Oddbean

I'd get paid from work in fiat, then I'd buy BTC on exchanges, a few $k at a time. Everyone else living their lives, travelling and buying shit, while I was living like a bum and buying bitcoin, postponing life for later. 'Saving for later' is just a waste of life. 😭

I think it's all done over Lightning Network custodial wallets, now, so the fees have gotten quite low. Example from the Bitpanda debit card from VISA (which is not yet available in Germany 😭 ) https://i.nostr.build/M5lq6.png

We are making bankers, and scammy exchange owners rich. My personal experience was so bad (everything overly complicated, convoluted and expensive) that I never dared to recommend it to anyone because I did't want to risk causing them unnecessary stress, trouble or loss. Instead, despite the fact that I was personally buying and forcing myself to use bitcoin, whenever anyone asked me what to invest into, I'd shrug shoulders or tell them to buy gold. I should have just walked in a gold shop and bought some myself. 0 fees.

Yeah, it's not a lazy man's get rich quick scheme. If wealthy people invested in people and small local businesses instead of storing it in gold or the ponzi stock mmarket, the world woulld be better.

Reserve assets and investments are completely different things, tho. They're not things that are in competition with each other; they're different categories that you divide your income up into: spending and investments (LN, fiat cash, and banking account) savings (Bitcoin hot wallet) reserve asset (Bitcoin hard wallet and gold)

The reason why I say that I consider sats "normal money", is that I now use it for all three levels and nearly all of the money I hold is in Bitcoin and it's what I prefer to use. Fiat is only a throughput currency.

🫂 I think my religion has a very moderating effect on me, so under fiat, I was never inclined to go into consumer debt, and under Bitcoin I'm never inclined to live in a hovel and eat Ramen to stack. I'm always financially conservative, but cutting edge on the margins, and that seems to be the maximum amount of risk and sacrifice that I can emotionally and fiscally handle. Everyone needs to find their own balance.

There is a lot of rehypothecation in the space, it's a house of cards. Bitcoin went up and people would take credit agains it to put in Ethereum, then Ethereum allowed creation of millions of shitcoins. You would take credit against your Eth and pump and dump scamcoins. You make a contract for 1 billion X coins. You buy 1 yourself for $1, and the market cap is $1bn. When enough people buy, you cash out and create another one, rinse and repeat. Exchanges like Binance are a part of the whole thing, paying anon devs to create the contracts, then they shill them on twitter, list them on Binance... Devil shit, blood money. The market cap coule be "trillions" but you can't cash it out, so Saylor tells you to buy and never sell. The dude lost billions in the dot com bubble and lied to his investors by cooking the books.