I feel like not only is this above my pay grade, but I also kinda dislike the idea behind the question as I wouldn't like it to be in anybody's pay grade! I want these things to emerge naturally and peacefully based on cooperation and exchange. to painfully force a connection to bitcoin, I want violence to be an extremely expensive option that people realize just isn't worth it when deciding how to reach social consensus!

meh, not much. I've seen a lot of "Nash inspired bitcoin" chat on twitter and never found it compelling.

What did Nash say about currency dynamics? Can you kindly point me to a reference?

yes

deez nuts

I'm gonna cop out of giving a specific answer for 2 reasons: 1) everything I have any familiarity with is at an incredibly speculative stage. if they work at all, they will outperform bitcoin by orders of magnitude, but I have no idea if that's gonna happen! but also 2) it sets up an interesting point that is very heavily related to my new company and that I will speak and write about a lot in the coming months: the way you outperform bitcoin is by running a business on a bitcoin standard and generating a naturally bitcoin-denominated yield.

my professional mission for the next decade at least is to make this as easy as possible and hence make it increasingly natural for people to think in terms of bitcoin rather than dollars. bitcoin's bitcoin-denominated return is zero, so any business on a bitcoin standard with a positive return on capital will "outperform bitcoin" on a technicality. so the point I'm making is that this is a better aspiration than happening to pick something that does well and comparing both to dollars. so long as dollars are still in the mix, there is more work to be done.

I'm hardly technically qualified to give a full answer on this but I have a few instinctive rebuttals: i) you can transact offline in a variety of (admittedly inferior) ways, ii) it's the UTXO set that really matters, and it would be preserved just fine until a new method of global synchrony on transactions was reached, and iii) there isn't really such a single thing as "The Internet", so the question is ill-defined anyway.

Great question! Fiat has caused so many distortions not only in hard assets but also soft assets in our culture (our morals, our families, our values, etc). Post-fiat can come soon enough.

political agitation for secession/devolution from regions of larger states that are both more economically successful in general and more accommodating of bitcoin in particular. especially if they have a distinct culture that the political movement can be tied to. I also look forward to "why are all the smart people leaving and taking all the bitcoin with them?" becoming a ubiquitous political issue.

hints from history - sadly no, as my reading is we have gone in the direction of fewer, bigger states for the entire relevant history of economics and politics. but I've always been drawn to late medieval and renaissance Mediterranean (obviously including Venice as an exemplar) as a hopeful example given the entire political economy was predicated on highly mobile capital and easily defensible city-states. the cannon ruined everything :P

staying cryptic enough to avoid direct cancellability, let's just say I think many people forget that twitter is not real life.

so yes, a lot of it seems pretty stupid.

I don't think I am allowed to go into too much detail on this, and certainly not on what my/our bull case, but for the time being it's mostly mining.

I like it for all of these reasons and more.

glad you like it, and appropriately humbling that the MMA section was all Sacha :P

to be fair, it is dense very much on purpose, and we went back and forth on this a lot while writing. there are people far better than me at explaining bitcoin concepts (or any, frankly) simply, for the layman, whereas I am attracted to extremely complicated concepts in the first place. the whole idea of BiV is that it will always be niche and never super popular, but that it might be useful for orange-pilling folks who enjoy a challenging read and have thought about things like culture and capital in reasonable depth (or MMA!) but never made the connection to bitcoin.

writing will massively vary based on the project (or lack thereof). on reading, I'd say I probably average around 10 hours, but with decent variance as some weeks I am too busy to read at all. I try to get in at least one hour a day, and on the weekends I tend to like 3-4 hour slots in the mornings when there isn't much else to do anyway.

hahaha - he said some incredibly stupid shit about bitcoin in clubhouse. I wrote an article explaining why it's so dumb. he got mad and made a lot of noise about it. fast forward a year and a half and no, never spoken, nothing resolved.

Dune, hands down.

I feel like it's so good that it feels unfairly worse in hindsight because so much of it was so brilliantly original that it's been copied to death and now seems clichéd.

sure, why not.

Guinness fo sho. tbh not a big beer guy though. in a pub I'd take a Crabbies (alcoholic ginger beer for non-Brits), but if the situation allows I'd far prefer a rum or a rakia.

hardly any of the inspiration came from bitcoin content, tbh! by far the most influential material was the writing of Jane Jacobs, Wendell Berry, and James C Scott, to narrow it down to a core few. the next tier would probably be the likes of Allan Savory, Roger Scruton, Friedrich Hayek, Elinor Ostrom, David Montgomery, Frederic Lane, and William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, authors of The Sovereign Individual.

