Avatar
Mysth
d920bbbdef05491eaf72de8827ca788bc03542fc482c89f8beb58b965213849e
tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito Better a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war. Stay humble and study #Bitcoin.

The option of using an open-source communication protocol rather than closed-source enterprise software.

Price predictions are BS, and the fact that Saylor’s bear case isn’t "BTC=$0" is also laughable.

The only thing that matters is mass adoption along with daily usage. If it doesn’t happen, BTC priced in fiat isn’t likely to appreciate much.

Replying to Avatar Ken Berry, MD

Simple, sharable steps to adopt a Proper Human Diet

1. Eliminate anything containing added sugar from your diet.

This sugar provides no benefit to your body and leads to high blood sugar, high insulin levels & chronic inflammation. This includes fruit juices which in many cases contain more sugar than a Coke.

2. Eliminate all grains & legumes from your diet. Wheat, rice, oats, corn, soybeans, etc. These have very little in the way of meaningful nutrition and contain 2 things to avoid; i. starch-long chains of sugar that break down into sugar in your body & ii. gluten-like inflammatory proteins that lead to chronic inflammation.

3. Eliminate seed oils from your diet. Canola, soybean, corn, peanut, sunflower, safflower, etc. These oils are new to the human diet and contain too much Omega-6 fatty acids that research has shown to lead to chronic inflammation in some people.

*** These 1st 3 steps will remove 100% of ultra-processed food from your diet and will give immediate results (in weeks) for 80% of people.

4. Make sure each meal contains meat, seafood or eggs. These foods were eaten by your ancestors for millions of years and are very nutrient-dense. Although many main-stream sources claim that these foods are inflammatory, we've seen bloodwork from 10,000's of people whose inflammatory markers go down on meat.

Carbohydrate Knob theory: Some people can tolerated more carbs than others. People who fatten easily or develop diabetes easily need to turn down their carb intake knob closer to zero. Young, active people can tolerate more natural carbs in their diet. Remember, there is no Need for carbs in the diet. As you turn down the Carb Intake Knob more & more you will be eating more meat, eggs & seafood...

Snacking: Snacking is never healthy, regardless of the snack. Eat discrete meals during the day separated by periods of not eating. Eating due to boredom or stress is never a healthy choice.

Plant Toxins: All plants use chemical defense chemicals to protect their parts, this is inarguable. Some plants are more toxic than others. Some people can tolerate these toxins more than others. Anyone suffering from inflammatory or auto-immune disease should try 90 days of Carnivore to see if they are reacting to the plant chemicals.

DAIRY: All mammals (you) can tolerate dairy as an infant. At about age 4-8 years most people (70% +/-) become lactose intolerant. That is not the only problem with dairy. Many people also become sensitive to the Caseins & Wheys in milk. This manifests in inflammatory conditions of the skin, joints, gut, mental... Dairy also contains caso-morphins that mimic morphine in the brain and can make dairy addictive to some people. This is good for keeping babies interested in mother's milk, but can cause adults to over eat/drink dairy for the good feeling. Some cheeses actually concentrate the caso-morphin content...

OK, that a good beginner course, I will answer every good question you ask here...

Regarding carbs, you say there are no need for them in our diet, but is it the same if your exercise 1 to 2 hours per day ?

I usually like to eat some fruit about 1 hour before working out, and I notice better energy levels throughout my workouts when eating fruit than when eating just meat.

Seeing kids grow.

Learning new things.

Getting better at things.

Fixing stuff.

Spending time with family and friends.

Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

The first season of Arcane was a masterclass on how to write interesting villains. The heroes are fine, but the villains Silco and Jinx are very well done, and went through more full character arcs than the heroes, which was an interesting creative choice.

It’s instructive for writing decent fiction, so I’ll put my longform blog-like thoughts here on what they did right compared to most fiction I’ve seen recently, which could be useful to someone whether or not they’ve seen the show. It’ll have major spoilers though.

Silco Villain Analysis:

Silco is first shown as a tropey crime lord. He’s cruel, power-hungry, and has a damaged eye and a scar. His philosophy is that power is held not by those who are born with it, but by those who will do anything to take it.

