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1420 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 15 Jun \ parent \ on: when do people stop trading houses that are on fire for fireproof houses? bitcoin
I think the grounding question is a big part of it, but there's a related class of precarity that's easier to talk about.
People always share that chart originally done by Vijay about how btc is better than gold in every way except for not having been around for three millennia. I think that's such cope.
Like, there is nothing that humankind can realistically do (James Bond movies aside) to ruin gold. It exists in the physical world, and nothing is required for it to continue in its role as a perfect ledger, instantiated in physical reality. Its POW was when the universe got created, now it need merely continue to exist. You can drop it into the bottom of the ocean for 400 years and it can be unearthed later, as good a SoV as ever. Its role as a perfect ledger could be ruined if we somehow found some massive motherlode of it in the center of the Earth or on an asteroid or something. But that's it. It cannot be vaporized if you get a head injury.
Btc is the ideal money. Or: the Ideal money. It is pure money-ness and nothing else, the abstraction rendered pure. But a pure abstraction is a dangerous thing. Or at least, so it seems to me. There are so few examples in the real world of a pure social abstraction that it's hard to tell. My best thinking at this point is to wrestle with this by making a very concrete functional argument:
- money is valuable for what it unlocks
- btc is pure money-ness
- its value should therefore converge on something like:
value of btc = a - (b + c + d)
a: value of pure money-ness
b: btc's foreignness and annoying idiosyncrasies and weaknesses, e.g., scaling
c: value of fiat money-ness
d: value of gold and commodity monies' money-ness
After all the noise shakes out, this seems the heart of it. So what do we get? It seems like a is a big number, and probably growing due to the nature of online life, the rise of AI, etc; and both b and c are shrinking while d is growing, although less fast than a.
So maybe it's fine. But apropos of our recent discussion on another topic, this to me is one that could benefit from really drilling into.
PS: going dark for a week, don't feel ignored if you respond and I don't.
One thing in this metaphor is that the fireproof houses stop being fireproof when people stop believing in them. The more people who believe, the more fireproof, but it all feels so precarious...
Under what circumstances would you think it worth your while to write the 200 page version? That's been on my mind a lot recently.
Have you heard of Hemingway's iceberg? If not, worth a google, you will dig it.
Also interesting in that code is (to date) the most no-noise communication, with utterly concrete semantics: within its interpretive context, meaning is locked in. Comments on code would then anchor to this solid foundation - drifting upward from it, but still closely in orbit.
In "normal" writing what's the reality we tether to? Perhaps the haziness, the non-consensually of that has loosened writing. The falcon cannot hear the falconer, or will not.
It's interesting how much work a writer can do for the reader, and the trade offs that different tech brings to bear - if you're in dandelion world, where there's trillions of things to read and write, taking great care is generally a bad investment. If you get one shot, you polish it like a gem.
I hadn't considered that as both a reading and writing strategy. And LLMs are a new thing entirely.
I like the "headings as proof of work" idea.
Thoughtful article, but as you said, it's remarkable to what degree that article could be a paragraph or two. Hmm.
I don't hear much about JBP these days bc the storm around him is maddening and I avoid it, but I'd assume he still has a fervent base and the crossover appeal would be significant.
21 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 11 Jun \ parent \ on: Debt, Leverage and Fiat Come to Bitcoin bitcoin
I wasn't implying that they are or that you are, any more than stereotypes of anything reflect all the participants. But they often exert undue influence, as here.
However, this year was a bit of a flip of the script. Rather than promoting HODLing or stacking sats forever, Mallers promoted spending bitcoin and even taking loans against them… debt… because the reality is, as you become an adult, there are things in life Bitcoin can’t buy. There are real moments, real bills quoted and accepted only in USD. This realization helps us understand the simple line Jack quoted:
“Money is a means, it’s not an end.” – Jack Mallers
I think this is progress. The sooner we can throw the stereotypical btc bro narratives onto the shitheap, the better off we'll be, and the bigger chance btc will have to impact the world in truth, not just through religious catechisms.
Reality is a competitive advantage.
If Bitcoin, as we are promised, becomes a universal and practical alternative to fiat currency, or even just a freely traded store of value like gold, the companies’ premiums to NAV should disappear.
My bet is that disappearance of premium will be the least of anyone's worry, defining 'anyone' as people who care about NGU on a five-year time horizon.
You should do an article on what the unwind looks like, when pure ideological contagion unravels not just the treasury companies, but ETF flows, and then the political / regulatory pile-on due to a hard Left post-Trump swing where a message about protecting the world from finance-bro apocalypse returns to vogue.
The rule of thumb for the band of vagabonds I fell in with while drifting internationally was the best way, by far, to learn the local language was to get a local girlfriend who didn't speak English. 100% checked out.
This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.
Time will tell wrt the singularity, but truer words were never spoken on how the rest of life goes.