Hi everyone,
I’m Aleksandr Svetski, and I’ll be doing an AMA for the next hour.
For those who don’t know me, I like to think of myself as a writer and a builder.
I’ve published a couple books, the latest one being the Bushido of Bitcoin.
I’ve also founded a bunch of different businesses, some successful and a WHOLE bunch of failed ones.
A little know fact is that I come from a background in Civil Engineering but over the years, have shifted my focus towards writing and building businesses instead.
I’ll be on here for an hour and am happy to answer any questions you have.
Reading your book right now. On the courage chapter. So far I am enjoying it. Your writing style is easy to understand.
Two questions:
Thankyou.
Thanks!
out of all of the businesses that have failed, which one were you the most bullish on and what did you learn from it's failure? 🫂
Derek you thought you could sneak onto SN for this AMA and go unnoticed. Unlikely!
Nice to see you. Appreciate all the work you are doing to promote nostr.
thank you for the kind words 🫂
One called iRecruit.
It's actually the one that I went on SharkTank for and for the past decade peopel laugh at me for..lol
But it was actually an incredible idea.
Hiring sucks balls.
So we created an app which was like tinder for jobs.
BUT...the way it worked was super unique.
There was no "job ads" or "resumes" - we done away with both and replaced it with: "Open positions" (on the employer side) and candidates just had a profile.
Open positions were created on the basis of a series of questions to the employer, less about the role, and more about "the kind of person" they wanted for the role.
The profile used a series of personality tests and skills tests to build a persona which was then auto-matched to any number of different "open positions"
So no more "applying" and all teh bullshit.
What this led to was a game of swipe left & right, in order of percentage match.
If you both swiped right, you were connected and could take the discussion to the next level.
It was a killer idea.
But i was young, we couldn't raise enough money and being a 2-sided marketplace we could never get critical mass of either employers or employees.
It taught me a SHITLOAD about network effects, which is what I think led me to understanding Bitcoin very quickly, and today gives me a uniqye perspective on Nostr.
Great question man!
Hey @Svetski nice to see you on SN. Just wanted to say I am a fan of your work.
How do you think we can get more writers/creators like yourself to participate in v4v platforms like SN, fountain, nostr etc?
MM..I'm not very bullish on V4V. It's not a commercial model that really scales. That's why Busking is not how the music industry evolved. It's a great way to make some pocket money and maybe hone your craft or get discovered, but for real creators to make their way over to Nostr, etc - there needs to be ways in which they can really generate money.
Think of Nostr as a country. America attracted the best talent from around the world, beacuse it was the "land of opporutnity". The story of "one man" striking oil or gold is what brought millions more.
Nostr has potential, but it's not a "land of opportunity" yet where anyone go seriously rich or wealthy as a creator. IG, TikTok and those places have that.
We need to find out own version.
💯
Idealism does have roots in Economics.
Do you think a hybrid of a v4v and traditional monetization of attention model via ads could work?
For instance, SN has a rewards pool that gets distributed to users daily based on the "value" they create on the site. I think SN could sell promoted posts, boosted posts etc to fund the rewards pool via commercial enterprises that want to promote their products and services but still maintain the v4v element that allows users to zap back and forth.
Maybe. It needs to be attempted and the market will decide.
I've not seen any really successful implemenatations yet.
I hear you.
What's something you believe about bitcoin that few bitcoiners agree with you on?
Bitcoin will bring back the age of Monarchies.
A new archetype of leader will build the new world. That acrhetype is a "CEO-King"
When do you think the state will be put into a corner / obsolete / vanished ?
Never. We'll always have a "state" - the question is just what kind.
Humans nee to oragnise around something. The "anarcho-captalist" paradigm is simply a suggestion that the "satte" is a coalition of private companies who are either cooperatative or competitive.
I'm no longer sure that's even an entirely good idea.
The "state" should be built around what the "people" it represents value most.
That could be money, yes - although there are other things of value that need to be take into consideration.
Let's say you get to move to another planet (together with a bunch of thousands of others) and is more or less like Earth.
How would you start a society?
What kind of base structure you will start with?
What's the craziest/most mindblowing fact you learned about the Samurai while researching for Bushido?
