A truth I was surprised to discover:

Most people want slavery. They just want to be comfortable. And the moment a little bit of freedom causes discomfort, they rush back to their cage.

Then to delude themselves because they can’t accept that reality, they label all things uncomfortable as “slavery” and all things comfortable as “freedom.” Convincing themselves that because their cage is “nice and safe,” this means they are actually free.

We're looking to put together a beta-testing team, to click through a simple script and do a bit of exploratory testing, and then tell us how it went. The test phase will start in a few weeks, and will require a few rounds.

If you are interested in volunteering, and helping us get #Alexandria fit for a minor release, just drop a note, here, so that we can add you to our list.

Meanwhile in France: French Senate has approved the 2025 budget, which includes an “unproductive wealth” tax targeting assets like Bitcoin. The tax would apply annually to unrealized gains on cryptocurrencies.

nostr:note1vpujusdgmfkyerwxv508dtpzqvtrwsavfq92ul6d056q0cpps6fs423a8y

What is the worst movie you ever watched?

Remind me of what the US produces that the rest of the world needs?

Even the US made weapons of war have turned out to be overpriced, overcomplicated, ineffective junk compared to the competition.

Is the Bitcoin community aware that they're using an SMS-required closed platform that can only be read by KYCed people to conduct their protocol discussions?

It did take me a bit of time to wrap my head around it, but this is the real innovation of #nostr--the ability to reconstruct application state from individual participants' signed event streams instead of a central database (or even blockchain).

Really looking forward to some common things like forums and signal/telegram/slack/discord type complex protocols recreated this way.

A gave a talk at the New Orleans Investment Conference the other day. At 50 years and counting, it is the longest continually-running investment conference in the country, and possibly the world.

It is diminished from its heyday due to broader competition and online investment media, but it has a certain air to it. Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman, Gerald Ford, and Steve Forbes have spoken at it, among many others. It is mostly a boomer/gold/resource/conservative/libertarian conference, and gets the best from that crowd, but otherwise is not huge. The guy who has run it for decades took it over long ago from the original founder, and he wants to freshen it up and modernize it a bit and throw some hand grenades into his own conference, so he invited me to talk. He is a gold guy, a resource guy, an old-school conservative, and he likes bitcoin and wishes he bought it earlier. He's open-minded, objective, and growth-oriented.

My talk was "Broken Money, Broken World".

-The first theme was that there are 160+ siloed fiat currencies. I used Egypt as my main example, and held up a physical Egyptian pound and said this is basically a national casino chip; it has very low salability outside of Egypt, similar to how a casino chip has very low salability outside of the casino. The 105 million people who live there are trapped in a fiat matrix of 20% annual money supply growth, like a treadmill that they have to keep up with in terms of their wages, price increases, rent increases, and so forth to avoid being diluted, and most can't keep up with that treadmill. And there are dozens of countries like this. I held up a Norwegian krone and said even though this is from a wealthy country, it is still a casino chip because what can I possibly do with it in New Orleans? It's too small and unsalable. This is outdated tech.

-The second theme brought it back to the US. I spoke about how the past four decades had two main trends: rising public debt/GDP and falling interest rates (see included pics below). Developing market currencies suffer while those of us in the US feel that things are stable. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, people rightly freaked out about the debt and deficit. The famous NYC debt clock went up in 1989. Ross Perot ran the most successful independent presidential campaign in the early 1990s on the debt and deficit. That was when interest expense as a % of GDP was at its peak. But what they didn't or couldn't predict, was that the next 30 years would be disinflationary. China opened up to the world. The Soviet Union fell. Western capital was united with Eastern labor and resources. China became a manufacturing hub, which was disinflationary. Russia supplied cheap energy to the German industrial base, which was disinflationary. Interest rates fell structurally, allowing more debt accumulation, and for prices to increase far more slowly than money supply growth. But then we hit zero interest rates, and then we monetized fiscal spending. We're in a new world now; debts and deficits matter again. Those guys from the late 1980s and early 1990s were right but early, and now we are facing some of those consequences. Fiat currencies including the dollar have structural instability.

