Because the alternative is being a bitch.
Every time I don't do something I'm supposed to do, I lose a little bit of my self-respect and confidence.
It's all downstream from there - maybe I won't ask a girl out, maybe I won't present my new idea at work, maybe I won't ask for a pay raise.
I often ask myself "What will really fail me in life?", "What will really make me miserable and full of regret?", "If I continue on this path, where will I be in 5 years? 10 years?".
I never got into watching Tony Robins and all these con artists that charge insane amounts for seminars.
What does it for me is - what is the fucking alternative. And I've come to the conclusion that the pain of not doing the thing I'm supposed to do far exceeds the pain of doing the thing.
I just discovered the psychologist Robert Cialdini and he's brilliant.
Highly recommend you check him out if you're interested in the psychology of persuasion, influence and ethics.
Lots of stuff from him on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO4RC70qU1U
After 2140, no new Bitcoin will be issued which means that the amount of new bitcoins in each block drops to 0 BTC.
Miners will only get paid via transaction fees.
The #Bitcoin subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks.
The initial subsidy was 50 bitcoins per block or 5 billion satoshis (there are 100 million satoshis in each Bitcoin).
The current subsidy is 3.125 bitcoins per block.
You can calculate the number of #Bitcoin halvings that have occurred by dividing the current block height by the halving interval (210,000).
For example, if the current block height is 846735 / 210,000 = 4.03 halvings.
Where the block height of a block is the number of blocks preceding it in the blockchain.
The 210,000 constant is the number of blocks between two halvings.
A new block is mined approximately every 10 minutes.
AI and robotics are bullish for UBI.
The only reason we are going to need UBI is because central banks don't allow for prices of goods and services to fall.
This is the best case scenario for governments as it maximizes their power, control over citizens and dependence.
In #Bitcoin, there's this thing called the difficulty adjustment.
As more and more hashrate comes onto the network, the difficulty is increased, so it becomes harder to win the block reward.
The goal is for each block to be mined approximately every 10 minutes, regardless of how much hash rate there is.
In fiat world, the rate of inflation is the difficulty adjustment.
As more and more currency is printed into existence, it becomes harder and harder to preserve your purchasing power.
The goal is for the majority of people to be stuck in an infinite rat race to nowhere, so they don't have time to question the policies of their government.
The number of Bitcoins produced between July 2016 and May 2020 was 210,000 * 12.5 = 2,625,000
The number of Bitcoins produced between May 2020 and April 2024 is 210,000 * 6.25 = 1,312,500
The number of Bitcoins produced between April 2024 and the next halving is = 210,000 * 3.125 = 656,250
There are 210,000 blocks between each halving (approximately 4 years).
The number of bitcoins produced will continue to be halved every 4 years.
This calculation excludes the fees which cannot be calculated in advance.
"The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once you see Bitcoin, you can never unsee it.
The average person is busy buying things he doesn't want with money he doesn't have to impress people he doesn't like.
This doesn't apply to the average Bitcoiner.
Your above average financial advisor's explanation of #Bitcoin:
Start playing video at 47:27 if it doesn't automatically.
https://youtu.be/wKv0gqXc5_M?t=2847
A 7 million times multiple... What in the actual fuck.
I've been reading a lot of books this year, however, not all of them have been insightful.
A hack I found is to google "<Author's name> quotes" and see if they've come up with interesting stuff before engaging in the author's book.
Reading someone's quotes (especially a philosopher) is like watching an MMA fighter's highlights. You get a very good idea whether you should pursue their books or pass.
This ends up saving me a lot of time in picking the right authors and books.
It is more important to use your mind to think than to use it as a warehouse for facts.
School and Uni mostly force you into the latter, and that's assuming your school is not propaganda-programmed.
Google manually sets boolean properties such as `isCovidLocalAuthority` and `isElectionAuthority` to determine who is a Covid authority and Election authority... Nothing wrong with that.
In hyperinflation, a kilo of potatoes was worth to some more than the family silver.
A side of pork more than the grand piano.
A prostitute in the family was better than an infant corpse.
Theft was preferable to starvation.
