There is no real privacy in a centralized system.
The only chance we have at privacy is in a decentralized system.


The right way to do Nostr

https://m.primal.net/HtMU.mp4


On Propaganda
---------------------

A while back, I had a friend that was a pastor and he was railing about guns on Facebook, how they should be banned and so on. What had brought on this tirade was a shooting by a Muslim guy which left a bunch of people dead.

In a sense, I understood his anger. At a very surface level, a bunch of people died, so there had to be someone or something to blame. Indeed, every shooting of any kind brings out these emotions, and the powers that be are especially good at using tragedies to further their own agenda.

Indeed, that's one of the evil things every authoritarian does is exploit times of vulnerable emotional states to further their agenda. Some would even say they manufacture such instances. But the point is that they further *their*agenda, and not what should be learned.

My pastor friend for example had many other angles to approach the topic that he was far more qualified to talk about. He's studied theology and other religions, so he could have talked about radical Islam and aspects of that which led to the shooting. He's also counseled a lot of people, so he could talk about mental health and talk about what puts people in those states of mind. He's also a Christian who knows the depravity of man, so he could talk about how sin and vice lead to these tragic outcomes. Instead, he talked about guns, because that was what the elites were focused on. He had never held or shot a gun and couldn't tell you the first thing about them, like what's considered automatic or semi-automatic.

Yet because the propaganda was strong, he spoke exactly on the issue the elites wanted him to talk about and placed the blame on the thing the elites wanted him to place blame on.

This guy, by the way, was not stupid. He's an Ivy League graduate and very sharp. But perhaps that's why he was so susceptible to propaganda. His success was largely based around following what the authorities told him. Intellect is no protection against powerful rhetoric.

We all outsource some of our knowledge, but the problem with a fiat system is that we all too often are *forced* to trust entities that we had no input in. These entities are the most likely to get corrupted and used for tyranny.

We need more interactions, more direct connections so that we can figure out whether someone is trustworthy. That's a decentralized trust model and it's about time we get used to judging such things for ourselves.


I don't know who needs to hear this, but a full eclipse really is an otherworldly event. I can understand why so many people throughout history thought it forebode something.


For free subscribers: self vs mob, totalitarianism, wonks, BTC standard and more!

For paid subscribers: SHA-2 Collision, LNCast, Nostrifying LN, Satoshi Email Hack of 2014 and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #391

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-391


They think we need permission from them when they need permission from us.


Even if you're a fan of Elon Musk and X, here's a reminder that it's still centralized.

Nostr has a deep structural advantage and it's only going to grow in the long term.

https://m.primal.net/Hryu.png


Write something that tells me you're not fiat.


fiat status symbols vs. real status symbols.


https://m.primal.net/Hrhj.jpg

# BTC Investing vs. BTC Standard

There's a difference between investing in Bitcoin and being on a Bitcoin standard. It may seem like semantic hair-splitting, but it's not, because the behavior of these two groups is very different, as is their mental model. In this article, I aim to explain what it means to be on a Bitcoin standard.

## The Bitcoin Investors
The Bitcoin investors are the people that are looking for a dollar (or some other fiat money without loss of generality) return. Their base money is the dollar and that's how they measure their wealth. That's understandable, since that's how they've been indoctrinated, but such a mentality is rigged from the start.

First, it's hard to measure how much value your assets are increasing by. If you use strict dollar terms, you may have gained some percentage (say 30%), but over what time frame? If the asset is something like real estate, that may be over 10 years or 10 months. Obviously, the 10 months is better, but exactly how much of that value is real? How much can you buy with the returns and is the money you got back the same as the money you put in?

## Inflation

Because, of course, there's inflation to consider. Investing with the dollar as the base asset means you have to account for it. If you have an investment that goes up 30% at the same time that inflation is 30%, you haven't actually gained anything. In fact, due to capital gains taxes, you likely have lost value.

Then there's the question of what measure of inflation to use. Many investors use the CPI-indexed dollar to measure how much they've gained. But this too is flawed because the CPI is a gamed metric. There are [hedonic adjustments](https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-answers.htm) that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts in almost arbitrarily to output a CPI to be lower than the actual prices. So if your investment merely kept up with CPI, you again probably lost ground in terms of purchasing power. It's not a good measure.

## Monetary Expansion

The classical definition of inflation is monetary expansion and the M2 money supply is a popular metric to measure that. It was $287B in 1959 and was $19.4T in 2021 (more on that in a bit), so annualized, that's about 7% per year. If you use that metric, most investments look pretty terrible. You're most likely losing ground because it's hard to get 7% every year consistently, even on average. Financial advisors use that 7% number to measure themselves and most don't meet that mark. So if your investment keeps up with M2 monetary expansion, you have merely kept the numerator up in proportion to the denominator. Again, because of capital gains taxes, you've probably lost ground in terms of percentage of money supply.

But even here, the stats are not great. The Fed discontinued the M2 in 2021 and came up with something called the M2SL, likely to add more fudge factors that they can use for gaming the metric. Why would they do that? Because investors started measuring their returns against the M2. Especially during the pandemic, the M2 was going up so fast that most of the investment gains were known to be non-existent in M2 terms. So now, we have their modified measure of money supply called the M2SL. There are all sorts of problems with the M2 measurement, and aggregate statistics are notoriously unreliable. Hence, for investors, even this harsh measure is likely being gamed to make their gains look better.

## The Bitcoin Standard

So what's left? You can use gold or a cow or a custom men's suit or even a big mac as a way to measure how you're doing with your investments. They're all useful ways to see how much purchasing power you have relative to points in the past, but all of them have flaws, are lagging indicators and are relatively easy to manipulate.

For the red-pilled investor, the real measure of wealth becomes Bitcoin because that's the most difficult to manipulate. When you accept this, that's when you are on a Bitcoin standard. In other words, Bitcoin becomes how you measure your investment gains, not the dollar, not the CPI-adjusted dollar or the M2-indexed dollar.

## Conclusion

There are undoubtedly a lot of Bitcoin investors. Between exchanges, ETFs, even apps like Robinhood, Venmo and CashApp, there are a lot of people that own Bitcoin. But that's not the same thing as being on the Bitcoin standard. The people that are most likely to hold for the long term are the people on the Bitcoin standard.

I know for myself that I finally flipped when I read Saifedean's book by the same name. I have had a very different mentality about money since then and think of the dollar as the depreciating asset that it is. The measuring stick for me has changed. In economics, we would call that function of money the unit of account.

It's been amazingly freeing because I don't worry about my investments, mostly because I don't have very many. I'm on a Bitcoin standard and I keep my value in my unit of account. We're so used to being stolen from through the fiat system that we've learned to live with the debasement. Debasement is a continual and never ending burden.

The Bitcoin standard frees us from this investing burden. And it's the game-theoretical end state of money. Hardest money wins. You can get there now or get there later.

Your choice.


A Bitcoiner should be able to secure a seed phrase, run a full node, verify a change address, send a LN invoice, pay a LN invoice, explain inflation, buy non-KYC coins, have an inheritance plan, send to cold storage, hold through volatility, show how altcoins are dumb.

LARPing is for rent-seekers.


The Antidote to Nihilistic Narcissism
-------------------------------------

“He’ll have a long life as long as he doesn’t know himself.”

In Greek mythology, this was the prophecy concerning Narcissus. Narcissus is better known for how the myth ends. He falls in love with his own reflection, which is where we get the word narcissistic. The ending refers back to the initial prophecy. When he saw his own reflection, he didn’t recognize it because he didn’t know himself.

In the middle of the myth is Narcissus rejecting the love of everyone else. The order matters. Narcissus only fell in love with himself after rejecting everyone. He didn’t reject everyone because he was in love with himself, but rather he fell in love with himself because he rejected everyone. His only target for love was himself.

I bring up this myth because this is the intellectual path that so many people take. They cynically reject belief systems one by one until they are left with nothing else. Lacking anything else to believe in, they turn to themselves and become completely self-centered. They become nihilistic narcissists.

Bad Parenting
---------------
Look at the prophecy again. Narcissus will have a long life as long as he doesn’t know himself. Presumably, his parents made sure he didn’t know himself because Narcissus didn’t even recognize his own reflection. They did this with the best of intentions, to ensure he had a long life, yet clearly, a life staring into your own reflection is not exactly meaningful.

Think about what we tell our kids: “You can be anything you want to be.” “Go find what you’re passionate about.”

These platitudes specifically avoid giving children an identity. More subtly, not giving them an identity makes it harder for them to get attacked. We do this with the best of intentions, yet is this really what parents should be doing? To define yourself is an enormous burden, especially for children.

Nihilism as Default
-------------------
Think about the myth again. Narcissus rejected all would-be lovers.

Why?

He didn’t know himself. He didn’t have any basis by which he could even evaluate their fit. How could he since he had no self-awareness or self-understanding? He couldn’t solve for love because he didn’t know half the equation.

Identity is the basis of evaluating everything. Without grounding, nothing can be built. Without identity, belief is impossible and nihilism becomes the default.

The Appeal of Narcissism
--------------------------
Nihilistic narcissism is a safe position. Because you never have to stand for anything and never take a risk, you can preserve your own ego, preserve your intellectual life as in the prophecy. The appeal is in preserving what you have, your own self, however empty and senseless you become.

But nihilistic narcissism completely strips meaning from life. You may live a long life staring into your own reflection, but it’s not a very fulfilling one. Lacking any sort of external north star, you are left with an internal north star, which if you follow, becomes navel-gazing. Ironically, narcissism is the end state of not knowing yourself.

