I guess they will do whatever they are told to do?
Bondholders are probably running things as their covenants must be…
Huh, why does iOS open Current every time I tap a link in Damus?
What is doing this? Damus? Current? Or iOS?
UBS offers to buy Credit Suisse for “up to” $1bn.
Market cap was $6.91 billion on Friday! 😂
14 cents on the dollar… overnight?
Yikes! 😱
Just looking back the mcap was $60bn just before covid. 🫣
… and Bankers get paid largely in equity?? Don’t they know anything about banks? 🤣
Reading this morning that farmers have seized control of the Netherlands, is this true?
If so, what are they planning to do with it?
I don’t think such an all satisfying circumstance exists even in theory.
Take the poor libertarian, a true libertarian must be content to live under a none libertarian system because their countrymen don’t want libertarianism and it’s anti libertarian to make non libertarians live in a libertarian system.
Libertarianism is trapped in a paradox and can’t win, which is why it never has.
Similarly anarchocapitalism lacks the organising structures necessary to protect its anarchocapitalism state from any emergent government. Anarchocapitalism is extremely vulnerable to any kind of emergent government, it is to submit all the necessary tools to defeat the one thing you seek to defeat. It’s another paradox and again is why anarchy never lasts long. Someone always fills the vacuum even if by accident.
These are just two examples, but communism too has its own paradoxes that make it unattainable. Communism with no democracy and no free market has no means whatsoever of determining the desires or the will of the people it purposes to represent so perfectly. A paradox that makes functional communism unattainable.
Monarchy actually does what it says, as do dictatorships, whereas democracies usually morph into stable oligopolies which sounds bad but is probably the cleanest dirty shirt.
For me the structure of government and the policies and strategies of a government are two completely different things. These are just various structures and in theory they could all implement the same policies.
Anarchism is zero government, no rule of law.
Plenty of Westerners take their libertarianism to this extreme, but I saw the Iraq war and I never, ever want to experience anything like civil collapse. Ever.
As the Iraqi’s used to say to news crews… When you lose security you have lost everything, all of your freedoms are worth nil. They actually wanted to bring back Saddam and his murderous police squads because anarchy was worse.
In reality anarchism means fighting off gangs of armed rapists and child traffickers every time the sun goes down. I’m too old for that, and I’m not that old.
So long as there are parents, there will be government. Social orders weren’t created by megalomaniacs seeking to enslave people, they were set up by parents wanting to protect their kids. Villages, elders, kings, federations, governments. It’s just the necessary math to protect kids from bad people. Once you have that apparatus in place it can get Co-opted by politics, but if any government ever waivers in keeping kids safe parents storm the palace.
Law and order is a huge improvement over uncontrolled malevolence.
Ideologically this is much messier and fuzzy than the simplicity of anarchocapitalism, but it’s probably right that we have some kind of incompetent muddling class v’s 2003 Iraq.
Bitcoin is just better money. It can’t be compromised, nobody can pressure their own bailout. It’s beyond corruption. It forces proper behaviour, because there is no second chance, no extra life. That means no screwing over working families every 15 years to keep some sleazy banking class afloat. Eventually parents will want Bitcoin and that will be that.
Zaps 4 snaps 😂
⚡️ 4 🫰
Yes, there’s definitely a certain counterculture piety to it.
I don’t think it’s virtue signalling either, I think it’s genuine anarchism but maybe more of the champagne variety anarchism?
I also wonder if there is a phase in your 20’s / early 30’s where you realise you are genuinely locked out of home ownership (because of the post 9/11 Greenspan put) and your natural reaction is to just reject the economic order.
I don’t think that’s a completely crazy response for many people in this cohort. I am sympathetic to their plight even if I don’t share their anarchism.
The go to solution is a monetary hack, withdraw your liquidity from the savings pool of deployed capital, which is actually self fulfilling! but probably over too long a horizon for this first cohort to benefit.
It sucks, but they weren’t born in 1920 either.
People aren’t rational, lots of folk like living under an authority.
Probably the highly educated small countries will be the early adopters, Scandinavia, Tigers, GCC, etc. That will then give cover for developing countries to follow.
It sounds like an insane list, but I could imagine UAE, Sweden/Iceland, Singapore, Nigeria embracing Bitcoin to position themselves as regional financial hubs.
I think you are probably right. Lots of scenarios, but I think 2 generations seems reasonable.
Bitcoin can coexist perfectly well for a long time though. There are 180 local currencies, the smaller ones will probably melt into Bitcoin gradually over time and the big currencies will be quite stubborn.
Delaying children = a fallacy.
This curve never steepens, the parental population never catches up and conceives the children that were delayed. Those children are simply never born.
Go to someone’s profile page and then the three little dots at top right.