Warmth was finer than honor.
Clothing more essential than democracy.
Food more needed than freedom.
---
Quote from the book "When money dies".
Cathy 🪵 is right.
However, when you buy her or any of the other #Bitcoin ETFs you are still subject to confiscation and counter-party risk, so make sure to own the real thing.
The book "When Money Dies" is very depressing because of similarities that can be drawn.
Quote from the book:
- "Even the most respectable of Austrian citizens now breaks the law, unless he is prepared to starve for the sake of obeying it."
Context: A lady was advised to exchange her Austrian kronen to Swiss francs to not get robbed by inflation but she refused because it was illegal.
Then the Austrian krone hyper-inflated and she got rekt.
The bank employee who previously told her to convert then said: "Well, wasn't I right? If you had bought Swiss francs when I suggested, you wouldn't have lost three-fourths of your fortune."
Tell your loved ones to protect their fiat by converting to #Bitcoin.
This coming print will be greater than any other print we've seen.
I tried to warn family and friends, some listened, others are going to get robbed by this coming inflation.
How to know that we're early:
- #Bitcoin dominance is at about 54% atm. In other words, nearly half of the money is invested in crypto shitcoin companies.
- Once we are no longer early, #Bitcoin dominance will go back to 99%+. Until then, the sweetest gains will be had.
https://m.primal.net/HmoR.png
For better or worse, I think we've seen peak Google in terms of market share.
I think Google is scrambling behind the scenes to not get overshadowed by Microsoft and OpenAI.
It's open season and every company that has the resources can scrape the entire internet.
OpenAI trains its AI on the same data that Google does.
It becomes a matter of who can filter the input data and can tweak the parameters better and quite frankly I haven't seen evidence that Google is winning.
Most of the Google products I've used are complete garbage.
1. I use Google Finance and its UI and API constantly breaks.
2. Google Analytics 4 is absolutely terrible (even worse than Analytics 3).
3. Google search console constantly breaks.
4. Gmail is the only email provider that cannot reliably filter out phishing scam emails to this day.
5. Google Ads and Youtube ads constantly promote crypto and get-rich-quick scams (although I think it's by design).
6. Starting this year, Youtube on Chrome started to prevent you from playing videos with an AdBlock, they removed the dislike count and largely castrated the site.
7. Their Gemini chatbot and image generator turned out to be racist as can be and factually inaccurate unless it fits their narrative.
Quite frankly, I think people are getting sick of all of the propaganda Google is trying to push down their throats and Google no longer has a moat.
If you have the resources to scrape the internet and have 500 good programmers, you can do much, much better than Google at search for less than 1 year.
I think Google is scrambling to come up with something that isn't a total disaster but they have too much baggage (in office politics) and technical debt.
My quant said that #Bitcoin has already bottomed because:
1. Clueless crypto influencers are positioned short.
2. Powell is a spineless coward and will do what his daddy Biden and mommy Yellen say. In other words, he'll signal rate cuts.
Also, none of this matters in the long run.
You can't make this stuff up.
Corporate media criticizing Elon Musk that he doesn't censor enough while he keeps telling them that he hides (de-boosts) content they disagree with, even though it's still legal content.
I get that he has to please his advertisers but at least don't promote Twitter as a free speech platform, promote it as "free speech unless our advertisers disagree" platform.
People who lend their #Bitcoin are going to get rekt again this cycle.
There's no magic way to get 20% annual percentage yield on your Bitcoin.
It's simply a ponzi scheme. They either take on too much risk, get rekt and lose your money or they simply steal your money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_GUF4nuzmw
There's people who've known about #Bitcoin since 2017, have traded it and now have nothing to show for it.
Instead, they could've just bought spot and held the best performing asset.
So close and yet so far.
Google's great plan:
1. Scrape all niche websites to feed your AI.
2. Kill the traffic of niche websites over a 1-2 year period. Keep gaslighting them that their content is not good enough and they're at fault.
3. Pay large publications to scrape their content so they don't sue you. Large publishers are well funded and have a large reach, so you have to be careful here.