Such a place is one of profound despair. There is no meaning and all you have to live for is yourself. Is it any wonder so many people are depressed?

Parents, give your kids the gift of identity. Your job is to help them know who they are. This should be natural, since the kids come from you. By knowing you, they learn to know themselves. By showing them who you are, you are really showing them who they are. By participating with them in community you are showing them who they are. By telling them your family history you are showing them who they are. Tether them to your identity so they can find meaning. Give them the solid foundation of knowing themselves.

Because identity is necessary to a meaningful life.


If you want excellence, bring back patronage.


I don't know who needs to hear this, but weed is just another pharmaceutical.


Yes

https://m.primal.net/HqtJ.png


Nostr messages only.

nostr:note1mqeguh80dkmkxxd9077vtdaqkl55ayy46nppx6z969xvkt74qrmqjx0gx7


You can make burgers, fry it up with some seasoning which makes it a lot like rice, make a soup, or put it inside jalapenos and then wrap them in bacon for a nice treat.


I have this thing, where if I'm out with people, I order expensive steaks, but when I'm at home, I just cook ground beef.

There's some need for me to enjoy my really good steaks with people. It feels wrong to enjoy them by myself.


Maybe it's time for a reunion show.


Nostr has less April Fool's content. That's a good thing.


who gives them to you matters, because the state can take them away. is that legitimate or not? if it's not legitimate, on what basis?


Free issue for the first of the month!

Adulthood is costly, Small businesses, Arctic > FROST, BitVM2, HedgeHog, SEC v. Coinbase and much more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #390

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-390


I would pay for a Nostr-compatible paid secure email service for me and my family.


Our rights either already exist or they do not. If they do, who gave it to us? If they do not, all your yapping about right to privacy, speech, property, liberty are all hogwash. If the government gives them, again your yapping is hogwash. If they are given by God, you have a leg to stand on.


He is risen!

I proclaim this, especially to those that think it cringe. Atheist and elitist Christians alike.


Reading Arctic. May be better than FROST.


Yes, they all serve the state now. Kinda like movies from Communist China or Soviet Russia.


I would point out the mindset is a slave mentality, brought on by fiat money. You can win, but you need to see that there's more to life than the paths they set for you.

Also, I would start thinking about what to do after your kids get out of the house. That's usually at least 30 years for most people, and if you don't have a plan, it's rough.


Indeed, all of the free stuff depends on fiat money.


Fiat success is addictive and enslaving. You pretty much have to sacrifice everything to it, including your morals, beliefs and social life.


Cooperation just makes selfishness work to build. Human nature doesn't change, incentives do.


Or it has to be paid by somebody. The real problem is that the "free" stuff is just stolen value from other people. Real generosity is truly a virtue.


Who knew that adding a trusted third party to a transaction would add friction?


Great documentary! Yeonmi Park's new books (While Time Remains) is a sobering reminder of how far we're going down communism as well.


Literally Diabolical


Got a link? I'd love to listen to it.


It's a trap!


Sadly, when you don't have personal relationships with the people in charge, they are incentivized to act like psychopaths.


# "Free" is Slavery

Thae Young Ho is the highest ranking defector to ever have come out of North Korea. He was an ambassador to Sweden and then to England. At the Oslo Freedom Forum back in 2019, I got to talk to him for a few hours, and it's a conversation I'll never forget.

It's rare that we get such a high ranking official to come out of the country to tell us how they operate, but Mr. Thae is one of those people. He was able to enlighten many of us what North Korea's process for the currency revaluation was and why they backtracked. He also told us about how they had to execute someone so that the regime wouldn't get blamed. If you read any works of Rene Girard, that shouldn't surprise you, especially given that it's an atheist country.

## Kim's Rise to Power

But the story that struck me the most was about Kim Il Sung's rise to power. Mr. Thae explained that after being installed as the hand-picked leader of North Korea in 1945, he wasn't that popular. His Korean was marginal as he had grown up mostly in China. His education was a scant 8 years, all of it in Chinese and communist guerrilla tactics weren't exactly beloved by the people. Yet if we look at how he's looked at in North Korea today, he's essentially viewed as a divinity. Somehow, this poorly educated, barely comprehensible puppet of the Soviet Union became the god of North Korea.

So what happened? How did he gain all that power? What did he do to take control? You would think that given what we're generally told about communism that it would be based completely on fear and ruthlessness that consolidated his power. And certainly, there was plenty of that. But according to Mr. Thae, Kim Il Sung relied on something else: free stuff.

## The Cult of Free

Everyone loves free stuff. Think about how popular the free stuff section on your local craigslist is. I'll bet you anything it's the most visited and monitored part of the site and rarely will you find stuff that's that valuable that someone hasn't taken already. It's part of the human instinct to try to get something for nothing and Kim Il Sung exploited it.

As with most socialist/communist programs, the way he won over the North Korean people was with lots of entitlements. They got free health care, free food, free housing, a guaranteed job. They got everything they needed. And with Soviet subsidization, it worked great. People supported him and for a time, a lot of international observers thought that North Korea was doing better than the South.

But there's a darker side to "free stuff." What happens when they run out of a scarce resource? How do you determine who gets it? Say there's medicine that will help two different people, but there's only enough for one. Who gets it?

In a free market, prices help you decide that, and a high price spurs greater production of the scarce resource so that the prices come down. But if it's free, what do you do? When you have a central controller of everything, the answer is obvious. You reward those that are loyal and punish those that are not. Instead of money being your currency, it was loyalty to the regime that was your currency.

## Markets Build Community

Soon, the only people that really got the free stuff were near the top of the ideological hierarchy. Instead of prices determining what you got, it was your perceived compliance and loyalty to the regime that determined it.

In the absence of a market, compliance was what determined who got what. Mr. Thae's point of the story was that there's something sacred about market transactions. Market transactions cause both parties to have obligations to the other. There's a mutual desire to satisfy the other party and it binds us together in a community. That's precisely what they lacked in North Korea and why the regime was so powerful.

It's easy to listen to these stories and think of it as "out" there, that it's got nothing to do with us. But after listening to this story, I started thinking about what stuff I got for free from centralized entities. I get GMail for free. I get Facebook for free. I get YouTube for free. I realized that the cost of getting these things was indeed compliance. In these walled gardens, they can kick you out at any time and that is indeed what they do. The reason why these companies have so much power is because they give you this stuff in exchange for compliance. They give you this stuff to *enslave* you.

## Western Governments

Fact is, there's way more of the communist/socialist system of free embedded in our supposed democracies than we think. Remember during the pandemic how you had to get a vax to keep your job, visit your sick relatives or travel? There were people in the US suggesting that unvaxxed people should be denied health care services. Such tactics really only work when the service is "free." The central controller of the resource extracts its pound of flesh, just not in money. Many governments have gone down this route. We're much closer to communism in western societies than we'd like to believe.

Prices and paying for things are a good thing. They obligate both parties to the trade to satisfy the other. The instinct to get something for nothing is not one that builds civilization. The reason communism has led to tyranny every single time is because the central government ends up with all the resources and wields absolute power through "free" stuff.

Reject free. Pay for value.https://m.primal.net/HpeW.jpg


Nostr is free as in speech.
X is free as in beer.

Few


Live auction begins in a few hours! If you want some physical Bitcoins that I've owned, here's your chance.

https://m.primal.net/HpFu.jpg

https://auctions.stacksbowers.com/auctions/3-18DWT2/spring-2024-auction-session-9-physical-cryptocurrency-part-1-lots-8001-8137?limit=36&coin_grading_service=1-11DOL&coin_grade=1-11DL5+1-11DO4


I talked to @parkeralewis and @iBobbyShell about small businesses and the opportunity that Bitcoiners have to acquire them given the many coming onto the market and the returns they give.

#Bitcoin Fixes This #122

https://rumble.com/v4kqkc6-bitcoin-fixes-this-122-small-business-with-parker-lewis-and-bobby-shell.html


Yea, that's objectively better.


You take the green pill, your savings end, you believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the orange pill, you get based and get shown just how deep the rabbit hole goes.


Centralized, top down is how everything currently functions. It's usually efficient, authoritarian and fragile.

Decentralized, bottom up is how things will function in the future. It's going to be free, robust and redundant in many places.


The goal should be to be wrong less often. So I would add level up your knowledge and virtue.


All security tokens and stable coins running "on a blockchain" should really be ecash instead. You have to trust somebody anyway, and you get better privacy features with ecash.


This is why you write unit tests. You put more time on the frontend, but end up saving tons of time on the backend.


the resend gives free subscribers all the articles that are paid, so you can read what was behind the paywall a month before.


Be patient with the cringey people.

Time shows truth


This brick used to be worth $6700 just 5 years ago, now it's about $110. It was worth double that when I was there 14 months ago.


You would think spam would be a bigger problem on Nostr, but it's totally not. Much easier to fool a centralized entity than a decentralized community. Instead of 1 heuristic, you get 100.

Decentralization generally results in better quality because there's competition.


Agree. Except for Dry-aged Wagyu steak. Those are totally worth it.


For free subscribers: Nocebo Effect, Chevron Deference, Cultural Power Law, Ordinals are Fiat and more!

For paid subscribers: Stratum v2 Implementation, Hashrate Vulnerability, Phoenixd, Remittances API and more!

Bitcoin Tech Talk #389

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-389


Something I've noticed in this space.

The people that play politics never last all that long.


Reasoning:

4/20 feels very left-libertarian to me. That is, the people that are more concerned with having access to all kinds of drugs and abortion-on-demand than sound money, property rights and freedom of assembly.