I made a meme a while back I was pretty proud of: the Winnie The Pooh template, and the top says, "Read The Sovereign Individual" while the bottom says, "Read The Entire Bibliography To The Sovereign Individual". there's a lot of amazing stuff in there - I'd highly recommend it as its own reading list.

yes, just far, far less than now. to be clear, I am a huge fan of equity-like investment products and will be discussing/announcing a lot on this in the near future! but, I can't see the utility of short-term credit for matching positive and negative working capital floats ever going away, and doing it with equity would be an administrative nightmare. I'm sure there will be other corner cases too, but I think the right way to think about this isn't that credit itself is "bad" (although you may reasonably also think that) but rather that the extent of its contemporary existence is entirely unnatural. I think bitcoin brings us back to a much lesser, more natural level.

this is a pretty good vintage if you ask me! but I think in general there is probably a youth development problem. it's just not popular in the population at large as it's mostly seen as posh, and the only development routes are private schools centered around Edinburgh and clubs in the Borders. plus it's a pretty small country to start with so the end result is just a tiny pool of professional players.

thank you :)

well, the bitcoin companies I have been involved in investing in are very early stage so their current financial metrics aren't really that relevant. I also don't think them being bitcoin-adjacent really makes a difference to the question. what matters is what I perceive to be the long-term incremental returns on capital they will be able to achieve based on the competitive dynamics in the space and there being ample opportunity to reinvest. none of this is remotely original btw - it's just that bitcoin is perhaps uniquely disruptive to established business models, hence I feel like I probably have some edge in assessing the likelihood of success of what are often business models without historical precedent.

on the second question, my answer is a complete technicality, I'm afraid, which is that I only professionally invest in equity and I only privately invest in the asset. if I ever did invest privately in equity, which is probably likely in the foreseeable future, it would be based on personal circumstance, wanting skin in the game, etc., rather than some kind of "portfolio"-esque consideration.

haha, I don't think I will list them all as we'll be here for a while. I'll treat the question instead as asking for recommendations. for an introduction, Economics In One Lesson by Hazlitt and Principles of Economics by Menger are both fantastic. Menger gets you nicely into the Austrian canon, which I won't now recite, although I will shout out Competition and Entrepreneurship by Kirzner as not getting the love it deserves. Others I have very much enjoyed include The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, Governing The Commons by Elinor Ostrom, and Risk, Uncertainty, And Profit by Frank Knight.

tbh I don't rate reading economics books all that much. everybody should read enough to disabuse themselves of whatever Keynesian, Monetarist, and Neoclassical nonsense they have imbibed from formal education or the culture at large, but most of it strikes me as common sense. past some baseline, I think you'll get a lot more on essentially the same topic from economic and business history.

1 - I don't really think about it that way, tbh. given that was my day job for 6 1/2 years, I wanted my private life to be devoid of financial stress so I basically got comfortable that I had more than enough bitcoin. my pension can't allocate to bitcoin so that's a large chunk of the total that is in de facto shitcoins, plus I'm now in a position in which it's overwhelmingly likely 99% of all I ever earn will come from bitcoin in one way or another, so even less reason to stress about that too much. 2 - I don't know what that is. DuckDuckGo tells me it's a romantic comedy from 2013, but I assume that's not what you meant?

it's Rocky the flying squirrel from Rocky and Bullwinkle. and the reason was that, when I got twitter, I didn't want to use a real picture of myself so I just found something quickly that made me laugh.

I don't think we really know yet, but I hope it works! your question is interesting but it doesn't worry me much as I think the answer is reputation, which is also a healthier mechanism for discovery than buying and selling your attention.

YES!

literally never watched big brother in my life so no real reaction to this. for reference my complete collection of reality tv in which I partake is: Love Island, Selling Sunset, and the Bulgarian Bachelor, or ергенът, for those in the know.

because you are reading it on your phone like a dummy. don't do that! lower your time preference!

soon

no, this should be mandatory.

that's Sacha's domain, I'm afraid.

sure! "finance" is a pretty large topic, and most of what I know I learned on the job, so don't take this as exhaustive by any means, but some I enjoyed: Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits by Phil Fisher, The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros, Latticework by Robert Hagstrom, Capital Account by Edward Chancellor, all the Buffett Shareholders, all the Saber Capital blog posts, all the Jerry Neumann (Reaction Wheel) blog posts.

haha, sure, and I do recommend it btw, just don't ever interact with him outside his books. it's not so much facts or even ideas as "ways of thinking". he's very good at making you suitably suspicious of how statistics and modeling might be misleading you, and if you get stuck into the more technical elements you'll pick up some heuristics on the math involved in debunking what he calls "macrobullshitting" beyond just your intuition.

digibux

that actually came from an in-person conversation with Clay Space, who went on to write up the idea here: https://clayspace.medium.com/bitcoin-as-subscription-c21b582d4e90

mathematical logic! it's in the prompt! :)

very good idea because it becomes the easiest onramp to real bitcoin ever in that: i) DCA becomes programmatic and cuts out brokers/shitcoin casinos, and ii) when fiat hyperinflates, the rug pull from bitcoin the network to bitcoin the asset is extremely simple.

fair