Gonna start deadlifting again. Used to do a lot of powerlifting to assist with martial arts competitiveness. I kept doing it for a while after that even though I gave up fighting. Lately I just do a lot of biking, pushups, body weight squats, etc. But my core’s gotten weak from so much sitting and typing. Posture not great unless I am mindful of it. Going to bring back the deadlifts and other things now that my husband has built a home gym, just at a bit lower weight and more reps than I used to. Deadlifts every day til 100k?

I got down to “email zero” on my personal email. Not my business email(s) of course, but my personal email. Cleaned it all out. Today is a good day.

I'm quite bullish on Bitcoin scaling tech and privacy tech. Fee spikes are incentives to build more scaling solutions and to use the ones that have been built. Without fee spikes or the mindfulness that fee spikes can materialize at any time, there is no significant demand to build them or use them. It's painful when it happens but it's necessary to grow. And stress tests help ensure that you are building the tech correctly rather than relying on shortcuts that only work temporarily. Same thing for privacy solutions. Privacy tech has to be like a hydra; if one head gets cut off then it grows more. Privacy solutions behind every blade of grass.

I’d be happy to contribute to and use my public platform to bring attention to legal defense funds for people who build open source privacy tools, or for legal attempts to push back on unconstitutional government financial surveillance. I just need to know that they are credible from people I trust.

One day, it would be nice to see a well-capitalized challenge to the Bank Secrecy Act on 4th amendment grounds. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they saw that people need a license to transmit money, or that the government thinks it has the right to surveil and censor everyone’s money and transactions. The default is privacy. To infringe on someone’s privacy should require probable cause and come with checks and balances. Ubiquitous surveillance shouldn’t be the default, since it enables tyranny.

I’m a hip flexor exercise maxi now. Realized how much more core work I need to be doing to offset how much I sit and type.

Prepare accordingly: View quoted note →

Money used to be private by default. Once it became widely surveilled in the 20th century, attempts to make money more private again were generally criminalized. View quoted note →

The entire developed world tax apparatus that was built in the 20th century and extends into the 21st century depends on ubiquitous financial surveillance. They are not going to give that up without a fight. I have been saying at a number of conferences and podcasts that privacy is the main battleground for the next decade. Back in the 19th century and before, money was mostly private. There were plenty of dictators but there was no major method of surveilling all transactions. Therefore things like broad income taxes were untenable to enforce. But in the 20th century as money increasingly moved around at the speed of light, people needed bank accounts to keep up. It wasn’t all forced on them; they chose it. And those bank accounts were centralized, surveillable, and ruggable. This allowed authorities to switch to income taxes, which require ubiquitous financial surveillance to work. And ultimately it allowed them to switch to fiat currency altogether. Now in the 21st century, Bitcoin and its various layers allow people to hold and move around money globally without permissioned banks. They can do so peer to peer, or they can do so with custodians and open layers, etc. Unlike the base layer of fiat, the base layer of bitcoin is permissionless. But this represents a threat to the entire current system of taxation and financial control. If bitcoin and particularly various private methods on top of it were to be adopted at massive scale, the entire tax structure and other things would need to reshape themselves around that reality. And so they won’t make it easy; they will try to criminalize financial privacy as much as possible while the network is still pretty small. The only solutions are to 1) make privacy tech so ubiquitous that it can’t be isolated and can spread organically in a distributed way and 2) to apply legal pressure when possible so that governments sort of have to operate within the bounds of their own law, like the 1st and 4th amendments.

Privacy is normal and good. There has been an effort among authorities to make “money laundering” and “financial privacy” the same thing. That is, the mere act of moving money privately itself becomes a crime. That’s not okay. Money laundering is when money that is obtained through crime is concealed by obfuscating it with clean money. The actual crime is the initial non-financial crime (say, mob stuff), and historically money laundering involves manual activity to work with the criminals. Now that open source tech can make certain transactions private, authorities increasingly equate all private money transfer with money laundering, even if the developer of the open source tech had no direct involvement with criminals. Authorities target them regardless, and sanction the technology itself. Financial privacy becomes synonymous with crime in their minds, and in the minds of the public.