As far as I can see.
1). Young people emigrating
2). Temporary collapse in birth rate during 90’s following USSR collapse, echoes.
3). Aging population
4). Usual stuff of urbanisation, rising wealth, contraception, etc.
Who can predict what happens?
But the demographics are awful and souring.
According to the CIA world fact book 🕵️ (2021), below is a list of countries with shrinking populations and the number of years it will take for their populations to reach 50% of current levels.
These numbers are 👶 births/deaths 💀 only and do not include immigration (most of them have net emigration). To put the Ukraine war in the correct context… Eastern Europe was already collapsing , as these populations collapse it should be obvious that all of these countries will sooner or later be bankrupt. 🙇♂️
These countries have a combined GDP of $14 trillion 💸, their combined population today is 574 million. A Malthusian disaster is underway here.
Bulgaria 🇧🇬
Population change: -6.0
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.06) ≈ 11.9 years
Croatia 🇭🇷
Population change: -2.6
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.026) ≈ 26.7 years
Estonia 🇪🇪
Population change: -1.1
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.011) ≈ 63.5 years
Georgia 🇬🇪
Population change: -1.3
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.013) ≈ 53.5 years
Greece 🇬🇷
Population change: -2.0
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.02) ≈ 34.6 years
Hungary 🇭🇺
Population change: -3.1
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.031) ≈ 22.3 years
Japan 🇯🇵
Population change: -2.6
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.026) ≈ 26.7 years
Latvia 🇱🇻
Population change: -5.3
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.053) ≈ 13.2 years
Lithuania 🇱🇹
Population change: -3.6
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.036) ≈ 19.3 years
Moldova 🇲🇩
Population change: -2.9
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.029) ≈ 23.8 years
Poland 🇵🇱
Population change: -1.2
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.012) ≈ 57.8 years
Portugal 🇵🇹
Population change: -2.5
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.025) ≈ 27.7 years
Romania 🇷🇴
Population change: -4.1
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.041) ≈ 16.9 years
Serbia 🇷🇸
Population change: -3.0
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.03) ≈ 23.1 years
Ukraine 🇺🇦
Population change: -4.6
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.046) ≈ 15.2 years
Russia 🇷🇺
Population change: -1.6
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.016) ≈ 43.4 years
Italy 🇮🇹
Population change: -3.2
Years to halve: ln(0.5) / ln(1 - 0.032) ≈ 21 years
On current trends, it will take just 30.6 years for the 574 million combined population of these countries to fall to 287 million, doubling their debt burden per capita… assuming zero future deficit spending. 😱
⚡️ ⚡️ Bitcoin is inevitable ⚡️ ⚡️
Optimal profitability is not infinite intelligence.
Whilst everyone is getting super excited about AI and is predicting a singularity. Let me state a few things I learnt from time spent running an industrial tech start up (all our clients were $100bn+ industrials).
AI does not trend to infinity.
Optimal AI capability is not infinity, it is maximum profitability.
ML is expensive, data access layers (at this scale) are expensive.
The bottleneck for us was not CPU’s it was getting petabytes of data into memory. We did it with lots of sockets and a big fabric.
You cannot move the necessary volumes of data via the internet. We had to move data by trucks, it was faster, a lot faster.
Back to economics… let’s say it takes you $10m to train a model that can perform a task with 98% accuracy, typically it would take $100m to reach 99% and $1bn to reach 99.5%. At some point you have already captured all the value in the addressable market and further training isn’t just uneconomic, it is wasteful.
Now lots of people argue that AI will create myriad new markets and added value, this is largely BS. Yes it will do these things. But nowhere near the levels people are taking about. AI will expand very quickly to displace people and companies from existing addressable markets but expanding beyond that is very different and faces a multitude of headwinds many of which are demand limited and beyond control.
It’s usually not worth spending billions chasing the last 1% of the error. But there are exceptions such as autonomous cars, etc.
Understanding the size of the addressable market and the competitive error rate for that market usually tells you how much investment is worthwhile to spend on AI.
I suspect the next economic cycle will see a huge AI bubble, where people think infinite intelligence means infinite ROI. This is wrong. I’ve lived it. It’s a very hard won lesson.
Valuation by market capitalisation is a huge scam, because the liquidity is NEVER there for such a transaction outside of M&A.
It makes vastly more sense for valuations to take a haircut from market capitalisation with the size of the haircut inversely proportional to the liquidity of the limit order book.
This is all because our financial system legislation is designed by accountants (static asset values), and not merchants (liquidity participants).
The system is antiqued and even if we change the monetary instrument to Bitcoin, we still need the technology to do real time valuations by bid liquidity and not by price of most recent trade.
These small details change the structure of everything.
Phrack #70 was published during covid?