Inelastic money allows for the natural volatility of the market. Human controlled elastic money always results in abuse and eventually larger crises.

🙂

#Bitcoin

Fairness – A Thought Experiment

Say you need a piece of paper delivered, and you are willing to exchange X amount of value for that service.

I answer your call, agree to terms, deliver the paper, and you provide me with the agreed-upon compensation.

I imagine we all agree that this constitutes the end of a fair transaction among rational economic actors.

Two consensual obligations were created and each subsequently met.

No other obligations remain, correct?

---

Now imagine that piece of paper is instead a cashier’s check for some arbitrarily large sum of money.

You need it delivered to a casino manager in Vegas so that they may place a bet on your behalf.

Same as before... I answer your call, agree to terms, deliver the paper, and you provide me with the agreed-upon compensation.

The bet hits, and you win big — 10x your money.

Do you owe me any additional compensation for "helping" you win the bet?

If so, how much? Why? What changed?

To be clear — we are not talking about generosity or what you believe should happen.

We are talking about the birth of an obligation — what is owed in order to cross the threshold of fairness.

---

Now flip it.

You lose the bet. The money is gone.

Do I owe you anything since I "helped" you lose the bet?

Has your answer changed?

If so, why?

---

We keep going.

I deliver more checks for you under similar agreements, more wins... 100x, 1000x, 10000x.

At what point — if ever — is a new obligation born?

At what point do you owe me compensation beyond what we agreed?

And if one of those final bets wipes you out, do I owe you anything?

Are your answers changing?

If so, why? How much? Based on what?

---

Let’s adjust the scenario slightly.

You need help with a different kind of bet.

Say you bought a bunch of parts, and now you need someone to help you assemble and package some trinkets.

I answer your call, agree to terms, assemble the trinkets, and you provide me with the agreed-upon compensation.

The trinkets are a huge hit, and your revenue is 10x your costs.

Do you owe me any additional compensation for "helping" you win the bet?

What if the trinkets flop and no one buys them?

Do I owe you anything since I "helped" you lose the bet?

Do I have to buy your leftovers?

Are your answers different?

If so, why? What changed?

---

Say I continue to assemble trinkets for you under similar agreements while you build a trinket business... franchise... empire.

At what point — if ever — is a new obligation born?

At what point do you owe me compensation beyond what we agreed?

If your industry dies and you lose it all — how much do I owe you?

---

Is the definition of fairness outcome dependent?

If so, does it cut both ways? Why or why not?

Or is fairness determined ex ante (before the outcome) and achieved solely through the creation and resolution of consensual obligations?

Contentious forks are good for Bitcoin.

Okay, so… I just dug into this whole Core vs Knots thing.

Late to the party, I know.... Whatever.

But you mean to tell me that people are losing their minds over a default setting that can be changed? In either implementation?

And this setting enforces a data “limit” that doesn’t really exist, because… you can just break your data into multiple chunks and send it anyway? And it's all still capped by consensus limits?

I'm sorry, but it kinda seems like people are arguing over quite literally nothing.

What am I missing? Someone please help me out here.

The only alternative to absolute scarcity is arbitrary inflation.

The health of a society is directly related to the breadth of ideas it allows to openly coexist peacefully.

Everyone is already on nostr. They just haven't logged in yet.

Bitcoin doesn’t care what you think its proper use case is. You’re basically yelling at the weather. Save your energy: stack sats, build tools, gently guide your loved ones toward the truth, and enjoy the show. The economic forces at play here are impossible to steer.

Capitalism requires a free market for money. We haven’t lived under capitalism since World War I (probably even before that). What we call capitalism today is a façade—an economy built on centralized monetary control, legal tender laws, and credit manipulation. The core of every market has been distorted. Today’s economic woes aren’t the failure of capitalism. They’re the inevitable consequence of central planning masquerading as free enterprise.

Bitcoin fixes this.

I’ve always found this punctuation rule a little strange: in American English, the period goes inside the quotation marks. Like:

> She shouted, “Hey.”

