This is a harsh reality for those who dream of making it big with their creative endeavors — success is dependent on you being an outlier. You need to find some other way to support yourself.

I tried my hand at being a starving writer. I'm not going back. I spent years as a part-time ghostwriter writing all kinds of shit and honing my craft until I was able to support myself full-time with it. Longevity is the name of the game.

As the saying goes, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

The Sig knows all! Thank you.

Bold claim. I have not seen any receipts yet.

I post when I have something to say. I don't post for the sake of posting. I think y'all deserve better than that.

Mindset is one thing. Whenever I hear this quote referenced, it implies a certain sense of inevitability that contrarian positions result in big success. That's not always the case.

You have to be contrarian AND right. They can be mutually exclusive.

I'm not a fan of this quote. It reeks of survivorship bias.

History books are fun of people who were ignored, laughed at, fought, and lost.

I'm sure it can be done but why choose a hard life?

I messed around with NixOS in a VM and it was way more trouble than it's worth for someone like me who needs a OS for just browsing and documents.

Compliance and regulation are dirty words in this space, but they can mean any number of things. I'm not going to go crazy over two words in a slide deck. Yet.

Usually when I'm doing something unrelated to whatever I'm trying to accomplish.

I think there's some truth to what Fred is saying. Bitcoin is being partially subsumed into the financial system, and there's not much we can do to stop it. The permissionless nature of bitcoin means there's no way to block Wall Street's participation.

Bitcoin is nowhere near ready to replace the financial system as we know it. We still need to figure out how to scale Layer 2. It's a harsh reality but it's the one we're in.

What is this sleep you speak of?

But real talk, I'm in a much better place since I found bitcoin. It hasn't all been sunshine and rainbows, but I'm more at peace now than I've ever been. Way less revenge bedtime procrastination.

Get a job at a central bank and you can be a comedian without any of the pressure.

Blogger here. I write for a living and do this blog on the side.

The biggest tip I have is don't do it for the money. Do it because you have something to say. As soon as you do something just for the money, God walks out of the room.

Don't expect one article to go viral. Strive for longevity and consistency. Content is a gravitational pull. The more you produce, the stronger your gravity becomes.

I prefer Ghost over Substack because Substacks all have the same milquetoast reading experience IMO, and I don't believe in building a business in someone else's backyard.

Three Days at Camp David is a good book for anyone interested in this.

In 1.0, I wanted to be a novelist, but I was too young and my writing wasn't good enough yet.

In 2.0, I found bitcoin and had a front-row seat for the greatest story of our time.

I don't think it's particularly helpful to focus on Wall Street as inherently evil. I view them as the culmination of a set of incentives. They're playing the game as it's designed, and if you talk to many of the players behind closed doors, they'll tell you the game is broken and will eventually end.

If firms have done the homework to build and sell bitcoin products after years of belittling bitcoin, I view it as a sign that, at the very least, they understand the incentives that made them rich in the past are changing. Their consensus is breaking. They benefit a lot more by playing both sides of fiat and bitcoin until a new reality is clear.

There's a clear split going on in Wall Street right now, and that split is playing out in the marketplace as it should. I don't worry about any of them changing bitcoin because owning more bitcoin doesn't give you any more ability to change consensus.

The most they might do IMO is push some dumb fork if an ETF gets drained, like the DAO hack on ETH, but I don't think even that would be successful. BTC is too widely distributed at this point. Wall Street was always going to notice.

I think the allure of backpacking around Europe or taking a gap year to learn about oneself has decayed with the new economic reality we're in.

Inequality has increased which limits potential participants. College tuition and student debt have ballooned, which increase the opportunity cost of traveling vs. working. Doing it young takes away crucial time for investments to compound later in life. And then there's the likelihood of these ventures proving to be a fruitless way for a person to spend their savings until they come back to reality and have to take the first job that comes their way.

Doing this when you're young has many benefits vs. doing it much older when you might not be able to for health reasons, the biggest benefit being the experience. But people ignore the costs.

I did a version of this. I didn't travel but I took time off to pursue a dream. I failed and the dream died. Then I started working and it sucked for years. Society had me under the thumb, and I made up my mind that I'd never make that mistake again. And through that experience, the dream 2.0 came along, and I gained the money to pursue it and travel as much as I want.

Kids like to run away from their problems. I'm not a kid anymore.

I think the most interesting quote from that clip was this:

"My last statement [in] the last time I'm ever going to talk about bitcoin is I defend your right to do bitcoin. I think it's okay."

Zerohedge put it in context here and bitcoiners can have a field day with it. JPM being an AP in the ETF was already a capitulation. Now it's coming out of Jamie's mouth.