But then we see his backstory. Silco grew up in the undercity, in a literal fissure in the ground where the air and water are polluted by the rich city state Pilthover that rules over them and literally sits above them. As he became a leader of the undercity, he fought for its sovereign independence from Pilthover, including to the point of promoting violent uprisings. He was then betrayed by his best friend and co-leader Vander, since Vander decided to make peace with Pilthover so that the warring and violence would stop. Basically, Vander had less of a stomach for the violence after seeing so much of it, whereas Silco remained radical for his goal of independence. And so Vander tried to kill Silco to make peace. And then Silco, while he was being betrayed, cut, and drowned, narrated that he could just die and have his troubles go away, or he could fight with everything he had, and he did the latter and managed to escape death. As Vander ruled the undercity in peace (but still oppressed and polluted by Pilthover), Silco partnered with a scientist that was making a new weapon: a mutant serum called shimmer.

Years later in the show, Silco used the power of shimmer to overthrew Vander and become the boss of the undercity. Unlike many clichĂ© villains, Silco respects Vander, had gotten over his hatred for Vander for betraying him, and is even thankful for Vander’s betrayal since he views the life or death moment as having helped him find the strength that he was previously lacking, but he wants to go on his more dangerous path of gaining independence for the undercity, which means replacing Vander. And that’s where his villainous streak gets bad: he’s willing to kill Vander, and even Vander’s adopted children to eliminate witnesses when they try to rescue Vander. The youngest child, however, embraces him, and so instead he adopts her as his daughter and truly cares for her, but by doing so corrupts her to be more like him as she becomes an adult.

Throughout the show after that, he makes plans, sometimes has to adjust those plans based on new things happening, reads other peoples’ emotions very well and communicates to them effectively to move forward with his goals, etc. He uses intimidation, science, and economics where possible, and violence more rarely as needed. There are no bad plot arcs based on obvious miscommunications and so forth. He’s a dynamic, competent, and realistic character that is impacting and reacting to the plot. He focuses on the development of shimmer to grow his undercity’s power so that if or when war for independence breaks out, his side will have a chance against Pilthover.

But then, toward the end
 as the situation gets messier, he chooses a path of peace with Pilthover while getting what he wants. His years of production of shimmer along with his adopted daughter’s theft of Pilthover’s key technology enhanced the underworld’s power enough that the council leadership of Pilthover agreed to let the undercity have its independence. Silco proposes to cease the production of shimmer and give back Pilthover’s stolen tech, thereby depowering himself in exchange for everything he has ever wanted: sovereign independence for his undercity which will be called Zaun, along with trade and economic deals between Zaun and Pilthover. And now he understands the late Vander better. Politics over violence.

But then Pilthover gives Silco a curveball- he has to give up his adopted daughter to be arrested for her crimes as part of the peace deal, which he contemplates doing and is leaning toward doing, but is torn up about it. He ends up being killed by his adopted daughter, and loving her anyway as he dies, siding with her at the end.

A tragic ending for him, but he’s at peace with it. Similar to how he views Vander’s betrayal of him all those years ago as having helped him find his own strength, power, and agency, Silco views that he has now passed on those traits to his adopted daughter.

Jinx Villain Analysis:

In League of Legends, Jinx is basically a Harley Quinn knock-off. Little depth. That’s what the show had to work with, and they filled it in so that she’s a better character than recent depictions of Harley. There are so many ways to mess this trope up and they avoided most of them.

Jinx starts off as an impoverished kid thief from the undercity; a physically weak tinkerer trying to make little smoke bombs and stuff to help her older sister and her two adopted brothers. Her parents were killed by Pilthover’s soldiers/police in a failed uprising, and so she is raised by Vander, who doesn’t have much in common with her and instead focuses on raising Jinx’s older sister who he has a lot in common with. And so Jinx ultimately is raised mainly by her older sister, which is who she has her primary emotional bond with. Her adopted brothers view her as weak, and it’s always her sister that sticks up for her.

