Be safe out there. DMs asking you for money are scams. They are all fraud impersonators. This is happening:

Some people say that when you die, you have a life review and see how your actions impacted others.

That’s like the real-world version:

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Commenting here to see if I can remember it. My bandwidth is all over the place but thanks for the heads up.

Not sure. I have to make sure it’s good enough to be publishable. If it’s publishable then I’ll figure it out.

Spent three hours today round-trip driving into Philadelphia and listened to music the whole way. Figured out a few of my mid-act 3 plot points.

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Mostly side passion. Bitcoin and signed messages transmitted by relays have appearances, tho. Not just to stick them in there, but because it’s the near future and they are relevant.

I’m strongly introvert, but there are limits to it.

While I’m separated from my husband for a few months (he’s held up working on a construction project on another continent), and while I’m working from home, I’ve gone kind of stir crazy.

Living alone back when I went to work each day with friends wasn’t a problem. Working from home when my husband is around isn’t a problem. But working from home while my husband is away is a monk-like existence that is even too introverted for me after a while.

Since we travel a lot we don’t even have a cat, so it’s like I’m trying out being a cat lady without even the cat.

That's pretty hardcore.

Shower thought *or driving while listening to music.

Don’t shower while driving, kiddos.

Sci fi thriller set in the near future. A terrorist with strange powers, and kind of a rabbit hole from there.

A sci fi thriller.

Gm.

I had trouble sleeping last night, so instead I reached 100k words in my hobby sci fi manuscript. Full length will be ballpark 120k.

I’m going to take a break from adding new words to it, and will spend some time editing the first 100k.

The reason I was able to write most of the first draft quickly (two months, as a side project) is because I had a bunch of plot outlines and character details bouncing around in my head for a long time. But the last part is less fleshed out, even though I know the outline of the ending. So I need to let it sit for a bit and collect some more thoughts on it, rather than rush to get it on paper. Sometimes a random shower thought driving while listening to music helps you think of that detail that completes a scene or ties scenes together.

It’s an action scene.

Tonight's background writing music:

https://youtu.be/Th7sFKiFLys

Spoilers for earlier parts of the book.

I read a book called How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying.

There is a woman from Earth named Davi who is the chosen one and she is stuck in a time loop in a fantasy world. Every time she dies, she wakes up in a forest pond and an old wizard finds her and says the prophecy is for her to save the world.

She has lived 237 of these lifetimes, totaling over 1,000 years, and can never win. The dark lord and his horde always wins, no matter what she tries. She has understandably become quite cynical. Her personality is like Deadpool now; she takes nothing seriously, constantly jokes about things, and breaks the fourth wall.

So as she is getting tortured in the dungeon of the dark lord on life #237 after yet another multi-year attempt that failed, she decides she is fed up with this. Instead of trying to defeat the dark lord and save the kingdom, she will instead join the bad side and become the dark lord.

So after finally finding a way to kill herself and end the torture, she wakes up in the forest pond again. When the wizard comes to find her, she kills him and then heads into the forest to start her journey to work up the bad guys ladder. Kind of like Groundhog Day she has so much accumulated experience (fighting, magic, combat tactics, knowledge of what events will happen when) and she can iterate when she fails, so she sets off on this new journey to become Dark Lord Davi.

So the story follows her as she builds a bigger and bigger army (she insists on calling it a horde, since dark lords have hordes) and adventures across the world accumulating power.

Funny stuff.

I like paranoid crypto anarchists. Good folks doing good work. Big fan.

This chart is kind of shocking actually. A society completely flipped the mechanism for how it deals with people who are problematic for themselves and others.

Epic. Thanks for sharing!

Miles is one of my spirit animals.

He hikes mountains faster than me and parties harder than me. I’m a fan.

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Roya is one of my favorite accounts on Nostr.

She was an early adopter, and from the start I somehow found her posts and enjoyed them. One of the most genuine accounts here. I know little about her but after more than a year of following her I'm a fan. Her posts make my Nostr experience unique and positive.

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Masculinity is under attack lately. But I like masculinity actually.

I know, shocker.