4/19 is, for me, the way better date. That's the day that the American Revolution started (Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775). That's a much better meme than "OMG weed day!"


Unpopular Opinion: I hope the halving doesn't fall on 4/20.


Copy-writing is underrated. If you don’t know what it is, it’s literally copying word for word, on paper something that someone else has written. It kinda works like this:https://m.primal.net/Hnyv.gif


A little bug in the stacker.news crossposting feature, it seems.


Yea, better to prepare now. The most envious tend to be your peers, whether siblings, college classmates, coworkers, etc.

This is one of the subtle reasons we say not to talk about how much Bitcoin you have.


I was just about to recommend the same book (Things Hidden). I also agree Wanting is a lot easier to get the concepts.


It's one of those things that we don't talk much about, but a lot of people have the exact wrong model that sets them up for failure.

On the one hand, they desire the life you have because you have wealth. On the other hand, they have an entitlement mindset from fiat money.

The combination means they want what you have without much willingness to work for it.

Holding and stacking are hard. Envy and the fiat mentality make that doubly hard.


Envy is toxic. He made terrible decisions, probably in an attempt to catch up and surpass you.

Managing envy is a big part of being successful. For me, reading Rene Girard has helped a lot.


Sunday Survey: Where is Bitcoin country?


Bilateral digital communication without a trusted third party should blow your mind.


I was asked a while back whether I would be richer if I wasn't Christian. The main implication being that there are so many immoral ways to make money that Christian values prevent. And while I agree that there are ways to make money that are closed off to me, there are also ways to lose money that were closed off, too.

There are a lot of monetary pit traps in the world today. There's all kinds of addictions that can destroy your balance sheet, drugs, sugar, power, games, etc. Christians exercise self-denial muscles through God's grace. So in that sense, I think I've been saved from the many ways in which I could have lost my stack.

To hold is hard. And it requires a lot of self-denial. If you want to hold, Christianity is a sort of super-power.


# Ordinals are a Fiat Scam

The past two years have seen a flurry of productive activity in the Bitcoin space. Taproot has brought in lots of new interesting possibilities from Schnorr Signatures enabling smaller on-chain lightning channel transactions to TapScript Merkle Trees bringing the innovative way to prove the execution of a program through BitVM. These are truly new and novel things in Bitcoin and they have been genuinely good for the Bitcoin ecosystem.

But that's not the full story of the last two years in Bitcoin, and as much as I'd love to write about the actual innovation, I have to deal with the fake, stupid, immoral and fiat scam that is ordinals. It's not a job that I enjoy, but given the asymmetry of the arguments, one side that's incentivized to pump it against an unfunded debunkers who talk about it objectively, there's some much-needed cold water that needs to be poured on their prospects and I'm here to deliver.

For most normal people, the idea of NFTs, unique digital property seems pretty dumb on its face. Whether it's a jpeg or a short video clip or whatever, they rightly ask after having the whole concept explained to them, "wait, that's it? I'm not missing something here?" I've written about them in the past, how they're a vehicle for scams in much the same way altcoins are. I'd go so far as to call NFTs altcoins, as they're an alternative and the T in NFT marks them as a coin. What's especially confusing for normies is this concept of a bitcoin NFT or ordinals. Does that mean that somehow it's better or purer than the ones on Ethereum or Solana? They're not, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start at the beginning.

## Trolls Gonna Troll

The whole "fad" started with Rod Armor, who inscribed a skull in using the witness discount in late 2022. It wasn't really even noticed by the network as it was a mere 793 bytes, well within the normal range of transaction sizes.

What really got it going was Taproot Wizards group, who are a disaffected group of "former" Bitcoin Maximalists that wanted revenge after getting humiliated supporting a whole bunch of affinity scams like BlockFi, Celsius and of course, FTX. Their intent wasn't to create a new asset class, they realized that inscriptions were the perfect vehicle to fill  certain blocks with noise for the sake of making Bitcoiners angry. So they inscribed a 4MB jpeg in early 2023 and a new market to make Bitcoin Maximalists angry began, which by August 2023 was an insane 21 million inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Though the rhetoric now is that inscriptions were some sort of new thing being "built on Bitcoin," nobody really noticed until this very obvious and continuous troll.

Also in early 2023, ordinals began, and given that there were a lot of degenerate altcoiners that would buy and sell pretty much anything, what got attention as a troll quickly pivoted to a business. BRC-20 tokens started soon after and stamps not much longer after that. Trading activity picked up and soon, they traded in various exchanges. And these trolls have definitely made some money, especially from VCs who are all too willing to sacrifice their Bitcoin bona-fides for the prospect of some ROI.
The troll put on a business suit and began arguing with Bitcoiners that they were a legitimate part of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

## Ordinals, the argument

Ask any ordinals supporter why they think ordinals are good for Bitcoin and they immediately change the topic to "rights" and "you can't stop it" and so on. Instead of telling Bitcoiners what they bring to the table, they focus on why the protocol doesn't stop them. Like shop lifters in San Francisco, they don't bring anything good to the table, so they focus the discussion on how there's nobody that's going to stop them from doing what they want. But of course, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. To paraphrase Chris Rock, you can drive with your feet, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

In other words, they don't have a good answer. They have bad ones, though, if you press them. Somehow it supports miners by giving them money. Or it undermines other altcoin launching platforms. Or making Bitcoin "fun." All these are very weak arguments and they don't talk about how their projects change the incentives or undermine the monetary use-case, which is why they don't make them that often. The discussion they want to have is that they "can" inscribe or put ordinals or stamps on the Bitcoin blockchain, which as stated above is confusing could and should.

## Why Are They on Bitcoin?

My gripe with NFTs in general have been that there's no technical reason for them to be on a blockchain. They're already clearly centralized. They have an issuer. You can't look at the ordinal without some other software which decides what it represents. Some other trusted entity decides whether you have the ordinal or not. If they change the rules in the future and you get the short end of the stick? Tough luck for you. They're no different in centralization than the run-of-the-mill forgotten altcoin from 2011.

So if they're centralized, why are they on a blockchain? A blockchain is a horribly cumbersome database to hold digital data. It's hard to develop, hard to scale, costly to maintain, and difficult to upgrade because they're voluntary. So from a purely technical point of view, a centralized project on any blockchain, let alone the decentralized one in Bitcoin, doesn't make any sense. It's much easier, faster, cheaper and more maintainable in a centralized database.

Technically speaking, a centralized project becomes more difficult in every way on the Bitcoin blockchain.

So what's the real reason why ordinals are on the Bitcoin blockchain? Because there's a large market of people to market to. Because it's easy to hype by associating it with Bitcoin's historical success. Bitcoin represents, hope, freedom, self-sovereignty, sound money, and a better world. It's an amazing thing and to even be slightly associated with it, as altcoins have over the past 13 years. But altcoins have a long history of going comatose, so ordinals are the new argument, a new way to sell old, outdated, failed ideas. In other words, ordinals are on Bitcoin because it's a new way  to scam a market that has wised up a bit.

## Anticipating the VC-funded Responses

Now the ordinals people will undoubtedly make excuses for why it needs to be on Bitcoin. You can't manipulate it! It's less work and requires real payments! Both of which are true. Bitcoin is secured by proof-of-work and that means anything embedded in it requires astronomical amounts of hashing power to change. But you don't need to use Bitcoin to do that. There are timestamp servers and receipts and backup services all of which are way cheaper and provide the same service without bloating the Bitcoin blockchain. And Bitcoin's blockchain is no real protection. You have to use other software to figure out whether you own an ordinal or an inscription or whatever. That software can change the rules anytime they want, just like any altcoin software. And these things aren't generally backwards compatible. So if you're running something old? You're not following the centralized "consensus."

Ordinals, like NFTs and really every altcoin, are a glorified spreadsheet that can just as easily be run on a $500 website while providing cryptographic proof that it hasn't been manipulated. Again, the only reason ordinals are on Bitcoin is to create more demand through marketing it as something that "helps" Bitcoin, which is like saying that spam helps email adoption.

## Conclusion

For many years, altcoins have ridden the coattails of Bitcoin to scam lots of people. It's getting harder to scam the same people and indeed there are currently only two paths left. There's the post-modern nihilistic tactics most fully realized in memecoins. Altcoins no longer purport to have real-world utility anymore. That ship sailed back in 2019. They are forced to go to memecoins because the market doesn't appreciate being lied to. Memecoins have no utility, no disruption of any industry, no innovation and no prospects, but at least they're honest about it.

The other way is to associate closer with Bitcoin than altcoins have been. It's not enough to be a "cryptocurrency" anymore, to affinity scam now, you have to pretend you're a Bitcoin Maximalist.

The actual technical reality of these projects is not new. Colored coins were live back in 2013, as were MasterCoin and Counterparty. But the cultural pivot is. Ordinals, inscriptions, BRC-20, stamps are all trying to clothe themselves with Bitcoin so the general public associates the benefits of Bitcoin with these projects. But of course, the values of these projects are antithetical to Bitcoin. There's no self-sovereignty, financial freedom, decentralization or really any hope for the future in these projects, just straight gambling. So they borrow the good values as much as they can from Bitcoin.

Fiat in English literally means creating something by decree. And these new types of altcoins are fiat in that strict sense. They're decrees by a centralized authority masquerading as a decentralized project by associating with Bitcoin.

Meet the new altcoins. Same as the old altcoins.


Bitcoin Fixes This #121: Recent Events with Jimmy Song
 https://rumble.com/v4kj0uu-bitcoin-fixes-this-120-recent-events-with-jimmy-song.html


The current fiat model is to expand the money supply to fund half-baked ideas. A good idea needs seasoning, both in terms of development and capital. The second is much better funded through savings, not debt.


