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.

The Fiatnam War is a spiritual war. Good morning.

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.

Interesting. So the "next iteration" of Bisq should have less features overall. I wonder if all users should arbitrate for each other to lessen the need for a DAO. Maybe after a couple of buys/sells on the p2p exchange.

Funny you say that... I actually love Bisq. But I never use CEXs, so maybe I'm just ignorant to how smooth an exchange UX could be 🤷‍♂️

What do you think is the biggest shortcoming of Bisq?

One potential avenue I'd love to hear more thoughts and skepticism on is the viability of the current P2P exchanges out there, what could be improved, etc.

One potential avenue I'd love to hear more thoughts and skepticism on is the viability of the current P2P exchanges out there, what could be improved, etc.

Will there be enough liquid bitcoin for everyone?

How difficult it will be to introduce further sat divisibility?

When a nostr dev does interior design

h/t #[0]

Who here read David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years?"

I'm curious what peoples' thoughts on it. I already have my own thoughts on it, but for something I'm working on I'm interested in hearing what people on Nostr think about it in their own words.

When you realize everything is impermanent, it’s so much easier to let go and simply do the best you can do.

there simply is no downside

Watching Bitcoiners cheer on federal takedowns of other cryptocurrency projects (justified or not) is... An interesting irony.

If they're coming for others they're going to come for Bitcoin. The law won't save you, we have to build and learn the tools.

Lmao talk about missing the entire point of Bitcoin.

"Feds please shut down our competition" is about the saddest response to a coming adversarial environment I can think of.