#[5] I'm very glad to hear about your productive endeavours and wish you'd post about those more than the net unproductive passive speculation habit. I'm sorry you put your money in the wrong place, but you're in good company, Isaac Newton lost $3M of his own money in the South Sea Bubble.

"Back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he ‘could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.’ Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000. But just months later, swept up in the wild enthusiasm of the market, Newton jumped back in at a much higher price — and lost £20,000 (or more than $3 million in [2002-2003’s] money. For the rest of his life, he forbade anyone to speak the words ‘South Sea’ in his presence."

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You’re actually growing on me. Loved the Newton reference.

Don’t shed a tear for me though. I believe bitcoin will succeed, but even if it didn’t, I’ve funded IVF with bitcoin “gainz” and have two beautiful children from it.

Bitcoin is far more than just “gainz” though. It’s a movement. A movement towards rooting out the completely corrupt and unfair monetary system that has served the people closest to the printers. I genuinely believe it’s our last shot at real freedom.

When people have their CBDC’s, those same people won’t be looking to bitcoin for the “gainz” they’ll be looking at it as the only viable option to spend the value that they’ve earned on the goods and services they wish to obtain.

If you’re into Austrian economics, I can’t understand why you’re so against bitcoin.

I'm against Bitcoin because of the grand unified centralized ledger, selling itself as decentralized when it's really just distributed. Every resilient centralized database out there is hosted on dozens, hundreds or thousands of nodes. What makes a data layer 'centralized' is that each node tries to sync up to the same, single authoritative global state, like Twitter or Facebook or Bitcoin's CDN.

What makes a data layer 'decentralized' like Nostr is that there are dozens or hundreds of unique databases, with no conception of a single authoritative global state, and no requirement in the protocol to sync up to the same version.

In short, I think CBDC's are the bogeyman and BTC is their plan. You can't solve the Byzantine Generals problem without centralizing something, and Bitcoin centralized the most dangerous thing to economic freedom: The ledger.