Still my favorite bitcoin chart.
https://m.primal.net/Heyz.png


It seems they were operating under the phenomenon called normalcy bias; where ppl even in the face of danger, carry on as normal, failing to be mindful of a present  danger, believing everything will continue as normal. This phenomenon is seen across most life forms


A decade ago I was in my car at a stoplight, and there was a bunch of seagulls eating a discarded bag of fast food in the intersection.

When the light turned green, the car in front of me went slowly to give the seagulls a chance to fly away, but they didn't. Instead, the car's tire just slowly ran over a whole pile of seagulls, who just kept going after the fast food as they were run over. I just watched horrified as this played out.

Every once in a while, I just wonder why the seagulls never got out of the way despite how slow the threat was.

Anyway, looking at the bond market reminded me of this again today.


The 10-year cumulative return for long-duration bonds inclusive of all their interest payments is like 4%. Just awful.

And of course when you factor in ten years of currency debasement, the return on purchasing power is deeply negative.

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


If some unlucky person bought bitcoin right at the very top of the cycle in 2021, they're now down less than if they had bought US Treasuries at that moment instead.

That's how awful bonds have been.

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


I think it’s more multi-dimensional than that.

Some people want small government but recognize the state for basic order, eg minarchist. Others advocate for small government but then suddenly jump ship into big government if it comes in the way they want it.


Cars beat horses despite political opposition.

Ironically they are being threatened again. I only buy old or low tech cars now.


People ask me for my financial strategy and I'm like:

-I'm so bearish that I'm bullish. Short fiat, long real assets, permanently.

-But be aware of counter-rallies, valuation, and sentiment. Don't get over-leveraged and rekt.

-I'm risk adverse and have a dozen people that depend on me financially in two different countries, and thus I mitigate the possibility of financial disruption via diversification up to a point.

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


I like to stack bitcoin, and to a lesser extent stack stocks and gold and real estate.

However, I am careful about dollars due to their centralization and tendency to lose value. The tokenomics for dollars just aren’t attractive. To the extent that I am long dollars for various liquidity needs, I am also short dollars to a similar amount through mortgages and so forth, so that I have zero net exposure to such a risky asset.


We are at a point where serious matters are not taken seriously enough, while trivial matters are dissected as if everyone's life would depend on it.

Society has lost wisdom and humor alike.


"All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else."


Caring about things is a superpower. But caring too much can destroy you. It's a fine line.


The really sad thing about constant currency devaluation throughout the world is that it benefits those who have the most access to cheap credit at the expense of those who do not.

People on the lower end of the income spectrum in Egypt are generally dealing with cash. Their wages and savings get debased, and they own fewer hard assets, so they have fewer offsets. Their ability to buy imported goods diminishes, their ability to travel outside of Egypt diminishes, and their costs in general rise.

People on the higher end of the income spectrum in Egypt have access to foreign bank accounts and/or have multi-year domestic property loans, which are basically currency shorts. They mitigate the impact from the ongoing devaluation, or in some cases benefit by it.

As a tangible example, last year I took out a 7-year loan or currency short against the Egyptian pound, and used it to buy a villa that houses a 9-person extended family (7 when my husband and I are not there). The money supply goes up by 20% per year but my interest rate is 3%, which is an ultra-cheap long-term currency short. Within the first six months of the term, the Egyptian pound was already cut in half relative to the dollar. Who knows what the exchange rate will be over the next 6.5 years.

The past four decades of global Fiat World have been like a game of Blackjack. In Blackjack, you try to get to 21 without going over. In Fiat World, you get into a position so that you can take out low interest debt and buy scarcer assets with it, and you do that as much as you can but without going bust in a downturn. The major governments can do that the most. The big banks are next. The big funds and asset managers and public corporations are next. The wealthy individuals are next. Then the middle class, and then the working class and the poor.

And the global aspect of Fiat World is important. An asset allocator can operate globally, so among the 160+ currencies out there, they can arbitrage them. They short a currency with negative real interest rates, and buy good assets somewhere with it. I personally did it in Egypt not to make money (we don't plan to sell for the foreseeable future) but to ensure good housing for the family at modest expense. But global firms do this around the world to make money. As the global economy got more and more financialized over the past four decades, a lot of professional talent shifted from engineering or medicine or wherever else and moved toward financial arbitrage.

Weak money financializes everything else. Strong money can de-financialize everything else.

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


This week I've been thinking a lot about the 1990s version of Mortal Kombat that I played on Sega back in the early 1990s as like an eight year old.

