It's an interesting country to be sure. And it's odd you ask this since I'm writing this from a cafe in Auckland.

My gut feeling is that a significant part of the economy is heavily influenced by government policy, but the most important one has a decent level of autonomy. I speak, of course, of food production.

In a sense, the relative freedom of this country, I think, is due to the relative peace they've had over the years. No one is trying to invade it, for example.

A word you should know: Volkswirtschaft

As defined in Mises's Human Action:

The Volkswirtschaft is a sovereign nation's total complex of economic activities directed and controlled by the government.

It's essentially a way to talk about the degree of economic authoritarianism a given government has.

The term Bitcoin Maximalist was an epithet.

They tried to define us by how we reject every altcoin. And that is accurate. But it completely misses why.

We reject those altcoins because they're centralized scams.

We reject those altcoins because they're worse money.

We reject those altcoins because they confuse the public about Bitcoin.

I am a decentralized digitally scarce money advocate and so far, there's only one that fits the bill.

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Bitcoin Tech Talk #346

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-346

People would rather rationalize lies than challenge the tenets of their identity.

This is why most policial arguments are a complete waste of time.

Your ability to change yourself is limited.

We've been fed lies about how we can be or do anything we desire. Not only does this set us up for a life of disappointment, but it's making claims about our internal state that just aren't true.

Yes, there are people that have had dramatic changes both internally and externally. But that's much more the exception and not the rule. Most people have a limited range of change.

But because of this dumb pop psych belief, most people go for drastic changes and fail.

We need to be a lot more humble about change. That lets us be a lot more thankful when we improve instead of depressed when we aren't perfect.

Ossification and the Burden of Proof

-----------------

Bitcoin has already proven its immense value. Over the course of 14 years, it has shown its potential as a store of value at the very least. Beyond that, it offers various use cases that deliver significant benefits to its holders. And these are not insignificant implications; it's dramatically shifted the global conversation about money.

Bitcoin's decentralization sets it apart. With no central authority or control, even a majority can't force decisions upon the entire network. This differs vastly from most other systems we're familiar with, which are centralized and only require the consent of specific decision-makers to implement change.

Hence, anyone proposing to change Bitcoin must bear the burden of proof. There are two primary methods to meet this requirement.

The first is through economic, permissionless proof which involves the market. Anyone can create a market good based on Bitcoin, and as every entrepreneur knows, the onus lies on you to convince your customers that you're offering something valuable.

The second method involves making protocol changes, which should be extremely rare and executed with utmost caution. Bitcoin's usefulness means that anyone opposing your changes can simply refuse to accept them - regardless of the majority. This sets a very high bar, and it only rises as usage increases. The logic is simple: the more people use it, the more challenging it becomes to reach a consensus.

In the traditional financial system, altering base rules is much easier than persuading the market to accept a new product or service. This mindset originates from the centralized control of money by central banks. Consequently, many opt for the second route - altering the rules, rather than innovating a product or service. I believe this approach is misguided, a futile endeavor in a realm where politics holds little sway.

If the proposed changes are truly advantageous, why aren't proponents capitalizing on them in a market-driven manner? Although it might be inconvenient, and the user experience may not be optimal, you can still achieve your goals without changing the rules. Validate your idea by proving there's a market willing to pay for a less refined version of the same feature, then we can discuss potential protocol changes for improvement.

Until now, I've yet to see anyone do this. No one has gone out and proved a use case with the market and then proposed the protocol change. The few projects which have created a degraded version haven’t succeeded as far as I can tell.

The resistance to change in Bitcoin stems from the vast number of people already using it to store value. They have a say in any protocol changes, just as much as the developers, since it's their money at stake. Until they're all won over, they're unlikely to budge.

So, any clamor for sweeping changes is ill-advised. People save in Bitcoin precisely because it’s unlikely to change. The feature they want is knowing their savings won't be debased. Regardless of how beneficial your proposed feature may appear, it's not a guaranteed win-win for everyone. Each update carries the risk of unforeseen bugs and network degradation, and there are holders who would prefer not to take on that risk.

So to those that want to change the protocol, I would challenge you to prove your product in the marketplace before asking for protocol changes. Because until then, you’re not going to get most of the people who have savings in Bitcoin to budge.

Jim Thorpe won two gold medals with two shoes he got from the garbage. His shoes were stolen the night before and he didn't have time to get another pair, so he made do with misatching, ill-fitting shoes he found in the trash.

