Yes, this could end up becoming the future risk free rate of the financial system, after subtracting cost of liquidity management

Followed! Good luck Ander and Itxaso

Aspirational movie scenes

Some of the best movies leave us in a state of aspiration. They make us feel there is something more to life than we had so far been aware of and, importantly, that this new something is accessible to us.

One surprising way some movies inspire me, personally is when you have a character, who after encountering some important moment in her life, is shown just sitting or standing still — often with a cigarette — pondering or contemplating what has just happened.

The reason I find this inspiring (or almost unrealistically romantic) is because most of us actually never take a moment to sit still and consider important events in our lives. We just go on to distract ourselves.

So when I see such a scene, I try to embody the experience of the character for a moment and I try to remind myself what it feels like to really. slow. down.

https://m.primal.net/HmPo.webp

💯 About a year ago I wrote this post about what makes Novak special comparing him to Ayn Rand’s fictional character Howard Roark:

https://open.substack.com/pub/soirbleu/p/djokovic-roark?r=o7r8l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The revered Indian sage Ramana Maharshi attributed his extraordinary insight and liberation to a simple question: “Who am I?”

This self-inquiry, if contemplated with openness and intent, can lead to a recognition of our true nature.

During meditation retreats, I have asked this question 1000s of times, usually in the form of diades: You’re facing another person and they prompt you with the question: “Experience who (or what) you are and communicate that to me”. You then go on to communicate your experience of self for 5 minutes, then the tables are turned.

For the first many times of doing this, I was prompted with the question and immediately my habitual thinking mind became active and tried to answer the question in some cerebral way: “I’m Daniel, born in Germany. I’m human. I’m a curious person…”.

There is no limit to the number of things your mind will come up with to answer a question like this.

Over and over the teacher would ask us to actually be open to what the answer might be, to actually look for what we are… in our experience right now. Not through intellectual hearsay, but through direct recognition.

One day, in between sessions I went for a walk, my mind finally capitulated and suddenly there was a very new, an almost inverted view of self and the world. I was no longer Daniel, up here in my head but I was one with everything: one with the soft breeze in the warm Texan air, one with the sounds of the cicadas and of shoes on gravel, one with my body but not limited to it.

Before this day, I had a subtle suspicion that Ramana Maharshi and many other wise men and women before him, were onto something. On this day any last doubts were erased.

https://m.primal.net/HmCk.webp

On the importance of incentives

In 1995 Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s brilliant lieutenant, gave a speech at Harvard titled “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”. One of the most famous quotes from the speech is “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome”.

This is an incredibly valuable framework for predicting outcomes in the world.

One expression of this principle is Clayton Christensen’s “innovator’s dilemma” which describes why very successful incumbents in business often find themselves struggling to fend off competition using disruptive technologies.

I witnessed first hand how Google, one of the greatest businesses of all time, set up internal incentives that make it increasingly difficult for the company to compete and innovate. To be very specific: the incentives at Google are increasingly oriented towards winning internal politics and this clashes increasingly with external outcomes.

We are seeing the beginning of this clash as Google struggles to adjust to competition from challengers in the space of artificial intelligence.

Another area where Munger’s model of incentives applies perfectly is in the area of predicting outcomes where politics interfaces with the private sector. Politicians generally are not incentivized to produce great outcomes for society, they are incentivized to win elections. This is the reason most politicians nowadays are not experienced technocrats but seasoned actors.

As a result, wherever politicians interact with businesses, bad incentives arise (this is the reason libertarians advocate for a small government). One area where incentives and hence outcomes are particularly toxic is in healthcare. Pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to maximize profitability and politicians are incentivized to pursue populist politics.

This inevitably delivers catastrophic outcomes as regulators that are half asleep at the wheel approve harmful drugs and as doctors are incentivized, nay sometimes even forced to prescribe treatments excessively, erratically and irresponsibly.

Munger’s incentive framework has also been helpful to those who have been holding #Bitcoin with conviction for years despite its significant volatility. In order to do so one had to understand the context and incentives of a few key players:

Government: They have to raise money in order to fund their lavish spending as well as interest payments on the nation’s debt. Taxes are unpopular so the better way to do this is to print money.

Institutional Investors: They are looking for returns to beat and ideally exceed inflation. As valuations relative to earnings reach all-time highs, they have to look for alternative assets to potentially provide a source of return as well as diversification.

Retail Investors: They are primarily incentivized to not be left behind (FOMO) and ideally to look for opportunities to get rich quickly.