Specifically the "Finish Him" aspect. I frankly never really liked that part; I was always a fan of mercy instead. I wanted to win but be kind after winning. I trained in martial arts a lot, so that was ingrained in me. Be kind to your opponents.

But admittedly, sometimes someone is *so fucking bad* that they need to be finished. Like totally and utterly rekt, so that they can't hurt other people anymore. Mercy needs to step aside for righteous devastation in that rare case.

Anyway, this thought has absolutely nothing to do with COPA and Craig Wright. Nothing at all. 😈

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


No. They can create new liabilities to buy more assets, and can do that infinitely. But they can’t create capital out of thin air.


Yep given a very long time they can eventually dig themselves out of the hole. Depends how high interest rates are by then though.


That's a cynical take.

When you go to Egypt, you can see multiple levels of greatness.

-The ancient pyramids, obviously.
-The middle ages- amazing architecture from them too.
-1800s and early 1900s colonization-era grand architecture.

When I look at pictures of my Egyptian grandparents-in-law (eg 1940s-1960s), it looks like the US from that era. It's very different than Egypt today.

Egypt has been heavily damaged by socialism/authoritarianism and developing market fiat currency.

It would be much better if individual Egyptians could choose which monies they hold, not have their capital constantly debased, and be able to participate in global commerce without frictions.

The "3rd world" is largely a fiat/colonization phenomenon. There's so much energy and capability there. I aim to do whatever small part I can to address the technological money issues, which are very specific to the past half-century.


Here's an example of why monetary verification is important (and can be expensive).

The gold price is currently $2075/oz.

If you buy a sovereign 1-oz gold coin, or a globally-recognizable privately-issued 1-oz gold bar, you'll generally pay something like a 3-5% markup to spot. This is basically the verification and distribution premium. Even if you buy a bunch of 1-oz items, you generally won't get the spread down too much. If there's a shortage, the premiums over spot go way up.

If you buy smaller sizes, that premium will be a bigger percentage. For example if you buy 1-gram gold coins, you'll be paying a >50% markup to the spot price, which is silly.

If you buy bigger sizes, like 1-kilo bars (which cost more than a typical car), you could get it down to a 1-2% premium to spot.

The bigger size you go, the less verification you have that the core of the item is indeed gold rather than tungsten. You have to trust the brand and supply chain, basically. The smaller size you go, the less possible and economic it is to insert tungsten into the item. And so on some level, it makes sense that the verification premium is bigger for smaller items- you're more assured that it is indeed gold to its core. The surface area to mass ratio is harder to forge, basically. Somewhere around 1-oz is probably the sweet spot.

Now, if you're buying gold in most U.S. states, including on a lot of popular online stores, you'll also pay sales tax, and you'll often have to pay the difference in terms of your payment method. So if your credit card costs the merchant 3%, then that would eat up the merchant's margin since it is razor thin, and so instead the customer often has to pay it. They could instead do a wire transfer for a sizable purchase to save some money, but many banks charge like $30 for a 1-day wire transfer.

And if you're buying online, there's a shipping fee. That's usually pretty low but then goes up a bit if you add insurance because you don't want to risk your expensive coins or bars getting lost in the delivery chain or stolen from your doorstep. From the time of order to the time of delivery, it'll generally take several days. This includes time for the merchant to process the payment (gold merchants are usually a bit more careful about chargebacks and other reversed payments than the average merchant) and ship you the items.

All together, including the verification premium, taxes, payment fees, and shipping, one generally pays 8-15% over the spot price to get 1-oz gold coins or bars. That means gold has to go up a pretty significant amount just to break even. And then you have collectible capital gains taxes on that price gain (which in the US is higher than the actual capital gains tax rate). If you take time (and time is money) to shop around and find ways to legally avoid sales tax and so forth, and figure out the cheapest/slowest payment methods, then you can push the premium down as close as possible to the verification premium and shipping costs.

And if you want to securely ship large amounts of gold long distances, especially internationally? Like imagine HNW investors, businesses, banks, or sovereign entities? You're going to pay a sizable amount. One does not simply ship millions of dollars worth of gold without robust security.

If you want someone to custody your gold, you're going to pay a fee. If you are fine with unallocated/mixed gold with multiple layers of counterparty risk, you could buy among the cheapest ETFs with annual fees below 0.2%. If you want to hold your gold in an allocated way by Brinks or something with fewer layers of counterparty risk, it'll generally cost over 0.5% per year. This goes toward the vault costs, salaries for people with guns, real estate costs, etc.

