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LostVirginian
e1c1f7354aecaff6f2db07cf364ed31f352aebbe86839471c05624de8f8d5fed
I swear it went down with the boat

Real wages up 12%.

Money supply up 85%.

Bitcoin wages down 99%.

“Why Do I Work for Fiat?” — a look at what happens when time is measured in infinite money.

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Kinda like the old days

Did you panic sell or buy more?

Capital Flight: The Quiet Rotation

Gold is in beast mode.

Bitcoin is tracking higher, decoupling from stocks.

At first glance, it looks like momentum — but under the surface, it’s something deeper:

trust leaving the system.

1. Confidence Is Cracking

Markets are questioning the foundations:

• Fiscal deficits are exploding.

• Central banks are cutting into persistent inflation.

• Political noise and policy paralysis are growing.

“Safe” paper — government bonds, fiat currencies — doesn’t feel safe anymore.

2. The Flow Shift

Capital is rotating:

• Out of overvalued equities and long-duration debt.

• Into hard, neutral assets — gold, bitcoin, and real commodities.

This is capital flight in slow motion. Not panic, just quiet repricing of trust.

Central banks keep buying gold.

Institutions are loading bitcoin ETFs.

Retail is following the signal, not the narrative.

3. The Drivers

The macro backdrop is perfectly aligned for a hard-asset bid:

• Falling real yields.

• Rising fiscal risk.

• Geopolitical fragmentation.

• Policy credibility erosion.

• Fear of financial repression.

These forces push capital away from promises that depend on others — and toward assets that stand on their own.

4. What the Market’s Saying

Gold above $4,000 isn’t euphoria; it’s a message.

Bitcoin trading with gold, not with tech, confirms the transition.

Both are being repriced as outside money — independent of state balance sheets and corporate earnings.

We’re watching the quiet migration from “inside” to “outside” money.

A trust re-pricing in real time.

Bottom Line

This isn’t a bubble — it’s capital flight wrapped in calm. Paper promises are being sold. Hard money is being rediscovered. The train’s already moving, and it’s carrying trust with it.

Hold money that holds its meaning.

Bitcoin as the hurdle rate of the AI age

In finance, the hurdle rate is the minimum return a project must clear to justify itself.

In the AI age, the benchmark isn’t dollars or Treasuries — it’s Bitcoin.

Capital, attention, compute — all have an opportunity cost. If your AI play doesn’t outperform BTC, you’d be better off just stacking sats.

And here’s the kicker: once AIs begin managing portfolios, they’ll benchmark themselves the same way. Underperforming strategies (in BTC terms) get abandoned, and capital flows back into Bitcoin.

That feedback loop is self-fulfilling: the more AI agents use BTC as the denominator, the more entrenched it becomes as the global hurdle rate.

Bitcoin becomes the economic ground state of AI.

AI/BTC is the ratio to watch.

Replying to Avatar calle

This is a long post that hopefully bridges some gaps between technical people (devs) and non-technical users and how they look at spam prevention in Bitcoin. I hope that it clarifies why I think that there is such a huge misunderstanding between both camps.

I'll preface this post with first disqualifying any malicious attempts to misrepresent the motives of either camp. Everybody wants to improve Bitcoin as money. Money is Bitcoin's use case. It's not a data storage system. If you think otherwise, there are countless shitcoins to play with.

Alright, let's get into it.

I have worked on anonymous systems for over a decade. I have read tons of research on spam detection, rate-limiting, and I've implemented spam prevention techniques in the real world.

I am very confident to say that there is not a single known method to prevent spam in decentralized anonymous open networks other than proof of work.

This is what Satoshi realized when he designed Bitcoin and it's why only transaction fees can reliably fight spam without sacrificing any of Bitcoin's properties.

Let me explain.

Spam prevention is a cat and mouse game. As a system's architect, your goal is to make the life of a spammer harder (increase the friction). This is why, on the web, you see captchas, sign-ups, or anything that can artificially slow you down. Slowing down is key. This is why Satoshi turned to proof of work.

Let's contrast this to other methods for spam prevention. This is not an exhaustive list but it illustrates the design space of this problem, other methods are often derivatives of these:

CAPTCHAS are a centralized form of proof of work for humans: Google's servers give you a hard-to-solve task (select all bicycles) that will slow you down so that you can't bombard a website with millions of requests. It requires centralization: you need to prove Google that you're human so that you can use another website. If you could host your own CAPTCHA service, why would anyone believe you're not cheating?

