Hey, remember that time when the Nordstream pipeline was sabotaged, and then after a while most investigations quietly concluded without reporting on who did it? Weird. Anyway, anything good on tv lately? I hear Shogun is good.

Bitcoin fees are currently only a dollar, but niche programmers are suggesting to change the fundamental nature of bitcoin and increase its attack surface to make it more scalable… for people who don’t necessarily know or understand the trade offs of that scaling. Scaling is an important discussion, but everything is a trade off. I like many of the scaling discussions, but rushing them is another matter. It costs me $100 to buy a 1oz gold coin by mail, or to send signed documents internationally in a few days. Verification is expensive. The idea that global monetary verification should be super cheap inherently comes with security trade offs. All ideas should be evaluated carefully and come to major consensus. Otherwise change proposers risk a fork war.

It is not about based vs woke. It is about independent vs subservient. Think for yourselves. Pursue truth. Build your life as though society and supply chains could be disrupted for several months. It doesn’t mean being a prepper. It means understanding what your life relies on for a moderate amount of time, and thinking for yourself.

This is not okay. View quoted note →

I’m doing three sets of five reps each equal to my full body weight a few times per week for deadlifts now. I won’t reach my 20s lift ratios (that was when I was young and hungry) but I am doing my best to get back in top core shape.

The Dynastic Cycle and the Fourth Turning are all basically the same thing. It's built into civilization, regardless of era or culture. There are debt/money growth cycles, law/bureaucracy growth cycles, and periods of reset for both of them. During the growth phase, debt accumulates, and laws build upon laws as bureaucrats become bloated and detached. Even well-meaning people in power can't fix it; every attempt to fix things just adds another layer of debt and legal complexity. And then after a long enough time, it blows up. It could be slow or it could be fast, but it gets fucking rekt. It could be a lost war, a major internal revolution, or a slow massive decline and then a major populist democratically-elected landslide pivot. The new government emerges, as order out of chaos, with elements of authoritarianism. The ideal scenario is that this newfound unity is enough to create change in the right direction, and then decentralize itself to re-establish rule of law and individual rights. The more common scenario, however, is that this newfound unity is not let go by those who claimed it, and it leads to authorianism/communism/fascism and decades of problems. In other words, the revolution against the decaying chaos is easy, but sticking the landing toward the re-emergence of freedom and productivity is the hard part. That's why nothing stops this train. We're in the debt cycle rotation/reset, and eventually the bureaucratic rotation/reset as well. It takes billions of dollars to build a thousand feet of high-speed rail in the USA. Europe flails around on energy optics. Politicians become satire. Japan is stuck in yield curve control. This can last a long time, but the tailspin is nearly irrecoverable. Incrementalism doesn't work at this phase. The event horizon is passed. Rather, the focus becomes on what order will emerge from the chaos. Is it rational order, or is it even worse than what came before? The answer to that question, is what people have a big part in shaping.

I agree with Jimmy’s take here. As the altcoin industry cycles through all possible unsuccessful narratives and every form of VC enrichment, the later stage is just memecoins. View quoted note →

Apple has lost the Mandate of Heaven.

This letter is really, really good. View quoted note →

I wanted to make a shareable overview video that people can point their family and friends to about money, banking, and bitcoin. “Read this 500 page book” doesn’t always go over well, but “watch this half hour video” is more approachable. So, hopefully it’s helpful:

Back in 2011, Fed Chair Bernanke told Congress that the Fed's balance sheet would return to its pre-crisis level. It never did, and now it's far larger than in 2011, let alone pre-crisis levels. And by around 2025 it'll level out and start to head up again. It's going up forever, Laura.

Whenever you feel dumb, just remember that there are people who bought negative-yielding bonds.

