The last people that should be blamed are the people withdrawing money from a defunct bank. They're the rational ones exposing the insolvency of the bank.
Instead, politicians are blaming them for causing more mistrust of the system. This is what people in power think about, conserving their position and making enemies of anyone that would threaten that, no matter how just their position.
Your leaders don't care about truth or justice. And they will gladly support lies and injustice to gain power.
They're all Nietzcheans now.
Feels like they're trying to eliminate all the on/off ramps for exchanges.
Good luck playing whack-a-mole! China tried this 8 years ago and people there still own Bitcoin.
They'll be much more successful taking the treasuries of altcoin foundations.
What content do you zap?
Is it a reaction that you have? Like it made you think, or laugh, or nod?
Is it appreciation of effort?
Is it insight that you wouldn't have otherwise had?
I wish I could poll this, but responses will have to do.
The emphasis of money as a method of payment is a fiat disease.
The fiat system puts a lot of emphasis on monetary velocity, which is a fancy way of saying how much we collectively trade. In a sense, this is an understandable metric. If trades benefit both parties, then more trades mean that more parties are satisfied and more goods are created and exchanged and we have a better economy, right?
In a normal free market economy, yes. But once you make that the metric that you aim at, it becomes worthless. You get boondoggles that count as "trades" when they don't benefit anyone. Malinvestment gets conflated with trades that do benefit everyone. Hence, the Keynesian mistake is to think the metric more important than the underlying thing that it's trying to measure, which is each person's subjective benefit.
Sadly, the Keynesian mentality is pervasive in a fiat money economy and instead of thinking about wealth generation, they merely think of monetary movement. The thing is money should only move when there's a good reason to, as in there's a good or service that's worth the money. If not, moving because of inflationary pressures, for example, is much more likely to lead to malinvestment.
Yet the idea persists that the thing you need more than anything is more trading with a particular currency for prosperity. I believe that's what's driven the Roger Vers of the world to emphasize the payment aspect above everything else. It's a Keynesian deceit.
The incentives will take care of themselves in time, don't be so concerned people aren't "spending" their sats on things. Merchants haven't caught up yet and until they do, we won't see massive uptake on Bitcoin as a method of payment.
Until then, provide value and stack.
If they bail out SVB, it'll combine with a bigger bank on a sweetheart deal arranged by the Fed.
If they don't bail out SVB, deposits will go to the bigger banks that are more likely to get bailed out.
Fiat money creates winner take all dynamics.
I'm secretly hoping things get worse and we can wipe out the cruft.
SVB depositors will get rekt!
Startups won't make payroll and die!
Debt Ceiling won't be raised!
We'll print a trillion dollar coin!
The lady doth protest too much. I expect a bailout announcement in the next few weeks.
Bitcoin is the only currency where people are worried there aren't enough zeros. Most currencies are trying to get rid of them.
Scarcity is real.
Man, the RFK Jr book...
The rot goes very deep.
1910's - Woodrow Wilson was very pro-war despite campaigning for no war
1930's and 40's - Communists were anti-war until Russia got invaded and then were pro-war, like the rest of the left
1950's - The left was pro-war and Truman lost to Eisenhower who wanted to end the Korean War
1960's - The left was pro-war until they actually had to go fight and only the radical left was anti-war for a short time toward the end
1990's - Everyone was pro-war, including the left
2000's - They were pro Afghanistan, and only anti-Iraq after a year or so.
Historically, the right has been more isolationist. It's only with the advent of the neocons in the 70's that they've become very pro-war. 1971 really was a watershed year because the US had to start defending the dollar hegemony through military means.
I saw an interview were Andrew said he was by far the biggest node in the federation and it just didn't make sense.
Nostr + Torrent = Decentralized shared video.
Is there a bounty for this yet?
The Godless Existential Burden
--------------------------------
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
Thus wrote Nietzche in The Gay Science. The character making this statement is known as the Nietzchean madman. What he talks about in the dialogue is replacing the meaning that God provided. The consequences of eliminating God, in Nietzche’s view, are pervasive and not easily dealt with.
This is in contrast to Humanist philosophers from the Enlightenment like Rousseau and Spinosa who removed God, but kept Christian morality. They claimed reason as their foundation for their morals instead of God. The scene takes place in a bar with Humanists, so they make fun of the madman who keeps saying “I seek God.”
The smart-alecky people in the bar, representing Enlightenment thinkers, suggest God is hiding, or is afraid or that He’s lost. They insult God since they don’t believe in Him. The madman’s answer, that God is dead, is the apex.
Base Layer Belief
------------------
"You have unchained the earth from the sun, a move of incalculable significance."
The madman’s lament is really about how God is a foundational belief. Removing God removes a whole host of beliefs which depend on God. If God doesn’t exist, what does morality look like? What gives life meaning? For what purpose does anyone do anything? To remove God is to remove the basis for all of those things, as Nietzche recognized, but Enlightenment thinkers did not. Philosophically, there was a gaping hole left by removing God.
