Here's an anecdotal data point on Nostr. Yesterday I asked people on both Nostr and Twitter what tropes in fiction they don't like. I have about 10x the followers on Twitter than Nostr, but I only received like 6x the number of replies on Twitter. So Nostr had a higher relative engagement rate.

Ya’ll want Nostr Lyn to write a sci fi novel in whatever spare time she has, or get back to finance?

I recently did an internal corporate Q&A with a $100B+ tech company about bitcoin. I do it more often with financial institutions but this one was tech. One of their executives personally runs a lightning node and asked all sorts of great questions. Really based stuff. There are bitcoiners in all sorts of positions in institutions, corporations, government, banks, etc. but they are usually not the majority in terms of decision makers, and without that majority (or the CEO being one of them) is basically why most of them haven’t gone from zero to one in terms of getting involved with bitcoin as a company. Basically from the outside it seems like no progress, but from the inside it’s a gradual growth of more bitcoiners but still at a sub-majority level for action. Important distinction. It’s like having a lot of plants quietly growing fruit but little of it is ripe yet.

Both Biden and Trump are kind of retarded. We have known this for a long time. During the debate, Biden’s age issues became unmasked. And then during the tragic shooting on Trump, he had the courage and presence of mind to fist bump and come out very strong. And in their emotion, people of course rally behind strength. But then when we go back to hearing Trump speak for an extended period of time, we are reminded that he is kind of retarded, like where we were before, prior to the emotion of the crisis. Nothing stops this train. All our heroes are retarded. Stay humble and stack sats.

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.

I had one of those false wake-up dreams. I generally check a couple things on my phone when I wake up, including the bitcoin price when it is within a raging bull market or bear market, and so in the dream I checked it and it was $84,254. I was like, “oh, nice”. But then of course I woke up and it was just $72k. And then I was like, “Geez even your dreams are lame. $84k and change? Not even $100k or some flashy number?” It was even plausibly correcting on the screen, like it was coming down from a spike to $86k with a perfectly plausible consolidating price chart. The most mid-curve normie dream imaginable. But then after chilling with my husband in the morning sun and drinking some tea, I checked my phone again and saw Craig Wright get totally rekt at trial, which is way, way better than $84k bitcoin.

Many bitcoiners think establishment powers are now in the "and then they join you" phase of the struggle. I don't. I think they're more entering the earlier "and then they fight you" phase. Or more specifically, they are happy to join in on the price exposure side (i.e. ETFs), but they are fighting against privacy (especially) and self-custody (to some extent). The struggle for financial privacy, custody, and overall self-autonomy is just heating up. The gradual shift of critics from "bitcoin is a useless speculative asset with no intrinsic value" to "bitcoin is so powerful that direct usage of it must be curtailed" can be dangerous.

Although it was predictable ahead of time that so many Palestinian civilians including children would die as a result of Israel’s response to the attack on Israel by Hamas, as the numbers continue to add up it is increasingly hard to watch. Half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18. There is not much more sad in this world than children, cut off from electricity and communication, violently dying from air strikes in darkness. And sadly this happens in other places of the world too. For much of human history, people were only aware of their own local area. Now we have awareness of large swaths of the world, and so we can keep track of tragedies in real time. We then desensitize ourselves out of necessity. Like, the sheer amount of negative information and unsolvable problems hit us through media, and in order to productively do something to add value to someone else, there is little choice other than compartmentalization it. An electrician can’t be caught up in the troubles of the world as he goes out each day and fixes things and building things, for example. In order to add order to his small part of the world, he can’t be fully caught up with its global chaos. And then, I see these crazy protestors tearing down flyers about kidnapped Israelis, as though that activity could possibly be the best use of their time. People have a strong tendency to want to be part of something bigger and longer lasting than themselves, whether it is their religion, their community, their ideology, or their work. But some people chose such fruitless ways of doing it. Yes, you can and should advocate for not bombing children. No, you shouldn’t try to erase what happened to murdered or captured Israelis either. It is not rocket science. The world is an increasingly polarized place, and my biggest concern is for those polarizations to be used to take rights away in a more broader context, or to wage war between larger opponents. Politicians will propagandize any small share of “crypto funding” to bad groups to justify more restrictions on those technologies and privacy in general. As countries go through sovereign debt crises, having some sort of enemy to point to helps their narrative for capital controls and keeping their citizens in currency and bonds as they are inflated away. I’ve studied the 1940s financial environment too much to be unaware of this. Always look through to the bigger story, and ideally with a perspective of empathy toward many sides of any complex issue. Strive to be able to articulate your opponent’s view as well as they can, so that your counter argument can be most effective and surgical in its nature. And then, when there is nothing you can do about something globally, try instead to bring order and reason and improvement and kindness to whatever small portion of the world that you can.

