April 2 - Nostr News with Max Webster and DK
The one where we walked around the Presidio in San Francisco
it’s official! nostr:npub18lzls4f6h46n43revlzvg6x06z8geww7uudhncfdttdtypduqnfsagugm3 and I are making “walking podcasts” a thing
Seems fine for miners to earn revenue off of participating in the protocol. But for the protocol to generate revenue sounds like clown show stuff to me.
reasonable, right up the middle tech stuff has always annoyed me
give me the weird people and products
#nostr
protocols can have value, but should not have revenue
choose free
it’s a slow revolution. but everyone can contribute to accelerate the pace
Hmm... I see it a bit differently. Dividend versus growth in an equity is more of a strategic/market issue and is very dependent on management decisions of the company. It’s not an inherent property of the asset. Whatever dividend they pay today may be changed tomorrow. Could go up or down. Just as the equity value of the asset could go up or down because the company is more/less successful in the market. The utility in my mind is the product/service the company delivers to the market.
I’d argue dividends are mostly a tax inefficient way to generate income compare to owning assets that grow that you can sell off small fractions of to generate the income you seek.
I don’t think mine is a popular view, but I keep looking and keep seeing it that way. 🤷♂️
i like that. our needs still require a utility value to assemble the market to serve those needs. but decouple it from a savings vehicle. you get a very different (more honest) world.
Tools for Saving
stocks, bonds, metals, real estate
Even if you’ve figured out how to acquire a pile of money, keeping it takes work. Truly wealthy folks sometimes stop chasing more, but everyone wants their pile to at least hold its value over time. Whatever you can buy today, the thinking goes, you should be able to buy the same tomorrow as well as ten years on. Wealth should be saved energy — society's debt to you — not a leaky bucket.
Preserving Wealth
We buy assets hoping they'll rise in value, but at the same time inflation reduces the buying power of our dollars each year. We need more and more dollars just to stand still. There’s an illusion of “making money” when we see the prices of our assets go up. But we’re often just running on a treadmill, while staying in place. We can’t choose not to run or we’ll fall off the back and become poor again.
So we’re all out there buying assets trying to at least keep up with inflation. And the pricing of those assets ends up having two components: 1) utility value and 2) monetary premium. The utility is obvious for many of these. “I will buy real estate so I can live in this house”. That is utility. But also, you’ve probably heard the very common idea that houses “go up” in price over time. Since most people know (err… believe?) that houses always go up they are comfortable storing value in homes. If you expect the house will store value and you can retrieve that value 10-20 years later when you sell it you become very comfortable buying a “more expensive” house than you might if you were purchasing just for the utility value of the house. That “more expensive” component could be thought of as the monetary premium. That monetary premium in real estate is why you hear about foreign wealth parked in unused real estate in Vancouver, California, and New York. They don’t care at all about the utility value. They only care about the monetary premium because it helps them store value to retrieve in the future.
To beat inflation, people are constantly searching for things they predict that other people in the future will see as valuable. In economics this is called a Keynesian Beauty Contest. It exists across all assets. There is no absolute metric of value in our ever changing world. Some people think it sounds smart to say that something has “intrinsic value”, but there’s no such thing. All value is subjective. There’s just whatever we all get habituated to agree is “about right”. And those estimates of value can and do adapt over time. However, they do tend to be somewhat sticky. So they adapt slowly. Therefore, a lot of people think of pricing as somewhat “real” at any given time even though it’s constantly shifting underfoot.
Problems with Traditional Savings Tools
The value of each of stocks, bonds, metals, and real estate is subject to human decisions, risks, and corruptions. Boards/CEOs can make bad decisions about a business destroying the value of a stock while technologies and markets can shift further destroying value. Bonds can have more underlying risk — especially “tail risk” — than their pricing recognizes. If metals or other commodities get bid up to hold excess monetary premium then miners produce more which drives supply up bringing prices back down. Real estate is subject to property taxes where the rules can be changed by a new political regime and the property cannot relocate. All of our best tools for saving are subject to these problems.
Bitcoin’s properties, on the other hand, are not subject to human decisions (they were at the start, but we’re far enough along now that no individual nor even small groups can make meaningful unilateral changes on any important policies today). There’s no strategic blunders and no yield/risk to price. Excess mining capacity doesn’t increase supply. And unlike real estate, the taxation must be considered a “fair deal” by the owner who pays the tax since the property is not tied to any particular location and the holder has the option to exit and pay tax elsewhere where they consider the tax just. Bitcoin’s is a transparent set of rules run on open source software that anyone can voluntarily run and audit. The whole thing works because enough people choose to run the same open source software as each other. Neither Satoshi nor anyone else can show up and force people to change the software they choose to run.
Now bitcoin’s exchange rate to USD is entirely subject to human decisions at any given time, but the important properties of bitcoin's monetary policy and scarcity are due to math, cryptography, and social consensus. If everyone decided bitcoin is worth nothing then it would be worth nothing. But it has this special property of digital scarcity that never existed before and despite 10,000+ attempts has never been recreated after. And it’s easy to predict that if something uniquely demonstrates absolute scarcity and can be transmitted across electronic communication channels like the Internet that in the future other people will probably also value it. That’s why bitcoin might be the best tool for saving we’ve ever seen.
When you have monetary premiums in traditional stores of value the system continues despite the problems. But when an alternative comes along that doesn’t have those problems, the monetary premiums enjoyed by those assets that exhibit the problems would probably shift to the one without those problems. It won’t happen all at once. It might take a generation to fully play out.
But it’s relatively easy to predict that people will choose to store wealth in the form least subject to such human decisions, risks, and corruptions if such a thing were to exist.
And such a thing does exist. But it’s very early in its existence. So that repricing will only occur as more people learn about the special properties bitcoin has that no other asset in the world has. In the long run bitcoin reprices all of those other value stores into the neutral value store of its network.
Which is why it’s going up forever. It’s a much bigger deal than just “digital gold”. It’s the best tool for saving.
♾/21m
For more detail on the scale of these traditional large asset classes:
Stocks (Equities): Estimates vary, but the global stock market value could be somewhere in the ballpark of $100 trillion to $300 trillion.
Bonds: The global bond market is estimated to be around $125 trillion to $150 trillion.
Metals: The global gold market alone is estimated at around $10 trillion to $12 trillion.
Real Estate: A rough estimate puts the global real estate market above $325 trillion.
Summing up the total value of these assets is somewhere in the range of $500-$750 trillion. Which is roughly the scale of the market of tools for saving.
nostr is great for preventing your speech from being suppressed.
(as long as it’s not intended to be read by anyone in particular)
*cough DMs*
😝🤙
this is why we nostr
gonna bring so much self custody 🔥💜
nostr:note1gfd6u95823q827y8x7qzgc5r4ernahxls96c0k32wzkj8xw592dq7z6vcp
all monetary value is a Keynesian Beauty Contest
nothing has intrinsic value
Algorithms aren’t your enemy
Closed source algorithms that are designed to manipulate you for the benefit of a corporation’s business goals are your enemy
Algorithms can be designed to serve your goals