After I finished Broken Money, I had a burnout period where I didn’t want to write much and my creativity was low. But over the past month my backlog of things I want to write about has increased a lot, and now it is a matter of finding the time to write all the things.

William Shatner is 93 but looks and acts like 73. Always impressed when I see him in interviews. Probably not a bad idea to do whatever he’s been doing.

The Congressional Budget Office expects about $20 trillion in net new federal bonds to be issued over the next ten years (cumulative deficits). This assumes that 1) interest rates will be lower than now and that also 2) there will be no recessions during that time. If either of those scenario are untrue, bond issuance is likely to be higher than that. In comparison, at current production rates and prices, about $2.5 trillion worth of new refined gold is expected to be mined over the next ten years. Production can go up a bit, but gold production changes are generally pretty slow within a given decade, especially with current capex. However, price could change a lot depending on how much capital wants to flow in/out. Finally, at current prices, about $70 billion of new bitcoin will be mined over the next ten years. The production rate cannot materially change due to the difficulty adjustment, but of course price can change a lot depending on how much capital wants to flow in/out. Anyway, my April newsletter is out and touches on this concept: https://www.lynalden.com/april-2024-newsletter/

I have watched a surprisingly small number of movies over the past few years, mainly because I have been so busy and also because not that many new movies have appealed to me. On a set of recent flights I watched a bunch of movies in a row: 1) Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It’s the prequel to the series and stars the character who later becomes a main villain in the series, so that is neat. Not bad actually. I found it pretty engaging even though the original Hunger Games series lost my interest somewhere around the second movie. 2) The Creator. Sci Fi military/drama/action movie about AI. It had a decent plot structure and theme, but overall was pretty “meh” and had some distracting plot holes. 3) Ferrari. A biopic about Enzo Ferrari during some of the harder years of his life. Great acting from Driver and Cruz. Somewhat underwhelming overall story, but solid film imo. 4) Wish. The first critically-panned Disney animated film in a long time. I was curious to see what was so bad about it. Imo the problem was not that it was truly bad per se but that it was aggressively mediocre. Songs felt kind of forced or out of place. The plot structure itself was pretty creative. There was hype from some conservatives around this movie being “woke” but I didn’t see that as being the case. It’s ironically about a bunch of people fighting for personal liberty and a smaller role for government, lol.

My husband recently observed to me how important conditioning is for people to accept things as normal. He said that when he first began reading my articles, he was like “Okay but I mean, fiat currency censorship isn’t really *that bad* as you describe”. But then in the years that followed, he was like “oh shit, it actually is. The fact that we have to ask permission to access significant amounts of our own money at banks and say what we will do with it is fucking insane. Why is this normal now?” In Europe especially but also elsewhere, it’s increasingly common to make cash transactions illegal above a certain threshold value. Above that value, you have to go through centralized, surveilled, corporate/government systems, or you’re doing an illegal transaction. That seems absolutely insane if introduced out of nowhere, but instead it has been introduced gradually through conditioning and so people are like, “well I don’t use cash anyway so that’s okay I guess, in fact I don’t even know that’s a law now”. The same is generally true for social media. Filtering communications through centralized pipes is actually a radical position but it’s increasingly the new normal. In fact, the centralization of banking and communications in the hands of the state were two of their ten steps proposed in the Communist Manifesto.