Bond market = Seagulls View quoted note →

The bond market used to be the smart money, and despite the fact that the era of that is long over, it still rides on that reputation. And mainly why it is over is that it’s just too damn big. The sheer amount of supply outstanding, and the sheer amount of supply coming to market every month, means that even the smart bond trader hedge funds who can forecast and position for things aren’t big enough to move the market much. Instead the bond market is a titan that moves in real time based on flows. The bond market is a laggard now, not a forecaster. They’re all seagulls at this point.

Chaumian ecash is awesome. That’s it. That’s the note.

When something becomes the case in virtually every country in the world, that is interesting signal. It doesn’t mean that it is ultimately the right way to do something, but it strongly implies that it was inevitable for that specific time period at least. Some mix of technology and incentives led to such a ubiquitous outcome, with few or no exceptions.

Both taxes and money-printing redistribute capital, but the difference is that money-printing does it less transparently. With money-printing, the effect works behind the scenes in ways that are harder to quantify. That's why when a government can't find a solution between hard spending choices, they print money. It's the easier method. People know their personal tax rate, they will riot if their taxes are too high, and they know exactly who is responsible for tax levels. But inflation is a more complex beast. It comes with a lag, for starters, since it takes time for printed money to work its way through the system. And when it comes, propaganda built on grains of truth is effective at making it unclear to people who is responsible. "It's the greedy corporations that are responsible for raising prices, not the fact that we increased the money supply 40% over the past two years!" And so money-printing effects people not directly based on their income, their need, or other things, but based on their level of awareness of what's happening. It rewards people who are aware of it, and are borrowing the devalued currency, owning scarcer assets, and denominating contracts in harder currency. It harms people who are not aware of it, who are earning wages in and keeping their savings in cash or bonds. Many of them are led to believe that CPI is the target to beat, which is a false low target. The real target is the money supply growth rate. And capital gains taxes, if the cost basis is unadjusted for the rate of money supply growth, further recoup some of that value from the various harder assets that aware people try to protect themselves with. A lot of MMT advocates act as though they found some grand formula. But really what they have re-identified is nothing new: it's that the less transparent that government spending is, the bigger it can be before people will complain. People will complain about taxes right away, but currency debasement is the sneakier method for which the consequences come with a lag. So it sidesteps hard decisions this year, and leads to bigger issues a year or two from now, when someone else can be blamed and the whole ordeal can be obfuscated. And it's not new, despite how some MMT advocates would spin it. Currency debasement has been occurring since the adoption of coinage. And even MMT-scale currency debasement has been occurring since World War I. It is turned to so frequently because its lack of transparency allows it to occur at times and magnitudes when more transparent taxes would not.

There is a common phrase: “he/she woke up today and chose violence”. I like it. It is funny. But it is imperfect. “Violence” is now a verbal defensive phrase that means too much. To “wake up and choose violence” in the modern parlance of people who know zero struggle means to choose public verbal opposition. Okay, sure. But not really. I woke up today and chose rhetoric. Not violence. I spent years doing mixed martial arts competitively. I know violence. I am trained in a dozen ways to choke someone out, and have been choked out in’s dozen ways. I have had a 200 pound male fireman try to beat me unconscious and fail to do so. Even that wasn’t really violence, since it was controlled. Assholes on my trailer park bus stop in my teenage years were violent. Verbosity isn’t violence. It is rhetoric. I woke up today and chose rhetoric. I woke up today and chose to defend noncustodial privacy tools with language and resources. Coordinating messages between entities shouldn’t be a crime per se. Bitcoin is anti-fragile and will continue to be so, thanks to all the people who work hard for it. But it is not without a fight. Privacy is necessary in a free society in the digital age. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto made this clear three decades ago and is still true.

I don't like the term "FUD", meaning "fear uncertainty and doubt". Or more broadly, I think it's over-used. When people criticize something, a common response is "that's just FUD". But, you *should* feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt sometimes about any given thing. That's healthy. That's what makes you not in a cult. And addressing that fear, uncertainty, and doubt in an honest way, and constructing a sense of probabilities from that, is what builds conviction to move forward and invest time or money into that thing.

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?