Price anchoring prevents many people from getting into Bitcoin. Sad, but true.


Beef cheek is better than brisket. Fight me.


Is there such a thing as private zaps? Would you want it if it existed?


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #388

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-388


Took a while, but I now have alby connected, so I can zap to my heart's content. Let's do a contest. I'll give a prompt, funny responses get zaps.

Reasons the mainstream media will give for why you shouldn't own Bitcoin.


A lot of people like the *idea* of collaboration, until they have to do some work.


I want to make a collaborative Nostr account. If you were to use something like that, what would be your desired features?


Volatility is our Protection
————————————

"Bitcoin is too volatile." How many times have you heard that from normie nocoiners? I know for myself, it's the biggest reason that I've heard for why there's not greater adoption.

Indeed, it's an understandable objection. The upside is great, but volatility and risk are not, at least from a normie point of view. After all, if the point of saving is to mitigate risk for the future, then volatility does the opposite because there's less predictability in purchasing power.

Yet if we examine things a bit further, what they ask for is something that cannot exist in a fiat economy. Let me explain.

The behavior that is sought by the people that complain about Bitcoin being too volatile is an asset is something like the various fiat currencies that are stable to the dollar. For example, the Euro, the yen and the Canadian/Australian dollars have fluctuated, but have stayed in a reasonable range of the dollar, not really deviating more than 25-30% from the average over the last 20-30 years.

Yet their lack of volatility is decidedly artificial. It's the result of central bank operations. They keep their currencies within a peg range against the dollar by buying/selling dollars as needed. Obviously, Bitcoin doesn't have a central bank, so there's no stabilization mechanism and thus is a lot more volatile.

Other than a few currency traders, nocoiners generally don't invest in foreign currencies despite there being relative stability and little volatility. They want the upside of Bitcoin as well. The returns of Bitcoin have been staggering, especially compared to traditional assets since its inception 15 years ago. The nocoiners want the large upside without the volatility. They want an asset that goes up over the long term with little to no volatility in the short term.

But this is impossible. Suppose such an asset existed. Say an asset went up 50% a year without volatility. What would happen?

The main feature of central bank backed fiat money is that there's no opportunity cost for money and loans are basically infinitely available. So say the loans are available at 10% yearly interest. The wall street finance bros in that case can easily buy the asset with the loan to make a cool 40% profit. They would do that all day long because making 40%/year is very difficult.

But because they need to *buy* the asset to make this trade work, this trade would cause the asset price to rise. But even if the asset price goes high enough that it's no longer 50%/year, but 20%/year, they would still continue because there's a 10% margin that they can make. Indeed, they will continue borrowing and buying for this trade until the asset's yearly price increase is at or below the loan rate.

Indeed most of the profit available in the market have gone to bankers for this reason. Profitable things (companies, assets, etc.) all get arbitraged to death through these infinite loans.

So why doesn't this dynamic happen to Bitcoin? It's the volatility, particularly to the downside. The problem with using loans to buy the asset is that when you're underwater on the loan, you get liquidated. And liquidation makes the downward volatility worse! In other words, the giant volatility swings add significant risk to the loan-based strategies, and the more people doing them make the risk worse, even in the face of the massive profit margins.

Bitcoin volatility is our protection against fiat games taking over. The volatility adds risk, which prevent the loans from being too easily given, making the borrow and buy trade harder. The volatility also clears out the leverage, which ultimately comes from money printing.

Volatility makes the levered players, the privileged players in the fiat system, lose. And that means the normal people, the ones that can't get loans or leverage win.

Volatility is the plebs' protection.


Pain is information. If all you do with it is complain about it, you're missing a massive opportunity to learn.


Of all the qualities of fiat money I hate, perhaps the most hated one is the permissioned nature of it. It's an artificial and unnecessary limitation on property rights.


Nostr may become the gateway to Bitcoin instead of the other way around as it is now.


Churchill was a career politician who stole his peoples' money for the sake of a war that he didn't need to wage.


the ups are slow and the downs are fast

feels like we are shaking out some long term volatility by having more short run volatility


Bitcoin is a tool. You can use it to leave a legacy or to live a hedonistic lifestyle. What you choose depends on your soul.


Remember, whatever you're thinking of buying to celebrate will be cheaper at the end of this bull market. perhaps with as much as a 90% discount.


you going to upgrade your gear? Those Fuji GFX series look pretty tempting.


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #387

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-387


GM, 70k


Bitcoin shows that greed will wreck you.

maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but stay greedy (leveraged) long enough and you will get wrecked.


In a few decades a lot of Bitcoiners will realize that while wealth is nice, the lifestyle changes and virtues gained were the real prize.


I have certain things I buy when BTC price hits a certain point. It's not the most economically rational decision, but a reward for myself for holding. For instance, I got a new hat at $10,000. I'm getting new boots now that it's past $50,000.

At $100,000, I'll get a new bed.

What's your reward?


Which altcoiner will next go to prison?


I've consigned 4 of my physical Bitcoins from my collection for auction at Stack's Bowers. I bought two of them directly from Mike Caldwell back in 2013 right before FinCen shut down his loaded coins business. I can't believe that was 10+ years ago!
https://m.primal.net/Hiaa.png
https://m.primal.net/Hiac.png
https://m.primal.net/Hiae.png
https://m.primal.net/Hiaf.png
https://auctions.stacksbowers.com/auctions/3-18DWT2/spring-2024-auction-session-9-physical-cryptocurrency-part-1-lots-8001-8137?limit=36&coin_grading_service=1-11DOL&coin_grade=1-11DL5+1-11DO4


Political Games Advantage Psychopaths
——————————————————

I went to a talk recently by Arthur Brooks, who's a Harvard Business School professor who teaches about happiness. The talk itself was good in that it gave voice to the wisdom of the ancients. Faith, family, friends and work are the essential ingredients of happiness, according to him.

At the end of the talk, he gave us, the audience a challenge. His analysis was that the dark-triad personalities were responsible for creating much of the unhappiness we see and experience. These are the people with offensive personality traits that include narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. His complaint was that too many of those people are now in control of institutions leading to a great deal of unnecessary and civilization-destroying strife.

I largely agreed that there's a small minority that causes a lot of the evil, but what I wanted to say and didn't get to say due to time constraints is that the current system incentivizes these types of people getting into positions of power. Hence, in my frustration at my not having had a chance to explain my reasoning, I write this essay.

Dark triad personality traits thrive in zero-sum games. Well let me qualify that. They thrive in zero-sum games where there are a lot of players, a lot being larger than Dunbar's number (~150). Under that number, it's hard to get away with dark-triad behavior because there's a collective moral intelligence at work. When in small-ish communities, dark triad traits are weeded out or at least marginalized. But beyond that number, most people know only a relatively small percentage of the people in the group and they instead have to back leaders based on limited information.

And this is where dark triad traits thrive. They are master manipulators and they can win these zero-sum games by doing the unethical. They generally give great first impressions, and only later are they found to be lacking empathy or morals. Sadly, society is currently full of large scale organizations where these dynamics are at play and you can see their operation in almost every institution. And that game has a name: politics, and nearly everything is infected with it.

Put simply, dark triad personalities have a massive advantage in political, zero-sum games and as such, they will be way over-represented in leadership positions. The largeness allows such people to get away with their immoral behavior and creates a lot of opportunities for them.

Sadly, nearly everything is large scale enough where dark triad traits win. Government, business, academia, media, education. It's pretty hard to come up with places where the dark triad traits *don't* have a massive advantage.

Yet there is one area of the economy and and it's small business entrepreneurialism. And no, I'm not talking about VC backed startups. The Silicon Valley VC world is a large institution where political maneuvering matters just as much as government or media and dark triad traits still have a massive advantage as witnessed by Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann and Sam Bankman-Fried. When I say entrepreneurialism, I'm talking about normal small businesses like a deli or a car wash. There's much less politicking there and little room for dark triad personalities to take the reins. The environments are too small and there are not enough places to hide for people like that to win. Positive-sum games like market transactions, give no room for rent-seeking dark triad behaviors. Such behaviors don't work where value has to be provided specifically because of the immediacy of needing to make a profit.

Small businesses are what built civilization. It's only in the last 100 years or so with the advent of central banking that politics and zero-sum games have infected everything. So the question to ask isn't how do we stop these dark triad personalities from getting to the helm of these institutions. The correct question is how do we change the system so politics and zero-sum games are not so prevalent.

And this is where we need to talk about the economic system we are all under. It's way more Marxist than we'd like to believe. Marxism is what creates large political organizations where dark triad traits thrive. These are cancers to civilization and they're unfortunately growing in what were formerly thriving nations.

The 5th plank of the communist manifesto was the control of money by the government. The reason we have the system we have now that's getting closer to Marxism is because of the monetary system.

So to answer the professor's question, the economic system is the reason why dark triad personalities thrive. The permanent average reduction in happiness that he pointed out in 2008 and 2020, were argued to be the result of social media and corona lockdowns. I would argue that they were both massive inflationary events for the world economy. If you study hyperinflation, monetary debasement correlates strongly with unhappiness, probably because people don't like having their stuff taken away from them by inflation or otherwise. I would suggest that this is because monetary debasement adds a lot more zero-sum games giving huge advantages to dark-triad traits, which combined with the concentration/centralization of power which debasement also induces, makes everyone more miserable.