The fact that so few U.S. presidential or vice presidential candidates have had beards in modern history is funny to me. I think men usually look better with facial hair, and the older they get the more likely that is. 20-somthing or 30-something strong jaw dudes often look great without facial hair. But when men are 50 or 60 or whatever, that salt-and-pepper beard is so rad and almost always beats the no-beard weak-chin look. I actually think it's weird that neither Biden nor Trump have a beard. JD Vance looks like shit without a beard. Growing a beard is the best move he ever made, imo. And yet the media is like, "A vice president candidate with a beard?"

Masculinity can be rough around the edges, but that's what we need sometimes. It's usually balanced by other societal aspects. In some societies it gets extreme and needs to be pushed back on. My husband has a temper, but his temper is part of his power and why he impacts the world to the extent that he does. So when I interact with his temper, it's not about eliminating it, but rather it's about appreciating it but making sure it's directed in the right direction.

Masculinity and femininity are good. They don't need to be forced. Nature is diverse but society tries to categorize nature into narrower categories. Feminine men and masculine women are cool too. But that doesn't change the fact that masculine men and feminine women are also cool.

I grew up kickboxing and submission grappling. I'm a tomboy. I'm a feminist in terms of promoting equal gender rights. But at the end of the day, I appreciate masculine men. I was never attracted to men who were weaker than me in any capacity, but rather was always attracted to men with gravitas.

The easiest approach to life is to 1) respect biology as it is but then 2) also appreciate the divergences that inherently exist within it.

Trying to equalize nature is to fight against it. And yet trying to eliminate the diversify of nature is also to fight against it.

Nature is fascinating, and I do my best to appreciate it.

GM.

I'm bullish on bitcoin, and I think a lot of people overthink it.

One of my favorite metrics is the market value vs realized value ratio. The realized value is basically just the on-chain cost basis. The value of UTXOs at the dollar price during which they last moved between wallets, which often means the time people pulled them from exchanges or deposited them to exchanges.

A relatively small amount of marginal buying can push up the market value by a lot. Like how if you buy one house on a street, it can boost the estimated price of all houses on that street even though only one of them traded hands. But when market value becomes stretched relative to cost basis, it means that part of the market value is kind of illusory. We don't *really* know what houses on that street are worth if only one of them traded hands recently and thus liquidity was low. Over time, as more houses on that street trade hands and we have more price points, the estimated value of the street becomes more real. The same thing for bitcoin; as more bitcoin trades hands at certain levels, it starts to make that level "real" compared to how real we should consider it when it just touches a certain level for a little while with limited volume.

Right now, bitcoin is at an all-time high in its realized price, i.e. cost basis.

Back when bitcoin was poking over $60k in April 2021, the cost basis for the network was only about $350 billion. Now, at the same market price, the cost basis approaches $650 billion, or more than twice as high. The marginal bitcoin has traded hands and moved between wallets at much higher prices than years ago, even though the market price is about the same. In other words, these levels have been truly liquid and been consummated by the market more than they were back in 2021, and thus the price is more robust at this level than back then.

The launch of the spot ETFs pulled forward some excitement this year, and so we've been in this big consolidation since March. But even in that time period from March to the present, the on-chain cost basis increased from like $520 billion to $640 billion, and so price discovery and progress is being made despite the ongoing price chop.

As the network builds a bigger and more solid base like it has been doing, it can set the stage for the next major breakout. The network looks healthy to me.

The Jackal was a movie from 1997 that followed the villain (Bruce Willis) as much as the hero (Richard Gere).

While the movie had some flaws, especially Gere’s fake accent, I do really like that concept of following a villain as much as a hero. It can work well in a lot of contexts. Has to be the right type of villain though. Complex and interesting, or entertaining.

Arcane did that too, which is part of why I liked it.

Based on the spoiler leaks, probably.

The crazy thing is that this is actually kind of a common dream variant. I've seen others describe it too. It's something that can come up in our common pysche.

I have it to, for like two different classes. It's not that vivid, but literally 15 years after graduating college I still occasionally have a "fuck, did I not realize I had an class this whole semester?" dream.

Here's an anecdotal data point on Nostr.

Yesterday I asked people on both Nostr and Twitter what tropes in fiction they don't like. I have about 10x the followers on Twitter than Nostr, but I only received like 6x the number of replies on Twitter.

So Nostr had a higher relative engagement rate.

Tech generally moves in one direction. Musical artists feared streaming and piracy but then the economics shifted more toward concerts. I think visual art will be similar- people do want original one-of-one works.

