Paying for dinner in Argentina requires a pile of notes.

In certain macro circles, so many people (especially >50 y/o) are big into the idea of a gold-backed BRICS currency and how it'll subvert the dollar and moon the price of gold.

And while there's some truth to it directionally over a certain time frame (e.g. Zoltan Pozsar's "Bretton Woods 3.0" theme, and BRICS nations really are trying to de-dollarize or at least diversify their payments and savings exposure to varying degrees), it's clearly a weak solution in the long run.

Bretton Woods failed within like 12 years of being fully implemented. Why? Because the proliferation of IOUs was not constrained, but the underlying metal was.

And that was with America being a hyperpower. A bunch of separate BRICS nations, some of which don't even like each other much (e.g. China and India), putting together some coalition is shaky form the start. Who will trust the audits of how much gold or commodities they have in their reserves?

In the intermediate term, it does make sense for BRICS countries to route payments through other systems, such as the New Development Bank (formerly known as the BRICS Development Bank) or through various bilateral swaps. But the longevity of such a model is dubious.

Bitcoin is too small at the present time to serve as solution for this scale of global trade, but in the long arc of time it seems a far more obvious solution for global payments and reserves.

I love this hat

Doing finishing touches for my book, which is now past all external editing. I'm doing the author's final edit/checkup, cover, getting it into the right format for publication, etc.

Some questions for the community:

-Do you prefer hardcover, paperback, or ebook?

-For hardcover or paperback, do you care about the physical dimensions of a book? eg do you prefer a 5.5"x8.5" thicc book or a 7"x10" thinner book?

-For those that like audio books, would you prefer to read the book physically or electronically rather than listen to it, if it had a lot of images?

Doing finishing touches for my book, which is now past all external editing. I'm doing the author's final edit/checkup, cover, getting it into the right format for publication, etc.

Some questions for the community:

-Do you prefer hardcover, paperback, or ebook?

-For hardcover or paperback, do you care about the physical dimensions of a book? eg do you prefer a 5.5"x8.5" thicc book or a 7"x10" thinner book?

-For those that like audio books, would you prefer to read the book physically or electronically rather than listen to it, if it had a lot of images?

What things are important enough to you that you would protest over, or practice civil disobedience over?

I would be very interested in Square phones if they were to exist.

Just throwing that out there. :)

Twitter is down for me, which is a good excuse to check Nostr.

Been so busy lately with limited bandwidth.

People attending the BTC Prague event (sadly I could not make it) should check out the Fedi federation associated with it.

In addition to functioning as a wallet app with good privacy features, it lists speakers, program details, side events, and has chat functionality.

You can also look at a map within the app to find vendors in the area that accept bitcoin, as well as do other things (eg donate via geyser fund from within the app). Convenient to have things in one place.

They also have a LN GPT within the app so you can pay a few sats and ask Chat GPT a question.

It only lasts for a week since it’s an event-specific federation. Really cool concept.

You'll like this book.

To keep the dream alive!

Twitter has way more of my overall network but the quality here is better and the decentralization is important. I want it to be bigger.

Judge me on my outcomes.

My personality is just a mix of tactics and is mainly for effect.

My book draft finished its second extensive edit.

Next week I'll be working on my final edit, now that it's gone through two editors.

If there were to be a book about money in all its forms (past, present, and future), what subjects would you want covered that you currently feel are under-covered by existing monetary books (including bitcoin books)?

Over the next five years, what do you think the chances are that talking about inflation or energy will be censored on centralized social media platforms comparatively to what happened with the pandemic during 2020/2021?

Ran into Peter today.