Fountain would be perfect if it did video.
Matt
codinginlondon@iris.to
npub16nd6...ftma
Kaya toast enthusiast | C++ engineer writing about things 🔋🔑
Gresham’s law: people tend to spend weaker money and hoard the harder money.
➡️ Therefore the harder money is not much used as a means of payment. However it is used for savings.
Thiers’ law: at one point, weaker money is losing its purchasing power so fast that merchants stop accepting it and prefer being paid with harder money.
➡️ Harder money then replaces weaker money as a means of payment.
A quote that struck me while listening to Audible last night:
"People have historically been willing to deal with weak money if it’s faster than gold, but if weak money doesn’t even have a speed advantage relative to harder money alternatives, then in a world of widely accepted bitcoin it would likely become harder for governments to convince their people to accept fiat currencies for payment and hold large amounts of value in them.
Gresham’s law dominates until the weaker money is basically useless. At that point, Thiers’ law takes over, which observes that good money drives out bad money.
A payee generally wants to pay for goods with weaker money, and a merchant generally wants to sell their goods for stronger money.
If a weaker money gets bad enough that merchants won’t even accept it, that is when Gresham’s law gives over to Thiers’ law. ”
Broken Money
Lyn Alden
Oh that's fun, you can see the genesis block on mempool.space
The Mempool Open Source Project®
Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with The Mempool Open Source Project®. See the real-time status of your transactions, get network info, and more.
"Consequences do not exist until they are felt"
Take a tour of a Gridless site in Kenya.
Tobacco was introduced to China by the Portuguese during the 16th century.
It was actually considered as a medicine (!).
People would sniff it out of small bottles. Emperors would collect those bottles and it became cool in China to carry around a snuff bottle.
(they do look cute)
I feel like visiting a history museum today
Heard about this for the first time while reading @Lyn Alden's book.
I can't believe I missed that news last year! OTEC makes so much sense.
Bitcoin Magazine
How Bitcoin Can Unlock The Energy Of The Ocean For 1 Billion People
Bitcoin can breathe new life into Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC), a 150-year old renewable technology stymied by economies of scale.
Bitcoin is used by criminals who are bored with the safety of physical cash and prefer taking the risk of leaving permanent tracks on a public blockchain, giving plenty of hints to help investigators find them sooner or later.
MorningBrew showing more details of the system used by Bathhouse spa in New York to heat up their water pools.
X (formerly Twitter)
Morning Brew ☕️ (@MorningBrew) on X
Bathhouse makes $$ heating its pools
ft. @macyagilliam
Lyn Alden: "fees aren't expensive because there are frogs on the timechain; fees are still cheap because relatively few people are using bitcoin to send and store money compared to the total addressable market that could be doing so."
Another good synthetic quote that summarises the current situation:
"If I were to describe in one paragraph why money has been broken around the world for so long while almost everything else has improved substantially (energy abundance, technology abundance, and so forth), it’s due to this gap between transaction and settlement speeds that the telecommunication era created.
For a century and a half, the world has been stuck in a local maximum that has required and incentivized ever more complex forms of centralized abstraction to bridge that gap.
The international gold standard worked for several decades during peacetime but was inherently flawed from the start due to how many claims it enabled to exist on such a small monetary base of actual gold, and it failed its first test as soon as war broke out between major powers in Europe.
The Bretton Woods system was even more flawed due to even greater levels of abstraction and managed to fail in less than a decade and a half after full implementation.
The modern system of 160 different ever-devaluing fiat currencies loosely tied to one world reserve fiat currency is highly flawed due to having no inherent grounding in scarcity."
Lyn Alden, Broken Money
Collecting some quotes from Broken Money (Lyn Alden), which I keep reading at night.
"A user typically wants to hold money that appreciates in value, that is easy to hold and pay with, that is private, and that is difficult or impossible to freeze or confiscate.
A modern currency issuer, in contrast, generally wants to issue money that smooths out near-term volatility, that pulls demand from the future into the present, that is easy to surveil, that can be frozen or confiscated by authorities easily, and that gives the issuer a lot of flexibility to spend money even at times when nobody wants to finance them"
The first form of savings accessible to anyone on the planet without any barrier of entry. And much safer in terms of secured storage.
From 1 EUR a month to any amount you can afford.
No KYC needed. No pre-requisite. No need to show a salary payslip, utility bill or a passport.
X (formerly Twitter)
Dr. Ammous (@AmmousMD) on X
"Unlike the vast majority of humans in the past century, bitcoiners today are able to save for the future in a monetary medium protected from debas...
Latest update on mining in Virunga by Sebastien Gouspillou at Adopting Bitcoin 2023
https://www.youtube.com/live/i7VERpwwTPY?si=JikPBhyDlbTyJavy&t=17345
Timestamp 4:49'00''
Latest update on mining in Virunga by Sebastien Gouspillou at Adopting Bitcoin 2023
https://www.youtube.com/live/i7VERpwwTPY?si=JikPBhyDlbTyJavy&t=17345
Timestamp 4:49'00''
“Bitcoin mining is the only economic incentive on the planet to reduce your energy waste and reduce your emissions that is not funded by government subsidies."
Benjamin Gagnon (Bitfarms)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=927&v=3KhsezFehlM&feature=youtu.be
A good synthesis of the current macro-economic situation by Mark Moss