I spent the last 36 hours in Barelcelona at a conference for my job. I met quite a few young professionals who say it's increasingly hard to live in the city due to excessive cost of renting a place to live. Ex-patriot tech workers with incomes double those employed by domestic companies can afford much higher rents and have bid-up the rental market ( of course facilitated by landlords and agencies).
It's a huge shame we are doing this to the young professionals entering their careers who should be putting in the base layer of their careers and finances (I know, I know .. at least they have jobs ..).
Can't help feeling this is a result of the financialisation of housing - something we all need and a basic requirement in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
This is happening in many places for sure... not just Barcelona, perhaps it's just the first time I heard young professional people attest to this.
Housing should not be a store of value and a means of wealth creation. It is a key source of inequality and it needs to stop.
Alas, the ink itself never materialized but our uncle Cedric did temporarily find use for the pulp in one of his cayman farms in the north.
My cousin Anthony would spend hours boiling artichokes with the crazed notion that they would yield an ink darker than pure indigo, for which he would be celebrated and reviled by the local clerics.
Winters were a favourite time of year. Our mother would cover our bodies in lard each Sunday evening and, barring typhoons or other inconveniences, would send us scurrying about the garden around dusk to drive away the wood pigeons. It rarely worked.
This is my politics
This is my politics nostr:nprofile1qqsp4lsvwn3aw7zwh2f6tcl6249xa6cpj2x3yuu6azaysvncdqywxmgpz4mhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejqzenhwden5te0ve5kcar9wghxummnw3ezuamfdejj7mnsw43rzun5d3ckxcfcwgmxzatev9mn2m34dqekcdf5xgexgmf5wde8jdty0fnx2ef5xcunven3v5u8xdn3va6kg6mnxajx5arxwvlkyun0v9jxxctnws7hgun4v5dpfm4n
NOSTR where it at!
There are those who say Bitcoin doesn't scale, and build blockchains with more throughput at the cost of more centralization (generally in the form of it being way harder to run a node), and then also point to Bitcoin as having low fees as a criticism.
The limiter it turns out, 16 years in, is not how many people *can* self-custody bitcoin. It's how many people *want* to.
Not everyone wants to deal with the technicalities of their own car, and not everyone wants to handle the technicalities of their own money. Quite few, in fact. It's always a subset for these types of things. People who are hardcore over their area of knowledge.
I leave my car details to pros down the street who I know the name of, and handle my money myself. There are those who handle their own cars but leave their money details to others.
Bitcoin currently processes about as many transactions per year as Fedwire, which handles $1 quadrillion worth of gross settlement volume per year for the US and for a good chunk of the world (in context, it's approximately 200 million $5 million average-sized transactions). That's actually a crazy stat. Bitcoin is casually this open-source global Fedwire with its own scarce units, and unlike Fedwire anyone can permissionlessly build on it or transact with it, for low fees despite it being a +$2T network. And if it gets clogged there are all sorts of permissionless layers above it with certain trade-offs.
Some people say paper bitcoin holders detract from the network. I say the opposite- their willingness to hold IOUs helps add to price stability and network size without clogging it. That leaves more room for cypherpunks to develop with, and work on. And those who finance them.
This has been foreseen as early as Hal Finney in 2010, when he wrote about bitcoin banks (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211).
We live in a sweet spot by most metrics. A golden age. Historically, so few recognize it when they have it so good.
Bitcoin is big enough to be of interest to many, and yet is still niche enough in a global context to have low base-layer fees. Suitcoiners are happy to add to its scale, and yet cypherpunks can also build, and users can transact right on the base layer, and move to Lightning and Ark and BitVM and Liquid and any sort of trade-off they want if fees get high.
And you're bearish, anon?
The real battle, though, is the ongoing government crackdown on privacy.
Bitcoin itself is in a pretty good technical place. It's a great tool. Certain conservative low-risk covenants might make it better, but even the existing design space is great and still expanding.
The US, Europe, and China cracking down on privacy is the threat. The headwind. And they're all expected. They're not surprising, but they're indeed fierce. That's the real battle- for the hearts and minds of people to embrace why privacy and permissionlessness are good traits.
In this ongoing funny contrast between podcasters and developers, that's the ideal role of podcasters- to spread the good news of what developers have built. To educate people. To tell them what's now possible thanks to developers. To articulate why cypherpunk values are good to a broad non-technical audience. That's where the overlap is. In overly-simplistic D&D terms, those with high CHA try to spread the work of those with high INT. It's not so much that "governments" are the problem. Governments often at least partially represent the people. If you convince a lot of people that privacy and sound money are good things, then you defang the problem. And you also challenge them legally in jurisdictions where it makes sense.