Basically, there's a pretty big inefficiency in the form of 1) routine verification, 2) secure transfer of ownership, and 3) secure custody, that all comes out in the form of high costs and slow speeds.

Bitcoin has fees, but they are very low in comparison. Nodes can verify bitcoin basically for free. Miners timestamp transactions to transfer ownership for a fee, and you can currently send ten million dollars worth of bitcoin globally for like $10 and have it confirmed within the hour. And you can custody bitcoin yourself, and bring it around with you globally, through ports of entry, across borders, in ways you can't realistically do with gold above a certain value threshold.

When thinking about periods of above-average bitcoin fees, it's useful to keep some of the alternatives in mind. Verifying and transferring ownership of other store-of-value assets like gold and real estate is slower and a lot more expensive, requires a lot more abstraction and permission, and comes with much less portability.


One problem that people face is that they box themselves into narrative corners and echo chambers.

"Not your keys not your coins" is a good one-sentence explainer to tell people to be careful about custodians, especially in such a nascent industry. It's powerful and memorable. Couldn't be said better.

But then some people take that to mean nobody should ever use any custodial service under any circumstances ever. You got $200 in a custodial Lightning app because it's faster and easier than alternatives? You've failed the purity test. You're in a developing country and want to save $100 worth of bitcoin? Better do it on-chain, otherwise it's not yours!

But then some of the same people resist a block size increase to keep the network decentralized (a good thing, imo) and also say that bitcoin will fix the world (I think it can).

But while all reasonable statements on their own, the issue is that statements 1, 2, and 3 don't add up when taken to their extreme.  It has been written about since the time of Nakamoto and Finney on Bitcoin Talk forums that Bitcoin would need to scale in layers.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211

So any statement about "Not your keys not your coins" has to be paired with an alternative solution, or a spectrum of alternatives. What if someone can't fit into the one of the only tens of millions of on-chain transactions per month? What if $35 fees is high for the $200 in bitcoin they want to save?

Is holding your bitcoin on an 11-of-15 multisig (Liquid) okay, in exchange for lower fees, faster block times, better privacy, and some additional features? Depending on the amount, I would say yes. It has trade-offs, though, which have to be made clear.

What about a Chaumian mint? What if an app lets a community in South Africa set up a 5-of-9 multisig run by well-known people in the community who would face consequences if they break trust? And the same app can let a smaller community in Guatemala set up a 4-of-7 multisig? And a bigger multi-country 6-of-11 multisig can be set up as well? It's private, interacts with Lightning as seamlessly as Wallet of Satoshi, and can make in-person payments even when the internet is out briefly. Plus, it can be customized via open source add-on modules by the community running the specific mint so that it can also store private data for users, monitor reserves, monitor health of the multisig keys, run applications like Chat GPT payable in bitcoin per usage, run private DMs and group chats, run apps that show you local merchants that accept bitcoin, etc. And what if a user could, within the same app, seamlessly spread their funds out among a handful of different mints that they know pretty well to avoid having all of their eggs in one basket, and then pull into self-custody when above a certain amount?

Maybe there will be more softforks in the future. More flexible scripting to allow more share-ability of UTXOs, for example. But those require consensus, and they tend to come with some trade-offs or code risks, and so they take time.

Bitcoin is an engineering marvel. But it's not magic. It has limitations, and it has a spectrum of solutions for those limitations at any given time. The best solutions solve multiple problems at once: they add scalability, they add speed, they reduce fees, they add privacy, and they add flexibility/programmability all at once, while still being more distributed than trusting some centralized KYC entity.

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer open source money. But it's not infinitely scalable on the base chain. If it were greatly scaled up on the base chain to fit everyone, then only institutions would be able to run nodes and it would be greatly centralized and thus useless. So the solution, known from the start of the Bitcoin Talk forums, is to build additional peer-to-peer open source layers on top of it, allowing for a range of transaction sizes, a range of speeds, a range of privacy, and a range of programmability, all to serve different users' needs, and without compromising the decentralization and security of the base chain. That's the type of statement that needs to be provided along with "not your keys not your coins" for the full context to make sense.


Shareholder value was more at risk prior to the bitcoin strategy. Most other business analytics companies went away or were absorbed into the tech titans. MicroStrategy was hanging on, but it was a melting ice cube, which then makes it hard to attract the best employees or maintain the best economy of scale, which then accelerates the melting of the ice cube.

