GM.

Some people say that everything is good for Bitcoin. I almost, but not quite, agree.

Everything that fails to land a critical hit, is good for Bitcoin. What doesn't kill it, usually makes it stronger. The bigger and more robust it gets, the more resilient it is against even the idea of a critical hit, and that has required work. When threats materialize, programmers program, financiers finance, and podcasters podcast.

Bitcoin is a growing, robust ecosystem that responds to threats and hardens against them. Sometimes at the base layer, often at higher layers. It doesn't put too many premature resources against threats that aren't currently hurting it, but can swarm massive resources in response to something that does start to hurt it. Nobody's in control; it's a well-designed swarm of incentives trending toward life, and in this case life means functional operation as a permissionless and high-quality global ledger to store and transmit value (i.e. electronic cash).

I've long since viewed it in that self-healing way, since it's a similar lens to how I view the established macroeconomic system as well. People continually underestimate a lindy system's response functions against threats, for both good systems (like Bitcoin) and bad systems (like central banking). It took me a bit of time to be convinced that Bitcoin was lindy, but once I did, I haven't seen any reason to waver.

Bears doubt its robustness. Bulls consider it highly robust. I'm a bull. It's not that I consider it invincible though; it's that I consider it as having a high probability shot at resisting forces against it, and a better shot than any of its competitors.

And for those who don't know, my background is in electronics engineering with a control systems focus in my early engineering career, so the fact that I became enamored with the robustness of a decentralized money's inbuilt control system and the ecosystem surrounding it was no small hurdle. It probably contributed to my skepticism early on, but once my skepticism was satisfied, it instead contributed to my conviction.

I agree with those who say that one day state attacks will be the biggest threats against Bitcoiners. Not against Bitcoin's existence itself, most likely, but against its permissionless and private usage.

The defense against that comes from those writing high quality code that gives people tools to resist, educators and financiers that help expand them, as well as jurisdictional arbitrage as high-conviction people can and do move around between legal jurisdictions toward freer ones.

It'll be a longer process than many expect, I think. But the ecosystem is built for it, and attracts the best people to deal with it. And Nostr is currently part of its epicenter.

July setting up to be a ripper

Big drop in UST yields today. Anything news related?

What are your favorite negative character arcs?

A negative character arc is one where the protagonist gets worse over time rather than better. They might or might not turn for the better in the end, but the majority of the time is spent on a negative descent.

A well-done example would be Frodo. The ring wears him down through the course of the story.

An example that should have been good but wasn’t executed as well as it should have been, would be Anakin in the Star Wars prequel.

Am I the only one in the #Bitcoin space who doesn’t get off on El Salvador’s prison porn?

#asknostr

Every individual user has different circumstances and so different needs. Government needs digital gold so that's what bitcoin is to it. Other people need p2p cash and that's what it is to them. It can change for the same person one day to the next. There's no reason to impose one use case on everyone.

I just read the EO for the reserve and honestly it sounds fantastic. I don’t know what everyone is frowning upon. 

The fact that that is no buying happening is probably a good thing since this is being put into a single basket with shitcoins. You don’t want the public to get angry (rightfully) for utilizing tax payer money to buy shitcoins. That would be a PR disaster for bitcoin by mere association. 

This is like the first time we have had any positive press from the White House that paints bitcoin in positive light and that is huge. I’m actually glad they are not going to buy any further bitcoin at the moment because I don’t want them to have any. This gives us more time to stack, for natural adoption to take place to hopefully severely limit the available bitcoin for the reserve, should the time come to buy.

It’s unlikely congress would approve of any such spending anyway, so it’s weird that bitcoiners expected there to buy purchasing going on. Though, this EO DOES spell out that there will be a review of strategies to acquire more: 

“(c)  The Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Commerce shall develop strategies for acquiring additional Government BTC provided that such strategies are budget neutral and do not impose incremental costs on United States taxpayers.” 

This is the correct path I believe, unless that acquisition involves civil forfeiture (which it could… and I don’t think anyone would be happy with that).

i feel noticeably worse since coming back to America.

there is something wrong here

Becoming pretty clear that the Milei memecoin is not a hack…

Brutal

summarize your upbringing in one picture. I'll start:

Hodling is so hard people don’t even believe you do it

You don't have to choose between Bitcoin as Store-of-Value and Digital-Cash.

Fighting SOV bitcoin is like fighting water. Bitcoin is a central bank replacement. It's the only non-counter-party thing you can really own.

The Mempool is sub 5sat/vB, it's cheaper right now to send L1 sats than anything else.

So why don't people send it?

NgU and Gresham's Law will work against bitcoin as Digital Cash until people don't have any other garbage to spend first.

Natural incentives hold bitcoin from being used as digital cash not narratives.

Keep building the Digital Cash tools, eventually there will be nothing else to spend but bitcoin.

There’s a widely held belief that empathy is a virtue and I’m not sure that’s accurate.

Compassion is a virtue, but empathy seems to be pathologically corrosive.

Haven’t totally made up my mind on this, but I’m leaning towards the idea that empathy in general is actually destructive.