4. If small publishers don't have any traffic, you can introduce SGE without much backlash. You won't be stealing their traffic because they don't have any.
5. You become an answer engine instead of a search engine.
6. Profit.
I have a feeling some of these #Bitcoin miners are going to outperform by a lot once the FOMO kicks in and the halving FUD subsides.
I like Bitfarms at these prices.
I am 95% allocated to the real thing. 5% is my degen miner allocation for excitement because I've spend (probably) thousands of hours researching miners.
Probably need a real hobby though.
Google rewrites the queries you search for.
Last year, wired.com wrote an article which exposes how Google alters search queries to ones that monetize better (for them).
But it's important to note that Google also ideologically alters search queries.
For example, if you search for "white man and white woman" and click on "images", you won't see a single photo of a white man and a white woman.
https://m.primal.net/HkfZ.png
In other words, what you searched for is NOT what you get.
After Wired wrote the article, Google told them to take it down.
Initially Wired refused to take the article down, but then they caved.
If you go to the URL of the article, you will now see an "Editorial note": https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
However, you can use the way-back machine to still access the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20231002162713/https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
===================================================
Here is the complete text of the article for reference:
How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet
RECENTLY, A STARTLING piece of information came to light in the ongoing antitrust case against Google. During one employee’s testimony, a key exhibit momentarily flashed on a projector. In the mostly closed trial, spectators like myself have only a few seconds to scribble down the contents of exhibits shown during public questioning. Thus far, witnesses had dropped breadcrumbs hinting at the extent of Google’s drive to boost profits: a highly confidential effort called Project Mercury, urgent missives to “shake the sofa cushions” to generate more advertising revenue on the search engine results page (SERP), distressed emails about the sustained decline in the ad-triggering searches that generate most of Google’s money, recollections of how the executive team has long insisted that obscene corporate profit equals consumer good. Now, the projector screen showed an internal Google slide about changes to its search algorithm.
I was attending the trial out of long-standing professional interest. I had previously battled Google’s legal team while at the Federal Trade Commission, and I advocated around the world for search engine competition as an executive for DuckDuckGo. I’m all too familiar with Google’s secret games and word play. With the trial practically in my backyard, I couldn’t stay away from the drama.
This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.
There have long been suspicions that the search giant manipulates ad prices, and now it’s clear that Google treats consumers with the same disdain. The “10 blue links,” or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness, camouflaged in the company’s kindergarten colors.
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
Why would Google want to do this? First, the generated results to the latter query are more likely to be shopping-oriented, triggering your subsequent behavior much like the candy display at a grocery store’s checkout. Second, that latter query will automatically generate the keyword ads placed on the search engine results page by stores like TJ Maxx, which pay Google every time you click on them. In short, it's a guaranteed way to line Google’s pockets.
It’s also a guaranteed way to harm everyone except Google. This system reduces search engine quality for users and drives up advertiser expenses. Google can get away with it because these manipulations are imperceptible to the user and advertiser, and the company has effectively captured more than 90 percent market share.
It’s unclear how often, or for how long, Google has been doing this, but the machination is clever and ambitious. I have spent decades looking for examples of Google putting its enormous thumb on the scale to censor or amplify certain results, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better. Most scams follow an elementary bait-and-switch technique, where the scoundrel lures you in with attractive bait and then, at the right time, switches to a different option. But Google “innovated” by reversing the scam, first switching your query, then letting you believe you were getting the best search engine results. This is a magic trick that Google could only pull off after monopolizing the search engine market, giving consumers the false impression that it is incomparably great, only because you’ve grown so accustomed to it.
Even if Google prevails in this antitrust trial, I predict its troubles will continue. A company executive at the trial spoke on the stand about Google’s “contract with the users” and its “honest results policy.” No matter what pretzel shape Google twists, no matter what loopholes and legalese it bandies about, defying reasonable user expectations is a loser’s game. Until then, Google’s massive market share and deep entrenchment in everyday life ensure that these warped results pollute our ability to discover and learn basic information about the world around us. The next time you Google, remember that you’re getting search results that have been skewed—not to help you find what you’re looking for, but to boost the company's profits.
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