Don't complain about the tools, level up your resourcefulness and skill instead.

The Cure for Narcissism

We have an epidemic of Narcisissism. I outlined in another essay (note1vuzmx5qetm3zrjd7puvev645fsv5gdj9f6m3997guk4qy2ayv2jqd4wesf) how it comes into being. The rejection of belief in anything ultimately leaves nothing except yourself and given that there's nothing to love, nothing to believe in, what results is a love of self. It's a pathetic, pitiful love, borne out of not knowing yourself, and one that ultimately leads nowhere.

But how do we avoid this cruel fate? How do we get away from being an empty shell of a person staring into a reflection?

The answer might be obvious from the previous essay. Know yourself. Narcissism is not the result of knowing yourself too much, it's the result of knowing yourself too little. What basis can you judge anything until you have a grounding?

But that brings up the question: how do we get a grounding?

And this is where it means pushing your own boundaries. Most people don't know themselves because they live in a bubble. They do what's safe, what's comfortable. This is why Narcissus rejected would-be lovers, because that sounded too scary. He never tried anything scary because there was no impetus. There was no drive.

And really, isn't it the scary moments that we really get to know ourselves? Moments of danger, struggle, victory are when we find out what we're made of. Yet most people avoid uncertain situations because they'd rather be safe and comfortable.

Safe and comfortable lead straight to narcissism. We need experiences that challenge us, stretch us, put us at the brink. That's when we learn who we are and paradoxically, it lets us focus on something outside us.

That focus on the outside, whether it's glory, accomplishment, success or just winning is the beginning of finding purpose, finding love.

You love what you work for more than you work for what you love.

Getting Away With Evil

A lot of people see bad people thriving and secretly get jealous. They see altcoin creators make millions, or immoral VCs dump on retail and despise them, not so much because they're immoral, though that's the main rationalization, but because they want to get away with it, too.

You must kill those instincts with everything you have. Because that means you're also willing to sell your soul for money. It's just that you haven't had the opportunity yet.

Many OGs have gone into altcoins for this very reason. They saw Vitalik or Brad or a16z killing it with dogshit and decided to do it themselves, more out of envy than even greed. The scorn heaped on them is not as much moral than it is envious. I've seen these people, they altcoin eventually. This is not a good road to go down.

This envy is a fiat mindset. You want to get money without working hard. You want to scam people, as long as the payoff is sufficient. And you can tell there are a lot of such people, because they turn around rather suddenly and launch something that completely goes against what they said they believed.

This is sadly true of a lot of people. I don't need to name names but you know who they are. And unfortunately, we'll see a lot more of it going forward. The problem was always a moral deficiency.

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #345

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-345

The Green Lobby is a Death Cult.

This may come off as hyperbolic and I can already feel your eyes rolling. But hear me out. The environmental conservationalists really hate humanity.

It's not that they hate you personally, though if you oppose their agenda, they very well may. They hate humanity as a whole. They think humans are somehow doing irreparable harm to nature and that nature needs their protection.

Of course, this is vastly overstating their own importance, as well as the affect humanity has on nature. Nature's been around a while and has survived a lot, including asteroid impacts. It doesn't need you to protect it.

Yet the conservationalists keep going about how we need to reduce the planet's population by several billions. They hate *humanity* as a whole.

This is why I call them a death cult. They want less humans, period. And it's for a very vague and nonsensical reason.

What are you doing to provide value to the Bitcoin community?

Investing is an ego thing for a lot of people.

And that's not just VCs, it's Angel investors and a lot of others. Think about it. Many of these people have more wealth than they can spend. Others are really investing other peoples' money. What they're really after is the status that comes with being an investor in something truly big. They want that glory.

It's weird, because in many ways, they don't do much, other than provide capital. And that capital is often leveraged loans, or money from thin air. As much as VCs act like they add tons of value to companies, vast majority of the time, they just get in the way. That capital is useful, though, because you don't have to compete on merit, you can compete on scale and marketing instead. This is where the zombie infection starts.

Yet the narrative is that these are the people that should get credit and the reason that the economy thrives! That's the status they're after. And the mainstream media is happy to give it to them.

Bitcoiners ought to know better. The people that do the work are the ones that deserve credit, not their investors.

Free Nostr idea: Conference ticket exchange.

