I’ve been studying the Cairo real estate market both because I’m a buyer and because it’s useful inflation research to witness the process of how quickly/slowly and evenly/unevenly prices adjust to an FX devaluation.

Some real estate in bubbly areas jumps in local nominal price quickly; other areas barely move in price. Egypt doesn’t have a ton of foreign real estate buyers (compared to say, Chinese nationals buying Thai property) so prices tend to be low. There is however a lot of construction supply growth.

Was looking at a new villa today which is four stories and six bedrooms, in order to house a multigenerational family (nine total people). Made of brick and cement at its core and with beautiful finishing. Has an elevator, which is important for the seniors of the family that have trouble with stairs. Nice view, yard, community.

It’s comparable in price to a random house half its size in US suburbia that is made of cheap wood and drywall that will last a third as long. So the price per square foot compared to that is half, and even less if quality-adjusted. Of course, with a much riskier legal and financial jurisdiction.

But then it can be paid for over seven years without interest (you just forgo the cash-up-front discount which is not all that big), in the local currency that doubles in supply every four years (20% annualized broad money growth), so you are basically shorting the currency.

Was asked to prune a Mahonia (Oregon grape) earlier in the week so it's time to make some #berberine tincture. It tastes like total crap but like most bitter things its very good for your liver. 😁

You want to snap the twig and extract the cambian later below the bark. Pop it in some vodka or in this case I am using polish spirit leave it for month or so to extract and your good to go. It will stain everything more yellow than Coldplay so just be aware of that too.

You can get berberine from Berberis and other plants too but I find it much easier to get the berberine rich part out of a mahonia.

#herbs

I’m really liking the distinct Nostr experience vs the Twitter experience. Occasionally I cross-post something on both, but my decision in recent weeks to treat them differently has been very rewarding.

Years ago, I used to post on certain forums. But as someone with a big Twitter following now, I am more self-conscious of what I post there these past few years. It’s like, I feel quite a responsibility before I send something out to 600k followers, rather than being able to treat it rather carefree like I would treat a forum in the old days. Of course, once in a while I get provoked by something or I share something random and funny for no reason, but not usually.

Since the community on Nostr is still smallish, it kind of rekindles that more carefree feeling of just posting, talking. And I post less about economics, which is my main Twitter silo.

And because I want open protocols like Nostr to succeed, I deliberately want to be here, posting. So it is a win-win; I try to add value but also it scratches an itch for me that hasn’t been scratched in a while.

Maybe if/when Nostr becomes large, it will recreate that sense of filtering that I have on Twitter. But I would still consider that a success, because it means Nostr succeeded and I at least got to experience a smaller social environment for another period of time.

I spoke at a big bitcoin-adjacent company this week and one of the best questions was from someone who asked what the downsides of bitcoin adoption might be.

I always do appreciate these steelman questions, the skeptical questions, the ones where we challenge ourselves. Only when we can answer those types of questions do we understand the concept that we are promoting.

So the classic example is that in modern economic literature, "deflation is bad". This, however, is only the case in a highly indebted system. Normally, deflation is good. Money appreciates, technology improves, and goods and services get cheaper over time as they should. Price of Tomorrow covers this well. My book touches on this too, etc. The "deflation is bad" meme is still alive in modern economic discourse and thus is worth countering, but I think in the bitcoin spectrum of communities, people get that deflation is fine and good.

My answer to the question was in two parts.

The first part was technological determinism. In other words, if we were to re-run humanity multiple times, there are certain rare accidents that might not replicate, and other commonalities that probably would. Much like steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity, and nuclear power, I think a decentralized network of money is something we would eventually come across. In our case, Bitcoin came into existence as soon as the bandwidth and encryption tech allowed it to. In other universes or simulations it might look a bit different (e.g. might not be 21 million or ten minute block times exactly), but I think decentralized real-time settlement would become apparent as readily as electricity does, for any civilization that reaches this point. So ethics aside, it just is what it is. It exists, and thus we must deal with it.

The second part was that in my view, transparency and individual empowerment is rarely a bad thing. Half of the world is autocratic. And half of the world (not quite the same half) deals with massive structural inflation. A decentralized spreadsheet that allows individuals to store and send value can't possibly be a bad thing, unless humanity itself is totally corrupted. I then went into more detail with examples about historical war financing, and all sorts of tangible stuff. In other words, a whole chapter full of stuff. I've addressed this in some articles to.

In your view, if you had to steelman the argument as best as you could, what are the scenarios where bitcoin is *BAD* for humanity rather than good for it, on net?

Man I have been so burn out lately. When I look at my emails in particular I’m just like, “No, I don’t think I will.”

I am making a vow to catch up on all my comms next week.

For those not Xitter, Craig Wright lost his appeal against me where he received a £1 judgement for putting forward wholly dishonest and false evidence.

After +4 years, this is all coming to a close.

Breath!

If a book had a decent number of diagrams and charts, would you want the audio version or would you want the physical/ebook (visual version)?

Secondary question- if those charts and diagrams are described in the audio version by someone who knows what they are talking about, would that affect the answer?

People convinced me to move to Signal, and then to Nostr.

Then they said Bluesky and Threads which I have resisted. I can't be everywhere.

Now they are saying Simplex.

I'm on Twitter, Email, Signal, Nostr, Whatsapp, and DMs.

Give me the Simplex case. Make this Herpes-adjacent name sound good to me. Is there critical mass there? Should my scrambled attention start to spend some time there? Tell me.

Doing finishing touches for my book, which is now past all external editing. I'm doing the author's final edit/checkup, cover, getting it into the right format for publication, etc.

Some questions for the community:

-Do you prefer hardcover, paperback, or ebook?

-For hardcover or paperback, do you care about the physical dimensions of a book? eg do you prefer a 5.5"x8.5" thicc book or a 7"x10" thinner book?

-For those that like audio books, would you prefer to read the book physically or electronically rather than listen to it, if it had a lot of images?