individual power, not institutional power. We will see this time and again as we see the individuals who bring Bitcoin to their institutions ultimately choose Bitcoin over their institutions.

Closed source code seeking network adoption is inherently evil.

There will exist a Bitcoin University. My admission standard would be to show ownership of 10% of the prior epoch block reward as held Bitcoin. Sign the UTXOs and you’re in. No academic pursuit can ever exist unless the student is in total control of his time.

Time preference and mathematics: Human beings think they suck at math but it turns out that they are too high time preference to see through the tedium of it. Math is NOT complicated. It’s tedious. Math is about generalizing to any system. Doing this with simple addition is very tedious so we only teach our society how to do it in ONE BASE (base 10) and even that is too tedious for people. They scream - What am I ever going to use this for? And their high time preference tells them: NOTHING This is why the successful math students in the world tend to come from privilege - it’s not because they paid for better teachers - rich kids with high time preference don’t learn math no matter how good the teacher is. But some kids have a time preference low enough to see value in going deep and will spend their time ensuring the ruthless tediousness that mathematics entails. It’s not about intelligence. It’s about time preference. Bitcoin will bring a renaissance of mathematics once we lower the time preference of children and the adults who choose their education.

tldr on Blackrock from RockPaperBitcoin Blackrock is a liability driven investor who : 1) doesn’t want to be bailed out ever again; 2) hates bonds with a passionate vitriol 3) understands btc enough to use it as the risk-free asset for portfolio construction 4) sees the ETF as a way to hedge the upshock risk that bit them last September. Implication is that they’re not necessarily in it for NGU - but they’re using it for existential purposes and will likely see it through. Will start to create enhanced SPX etfs sprinkling in the btc ETF - then will move as far as they can towards 100%

I’m reclaiming the saying “laying an egg” to be positive and life-giving. Only in the dystopian Malthusian hell do we consider laying an egg to be embarrassing and shameful. Go forth and lay eggs!!!

Choose your difficulty adjustment. Bitcoin or A few weak men acting in service of a corrupt state with a monopoly on violence

A great thing about nostr is that nobody puts their fiat credentials in their profile and attempts to give value to Bitcoiners

Decoupling alert!

Using Twitter just feels dirty now - like going to a strip club in the daytime