To fix the problem of evil people thriving, we must change the system so it doesn't produce such bloated, inefficient, zero-sum institutions that give evil people so many advantages.


The bad news is that we're down $7000 from the high a few hours ago.

The good news is that we're set up for a God candle.

Also, what's the inverted God candle called?


Do your wives start looking at real estate listings during bull markets?


Collectively, we are more economically significant than all the big orgs. Those who seek mainstream respectability don't really believe that.


Maximalists' Creed

https://m.primal.net/Hhdo.png


Free issue for the first Monday of the month!

Shirky principle, Physical Bitcoins for sale, MSTR speculative attack, re-thinking Bitcoin URIs, Lightning Routing Node profitability, Zaprite Teams and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #386

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-386


Those who seek respectability will neither get respect nor truth.

Those who seek truth will get truth, and perhaps even respect.


Courage is a necessary virtue to be a Bitcoin holder. Not just to hold through the bear markets, but also to resist the FUD that continually comes our way.


Saylor Moon
-----------------

Is a speculative attack on USD coming soon? If it does, it's going to be a crazy sight to see. Every institution that can borrow will and essentially short the dollar by going long Bitcoin. The dollar will begin hyperinflating and there will be a lot of unhappy rent-seekers that will want some blood. It may in the end create calls for a CBDC to control the lending/printing of money, which is currently in the hands of too many banking institutions. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start from the godfather of the speculative attack: Michael Saylor.

For those with assets, loans are really easy to get. In a fiat economy, loans have no opportunity cost so banking institutions are incentivized to lend as much money as possible to qualified borrowers. More loans, more interest payments, more profit. And the rich borrow. A lot. Loans are how Cantillionaires stay rich. They use the newly printed money to invest in all sorts of stuff and as long as their investment returns higher than the minuscule interest rate from the bank, they come out ahead, sometimes my many multiples.

Using these loans to buy Bitcoin is what we can call a speculative attack on the dollar. That's essentially what Michael Saylor has done with every kind of loan he could get. He's used unsecured loans, secured loans, and stock issuance, among other things, to acquire as much Bitcoin as possible. I'm sure he'd take out more loans if he could and I have no doubt in my mind he's looking into more ways to add more to the incredible Bitcoin position he has.

What's going to be even crazier is that he will soon be able to use the Bitcoin itself as collateral. Wall Street isn't that comfortable with this idea yet, but at some point, they're going to because there's too much free money in it for them. And then the real leverage games can begin. He's in deep profit on his Bitcoin position and as the price goes up, there will be more loans available. But at least at the moment, banks aren't loaning out with Bitcoin as collateral just yet.

As such, he has to wait for more stock issuances to buy more Bitcoin. With almost 1% of all BTC in his treasury, there's a lot of demand for his stock and with additional issuances, the market now knows he'll buy more BTC. As a result, he can keep issuing stock and buying Bitcoin this until he's saturated market demand. The result is that MicroStrategy right now trades like a 2x Long Bitcoin ETF.

But here's where it gets fun. What happens when there are more companies besides MicroStrategy that use this strategy? You really just need one more CEO with this level of conviction to take this strategy to the next level. The stock's returns have been so insanely high that some company will mimic it. Heck, even someone that doesn't have a company right now could, perhaps, buy up a small cap stock with some cash on its balance sheet, buy Bitcoin with it and then issue more shares to buy even more Bitcoin. It would be slower, of course, but there's no reason why it won't work. The key is a large cash position and a way to get lots of debt. This hypothetical alternative to MSTR would have to have some differentiation of course, and perhaps they'd use more or less leverage than MSTR.

For that matter, could we see a mining infrastructure company go in this direction? Keep lots of Bitcoin on the balance sheet and use USD loans to mine more. If the treasury is in BTC and the acquisition strategy is mining, then it could very well use its line of credit to become something like MSTR, only a bit more related to energy production.

How about one of these zombie companies? A visionary CEO could turn a zombie company into a living one by making it into a Bitcoin substitute. A company like IBM has lots of assets to get loans with. Use those assets to put Bitcoin on the treasury. It can quickly become another stock that's a store of value. Speaking of which, the reason MSTR is doing so well is because it's taking the store of value premium away from other stocks. Stocks have functioned as a de facto store of value for a long time, the premium is now leaking towards something that holds its value better.

The presence of Bitcoin on the balance sheet turns the store of value premium in these stocks into Bitcoin substitutes. And it really won't take many companies to do these things for the entire market to expand USD and complete the monetization of Bitcoin.


I was pretty confused when I read the headline nostr:npub1az9xj85cmxv8e9j9y80lvqp97crsqdu2fpu3srwthd99qfu9qsgstam8y8

https://m.primal.net/HgaS.png


Work on yourself. When bitcoin goes up, you don't want to be like the people who win the lottery and subsequently ruin their lives.

It takes virtue to handle significant wealth.


I worry that most of us won't be able to handle $500k BTC.


Clean up your tabs.


A split that seems inevitable: Woke vs. Based


lots of people that are not ready for the red pill. Not just Bitcoin, but everything else.


Time in the market, not time the market.

Every time you trade out, you're removing time that you could be holding Bitcoin.


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #385

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-385


Bad money corrupts good character.


slow and steady organic growth will win over debt funded fragile sales.

that's why Nostr will win


We're being gaslit to believe that the problems we have are unsolvable.

They are completely solvable. But that would remove rent-seekers from their positions, so the solvable problems don't get solved.


Free product idea:

Nostr mail.

Provide an email relay for Nostr, but filter out any spam before encrypting to the public key of the recipient and provide a way to send to a normal email address from your Nostr messages but add something that lets the recipient sign up for private messages, too.


If you want to be popular, Bitcoin is not for you.

If you want to be invited to the right parties, Bitcoin is not for you.

If you want to influence the hoity-toity, Bitcoin is not for you.

If you want to climb the status ladder, Bitcoin is not for you.

If you want respect from the establishment, Bitcoin is not for you.

But if you want self-sovereignty, Bitcoin is for you.


Debt debases property rights
-----------------------------------------

Debt is weird. You borrow something against some collateral you have and return that something, usually with interest later on. Technically speaking, debt is a displacement of money over time, allowing you to bring consumption forward. What's weird about it isn't the mechanism, but what happens with the collateral.

The collateral is something you own and by putting that up against what you're borrowing, it's not really "owned" by you anymore, but rather shared. There's a debt contract where you own the collateral if you pay back what you owe, or the lender owns the collateral if you don't. It's like Schrodinger's cat, but with property. The ownership of the collateral doesn't resolve until the debt is settled through repayment or default. And since the debt settlement is in the future, the property rights around the collateral are in an in-between, uncertain state in the present.

Now I'm not writing about possession or property rights in the legal sense. Various jurisdictions have different rules about who controls the collateral during the time of the debt. For mortgages, the borrower gets use out of the house, for pawning, the store takes possession during the duration of the loan. That's a practical question and the rules differ. When I say that debt is weird, I'm talking more about the metaphysical property right. Whose is the collateral?

It's a bit of a tangled web because both parties have some claim to it. It's not entirely owned by one party or the other during the duration of the loan, and it's that ambiguity that debases the collateral in question. Suppose, for instance, that during the duration of the loan, the collateral is exploited in some way as to reduce its value so that it no longer covers the cost of the loan. This very well may be the economically rational thing to do if the borrower plans to default.

Take for example an auto loan. The borrower can use the car as an Uber during the months it takes for the bank to repossess it to earn money while depreciating the value of the car. Similarly, a person with an underwater mortgage may use the place to host events and trash the place while not making payments.

In other words, the lack of clarity around who owns what makes for bad incentives. Of course, this is exacerbated in a fiat monetary system as debt, particularly collateralized debt, is ubiquitous. The debt printed out of nothing decreases the incentives to take care of property that ends up as collateral.

In other words, debt, especially fiat debt, debases the things society finds most valuable, particularly as the debt goes bad and default becomes imminent. Of course, there are many debts that are repaid and collateral remains pristine. But those are situations where the loan plays out as expected, that is, the collateral stays at or increases in value. When the unexpected disasters happen, particularly when it's at the macro-economic level, the mechanism of fiat debt ends up destroying way more value than simple possession.

Which brings us to the many different debt mechanisms in the Bitcoin space. The more I study it, the more I'm convinced that adding debt mechanisms is generally not a good idea. I think it's fine for two consenting parties to do a debt contract. But complicated "DeFi" solutions all end up in weird places because of the lack of possession. There usually ends up with some trusted party that abuses the collateral in their possession and we get disasters like 3AC, FTX, DCG and Celsius.

As Hoppe says, all rights are property rights. Let's not debase it in some degenerates' quest to play more financial games.


Gut feeling is that BM's July conference will debase the brand even more than it already has.

Lots of VCs pumping ordinals/BRC-20/inscriptions that will find that Bitcoiners just aren't interested.


I wish the media would put as big a microscope on the deep state as they do El Salvador.


People that matter for Bitcoin, roughly in order of importance:

Diamond Hands
People that help people get through bear markets without selling
People that explain Bitcoin's store of value function well
Core Devs
Infrastructure Devs
Miners
Privacy Advocates
Wallet Makers
People that combat FUD
Exchange Operators
Conference Organizers
...
Degens
...
Paper Hands
Marketers
VCs
Shitcoin on Bitcoin advocates
Shitcoiners


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https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-384


Non-technical people are gullible about technical stuff.
Mainstream economics people are gullible about economics stuff.

The worst combination is the mainstream economics non-technical people that think they know stuff when really, they haven't verified anything and use all sorts of manipulated substitutes for real knowledge.

