Awesome to add two die-hard bitcoiners to the team!! 🔥🚀
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I heard it (also) has something to do with the memory of the Weimar Republic hyperinflation still being relatively vivid, with stories being passed on from previous generations.
On a long enough timescale, "risk-free rate" will turn out to be a buzz word from the fiat era.
Study #Praxeology & #AustrianEconomics to understand why.
All humans act with the goal to remove uneasiness for themselves. However, there is never a guarantee, that action will lead to the desired outcome.
This means everything people do implies risk. Even deciding to do nothing can be risky. Economic activity, saving and investing, are ALL downstream from this principle.
As Mises pointed out, every investment (in fact all human action) is speculative. Spending our time & energy is never guaranteed to lead to the outcome we anticipate or desire.
Since there is no way to remove this inherent risk, the only way to have something called a "risk-free interest rate", is to offload the downside risk to others.
As Saifedean points out, this is only possible by printing the money, or through bailouts when things go wrong.
In both cases, the "others" paying for the downside risk, are those who hold their value in fiat currency. The dilution of their value, is what finances providing "risk-free" returns to those who actually put capital at risk by investing it in government bonds.
I have a hard time believing Sayor doesn't understand this. If that were the case, he would try to argue against the points being made by Saifedean. Instead, he says: "You're going all maxi on me", claiming governments and the dollar aren't going anywhere.
I find it equally hard to believe Saylor doesn't understand the game theoretic probability of hyperbitcoinization.
You can't say everything is going to zero against #bitcoin, there is no second best, and at the same time claim the dollar will last forever.
As he eloquently explains at many occasions, inflation is caused by debasement of the money supply and bitcoin is the ideal form of property to protect your net worth against it.
However, history shows that on a long enough timescale, inflation transitions to hyperinflation, which is the collapse of people's trust in the currency.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/The_Hanke_Krus_Hyperinflation_Table.pdf
Saylor makes a distinction between property and currency, saying bitcoin is the best property, but the dollar will remain the dominant currency. However, as goes for the entire fiat-based monetary standard, this distinction is only kept in place by (the threat of) violence.
If you're not sure what that means, try printing your own money, not paying taxes or breaking legal tender laws and other financial regulations. You will soon find out that these privileges of states, governments and banks are protected by potential violence.
Without this threat, nobody would be using non-scarce pieces of paper and numbers in a very big Excel sheet, and exchange them for things that in fact require time & energy to produce. Yet here we are.
What is ironic, is that the inconsistencies in Saylor's reasoning, in part, boil down to fear of that same violence.
If he were to advocate for bitcoin replacing the US dollar as currency, there is a non-zero chance he would have to jump on his yacht and flee, McAffee-style.
The other explanation is more straightforward: Follow the money.
Saylor makes smart use of the fiat system to build a bitcoin stack that will most likely one day be of geopolitical significance. A game that clearly brings him fun and satisfaction (removal of uneasiness 😉).
Advocating for replacement of the dollar would put $MSTR stock in the bucket of non-investable assets for many of the institutions that buy it to get indirect exposure to bitcoin's asymmetric upside, which would in turn decrease Saylor's ability to attact more cheap capital.
I have immense respect for Saylor's guts, intellect, and ability to explain bitcoin from first principles, but he's clearly walking the tight-rope between two diametrically opposed systems.
Sooner or later, he will have to choose...
If you think smartphones leading to a generation of youngsters who can't do elementary mental calculation, can't read an analog clock and have the attention span of a goldfish was bad, wait until an entire generation has grown up using AI...
Besides simple personal values such as being caring, responsible and honest with loved ones, I changed my entire life and my views on practically EVERYTHING over the last 6-7 years.
The irony of calling the current paradigm "capitalism", while simultaneously quoting "Chancellor on the brink of second bailout" in bitcoin's genesis block, is lost on a lot of people.
No, it's the Onyx firmware. It used to work OK without GSF, which I could just let unchecked in settings. Never tried to flash another ROM to it
I know. I have an Onyx Boox 8 e-ink tablet, that until recently allowed not enabling GSF. Unfortunately, after the latest update, ik keeps giving a pop-up saying GSF is required when I open any app I installed on it through Aurora Store. 😤
GrapheneOS fixes this...
✅