A couple months ago I had a discussion with the head of digital assets at a multi-trillion AUM financial institution about the topic of whether bitcoin is a risk-on asset or a risk-off asset. This wasn’t about what it is conceptually (i.e. globally portable finite bearer assets are conceptually good to own in a crisis, neither of us disagreed on this), but rather how its price would *actually* behave in a crisis currently and for the next several years. Their view was that it could be marketed as a risk-off asset, meaning something that is likely to go up in a crisis, and that if marketed this way it would allow them to put bitcoin ETFs into more portfolios and weight it bigger. My view was that while of course people should own bitcoin, it’s not yet a risk-off asset in practice in terms of price action, and that marketing it that way is likely to lead to disappointment for those that expect it to perform like that. We then got into a discussion about how bitcoin went up in the March 2023 banking crisis. They suggested that this is evidence of emerging risk-off behavior, to their point. I disagreed, and clarified that in my analysis the closest correlation to bitcoin price action is measures of global liquidity. Some types of crises are pro-liquidity and some are anti-liquidity, and will likely affect bitcoin’s price accordingly. The March 2023 banking crisis was a pro-liquidity event because it was quickly apparent that the Fed/Treasury would bail banks out fast and slow their rate hikes. Therefore, bitcoin went up not because it was a risk-off asset per se, but rather because it behaved as a pro-liquidity asset as it frequently has. The Iran/Israel event this weekend was an anti-liquidity crisis because it contributed to a flight-to-safety move toward the dollar (i.e. the unit of account for which the most debt is denominated in, and debt represents inflexible demand for that unit). A sharp move up in the dollar is bad for global liquidity because it hardens the debts of various foreign entities (sovereigns and corporations) relative to their cash flows (which are to varying degrees partially or completely denominated in fiat units other than the dollar). And so bitcoin behaved as it normally does: it went down amid falling global liquidity. At this stage (with its relatively small size, high volatility, and poor understanding of most people for the asset), I continue to view bitcoin price action as likely to be pretty correlated with global liquidity for a while. Understanding that dynamic is helpful when communicating expectations to people and when determining which types of crises are likely to push its price up or down. Yes, bitcoin is a risk-off asset conceptually, but in practice in terms of macro price action it is still a pro-liquidity asset primarily. When bitcoin price action starts to behave differently from that trend, I’d be happy to report on that observation.

Sorry not sorry.

This a really good post from Jack. Part of the answer might just be time. The tech is real, people are building on it, and it takes time for people to be burned by permissioned systems to discover permissionless ones now that they exist. I do think that bitcoin wallet + social graph is a big combo in the long run. The fact that you can just look up and pay anyone you know without that person taking action to tell you their payment details, especially in an open source and international environment, is a pretty big deal. Not just zaps as tips on posts, but zaps for Nostr marketplaces or for saying “pay me on Nostr” for products/services unrelated to Nostr per se. And for the social network part, I just like the fact that Nostr is permissionless and open. Twitter has a huge network effect and I have plenty of friends/connections there, so I still post there a lot and use it for research as well. That is irreplaceable until it is not. But Nostr feels different. The tech feels right, the group that adopts that tech early feels right, and so to me it feels right to post things here that I would not otherwise post to 675k Twitter followers. Less filtered, for better or worse. I used to be involved with individual small forums back before widespread social media was a thing, and was an administrator for one to help run it, and that type of smaller community was valuable. In fact, I inadvertently met my now-husband there 13 years ago, who was also an administrator. The forum had fewer than 50,000 people, with only a few thousand active at any time, but in context that is the size of a significant town. But while Nostr still has the “feel” of a smaller forum now, its open source and permissionless nature gives it enormous expansion opportunity. While programmers do their best to build new features and capabilities, I try to seed this current smaller version of Nostr with unique content that doesn’t feel right to post in a larger centralized setting but feels more right for a smaller decentralized community of adventurers. Because I want permissionless and open source tech to win. View quoted note →

Stayed at a hotel in London. As the receptionist showed us to the room, he mentions that the roof was “once blown off in the Blitzkrieg” and then casually goes onto pointing out the minibar and WiFi password.

There is a hotel and pub on the outskirts of Bedford that has 5’10” ceilings. Like, imagine walking into a restaurant and hit your head because you are 5’10”. I am under 5’8” but was still kind of being careful since certain parts of the ceiling were surprisingly low. It’s basically the Shire.