Currently chilling at a cafe at midnight in some Red Sea coastal town five hours south of Cairo.

A doctor from Syria recognizes me and comes to talk. He is briefly here in Egypt but works in Syria treating people.

He and his colleagues use the informal Hawala system to move money for legitimate purposes, because Syria is sanctioned by the US. The Hawala system is ancient, stretching back to the medieval Silk Road and prior, but is still used today in many regions. He’s a fan of Bitcoin obviously.

So many people in the developed world take money for granted. But people in developing regions or conflict regions often have a better appreciation of permissionless money, undebaseable money, etc.

Because a lot of it is visual and measurable, and occurred within the past decade, Egypt is currently providing a useful case study in the perils of central planning.

The country over the past ten years (when current leadership took over) took on $120 billion in external debt, and also used a lot of local deficit spending, with the reasonable goal of building lots of new infrastructure, alleviating congestion with new cities, and boosting international tourism to what are some of the best beaches in the world.

But details and order matter. And an entity with a monopoly on violence has less incentive to get the details and path dependence correct, and has fewer error correction methods built in than private developers do.

So the government built a big network of roads and bridges, which helped somewhat, although many of the roads are badly designed and always delayed. They built an entire new capital city for the government and military HQ, along with business and residential districts, which nine years in is still mostly vacant. They are developing the north coast city of El Alamein, but unlike well-designed private developments (eg in El Gouna on the Red Sea), the government was heavily involved for El Alamein, did massive overbuilding with incongruent designs that will take decades to fill (by which time the buildings will be deteriorating).

Now they have chronic power outages due to insufficient power generation. They are building their first nuclear facility, but it only began in 2022 and won’t be finished until 2026 or later (probably later). Maybe they should have started that facility earlier, before their now-empty city…

The average Egyptian pays for a lot of this through currency debasement. They look around and say “yes there are new bridges and entire new cities, but it takes me more hours of work to afford a car than it did ten years ago and there are three-hour power outages each day…” Basically they get taxed in opaque ways via debasement, and don’t benefit from most of the development that they are paying for.

And while those developments might make sense if successful, the order of development, the details of development, and so forth have clearly been suboptimal.

Anyway, good morning.

Because a lot of it is visual and measurable, and occurred within the past decade, Egypt is currently providing a useful case study in the perils of central planning.

The country over the past ten years (when current leadership took over) took on $120 billion in external debt, and also used a lot of local deficit spending, with the reasonable goal of building lots of new infrastructure, alleviating congestion with new cities, and boosting international tourism to what are some of the best beaches in the world.

But details and order matter. And an entity with a monopoly on violence has less incentive to get the details and path dependence correct, and has fewer error correction methods built in than private developers do.

So the government built a big network of roads and bridges, which helped somewhat, although many of the roads are badly designed and always delayed. They built an entire new capital city for the government and military HQ, along with business and residential districts, which nine years in is still mostly vacant. They are developing the north coast city of El Alamein, but unlike well-designed private developments (eg in El Gouna on the Red Sea), the government was heavily involved for El Alamein, did massive overbuilding with incongruent designs that will take decades to fill (by which time the buildings will be deteriorating).

Now they have chronic power outages due to insufficient power generation. They are building their first nuclear facility, but it only began in 2022 and won’t be finished until 2026 or later (probably later). Maybe they should have started that facility earlier, before their now-empty city…

The average Egyptian pays for a lot of this through currency debasement. They look around and say “yes there are new bridges and entire new cities, but it takes me more hours of work to afford a car than it did ten years ago and there are three-hour power outages each day…” Basically they get taxed in opaque ways via debasement, and don’t benefit from most of the development that they are paying for.

And while those developments might make sense if successful, the order of development, the details of development, and so forth have clearly been suboptimal.

Anyway, good morning.

Because a lot of it is visual and measurable, and occurred within the past decade, Egypt is currently providing a useful case study in the perils of central planning.

The country over the past ten years (when current leadership took over) took on $120 billion in external debt, and also used a lot of local deficit spending, with the reasonable goal of building lots of new infrastructure, alleviating congestion with new cities, and boosting international tourism to what are some of the best beaches in the world.

But details and order matter. And an entity with a monopoly on violence has less incentive to get the details and path dependence correct, and has fewer error correction methods built in than private developers do.

So the government built a big network of roads and bridges, which helped somewhat, although many of the roads are badly designed and always delayed. They built an entire new capital city for the government and military HQ, along with business and residential districts, which nine years in is still mostly vacant. They are developing the north coast city of El Alamein, but unlike well-designed private developments (eg in El Gouna on the Red Sea), the government was heavily involved for El Alamein, did massive overbuilding with incongruent designs that will take decades to fill (by which time the buildings will be deteriorating).

Now they have chronic power outages due to insufficient power generation. They are building their first nuclear facility, but it only began in 2022 and won’t be finished until 2026 or later (probably later). Maybe they should have started that facility earlier, before their now-empty city…

The average Egyptian pays for a lot of this through currency debasement. They look around and say “yes there are new bridges and entire new cities, but it takes me more hours of work to afford a car than it did ten years ago and there are three-hour power outages each day…” Basically they get taxed in opaque ways via debasement, and don’t benefit from most of the development that they are paying for.

And while those developments might make sense if successful, the order of development, the details of development, and so forth have clearly been suboptimal.

Anyway, good morning.

Have you checked the price today.

Magoo : No

Abortion prohibition has never been about utilitarian ends. Its been about ethics. Its wrong to kill an innocent human life.

Reading educates !

DEVS DO NOT DICTATE BITCOIN PROTOCOL CONSENSUS.

USERS ULTIMATELY CHOOSE WHETHER THEY UPDATE THEIR NODES.

THE PROTOCOL IS INCREDIBLY RESISTANT TO CHANGE BY DESIGN.

EMBRACE IT. GOOD MORNING.

Every once in a while if I feel down about something, I practice gratitude by reminding myself that at least I'm not a bond investor.

Lots of jubilation about Trump coming out with a pro- #Bitcoin script, but I’d just like to remind everyone that Trump’s DOJ indicted Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, he didn’t free Ross when he was President, and he didn’t pardon Snowden.

Actions speak louder than words.

Anyway, goodnight.

Stablecoins have a lot of shortcomings, but the vast majority of people who complain about the existence of stablecoins themselves have dollar or euro bank accounts and thus aren’t the target user anyway.

Overall, stablecoins are basically offshore dollar bank accounts for people in Argentina, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries with less reliable currencies.