And within the bitcoin strategy, taking on debt is the bigger risk. If bitcoin is in a bear market when their debt matures and without a lot of gains from the cost basis, that could cause them to dilute equity at a bad time, or have to sell bitcoin, or do other inopportune actions that would damage shareholder value.

Issuing overvalued equity to buy more bitcoin and thus improve the bitcoin-per-share metric, mildly de-risks the company by improving the equity/debt ratio, and is good for shareholder returns, assuming shareholders are bullish on bitcoin (which by this point, most of them are). It makes the overall company size way bigger, gives them a warchest of capital if they need it, helps them hire top talent including for their business analytics business, and reverse the melting ice cube trap.


“Responsibly all-in.”

“I like the orange coin. A lot.”

My research and audience straddles the macro finance world and the bitcoin world. And so humorously, I get heat from both sides.

“Lyn, I love your macro work but you’re too obsessed with bitcoin; I wish you would focus less on that stuff.” -hedge fund reader.

Vs

“Lyn, since you’re a fellow bitcoiner, why do you only have a 5-10% allocation to bitcoin in your public model portfolios!? Shouldn’t you sell all your stocks and buy more?” -fellow pleb.

I talk to many institutions, as well as high net worth individuals, and medium net worth individuals like engineers and doctors. This is where individual situations come into play. I had been watching bitcoin for a while, publicly wrote about it near the top of the cycle in 2017 and (correctly) passed on it from that point, but then kept watching it during the bear market and then hardcore jumped into it during the March/April 2020 crash starting at $6,900/coin as a long-term bull, and haven’t wavered since.

For example, 2.5 years later as Bitcoin crashed amid the FTX fallout in November 2022 from 69k to sub-16k, I was at Pacific Bitcoin laughing about it. I was not uncertain.

In those initial months of 2020, I put every dollar of my liquid capital into bitcoin. I didn’t sell my existing stocks and trigger capital gains tax, didn’t withdraw from my IRA or 401(k), but otherwise most of my existing liquid cash and all of my incoming earned cash went into bitcoin. I threw like a quarter of my net worth into it. And it paid off. For me as a conservative investor, that was my version of “all-in”. I wasn’t fucking around. I never go all-in like that, but I did it for bitcoin.

I grew up poor, and then worked for 12 years in engineering and engineering management. There is no world where I would invest in such a way that there was even a 1% chance that I could be wrong and lose my entire net worth and the past 12 years of my work at that point. I would never be 100% invested unless I consider it to be risk-free, and I consider nothing to be risk-free, and so I diversify by default. I am conservative as a baseline, but opportunistic when appropriate. I put at most 5% into any one stock, but I threw 25% into bitcoin as an anomaly due to how bullish I was. My husband was like, “what are we doing?” and I was like, “trust me, here’s why”.

And then, there are eight family members and associates who, if I were to go broke, would have to radically diminish and change their lifestyles. Their housing support and their everyday income comes significantly from my earnings. It’s like running a small business. So, when I see people on social media be like, “wHy DoN’t YoU gO aLl iN?” I’m thinking like, “Bitch, I’ve gone about as all-in on this new distributed ledger as I can while still sustaining a reasonable level of lower volatility equity and other assets for tangible income and fallback support for eight people”. And then I realize the anon who wrote that is probably a single dude in his parents’ basement, and my response is unwarranted. Don’t let anons on social media affect you.

For example, our extended family ran into a liquidity issue and had to change households this year, and we got a good real estate deal but it was based on me having six figures in liquidity to just throw around at short notice, which meant having maintained adequate diversification for that possibility, which I was anticipating.

In my model portfolios, I began to recommend a 5% bitcoin allocation in early 2020, and then I took some chips off the table in 2021 near the highs after a 3x and 5x gain as Musk was pumping Dogecoin, to rebalance back down to that 5% target. Why? Because not everybody has put a thousand hours of research into it and can realistically put a quarter of their liquid net worth into it. My point was, “your portfolio has zero bitcoin, you should probably have at least 5% bitcoin, and better yet, you should buy bitcoin non-custodially at whatever size is appropriate for you. As it soars, rebalance. As it falls, buy back in.” That rebalancing worked well for my public portfolio. I warned of exuberance, leaned into fear, despite not trying to predict any short-term price action.

