Churchill was the worst PM of all time.

Bought a car in Argentina today. They meticulously evaluated all the $100 bills I had. This one was rejected because of the writing. Another because of a stain. Not sure how much I can get for them.

What’s going on with money here is fascinating. Everyone’s a money trader. I traded a few thousand USDt for usd bills for only 0.25% today, but realized I needed pesos so asked the Chinese guy at the corner store if he wanted dollars for pesos and then I traded with him.

I’be been trading dollars for pesos with the owner of the gym I go to the last couple of weeks. He even helped me make a digital transfer to the car dealership for the deposit.

Money is on everyone’s minds here. Just not yet Bitcoin…

My ideal car until Bitcoin stops going up

Finally figured it out:

Food truck

Only items deep fried in beef tallow

Won’t poison customers

Food will be the best they’ve ever had

Propaganda has made tallow a waste product, so basically free

Near zero costs

cash business,

Fuck taxes

aggressive advertising that calls out the lies

Will obviously take Bitcoin

will obviously hold up the line to rant about sound money

Will not pay for any licenses to operate

Will just relocate

Sovereign business

fuck the state

Fuck this dystopia

Also these chicken nuggets will fucking SLAY

Almost none of the “huge monopolies” produced by the market that everyone was complaining about being too powerful 20 years ago, are still the same ones people are complaining about today.

Practically all of the regulatory and bureaucratic institutions that people were complaining about being too powerful and wasteful 20 years ago, are the exact same ones people are complaining about today.

——

Markets allow change. Despite enormous resistance, disruption can’t be stopped.

However, govts create waste, corruption, and destruction with no viable means of defunding. It metastasizes until it grows to a point where horrific violence becomes the only course of action to get any change.

I will still never understand IOS nostr users...

Truly amazing how anti-free speech the younger generation is.

It’s just words you fucking pussies.

All these years later and I’m not sure we’ve topped this moment in bitcoin culture.

We spend our entire lives working for money that they can print for free.

Opt out with #Bitcoin

Left is healthier

Here's an example of why monetary verification is important (and can be expensive).

The gold price is currently $2075/oz.

If you buy a sovereign 1-oz gold coin, or a globally-recognizable privately-issued 1-oz gold bar, you'll generally pay something like a 3-5% markup to spot. This is basically the verification and distribution premium. Even if you buy a bunch of 1-oz items, you generally won't get the spread down too much. If there's a shortage, the premiums over spot go way up.

If you buy smaller sizes, that premium will be a bigger percentage. For example if you buy 1-gram gold coins, you'll be paying a >50% markup to the spot price, which is silly.

If you buy bigger sizes, like 1-kilo bars (which cost more than a typical car), you could get it down to a 1-2% premium to spot.

The bigger size you go, the less verification you have that the core of the item is indeed gold rather than tungsten. You have to trust the brand and supply chain, basically. The smaller size you go, the less possible and economic it is to insert tungsten into the item. And so on some level, it makes sense that the verification premium is bigger for smaller items- you're more assured that it is indeed gold to its core. The surface area to mass ratio is harder to forge, basically. Somewhere around 1-oz is probably the sweet spot.

Now, if you're buying gold in most U.S. states, including on a lot of popular online stores, you'll also pay sales tax, and you'll often have to pay the difference in terms of your payment method. So if your credit card costs the merchant 3%, then that would eat up the merchant's margin since it is razor thin, and so instead the customer often has to pay it. They could instead do a wire transfer for a sizable purchase to save some money, but many banks charge like $30 for a 1-day wire transfer.

And if you're buying online, there's a shipping fee. That's usually pretty low but then goes up a bit if you add insurance because you don't want to risk your expensive coins or bars getting lost in the delivery chain or stolen from your doorstep. From the time of order to the time of delivery, it'll generally take several days. This includes time for the merchant to process the payment (gold merchants are usually a bit more careful about chargebacks and other reversed payments than the average merchant) and ship you the items.

All together, including the verification premium, taxes, payment fees, and shipping, one generally pays 8-15% over the spot price to get 1-oz gold coins or bars. That means gold has to go up a pretty significant amount just to break even. And then you have collectible capital gains taxes on that price gain (which in the US is higher than the actual capital gains tax rate). If you take time (and time is money) to shop around and find ways to legally avoid sales tax and so forth, and figure out the cheapest/slowest payment methods, then you can push the premium down as close as possible to the verification premium and shipping costs.

And if you want to securely ship large amounts of gold long distances, especially internationally? Like imagine HNW investors, businesses, banks, or sovereign entities? You're going to pay a sizable amount. One does not simply ship millions of dollars worth of gold without robust security.

If you want someone to custody your gold, you're going to pay a fee. If you are fine with unallocated/mixed gold with multiple layers of counterparty risk, you could buy among the cheapest ETFs with annual fees below 0.2%. If you want to hold your gold in an allocated way by Brinks or something with fewer layers of counterparty risk, it'll generally cost over 0.5% per year. This goes toward the vault costs, salaries for people with guns, real estate costs, etc.

Basically, there's a pretty big inefficiency in the form of 1) routine verification, 2) secure transfer of ownership, and 3) secure custody, that all comes out in the form of high costs and slow speeds.

Bitcoin has fees, but they are very low in comparison. Nodes can verify bitcoin basically for free. Miners timestamp transactions to transfer ownership for a fee, and you can currently send ten million dollars worth of bitcoin globally for like $10 and have it confirmed within the hour. And you can custody bitcoin yourself, and bring it around with you globally, through ports of entry, across borders, in ways you can't realistically do with gold above a certain value threshold.

When thinking about periods of above-average bitcoin fees, it's useful to keep some of the alternatives in mind. Verifying and transferring ownership of other store-of-value assets like gold and real estate is slower and a lot more expensive, requires a lot more abstraction and permission, and comes with much less portability.

Raw cream you mean. My wife does. It’s great.

This meme makes me laugh so fucking hard 😂

Caught in the act (Shrinkflation)

Same price but one is almost a third less product.

I also don't think we'll see any moves in Argentina to make bitcoin a legal tender.

But who am I to judge? 🤷🏻‍♂️