Everyone seems bored at $91k. The Zcash shills don’t even argue with Bitcoiners because there’s literally zero conviction - pure bag pumping. The mETHeads have realised it’s over and don’t engage Maxis any more. A few still follow Creg to torment him by forcing him to argue with Grok. Macro people have NFI what’s going on and just keep talking about how nothing stops this train. All news about my country makes me want to guillotine fuckers, can’t stand it. Meanwhile, #Bitcoin Xitter is retard maxing.

The enshittification of Melbourne continues with 7/11 opening it’s first staffless vending-machine-only outlet in the CBD due to rising crime. I remember seeing a Walgreens with half the stuff locked behind plexiglass in San Fran 8 years ago and thinking “wow, this is bad”, but walking the streets you understood why. Melbourne already has injecting rooms and has banned machetes - just needs some homeless encampments and a poop map now to catch-up

Just rewatched this. Released 1/1/2025 and it’s probably the video of the year. The prescience you would expect from a philosopher, delivered by a weird comedian who just fucking nails it, zeitgeist and all. If you haven’t seen this, take the time to watch it. View quoted note →

The #zcash shilling is ridiculous. I’d suggest @Super Testnet could smash them like he did the #Monerobros, but it’s all just influencoors (this is Naval’s pet @Arjun Khemani ) shilling their bags and none of them use it so couldn’t actually test anything against him.

A language is a dialect with an army and navy

Scott Bessent is asked whether Trump’s $2,000 stimmy checks would be inflationary. “Maybe we can persuade Americans to save that.” $2,000 Bitcoin stimmys?..

More people should discover Sam Hyde. Weird guy but he has a good head on his shoulders and a knack for seeing through to the heart of the thing. View quoted note →

@Stephan Livera thinks Dathon should spend his time educating people to re-download the #Bitcoin blockchain using a newer version of Core (v28>), the versions which enabled CSAM to be embedded in the chain with 100,000 byte OP_RETURN, so that the CSAM onchain enabled by the newer versions of Core, can’t be viewed on their device. Stephan has officially lost the plot. Crypto Dubai has rotted his brain.

The problem with shitcoiners like Balaji and Slopp, is they think they got rich because they’re smart. And because they were smart to go all-in on “crypto” early, their vision of the future must be smart because they were right once before. That’s not how the world works. You can be smart, and retarded at the same time. I am. You probably are too. The trick is to know WHEN YOURE BEING RETARDED. Sam Hyde below is, and he nails what all the privacybros are too retarded to understand stuck sniffing their smart farts in their VC shitcoining circles. The next 8 years will not be about privacy. Privacy is not a winning idea. It’s not what will see #Bitcoin uproot fiat because it’s not what will grow adoption. What it is is a complicated concept which well-placed insiders can use to bamboozle retail schmucks and institutional money because they won’t understand the technicalities m, but will be drawn to the narrative in a world of increasing censorship and control. It’s pure opportunism to further pump their own bags. There’s no real ideological bent towards privacy here, they don’t actually care, they just know they can use it to fleece more suckers as they’ve proved in resurrecting Zcash recently. They don’t need to do this, they don’t need the money, but they can’t help themselves - it’s who they are. View quoted note →

One day I’ll get around to writing a thread on how traffic actually works in #Vietnam. You see the craziest shit on the roads here.

A short review of a short book for #bookstr This time, “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. Consider this a “replacement” for Desmet’s widely acclaimed “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” which I read and reviewed earlier this year: View quoted note → Desmet’s book remains the worst I’ve read this year. This book does a much better job of explaining that psychology - how it works, why it works, on whom, and by what tactics. It’s all rather simple but when you combine with Le Bon’s “The Crowd”, you can understand why and how that is the case. You could knock this over in less than 2 hours and would undoubtedly come away with a better understanding of how and why totalitarianism works after that than slogging through Desmet’s love letter to Hannah Arendt.

The reality of a 50 year mortgage is disgusting. 30 years to obtain just 25% equity in your home is absurd. You’ll be sacrificing your most productive years from ~25-55 just to own your living room, all whilst the Government takes half your income and redistributes it to their friends and pets who ensure they stay in power and your QoL continues going down. #Bitcoin adoption might seem slow but young people are going to see through the real estate ponzi and opt out of being liquidity for Boomers when they understand just how screwed they are locking in to this system.

Chinese cars are so far ahead of the rest of the world and most people have no idea it even happened. People take time to update their mental models of the world but it will happen. In July we flew via Kuala Lumpur. They had a special service of BMW i7s to transfer between terminals which we took. It was nice. But I’ve since seen 10 cars in #Vietnam that were nicer, all from China (Vietnamese cars aren’t there yet). It takes time for preferences to change but Germany is already dead, as is the rest of Europe bar supercars, and the US won’t be far behind. Japan might survive with Toyota, Worst Korea is 50/50. China is going to eat all their lunches unless protectionism makes the biggest comeback of all time and even then, you’ll likely pay more to get the Chinese car if you can and are shopping for bang-for-buck because they’re just miles ahead of Western car tech. View quoted note →

When did Communism stop being about “the working class” and instead become solely the domain of “the sit on their arse class” who want everyone else’s productivity redistributed to them for being good little online commie evangelists? It’s too ironic to believe.

The “Mag 7” make up so much of the US stock market, which makes up so much of the US “economy” and people’s wealth and pensions, that a backstop at minimum just to keep the skids greased for funding is quite possible IMHO. But once there’s a backstop in place, expect the circular dealing and other shenanigans to ramp massively and blow up the bubble - would be the perfect catalyst to bust this cycle. View quoted note →

Looks like the Chinese have been reading my notes. View quoted note →

Up next for #bookstr is Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”. An excellent book from which I took a great deal. Le Bon’s writing from 130 years ago was incredibly prescient, foreseeing how socialism and populism would be wielded to ultimately erode Western societies. I want to relay some specific points that made this such a worthwhile read. First, Le Bon discusses how concepts in language can be wielded to focus a crowd toward particular ends. He identifies words like “democracy,” “liberty,” and “freedom” which, being somewhat nebulous, allow crowds to project their own meanings onto movements. He also notes how these words mean completely different things in different epochs, and how easy it is to project our present understanding onto the past when reading, thus arriving at flawed interpretations. His discussion of “race” should be understood in this context, and I found it incredibly compelling - acknowledging the cultural inheritance from our ancestors and how that shapes each people as much as any other factor. This is the kind of pragmatism we rarely find in modern discourse; it’s partly how and why we ignore the entire narrative of the West being “the good guys” in the post-WWII consensus. Le Bon categorises crowd beliefs into two overarching types: great permanent beliefs (e.g., feudalism, Christianity, and Protestantism) and transitory opinions, which are generally born and die within a lifetime. I found this particularly interesting as he identifies not only the difficulty of implanting the former but also what it takes for them to be uprooted. Finally, his discussion of “Prestige,” to which he dedicates Chapter III, was the highlight for me. Incredibly perceptive and set my mind racing down numerous rabbit holes including what “prestige” could and should mean amongst #Bitcoiners I’m glad I finally got around to this one. It’s not a long book, and while it covers many metaphysical ideas, it does so in a succinct and compelling way.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reels off predicted words from Polymarket, where USDC is used to bet on these outcomes, on latest earnings call. USDC’s parent company Circle, is part-owned by Coinbase..