*Bitcoin rendered the bank unnecessary. Lightning rendered payments instantaneous. The next evolution must render sovereignty effortless. Only then will the architectural obsolescence of financial intermediation become irreversible* View quoted note →

*technology alone cannot guarantee sovereignty. Institutions have learned to operate within open protocols, shaping them through user experience, liquidity concentration, and compliance logic* View quoted note →

*The bank, reconstituted as a node, resumes its role not by monopolizing trust but by monopolizing liquidity and convenience* View quoted note →

*Bitcoin’s first layer resolved the problem of trust. Lightning’s second layer must now resolve the problem of convenience. If self-custody and peer operation remain labor-intensive, users will gravitate toward intermediated solutions, regardless of ideological cost. Thus, the survival of financial sovereignty depends not on theoretical purity but on practical usability. This dynamic redefines the locus of contestation. The battle is no longer between decentralization and centralization in abstract terms, but between custodial ease and sovereign simplicity. The institutions adopting Lightning are not violating its open protocol; they are exploiting its optional complexity. Their success depends on the inertia of users who prefer managed experiences over self-determination.* View quoted note →

*The trajectory of the Lightning Network illustrates a recurring phenomenon in technological history: the co-option of disruptive architectures by the very systems they were designed to displace. When sovereignty imposes operational friction, institutions monetize its reduction. The result is not a technical failure but a social inversion.* View quoted note →

*Custodial Lightning effectively reintroduces the logic of financial intermediation under a new technological guise, offering comfort and simplicity while reducing individual agency. Non-custodial Lightning embodies the radical intent of the network: to eliminate intermediaries entirely by substituting verifiable computation for trust* View quoted note →

In non-custodial systems, *The trade-off lies in operational responsibility: users must maintain node uptime, monitor watchtowers to guard against fraudulent channel states, and ensure sufficient liquidity for effective routing.* View quoted note →

*If an LSP declines to open or rebalance channels, the user’s node becomes effectively isolated. Control over liquidity translates into control over usability. The model thus shifts from key custody to liquidity custody—a subtler, but equally consequential, vector of dependency.* View quoted note →

*If a small number of high-capacity custodial nodes can observe or restrict routing, they become functional analogues of settlement banks* View quoted note →

*It would be nice to own some gold when it goes through boom times like 2025 but you have to get used to not always owning the most popular asset each year* Why I Don't Own Any Gold - A Wealth of Common Sense

A Wealth of Common Sense

Why I Don't Own Any Gold - A Wealth of Common Sense

Gold is on fire. The yellow metal is up more than 60% this year. It’s risen nearly 30% in the last 3 months alone. It’s hard to get a n...

Apparently, debt is good.... Government debt is private wealth, so why do people want to get rid of it?

Funding the Future

Government debt is private wealth, so why do people want to get rid of it?

Every pound of so-called “government debt” is a private financial asset. When the government spends, it creates money that becomes your wealth....

*The system keeps telling ordinary people to save harder within a broken framework instead of rethinking money itself*

Stacker News

Max Out Your Pension Savings, Plebs! (FT, Moira O'Neill) \ stacker news ~econ

Alright, here's a pretty standard run-of-the-mill take that's completeeeely insane, borderline immoral. It's a violation of fiduciary duties to you...

*Stop measuring in dollars and start measuring value against other scarce assets* View quoted note →

*One of the greatest tricks the government has ever pulled was keeping the apparent form factor of the currency media the same (coins, bills, etc.) but removing the money from it.* View quoted note →

*The real test of a revolutionary technology isn’t whether it excludes power structures. It’s whether it forces them to play by new rules they didn’t write and can’t rewrite* View quoted note →

A great achievement, Jordan. *We also have to set that example for little ones. They learn courage by watching courage, not by being told to be courageous* View quoted note →

*They have meetings. We have blocks. They have promises. We have proof. One architecture will survive the next century. The other will not.* View quoted note →

*the rules of the game are written by the guys who own the banks and have vested interest in the currency* View quoted note →

*The Psychotic Topology of Home Value This is not a market correction. It is a mass psychotic break with reality, where the metaprograms of human cognition have become the delusional architecture of the market itself. · The Global ↔ Specific Psychosis: The Global mind clings to the axiom (remember, an axiom does not have to be proven, yes): "A home's value never falls."*

Stacker News

Why UK Homeowners Are Delusional About Property Values (FT, Hugo Cox) \ stacker news ~econ

Here's a nice little report on UK property owners. Like in most Western countries — Australia or Canada probably the worst — the majority of th...

*the reason you will eventually grow out of forums is that they are search queries written by other people. LessWrong was summoned into existence by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson writing a sequence of exceptionally powerful search queries (on Overcoming bias), blog posts so strong that the networks they created survived the exodus of the original nodes. This is what online writing is at its limit—the summoning of a new culture. If we squint a little, we could even say that this is how the internet itself came into existence. In 1963, J. C. R. Licklider wrote a memo about an “intergalactic computer network”, and that search query was so powerful it summoned the aliens. We’re all living inside his search query now.*

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.