This creates a perfect storm of incentives for an asset like Bitcoin: Increasing liquidity in the system due to the expansion of the money supply, institutional investors desperately seeking yield and retail investors looking to FOMO into the market. It explains both the short term volatility and reflexivity of Bitcoin and the steady longer-term increase in its market capitalization

https://m.primal.net/HlgA.webp

Throw on your tinfoil hats

In her masterpiece “Atlas Shrugged”, Ayn Rand describes a society in economic decay with widespread business failures, decreased productivity and shortages. In the book this decline is exemplified by accidents in the US railroad system and the fictional railroad company Taggart Transcontinental.

If you’re looking for early signs of the decline of the US economy beyond fiction, look no further than Boeing. Boeing, and particularly its 737 MAX plane, have had numerous issues and accidents in the past with this last week marking a new wave of incidents.

A lenient interpretation is that these incidents are still marginal in the greater scheme of Boeing airtaffic and that the company merely needs to refocus on engineering quality over profitability.

More scrutiny, however, seems to suggest that the US government is failing to regulate air safety and that this is one of many prominent examples of regulatory capture and the revolving door between many US industry giants and their regulators.

In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.) has over recent decades introduced a practice of delegating some of its inspection functions to Boeing’s own engineers. Design issues with the 737 MAX, which was rushed into production to compete with Airbus’ new A320neo, were known and documented but arguably glossed over by F.A.A. oversight (more here).

The part of the story where we should throw on our tinfoil hat is where John Barnett, a former Boeing quality-control-manager-turned-whistleblower was found dead by apparent suicide two days ago. This happened a couple of days before Mr. Barnett was scheduled to give legal interviews linked to his whistleblower retaliation case against Boeing.

In the words of the Charleston officials: “No detail can be left unturned”.

one would hope

On spiritual bypassing and psychological underpassing:

Spiritual bypassing is all the rage. It refers to engaging in all kinds of spiritual practices without resolving any more difficult aspects of our identity and without actually getting closer to living an awakened life. It’s the proliferation of the casual use of psychedelics without integration, it’s the hollow hippie attire and burning of incense, it’s the very commercial yoga retreats.

It’s spirituality without grounding.

There is less talk about the psychological underpass, but this appears to be equally common. It refers to an excessive engagement with psychological concepts and “scientific” literature without ever getting closer to transcendence of the conceptual domain.

It’s perfectly understanding your big 5 personality traits, it’s using your love languages to decide how to interact with others, it’s trusting articles that write about “the recipe for being happy at work”.

All of these things have value. But they can never lead to an effortless and authentic engagement with reality.

This type of engagement requires the seeker to take a third path, one of gracefully accepting the inconvenience of grounding while courageously facing the fear of transcending.

wen scheduled messages on nostr:npub12vkcxr0luzwp8e673v29eqjhrr7p9vqq8asav85swaepclllj09sylpugg?

Starting to get the first random private LinkedIn messages from very old acquaintances on whether they should buy #Bitcoin

nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m has been talking a lot about SimpleX

"stealing with pride from" nostr:npub1ldjpk76lhwy4jrhper7vfv5syzffamerpqslt5jr8ujysn82m6zqez42tx

Proof of Work

Today I’m going to steal with pride from to take a moment to describe what I’m currently doing with my writing on Medium and Substack.

The goal is not to accumulate millions of followers and sign brand deals.

The goal is to write and publish every day without fault in order to 1) clarify my own thinking and 2) commit to putting something out in the world that will hopefully lead to some positive spark in someone else, no matter how marginal.

After a little over a month of doing this, I can already feel this potentially evolving, taking on a dynamic of its own and leading to other, more impactful projects.

What’s your proof-of-work?

https://m.primal.net/HkQq.webp

Love the concept and well put!

I recently started blogging every day without fault and I can feel the virtuous cycle you describe.

Here’s my blog: https://substack.com/@soirbleu

I feel like more projects will come out of it.

I think it’s working. Price is up ;)

Thanks for your effort!

We agree there. I just think that the new equilibrium may be much smaller states with much less power to issue Fiat at will

I’m intrigued. Say more about what a proof of work project is please :)

You're right that "aggregate market preferences might still gravitate towards state-issued fiat in politically stable context".

I don't think any Bitcoin maxi has denied that the nation state has been a very powerful, albeit relatively recent phenomenon in human history that represents the current equilibrium. And to a great extent its power is derived from its ability to issue fiat.

This is not the point anyone argues with.

What maxis say is that this equilibrium was a local maximum which is destabilized by the rise of truly decentralized money. Bitcoin, over time, “reduces the capacity of the world’s nation states to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual […] and liberates the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation.” (from The Sovereign Individual).

It will thereby introduce a new operating system for the world, which transcends the current nation state model.

what do you all thing is the best angle to convert ETF holders to self-custody?