GN

Made a bet today with a skeptic that Nostr will have more than 1M weekly active users by Jan 31, 2026

We are at ~35k today

That’s about 18 months from now

LFG 🚀

Check the last place you left it.

I'm sure that's part of it, for sure.

> Superchiasmic Nucleus: scanning social network for fertile feminine behaviour patterns.

Scanning...

Search timed out. No females found. Setting Reproduction fitness budget to zero...

Because a lot of it is visual and measurable, and occurred within the past decade, Egypt is currently providing a useful case study in the perils of central planning.

The country over the past ten years (when current leadership took over) took on $120 billion in external debt, and also used a lot of local deficit spending, with the reasonable goal of building lots of new infrastructure, alleviating congestion with new cities, and boosting international tourism to what are some of the best beaches in the world.

But details and order matter. And an entity with a monopoly on violence has less incentive to get the details and path dependence correct, and has fewer error correction methods built in than private developers do.

So the government built a big network of roads and bridges, which helped somewhat, although many of the roads are badly designed and always delayed. They built an entire new capital city for the government and military HQ, along with business and residential districts, which nine years in is still mostly vacant. They are developing the north coast city of El Alamein, but unlike well-designed private developments (eg in El Gouna on the Red Sea), the government was heavily involved for El Alamein, did massive overbuilding with incongruent designs that will take decades to fill (by which time the buildings will be deteriorating).

Now they have chronic power outages due to insufficient power generation. They are building their first nuclear facility, but it only began in 2022 and won’t be finished until 2026 or later (probably later). Maybe they should have started that facility earlier, before their now-empty city…

The average Egyptian pays for a lot of this through currency debasement. They look around and say “yes there are new bridges and entire new cities, but it takes me more hours of work to afford a car than it did ten years ago and there are three-hour power outages each day…” Basically they get taxed in opaque ways via debasement, and don’t benefit from most of the development that they are paying for.

And while those developments might make sense if successful, the order of development, the details of development, and so forth have clearly been suboptimal.

Anyway, good morning.

Why wouldn't you accept your legal tender in addition to accepting bitcoin?

Such as?

I expect you are right about that.

Interestingly, its only in the West (and a couple of Westernising East-Asian countries) where male Testosterone levels (and sperm counts) are cratering. Men in LatAm, Africa, South Asia and China doing just fine.

- Status of men?

- Increasing inequality generally?

- Change in social comparison group when using modern media?

Its not urbanisation or sedentarism or even pollution, because China et al have all of those.

I'm sitting in a McDonald's while my son visits his girlfriend 🥹 She works here. She's on break.

Me, I'm just shocked at how shitty McDonald's is now. I have not been in one in over a decade. Wow.

We need a Bitcoin themed burger joint.

Human biological characteristics can rise and fall in terms of evolutionary importance in the same way that nation states do.

For example: historically, high testosterone men have climbed to the top of the social hierarchies. However, in the digital age, lower testosterone men will dominate by being more adaptable to a sedentary lifestyle.

I wonder what other biological traits this applies to? #asknostr

Very true. Bitcoin is hope!

Is there freedom of will?

A top prize

Personally I think it's just a play to win votes and he either doesn't really understand it or thinks he can control it.