RIP Alexei Navalny.

The US/UK should free Assange, free Ulbricht, pardon Snowden, and double-down on freedom as a contrast. They won't, but they should.

Russia is way more politically controlled and censored than their western counterparts, but if the western counterparts were smart they would emphasize this fact rather than lean more into being even half-like Russia.

Kudos to builders of various freedom tech.

I like to stack bitcoin, and to a lesser extent stack stocks and gold and real estate.

However, I am careful about dollars due to their centralization and tendency to lose value. The tokenomics for dollars just aren’t attractive. To the extent that I am long dollars for various liquidity needs, I am also short dollars to a similar amount through mortgages and so forth, so that I have zero net exposure to such a risky asset.

When I was at Princeton, I talked about how many applications don’t need statefulness and are better without it.

It’s not the easiest discussion, but the TLDR is that I shilled all the work you folks are doing on it.

If you are near Princeton in early March, they are hosting a decentralized social media workshop that now includes Nostr. 😎

I choose to attribute bitcoin touching $50k to Jack’s choice of t-shirts.

TL;DR:

nostr:note17jtcee97mkcxl5ysp4ka9s68nmt3s7a34c3ngyah3ud03zyjrfmqmjtf9l

The wider-than-normal divergence between loose fiscal policy (which is stimulating) and tight monetary policy (which slows things down) contributes to wider-than-normal divergence between the performance of different economic sectors.

In particular, it results in a wider-than-normal gap between sectors that are directly or indirectly on the receiving side of the deficits (eg business that rely on spending from upper and upper-middle class spenders) vs those that are the most sensitive to interest rates and thus are the most hurt by tight monetary policy (eg commercial real estate).

And because some sectors of the economy are doing great partially due to the fiscal stimulus, it makes it unlikely that monetary policy or other assistance will arrive to the weaker areas any time soon.

And then ironically, because public debt levels are high, tight monetary policy *contributes* to looser fiscal policy by increasing the overall interest expense of the government, which goes to various entities in the economy and strengthens some of the sectors that are not sensitive to interest rates.

This is a condition known as fiscal dominance.

The way things are shaping up, I think the story arc for this next cycle or two will be:

-A lot of altcoin VC money flows back into the Bitcoin ecosystem, builds a bunch of bubbles in startups based on too-early tech and broad speculation, and gets washed out when that tech takes longer than expected to mature. Additionally, a lot of the capital will get pulled toward speculation/trading of tokens on top of Bitcoin and blow up from that direction as well.

-Then after it washes out, there will indeed be some good mature utility-focused tech that emerges out of it that makes Bitcoin's layered stack better and more user-friendly. Bitcoin, both as sound money and to some extent as an immutable truth layer, emerges stronger.

What do you all think of BitVM?

People are all up in arms over this Tucker-Putin interview.

I’m all for free journalism but I am also busy this week. For people who have seen it, is it worth spending two hours to watch it or does Tucker get cucked by Putin the whole time?

Very well done indeed 👏

I was tempted to run away with all the books they were handing out for my book drops 😅

Because financial technology has been limited over the past several decades, credit card payments are basically like, "okay so, hand over your private key and pin, and then we'll use them to get that transaction completed asap".