#Bitcoin is the wheel. You don't reinvent the wheel.

- nostr:npub1dergggklka99wwrs92yz8wdjs952h2ux2ha2ed598ngwu9w7a6fsh9xzpc

#BitcoinTwitter

Just got a notification from X about an update to their privacy policy… Interesting…

“We’ve updated our Terms to explain that in some places, for example, the EU and UK, we may need to remove not only illegal content but also content considered harmful or unsafe under local laws.”

Confessions of a MicroStrategy Investor

A letter no one asked for, but everyone should read before handing their Bitcoin dreams to a man in an orange tie.

—

Dear Fellow Bag-Holders, Future Therapists, and Anyone Still Pretending This Was “Strategic,”

I write to you today not as a proud MicroStrategy shareholder, but as a man who has stared directly into the mirror and whispered the words:

“Bro… what have you done?”

Look—I’m not embarrassed that I invested in Bitcoin. Magical internet money is fine. It’s pure. It’s incorruptible. It’s literally math wrapped in electricity. Beautiful.

I am, however, deeply embarrassed that I gave a company with salaries, leases, marketing teams, HR reps, and a snack budget my money… so they could buy that same magical internet money at a premium, wrap it in a corporate costume, and then somehow—somehow—turn it into something that trades at a discount.

A discount.

On Bitcoin.

In a Bitcoin bull market.

Amazing. Inspirational, even. If there were an Olympic event for turning alpha into coupons, MicroStrategy would sweep the podium.

Do you know how helpless you feel when your investment thesis boils down to:

“I believe in Bitcoin so much I outsourced it to a business with overhead.”

That’s like loving organic vegetables so much you hire a Fortune 500 company to grow them for you under fluorescent lights, at 4× the cost, while their interns eat half the crop.

And yes, yes, I get it—leverage, strategy, blah blah blah. But when your CEO has to juggle debt payments, stock issuance, Twitter theatrics, and a line item called “orange tie dry-cleaning,” you start to wonder:

Was I investing in Bitcoin… or in the world’s most complicated meme account?

At this point, even my Bitcoin-hating uncle respects me more than my financial advisor does. At least the uncle says he bought gold once because “it was shiny.” My excuse? I thought buying a corporate wrapper around Bitcoin was “efficient.” Efficient at what? Converting sats into operating expenses?

If I wanted discounted Bitcoin, I should’ve just bought Bitcoin.

If I wanted chaos, I could’ve bought a shitcoin.

Instead, I bought a stock that somehow blended both worlds. A schrödinger’s tradfi-wrapped-Bitcoin derivative that lives in a simultaneous state of premium and embarrassment.

So here I stand—an MSTR shareholder.

A man who believed.

A man who delegated.

A man who now understands that true self-sovereignty means never relying on a corporate board to stack for you.

Godspeed to us all.

And please—next board meeting—cut the marketing budget before the coupons.

Sincerely,

A Recovering MicroStrategy Apologist

P.S. If anyone needs me, I’ll be buying the underlying asset directly like a grown adult.

My wife and I just throw a somewhat risky "get to know your neighbors" party in our apartment. Nobody knew each other in spite of living just a few feet away. Whole floor invited. Everybody came. Very different backgrounds, lots of fun just telling stories. A 3hr party became 6hrs. Huge success.

A good reminder that good things do happen when you give them a chance.

In the entire original Star Wars trilogy, no two named female characters ever spoke to each other.

In fact there, were only four named women across the trilogy, throughout six and a half hours of content spread across multiple worlds, and for most people they can only name Leia.

I'm not bringing it up as a criticism; just an observation. Sometimes guys wonder why their girlfriends/wives don't love their favorite fiction quite as much as they do.

It's not to say a given story *should* have more characters of XYZ demographic, but basically if a guy tunes into a movie and no two guys ever speak to each other in it, and it's ladies everywhere with hardly any men around, you'd basically just get the vibe pretty quickly that this wasn't written with you in mind at all. If you like it, that's great, but it's kind of by accident since you just weren't really considered as part of it being put together. I do like Star Wars, for example.

