*In an era defined by gyres of chaos – accelerating without centre – Bitcoin remembers. It is not progress for progress’s sake, but growth with memory. It spirals upward, returning again and again to the same questions: What is value? What is freedom? What is truth? And each time, it answers not with ideology, but with structure; don’t trust, verify. Participate, don’t demand. Save, don’t squander.* View quoted note →

*The spiral, then, is not complete. Bitcoin is not its summit. It is the new axis around which the next turn begins. Whether that turn ascends or unravels depends not on the code, but on us. On whether we act as Steiner envisioned, with moral imagination; whether we respect voluntarism as the Austrians defended; whether we cultivate care, as Pirsig urged; whether we integrate our shadows, as Jung demanded.* View quoted note →

*In an era defined by gyres of chaos – accelerating without centre – Bitcoin remembers. It is not progress for progress’s sake, but growth with memory. It spirals upward, returning again and again to the same questions: What is value? What is freedom? What is truth? And each time, it answers not with ideology, but with structure; don’t trust, verify. Participate, don’t demand. Save, don’t squander.* View quoted note →

*Sovereignty without violence. In the traditional order, property rights are secured by legal fiat, backed by coercion, at best. In Bitcoin, they are secured with mathematics, cryptographically by private keys. To hold Bitcoin is not to be granted permission, but to accept responsibility. There are no bailouts, no appeals, no undo buttons.* View quoted note →

*To save in Bitcoin is to confront one’s time preference. To run a node is to participate in verification, not trust. To face its volatility is to wrestle with fear and shadow. These are not merely financial behaviours, they are disciplines, initiations into responsibility. Bitcoin is not just money. It is, in a Jungian sense, a symbolic mirror; a structure that reflects back the ethical coherence, or incoherence, of its participants.* View quoted note →

*And so, he argued, the task of life is not control but cultivation. Not endless choice, but disciplined attention. For Pirsig, Quality is a driving force for authentic living, suggesting that true freedom comes from aligning one’s actions with an inner sense of purpose or excellence. “A person," he wrote, "isn’t free until he is doing what the best part of himself tells him to do”. Quality cannot be faked. It must be lived.* View quoted note →

*Though often dismissed as merely digital money or speculative asset, Bitcoin represents something deeper. It is a moral architecture. A protocol of sovereignty. A mirror held to modernity’s soul. By design, it encodes responsibility, transparency, and freedom without permission, not as promises, but as structure.* View quoted note →

Attention as Infrastructure: Attention is increasingly recognized as a foundational input for the digital economy, akin to land, labor, or capital in traditional economies. Narrative and speculation are layered on top to operationalize and fuel economic activity. Feedback Loops and Speculation: The attention economy creates feedback loops where capturing attention increases capital investments, which in turn drive more attention. This dynamic is evident in influencer culture, meme coins, AI hype, politics, and media markets. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/https-music-youtube-com-watch-2Wes1kM8QMmn.sp.sIBAew#1

*“There’s no doubt that this financial cycle has likely surpassed the dotcom era in terms of enthusiasm, valuations, and capital markets activity,” Chanos said this week. “So now, we just have to see how it plays out.”*

Forget the golden age of fraud, the billionaire investor who shorted Enron warns we might be in the ‘diamond or platinum level’ amid the AI boom — FORTUNE

“When it comes to financial fraud specifically, there’s no question we’re seeing more of it—especially riding the wave of the current AI-dr...

Really enjoying your notes, Contra. 🫡🔥 *younger people are looking at Bitcoin and seeing something their parents can’t: that money doesn’t have to be controlled by governments, and that maybe, just maybe, we’ve been getting quietly robbed our entire lives through monetary policy* View quoted note →

*For my father in law to accept bitcoin for the moral corrective it is, is to tacitly accept that his nominal gains were the fruit of debasement* View quoted note →

*Originally CashApp did only peer with select nodes because of legal and compliance reasons. I guess at some point they figured they could earn a bunch if they put a node running LDK between them and the rest of the network. It's frankly a bit strange how they act like they earn from routing while they are just an exclusive gatekeeper for CashApp lightning.*

Stacker News

CashApp is making nearly 10% APR (aka yield) on its bitcoin via lightning \ stacker news

from X (Bummed that I missed this talk.) [29 comments]

*For context, Kupperman notes that Netflix brings in just $39 billion in annual revenue from its 300 million subscribers. If AI companies charged Netflix prices for their software, they'd need to field over 3.69 billion paying customers to make a standard profit on data center spending alone — almost half the people on the planet. "Simply put, at the current trajectory, we're going to hit a wall, and soon," he fretted. "There just isn’t enough revenue and there never can be enough revenue. The world just doesn’t have the ability to pay for this much AI."*

There's a Stunning Financial Problem With AI Data Centers — Futurism

"I recognize an insanity bubble, and I recognize hubris." Over the past few years, the tech industry's plans for artificial intelligence have grown...

*Physicists keep burning money trying to centralize in a lab what Bitcoin has already solved: entropy resolution into conserved, immutable structure* View quoted note →