Bitcoin has 2.1 quadrillion pieces.

I recently did an internal corporate Q&A with a $100B+ tech company about bitcoin. I do it more often with financial institutions but this one was tech.

One of their executives personally runs a lightning node and asked all sorts of great questions. Really based stuff.

There are bitcoiners in all sorts of positions in institutions, corporations, government, banks, etc. but they are usually not the majority in terms of decision makers, and without that majority (or the CEO being one of them) is basically why most of them haven’t gone from zero to one in terms of getting involved with bitcoin as a company.

Basically from the outside it seems like no progress, but from the inside it’s a gradual growth of more bitcoiners but still at a sub-majority level for action. Important distinction. It’s like having a lot of plants quietly growing fruit but little of it is ripe yet.

Both Biden and Trump are kind of retarded. We have known this for a long time.

During the debate, Biden’s age issues became unmasked. And then during the tragic shooting on Trump, he had the courage and presence of mind to fist bump and come out very strong. And in their emotion, people of course rally behind strength.

But then when we go back to hearing Trump speak for an extended period of time, we are reminded that he is kind of retarded, like where we were before, prior to the emotion of the crisis.

Nothing stops this train. All our heroes are retarded. Stay humble and stack sats.

William Shatner is 93 but looks and acts like 73. Always impressed when I see him in interviews.

Probably not a bad idea to do whatever he’s been doing.

I had one of those false wake-up dreams.

I generally check a couple things on my phone when I wake up, including the bitcoin price when it is within a raging bull market or bear market, and so in the dream I checked it and it was $84,254. I was like, “oh, nice”.

But then of course I woke up and it was just $72k. And then I was like, “Geez even your dreams are lame. $84k and change? Not even $100k or some flashy number?” It was even plausibly correcting on the screen, like it was coming down from a spike to $86k with a perfectly plausible consolidating price chart. The most mid-curve normie dream imaginable.

But then after chilling with my husband in the morning sun and drinking some tea, I checked my phone again and saw Craig Wright get totally rekt at trial, which is way, way better than $84k bitcoin.

Many bitcoiners think establishment powers are now in the "and then they join you" phase of the struggle.

I don't. I think they're more entering the earlier "and then they fight you" phase.

Or more specifically, they are happy to join in on the price exposure side (i.e. ETFs), but they are fighting against privacy (especially) and self-custody (to some extent). The struggle for financial privacy, custody, and overall self-autonomy is just heating up.

The gradual shift of critics from "bitcoin is a useless speculative asset with no intrinsic value" to "bitcoin is so powerful that direct usage of it must be curtailed" can be dangerous.

Although it was predictable ahead of time that so many Palestinian civilians including children would die as a result of Israel’s response to the attack on Israel by Hamas, as the numbers continue to add up it is increasingly hard to watch.

Half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18. There is not much more sad in this world than children, cut off from electricity and communication, violently dying from air strikes in darkness.

And sadly this happens in other places of the world too.

For much of human history, people were only aware of their own local area. Now we have awareness of large swaths of the world, and so we can keep track of tragedies in real time. We then desensitize ourselves out of necessity. Like, the sheer amount of negative information and unsolvable problems hit us through media, and in order to productively do something to add value to someone else, there is little choice other than compartmentalization it. An electrician can’t be caught up in the troubles of the world as he goes out each day and fixes things and building things, for example. In order to add order to his small part of the world, he can’t be fully caught up with its global chaos.

And then, I see these crazy protestors tearing down flyers about kidnapped Israelis, as though that activity could possibly be the best use of their time. People have a strong tendency to want to be part of something bigger and longer lasting than themselves, whether it is their religion, their community, their ideology, or their work. But some people chose such fruitless ways of doing it. Yes, you can and should advocate for not bombing children. No, you shouldn’t try to erase what happened to murdered or captured Israelis either. It is not rocket science.

The world is an increasingly polarized place, and my biggest concern is for those polarizations to be used to take rights away in a more broader context, or to wage war between larger opponents. Politicians will propagandize any small share of “crypto funding” to bad groups to justify more restrictions on those technologies and privacy in general. As countries go through sovereign debt crises, having some sort of enemy to point to helps their narrative for capital controls and keeping their citizens in currency and bonds as they are inflated away. I’ve studied the 1940s financial environment too much to be unaware of this.

