Oh to think shitcoindimensionally

You love to see it.

nostr:note17qzxscpc9y36pmv46a558e0wvujdn4yjkddcy4zv3mjruvj33lwqhpwj9g

One of the remarkable things about this era is that the long-term debt cycle has correlated with the longest-ever period of growth stocks outperforming value.

The path has been chosen...

🤡 🌎

How much did mallers make in fees to convert your check to bitcoin and then back into dollars the next day to pay your housing payment?

So nostr:npub1hu3hdctm5nkzd8gslnyedfr5ddz3z547jqcl5j88g4fame2jd08qh6h8nh and I are both devouring the Mistborn saga by Brandon Sanderson (thank you nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a for the rec)…

I started reading first and just started “The Hero of Ages” and she’s on “The Well of Ascension.”

But the problem is I don’t want to finish… know what I mean? Once you’re invested in a truly great piece of fiction, invested in the characters, you don’t want it to end.

But it must end. Anything that cannot go on forever must stop. All good things must come to an end. Etc etc

Anyway, I guess what I’m really saying is I wish there was a Mistborn video game…

#bookstr

Got enough billboards?

The future banking stack:

- bitcoin

- lightning

- Ark

- Chaumian ecash

Open source, interoperable and permissionless.

Sound money that moves fast, is relatively cheap and more private.

It’s hypothetically $10. That hypothetical $10 million TX costs a lot more if it’s coming from many UTXOs.

Here's an example of why monetary verification is important (and can be expensive).

The gold price is currently $2075/oz.

If you buy a sovereign 1-oz gold coin, or a globally-recognizable privately-issued 1-oz gold bar, you'll generally pay something like a 3-5% markup to spot. This is basically the verification and distribution premium. Even if you buy a bunch of 1-oz items, you generally won't get the spread down too much. If there's a shortage, the premiums over spot go way up.

If you buy smaller sizes, that premium will be a bigger percentage. For example if you buy 1-gram gold coins, you'll be paying a >50% markup to the spot price, which is silly.

If you buy bigger sizes, like 1-kilo bars (which cost more than a typical car), you could get it down to a 1-2% premium to spot.

The bigger size you go, the less verification you have that the core of the item is indeed gold rather than tungsten. You have to trust the brand and supply chain, basically. The smaller size you go, the less possible and economic it is to insert tungsten into the item. And so on some level, it makes sense that the verification premium is bigger for smaller items- you're more assured that it is indeed gold to its core. The surface area to mass ratio is harder to forge, basically. Somewhere around 1-oz is probably the sweet spot.

Now, if you're buying gold in most U.S. states, including on a lot of popular online stores, you'll also pay sales tax, and you'll often have to pay the difference in terms of your payment method. So if your credit card costs the merchant 3%, then that would eat up the merchant's margin since it is razor thin, and so instead the customer often has to pay it. They could instead do a wire transfer for a sizable purchase to save some money, but many banks charge like $30 for a 1-day wire transfer.

And if you're buying online, there's a shipping fee. That's usually pretty low but then goes up a bit if you add insurance because you don't want to risk your expensive coins or bars getting lost in the delivery chain or stolen from your doorstep. From the time of order to the time of delivery, it'll generally take several days. This includes time for the merchant to process the payment (gold merchants are usually a bit more careful about chargebacks and other reversed payments than the average merchant) and ship you the items.

All together, including the verification premium, taxes, payment fees, and shipping, one generally pays 8-15% over the spot price to get 1-oz gold coins or bars. That means gold has to go up a pretty significant amount just to break even. And then you have collectible capital gains taxes on that price gain (which in the US is higher than the actual capital gains tax rate). If you take time (and time is money) to shop around and find ways to legally avoid sales tax and so forth, and figure out the cheapest/slowest payment methods, then you can push the premium down as close as possible to the verification premium and shipping costs.

And if you want to securely ship large amounts of gold long distances, especially internationally? Like imagine HNW investors, businesses, banks, or sovereign entities? You're going to pay a sizable amount. One does not simply ship millions of dollars worth of gold without robust security.

If you want someone to custody your gold, you're going to pay a fee. If you are fine with unallocated/mixed gold with multiple layers of counterparty risk, you could buy among the cheapest ETFs with annual fees below 0.2%. If you want to hold your gold in an allocated way by Brinks or something with fewer layers of counterparty risk, it'll generally cost over 0.5% per year. This goes toward the vault costs, salaries for people with guns, real estate costs, etc.

Basically, there's a pretty big inefficiency in the form of 1) routine verification, 2) secure transfer of ownership, and 3) secure custody, that all comes out in the form of high costs and slow speeds.

Bitcoin has fees, but they are very low in comparison. Nodes can verify bitcoin basically for free. Miners timestamp transactions to transfer ownership for a fee, and you can currently send ten million dollars worth of bitcoin globally for like $10 and have it confirmed within the hour. And you can custody bitcoin yourself, and bring it around with you globally, through ports of entry, across borders, in ways you can't realistically do with gold above a certain value threshold.

When thinking about periods of above-average bitcoin fees, it's useful to keep some of the alternatives in mind. Verifying and transferring ownership of other store-of-value assets like gold and real estate is slower and a lot more expensive, requires a lot more abstraction and permission, and comes with much less portability.

I need a nice fantasy sci fi ish type movie to watch .. suggestions

Ordinals and inscriptions aren’t using bitcoin the money. They are merely using #Bitcoin  *nodes* to store their garbage, and the bitcoin *name* to sell it to people.

It makes perfect, and necessary,

logic to build, optimize, and restrict the #Bitcoin  system to only allow and facilitate the bitcoin *money.*

This isn’t a contradiction, it isn’t censorship, it’s necessary to defining what the protocol even does.

Any other arguments you want to have about the difficulty, feasibility, or foolishness of making or trying to reverse changes or certain data that is already included are valid. But the above point is true no matter what side you take.