In an attempt to help her sister and adopted brothers save Vander from Silco’s overthrow of Vander and prove she is not weak, Jinx accidentally messes everything up. One of her creations, a bomb, accidentally kills her adopted brothers directly and ultimately leads to Vander’s death indirectly. And then from her perspective, she is abandoned by her older sister due to her disastrous bomb decision, and so instead Jinx embraces Silco and joins him. Silco replaces Jinx’s sister as the one directly raising Jinx, and for whom Jinx has her main emotional bond with as her father figure.

When she grows up, Jinx becomes a mentally unwell weapon maker and combatant, supporting Silco’s undercity’s accumulation of power against both Pilthover and rival gangs.

Harley Quinn’s “craziness” as depicted in Suicide Squad movies and so forth, is pretty shallow. It’s played most of the time for humor and aesthetics, and if one were to describe in what specific ways she is crazy, it would be hard for many to do so. It does have a name though: it's called histrionic personality disorder, and in her case it's combined with what is basically sociopathy I guess.

Jinx’s mentally ill aspects are more specific. And she suffers for it; it’s not depicted as funny. The two adopted brothers she accidentally killed are now voices in her head and visions in her eyes. She is emotionally stunted, stuck with the personality of a child despite possessing the intelligence of an adult engineer and schemer. She is emotionally over-dependent, first on her older sister and then on Silco as her adopted father. She is obsessive-compulsive, which makes her a good engineer and schemer but also stresses her mentally. She is self-absorbed. She lacks empathy for others except those she latches onto. As her sister returns after seven years, Jinx is forced to confront the violent person she has become, and has an identity crisis over it. She wonders if she could go back to being a more normal person after all that she’s done, accepted by society, or if should she remain in her more violent line of work of empowering Silco and the undercity.

Despite her mental issues, she’s among the most proactive and competent characters in the season and all of her actions combine into a specific purpose rather than being random. She builds a variety of dangerous weapons and traps. She uses them to kill rival gang members that try to attack Silco’s shimmer operations. In a world where Pilthover’s soldiers/police killed her parents and most of them are corrupt, Jinx kills soldiers with bombs in order to sneak into Pilthover’s academy to steal a sample of their most powerful technology, successfully reverse-engineers it, and makes it into a powerful new weapon to potentially use against them. When her sister returns after seven years and Silco is hiding that fact from her, Jinx correctly senses something is being hidden due to Silco’s gang acting differently, captures and interrogates Silco’s underboss in order to find out that her sister is back, leaves that underboss unharmed, and then actively reaches out to her sister to try to reconnect with her. She is angry at Silco for lying to her but goes to him to learn why he did, and is convinced to remain on his side. When Pilthover’s technology is stolen back from her, she goes after it, kills more corrupt soldiers to do so, fights one of her childhood friends who leads a rival gang now, and successfully retrieves it before it gets back to Pilthover, nearly dying in the process and then going through an agonizing recovery.

So she’s not quite sociopathic up to that point- she mercilessly kills those who she sees as enemy combatants rather than civilians, and for specific goals. She has outright schizophrenia and a growing identity crisis, but mostly functions around it. It's not the "tragic backstory therefore I kill everyone" weak trope.

But then that’s where her mental illness starts to go off the rails and screw everything up for everyone. Her sister gets a girlfriend who is a Pilthover soldier (who wants to get Pilthover’s stolen technology back from Jinx), and Jinx views that girlfriend, of the enemy side, as having replaced Jinx as her sister’s closest emotional bond, and Jinx visibly sees schizophrenic delusions of that girlfriend laughing at her. She is given shimmer serum by Silco to save her life from injuries at one point, which makes her stronger but likely deteriorates her mental state further. And then, as Silco agrees to peace with Pilthover, Pilthover’s leaders demand that Jinx be given to them and imprisoned as part of the deal, putting Silco in a tough position to choose between the undercity’s peaceful independence or his adopted daughter’s freedom. So Jinx feels betrayed by both her sister and by Silco. She successfully captures Silco, her sister, and her sister’s girlfriend, to talk to them and figure out what her decisions will be. Mainly at that point she wants her sister to side back with her.