Always look through to the bigger story, and ideally with a perspective of empathy toward many sides of any complex issue. Strive to be able to articulate your opponent’s view as well as they can, so that your counter argument can be most effective and surgical in its nature. And then, when there is nothing you can do about something globally, try instead to bring order and reason and improvement and kindness to whatever small portion of the world that you can.

Unless someone is setting out to be a professional author (very hard), nobody should write a book to make money.

When I set out to write Broken Money, it was because I *had* to, not because I wanted to. Spending a thousand hours on something that I get a profit of $5/copy for is not my best use of time.

Any time I spent on my research business revenue generation content, or leaning harder into my venture capital partnerships, would have been better on an hourly ROI basis. I have to sell 40 books to equal each newsletter subscription on my website; clearly the latter is better financially.

Almost regardless of how many copies I sell, it's a bad ROI for me. I'm overworked and the fact that I wrote a book while maintaining my existing business stressed my relationship and social life. And further, I am reinvesting most of my initial profits; the first 1,000 copy profits go to the Human Rights Foundation Bitcoin Development Fund, and the next 4,000 copy profits will go towards making a video about money and why it's broken.

And all of it was worth it. When a creator has something in their head, it's painful until they get it out into the world. I wrote this for bad ROI but because I wanted it to be out there for people to read, period.

Will I make a profit? Yes. But at a much lower hourly rate than I make on other work I do. It's a negative profit compared to having reinvested that thousand hours into my other existing work. But I consider it to be more important, which is why I spent the time.

I wrote Broken Money because I had to. The book concept formed in my head after many years of writing and research regarding money, and it would have been increasingly distracting to *not* write it. I didn't realistically have a choice. I felt compelled to write it. Part of it was altruistic; I wanted people to learn from my total monetary framework thoughts over five years of research. Part of it was egotistical; I wanted to timestamp something in the world, in physical form, and put it out there. Maybe it's the low time preference part of me; I'd like something of me to be mentionable to people in the distant future who look back at this time.

My background has been a blend of engineering and finance, with both ironically pointed toward bitcoin.

I don't care where you buy it from, and you can pirate it if you want, but it benefits bitcoin and nostr:npub1gdu7w6l6w65qhrdeaf6eyywepwe7v7ezqtugsrxy7hl7ypjsvxksd76nak if you buy it from his website. Circular economy rather than big fiat business. We've introduced a special edition hardcover with a cloth cover and dust jacket for those that prefer that premium format, only on his website. And you can buy it in fiat or sats.

https://academy.saifedean.com/product/broken-money-hardcover/

Every year, I spend 1-2 months living in Egypt. This is because my husband is originally from Egypt, his family is much larger than mine, and so while our economic base is in the US, our social base is actually in Egypt. I thus became multinational many years ago.

However, my husband spends 3-4 months each year in Egypt, while I only spend 1-2 months there. So, there are 1-2 months where I’m in the US alone. The reason I choose to do this is to look after the household and business, and because I’m not as productive in Egypt (inconsistent internet, less optimal workstation, way more social pressures, and so forth).

In some ways, we find that spending some time apart strengthens our relationship and lets us focus on our separate things for part of the year. And when we meet after 1-2 months, it’s such a great reunion. We find ourselves wanting to catch up on so much and spend extra time together. But also, even though in some ways I look forward to having time alone and indeed get a lot done during that time, I immediately regret it once I am alone. I find myself constantly looking forward to going to Egypt, as I am now. During these periods, I end up posting more on social media, either constructively or non-constructively, in what tends to be a replacement for diminished in-person contact.

This seems to be amplified by my work situation. When I was an engineer, I worked with colleagues in person each day, but now that I work from home, my colleagues are virtual and I meet them in person only at major events. So, this relatively brief window each year of being in a different place than my husband tends to be oddly monk-like, with me at home alone 24 hours per day, working and living and doing whatever I do. I think one of my future goals will be to increase my deliberate effort at spending time with local friends, especially during this part of the year.

Anyway, I’m doing a series of “real thoughts” uniquely on Nostr, and this is the first one.

Conclusion: Social circles are (obviously) a very important thing, including for workaholics and introverts like myself. Social circles affect us in various ways, and having gone through many cycles, I have become increasingly aware of the changes that take place during these seasonal cycles of being close to others vs far from others.