And yes, I'm describing most VCs.


When do you think Bitcoin Market Cap exceeds the Federal Deficit?


Just saw an M2 Pro laptop for $1200 at Costco. I was thinking about upgrading, but then I realized, if I just wait, it'll be cheaper in BTC by a factor of 2 or more by the end of the year.

Bitcoin helps so much with self-control.


Most people's spiritual states are so bad that they feel the need to alter it with alcohol, sugar, porn, weed, psychedelics and shopping/consumption.


Pushups >> Laser eyes

But not many posting videos...


I talked to Alex Voss and Marthinus Gobler about Free Private Cities, their history and their potential for  BItcoiners. We discussed Special Economic  Zones, Honduras's ZEDEs like Prospera and much more.

#Bitcoin Fixes This #120

https://rumble.com/v4cyf6z-bitcoin-fixes-this-120-free-private-cities-with-alex-voss-and-marthinus-gob.html


Did you know the two major parties in El Salvador conspired to keep Bukele off the presidential race in 2019? It was only through some clever legal manuevering that Bukele managed to get on the ballot and win decisively.

Funny how few human rights groups or US politicians even know about this.

Success breeds a lot of criticism, especially by those that have something to lose.


We’re back with a new episode of the Relai Podcast! Today’s guest is nostr:npub10vlhsqm4qar0g42p8g3plqyktmktd8hnprew45w638xzezgja95qapsp42

nostr:npub1c4m30mr6dteqhqm2j35zs22gms9dhfjdxz4lks9233nxfh0relrs555akf and Jimmy spoke about:

🔷Why Bitcoin needs more educators

🔷How rigged the fiat monetary system is

🔷Why you should start a Bitcoin business

https://youtu.be/HDbKNrwxXQw?feature=shared


The Coming VC Crisis
—————————

VCs have had it good for a long time. Their business model of getting 2% in fees every year and 20% of the returns on the money has been extremely lucrative. There have been a lot of VC "successes" that have driven their returns and it seems like there are new VC funds being found every week.

But beneath the surface, there's a storm brewing. The returns just aren't what they used to be. There was a run in the 90's and 2000's where a single hit would be enough to propel your fund into the stratosphere. A Google or a Facebook in your portfolio was enough to make your fund very profitable.

More recently, there was the ICO/token craze which got VCs insane returns, mostly by scamming retail. These were unheard of exits which were sometimes many multiples in just 6 to 12 months. These were very profitable for a while, but of course, all unsustainable things must come to an end, and we've seen it the last few years. The last two major VC-driven tokens, WorldCoin and BitClout have done horribly and most of these "crypto" funds are underwater.

The problem is that there's way too much demand. That is, there are too many VC funds chasing after too few startups. This is unsurprising in a world of fiat money since there's no opportunity cost for money and as fiat money continually gets printed, a lot of that money finds its way to VC funds. Got a $50M asset? You can get a loan for $40M using that asset as collateral and invest some of that in a VC fund. That loan money, of course, comes from nothing and is printed into existence. So there's essentially a fast growing supply of money whereas the supply of startups is more or less steady, especially as many either die or graduate to being bigger companies.

As a result, we've had the phenomenon of startups getting crazy valuations as there was so much newly printed money chasing a pretty small supply. Higher interest rates more recently have meant that there's been less money printing, and thus less money has been flowing into VC firms. Hence, there was a bit of a correction on startup valuations, but as we all know, this is a temporary situation. There's about to be a lot more money printing and much of it will flow into venture capital. So why am I arguing that VCs are soon going to face a crisis? Doesn't more money printing mean more VC money?

The startup ecosystem isn't what it was 20 years ago. There are fewer and fewer superstar companies like Amazon and Google. The "successes" of the last few years like Lyft and Coinbase haven't fared well in the public markets. Retail knows that they're getting dumped on. The startups coming to market who are supposedly disrupting things aren't really profitable, and that means they're not getting great exits.

What's happening is that the fiat system's natural protectionism of incumbents is hitting up against the money being poured into startups. The abundance of money has made these startups less and less like real businesses and more and more like market playthings. Startups now are less healthy than startups from 20 years ago because they've been coddled by too much money. At the same time, the top firms in the economy are being protected by the fiat system, whether through subsidies or cooperating with intel agencies, they've found ways to build regulatory moats around their businesses. There simply isn't that much room left at the top.

Naturally, this means that VC funds are making less money because successful exits are getting harder. More of them are underwater and the returns for LPs are getting worse and worse.

Then, there's Bitcoin, which has beaten the returns of most VC funds. As more people use Bitcoin as savings, the prospect of putting money into a VC fund looks less and less attractive. The returns that VCs are getting just isn't cutting it and the newly printed money has a much better savings vehicle in Bitcoin.

And that means we'll soon get to a point where many VC firms will no longer be able to raise funds. And that's a good thing. Venture capital is a bloated ecosystem that has gotten fat on fiat money and has largely been able to avoid reality for a long time. A closer alignment with reality, that is profit, is going to make for better companies in the end.

In other words, the long term prospects of venture capital look grim because smart money is headed toward Bitcoin.


Twitter discovery is hard. Nostr discovery is even harder because the calculations involved are not trivial in a decentralized context.

But I think people would be willing to pay for a better experience and this is where clients could differentiate themselves.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #383

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-383


Congrats to Taylor Swift.


Over the long term decentralized will always beat centralized because centralized has a finite lifespan.


First principles thinking is hard and takes time. It's real work.

Visual substitutes and proxies of information are easy and take little to no time. It's fake work. It's meaningless trust in authority.

Bitcoin is the former, fiat is the latter.


Looking forward to listening


I swear, every company is trying to be a SaaS player now. They'd rather rent stuff to you than to sell stuff.

This is, at a deep level, what it means to own nothing.


The Nationalization of the Work Force
—————————

The economic numbers, like unemployment, inflation and GDP, are getting gamed. Layoffs are being offset by government hiring. Slowdown in the economy is being offset by government spending. No one in the actual economy wants to spend, so the government is counter-balancing it with spending of its own.

As interest rates rise and all the economic health indicators look increasingly horrible, the short-term Keynesian band-aids are being applied. After all, politicians have to *do something*, lest they be accused of not caring. This is, of course, an excellent example of high time preference behavior. Politicians really only worry about the next election and long-term consequences be damned! So what if government keeps growing? So what if inflation destroys peoples' savings? So what if the private sector mal-investment never has a chance to clear out? The game is to keep things the same so that they can get re-elected and they can always dip into the cookie jar of inflation to fund it.

In the short term, this is a very understandable strategy. Creating government jobs not only makes the unemployment numbers look better, but it also has the nice side effect of making those that get these jobs way more statist. These are not people that are going to vote for a reduction of government, they have strong financial incentives to never do that. And spending on unnecessary wars to prop up defense contractors? You think those people would ever vote for less spending?

The divide right now is not between liberals and conservatives. The divide is between the rent-seekers and productive people. And as currently comprised, it's about 50/50. And it's not who you think that's on the productive side. Sure, obvious groups like government employees, media and even the military, educational and health care industrial complexes are very obviously on the rent-seeking side, but there are others that you may think are productive but are not. Big tech, for example, is overwhelmingly on the rent-seeking statist side. The war-mongerers are on the statist side.

The productive people are the middle and lower class people that haul away your garbage and fix your AC and deliver your packages. And as the populace re-aligns, the productive people are correctly calling out the uniparty as the party that wants to keep the rent-seeking going.

There's only so much you can steal from the productive people before there's a revolution. But this is where the infinite pool of money that the central bank can draw from becomes the tool to tip the balance. You can co-opt the productive people by giving them government jobs. And make no mistake, that's exactly the strategy being executed right now. The public sector is growing fast, even as the private sector shrinks. They are nationalizing the work force so that voters are dependent on the state. And honestly, it's not that far from socialism. If 100% employment by the state is socialism, then we're about half-way there, roughly speaking.

But this strategy has consequences. As more people come on the government payroll, either through direct payment, as with government employees, or through subsidization of industries, the money to pay them has to come from somewhere. If it's explicit taxes, that will get the politicians voted out real quick, so it's not really an option. Inflation, on the other hand, is great because it's a stealth tax and there's plausible deniability by blaming greedy corporations and so forth.

But inflation debases savings and soon, people can't afford to live on their old salary. Not least of this is the bloating public sector, whose salaries tend to adjust last. Thus, there quickly becomes a large and powerful lobby of government workers who will demand raises. And this creates a major dilemma for those in power. Do you give them raises and exacerbate inflation, or do you deny them raises and get voted out of power? The high time preference nature of politicians almost guarantees the former outcome. But then, that extra money adds inflationary pressure to the economy. This may hold things off for a bit, but the bigger the public sector, the faster prices in the rest of the economy increase. Inflation becomes a problem again. Soon, the government employees, stronger now, perhaps as a larger constituency and having a precedent to work with, will again demand raises.

Raises -> Inflation -> Raises -> Inflation -> …

The only end here is hyperinflation and that's not pretty.

I'm not going to suggest that it's around the corner, but as Caesar once said, "aleta iacta est" or "the die has been cast." The expansion of the public sector is inevitable and thus, so is inflation and eventually hyperinflation.


I talked to @AaronvanW about his new book, The Genesis Book. This was a fun conversation about economics, hacker culture and the Cypherpunks, the pre-history of Bitcoin, if you will.

#Bitcoin Fixes This #119

https://rumble.com/v4biplw-bitcoin-fixes-this-119-cypherpunk-origins-with-aaron-van-wirdum.html


The people with no stake in the future, the ones without any children, should not get to make them pay for their excesses now.