I love the Breaking Bad show, too. The premise didn't appeal to me on the surface (middle-aged guy with cancer, young drug maker guy, and to the extent that there are women in the show it's mostly the wives of the important characters), but my husband told me it was great so I watched it with him and loved it. Wouldn't change a thing about it.

And then of course, since we can't have nice things, over the past decade the attempts to put more diversity into fantasy or science fiction have been pretty ham-fisted. Rey is a trash character, basically. Almost any attempt with this sort of stuff is lazy. Books have generally done it better because it comes from one author's mind rather than some committee.

I think part of why the TV show Arcane was so well-received (especially the first season) was that it had a ton of different characters in it but it wasn't *about* that diversity. It just happened naturally as a byproduct of good writing and care. A bunch of very different characters dealing with themes that are about technological progress vs safety, economic disparity and sovereignty, extremism to achieve goals, etc. Young and old, male and female, rich and poor, all different colors. Rather than feel forced, it just seems obvious in that setting.

I've put some thought into this when writing fiction. Men and women, and people of various cultures, do have a ton in common in the fiction they like. Probably more than most realize.

-My number one priority is to just write good stuff and tell the story I want to tell. By default there are a broad range of characters in a story like that, at least in my head. Otherwise it would feel boring. Unless I was writing a specific period piece (something like Saving Private Ryan set in WWII battle zones where obviously it would almost all be men), I'd have to go out of my way to write a story where no two men ever speak to each other, or no two women ever speak to each other. That would take effort.

-My second consideration is to of course think about my audience (which a lot of current media trends ironically don't do- they just create a piece to fulfill their own grievances and forget about the main demographic that would actually want to watch/read what they made). How would different people experience it? That's where beta readers are helpful, but also just a basic 101 test of imagining like five different people reading it and getting the vibe of whether it's written with them in mind, or not. The goal in that case is certainly not to write for everyone (eg most stories I think of tend to be quite dark and violent, and with substantial complexity, which is a combo that already excludes a lot of people), but to at least be aware of the types of people I might be writing for. The natural state of things in a sufficiently complex setting is a broad range of character types.

Basically when I exclude types of readers, I want it to be a conscious decision rather than "huh, I hadn't considered that."

🙈

nostr:note13up35ewyludllenvrm28204qnstt72vm8cdtud8l2eqanncv42gqlxajfm

I listened to some AI generated music lately. There’s plenty of it on YouTube.

-Vocals sounded fine. Similar to any auto-tuned singer. A rehash of a rehash.

-Lyrics had some individually poetic lines, but didn’t make much sense when strung together. At best their meaning was vapid, and at worst literally incoherent.

El Savador doesn't hash only to monetize their power, they recognize that engaging in hashing is the only way to ensure permissionless access to the network. El Salvador guarantees their transactions cannot be censored in this way. So many Bitcoiners have lost sight of this fact, effectively trusting other people not to censor them. The people will wake up eventually and become one of the most dominant hash powers on the planet specifically to ensure their transactions aren't censored.

nostr may replace tiktok or instagram but more importantly it represents the evolution of wikileaks.

distributed. unstoppable. wikileaks.

nostr is a distributed truth protocol.

That's all true... but the power competition occurring over ledger writing authority, is from a technical first principles analysis, a physical-power-based dominance hierarchy and resource control structure. With all due respect "nah" is not a valid counterargument.

I'm not talking about the size of anyones stack, I'm talking about the real physical power being used to compete over the ledger.

Broken Money was published a year ago this week

Thanks to everyone who read it, shared it, and reviewed it! 🙏

I resisted writing a book for years since it’s such a tedious process, until finally a book formed in my head that I felt needed to exist, and that was too distracting for me *not* to write. And then I poured everything I had into it.