Beautifully written and deep compassionate concern for humanity here. To think that we are only 15 years into this experiment is really wild. Given how entrenched and coded into the culture the fiat system is, it’s kind of amazing how far we’ve come already, even though we’re all still taking our baby steps.

Thanks for your response, Erik. You definitely add to the “freedom vibe” in this whole wild space we’re in. And I’m grateful for you. 🙏

Also, ironically, when I’ve taught “Bartelby” to undergrads in the past, at first it’s very hard for a lot of kids to grok anything but that Bartleby is an abject nihilist, and it takes some extended conversation to move past that, to an understanding that he’s something like an exemplar of finality of agency.

Dear Eric,

I listen to a fuckton of Bitcoin podcasts and other audio content. It is rare now that while listening to something, I literally get up and cheer, or shout out loud with wild celebratory whoops or, conversely, with insane fury. Today, listening to your WBD interview, at the end of your Synopsis of the Melville story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a story I know very well. I actually teared up and then bellowed aloud like a barbarian. I resounded my yawp because I realized that Bitcoin is “the power of last refusal.”

For a time I worked for a publishing company in their subsidiary rights department and I have had some of my own writings published as well. In publishing, we have this concept, as I am sure you know, of “the right of first refusal.” It’s “a contractual right to enter into a business transaction with a person or company before anyone else can.” But Bitcoin is literally the power of last refusal. I never thought about it this way until you spoke about Bartleby. Note that I use the word “power” and not “right” when referring to Bitcoin, because this ability is intrinsic to its nature as property and how it can be managed by a person individually (as opposed to extrinsic).

Bartleby exercises his power of last refusal, in which he literally pledges, unto death, his unwillingness to participate in a world system that he has no truck with. We cannot know what Bartleby’s reasons are: he never tells us (another power!). But because he is a human being, he can choose to die instead of being forced to live under a set of rules that he does not accept. In this sense, the state, the world, the human community, cannot extract from him what it wishes. Bartleby’s conscientious objection constitutes the power of last refusal.

If I choose, upon my death, not to pass on my seed phrase to anyone, or give it up to the state, but instead choose to die with that cryptographically protected secret, I am exercising my power of last refusal. At the last, I force the state to accept my power as a self-realized “moral majority of one,” to bend Thoreau‘s phrase. In my final act, whether it wants to or not, the state has to recognize my self-sovereignty, and it cannot see me only as a unit of labor.

The existence of the power of last refusal opens up, as you say later in the interview, a whole new ethical framework. It means that my conscientious objection is not just an act of language or thought, but an act that tracks materially onto the real world.

Anyway, thanks for the big revelations. I’ll be buying your book today.

Warmly and in brotherhood,

Cosmo Crixter

En el Día de l’os Muertos rendimos homenaje a la cadena válida más pesada.

Hey man! Yeah, I need to be here and stay here on Nostr way more. It’s so much better than anything else. Happy Halloween!

Been screwing around with AI. Pic #12zxt7vq:

“Why?” is the deepest question. May he never stop until he understands all.

Fuck yes. Anti-totalitarian tech. Fuck yes all day.

Kayaks are great for quiet mornings fishing in bays. But if I want to go far, fast, and with a movie…yeah, it’s ✈️’s.

There is one party, and it is a transnational party of military industry and surveillance. Seeing and knowing the truth, it’s futile to rage against it. Only tune up to the harmonic flows that transcend it, and do so without catching its watchful eye.

Thank you, John! 🙏

And here is the Substack link to the letter if you’d like to read it there:

https://open.substack.com/pub/cosmocrixter/p/an-open-letter-to-senator-elizabeth?r=1iazri&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

Reposting for nostr my newest open letter. Posted it yesterday on Twitter. This one is to Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Brad Sherman, about how Bitcoin is a union that anyone can join to defeat many types of shitcoins.

Thanks so much for reading (and for the zap!)! 🙏

Reposting here the second of my open letters. This one to Fidelity and Fidelity Digital Assets, posted on Twitter on 12/8/22, on the occasion of their deciding to allow clients to trade Bitcoin on their platform, but not to take custody of it.

Is that old dirty snow melting in the foreground?

Be In Balance

Everything grows weird.

The way we see…

What you see…