Bali, for Indonesia Bitcoin. If you’re here too, drop me a line and let’s hang out!
Just got off a call with a bitcoiner working with some cutting edge projects — L2s and more. We agreed on this: the greatest threat to bitcoin isn't the state, or anything like that. It's complacency.
Suffering is probably the only way we overcome.
Price pumps in the near future may be dangerous for bitcoin's long term future. They'll boost complacency. When we're fat and happy, we don't invest in scaling and privacy and extensibility.
Unfortunately, near term price pumps are also the most obvious path to better funding for bitcoin research and development. We have no token to print at zero marginal cost, no foundation, no company, no lawyers, no marketing office, no trademark holders, no CEO.
A real dilemma!
What kind of suffering could do the job here? I'm afraid many of my readers will hate the answer. It can be expressed in one word. No, not 'dump'. It's 'flippening'.
Imagine the seething, the cope, the fury, the wild cognitive dissonance, were eth to flip bitcoin.
Now that's suffering.
Suffering sucks, of course.
But if I learned anything from all those Greek tragedies, it's that suffering is also the only path to wisdom.
Some will be quick to add that eth has already flipped bitcoin — in daily fee revenue, in L2 proliferation, in TVL, in daily volume (when measured in just the right way).
I reply: sure, but we always had the market cap cope ready to hand. What if that were gone?
Suffering.
Worldcoin is bad.
When someone prints a token for free, and sells it to you for something else, they reveal a preference to hold that something else, rather than their own invented token. What does this tell us?
I’m more concerned that my future self will not like it!
Curious if anyone else is in this boat: I’m more cautious about saying things on Nostr than on Twitter — because deletion is much more straightforward on Twitter.
I feel this way even though I know that deleting on Twitter doesn’t actually remove it (the internet never forgets), and even though I know there’s a much smaller audience on Nostr.
Not equally so, no. It might be slightly authoritarian, sure, but in a much less distressing and significant way (no long term implications for First Amendment protections if sustained, for example).
Pick two:
1. The United States should ban TikTok
2. The United States cannot ban TikTok without expanding capacity for overreach, surveillance, and censorship
3. The United States should not expand capacity for overreach, surveillance, and censorship
- Digital authoritarians pick 1 and 2 and reject 3; this is wicked.
- The starry-eyed dreamer picks 1 and 3 and rejects 2; this is silly and naive.
- The lover of liberty picks 2 and 3 and rejects 1; this is the way.
True or false: there is no known way to cryptographically prove that you've deleted some data.
Few things* give me greater joy than overconfident prognosticators getting punished by markets. Especially when bitcoin is involved.
*actually many things; but this joy remains special
It's high time I shared more on why I've shifted focus more to Bitcoin from Monero over the past several months, and my latest blog post is an attempt to do just that:
https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/why-i-focus-on-bitcoin/
Happy to dive into more detail for any of the points given or my reasoning behind this shift 🙂
This is really nice, Seth — measured, focused on the values that actually matter, and pragmatic. A model.
It's easy to focus on buying power — number go up, number go down — which messes with your peace of mind.
This is a cost. I find that self-custody compensates for it, and more. I sleep better knowing that my money isn't someone else's liability and can't be rugged.
As usual, this is not financial advice. It is spiritual advice. Self-custody is self-discipline. It is also freedom.
What a 24 hours it's been, and it still doesn't top FTX day in November:
- Ether a security
- 30% tax proposed on bitcoin mining
- Silvergate, dead
- Another big bank, dead
Me, a crypto person: bored, unstimulated, hoping for more.
Seems like a fine time to meditate on Satoshi's words: "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required... Banks must be trusted to hold our money... but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve."
Dude drops some gross antisemitism on Nostr. Relays drop him. But if you really want to tune in, you totally can — exactly as one would hope for with a protocol rather than a platform. Nostr is working as designed, in other words. Very cool.
Rules one and two are Socratic. We do best when we know our limits.
Rule three reminds us: despite rules one and two, prices encode real information (this does not mean markets are perfect).
The rules are practical, too. For example:
Will I subscribe to your market signals newsletter? No; see rule one.
Will I start a market signals newsletter of my own? No; see rule two.
Will I invest in your pamping ponzi and stake/lock my tokens for years on end? No; see rule three.
Thinking about the first three rules of Bitcoin Uncensored:
1. You are an idiot
2. I am an idiot
3. Markets are efficient
Pure wisdom. And the three hang together well -- better together than any one or two rules in isolation.