Every Bitcoin conference, my telegram groups fill with messages about someone that has a ticket that they need to get rid of or people that are looking for tickets last minute. There really ought to be a way to aggregate these ticket offers and bids on Nostr, provided people post them here.

When you have a fungible good like that, it's important to be able to compare. Most sellers don't have enough information to price their tickets well and buyers also don't have enough information to know what they should be paying. A market solves both these problems.

Maybe it's a custom relay that collects only these kinds of offers. Perhaps there's some sort of reputation check eventually. But it's ideal for this sort of platform because clients are aggregating lots of data from a lot of sources already. Peer-to-peer price infromation would make for a really interesting application of Nostr.

Obsession with scale is a fiat disease.

Seeking to get big when you're profitable makes a lot of sense. You can make even more money by scaling up. But what's really odd these days is that a lot of people want to scale even when they're not profitable.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense can figure out that this is not a good idea. If you multiply a negative number by a large number, you get an even bigger negative number. You're only going to lose more money. And that's true. You will lose more money, in a sound money economy.

In a fiat economy, things are a little different. If you're growing, that can be leveraged for additional loans on the potential to make a profit eventually. There's a lot of newly printed money floating around and it debases constantly, so more people are willing to take risks with their money. So malinvestment is common and unprofitable companies can suck in a lot of it.

Not all of these companies are bad, of course. Amazon famously made no profits for years to scale up. But for every Amazon, there's buy.com, boo.com, pets.com and so on. It's a gamble like with any unprofitable business. Sometimes you hit, sometimes you don't. The point is that the new money entering the economy often goes to stupid things and big things are what get attention. Thus everyone tries to scale massively.

Under sound money, profitability is first. You don't want to be losing something that's scarce. Thus, delaying scaling to maintain profitability is the logical choice. Businesses grow more slowly and cash infusions are much less common. That means they are generally much more hardened to market disruptions, because they last.

Family businesses used to last many generations. Heck, many last names today reflect the occupation of the ancestors that had a long-lasting business. A profitable venture that lasts is something you hold onto. It's also what we should be focused on instead of the fly-by-night, scale fast, rent-seeking culture we live in.

Sound money businesses will be very different than what we're used to.

Yes. You can define this pretty easily using miniscript which compiles to script. Some day, someone will make composing these scripts something you can do with a reasonable UI.

Most people are profoundly narcissistic.

You can tell because they blame everyone but themselves for anything that happens. They believe that they'd be fine if the world, really specific people, would get their act together. These people are usually fans of books like Catcher in the Rye. They like that book because it tells them what they want to hear. Specifically, that they, too, are geniuses and that it's the world that misidentifies them.

I really hate that book because it tells people that they're really hidden geniuses and that it's society's fault for not recognizing them. No, it's not society that's at fault. It's you. And it's profoundly immature to blame everyone else but yourself. That's what children do, not adults.

Yet if we look at the population, the people that act this way make up a significant percentage. Why is that?

It's because they've never had to grow up. This attitude is characteristic of someone that's never had to deal with adversity. And indeed, we get a lot of people like that under fiat money. Anyone with financial privilege has this potential to be this narcissistic. Honestly, if you constantly got bailed out by your parents or government, you'd never even think of improving.

Fiat money has made things way too comfortable, especially for the class of rent-seekers that don't contribute anything. We'll see a lot more of this as inflation takes its toll.

Merit vs. politics.

What is a woman?

Does that question trigger you? Does that question out me as a certain type of person?

What used to be a simple question that any 4-year-old could answer has now become a political hot potato. The reason is ultimately fiat money. Stay with me, because I can already feel your skepticism. What does transgenderism have to do with fiat money?

The reason is that in a fiat money society the government budget is essentially infinite. And that money is very powerful. But with that power comes a lot of needs. In a normal budget, you have to trade off claims of one group against another. But in a fiat budget, there's no real tradeoff, just the magnitude of the injustice that needs correction.

Thus, every group is incentivized to play victim. The bigger the perceived injustice, the more you'll get compensated through government action. Hence, every group exaggerates their victimhood. It's become something of a contest and it's funny to watch one victim group proclaim bigger victim status than another.

Transgenderism and its claims are another vector to claim victim status. It's what will get influence and more government spending. And questions like "what is a woman" being triggering is a way to claim a bigger victimhood status, and the potential purse that comes with it.

If you follow anything far enough, it always goes back to the money. And we have a terrible, terrible money.