In the end, she kills Silco to prevent him from killing her sister, and spares the life of her sister’s girlfriend when she could have killed her. As Silco dies (which Jinx is heartbroken over), he tells Jinx he would never have gone through with giving her over to Pilthover, would give up everything else for her, and tells her to be herself.

She then resolves her identity crisis, and decides to fully embrace herself as a war criminal against Pilthover, remembering what Silco told her years ago: “we will show them all”. She could turn herself in to Pilthover for life imprisonment in terrible conditions in exchange for her undercity’s peaceful independence, but she chooses not to make that type of sacrifice. Instead, she chooses to “show them all”, and launches that new weapon, which she made from the tech she stole from Pilthover, straight at Pilthover’s council chamber, killing most or all of Pilthover’s seven corrupt council leaders and triggering outright war for the undercity's independence.

And that’s an actual set of character arcs for villains. One can see from their perspective why they're the protagonist of their own stories.

And a chain of cause-and-effect actions went from the economic and cultural situation of Pilthover and its undercity, to Silco, and then to Jinx, and then disastrously back to Pilthover’s leaders, with certain decision points along the way to either continue the cycle or break it with a more selfless decision.

Did I just read "Monthly Newsletter : Market conditions in Piltover, geopolitics and rising tensions in the world of Runeterra." ?

Replying to Avatar StackSats.IO

Finally, an interesting Bitcoin podcast!

It’s been a while since I’ve seen people argue in Bitcoin but nostr:npub1gdu7w6l6w65qhrdeaf6eyywepwe7v7ezqtugsrxy7hl7ypjsvxksd76nak managed to pull Saylor into an interesting conversation about credit and lending in Bitcoin.

Saylor apparently hasn’t fully thought through the implications of 21M and remains wedded to his fiat ideas.

He expects there to be yield on Bitcoin in future, but never says where it will come from in a completely fixed supply money.. “They’ll have to sell their assets to finance themselves!” - yeah no shit Michael!

The only way to generate yield in Bitcoin terms is to mismatch duration - literally run a Ponzi scheme. But Saylor expects that because the US Government will back the banks that this can’t go wrong đŸ€ŁđŸ€Ł

Saif takes nostr:npub1sfhflz2msx45rfzjyf5tyj0x35pv4qtq3hh4v2jf8nhrtl79cavsl2ymqt line that capital will flow but HODLers will take equity rather than yield. This is the correct logical conclusion.

I’m not saying Saylor is completely wrong - I do see a future where banks will get into this space and lend and pay yield on Bitcoin.

But they WILL blow up. I don’t give a fuck if they’ve got their own nuclear arsenal let alone the full faith and credit of the US Government behind them, they WILL get out over their skis and they WILL be unable to fulfill their obligations at some point because they WILL greedily try to rehypothecate it in the meantime and no Government will be able to save them.

Saif and Allen both know the economy doesn’t require interest to function, that the world won’t grind to a halt without it - people will still spend money. Saylor just isn’t ready to let go of his statism (as evidenced earlier in the conversation) because he’s become accustomed to Billionaire privileges.

This is why I love #Bitcoin. You can be the CEO of the most successful public company of the past 4 years, all thanks to Bitcoin, and you will still be totally humbled by it unless you fully embrace the system as it is because it won’t be changing for your fiat games!

https://youtu.be/k7XhzXMSAPo

I've listened to the full podcast, and the two mains points I got from it are :

-Saylor is all about a "soft deleveraging" (paraphrasing Ray Dalio), and think we'll go from a FIAT standard to a FIAT+BTC Standard progressively, but that not much will change in the economy. He thinks BTC will basically start to underpin FIAT and become part of the base layer of money, which is currently the bond market.

It's highly debatable that a soft deleveraging can be achieved at this level of worldwide debt, and part of me thinks Saylor is playing the statist card to not have his assets seized in the eventuality the US becomes a communist government and starts confiscating assets of "dissidents capitalists."

