Been thinking about Dhruv Bansal’s idea that bitcoin are not produced or generated — wrong way of thinking about it induced by “mining” metaphor — but rather all bitcoin existed from the moment the network was launched, but are auctioned off to miners as a whole, in exchange for hashes (compute), on an auction schedule of 140 years or whatever it is.

Each miner decides to take the network’s offer or not, by running their machines or not. Collectively, they determine how much that latest round of auctioned bitcoin is worth, in hashes and/or in energy.

Then there’s another market on top of this one which is coincidental but distinct, and that’s the market for block space, where the sellers are individual miners and the buyers are would-be transactors and of course that’s sat/vbyte.

I really do think it’s more accurate than thinking of bitcoin miners as “producing” bitcoin the way a manufacturer produces a product like cars or even discovered like gold miners discover gold. The bitcoin, all 21 million exist, just not on the ledger, from the get go. They only need to be auctioned, like treasuries. We don’t think the bidders on treasuries produce the 10-year! It’s just a weird auction mechanism where you have to prove work and your odds of winning the auction are proportional to your work / the total work by bidders.

I do get it and I think it’s right and I think it helps with a lot of misconceptions once you grok it fully. And as Dhruv says it shows you the formula for how bitcoin disrupts everything which is by making markets where there weren’t any, and building layers of distinct markets, including lighting and eventually the internet.

So, good job Dhruv.

But… it is not so easy to communicate is it? This thing is bloody hard to explain, as someone said once.

I’m starting to think the real divide isn’t Left vs. Right—it’s between those who support institution-controlled democracy and those who believe in democracy by the people.

Defending institutions that have repeatedly destroyed public trust just doesn’t make sense.

But doesn’t this just increase sell pressure? Keep the cap gains tax as high as you want for the next 10 years.. not planning for on selling anytime soon anyway

From a writer's perspective, one of the characters in fiction I find most interesting is Jaime Lannister.

The reason is that the story immediately puts him past the moral event horizon, but then *still* gets you to kind of like him. That's really hard.

I'll focus on the show rather than the books. In the first episode of the show, he pushes a child out of a window to their near-fatal death. Jaime is royalty, and he's an asshole, and the kid did nothing wrong. And he's casual about killing a child. There's nothing more bad than that, so we hate him immediately. Enemy #1.

So the narrative starts in hard mode. How to make this character semi-likeable. What made him do such a crazy thing.

Jaime loves his sister. At first that's another red flag. We almost all cringe at incest. An incestual killer is like bottom-of-the-barrel, almost comically bad. But... they're legit in love and have c hildren. The kid saw them together, and Jamie tried to kill the kid to preserve the secret.

So as an audience we're like, "Well, fuck, okay this is a medieval England/Westeros world where almost everyone is dirty, and his own royal sister is the hottest person to him, and they fell in love." It's not like they have the Internet to keep them entertained and knowledgeable; these things could happen in their palace. They had children, and now are in a tough position, since the sister is married to the king and are assumed to be his heirs but are really Jaime's. They can never say they this to anyone, because both they and the children would be killed. So regardless of what one may think about the young versions of them that got into this mess, once they are in this mess as adults, the audience is kind of like, "well, who wouldn't take extreme action for their own kids if it came down to it, especially in such a brutal world?"

Jaime then becomes an understandable villain. We hate him, but we understand him. He's not evily twirling his mustaches for no reason; he's dealing with a chain of events that started when he was young.

And then over time, the narrative crosses the bridge into actual likeability. He loses a war, he gets captured, he gets humbled and has a rough time. And he's a charismatic top-tier swordsman.

We also learn more about his backstory. He was a kings' guard that killed the king, which gives him widespread dishonor. But the king was a monster, and he killed him for good reasons. So, that's interesting. Even people who disliked that king tend to dislike Jaime since his action was so dishonorable ("one does not kill the king they guard, even if the king is bad"), whereas Jaime has more of the pragmatic anti-honor approach of "Well, he was fucking bad, though. I had to."

He then escapes with Brienne of Tarth, which has a typical buddy-cop narrative or fantasy guy/girl semi-romance narrative, since they don't like each other but then eventually grow to like each other amid their travels. And then he gets his hand cut off, which in addition to being painful attacks his main attribute (top-tier swordsman) and humbles him. He also does his best to keep Brienne safe, since he grows to respect her and even maybe love her. We see his good side. We almost see him as a boy in this arc, just some guy who we feel bad for and is kind of simple and meaning to do well.

And from then til the end, he's always a more likable character. Most readers and audience members find themselves generally on Jaime's side. An anti-hero, who once pushed a kid out of a window.

Having been on the inside from 13-17, I can attest to it being a dumpster fire, but fractional reserving is one thing I feel confident that CB doesn’t do.

GM #nostr family! ☕️

I was pleased to learn today that, according to the BarclayHedge database of funds, Vailshire Partners LP hedge fund was the world’s top-performing Multi-Strategy hedge fund for 2024!

Shout out to #Bitcoin for being the underlying growth engine of my fund.

(Not a solicitation to invest. For qualified clients only.)

Other than in my case, where science has been redacted for some idea of ethical medicine overruling scientific knowledge, I'm too analytical to believe anything other than those vaccines save lives and that's science. It's basically immoral from a societal perspective and selfish to not get them. You do you, but that doesn't make you right. I prefer moral decisions, it makes life and society better.

Points at data.

And who is causing this to happen?!?!? MSTR shitcoiners and ETF Degens that should be holding their own keys.

If you believe this and you own MSTR or an ETF......you are the problem.

We haven’t had such an asymmetric advantage for the virtual. (Arguably, Amazon paying no sales tax was similar.)

Something is going to break as the physical economy becomes hyper-localized and borders regulated while the virtual economy becomes borderless and impossible to control.

Anything that ships to your house will either come from the US or being taxed heavily. But what you download won’t be subject to that tariff (unless we surveil you heavily) because there’s no customs at a border.

Likewise, tariffs plus immigration restrictions means you can’t outsource production to cheaper labor markets and you can’t import the labor either. But… you can pay someone for their labor while they remain overseas, by streaming them sats.

So something will give. Either we’ll get draconian surveillance and control of the digital domain or accelerated virtualization as we can achieve efficiencies there from free trade and cheap labor that are not available in the physical domain.

The meme is from people that lied, isn't that obvious. People lie on self reporting surveys, the smallest categories are the most influenced. As faculty at a med-school, I promise the doctors all get vaccinated. Where you see hesitancy is in the nurses, etc. People with doctorates are not RFK-types. I work with those PhDs and MDs. Do you?

NOT A SCIENTIST SO IT MAY BE A PLACEBO EFFECT BUT SLEEP SEEMS BETTER.