Not sure if it blew my mind...I guess because I expected it...but the Samurai were biologically different from their peasant / artisan counterparts.
This was also the case with the warrior classes in other cultures.
The "knights" were literally BUILT different. They were genetically bred for war and battle. They were larger, stronger and more able to take life.
Over the centuries though, bloodlines were mixed.
This is both good and bad. Bad because we don't have distinct classes as much anymore. Good because some of us carry the blood of warriors in us, along with other strains (builder, artisan, etc).
This is what gave rise to the "entrepreneur" IMO
Any new book ideas in the works, or are you going to remain fully focused on Bushido and Satlantis for the foreseeable future?
Part 2 of the Bushido of Bitcoin is in the works. It's half written already beacuse it was supposed to be part of the first book - but (a) it was getting too long and (b) I couldn't work out where to put some of the sections.
It's going to be called: "The Metaphysics of War & Beauty"
Will aim to write that this year, and release it Q1, 2026
My Satlantis hype level is growing quickly going into 2025...
What upcoming updates/features are you most excited about?
Oof...here's what I can say at a high level:
Q1 Goals
Feature-complete social app
Merchants
Events
Q2
It's been a long road, but a HUGE amount of work is going on behind the scenes, and it will begin to bear fruit from early next month
Do you foresee a similar rollout for part two, ie, doing podcasts regarding specific chapters like you did with Breedlove, et al?
Most likely, yes.
I've actually got to do the full chapter review with BReedlove for Book 1 (at some stage)
I thought The Bushido of Bitcoin was a great book. What is your origin story of when you first found out about Bitcoin? Do you think Bitcoin attracts a certain type of person, or does it change the people that find it?
Thankyou.
Origin Story...hmm..
I was a Gold/Silver bug from 2009 - 2012.
Have briefuly come across Bitcoin but ignored it.
Didn't come on my radar again until late 2015 and I didn't take it seriously until 2016.
I climbed Shitcoin mountain in early 2017, but quickly became a maxi when I discovered Twitter.
To your last question, I think it's a blend of both.
Kind of liek nature & nurture. We are all some blend of both.
It's impossible to know the quantity of each element, but they are for sure both there.
Thank you for the answer!
Anytime!
What's the most annoying thing you've ever listened about Bitcoin?
Lol. Too many things to list.
But the whole banking the unbanked and "helping the third world" and "bitcoin is egalitarian" is nonsense.
Bitcoin is an unforgiving bitch. Bitcoin is about excellence - the opposite of equality.
People get real mad when you point out that better money doesn't immediately help people that don't have any money.
Truly. Poverty is a behaviour more than anything else. You can give a poor person better money and they will still squander it because they are poor.
You can give a rich person bad money and they will multiply it because they are rich (in nature/psychology/mindset/behavior).
Who is the smartest person you've ever met?
Ross Stevens
What was the hardest part about writing a book?
The things:
I wrote this new book 8 times. I probably could've written it another 5 times. But I had to make a call & just release it.
The second one is more my fault - beacuse there's so much I want to do. It kept dragging me away from the book. The only way I could write was to designate specific days for it
Biggest threat to Bitcoin in your eyes?
it is always good to know the experiences not of the times that we fall but those that we get up and undertake a new task to see its success. from failure come triumphs, can you share of those experiences? thanks in advance, sats to all.
How was your experience in Australia Shark tank tv show?
You have a line in the Bushido book saying something like "female suffrage was the worst policy mistake of the 20th century."
Can you explain how you think about that, and why you'd put it ahead of others? (WWI, democracy, welfare states, going off gold, the Great Inflation of the 1970s etc)
Why does US and Europe differ in Bitcoin approach than that for India or South East Asia?
When I look at the map and compare, I don't find as many Bitcoin merchants as I find in US and Europe, not even as many as we have in Africa.
Thanyou everyone!
Chicks dig scars.
What's the most or one of the most surprising things you learned founding a bunch of different businesses?
hmm. tough question.
One is that while the businesses can vary, the principles are often very similar.
Both the principles of what TO do, and what NOT to do.
If you are good at building and running a restaurant bussiness, you might well have the necessary ingredients to run a technology company.
It's not ALWAYS the case, but it seems to me that principles (not skills) are applicable across contexts and paradigms.