I don’t think this convention is logically sound. Maybe that doesn't matter. I don’t know. But allow me to make my case.

A sentence ends when all of its information has been delivered, and a period is supposed to mark that end. But the end of a sentence can’t arrive when there’s still another piece of information coming—like the closing quotation mark. That mark carries meaning. Without it, the reader wouldn’t know the quote was over. So if the period comes before that, it’s stepping in early. The sentence is saying “Sentence over!” and then giving you one more piece of itself. That’s logically inconsistent.

Sometimes what you’re quoting is a full sentence, and sometimes it’s not. I think you should punctuate accordingly.

> She shouted, “Hey".

“Hey” isn’t a sentence. It doesn’t need a period. You should mark the end of your sentence after all pieces of information.

In cases where the quoted material is a full sentence, and that quote is the final part of the larger sentence, the period really belongs in both places—inside the quote to complete the quoted sentence, and outside the quote to properly mark the end of the full sentence.

She said, "I don't want you to go.".

That feels logically consistent to me, even if it breaks every style guide.

Am I alone in this?

The four year Bitcoin cycles are starting to feel like the movie "Groundhog Day".

Bitcoin is economic jiu-jitsu—It doesn’t attack the financial establishment head-on but redirects its weight, exploits its overextensions, and uses timing, leverage, and positioning to subvert it from within. Bitcoin turns the strengths of its opponents—centralization, inflation, control—into liabilities, forcing them into compromised positions they can’t escape from without surrendering their advantage. It is silent, technical, and unrelenting.

Sovereignty is taken, not given. Bank involvement was always inevitable. There is no path to monetization without that. You don't have to use banks, and there are ways to hide. Many will choose the easy path and sacrifice freedom, but then again, many already do.

The government is being looted.

It's been so for a while.

Forever, Laura

Define "Man"...

"If"

By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Thinking you are "late to Bitcoin" means you are searching for a jackpot and have no interest in a long term savings strategy. Start stacking, or you'll feel "late" at $1,000,000... $10,000,000... and so on.

Sovereignty is a terrifying prospect to most people.

Your allocation to Bitcoin is directly proportional to your understanding of money.

I think it's worth clarifying that pure barter economies likely never existed in reality. In his book "Human Action," Ludwig von Mises refers to a theoretical "state of barter" to explain the limitations of direct exchange and highlight the benefits of money. However, it's doubtful that any economist, and certainly not those within the Austrian School, would argue that humans ever lived in a state of pure barter.

A society living in a state of pure barter is akin to a society living without any language. You can use that theoretical society in order to illustrate the benefits of language, but claiming that such society actually existed would be nonsensical. Language has always been an integral part of human and pre-human societies. language evolved alongside intelligence, becoming recognizable as "language" once it reached a certain complexity, but the fundamental elements of language were always there. The same can be said for money, or at least the fundamental elements that give rise to the concept of money.

Intelligent beings act purposefully, and every action denotes an exchange of time, energy, resources, or social graces. The counterparty to this exchange can be oneself or another entity. Exchanging with other entities creates a market and is only possible when all participants abide by a unified set of rules, whether it be through kinship, social norms, or laws. Markets, in this sense, have existed as long as organized systems have, and under these market conditions, money—or at least the conceptual underpinnings of money—emerges almost instantaneously.

Therefore, money, at least in a conceptual sense, has likely existed for about as long as language has. They both serve as fundamental structures enabling complex social interaction and organization. They are defining characteristics of humanity and perhaps intelligence, and we must never, ever, allow anyone to legislated or regulated them.

#Bitcoin

Nobody gets to decide what constitutes hoarding and what constitutes saving. Money is extremely important to the decision making and planning of every individual. How one chooses to spend one's time, energy, gold, or coupons (i.e. one's money) is for each to decide.

Technology drives prices lower over time. That's the signal. Everything else is either temporary or artificial noise.

#[0] Verifying My Public Key: "Houdinic4"