Let’s look at morality, for example. In a philosophy that has no God in it, how do you determine what is a good or bad action? Can you go from descriptive statements like “all men are mortal” to imperative statements like “thou shalt not murder”? In philosophy, this is known as the is-to-ought problem and there aren’t any good solutions. The intellectually honest solution, according to Nietche and many others, like Hume, is that such a derivation doesn’t exist.
In other words, without God, there is no basis for moral imperatives. The very concept of good and evil requires re-examination, which is what Nietche considered in his books. Even seemingly obvious moral imperatives like “we should not torture children” or “we should not commit genocide” need to be questioned once you remove God from the equation.
Nietzche argued that the Enlightenment thinkers were wrong in keeping Christian morals. They couldn’t logically generate morality, or meaning or purpose through facts, because of the is-to-ought problem. Therefore, the morality they espoused was intellectual cowardice. They wanted the comfort of a Christian world view while rejecting the God that undergirds it all. With God, the oughts come naturally. Without God, there requires a whole new set of justifications for any sort of ethics.
The madman was pointing out that they had killed not just God, but all the things dependent on God, including morality, meaning and purpose.
Will-to-power
--------------
Nietche’s conclusion was that if you really removed God and all the morals, meaning and purpose that depend on God, then you are left with strength. The philosophy he espoused is one of being honest about that massive metaphysical hole and facing it with courage.
If God is dead, one has the daunting task of filling that hole, of creating meaning, purpose and ethics. If you reject God, you must also reject everything built on God and come up with another way to live, wholly different from how Theists live.
For many, removing God from their lives is an attractive proposition. They have the freedom to change morals to suit their needs. Indeed, humanism, a child of the Enlightenment, has very similar morals as Christianity, except a few changes, mostly around sex. Yet as Nietzche points out, such arbitrary tweaking is cowardly and intellectually lazy because it doesn’t go far enough. All morals have to be thrown out with the denial of God and a brand new form of godless morality, one that is philosophically consistent, has to take its place.
Nietzche’s morality comes down to the strong ruling over the weak, a might-makes-right philosophy. It can only be described as sociopathic, where anything is permissible and nobody has any inherent worth.
Burden of Meaning
--------------------
Few people have sociopathic morals, but the influence of Nietzche continues to the present day. The default societal assumption is godlessness and each person has the burden of finding meaning.
For example, modern people see jobs as the source of meaning. They are presumed to be where individuals can find self-actualization and metaphysical fulfillment. Jobs have taken on an additional burden and are no longer a place to just make money.
Without God in the picture, each person has to find meaning and many try to do so through their jobs. Success in a job takes on existential significance and there are two godless ways to measure it.
The first way is essentially some sort of status game where doing better than others is the metric. This could be salary, honors, recognition or something else. The meaning comes from others’ approval, which is not easily earned and is at best temporary even when you get it.
The second is a subjective metric based on internal feeling. Being subjective, the metric can and does change and is like a compass pointed in towards yourself. There’s no real direction or progress and a lot of meandering. A subjective measurement is unstable because what makes you happy one day might not the next.
Neither of these measurements are ultimately satisfactory.
Which brings us back to the beginning. Removing God means having to define meaning ourselves. Defining meaning for ourselves is an enormous burden, a gargantuan task and is a heavy existential load to bear. The ubiquitous questions of moderns like “What should I do with my life?” and “How can I be happy?” are really presenting symptoms of this underlying philosophical disconnect.
The madman’s question shines a light on the gaping hole of godless meaninglessness. How shall we comfort ourselves?
Bitcoin moderates are fame maximalists. So are most altcoiners and fiat people.
We are not the same.
What if the continued tight monetary policy is because of Bitcoin?
I'm in Southeast Asia right now. It sucks that if I posted notes as I think them, that most of them would be while you're sleeping.
strong and compliant, like a mule.
My final article of the incentive series for Bitcoin Magazine looks at global level incentives of fiat money. The dollar hegemony has lots of second and third order effects from military adventurism of the US, the oppression of developing countries and much more. Excerpt after the link.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/fiat-money-has-broken-the-world
In the first three parts of this series, I examined the different ways that fiat money has led to terrible incentives at the individual, corporate and national levels. We are more isolated than ever, we are less satisfied with our work and we work under tyrannical, authoritarian governments as a result of fiat money. In this article, I go through the ways the entire world is incentivized by fiat money.
The previous articles spoke more generally about how individuals, companies and nations are affected by fiat money. This article will be a lot more specific as there's only the one world we live in and we don't need to speak generally. Thus, I will start this article with some historical context as that will give us a better understanding of why the financial incentives in the world are the way they are.
Bretton Woods
---------------
We start the analysis of global fiat money incentives with one of the major historical events that precipitated the world we live in today and that's the Bretton Woods Agreement from 1944.
Make a curated version of the account and charge money?