Bitcoin is cheap. For now.

Humans are clever, especially if you have a lot of them. We are so clever, we increase the carrying capacity of our natural environment…so much so that we, in terms of population numbers, are capable of hundreds or even thousands of years of supra-exponential growth. This fact was first recognized in the late 1950’s…and concern hit a fever pitch in the late 1960’s. And by the mid 1990s, we failed to continue our growth trend. So, what happened? Humanity was making huge gains in tech to make sustaining larger and larger numbers of people possible, but it stopped somewhere between the 1960’s and 1990’s. I wonder if 1971 Nixon gold shock was intended to make us less prosperous and cause us to decide to reproduce less out of poverty / economic difficulties…

Fun fact: Bitcoin can not make everything cheaper for everyone, but it can for some. At best it can make things stop getting more expensive for everyone, but even that relies on people creating goods and services to exchange for money.

I don’t care what anyone says. I still love my corldcards…especially my Q, which I bricked trialing a new setup for which I tried to use a new but unwritten pin…anyhow, a bricked Q is not useless! I wouldn’t call this ideal (because a non-bricked Q can do this too) but you can use your Q as a basic ECC calculator 🤣

Remember when @Damus could send zaps. Yeah, that was a cool feature.

You are your own first responder. Firemen, paramedics, and police are always second responders.

I’ve been in bitcoin since July 2010 when I mined my first block. And I’ve learned a little bit since then. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned is that the fraction of your stack that you get to keep from year to year is directly proportional to your income. If you have none, you lose your stack at the fastest rate. I’ve seen many people “retire” on bitcoin and thus become forced sellers of bitcoin…for those early Bitcoin retirees, their first few years of retirement cost an incredible fortune which was spent on a comparatively modest lifestyle. Want to maximize your Bitcoin stack? Stay productive or at least well compensated. Without Bitcoin, I probably would have taken a higher paying job. And if I did have Bitcoin but I was not a physician, I might have retired pre-pandemic thinking I had done really well for myself —but— I would have spent half my stack by now. And maybe that would have been better for home life, who knows…but the world is a better place because I helped save people and I have been compensated handsomely in Bitcoin returns for it. I guess the moral of the story is: don’t quit. Push hard to grow your stack early on and then let your stack give you the freedom to do what you love, even if it’s not the highest paying job you could have had…and only after you’ve done what you love and have had your fill of that, then retire.

Remember that time when a guy gave a talk on an in the wild ledger hardware wallet that had been modified and sold via third party 3 months ago?

People are critical of Bitcoin because it is not a widely used means of payment. But how in the world would you expect the good money to circulate when bad money exists? This is the modern equivalent of the ancient fraud perpetrated against the people in the old days of physical coins. The fraud where the king or government would declare that a new coin with less precious metal in it must be accepted at the same value as the old coin of higher purity/weight… upon pain of death or imprisonment… in those days, the new Bad money was circulated, and the old good money was hoarded. The Bad money drove out the good money. Bitcoin is the good money. Therefore it is not surprising that we don’t see it circulating like dollars.

Bitcoin is what bitcoin is. It is not yet treated as how we expect it to be in the not too terribly distant future, which is why it’s so cheap.

At the end of the day, nothing is certain except that Bitcoin wins.