I don’t know who needs to hear this but the Covid mask 😷 that you wore for two years never did anything.

You know it feels like hardly a single day passes without feeling like I’m being totally fucked by my own government. Family man, entrepreneur, employer, never been convicted of a crime and I’m being backed into a corner for which there is seemingly no peaceful way out of. The authoritarian wrecking ball is in swing.

USA is quickly turning into a failed rogue state, how long until official banana republic status?

Just emptied my wallet. Sad day for America.

Monero also good. If not the best.

People are thinking about the Samourai situation the wrong way IMO.

They’re worried about hiding (KYC vs non-KYC) like it matters.

"Oh, I see you’ve bought a house, but we have no idea where you got the money for it and can’t trace it back to a sats purchase you made through your bank. We do see you paid taxes on $60K per year and have a $5M house, but we will leave you alone in this citadel since we can’t trace the specific sats to your bank account!”

FFS, if they’re coming after your property, they’re coming after your property. They don’t give a fuck about your rights, and they don’t really care how you got what you have. You think it matters they can’t *prove* you got it through sats appreciation? They can’t prove someone else didn’t lose his keys, either. They don’t care.

The beauty of the technology is they literally cannot seize this one asset unless you volunteer the keys. They can jail you, they can murder you, but they can’t take it from you, and more importantly they can’t do so remotely. They need to expend resources and be on camera, in person. This is a very big handicap and a huge advertisement to others to store their wealth out of their reach.

You have the strongest hand in the history of humanity. Stand up to the bully.

Seems crazy now , but true ! in 2010 this web site gave 5 whole Bitcoins to every visitor , 😍

We always knew some totalitarian, faux-liberal, midwit politician would propose a special wealth tax or windfall tax on #Bitcoin

Warren checks all the boxes ✅

I've only been hodling bitcoin for a few years and this is my first halving.

Some plebs have been hodling for multiple epochs.

It takes nerves of steel to hodl #bitcoin . Most normies think we're insane for what we do.

I'm so proud to be a part of this group🧡

All I am saying is a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS is not a "de-Googled phone".

Yup... Only thing not entirely accurate is the drop in tax rate wasn't overnight as alluded to in the meme, but it started that year and throughout his administration

THERE IS HOPE FOR TARDS

#tardstr

You don't have a lightning wallet connected to your pubkey so I can't zap you, which client are you using?

Let me make my stance on Iran vs Israel explicit:

1. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are NOT Iran. They may be funded and supplied by Iran, they may get advice from Iran, but just like Ukraine is not the United States, these groups are not Iran and legally speaking, according to the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and other international law, Iran is not culpable for the actions of these groups. The groups themselves bear full responsibility for their own actions.

2. Iran recently attacked Israel. This was the first time Iran ever attacked Israel AFAIK. They were very careful about it. They followed Chapter VII Article 51 of the UN charter, and reported to the Security Council their exercise of their right to self-defense before they attacked. They compiled with the proportionality rules of the 1949 Geneva Convention, and furthermore limited their attack to military targets, and not even to people but things like airstrips where nobody died. They didn't have to be that careful, but clearly they are trying to only send a signal, rather than escalate. They clearly announced afterwards that their attack was over and there would be no further retaliation, that the matter is now resolved.

3. There is no right of self-defense for a strike that was itself fully legally compliant self-defense. Israel has no right to respond.

A couple months ago I had a discussion with the head of digital assets at a multi-trillion AUM financial institution about the topic of whether bitcoin is a risk-on asset or a risk-off asset.

This wasn’t about what it is conceptually (i.e. globally portable finite bearer assets are conceptually good to own in a crisis, neither of us disagreed on this), but rather how its price would *actually* behave in a crisis currently and for the next several years.

Their view was that it could be marketed as a risk-off asset, meaning something that is likely to go up in a crisis, and that if marketed this way it would allow them to put bitcoin ETFs into more portfolios and weight it bigger.

My view was that while of course people should own bitcoin, it’s not yet a risk-off asset in practice in terms of price action, and that marketing it that way is likely to lead to disappointment for those that expect it to perform like that.

We then got into a discussion about how bitcoin went up in the March 2023 banking crisis. They suggested that this is evidence of emerging risk-off behavior, to their point.

I disagreed, and clarified that in my analysis the closest correlation to bitcoin price action is measures of global liquidity. Some types of crises are pro-liquidity and some are anti-liquidity, and will likely affect bitcoin’s price accordingly.

The March 2023 banking crisis was a pro-liquidity event because it was quickly apparent that the Fed/Treasury would bail banks out fast and slow their rate hikes. Therefore, bitcoin went up not because it was a risk-off asset per se, but rather because it behaved as a pro-liquidity asset as it frequently has.

The Iran/Israel event this weekend was an anti-liquidity crisis because it contributed to a flight-to-safety move toward the dollar (i.e. the unit of account for which the most debt is denominated in, and debt represents inflexible demand for that unit). A sharp move up in the dollar is bad for global liquidity because it hardens the debts of various foreign entities (sovereigns and corporations) relative to their cash flows (which are to varying degrees partially or completely denominated in fiat units other than the dollar). And so bitcoin behaved as it normally does: it went down amid falling global liquidity.

At this stage (with its relatively small size, high volatility, and poor understanding of most people for the asset), I continue to view bitcoin price action as likely to be pretty correlated with global liquidity for a while. Understanding that dynamic is helpful when communicating expectations to people and when determining which types of crises are likely to push its price up or down. Yes, bitcoin is a risk-off asset conceptually, but in practice in terms of macro price action it is still a pro-liquidity asset primarily.

When bitcoin price action starts to behave differently from that trend, I’d be happy to report on that observation.