Lawfare has to be one of the most fiat things imaginable.


VCs like to act like they're expert consultants on everything from marketing to capital management. In reality, that's all a smokescreen to hide the fact that they're money middlemen. They take money from LPs and distribute them to startups, which is what banks used to do.

You can get better and more objective consulting services from people that aren't trying to fatten you up like a commercial pig.


Free issue for the first Monday of the month!

Citation Cartels, Fauxductivity, VC redux, non-standard TXs, LN Offline Payments, Tether Profits and much more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #382

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-382


//another
Thriller 🟠 drop

Bitcoin talk with Jimmy Song

Car talks with nostr:npub10vlhsqm4qar0g42p8g3plqyktmktd8hnprew45w638xzezgja95qapsp42, a renowned Bitcoin dev, educator, and entrepreneur. They discuss the ethical dimensions of the monetary system, scaling bitcoin, venture capital and building sustainable, debt-free businesses.

🪂 topics discussed:

• capital factory
• 2021
• rite of passage
• og
• thank god
• education
• 2017
• devs
• programming
• books
• o'reilly
• sprints
• on writing
• l2
• scaling
• necessity
• synergy
• custodians
• incentives
• vc's
• manage money
• invest
• startups
• talking investments
• builders
• lp's
• scaling debt
• dividends
• alienating startups
• nic carter
• kingmakers
• two exits
• group think
• allocation
• deal flow
• merit
• building from savings
• product market fit
• ephesians
• generational continuity
• jimmy's suds
• debt free

//Thriller ep

📀zap via fountain: https://fountain.fm/show/6Na2tAjoNr9lZxpPAH25

📀rss via transistor:
https://share.transistor.fm/s/a2fb0185

📀subscribe to the zine:
https://www.thrillerbitcoin.com/thriller-zine

📰 THRILLER ZINE – 04 FEBRUARY 2024 – PUB VIEW →
https://www.thrillerbitcoin.com/bitcoin-talk-with-jimmy-song/

⚡Follow the conversation for the ep on Stacker News.
https://stacker.news/items/412210/r/Car


Anything that promises "passive income" is ultimately a rent-seeking job.


You're actually not going far enough. I've been in 13 startups, all VC funded with two public exits. I've done due diligence for VCs. I've connected a lot of startups to VCs in the past. I've done angel investing. I know the ecosystem. I've been in it.

So what? The fact that I've participated in the past means that I can't criticize it or point out the evil in it? The fact that I was involved is exactly why I can speak to its fiat rent-seeking woke idiocy.

I went to university. I still rail against their fiat rent-seeking woke idiocy.
I used health insurance. I still rail against their fiat rent-seeking woke idiocy.
I have a bank account. I still rail against their fiat rent-seeking woke idiocy.
I use Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon products. I still rail against their fiat rent-seeking woke idiocy.

If you can't see the substance of my argument and want to just defame me, I can't help you.


Painful Truth:

We need more normal businesses that integrate Bitcoin than Bitcoin businesses that are creating yet another wallet/exchange/mining facility.

The former is what you'd call a traditional business, the latter is a VC funded business, which is largely running on fiat. We don't need more speculative companies that are still trying to find product/market fit that gets them profit. We need more businesses that really provide value.


Saying what you really think is not something most people are used to. If they get there at all, it's toward the end of life.

The Overton Window is oppressive and unnatural.


Bad takes always come from mental gymnastics to justify in-group values.

That, in turn comes from playing status games ascend the hierarchy of your group.

The ability to let go of your need for popularity is a super power.


most people are uncomfortable with politically incorrect truths.

that's what we call a security hole.


For those asking:

Unhook - disables recommended videos for YouTube
Control Panel for Twitter - disables the "For You" tab, trending, etc.


On Providing Value
———————

How can we tell if transactions "provide value"?

The assumption from an Austrian economics standpoint is that any voluntary transaction is value-providing because each party believes the trade will satisfy some subjective need or want. So for example, OnlyFans is a value-providing transaction because both parties do what they do willingly and do so in the belief that they will get value.

Yet practically speaking, there's something weird about this. There are lots of voluntary transactions that don't provide value, perhaps significantly subtract value. Gambling, for example or other addictions (drugs, porn, etc) where one party is making a lot of money from the addicted person does not seem value-adding at all. How do we account for this? Is there some hidden fraud in these transactions? Or can we add some other principle by which we can tell if a transaction is value-providing?

The first thing to notice about these transactions is that they have high time preference behavior around them. There's at least one party that's being especially impulsive. A lot of mobile games, for example, rely on addictive, impulsive behavior to make money and they have more of the sucker-swindler relationship. The dynamic shares much more with rent-seeking or fraud than, say, someone paying for an Uber ride.

Yet the libertarian norm is considering anything voluntary to be value-adding. But is trading of fentanyl by an addict and dealer really a value-providing transaction? Common sense says no, yet subjectively, both parties wanted to do the transaction, so what's the problem? Is subjective evaluation of the benefits of trade enough to determine whether it's value-adding?

This is not an idle question. The British got a lot of resources from China by getting them addicted to opium. That would seem at some level nasty and unfair, that people were in some way tricked.

In other words, there has to be some expansion of the definition of fraud to align our definition of providing value to practical experience. Does selling drugs to an addict provide value? Subjective value says if it's done voluntarily it is. Can fraud be defined precisely enough that we can align our intuition that such trades don't provide value? This is the gap through which much evil is justified. We seek here to close that gap.

What's the character of these problematic trades? First, the person buying doesn't have self-control. There's little personal responsibility and the trade is made under some personal distress. Clearly, such buyers don't have low enough time preference and we could leave it at that, but it's unsatisfactory because these people are hurting themselves. Many such actions like that are clearly detrimental and value-subtracting. Suicide is clearly detrimental, for example, and is essentially a transaction with yourself.

And this is where we get a little more intuition about what's value-adding. The obviously bad transactions are done by people committing violence to themselves.

Please don't misunderstand where I'm going with this. I'm not using some concept of violence against ourselves as the justification for government tyranny, by saying that they are protecting you from yourself. I'm only saying that we should acknowledge that some people do commit violence to themselves and that this is not a good thing or a value-adding thing.

Should we be preventing people from committing violence to themselves? That's a much harder question, because doing so may infringe on their human rights. But you can condemn the people selling this stuff as if it's something good. They are committing fraud in how they present their goods and/or services.

Indeed, that's what's been happening. The people with the profit motive are getting angry, because they don't like other people interfering with their sales with moral condemnation which is really bad publicity. But this is the normal consequence of bad behavior. You get condemnation by third parties. That doesn't mean third parties should now suddenly be trusted, but we need more information in the market, not less.

Now, some behavior that is condemned by one group may not be considered bad by another. This is where we get some subjectiveness to morality. And this is where we also get a lot of righteous indignation. But there is another dimension, particularly of violence to yourself that need explaining. Not everything voluntary provides value.


I've eliminated the recommended list from my YouTube and the "For You" tab from Twitter using some browser extensions. I'm finding that it's emptying my digital house of junk food.


For free subscribers: Marshmallow test v2, Fertility rates, Food sweeteners, Bitcoin inheritance and more!

For paid subscribers: btcd consensus bug, Mutiny DLCs, Discount Window games and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #381

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-381


Taylor Swift is what every woman wants to be. Rich, successful, young looking with a high status boyfriend.

A healthy society would pity her lack of husband and children, condemn her failing to mature and be repulsed by her addiction to fame.


The world would be healthier with no VCs


Rare sats and ordinals in general are an attack on Bitcoin's liquidity.


I talked to Anthony Park, Estate Lawyer about the ins and outs of Bitcoin inheritance:

https://rumble.com/v48t23c-bitcoin-fixes-this-118-bitcoin-inheritance-with-anthony-park.html


Behind every fiat scumbag is a greedy banker.


Ordinals have Nikki Haley vibes.


The people pushing for drivechains, the people defending ordinals, the people wanting changes all seem to run together.


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #380

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-380


It's funny how many people with BDS go on to become friends with each other.

There's a deep human need to be well thought of by others and most of these people are so deeply offended by their lack of status in the Bitcoin community and so in need of being at the top of the status hierarchy that they willingly believe in stupid things to get allies.

Understandable, but their "principled" stand doesn't pass even cursory examination.


Imagine how profitable most businesses would be if you just eliminated the income tax.

There's a reason why companies were so much more profitable during the Golden Age.


# Fiat Games on Bitcoin

There's a saying about standing armies in peacetime, it's generally not a good idea. Wartime emergencies are one thing, but when you have a standing army during peacetime, they generally just get in the way because, like most armies, they crave action.

If you have a perfectly virtuous military, perhaps having a standing army is fine, but given the flaws of the human condition, there's bound to be some trouble. Many a revolution started with standing armies that felt disrespected and seized power when they could.

I mention this because this dynamic is at play in the Bitcoin ecosystem, where a bunch of bored holders are starting to make trouble. They identified as Bitcoin Maximalist even as recently as a few years ago, yet got off the rails, pushing all sorts of idiocy like this ordinals/brc-20 stuff.

The problem with these people is that they crave action. They can't just sit back and enjoy the ride. They're the type that needs to always be doing something, good or bad. And let's face it, once you get that Bitcoin is sound money and have given your pitch to your friends and relatives, it's a matter of waiting things out and watching your fiat enemies float by the proverbial river. I've been in those conversations, they go around the same topics over and over again.

