Bitcoin first reached $58k on February 21, 2021. Adjusting for inflation, that’s approximately $71k today. Have a blessed day!

To traverse the globe at speed, to divide arbitrarily, to become programmable, to become money for the digital age... gold must be exchanged for an IOU for gold. It then loses its censorship-resistance, its privacy, its trustlessness, the good stuff. The market is saying it doesn't care so much about long-range censorship-resistant payments. It's also not concerned that custodians are lying about the underlying, or that, like Nixon in '71, settlement will be denied. It's ok with IOUs if the underlying is supply-limited. Capital isn't afraid of being squeezed at the chokepoints of finance. Those same chokepoints are there for the ETFs and for stables and for treasury company stocks anyway. The market actually CLAMORED for chokepoints for crypto. Capital begged to be chokeable. So it's no surprise that capital would fail to appreciate this deep virtue of bitcoin. In fairness, gold itself is hard to choke. Physics, not politics, is what slows the flow of gold. Physics makes its arbitrary division into smaller quantities hard too. To transcend its physical constraints, gold must become an IOU, a social obligation, tracked on politically-approved centralized ledgers. Bitcoin is different. While existing on a ledger it isn't an IOU. It's a stuff, a bearer asset. Its ledger is distributed, decentralized. Bitcoin's ledger, strictly speaking, does have *a* throat to choke. The problem is that it's got tens of thousands of them, and you can't choke 'em all. Why can't gold do the same? Why can't gold jump to a decentralized ledger, like bitcoin, rather than taking the form of an IOU on a centralized ledger, which can be choked by a political or financial authority? Because, for gold, the map is not the territory. The map is the ledger of who owns what gold and the territory is the physical stuff. Bridging the divide between the ledger and the physical underlying, which lives in actual vaults, will always make the ledgers chokeable. "The oracle problem" for physical gold is real. With bitcoin--cue Gigi--the map is the territory. There is no oracle problem. The bitcoin white paper solves the problem of how to coordinate distributed ledgers without any reference to the outside world. This is THE WHOLE INNOVATION OF BITCOIN. In sum... when gold transforms into information, it loses its greatness. Bitcoin was born as information, and hence, born already into greatness. (Cue Lyn.) It doesn't need to transform into an IOU to function as money and give up its greatness. That's the difference. But the market is telling us it doesn't care. We're hardly in a position to complain, as our focus has been on achieving and then hyping highly chokeable forms of bitcoin ownership. We fully embraced the mindset. "The important thing is that the underlying is still censorship-resistant!" Well yes. I do think it is a super important difference and it WILL matter in the long term. But most bitcoin owners don't own bitcoin. They have ETFs, exchange balances, treasury company stock. (I can bring the stats on this if you like, from our study.) Their bitcoin value is flowing through choke-able channels anyway. Even bitcoiners choose chokeability with their own money, so why be surprised when normies buy paper gold over paper bitcoin? It may take some hard lessons for capital, and the masses, and even bitcoiners themselves, to appreciate bitcoin's true value: scaleable censorship resistance. The moment is clarifying, isn't it? Thanks for reading. Note also, I have nothing against paper bitcoin. Let a thousand flowers of fiat-system-bitcoin bloom. I am just pointing out a reality: the key differentiator for bitcoin > gold isn't being valued, even by us.

If you’re a bitcoiner, reply and I’ll follow you.

Nostr: “4 in 5 Americans can’t possibly want the U.S. to swap > 0% of their gold for bitcoin. You are full of shit!” Meanwhile, more Americans own bitcoin than gold.

4 in 5 Americans want some US gold reserves converted to bitcoin.

She’s wearing a very nice bitcoin orange here, I’ll give her that.

Been thinking about Dhruv Bansal’s idea that bitcoin are not produced or generated — wrong way of thinking about it induced by “mining” metaphor — but rather all bitcoin existed from the moment the network was launched, but are auctioned off to miners as a whole, in exchange for hashes (compute), on an auction schedule of 140 years or whatever it is. Each miner decides to take the network’s offer or not, by running their machines or not. Collectively, they determine how much that latest round of auctioned bitcoin is worth, in hashes and/or in energy. Then there’s another market on top of this one which is coincidental but distinct, and that’s the market for block space, where the sellers are individual miners and the buyers are would-be transactors and of course that’s sat/vbyte. I really do think it’s more accurate than thinking of bitcoin miners as “producing” bitcoin the way a manufacturer produces a product like cars or even discovered like gold miners discover gold. The bitcoin, all 21 million exist, just not on the ledger, from the get go. They only need to be auctioned, like treasuries. We don’t think the bidders on treasuries produce the 10-year! It’s just a weird auction mechanism where you have to prove work and your odds of winning the auction are proportional to your work / the total work by bidders. I do get it and I think it’s right and I think it helps with a lot of misconceptions once you grok it fully. And as Dhruv says it shows you the formula for how bitcoin disrupts everything which is by making markets where there weren’t any, and building layers of distinct markets, including lighting and eventually the internet. So, good job Dhruv. But… it is not so easy to communicate is it? This thing is bloody hard to explain, as someone said once.

I woke up this morning from a dream in which I noticed I had re-sprouted a full head of hair. In fact, my hairline was actually too low, like encroaching on the eyebrows. What does it mean.? Will zap all interpretations.

I just bought some bitcoin.

Happy day.

Our study can be downloaded at nakamotoproject.org.