Every once in a while if I feel down about something, I practice gratitude by reminding myself that at least I'm not a bond investor.

When people don't trust their government, one of the best tools they have is to trust each other. If you trust neither your government nor your peers, then your battle is going to be all that much harder. Being able to choose who to trust, and having tools to help you do that as efficiently and as minimally as possible, is almost as much of a superpower as not having to trust at all. Some types of trust can be privacy-preserving. Some types of trust can be spread out over different groups of trust, so that the burden does not rest too heavily on any one person or group. Thanks to cryptography, we can break down trust to its smallest possible components, and assign them as deliberately and as minimally as we want, and to whom we want. Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, have I mentioned how much I like Chaumian ecash?

Nostr be like:

Random macro stuff I'm watching today: containership rates.

Stablecoins have a lot of shortcomings, but the vast majority of people who complain about the existence of stablecoins themselves have dollar or euro bank accounts and thus aren’t the target user anyway. Overall, stablecoins are basically offshore dollar bank accounts for people in Argentina, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries with less reliable currencies.

The broad crypto industry rallied hard soon after the White House threatened to veto the bill that would let banks custody digital assets. And now it’s making a big difference, with Congress voting strongly for it, the White House pulling their veto threat, etc. While it’s right to pass that bill and let banks custody them if they want, it’s sad to see that the crypto industry response to that was like 100x bigger than the response to all of the anti-privacy stuff that has been happening. The desire of people in the industry for banks to help pump their bags is way bigger than their desire to pave a way for freedom tech in general. Much love to all those building and supporting real freedom tech.

I really dislike social media algorithms and incentives. Negative stuff is what sells. There are so many times where I sit down with a good host and have a thoughtful discussion about macro finance, and then the Youtube title and thumbmail that their producer makes is some version of me smiling next to a terrible headline and often something on fire or blowing up.

This is the way. View quoted note →

Most web3 enthusiasts are just in it for token speculation, not permissionless communication. And the problem with that model, is that whenever there is a shiny new object in web3 land, they go to it. So it builds the opposite of brand loyalty and makes it hard for companies to measure any real user metrics. If those users actually cared about permissionless communication, they’d at least spend a bit of time on Nostr. Simple base protocols are what can actually last a very long time.

One day, when my 15-year-old Hyundai stops working, I’m going to get a Toyota.

A legal defense fund for non-custodial tools. Very cool: https://p2prights.org/

The sheer completeness with which Wright’s documents were ripped apart by forensic evidence in the COPA trial, and the thoroughness with which the various lies were deconstructed, was a beauty to behold.

My May newsletter is now available, and discusses money-printing, price inflation, and the bond market's inability to forecast it. https://www.lynalden.com/may-2024-newsletter/

For about seven months after publishing Broken Money, I was so burned out from writing. I had written that book within a year, while also writing public articles and private client reports as usual. So I was basically just absolutely dead in terms of writing, had pushed myself a bit too far, and was kind of phoning it in for articles and reports the next few months with gradual recovery. But within the past couple months, my writing energy has fully returned. So many articles in the pipeline, in various states of development!

The problem with a company running a social media public square is that they have a lot of monetary incentives to comply with censorship or to sanitize things through deplatforming. In current Twitter’s case, even though they are less reliant on advertising now, their primary owner has much bigger business interests in cars and rockets, so the incentive structure is one that points to Twitter complying with strongmen leaders’ censorship requests to ensure that those bigger car and rocket companies don’t get blocked out of those markets (eg Turkey or India). Even if he would prefer otherwise. A lot of people don’t realize that Twitter used to fight international censorship attempts in various countries more, and under current leadership it’s *quicker* to comply with censorship in many cases, with less of a fight. Twitter’s current marketing angle is to be known as the free speech platform in the US, but then to quietly comply more readily than ever before for censorship requests in other places like Turkey or India. That’s why Nostr is so important. https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana

It would be unfortunate if some of the more ambitious Bitcoin script change proposals, particularly those attached to real or perceived culture wars within the Bitcoin ecosystem, end up slowing down the adoption of some of the more conservative or well-defined script change proposals that are broadly considered safe and that were steadily building momentum last year.

ETHBTC quietly making new cycle lows today.

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.