good people of nostr!
Julia Tourianski and I have written a review of Barbie that we are scheduled to post tomorrow but I’ll probably just post it here shortly 1) to test out Habla and 2) to reward people for staying off the bird app and living in the decentralised future (or the letter app? idk what we are supposed to call it now fml)
Twitter post scheduled for an hour’s time but the good people of Nostr obviously get to see my new pricing model first!
🚀🥳🧡
https://medium.com/@allenfarrington/modeling-bitcoin-value-with-vibes-99eca0997c5f
I posted this on twitter at the time (~november) but I’m coming around to the idea that twitter is just for shitposting and if you want to have serious, nuanced discussions, you have to do them here.
it’s not a long read but TLDR is that there is a highly counterintuitive logic to embracing conditional probability in investing. and I really mean counterintuitive - Sacha and I have explained this directly to highly intelligent financial professionals who seem to follow all the individual steps but still can’t accept the conclusion.
we cheekily distil this down to the Meyers-Farrington Law: “it’s better to be right when you think you’re right than it is to think you’re right when you’re right,” but the fun thing is that this is really just a rigorous mathematisation of a Buffetism.
Warren do be smarts tho (other than on bitcoin):
comments and commentary very welcome, especially since nobody cared on twitter 😂
Medium
Inversion
or why avoiding losers can be more valuable than selecting winners
have any MURICAN🇺🇸🏈🦅 bitcoin bros thought about the following:
is it conceivable that an extremely bitcoin-friendly state legislature (Wyoming? Texas? Florida?) could create a regulatory environment to allow for USD-based fully reserved banking that simply has no connection to the federal reserve system or any federal regulatory agencies?
so Custodia or The Narrow Bank, but presumably needing to keep business in-state?
if so, could it work mechanically? you’d obviously be cut off from FedWire but what about ACH? it could conceivably issue and acquire for card networks too via whatever clearinghouse options work mechanically, unless political pressure cuts this off? but then, if the starting point is friendly regulation, surely part of that could be: “listen up, VISA, either you let AllenBancorpOfWyoming in or you GTFO our state”?
this can go in a bajillion directions, so any and every thought entirely welcome. please also tag whoever you think would have interesting thoughts. I’ll start with #[0], #[1], and #[2] … what do you all think?
DING DING DING 🔔
the market is open! happy bank run day everybody 🍿
I’m not sure I can be bothered tweeting this coz I don’t want to deal with the negative pushback, but equally I do want to vent so I can sleep soundly:
if you deposit in a fiat bank, you are an unsecured creditor. you are not a victim. the real victims are those furthest from the fiat spigot, who are persistently priced out of ever accumulating capital, and whose time will be stolen *yet again* to plug the gap of fake value destroyed by this latest round of insane leverage collapsing.
the idea that it is crass to be rooting for bank failures or opposing clear-cut short-term fixes has a certain sentimental appeal but is ultimately asinine.
THE BANKS ARE ALL GOING TO FAIL.
the longer it takes, the worse it is going to be for exactly the people who are harmed by it happening now. if you really care about them, you want this out of the way as quickly as possible. but the idea you can just close your eyes and procrastinate this all away is juvenile. it is arguably even *the cause* of the problem. this could have been dealt with at any point in the past 50 years, but no. we just kept borrowing more than it is possible to repay and consuming more than it is possible to produce.
at some point people need to learn to take responsibility. ignorance is not an excuse unless you are also willing to pay the entire price yourself, which, note, nobody whining about this is. you can tell because, if they were, they wouldn’t be whining.
“but I thought I was a depositor!” <> “I don’t give a fuck what you *thought* - you were lazy and you were wrong. and you are asking the already poor and already fucked over by your ignorance to pick up the tab for it *again*. learn what is actually happening and have the balls to fix it.”
feel free to quote me to anybody you think needs to hear that.
mrs allen: “I feel like we should be shorting things” 🤔
here’s the first draft: edit like the wind!
***
*Make SVB Depositors Whole - 1 of ~120*
On March 10th, Silicon Valley Bank went out of business. This has left thousands of tech startups and venture capitalists unable to make payroll, to manage their billings, and to make the world a better place.
The Tech industry is the beating heart of American dynamism and it is difficult to imagine the extent to which working people across the US - and possibly across the world - will suffer if the depositors of the bank are not made whole.
With interest rates at staggering decadal highs, there seems to be little possibility of financing a restructuring of the bank on the open market. The scope of world-changing innovation supported by SVB and brought about by its depositors has consequences so profound, and so far in the future, that it is frankly unfair to try to value it using the politically questionable discount rates cruelly imposed top-down by the government in recent weeks and months. The only solution is a bottom-up effort to save this vital engine of growth, prosperity, opportunity, progress, and change.
This is why we are asking for $1bn to ensure the tech startup and venture capital community is not made to suffer unnecessarily for the sins of the credit markets. Please note this is the maximum GoFundMe will allow and so we expect to need to do this around 119 more times. But we have to start somewhere. We have to try. We have to be the change we want to see in the world.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Save Tech. Save the VCs. Save America.