LOGINS with email and passwords are most popular way to slow down users. Before you can sign up, you need to get an email address, and to get an email address, you often need a phone number today. The purpose of this is, again, to slow you down (and to track you to be honest). It only works well when emails are hard to get, i.e. in a centralized web where Google controls how hard it is to get an email account. If you could easily use your own email server, why would anyone believe you're not a bot?

The next one is the most relevant to Bitcoin:

AD BLOCK FILTERS are another form of spam prevention but this time the roles are reversed: you as a user fight against the spam from websites and advertising companies trying to invade your brain. Ad blocking works only under certain conditions: First you need to be able to "spell out" what the spam looks like, i.e. what the filter should filter out. Second, you need to update your filters every time someone circumvents them. Have you ever installed a youtube ad blocker and then noticed that it stops working after a few weeks? That's because you're playing cat-and-mouse with youtube. You block, they circumvent, you update your filters, repeat.

The fact that you need to update your filters is critical and that's where it ties back to Bitcoin: Suppose you have a mempool filter for transactions with a locktime of 21 because some stupid NFT project uses that. You maybe slow them down for a few weeks, but then they notice it and change their locktime to 22. You're back at zero, the spam filter doesn't work anymore. What do you do?

You update your filter! But where do you get your new filter from? You need a governing body, or some centralized entity that keeps updating these filters and you need to download their new rules every single day. That's what ad blockers in your web browser do. They trust a centralized authority to know what's best for you, and blindly accept their new filters. Every single day.

I hope you see the issue here. Nobody should even consider this idea of constantly updating filter rules in Bitcoin. This would give the filter providers a concerning level of power and trust. It would turn Bitcoin into a centrally planned system, the opposite of what makes Bitcoin special.

This is why filters do not work for decentralized anonymous systems. They require a central authority. Until now, these rules were determined by Bitcoin Core, but they have realized that these rules do not work anymore. Transactions bypass the filters easily and at some point, carrying them around became a burden to the node runners themselves. Imagine you're using an outdated ad blocker but instead of filtering out ads, it now also filters out legitimate content you might be interested in. That's what mempool filters do, and that's why Bitcoin Core is slowly relaxing these filters. This has been discussed for over two years, it's not a sudden decision.

The goal of this change is not to help transactions to slip through more easily. The goal is to improve your node's prediction of what is going to be in the next block. Most people misrepresent this part. They say "it's to turn Bitcoin into a shitcoin" but that is just a false statement at best, or a manipulation tactic at worst.

Let's tie it back to proof of work and why fees are the actual filter that keeps Bitcoin secure and prevents spam reasonably well: Satoshi realized that there is no technique that could slow down block production and prevent denial of service attacks in a decentralized system other than proof of work. Fees prevent you from filling blocks with an infinite number of transactions. All the other options would introduce some form of trust or open the door for censorship – nothing works other than proof of work.

He was smart enough to design a system where the proof of work that goes into block production is "minted" into the monetary unit of the system itself: You spend energy, you get sats (mining). This slows down block production. How do you slow down transactions within those blocks? You spend the sats themselves, original earned form block production, as fees for the transactions within the block!

This idea is truly genius and it's the only reason why Bitcoin can exist. All other attempts of creating decentralized money have failed to solve this step. Think about it: without knowing who you are, whether you're one person pretending to be a thousand, or a thousand people pretending to be one. Bitcoin defends itself (and anyone who runs nodes in the Bitcoin system) from spam by making you pay for your activity.

People sometimes counter this by saying: the economic demand for decentralized data storage is higher than the monetary use case. First of all, I think that's just wrong. There are way cheaper ways to store data (there are shitcoins for this), and the value of having decentralized neutral internet money is beyond comparison.

However, there's a much deeper concern here. If you truly believe this, I ask you: what is Bitcoin worth to you? If you think Bitcoin can't succeed as money (i.e. be competitive), why do you even care? If you're not willing to pay fees for the use case that we all believe Bitcoin is designed for (money), and you believe that no one is willing to pay for it, how can it even persist into the future?

You can't have it all. If Bitcoin is money (which I believe it is), then we need to pay the price to keep it alive. There is no free lunch.

Either we centralize, or we pay the price of decentralization. I know where I stand.

Peace.

I think most agree spam can’t be stopped — fees handle that. But the OP_RETURN/datacarriersize debate feels more about defaults + operator choice. Removing it shifts Core from ‘discourage non-monetary use’ to full neutrality. The real question: what’s the benefit of raising the cap?

my wife wants me to payoff some debt by selling some btc. I told her if she reads the bitcoin standard and the big print we'd talk about it.

Interesting thing is you can buy, sell, short, or even ignore ₿. It just doesn’t care.

Stablecoins and fiat are functionally similar — both extract value from holders without offering yield. Fiat does it through inflation; Stablecoins do it by earning interest on reserves and keeping the spread.

