This is why I got into bitcoin, every dollar held is supporting this insanity

War

FUD = Samsara?

It’s all about clarity. Because the root of everything is right here, right now. The thought is that simple. The practice of this is always fresh and never ends.

Excerpt from Nemik’s Manifesto that reminded me of Bitcoin and Buddhism: “Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy.” Something about the spontaneously without instruction particularly reminds me of the core of what all religion is working towards. And I also feel Bitcoin has this essence. Yes it has a protocol and rules, but the way it functions and flows feels spontaneous, uncontrollable, almost random in how it has a “life of its own”

Manifesto - by Nemik There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this: Try. From Andor season 1

Great clarification. Makes a lot of sense.

Bitcoin has taught me: What we are experiencing is not capitalism. It’s not a free market. It’s crony capitalism. Socialism and communism sound nice on paper and many utopias can be dreamed. However they centralize power. And inevitably that power corrupts.

Long time preference feels counter to our current culture. How do we lengthen it? 1. Not feel like I’m about to get financially strangled down into serfdom. — solution: education, work ethic, discipline, clear mind, ethics, BTC 2. Have a lifestyle worth living — love family, spirituality, community, wonder I could’ve smithed this for much longer. Sometimes more fun to just let it out!

The USA is a machination that turns the work of good people into means for evil people.

Just finished watching Barry Lyndon. Absolutely loved it. I had no idea Kubrick was so hot on the trail. Would he have been a bitcoiner? - Kubrick believed the private creation of the Fed handed the U.S. money supply to the same European banking dynasties (Warburg, Rothschild, Rockefeller-Morgan interests) that had already captured the Bank of England generations earlier. - He underlined in his copy of G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island the passage claiming the Act was drafted in secret on Jekyll Island by seven men who controlled one-fourth of the world’s wealth. - Quote he repeated to Herr: “Once you let private bankers issue the nation’s currency and charge interest on it forever, the politicians become employees and the voters become extras.”

When engaged with what is (right in front of us), we are engaged with all that is.

Trust more, micromanage less Observe more, react less

I just watched the Big Short for the first time. I absolutely fucking loved it. Also, what the fuck?

Some thoughts on the below Lyn Alden passage on price as information compression. Growing up in Massachusetts, I was taught to be suspicious of anything that sounded like “free markets.” The phrase carried a whiff of greed and exploitation. But what Alden points to here is simple: ten million people making everyday choices process far more real-time truth than a handful of planners ever could. From a Buddhist perspective, this is akin to dependent origination. Reality itself is a web of conditions — no central controller could ever grasp it all. The ego that tries to run the show limited, rigid, and eventually corrupt. When you let go, the interdependence of things takes care of itself. It’s scary to trust that — just as it was scary for me to leave an aikido teacher who had turned a bit cultish, or to question the state’s role in money. But the lesson keeps repeating: liberation isn’t in handing power to a central authority, it’s in seeing that no authority is needed. The ten million small decisions — or the ten thousand things (Lao Tzu) — are wiser than any ruler or guru could ever be. The passage from Broken Money p. 230: "Suppose that ten million people in a country make economic decisions, and they each buy five things per day. That’s 50 million transactions per day, or 18.25 billion transactions per year, nationwide. Can a central committee of elders allocate prices better than those ten million decentralized people can? Most evidence suggests no; ten million people can incorporate real-time information, and allocate prices better than a detached central committee of a handful of individuals. That is why politburos are not the most efficient form of economic planning; regardless of how wise and intelligent those individuals may be, they are incapable of processing and organizing the amount of information that ten million everyday people can with their various specific expertise."

Last night I was at a book bar in the east village and reading “broken money” by Lyn Alden. Some Indian dude and I started talking and we ended up talking about bitcoin for 3 hours… I then dreamt about an infinite money glitch where all I had to do was go into a zoom and it would print $… Bitcoin is worming its way deeper into my psyche 🤷‍♂️

Time is so fleeting. Try too hard to take advantage of it and it slips away even faster.

“Never Attained Anything” mini-rendition. Fully fleshed version on Spotify and @Wavlake

Another glorious 1-2 punch about how abstract money gives government overnight access to citizen’s savings from page 102 of Broken Money: Inness (1914): “What is a monetary unit? What is a dollar? We do not know. All we do know for certain — and I wish to reiterate and emphasize the fact that on this point the evidence which in these articles I have only been able briefly to indicate, is clear and conclusive — all, I say, that we do know is that the dollar is a measure of the value of all commodities, but is not itself a commodity, nor can it be embodied in any commodity. It is intangible, immaterial, abstract. It is a measure in terms of credit and debt.” Lyn Alden, Broken Money: “Some economists such as Saifedean Ammous have argued that from a monetary perspective, World War I never really ended once it began in 1914. In prior wars throughout history, wars had to be funded with savings of taxes or very slow debasement of coinage. Physical coinage held by citizens could usually only be debased by their government gradually rather than diluted instantaneously, because a government couldn’t just magically change the properties of the coins that were held by households; it could only debase them over time by taxing purer coins, issuing various decrees to try to pull some of those purer coins in, and spending debased coins back out into the economy (and convincing initial recipients to accept them at the same prior value, despite the lesser precious metal content, which would only work for a time and might not even be noticed at first). However, with the widespread holding of centrally issued banknotes and bank deposits that were redeemable for specific amounts of gold, governments could change the redemptive value with the stroke of a pen or eliminate redemption all together. This gave governments the power to instantaneously devalue a substantial part of their citizens’ savings, literally overnight, and funnel that purchasing power toward war or other government expenditures whenever they determine that the situation calls for it.”

Another beauty from Lyn: In 1970, Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act, which made banks file reports to the government whenever their customers do more than $10,000 in transactions within a day. Back then, this dollar amount was worth more than the median annual income, and reporting therefore happened rather infrequently. However, the Bank Secrecy Act was not adjusted for inflation, and so over the course of five decades the government has automatically reduced the threshold for necessary reporting and has therefore continually expanded their surveillance mandate each year without further legislation. The combination of restricting the number of physical banknotes in circulation, making it undesirable to hold physical banknotes for long periods of time due to inflation without interest, and surveilling bank deposits, has been an effective surveillance and control combination.