It's guesswork, so he might really believe it, but I personally thinks he has to play it safe with the state, otherwise he might come under fire from his shareholders/lenders...

-Saylor thinks capital that doesn't produce yield is useless, so Bitcoin would have to produce a yield to keep enticing banks, institutions, states and even people to hold it.

That's a wrong take in my opinion because as Saif rightly stated several times, you can't guarantee a yield without a lender of last resort that can print infinite money, and especially not a 5% yield.

If a 5% Bitcoin yield would somehow exist, my guess is that it would either involve paper bitcoin (Fractional reserve banking) so it would eventually collapse ; or if it was done in a Full-reserve banking kind of way, it would be arbitraged close to 0% very quickly by the big capital allocators.

In the future, I believe banks and lenders will still exists, however they'll be much smaller in size and in scope. There will be many more smaller regional/national and independent banks, which will mostly be about keeping custody of people's bitcoin with full-reserve banking, and facilitate their life for the time that fiat and bitcoin will coexist (could be for decades, even a century or two). They would also offer local investments opportunities which would return very low yields over short periods of time (months, couple of years maximum), but with very low risks because it would be for small scale, local projects with "known in the community" people (think your local farmers needing a new tractor, your local entrepreneur creating a company...)

On the other hand, specialized lenders/big national/international banks would focus on national/international companies and states, and offer lending opportunities with higher yields and equity in national or international ventures, with much bigger scope (Think the next SpaceX, the next OpenAI, even state-sponsored projects, etc...), but with also much bigger risks and time horizon. These projects would probably be offered only to professional capital allocators

Most of the everyday people would not care about getting a big yield on their Bitcoin, because due to technological improvements of the means of production over time, their purchasing power would either stay flat, or even keep increasing over time when the next big successful ventures would bear fruit. (Mass-produced factory robot workers, AI Agents replacing repetitive and boring jobs, Real full self driving cars, Nuclear Fusion...)

That in itself would be their "yield", and everyday people would focus on what matters in their everyday life : Family, Health, Work, Relationships, Community Projects... Without needing to spend time and energy fighting endless inflation due to endless money-printing, they would do a much better work at these activities too, and end up living longer, healthier and fulfilling lives...

That last points also highlights why lending is good and needed in the economy, and will surely keep existing for ever. Humanity will always birth a next Leonardo Da Vinci, a next Nikola Tesla, a next Thomas Edison, a next Steve Jobs, a next Elon Musk... And most of them might not come from a wealthy family, so they'll need capital from other people whom accumulated it over the course of their lives to unleash their creativity, fulfill their destinies, and hopefully keep pushing humanity toward a brighter future.

These future capital allocator will be probably very smart since they would have managed to accumulate capital in a fixed-money supply world, which means they produced a lot more things than they consumed.

And these future capital allocators might reach a point in their lives where they realize they'll be more efficient allocating ressources than grinding in a factory or a lab 24/7, thus allowing the cycle to continue.

Why save in a money than can be printed ad infinitum ?

All money got debased, and eventually failed. Yes, even gold.

Bitcoin (not held on a exchange) can’t be debased.

Not your keys, not your coins.

Leaving your Bitcoin on any exchange opens you up to the risk of ending like FTX creditors sooner or later.

It’s not a matter of "if", but "when".

I believe one of the main cause for unhappiness is thinking the "magic pill" actually exists.

Imagining life simply as "If this ONE thing happens, then all my problems will go away."

But there is no magic pill, and that ONE thing eventually happening will either fix one of your problem for a very long time, or make all your problems go away for a very short time ; not both.

Just as piling enough small bricks together creates a big house, taking enough small decisions leading to 0.1% improvements eventually makes you ending up where you want to be.

“I won’t use #Bitcoin because the government will ban it.”

“I won’t use #nostr because the government will ban the clients.”

There must have been cavemen whom were afraid of fire and argued with other cavemen that fire was unnatural and should not be used to cook food or warm oneself become it was dangerous and could kill them.

Thankfully, smarted cavemen prevailed as we made it until today, and I hope our smarter cavemen species will still prevail about using oil and nuclear to keep improving humanity.