And during 2022, amid the bear market, I joined the formation of Ego Death Capital, a bitcoin-only VC firm, as a founding advisor. And more recently, I’m leaning more into that role, and some announcements regarding that are incoming in terms of my deeper involvement. In other words, while bitcoin price action was in a period of weakness, I was happily ready to lean in to it with my capital, my time, and my reputation, to fund bitcoin companies that were developing cool stuff. https://egodeath.capital/portfolio

And then there was my husband’s wisdom. He edits all of my research reports, among other work that he does. And he has better wisdom than me overall. One day in early 2023 amid the bear market out of the blue after hardly ever talking about bitcoin he was like, “How many bitcoins do we have?” I said the number X but also explained that I am buying more lately. He said, “Alright, good, let’s get to Y soon. I know you are super cautious, and I love that, but don’t mess around on this. Buy more. Push harder. I know you have extra pockets of liquidity above the baseline. Use them.” By Y, I mean he gave me an aggressive number that was a bit above what I would have otherwise done in that timeframe.

I was like, “Okay I’ll try. But I mean, we need certain liquidity.” And he said, “I’ve edited your research reports for years. I’ve never seen you more convicted on something. Don’t fuck around on this. Lean into it. We will figure out liquidity if need be. You said to trust you in early 2020 when you initially bought it. Trust me here in 2023 when I say to buy extra vs whatever you’re buying. I can read you better than you can read yourself, and the answer is to buy. You’re being too conservative.” I followed his advice, at like sub-$20k and sub-$25k.

And then later this year, within the past few months, we indeed balanced it very tightly; I had bought as many bitcoin for us as we could early in the year and I barely hit the target he set since I was being cautious, and then we ran into a surprise liquidity requirement (changing households in Egypt) and needed to throw capital at a new place as a down payment for our family for seven people, and I was like, “This is why I maintained so much liquidity, btw. We have it because I saw this type of thing coming!” And he was like, “But we have it, right?” I and I was like, “Yes, barely at such short notice!” And he was like, “So we have the exact amount then, fucking nailed it!” The yin-and-yang worked well.

The point is, I’m as all-in on bitcoin as I get with any asset. Which means to say, I am ready to survive its failure or repression in long bear markets without selling any, but I am also highly engaged and invested in its success.  I never go all-in on anything, but I’ve never leaned into any asset as thoroughly as I have done on bitcoin since April 2020. It’s the maximum I lean into any asset while still maintaining financial prudence. When it falls 80%, it doesn’t affect my lifestyle or force me to sell. When it soars, I am cautious, and focus on how to best improve the success of the network.

Good evening. Let's accelerate.


Stablecoins are for like 3-9 month stable liquid holdings, which can’t be done with highly-inflationary currency, can’t be done with bitcoin yet, and yet most of us arguing about this have access to in developed markets without thinking about it.

Stablecoins solve that problem for a lot of people. They aren’t for putting your life savings into.


“Economics” only seems complicated when viewing it through the same system designed to steal from you.

#Bitcoin


Money is a market good.

Imagine comparing people choosing to hold dollars for part of their savings and payments to enslaving other people.

Most people who get angry about stablecoins have dollar bank accounts, euro bank accounts, etc, and use them regularly.


They have a need to hold stable liquid value for six-month periods, which their local currency doesn’t do, bitcoin doesn’t do yet, and that those of us arguing about this all enjoy without thinking about it.


The ability to hold purchasing power roughly flat for six months.

You don’t make a stablecoin out of hyperinflation currency. You make them out of whatever the most salable currency is- usually the dollar.


In the past month I’ve travelled from Vancouver to LA, amsterdam, bali and now tokyo. at each stop I was able to pay and zap people in every part of the world with 0 friction. Bitcoin is borderless. When you hold bitcoin you have the ability to store and teleport value to any person on the planet. At some point we were convinced we need permission to do this, but not anymore. #Bitcoin the closest thing we have to true freedom, and its ours 🌏🧡


People tend to ignore bear markets and then buy high-volume tops. It is sad but that is what happens.

I’m going to emphasize “study bitcoin” to people this cycle. Not tell them to buy it. Not tell them to have fun staying poor. Just point out that it’s still here, yes it’s important, and yes you should take the time to understand it.


Noobs guide to adding #zaps on #nostr

1) Download the Testflight App from the app store, here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/testflight/id899247664?mt=8

2) Get the TestFlight Damus install link for the app: https://testflight.apple.com/join/CLwjLxWl

3) Click on this link: https://nostrscript.suhailsaqan.com

4) After clicking the link, you should see this screen, and press RUN -- https://image.nostr.build/afddb910478b897a8e82140cff4ee68cf46e0478334f2ae48d24d612297781cf.jpg

5) Restart Damus.