Unless someone is setting out to be a professional author (very hard), nobody should write a book to make money. When I set out to write Broken Money, it was because I *had* to, not because I wanted to. Spending a thousand hours on something that I get a profit of $5/copy for is not my best use of time. Any time I spent on my research business revenue generation content, or leaning harder into my venture capital partnerships, would have been better on an hourly ROI basis. I have to sell 40 books to equal each newsletter subscription on my website; clearly the latter is better financially. Almost regardless of how many copies I sell, it's a bad ROI for me. I'm overworked and the fact that I wrote a book while maintaining my existing business stressed my relationship and social life. And further, I am reinvesting most of my initial profits; the first 1,000 copy profits go to the Human Rights Foundation Bitcoin Development Fund, and the next 4,000 copy profits will go towards making a video about money and why it's broken. And all of it was worth it. When a creator has something in their head, it's painful until they get it out into the world. I wrote this for bad ROI but because I wanted it to be out there for people to read, period. Will I make a profit? Yes. But at a much lower hourly rate than I make on other work I do. It's a negative profit compared to having reinvested that thousand hours into my other existing work. But I consider it to be more important, which is why I spent the time. I wrote Broken Money because I had to. The book concept formed in my head after many years of writing and research regarding money, and it would have been increasingly distracting to *not* write it. I didn't realistically have a choice. I felt compelled to write it. Part of it was altruistic; I wanted people to learn from my total monetary framework thoughts over five years of research. Part of it was egotistical; I wanted to timestamp something in the world, in physical form, and put it out there. Maybe it's the low time preference part of me; I'd like something of me to be mentionable to people in the distant future who look back at this time. My background has been a blend of engineering and finance, with both ironically pointed toward bitcoin. I don't care where you buy it from, and you can pirate it if you want, but it benefits bitcoin and @Saifedean Ammous if you buy it from his website. Circular economy rather than big fiat business. We've introduced a special edition hardcover with a cloth cover and dust jacket for those that prefer that premium format, only on his website. And you can buy it in fiat or sats.

Broken Money: Hardcover | Dr. Saifedean Ammous

Every year, I spend 1-2 months living in Egypt. This is because my husband is originally from Egypt, his family is much larger than mine, and so while our economic base is in the US, our social base is actually in Egypt. I thus became multinational many years ago. However, my husband spends 3-4 months each year in Egypt, while I only spend 1-2 months there. So, there are 1-2 months where I’m in the US alone. The reason I choose to do this is to look after the household and business, and because I’m not as productive in Egypt (inconsistent internet, less optimal workstation, way more social pressures, and so forth). In some ways, we find that spending some time apart strengthens our relationship and lets us focus on our separate things for part of the year. And when we meet after 1-2 months, it’s such a great reunion. We find ourselves wanting to catch up on so much and spend extra time together. But also, even though in some ways I look forward to having time alone and indeed get a lot done during that time, I immediately regret it once I am alone. I find myself constantly looking forward to going to Egypt, as I am now. During these periods, I end up posting more on social media, either constructively or non-constructively, in what tends to be a replacement for diminished in-person contact. This seems to be amplified by my work situation. When I was an engineer, I worked with colleagues in person each day, but now that I work from home, my colleagues are virtual and I meet them in person only at major events. So, this relatively brief window each year of being in a different place than my husband tends to be oddly monk-like, with me at home alone 24 hours per day, working and living and doing whatever I do. I think one of my future goals will be to increase my deliberate effort at spending time with local friends, especially during this part of the year. Anyway, I’m doing a series of “real thoughts” uniquely on Nostr, and this is the first one. Conclusion: Social circles are (obviously) a very important thing, including for workaholics and introverts like myself. Social circles affect us in various ways, and having gone through many cycles, I have become increasingly aware of the changes that take place during these seasonal cycles of being close to others vs far from others.

Hello world.