Defund the bureaucracy #bitcoin

For your Bitcoin privacy: aim to be surveillance resistant. Complete untraceability is great if you want to invest 10x the effort, but I'd only do this for a small amount of BTC you're making a specifically dangerous payment with. (Single whirlpool utxo mixed a dozen times, sent to a single use lightning wallet via tor etc) This means for most people its okay to just make lightning payments with a wallet like Phoenix, and even better if you fund it from a whirlpool mix. A really really motivated spook could possibly find some metadata here to infer some things, but difficult to do anything across a large number of users.

People always talk about the number of bitcoin buyers and how this is the central driver of demand. But they usually miss the secord order: it's the amount of BTC these buyers think they need. When I first bought in 2014 I had the equivalent of my monthly salary, and it felt like A LOT. Today, the few friends of mine that have been interested enough to get some have around that level or much less. That's fine, great even! It's a start! But they still haven't made the leap to recognizing that Bitcoin is THE asset, it's THE savings device. As a portion of my income, my BTC holdings is orders of magnitude higher now than when I got started. My current demand is equivalent to a few dozen of me in 2014. THAT is where demand comes from. The slow, but sure, irreversible realization that Bitcoin is the hardest money ever, and why that matters. Massive increase in demand, but also of the type that doesn't panic sell.

The size of the government is much larger than official state expenditures. There are obvious cases such as the BBC - its license payer funded, but they are forced to pay by the government. Then there compliance departments and lawyers who exist simply to help businesses adhere to government laws. Finally, there are all the businesses that exist in service of government created problems. E.g. startups that identity or KYC, or auditing etc. Probably a lot of fintech. How big can this thing get? We can't all be servicing the state? Someone has to grow the food, build the houses etc. (Although even these have their share of government sacrificial offering)

We're never going below $28k again!

Hope I'm wrong, but Ray Youssef has always given me scammer vibes. Something fishy about this Paxful closing stuff.

Lol - is this a late April Fools? 🤣

Scrolling through negative reviews of Everything Everywhere All At Once to make myself feel less crazy for really not liking it 😅

We are very powerful at the bitcoin cartel 🤣

😵‍💫 Just listened to a Bankless podcast. Wow. Even worse than I thought it would be. The topic had nothing to do with crypto, but their interviewing was really amateur, and they couldn't keep up with their guest. But they still have such a smug overconfident vibe! And then there are the ads ... Jfc. I sometimes think maybe bitcoiners exaggerate about shitcoiners, but it was literally all for shitcoin trading and NFTs. Not even anything clever - just "X platform let's you trade your NFTs really easily!". And this is supposed to be the biggest crypto podcast out there? Speechless.

It's been said before, but I just want to vent: I can't stand the people that smugly say Bitcoin will fail because the state will ban it. They just want to submit to the tyrany of CBDC's and/or banking surveillance? Look, they're probably even right that the purchasing power of Bitcoin _could_ plummet. But, all they do is actively reinforce the power of the state (even if they're otherwise liberty-minded). Absolutely infuriating. What is a fictional character that most resembles them? I need to call them a name.

I just figured out the solution to protecting earnings and savings against inflation. Its's not Bitcoin. All you need to do is become a UK member of Parliament and enjoy a defined benefit inflation index linked salary and pension 🤑

Hot take on fractional reserve banking: Its's fine as long as depositors' accounts are clearly and no longer considered cash. You can choose to put your USD/GBP/ZAR into an account that's used for loan creation, but should be clearly demarcated and probably have a call period. Then its just quite obviously an investment. This can work for BTC too as long as those lending their BTC know they are, and get compensated for the risk. When this disclosure doesn't happen (e.g. FTX) then it's fraud. Today, FRB is effectively fraud - it's just easier to see when we replace USD with BTC, and a bank with a scammy exchange. Insert meme: Corporate wants you to find the difference between these 2 pictures ...

So it's more expensive mortgages for plebs while at the same time banks get the exclusive privilege of unlimited borrowing and loss protection on bonds 🙃 And none of the NPCs care? I guess Occupy Wall street was a bunch of right-wing conspiracy theorists?

This is a must listen podcast for Bitcoiners:

Econlib

Omer Moav on the Emergence of the State - Econlib

Since at least Adam Smith, the common wisdom has been that the transition from hunter-gathering to farming allowed the creation of the State. Farmi...

Deeply insightful analysis of how the state emerged, and how it operates as a mechanism to maximize rents to the elites. Easily explains recent pushes to impose more control on food supplies, bitcoin mining etc. Fortunatley, Bitcoin is cassava and not a grain.

Oh dear, Ben Hunt going the way of Taleb. Gets his opinion obliterated by bitcoiners, now will dedicate his life to being anti-Bitcoin. I even subscribed to Epsilon Theory pro once and paid with Bitcoin, posted on the forum etc. But obviously a lost cause now.

What if humans evolved genetic mesa-optimising traits (e.g. love / friendship / mercy) at the same pace as they evolved intelligence, but now AI intelligence growth is far outstripping any stabilising characteristics? We're on the path to an insanely intelligent entity that purely cares about one single objective such as sentence / narrative completion.

The next bull cycle will be more sustainable because mainstream media will suppress any stories about Bitcoin price, or actively downplay it as hysteria amongst greedy capitalists or right wing conspiracy theorists. This is good for Bitcoin :-P

I need a GPT4 version of myself on my fiat mine Slack to respond to all the dumb questions people ask product managers 😅

One of my takeaways from TFTC 404 with Konstantin Kisin: Don't fight fire with fire. Not even the metaphor works 😅