I’m starting a GoFundMe to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. the target is $1bn because that’s the most GoFundMe will allow, so I will say that we probably need to do this 119 or so more times.
shoot me a nostr DM if you wanna workshop the pitch or contribute any good jokes 😉
I’m about to be offline for a few hours to watch rugby but when I get back I expect to get these creative juices flowing!
I don’t wanna get too ahead of myself but we may be about to see a major public reckoning on what on earth banks even are and what they are supposed to do.
SVB didn’t go down due to “the tech bubble” or really anything to do with “banking Silicon Valley” being a bad idea. if anything, it’s a great idea! Their deposits went up ~2.5x in 2 years because there was a shit load of cash that needed to be banked! (debate separately to what extent that was a ZIRP phenomenon. I’m not saying this was good in the grand scheme of things. just that, in context, it was good business).
the problem is what to put the money in. most nocoiners seem to think that their deposits just sit there “as money,” and although I’m sure they don’t imagine notes in a vault, exactly, to a large extent that was true for SVB: they held treasuries - the “risk free” asset lmfao - which is as close to cash as you can get in a liquid security.
the conundrum here is that there literally is no such thing as “liquid dollars” - there is only credit. all dollar assets are somebody else’s debt. for all intents and purposes, treasuries *are dollars*. the idea of “keeping it in cash” at the relevant magnitudes is literally nonsensical. what would it even mean? deposit it at *another bank*? that hardly solves the problem!
the further you tug at this thread, the more you realise that dollars can only really be defined as vacuous promises by the US government to … one day give you slightly more dollars?!? that realisation is now getting aired in public.
I think the first consequence as this starts to sink in will be a massive preference for shorter term debt that can just be rolled over and over and over because the lesson of SVB is the duration sensitivity is absolutely not worth it. you can literally evaporate hundreds of billions of dollars by getting that just a little wrong even though you didn’t have much of a choice (“RISK FREE ASSET” LOLOLOLOLOLOL) this is yet another example of fiat driving up time preference and corrupting the information signals necessary to coordinate long-term capital investment. but oh well, the currency is collapsing so we have bigger fish to fry than the yield of long-dated bonds 😂
but the juicy bit is that we may be on the cusp of this reasoning, and the insanity of fractional reserve and central banking, finally being aired in public as people try to make sense of all this.
or maybe not, I dunno. maybe I’m naive. but I’m also bullish 🤙
you guys realise that SVB was/is literally punting around in liquid securities markets, right? this is the insanity that fiat brings to “banking” - commercial banks have to fail because raising the everything price hits their book of mortgage backed securities (I can’t even believe I’m typing this it’s so stupid) because there isn’t enough of a yield in making *actual loans* and the maturity mismatch is too scary anyway. SVB is FTX, just with mildly less stupid and fraudulent shitcoins - but stupid and fraudulent shitcoins nonetheless. so is every other “bank”.
fuck me sideways. it causes me acute emotional distress that people think this is normal and don’t see any problem with it. we live in such a clown world 🤦♀️
so I’ve basically given up ever arguing with normies about bitcoin coz I feel like I put in a good shift and it’s not rewarding anymore. occasionally I’ll dive back in if the idiot in question is famous enough for the audience to make it worthwhile. but for the most part my attitude is that it just doesn’t matter: we are going to win, and it doesn’t matter whether or not the high priests of fiat understand what is happening.
but I just realised something pretty hilarious. the high priests of fiat *really do think this matters* because, in their clown world, winning the argument literally is affecting reality. that’s how fiat works: whoever convinces the most, and the most important, people, gets to do what they want with the money.
it’s not about accurately reflecting reality. it’s not about capturing time or causation. it’s not about being mindful of unintended consequences. it’s entirely about *sounding* impressive.
it’s pretty fun to think about how this will play out as the collapse of fiat accelerates. my prediction is they will get louder and louder, thinking this grants more and more influence over the reality that is increasingly spiralling out of their, and anybody’s else, control.
and when they try to argue, I’ll just shrug.
“but can we fix it faster than it’s falling apart?”
- #[0]
this was said pretty flippantly in his chat with Kelly but it hit me hard 😢
mrs allen just made a hilarious observation about the US covid “vaccine” border control: you need to be “vaccinated” if you are coming by air and as a tourist. if you cross by land, you’re fine, and if you are an immigrant, you’re fine.
so the only people it really applies to are those from rich countries that bought a shit load of “vaccines” from the US and dared not to take it. it has sweet fuck all to do with “science” or even common sense, but it’s also not just kinda dumb and not well thought through: it’s explicitly political. it’s a punishment.
my alternative theory is that you can’t have people running around both talking about and proving by their very existence that significantly less insane “vaccine” regimes exist in just as developed countries and everybody is not only fine, but better. but that suggests a lot more nuance than I think these clowns are capable of. mrs allen is probably right.
Covid
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Find links to guidance and information on all topics related to COVID-19, including the COVID-19 vac
me: “I’m just chillin over here, gettin zapped, zappin em back.”
mrs allen: “zapping them back? why? are you an idiot? don’t do that.”