-The third theme was to bring up again that there are 160+ casino fiat currencies in the world... and that every one of their gates are fucking down. Pre-Bitcoin, the only way to get money in or out of a country was 1) physical ports of entry (typically limited to $10k USD or so worth of cash and gold) or 2) bank wire transfers (highly controlled by local governments). Countries could maintain their little currency bubbles. But Bitcoin and then stablecoins blew that open. You can bring a billion dollars worth of bitcoin through an airport by remembering 12 words, or writing them down and tucking them away in your baggage, or briefly putting them in an encrypted file in the cloud. Infinite value density. Same for stablecoins- tokenized dollars or whatever the market wants in terms of global fiat currency and assets. I can pay a graphic designer in Nigeria with a QR code over a video call or email or DM in bitcoin or stablecoins or whatever she wants. All of this bypasses their currency bubble and goes around their banking system, unless their country wants to be North Korea and cut itself off or get shut off externally from the internet. And I said the investment implications and macro implications of this are massive; it's a new world that, over the long arc of time, breaks all the fiat bubbles.

I am getting close to giving a more detailed assessment on Israel/Hamas, as it drags on.

And it will probably be Nostr-only since other platforms can’t handle it. It is too polarized. Everyone is tunnel-visioned.

My husband is currently in Cairo dealing with some property work we are doing for our extended family. They are only 250 miles from the problem, and Egypt’s acute currency crisis brings it closer to home if military or refugee shit hits the fan. Most of my extended family is geopolitically or financially close to the Israel/Gaza issue and is Muslim. I am thus both close and far from the issue. And I grew up in the US in a diverse region with Jewish and Muslim peers, but more-so Jewish overall.

Suffice to say, I don’t want civilians on either side to suffer or die. I am pro-humanity first and foremost.

Before I give my eventual analysis, I am happy to see Nostr comments on the issue. What are your thoughts and questions on the topic? What would you like to see addressed from a diverse or as non-biased source as possible?

If “green energy” (including w/ storage as needed) costs more than hydrocarbons and doesn’t win in the marketplace, then maybe it is more environmentally impactful than you think, with energy-intensive and materially-intensive supply chains.

Likewise, if fake meat costs more than real meat, then maybe it too is more environmentally impactful then you think, with energy-intensive and materially-intensive supply chains.

As developed nations continue to enter sovereign debt crises akin to the 1940s, there are a few main outcomes.

Option 1) In a world without bitcoin, or if bitcoin fails, central banks and their governments recapitalize themselves with gold, devalue the people, and do another cycle of this inflationary policy for the next few generations. The Treasury/Fed handbook literally has a written option for this, although it is stated more opaquely. It can be done in the US (and probably many other countries) based on current laws if shit hits the fan. Denmark's central bank and China's economic ministers have also written similar things regarding extreme outcomes. It's pretty straightforward based on the past.

Option 2) We go into a centralized technocratic future. Centralized AI and CBDCs win. People have cuck money that the AI+government control. It's like Brave New World, 1984, take your pick. Hard to say, but not free.

Option 3) Open source money wins. Bitcoin and its ecosystem win. Governments get defunded from their fiat printers, and have to be more honest with their ledgers or default and get reconstructed since they can't print what their people hold as savings, or in the hegemon's case, can't print what the world holds. Probably a world of chaos for a time during the transition, but also an opportunity for peace and building the next era. Keeping track of the nukes would probably be a big deal, like when the Soviet Union fell. It's actually kind of remarkable that they collapsed economically and politically but in an orderly enough way to keep track of and secure most of the nukes.

I don't know which one will win, but I consider Option 3 to be the honorable method; the path of transparency. That's the one I am rooting for and building for.

If I fail, I would like it written that it's the method I tried for, but realistically the AI+government will probably delete most of the records of all of the failures anyway, since that is how history works, without any sort of objective truth keeper. Our best hope is to hide records in a distributed way and hope they can remain undisturbed for a while. At least bitcoiners have a tendency to write stuff in steel and make low time preference things. Some psychopath will hopefully carve a life work in steel in a cave or something, but who knows, lol.

And ironically, if Option 3 wins, any of the losing factions could still insert their ideas and paths into the Bitcoin blockchain, now or in the future. It's the most immutable database that we know how to build, and would preserve their ideas as it does our ideas. Like, you know what? I *want* the Communist Manifesto to be in the immutable Bitcoin blockchain, because I want people in the future to know how *bad* it is. It might already be in there; I don't know. I wouldn't want people centuries from now to think about those ideas and believe they came up with something new; I want to preserve my enemies' texts because I believe I can win through markets, force, virtue, and truth.

I think that's almost always what determines the winning side. Losers want to burn their enemies' texts to ensure that their good ideas don't spread too much. Winners want to preserve their enemies' texts to ensure that their bad ideas are never repeated.