The technical foundation is good. The development of the past 16 years has been amazing, and it has brought us here. The scale has reached institutions, which is expected, not a threat. The actual threat is not treasury companies; it's anti-privacy regulations by governments. And more deeply that's a social issue, given how many people accept it. A vast amount of people believe privacy is only important for bad people who have something to hide. There's a ton of education work to do on it. Privacy is good. It's the default. But most people don't realize it when it comes to money.
We're winning. For 16 years ya'll have been amazing. But we'll need another 16 years more. More developers. More podcasters. All of it. We're a $2 trillion in market cap entering into a global fiat network of hundreds of trillions. And as their own institutions melt down from their own failures, their own top-heavy demographics and false promises, they will look for scapegoats. They will look toward those who are winning, and say they are the enemy.
When interviewers ask my price predictions, I tend to be conservative. That's mostly a liquidity assessment, and a rotation from OGs to new buyers. Price growth does take time.
But under that surface, I also have the benefit of being a general partner at among the largest bitcoin-only venture funds. I see what people are building, and I'm bullish. And for those who are working on stuff that doesn't align with profit, entities like the HRF and OpenSats are doing great work. Across all of the options, people are building great things.
I couldn't be more bullish on the ecosystem that's in place. All of you.
Let's go.
Good evening.
Great recap and a very important message and reminder, thanks Lyn.
Another one I love: judging people only makes you like them less - like scratching a mosquito bite, it feels great and justified in the moment, but just bothers you more and more when you do it.
Fix yourself before you seek to fix other people is another mantra I like to remember when I feel the urge to whine...
It's a just a momentary glitch... hopefully...
Checking the burners... Plumbing getting hooked up as we speak.
Quality over quantity! When you come to think of it that's basically the value prop of NOSTR.
nostr:nprofile1qqs985gwfncy27y7jtkqclfs5lckknc8vt59eqkyee74hn9k820j6aspp3mhxue69uhkyunz9e5k7qg4waehxw309ajkgetw9ehx7um5wghxcctwvsfrndp3 I enjoyed your conversation with Peter, really appreciate your insight and articulate points 🙏
NEW EPISODE DROPPED...Swiss politician Samuel Kullmann joins me to explain how the Swiss model can fix a broken Britain, the power of direct democracy, and why we must end the era of the career politician.
Links to full episode - https://linktr.ee/PeterMcCormack
https://blossom.primal.net/02bf61702c7eb57d007a62b941923b0e012e3a8d043467c17ec30d3985ab3870.mp4
Great episode Pete! For sure Switzerland should be on your list of places to consider if and when the time comes... But Brexit made settling as a British citizen more complicated than previously (not too sure of the details but EU citizens still have freedom of movement and to pursue economic activity / settle if they can prove employment or financial means).
There is actually a wealth tax that varies by Canton... 0.1% to 1%. No capital gains tax for private individuals on most investments.
The unemployment benefits mentioned in the interview are indeed 80% of you salary but with an upper cap... So if you earned CHF 1M you would not get CHF800,000 for 2 years.
Health insurance and housing is VERY expensive, as is general cost of living. Think 2-3x non-London cost of living.
The currency's very strong which makes travelling to other countries pretty affordable 😎
Loving the Jack Mallers Show podcast! Here's a little visual recap of the last episode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKxAOyQYYcw
Bitcoin, not Crypto! Sing it loud! 🔊
https://blossom.primal.net/8582e3d750d0bf11e3b442980b045b2bd165360f32fad236e7dadac0f33dbdea.mp4
Paper Made Men
by nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgqghwaehxw309ahx7um5wghxcmmjv4h8g73wd9ej7qpqhcf3acvqkmj5ss3vvqzd8njllau24x94t072yu9y3l3lmlcs4a7qxn6432
https://blossom.primal.net/f72940c945303fdb2982fd614c79fa9d0450f12ad8b164c64c0174107d177452.mp4
I see your Paper Made Men and raise you a Bitcoin not Crypto!!
https://blossom.primal.net/8582e3d750d0bf11e3b442980b045b2bd165360f32fad236e7dadac0f33dbdea.mp4
A fun little song I made about the state of the Bitcoin space :)
https://blossom.primal.net/8582e3d750d0bf11e3b442980b045b2bd165360f32fad236e7dadac0f33dbdea.mp4
Hope you're right... I honestly worry for my kids, growing up in a 100 percent digitally native world..
The algorithms are so insanely strong, they seem almost powerless to resist (I find it hard enough as a gen-X having known a time before social media). Finding meaning and purpose in a world that basically idolises content creators and empowers and incentives extracive attention farming.. it's an unknown and quite a challenge tbh.
Good for you Lyn, you're a fabulous writer, it'll be great.