Happy Zapping. #nostr


Whenever I encounter something I don’t know, whether big or small, I look it up. It’s simple, but a lot of people don’t do it.

After years, this compounds more then it seems.


What are the sneakiest things that can be done to Bitcoin via softforks? Or another way to phrase it, which types of softforks are so powerful that they are almost like hardforks?

I figure that the question could spark some interesting replies.

An example is SegWit, which effectively increased the block size without technically increasing it. Another example would be some sort of increasing transaction tax on older UTXOs, where in order to move them one must pay an extra fee determined by how many blocks they have been dormant for.

What else?


Proof-of-work is a beautiful thing, isn't it? You look at the outcome, and it's immediately obvious what went in. There is no hiding it, no faking it, no way around of actually doing the work. Like a beautiful marble statue. Or a chiseled body after years of working out. The work that went in is immediately obvious at a glance. Hard work. Energy. Scarcity. Related, distinct, and united in #Bitcoin.


When I was a kid, I used to watch Batman Beyond, which was set in the future.

The money they used was called “credits” and was digital, with no banknotes/coins. People would swipe cards like credit cards, but also when doing a bearer asset payment, they would hand a card with credits on it to someone who would take possession of it. The same type of card could be loaded with various amounts of credits for various sizes of transactions. Normal people used the money (it was ubiquitous) but also criminals used it, implying the funds couldn’t be frozen or taken back or anything like that, much like cash.

Turns out they were satscards, I guess.
^-^ https://image.nostr.build/a8e84a0ef9b7b6231943a6022eb525caecff41d256f0365b2f98522668c5cf86.jpg


I’ve always been amazed that people go cashless, meaning they literally walk around and even travel without cash, and just rely on cards to pay.

Credit and debit cards are centralized and can be shut off or denied for all sorts of reasons, or can run into technical issues. BTC/LN is better because it’s decentralized, although it still needs power+internet and merchant acceptance. Cash as physical bearer asset money is great. Of course I wish cash was redeemable for something sound, but maybe in the future that’ll be the case again. In the meantime it’s good to have a few meals or taxis or hotel rooms worth of cash on hand.

I always have a diverse mix of digital and physical payment methods on hand, so I never get caught unable to pay.

So far in life I have only had one instance where I couldn’t pay. I was at a restaurant in Cairo a few years ago and their card machine/connection was down, and were only accepting cash. I had physical US dollars but they were part of a bigger corporate restaurant chain and so didn’t have the flexibility to accept them. My husband normally carries Egyptian currency but didn’t have any on him that day, and since he carried it, I previously did not. Neither did our friend that was with us. So we had to go on an awkward search for an ATM for a while and then come back and pay. And from that point I iterated, so I always carry Egyptian currency in Egypt as well as my other methods. And it has come in handy a bunch of times, when my husband needs some spare cash for tips or something I always have a little stockpile ready to go since I am a stickler about always having a certain amount whereas he is more flexible.

I always have a kind of “prepare for everything” type of mentality and like to be in control of my situation, and thus always have like backups for my backups in various contexts, including payment or being able to access various types of value anywhere, even when such preparation is not really needed.


It also shows that central bankers aren’t unique in this. Their ledger is centralized and easy to tinker with, and so it gets tinkered with frequently. Jerome Powell is a normal rich dude and a Deadhead whose job is to tinker with the public ledger.

Same for Ethereum. Difficulty bombs from inception made it easy to tinker with. Fewer relevant nodes and more points of centralization (eg Infura) still make it easy to tinker with it. And so they do.

Bitcoin has tinkerers too. It just happens to be harder to tinker with. Ultimately it’s the tech more so than the people that are different, although of course in early stages certain types of tech tends to interest certain types of people.


Book never once says to buy bitcoin or calls it digital gold. (I know who it is; he didn’t read it.)


If gold backs a fractional reserve currency, it’s only a matter of time until the backing breaks.


Glad you liked it!

Consider posting a review on Amazon if you haven’t yet. Each one counts, especially in the early phases.


Lyn,

What kind of Architecture do you prefer though? A few month ago you mentioned you prefer an intricate stone buildings of a classical architecture. You also mentioned your appreciation for marbel works aswell.

I would be very interested to hear your thought on how the construction industry ( especially the buildings) is being affected by the monetary system.

Do you see the debased high-time preference fiat money also affects architecture, like Dr. saifedean?