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@SimpleStacker
1,236,148 sats stacked
stacking since: #48657longest cowboy streak: 114 verified stacker.news contributor
88 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 15h \ on: New construction in New York state must be all-electric, starting next year Construction_and_Engineering
This will probably just freeze a lot of development. Bullish for existing NY real estate?
Me and @Undisciplined are gonna THROW DOWN
The article's entire thrust seems to rest on two points:
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Inflation can happen due to natural demand growth---it doesn't have to imply monetary debasement
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The US dollar remains strong
On the first point, he's not wrong. But just because natural demand growth can lead to higher prices doesn't mean debasement isn't also at work. He didn't offer any compelling breakdown of how much of inflation was due to natural demand factors outpacing supply, and how much was due to increases in nominal demand from monetary debasement. I'd argue that the amount of inflation would have been much lower without monetary debasement. He didn't disprove that case.
Furthermore, in a naturally growing economy, both demand and supply expand. Supply expands due to growing productivity and resource availability, which is what to expect in a naturally expanding economy. Debasement, on the other hand, increases nominal demand without any of that naturally occurring supply expansion. So to me, it's actually more plausible that more of the currency devaluation has been from debasement than from natural economic expansion.
On the second point, he makes three supporting arguments:
- US dollar is still strong compared to other currencies.
- M2 growth is highly correlated with GDP growth and although the past few years have been outliers, M2 relative to GDP is coming down
- Stocks have outperformed gold
On point 1, I don't think this is a good argument because people who are alarmed about debasement aren't just alarmed about US debasement, they're alarmed about global monetary debasement.
On point 2, you can't deny that we've been in a persistently high outlier state since the 2008 financial crisis. I think that's what's got people worried. It's nice that things are coming down a bit, but it's still super high historically and there's no guarantee it'll keep coming down.
On point 3, I don't find this compelling. Stocks are holdings in companies that own real assets, so you'd expect their price to go up in a monetary debasement regime just like you'd expect the price of real estate and gold and bitcoin to all go up. So showing that one asset class outperformed another doesn't say much about debasement to me.
My brain hurts watching this. This guy is not a credible person to talk about Bitcoin. It would be easy for pretty much anyone even on a site like Stacker News to refute his points.
For example, he said that Bitcoin is controlled by 42 software developers, of whom only 5 have administrative privileges. I'm assuming he's referring to Bitcoin Core. Well, Bitcoin Core is not Bitcoin, it's an implementation of a protocol. He seems not to understand this. Why did they choose to give this guy a platform to talk about Bitcoin when he clearly doesn't understand?
Shame on Breaking Points for this segment. I take back what I said about them (#1061449). Unfortunately I think they're slowly drifting to becoming a Gen Z Leftist media organization instead of an independent unbiased one.
Wanna know how to sound smart in almost any setting? Ask "how will we know when we've succeeded?"
Evaluation is the hardest part, of almost anything. A similar adage: the secret to success is good taste.
This is well known enough that it's put into corporate practice. I've heard that Amazon, before engaging on a project, has the proposers write up what the press release should look like when the hypothetical project is complete.
Thus, the main difference between vibe physics and vibe coding is ease of evaluation. Vibe coding is easy to test: you know what the program needs to do and you can fairly easily see if it can do it. Even coming up with edge case tests isn't too hard. Testing a physical theory is much harder. Even testing its conformity to existing theories is no trivial task, let alone testing it in experimental reality.
There's an open issue here: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/issues/216
Currently, I think one local draft is saved for posts based on whatever you left it off as, and the latest text you input into a comment box is saved
But there's no real way to save multiple drafts, or to manage your drafts.
I think Bailey took it pretty well too, never really lashing out or appearing to get angry.
I don't agree with his position on "enable as much building on top of Bitcoin as I can, even if it's scams", but I respect him for being willing to come on your show, saying his point of view, and not getting mad.
There is also a question about the end game. This strategy can only work if bitcoin becomes more firmly integrated into the global financial system and perhaps even the global trading system. If these treasury companies are correct about this, at some point major market participants will want to acquire bitcoin at scale. In that case, these treasury companies would become targets for acquisition since acquiring a treasury company would likely be cheaper than trying to acquire a large stock of bitcoin in the market.
Hmm, this is interesting. If acquiring the treasury company is cheaper than acquiring a large stock of Bitcoin in the market, wouldn't that make the investors losers because they aren't getting fully compensated for the market price of the bitcoin holdings that the treasury company has?
Ultimately, these companies are betting on a joint hypothesis: (1) that bitcoin will play a major role in global finance, and (2) that the current regulatory and market segmentation will persist. For those interested in financial markets and financial history, it should be fascinating to watch.
The segmentation is likely to persist in the near future, IMO. Still too many normies with anti bitcoin views.