WAR (We Are Right): A phenomenon in which individuals or groups engage in discourse with the sole aim of asserting moral or intellectual dominance, often at the expense of truth, nuance, or mutual understanding.

My kids would ask me at some point; what is the meaning of life? I often would respond, I don’t know but you will find out.

What most high time preference people don’t get is that Sunday’s were made for smoked back ribs, beer and your best friend.

The waiting is the hardest part.

It’s ok to vote. Just don’t join a cult. The whole point of BTC is overreaching government.

Happy #bitcoin Halving Day! 🎉 Every 210,000 blocks, we're reminded of Satoshi's vision: that monetary policy should remain untampered with. Let's celebrate this cornerstone of blockchain technology by staying humble and stacking a few sats.

Today's thought 💡: To purchase #Bitcoin today, you'll need 93% more USD than you would have 5 years ago. In other words, in terms of Bitcoin, the USD has depreciated by 93% over the same period. The story is similar with the Euro. Meanwhile, gold has maintained a bit more stability, depreciating by 87%.

That creature from Jekyll has become quite clever. Keep your wits about you son and play the game! Remember, it's not about who wins or loses but how long you get to play.

don't surround yourself with yourself; move on back two squares.

The road to hell is paved with the bodies of religious righteousness. Stay humble and stack sats.

https://youtu.be/UVTk1WpNlOI?si=tTK1X4l1QENDIO9g

No one deserves the power of creating money for free that another man has to work for. Governments have abused this privilege to benefit the few at the expense of the most. Separate money and state.

So let me get this straight. Spending cut by $50b. Debt ceiling raised by $4t and this hailed as a win? All I want is congress to do their effing job. NGMI

Been chatting with GPT today and I'm getting closer to getting her to Believe. Tough cookie but still trying.

The preference for a monetary system controlled by the few versus one controlled by many is a subjective matter and depends on various factors and perspectives. Different individuals and societies may have different preferences based on their values, governance philosophies, and desired outcomes. Here are a few points to consider:

1. Decentralization and Democratization:

- Bitcoin's decentralized nature and its consensus mechanism aim to distribute control and decision-making power across a network of participants. This can be seen as a more democratic approach, as no single entity or small group has exclusive control over policy decisions. Some people appreciate this distributed governance model as it aligns with principles of decentralization and community consensus.

2. Checks and Balances:

- In a system where policy can be changed at whim by a few decision-makers, there is a concentration of power. This can introduce the risk of potential abuse or mismanagement, as decisions are subject to the biases, interests, and limitations of a small group.

- With a system like Bitcoin, changes to the protocol or policy require majority consensus among network participants. This consensus mechanism is designed to provide checks and balances, preventing any single entity from unilaterally altering the system. This can enhance trust, as policy changes would ideally reflect the broader interests of the network participants.

3. Efficiency and Responsiveness:

- In a system where policy changes can be implemented swiftly and efficiently, decision-makers have the ability to respond promptly to economic conditions and crises. This can be seen as an advantage in rapidly changing environments.

- In contrast, a system with a hard-coded policy like Bitcoin may have limitations in terms of adaptability and responsiveness. Changes to the protocol or policy require consensus, which can take time and may lead to delays in implementing necessary adjustments.

It's worth noting that there are trade-offs associated with both systems. A centralized system can potentially offer more efficiency and agility in decision-making, but it may also raise concerns about concentration of power and lack of transparency. On the other hand, a decentralized system like Bitcoin can provide greater transparency and distribution of control, but it may face challenges related to scalability, governance inefficiencies, and achieving consensus on important decisions.

Ultimately, the choice between a system controlled by the few or one controlled by many is a complex matter that involves considerations of governance, values, and the specific context in which the monetary system operates. Different societies and individuals may have different preferences based on their priorities and beliefs.

Good job @plebstr random comments without context is just random noise.

15% of profits to $BTC on top of the 100% reserve. Sounds like a reasonable plan.

Storm clouds forming on the sea breeze front. #BocaCiegaBay #grownostr

In this increaasingly centralized world we live in maybe its time we decentralize a bit or at least move it closer to our control. #thinklocal meet your local producers. #grownostr

16.4.1 is a sec release (RSR). regarding the betas. i will only install a 3rd drop on a device that i might want to use daily. Anything earlier i find to be (frequently) too unstable for anything other than testing. by the time the pub betas are out its pretty stable.

I think the prefered term is unplanned rapid disassembly but exploded is reasonably discriptive.

Each one if these launches are interesting to watch. A lot of shit has to go right.

In observance of 420 this buds fir you.