A story that illustrates why I will never orange pill anyone ever again.

2015- Attempt to orange pill friend multiple times. No dice. Totally uninterested.

2019- He asks me if now is a good time to get into bitcoin. “It’s always a good time”. I set him up with a HW wallet and tell him DCA and chill.

2019- Friend calls me a few months later, he wants to put the down payment money for his house into bitcoin, but he’s nervous. I say no worries I will backstop your investment. What’re friends for?! I want you to succeed. He now has a no risk investment. Financed by me.

2020: Friend is doing well. Has been stacking hard and has 2 coins. A great stack for his income.

2021: He starts watching cringey YouTube videos about shitcoin trading. Gets into a private telegram, trades his 2 bitcoin into 4 and then gets rug pulled and loses everything.

2021: He’s near suicidal, very dark times. He doesn’t tell me anything because he knows I warned him about trading and thinks I’ll be disappointed in him. Finally he tells me. I help him get a personal loan so he can take advantage of the remainder of the bull run. He sells at 55k and manages to break even. He’s not up but he’s got his house money back.

2023: We’re out drinking with some other friends from high school. He expresses some jealousy towards me in a semi awkward fashion. “Every time I see this dude (me) I think about bitcoin.”

2024: I meet up with him so the kids can play at the park. Vibe is off. Lots of insecurity and tension. They’re going on a trip to San Diego and I ask if they might go to the zoo while there. “I can’t afford that. That’s for rich people like you”. Odd interaction, but I shake it off.

2024: A few weeks later he gets drunk and hits on my wife via text messages. She shows me immediately and I confront him. He’s like “sorry bro I was drunk I didn’t mean it”. I tell him off and make clear this is the last time we will ever speak.

No good deed goes unpunished. I could not have been nicer to this dude and more helpful along the way and he is fully consumed by envy towards me.

Unfortunate.

I go to NYC several times per year for one reason or another. For work, for friends, etc.

Part of me likes it, but part of me gets fucking frustrated multiple times per day every time I am here. (Sorry, this is a Nostr Lyn post).

There are plenty of neat things in NYC that I can’t do at the same scale/quality elsewhere in the world due to the network effects around the city (broadway shows, financial district, etc), and yet after a day or two all I want to do is leave. It feels claustrophobic on multiple fronts.

People all have different vibes but for me, major cities are fun to visit but smaller secondary cities or suburbs around cities are so much smoother to live in. I can’t imagine living all the time in a major city.

The same applies to Cairo, to which I have been in far more total days than NYC. I like Cairo’s satellite cities but not Cairo itself other than going briefly.

Every time I am in a major city I am immediately reminded of the luxury of space, nature, quiet, parking spaces, and chillness of not being in a city. Everything I take for granted normally is now a luxury to fight for in a city.

Even politics are largely correlated to urbanization. If you live in rural or suburban areas, you likely drive around in your own car, you might have some land, etc. Your interaction with the local government exists in a moderate sense. The potential weakness is that you are more likely to always be around those who are similar to you, which minimizes your worldliness.

In contrast to all that, in major cities, everything is so tightly packed, and people rely on public transportation, and even a momentary lapse of government services (eg trash collection) becomes an acute catastrophe. But on the beneficial side, people are around those who are different than them more often, which breeds worldliness.

That’s why I tend to like the zone between rural and major cities. I like secondary cities or suburbs of major cities, because I get a bit of both worlds. The density and interconnectedness of major cities briefly, and the space and self-autonomy outside of them most of the time.

And yet I was born and raised in that sort of inbetween state, and so maybe it is just my upbringing.

What about you? Can anyone sell me the idea of NYC or other major cities that I am missing, especially in the remote work era? I see glimpses of how it could be attractive if you are used to it and know every detail of your neighborhood, but it really does feel limiting to me.

Love it! Thanks 🙏

Why are phone batteries not improving much?

FaceTime has been around for over a decade, and it seems like it eats the same amount of battery today as it did back then.

I know performance improvements consume more battery, but can’t imagine the “performance” has improved on something as simple as FaceTime over the past 10 years.

I really hate flying. Not the flying part per se, but just the logistics to the airport, time in the airport, time in the plane, logistics to the hotel, etc. I feel less healthy by the time I arrive.

Major props to people who fly to Madeira all the way from like Australia and New Zealand.

Great night in Chicago

#Chicago Symphony Orchestra

It’s great meeting so many people on Nostr here in person at Bitcoin Atlantis!

Haven’t had time to post on social media much this week but wanted to give everyone a shoutout!

I talked to a guy the other day who had an irresponsible number of sats.

I asked him, “what makes you so certain about all this?”

He simply smiled and said “track record”.

How many sats did the man have?

Most of the miscommunication (and hard feelings) between fiat brains and Bitcoiners involve an unclear understanding of the three use cases of money/currency:

1. Store of value

2. Unit of account

3. Medium of exchange

Bitcoiners love to focus on the obvious superiority of Bitcoin as a store of value.

Fiat brains often deride Bitcoin as a reliable unit of account, given its legendary volatility over the past 15 years. The dollar is far less volatile, but is actually a terrible unit of account over time, given its unknown current and future supply. The lower short term relative volatility makes the dollar a better short term unit of account. This advantage will diminish over time.

Fiat brains often ignore the critical importance of store of value in favor of the dollar’s current superiority as a medium of exchange. The world clearly does not have a medium of exchange problem, as there are hundreds or thousands of ways to perform this monetary function (think ACH transfers, checks, credit cards, crypto, etc.). That said, L2 solutions are being rapidly developed on the #Bitcoin base layer (L1), which will soon make it a comparable medium of exchange to the massive amount of our current options.