I don’t trust that if KamaWalz wins, they won’t somehow find a way to ‘suspend’ access to Twitter/X in the US.

Remain decentralized, my friends.

The people that want to trust government are the people that are least trustworthy. They project their own lack of character on others and depend on authority to fix it.

I normally keep my Uber rides under 45 mins. But for a few reasons I ended up just getting a two-hour Uber from an airport the other day.

The driver was nice but was like, “damn lol I hope Uber pays me well for this”. The issue with long rides is that the Uber driver is far away after the ride in a new territory and has to try to earn rides back to their normal location. He asked if he could at least stop for coffee or something and I said of course.

So we go for a while and eventually pull over over at a convenience store and he goes to get some coffee and a snack. I go out and get a coffee too and then I pick up his tab and pay for both of us. Uber ended up calling both of us for a health check because the car was stopped.

Buying him a coffee opened him up a bit so we talked for a while. He asked where I was coming from and I said Egypt, and he said he was from Ghana. While chatting and me explaining why I am coming from Egypt, he made a great point that in many places outside of the US, family is a big deal whereas in the US, it is much diminished. And as a result, it’s very important to build connections with neighbors and coworkers in place of that. Even just tell people “good morning” if you usually see them on the way to work so that people know who you are. He came to the US alone four years ago so that is something he describes having learned and a strategy he is using.

Anyway as we pulled up to my destination I gave him an unusually big tip to compensate any inconvenience or unpaid time he might have getting back. A few mins later my doorbell rang and he had come up to say was super thankful for the big tip. The Uber algorithm had kind of screwed him over and the trip price (and thus his share) was low for the hassle, and he felt screwed over by Uber, but then he saw my tip which instantly fixed it.

I should have checked to see if he had a lightning wallet or tried to convince him to download one if not, because then I could have done one of those social media “okay everybody tip this guy” posts. :/

PV

Grateful to those building on NOSTR. For the first time I am able to share authentically. So freeing!

Truth shared at scale is an extremely powerful gift to humanity 💫

I went to this restaurant on a mountain. But the food was absolute dogshit.

There was a silver lining though. Everyday in Cairo I come across friendly cats that like to be pet and are hungry. I never happen to have food for them, and feel bad every time.

But this time I was like, “You know what? Go to town.” So I gave it all to the cats.

What are your favorite hardware wallets, among the latest generation of them?

And are there any that you really don’t like?

This was Obama you dumb fuck AI

Egypt is one of the handful of countries joining BRICS next year.

Friends and family here who don’t normally talk about finance are talking about it a lot. They see it as a pathway to escape the yoke of the dollar and American imperialism. They ask if this could mean the downfall of the dollar, and so forth.

I’ve been writing about long term de-dollarization for the past 3-4 years, and of course Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent freezing of Russian reserves accelerated it around the margins. I touch on de-dollarization in Broken Money too, in the “Heavy is the Head That Wears the Crown” chapter.

But like most things, people got overly excited by this process. Popular gold analysts were calling for a gold-backed BRICS currency announcement here in August, which of course never came.

Some major BRICS countries don’t even really like each other, like India and China. This will be a stepwise piece by piece process of closer financial and trade integration. Over time, countries can swap currencies rather than go through dollar rails.

It’s an important geopolitical process, but beware of people hyping it up too much or making something out of it that it is not.

Finally got a 1-star book review by someone who hates bitcoin and tether (and didn’t read the book).

Pretty sure I know that guy on Twitter. One of those obsessed reply guys.

One challenge to abandoning X:

Educating the uninformed on bitcoin.

Aside from in-person, where’s the best place to spread the good word?

LinkedIn ain’t it.

Most people on LI have blinders on.

I like these trees with the hanging leaves.

That’s it. That’s the note.

Drivechains

Alright people, we are playing a game of chess here. The one thing, the absolute one thing, we can't do is give up the king. To give up the king, in my humble opinion, is to mess up the base layer. This mistake would disrupt the delicate incentive structure that ensures sound money. That sound money pegs the extremely fragile credit markets and out-of-control G7 policymakers that are creating clown world with their CB fiat policies.

We don’t need the sound, pegged, money to move fast, we don’t need the money to do smart swoopty things, we just need it to be pegged, immutable, and digitally sailable to actually stop the madness of clown world.

By introducing a whole lot of technical complexity to the base layer and potentially screwing with the incentives all so we can connect to a bunch of centralized shitcoin projects is like playing offense with the king when you’re down 7 pieces and the other player still has their entire back row at their disposal.

A. Why the rush!?

B. Why not just go use Monero if you need that level of anominity in your transactions. Why do you have to have it in a wrapper via drivechains?

C. Why risk the king without deep understanding and testing of the technical risk and potential change to incentives?

The beauty of Bitcoin is you can build it and softfork it, and we’ll let the community vote with their nodes. BUT, I for one, have no use for drivechains (that doesn’t mean everyone is like me). And as a result, I will not be updating my node and running any attempted “secret” softfork updates by the miners.

People that are good at school are generally good at making justifications for anything and everything.

That's great for anyone that wants yes-men/slaves, not for truly creative endeavors.

School teaches you to pursue approval, not truth. And that's toxic to the soul.

Train yourself in managing your desires, rather than merely amassing knowledge.

The old adage, "knowledge is power," is one that I challenge. While knowledge can certainly offer an advantage, the real source of power lies in controlling desires. The one who masters the desires of others effectively wields power over them.

Acquiring knowledge can indeed fuel your aspirations, but it's crucial to keep a firm rein on these desires. Devotees of Bitcoin instinctively understand this, for if you pursue anything other than Bitcoin - whether it's quick riches, fame, or material possessions - you risk losing sight of your true aim.

Numerous Bitcoin veterans have faltered because their ambitions lay elsewhere. What they should have yearned for was securing their future. This involves careful planning, prudent saving, and establishing a meaningful legacy.

Thus, it's not about collecting a reservoir of knowledge or chasing immediate gratification. Instead, power lies in fostering the right desires and utilizing knowledge as a tool to manage them efficiently. By doing so, we not only ensure our individual success, but we also help create a better place for everyone.

When money inflates in supply, employers have the benefit of the status quo, and wage earners have the burden of work to negotiate higher nominal wages to keep up.

The effect is subtle in developing countries, a few percentage points per year, but it's always there behind the scenes. People often have to switch jobs to get proper higher wages, and avoid the anchoring bias from their prior employer. This is all because of dilutive fiat money.

The problem becomes more obvious in developing countries.

For example, the IMF tells Egypt to cut its currency in half relative to the dollar, if it wants some loan relief. It does. Now, every Egyptian wage earner has to try to negotiate a raise to regain some portion of their prior wages in terms of global purchasing power. Virtually all of them will not be able to. And then seven years later they do it again.

But when money deflates in supply, and the unit of account therefore appreciates, wage earners gain the benefit of the status quo in negotiations. If their salaries merely remain the same as averages prices go down, they have gained a raise (which makes sense, with greater experience).

The burden of work shifts to the employer, who has to argue that wages should be cut in line with prices.

I think the magnitude of this effect is poorly understood. If it were more understood, I think a subset of labor-oriented political proponents would appreciate hard money a bit more.

To me, the biggest issue is age. A healthy society is one that retires elderly people to a life of leisure, not having them in the most stressful jobs like running the country! It’s all unfolding like the 4th turning. Prophet generation is clinging onto power, nomad gen is skipped over. It’s time for the hero gen (millennials) to rise up! ✊