As a result, these people feast on news. Wow, Michael Saylor did something, or there's an ETF coming, or X or Y or Z is happening. They're all addicted to talking and rallying the troops and once you're bored of talking about the things that matter, there's a natural tendency to talk about the things that don't matter as if they were.

I blame the BUIDL movement that emphasized building something, anything. It's an understandable attitude. Surely, doing *something* is better than doing *nothing*, right?

This is the error that every politician makes and it's high time preference behavior. X just happened and so you have to do something to react, *right now*. Or Y is a problem so you do something to "solve" it. The problem with these actions is that they're usually not well thought out and good actions, the ones that provide value, require some planning and research. But for the people with the BUIDL mindset, they just go and make something regardless of whether there's a need in the market or not. And the people addicted to action love this stuff because it's new.

I'm old enough to remember the 2008 crisis and the $800B TARP bailout that came along with it. The idea was that there would be lots of "economic activity" in the form of "shovel-ready projects." 16 years later, there's very little in terms of real, useful stuff that got built from the program. Most of that money ended up in slush funds and the coffers of the Cantillon winners who magically doubled or tripled their billions in the decade or so since.

That mindset of "build whatever" is a fiat mentality. It's not "if you build it, they will come." There has to be value being added to real people and not just a good story about what's possible. And that's what we're seeing in the Bitcoin community. There's a lot of VC money floating around still and they'll put money into anything with a good story, even if it makes little sense.

The fact is, VC investment is a fiat vestige that's horribly inefficient. And the incentives around it are deeply misaligned. The VCs, even the good ones, will pump their bags. And once invested, it's very hard for them to be objective about anything and takes superhuman amounts of virtue to do what's good for Bitcoin and not for your fund. You'd hope those things are aligned, but every VC inevitably gets into the situation where they have to invest in something questionable.

And invest in questionable things they have. This has been going on since 2013 or so with "investments" on "blockchain technology" and "ICOs" and "DAOs" and "DeFi" and "NFTs" and on and on and on. They may not even be explicitly looking to scam, but that is what they inevitably do. The pump and dump nature of tokens is such that they benefit the early pre-sale investors at the cost of the public, though to a large degree, this no longer has the returns it once had.

The flavor of the day is ordinals/brc-20 and unsurprisingly, a lot of VCs, even "Bitcoin-only" VCs, are invested in one or two already. That's because this is their model. They have to invest in a lot of stuff because their hit rate is so low. And diversification necessarily means you let the foxes into your henhouse. The "investment" ends up enriching scammers like the TARP bailouts did and the stuff that gets built ends up being largely useless.

And really, that's who is addicted to action the most. It's the VCs. Unsatisfied with Bitcoin's insane returns (or lacking justification for their fund in lieu of Bitcoin's existence), they talk and talk and talk on clubhouse and twitter spaces and whatnot to pump their bags. Even if they don't have bags to push, they're always talking openly to people about what investments they should make. And because they are looking for places to put money, they become much less objective and will fall for anything with a good story.

Investing in a good story is not a bad strategy in the fiat world. The narrative wins over things that provide value as long as there's an overwhelming amount of money put in on the narrative side. And the money printer is ultimately run by humans who will put resources toward good stories because there's no hard reality of the market to deal with. In other words, you often don't have to win the market. You can win it later with some money-printer-induced advantages.

But in Bitcoin, things are a little different. We have to be a lot more choosy about what gets built because what fails is a lot of wasted time and resources. Worse, that which gets built which ends up scamming wastes even more time and resources and sets Bitcoin further back. The entire altcoin industrial complex and the billions wasted on them since 2011 are the vestiges of this build-anything mindset.

Building has been very inefficient in the fiat world and unfortunately, we're having to re-learn what it means to build something that provides value.

Back during the gold standard, Standard Oil once paid 33% in dividends in a single year. That's not price appreciation or profits, that's dividends, as in money that went straight to the shareholders in a single year. And that's not a huge outlier. Most years, they paid over 10% in dividends.

Nothing like that exists now because all profitable stuff has been arbed to death. Anything that profitable gets "investment" (read: debt) which ultimately scales the business but reduces profitability. Most businesses these days are zombies, living out a dead existence while sucking value out from everyone else through inflationary theft. And unsurprisingly, that is the state in which most altcoins currently continue.

Which brings me back to the issue of Bitcoin culture. The problem right now is that too many people build on Bitcoin the same way they build on fiat. They play by the same rules and systems which have caused the stagnation we see all around us. But as we're progressing toward a sound money world, these processes and the fiat games that they run on won't work. The building that people do will have to run on a different set of *values*, not the fiat ones like satisfying venture capital with good stories.

The sad thing is that most people would rather do something rather than nothing. The lesson of the last 11 years in Bitcoin is that building something that is hurtful is worse than useless, it's better to do nothing.


It's going to be yet another few years of waiting by the river to see the corpses of my enemies float by.

A whole lot more scamming starting that will have some serious repercussions going forward.


Is there any project that lets you zap on Nostr using Cashu/Fedi/Mercury/Liquid?

I think it'd be pretty ideal for testing the microtransactions use case for each of those L2's


Fiat world: seeking approval of authorities is the key to getting a rent-seeking job

Bitcoin world: making stuff people want is the key to making money

This is the difference in a nutshell.


I've been exploring FROST and it's pretty ideal for a t-of-n multisig for Nostr. Has anyone done anything like that? I would imagine this would be ideal for any sort of organization account that can change hands without changing the underlying secret.


For free subscribers: Shinzo's Murder, Occupy's Legacy, eBay behaving badly, Capetown and more!

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #379

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-379


On Lincoln
----------------

Lincoln wasn't a good president. He wasn't even a mediocre president. He was a terrible president. He suspended individual rights. He massively expanded the government through money printing. He led millions of people to their deaths. All for power.

What we learn in school is that he was the great emancipator, ending slavery and winning a war that had to be won. That he was some man of genius and virtue, thrust upon the national stage at the right time to progress history.

Such is the result of the history being written by the winners. Similar hagiographies have been written about FDR and even Woodrow Wilson. But like the news, much of history is spun to manipulate us. Most of conventional history is fake and even a cursory study of what actually happened is enough to make you question how virtuous they were, and why they made the decisions they did. Almost always, you find that they were opportunistic cowards that did what would cost them least, even at the expense of the people they affected.

History is a tricky topic because the counterfactuals are always very speculative. But what we can judge is the values played out in actions taken, and in that sense, Lincoln was pretty terrible. He suspended habeas corpus, he cheated in border state elections to keep them in the union, and he massively, massively expanded the scope, power and size of government through inflationary theft.

It's hard to imagine what things were like before Lincoln, because before him, was a string of single-term Jacksonian, hard-money Democrat presidents. This was back when liberal meant being for personal liberty and that era of government before 1860 was insanely small, about 2% of the GDP. He would oversee an unprecedented expansion which would take the government to 20%.

Much of it, was, of course, because of the Civil War, and the popular narrative is that he needed to wage that war to end slavery. And yes, the issue was a major one in that era, but the elimination of slavery was more of a lucky by-product than an aim. His main goal, as he stated over and over again and as acted out in his policies, was to preserve the union, not to end slavery.

In preserving the union, he destroyed the idea that states had the right of secession, he weakened the idea of natural rights and he stole through inflation and sent many to their deaths. The centralizing of the federal government, the behemoth that we live with today began during his heyday.

The main thing that preserved his legacy was his assassination. Had a couple of battles gone the wrong way in 1863 and 1864, he wouldn't have been re-elected and he would have disappeared into the annals of history as a political amateur that lucked into the presidency in 1860 and screwed things up for 4 years. Instead, he was re-elected, assassinated and the horrific legacy of reconstruction was blamed on others. In short, he died at the right time.

There are those, of course, that will argue that Lincoln would have done things differently, and that he would have been more merciful to the south and rebuilt things as to spare them the suffering. But that's inconsistent with everything he did. Like most politicians he was a power grabber and he did what was politically expedient and not what was virtuous or right. He suspended habeas corpus (needing a reason to arrest and detain people)! He made generals do what would make him look good so he would get elected, not what would save the most lives or win the war the quickest. He created the greenback, which was a form of money printing to finance the war. And he spent an insane sum of other peoples' money through implicit and explicit taxes to "preserve the union."

Ending slavery, of course, was a big deal and in the annals of history, it's a dark mark in the history of the US that the institution survived so long. And yes, the Civil War did end it, but that wasn't the objective of the war itself.

Being Republican, he had a large Radical wing that he had to deal with and they wanted abolition, and later full voting rights for blacks. Because the south had seceded, they had the votes to pass the constitutional amendments, though only toward the end of the war when it was clear the north would win. That was a political expediency that ended up defining his legacy. But really, it's his biographers and historians of the winning side that have spun him to be a hero, when he was anything but.

The big flaw of Lincoln is that he created an unnecessary war that cost millions of lives and billions of dollars, one that set back the US by decades. Letting the south secede and revoking the Fugitive Slave Act would have ended the institution just as well, for much less cost. And this isn't idle speculation. Brazil had the second largest slave population in the 19th century that was whittled down quickly because the slaves had northern provinces where they could escape. The price of slaves dropped dramatically and soon, the institution itself was destroyed through economic means, not martial ones.

What's worse about Lincoln's legacy is that he set a precedent for federal power that brought forth the progressive era and eventually to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The centralization of federal power began with him.

Lincoln wasn't a good president. But the history is written by the winners and they have made a secular saint out of him.


So the ETF disappointment was from the GBTC unwind which were the result of 3AC and others making leveraged bets. That makes a lot of sense to me. Still some paying for the sins of altcoins, I guess.