The Unz Review

The Two 9/11s: How Israel Hijacked the American Deep State

"Being intelligent is a curse. You understand the game, you observe the lies, you recognize the schemes. But you still have to pretend to be stupid to survive." — Arthur Schopenhauer

GM ☕️🧊🥃

On Nostr I see a cemetery of digital hopes. 💜 Deleted Account 🪦 R.I.P.

🫂 The truth you have to keep in mind You are no inferior to them. You just arrived in a game where the rules had already been written to favour those who were already there.

In 1915, Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift. Official geology dismissed him as an amateur astronomer who didn't understand the "true" physics of the Earth. His evidence? Matching coastlines, identical fossils across oceans. Superficial, they said. But the rejection was not scientific: it was tribal. Wegener did not belong to the geologists' circle, did not know its rituals, did not accept the dogma of fixity. He was ignored, mocked, marginalized. He died in Greenland, forgotten. Thirty years later, underwater sonar revealed the oceanic ridges. His "superficiality" was the only depth the tribe could not see, because it required looking not at the rock, but at the shape of the world. The dominant narrative is not the truth: it is the threshold of those who remain on the surface.

The blockchain is a masterpiece of cryptographic engineering. Bitcoin is its first, most famous, and perhaps most tragic application. Not tragic in the sense of collapse—though the boom-and-bust cycles are spectacular—but tragic in the classical sense: an heroic promise of liberation that inevitably forges its own chains. The fundamental question is not *whether* Bitcoin functions as money, but *which* money, among gold, fiat, and Bitcoin, individuals would choose in a free market. The answer—gold, for its greater price stability—is a gut punch to the maximalists. Because if the ultimate "hard money," the one meant to render the fiat system obsolete, is beaten by an Old World metal, then what remains? The architecture remains: the distributed ledger, the proof-of-work, the supply cap. The box remains, emptied of its supposed revolutionary content. The category of "quasi-commodity" grasps something many mainstream economists misunderstand: Bitcoin is less prone to counterfeiting and supply-side shocks than the alternatives. But it is precisely this "quasi" nature that makes it so vulnerable. It is neither fish nor fowl: not a true commodity with industrial or aesthetic use to support its value beyond speculation, nor a fiat currency backed by taxation and a state's monopoly on violence. It is a floating object in a legal and economic void, its price determined almost exclusively by collective faith in its future mass adoption. And faith, as we know, is volatile. Another pillar of Bitcoin orthodoxy crumbles when we scrutinize the concept of decentralization. We must not merely assume that decentralization is always good. Bitcoin's system is neither decentralized nor centralized, but distributed. This distinction is not academic pedantry. It is the heart of the matter. A distributed network of miners, concentrated in a few jurisdictions with cheap electricity, is not the horizontal democracy of nodes that early adopters imagined. It is an energy oligopoly disguised as a protocol. "Decentralization" has become a faded ideological banner, used to justify a concentration of wealth and power that would make any central bank blush. And here we arrive at the final paradox, formalized by some economic models: Bitcoin's fundamental value is the stream of net transactional benefits it is expected to provide in the future. In other words, Bitcoin is worth today because we believe it will be worth tomorrow, and it will be worth tomorrow because we will be able to use it to buy things. But if today we don't use it to buy things—if it is predominantly a speculative asset held in anticipation of a price hike—then its fundamental value is a bet on a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is an economic time loop. The price is volatile not *despite* the fundamentals, but *precisely because* the fundamentals consist of expectations about future prices. The question posed to us, almost unintentionally, is this: if Bitcoin has failed to become the global currency of the poor, if it has not saved bankrupt states nor fed the hungry, if its main legacy is having created a new class of wealthy individuals and a mountain of electronic waste, then what exactly is the problem it has solved? The uncomfortable answer is that perhaps it has only solved the problem of how to make those who were already rich and technologically literate enough to understand the protocol before others get richer, quickly. The rest is narrative. And narratives, however powerful, do not pay the bills.

Proof-of-Stake is a beautiful democracy of the wealthy. I prefer the ruthless, beautiful meritocracy of the hashrate.

Have a nice day, baby. May the sun be hot, the sea be blue, and the noise of Nostr stay far away, down there. 💜🌊🌞