If bitcoin miners can afford to pay for their electricity at the prevailing market rate, then they are no different from any other consumer of electricity. The end.

Starlink is disguised as internet for the underserved. The bread and butter for that one is governments and military.

I kind of refuse to believe the Mars stuff is a scam because I refuse to believe anyone is actually stupid enough to believe he's serious.

Basically 95%+ of people who can afford starlink live in places with infinitely better and cheaper internet. Thinking you can finance thousands of satellites to orbit earth from revenue from people who are too poor to have broadband or proper infrastructure is the equivalent of thinking electric cars or dogecoin are not a retarded idea.

I do think bitcoiners fall victim to anger and outrage about the systems they are trying to challenge and replace that cause them to under and over-estimate various things. I think bitcoiners over-estimate the chances we are going to see the USD hyperinflate. They over-estimated the chances the SVB collapse was going to bring down the entire fiat banking system. They underestimate how much hard work it's going to be to 10X bitcoin adoption from here.

I'm pretty committed to doing that hard work. But I try to be very honest with myself about how hard that work is going to be. But a lot of people around here think the work is already done and we just have to wait for seven seals of the fiat apocalypse to be opened.

are you prepared to be a target?

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.

I will be building this for NOSTR too. Give me a few weeks or so.

Steak and butter are the most healing foods on the planet.

I was completely against this idea most of my life. Until I tried it.

The American Dream is a harmful narrative.

The traditional expectation in American society is that if you put in a basic level of effort, you will be successful. You go to school, you study, you graduate, and you go to college. You don't do drugs, you stay out of trouble. You start at an entry-level job and get promoted every few years. Financial success is supposed to follow. Not extreme success, but a stable job that pays well, marriage, kids, owning a house, vacations, etc.

Those things are supposed to happen because you followed the rules.

When you follow all the rules and are not successful, it creates a psychological disconnect, and people react in different ways to that disconnect.

Some people react by rejecting the traditional expectations and redefining success. So you get things like minimalism and child-free lifestyles and the sort of Bohemian hipster ideal that it's okay to not settle down. A generation ago it was hippies and communes.

On the other hand, some people react to this psychological shift by forming the belief that they were not successful because they failed to follow the rules sufficiently strictly.

So they become fundamentalists. They lean into following the rules and they make following the rules a core part of their identity. The whole grindset thing is not about work, it's about an identity. It is doubling down on the idea that if you work hard and relentlessly improve yourself, you will achieve success. Along with it comes the idea that people who have failed did so because they did not work sufficiently hard.

The people who post endlessly about the grindset mentality are trumpeting their own moral purity. They are successful because they are following the rules. And they know that they are successful because they talk about how much they are successful.

The flip side of this phenomenon is that some people will encounter this psychological disconnect and form the mindset that the rules are bullshit and people only achieve success if they are willing to break the rules. Thus there is nothing morally wrong about it because everyone else must be doing it too. It opens the door and creates a motivation for criminal behavior because there was no success achieved from following the rules.

There is no formula for success. Nor is success even an objective goal. Folks should seek validation from within rather than Keeping Up With the Joneses.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, there were a lot of capital controls, lending restrictions, securities restrictions, etc. And it was for two different but intertwined reasons.

One obvious reason was that, among countries involved in trade wars or shooting wars, they wanted to reduce capital flows to the enemy.

A second reason was that, due to the war, sovereign debts became so high relative to GDP that they had to inflate away the debt, which was a form of default. It wasn't just 6102; it was a broad range of controls. Carmen Reinhart described it well as “creating a captive audience” in an

IMF Working paper:

“High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or belowmarket real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for government debt, limiting tax-base erosion. Financial repression is most successful in liquidating debt when accompanied by inflation. For the advanced economies, real interest rates were negative ½ of the time during 1945–1980. Average annual interest expense savings for a 12—country sample range from about 1 to 5 percent of GDP for the full 1945–1980 period. We suggest that, once again, financial repression may be part of the toolkit deployed to cope with the most recent surge in public debt in advanced economies.”

-IMF Working Paper No. 2015/007

Unfortunately, as most here know, both conditions are once again present in the 2020s. The US/Europe vs Russia/China contest is providing a useful excuse for governments to crack down on privacy, p2p exchange, money transfer, etc. Meanwhile, western governments have a similar sovereign debt problem that ultimately necessitates inflating the debt away.

Some of this Operation Chokepoint 2.0 stuff is just targeting scammy crypto companies and things like that. And the SEC enforcement actions are also going after crypto securities fraud and so forth. For bitcoiners, those things are not particularly relevant.

But under the surface, the bigger risk is all of the ongoing pressure on privacy, p2p, and the free flow of capital, including tighter bank restrictions and debanking.

I see the light and it is beautiful

Amazing how fast features are developed once clients have to compete on merit and quality of service, as opposed to thickness of walls and quality of lock-in.

Twitter is a shitcoin

Don't be a binary thinker. Politicians can be both incompetent and evil.