The world is changing in fundamental ways. The global financial system is slowly being remade.
#Bitcoin represents a rare opportunity to make the transition more prosperous and humane. https://valued.nataliesmolenski.com/blog/after-the-petrodollar-bitcoin-and-the-coming-monetary-reset
Getting into the room is an important skill.
Knowing what to do once you’re in the room is even more important.
State and society are mutually constitutive and form imprecise polarities whose contestation creates the possibility of liberty (and lack of contestation forecloses it).
The Original Technologies of Trust
https://inthemesh.com/archive/the-original-technologies-of-trust/
We are facing a stark choice: will we carve out a space for liberty that is not surveilled? Or will surveillance prove too tempting in its utility?
Transaction privacy & censorship resistance are prerequisites for economic freedom. Economic freedom is a critical element of human freedom.
A nation that toys with the lives of its people is not free.
The development of autonomous personhood is contingent upon the psychological process of individuation: the messiness of truly leaving home and taking responsibility for one’s own destiny.
A reminder that all modern nation-states were produced by centralizing governments imposing linguistic, ethnic, and/or religious homogeneity on extremely diverse populations.
The idea of “nations” governing themselves seems liberating, until you start to ask, “What is a nation?”
I suspect Socrates would have made the tenure track at exactly zero institutions.
Civil society must always be at the ready to push back against the excuses that justify abuses of surveillance power.
One thing you can do immediately to level up your life in just about every way is set expectations early and often—and then meet the expectations you’ve set.
So much drama and misunderstanding because people just don’t communicate.
Hi Natalie, I am the "Fan" account. Just wanted to say hi and let you know people like your words. I hope you are not upset by this account, I just think you have a message that is worth putting out into the world. below are the sats people have sent so far, I am sending them on to you now. Your words and ideas have value (way more then these sats). Have a great day and keep on doing you.
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+10 sats
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+30 sats
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+10 sats
a3WSQXCieU22sNjZxiSQNZVb
+77 sats
1WeHKqBphNrxiRemqdiSVD6v
+54 sats
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+1,988 sats
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+420 sats
First
+1,000 sats
P.S. I am not a stalker and don't live in or go to the USA.
If you have any transcripts of interviews you have done or other places online that I have not yet found and its not trouble, please do let me know. I actually have so many questions for you, but wont bother you with them.... except to say that I have seen online that you have a couple books in the works and that is exciting. If for any reason you end up not publishing something but are not apposed to sharing some chapters or paragraphs, I would LOVE it!
It seems that our culture vacillates between expecting perfection and relishing in dysfunction, and neither of these extremes are healthy or inspiring.
HI and thanks! Full transparency: This an Unsanctioned Fan Account of NSmolenski. The real deal is located here: @nsmolenski
We are exquisite truth machines calibrated through our very vulnerability.
The challenge—the imperative of growth—is to continue disrupting the taken-for-grantedness of meaning that sediments behind our backs as we experience the world.
Now Is the Time to Think about Value
What is value? Why does it matter?
https://valued.nataliesmolenski.com/blog/now-is-the-time-to-think-about-value
I think it's already been precluded that the weaponization of the global banking system and the financial system as an instrument of, not just identity verification, but consistent surveillance, that is already a fait accompli. That is done. A CBDC will not depart from the assumptions underlying the existing financial system, which is also one of the reasons that it's superfluous as initiative. The global banking system is already fully digital, it's fully surveilled.
The main benefits of a CBDCs at this point for the state are getting down to that granular programmability of token by token, individual by individual transacting. I would suggest CBDCs will likely be implemented in many countries against the will of the people, often as a surprise.
People will hear about them for the first time when CBBC account is created for them at their bank, and then used implement a - 2% interest rate for example to recover some of the sovereign debt burden of that bank.
People will begin flocking to #Bitcoin, not because they love Bitcoin, but simply because it will be the only non-state self-sovereign alternative out there.
Why Bitcoin?
It is virtually impossible to reverse the momentum of state consolidation of power as such. The state will not constrain itself. The only long-term checks on state power emerge from a civil society whose power is significant enough that the state fears it.
This is the thesis of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson two historians. One at MIT one at the University of Chicago. In their book The Narrow Corridor. They suggest that the only thing that preserves liberty in the long run is something called the Red Queen effect. That is an analogy taken from Alice in Wonderland, where Alice races the red queen. The red queen represents the state, Alice represents society, and this constant race - the maintaining of parity in the capacities between state and society is what ensures liberty.
The universalization of end-to-end encryption and a direct ownership model of censorship-resistant digital assets, in the case of the bank state, that is what reasserts civil society’s power in the face of that growing state consolidation of power.
I would suggest here is that bitcoin’s most important property is precisely it statelessness an its censorship resistance. It mirrors physical cash and that it is a bearer asset that can be exchanged directly without identity verification, it is a guarantor of individual liberties at the protocol level, there is no one party, or set of parties that controls the protocol.
A complex set of game theoretic conditions ensure that incentives remain appropriately distributed an balanced. Bitcoin for this reason enables direct peer-to-peer transacting using ‘self-hosted’ wallets. Basically, a digital version of the wallet and carry it around in your pocket.
It serves as a monetary demilitarised zone for states. It represents a non-political alternative to US controlled in the BRICS controlled financial systems. Central to this, is move away from account model of digital assets. Anytime we were talking about a third-party trusted custodian we're talking about centralised implementation of public key infrastructure, in which some custodian holds the private keys that that determine ownership of an asset.
Bitcoin is an implementation of decentralising PKI, meaning it represents a direct model of digital asset custody, that asset is custody by the end user who owns their private keys, and therefore can operate in a self-sovereign manner.
This is critical. Bitcoin has no customers. That is why there cannot be AML/KYC requirements for the use of Bitcoin. It is a tool. Tools create inclusion as people freely adopt them, not based on top-down coercion.
Ultimately the takeaway here is that: Liberty is a bottom-up process, and as states move forward with implementing CBDCs having a liberty-oriented alternative like Bitcoin will be key to ensuring that a space for freedom continues to exist.
The airport is a quintessential border institution.
As the world has internationalised and state capacity has grown, that this difference between inside and outside local and foreign has collapsed into a permanent state of familiar otherness, a vigilant containment that is not hospitality and never become solidarity.
The airport is a space of both law and lawlessness in which the distinction between those two is often erased. Here I want to bring in philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has theorised extensively the lawless law that characterises the state of exception.
The state of exception, you can think of it as akin to the Roman used iustitium which was generally proclaimed during the state of tumultus when the Roman state was threatened from either without or within. The iustitium was the suspension of law that enabled the Roman state to raise an army and confront whatever the threat was.
This was a zone of anomie in the words of Agamben in which all legal determinations are deactivated and it also functions as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism, and a threshold of indifference between anomie and law.
In other words, if the law encompasses everything or nothing, then the distinction between law and lawlessness is meaningless.