randomly just remembered I once had a hilarious irl convo with Breedlove and Jordan Bush about how Satan was the original shitcoiner.

good times.

There are 60 million millionaires in the world, and every single one of them has a store of value problem. And so does everyone else in the world.

The cost to ship a sizable amount of gold internationally costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Even if you just buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold domestically and bring it home, you're paying a spot markup of thousands of dollars. The cost to close a luxury mansion real estate deal (which many wealthy people just own and leave empty as a store of value) can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and then depending on their jurisdiction they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in property taxes on it. An international wire transfer often costs like $30 and takes days and is entirely permissioned/centralized/credit-based. Credit card fees are like 3%. The global banking industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in fees per year even though it's all centralized.

Bitcoin is a decentralized global liquid store of value and settlement network. You can send money to any internet-connected person in the world generally in an hour or less depending on desired block confirmations. You can indefinitely self-custodially store value in a unit that is scarcer than gold and scarcer than real estate and that unlike both gold and real estate is globally portable. It currently costs like $35 to do this and everyone is losing their minds at how expensive that seems. But $35 is an *outstanding* price for this service, and in ten years I have no idea what the price will be but there are many scenarios where it could be way higher.

Right now, bitcoin fees are higher than normal because people are trading frogs on the timechain and so forth. But regardless, people need to be ready for the prospect of sustained high fees if bitcoin adoption continues to grow structurally with limited block space. This means users, developers, businesses, etc. To put it into this bigger context, fees are still insanely cheap compared to other alternatives listed above that give similar store of value and global payment properties at scale.

I'm a bit surprised fees haven't *already* been $35 on a regular basis by now. So to flip it around; fees aren't expensive because there are frogs on the timechain; fees are still cheap because relatively few people are using bitcoin to send and store money compared to the total addressable market that could be doing so.

Does this price out small users? Unfortunately, yes. That's where layers come in, and the options vary depending on if someone is a power user or not. Hal Finney wrote about that in 2010; it's not a new narrative.

A couple Lightning channels can open a lot of payment liquidity for you. Sidechains like Liquid didn't get much attention when fees were low but now people are giving them a second look. Chaumian mints allow communities around the world to set up their own community banks/custodians with built-in privacy. Places like Cash App allow people to buy bitcoin with decent custodial assurances run by serious people (eg it's not some crazy-haired idiot in the Bahamas). These are all tools that people can use to have bitcoin price exposure, pay in bitcoin, etc. And a unique aspect of bitcoin is the ability to split control. Multi-institution multi-sigs, or federated sidechains: the fact that ownership can be broken into several different entities is not something available to gold or similar assets, and yet a lot of people take it for granted on bitcoin. These are all tools that businesses can offer and people can use for smaller amounts, and then pull into on-chain self-custody if they have a sizable balance for longer-term storage.

In the future, some soft forks or non-form upgrades might allow other types of models. I think the ecosystem is still in its infancy. But in the meantime, it helps to have perspective on what bitcoin offers compared to alternatives, and to be realistic about the long-run inevitability of substantial base-layer fees if any meaningful adoption becomes sustained, and thus the importance of preparing for them.

I wrote a short rant called "fuck easy" a couple of days ago. I've been listening to podcasts and after the 5th person complaining that nostr is too hard (is it, really?) I was fed up and typed this out on my phone. I hope that we can return to a point, culturally, where "hard" is okay, just like the first level of the original Super Mario was hard.

Coddling everyone's mind has led us to the upside-down clown world we're currently living in, and coddling everyone's body has led to less-than-optimal health, to put it mildly. In the Bitcoin world, coddling users and making things "easy" has led to Coinbase-by-default and other stupid bullshit, and I truly am fed up with all of that.

There is a better way, but the "better" isn't necessarily "easy."

I was speechless when we walked out of that film… I was just… “what the fuck did I just watch?”

I’ve never heard of a casting decision so retarded, as picking a young lead with no acting experience… based on nothing more than a karate video. This kid has to CARRY THE CHARISMA OF THE WHOLE SERIES, and it has to be a child actor, and he literally cast a hollow wooden block as its lead. That should’ve been seen as the single biggest and most important problem on their hands for making that film work. Can they find a lively, liveable, bright, playful kid, who can do some elaborate flow and dance movement (or enough to use a stand in) that every person in the audience is going to care about, and who can put up with this crap for 6 years of films if it’s successful.

“Can he do karate” is not even on the list of “stuff that fucking matters.” Just get a kid who dances FFS. Get a Bollywood kid, they’d be perfect. They sing, dance, have a more stage acting presence so they exaggerate emotions and delivery. Thats what they need for Aang. Literally anything other than what they did. The whole cast was like this. That casting director should be ashamed, lol.

The awful casting choices alone are hard to recover from if they didn’t make 100 other absurd choices that they piled on top of a script that sounded like the characters were reading a bullet point outline of the plot as dialogue lines.

….

You can see why I had the motivation to fix this stinking mess of a film 🤣

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Avatar: The Last Airbender

all strike users now have full Lightning Address support.

what can we do to make Strike a better wallet? what are we missing?

Have you ever been so mad with how horrible a movie was that you were super excited about, that you spent two months writing 200 pages of an entirely different script and laying out casting ideas for it until you felt it was “fixed”?

I have 🤣

Guess the movie (don’t be greedy, repost so others can play 🤣) and I’ll zap 21,000 sats

Outside of a handful, the majority of podcasts are repetitious enough these days that I would rather listen to a bunch of theater nerds play through a long Dungeons and Dragons campaign together than listen to those podcasts.