I’ll still be checking into this thread for the rest of the day, but for those of you who want a shorter burst of my manic brain patterns, aside from aiming to be more active on StackerNews, I do also want to share my npub:

I think there are structural reasons why China won’t be the next hyperpower - demographics being key and the recent demographic reversal. China is also surrounded on all sides by rivals, including a rapidly growing India. I also haven’t read Dalio except in a very cursory way - but his love of citing Confucius to explain Chinese society has always puzzled me, since Confucius is more pop psychology and sociology in post-Mao China than real table stakes. So take that for what it's worth.

That said, China will be a very strong regional power at least for quite a long time barring regime collapse, and the United States seems to have expanded Monroe to mean the world at this point...

@Kenobi I will teach you the ways of obscure underground tours

I have a nose for these. There’s one for Dresden where you can visit the actual cellar Vonnegut was in when the firebombing happened.

Haha, the real story is that my publisher made the wise choice to get me to rename my title, I scrambled to put some references in the book, and I settled on Mao because I was like “what do Americans know about China?”.

But the answer I’ve developed is that Mao would hold Bitcoin as a tyrant and a rebel, but as a tyrant, he would prevent others from doing it. No doubt in my mind that Bitcoiners would be “capitalist-roaders”.

I wrote a more through writeup here on the bans: https://chinabitcoinbook.com/?p=158

Currently looking for lawyers at the frontlines of dealing with the restrictions - keep posted :)

Shoutout also to Colin Wu, who while being more “crypto-general” has a newsletter that covers a lot of terrain in the space (WuBlockchain).

There are also now 2 (!) Mandarin-language podcasts on Bitcoin-only and one crypto-general, 发现比特币 and 1sat, both are Bitcoin-only from the episodes I’ve listened to the latter, and the former I’ve been on and listened to extensively.

你好比特币 (more crypto/Web3 focused though with BTC in the name) is more news-focused from what I’ve gleaned

Good question, people are using Bitcoin and Tether mostly for trading and investing outside the Chinese financial system from what I can see. Merchant adoption is a non-starter because of the legal status, though I’ve seen anecdotal cracks in the restriction on use of Bitcoin as “currency” such as Nostr zaps. The one exception is HK where there’s a vibrant OTC/trading scene and where you can conceivably use Lightning/BTC as a way to get in/out of Hong Kong dollars.

Staying up-to-date - I browse Chinese social media (including RedNote), and keep in contact with Mainlanders who are building Bitcoin businesses/part of the Bitcoin VC scene. There’s a few Telegram groups I’m in that have Mandarin speakers and are focused on China/Asia and Bitcoin. I’m actually planning on being in Asia at the end of this year. For more general news, I usually follow Substacks like Following the Yuan and Bill Bishop’s Sinocism, or every once in a while, there are X rooms about trading/Chinese geopolitics in Mandarin that I go into.

yeah probably the most dramatic change from your time has been the shrinking window of where one can use cash :(

Great question - I think the best book of active dissent would be Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya - she was right on so many counts, and she does a good job of revealing hard truths through storytelling - hard truths she ended up paying her life for.

But if it’s on dissent, I like the Rebel by Camus or L'Homme révolté in the original French (which comes off stronger/more poetic) as a meta-analysis of dissent and rebellion itself. I have my own opinions on Camus and his positions - and the contrast/foil of Sartre which he is often placed in counter-position against. But perhaps saved for another time haha.

To start with, they’re pretty desperate for tourists these days, so things have been a bit more lax.

Summing it up though in terms of advice and keeping it to a very long line? - 1- Bring clean devices, 2- Have VPN/connection to your home server set up to evade Great Firewall 3-Make friends with somebody who has WeChat Pay so you can pay them cash otherwise you’ll be stuck using bad foreigner WeChat Pay or e-CNY, 4- Try to go outside the “Tier 1” cities and enjoy cuisines that don’t come out in the West as much like Hubei food, 5- Adding a fifth here to avoid 4

I am working on a second book my friendly anon - trying to orange-pill and freedom-pill people’s grandmas and grandpas fearful of AI

but as for Bhutan…sadly I think those sources were misinformed. and by those sources, I mean my prefrontal cortex and my Broca’s area

I do have a book from Liu Xiaobo signed by many prominent Chinese dissidents/writers. I was actually hoping at one point to get a copy of Snow Crash (first edition) signed by a bunch of the cypherpunks in the same manner

Kudos to your review of my book haha - good to see you on here!

Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good collection, including a First Edition (British) Homage to Catalonia, signed Player Piano, manuscripts from all sorts of places. etc. I got into the rare books circuit - it’s quite an adventure.

For example, there’s an Orwell tour of Barcelona for those discerning. And SF has a bookstore that combines KKK material with original Black Panther posters and queer writings from the Cultural Revolution.

Awesome! 感谢您的支持.

I should also mention that I’m a pretty active member of the Vancouver Bitcoin community, and we’re having Learning Bitcoin happening soon. In that measure, I’ve had the pleasure of being a noderunner that sells my book in sats and cash only - and seeing the city grow merchant adoption significantly.

Chinese society is pretty socially conservative, so definitely I’d say one element is the expanding rainbow flag. That said, some Chinese people (queer, lesbian, gay etc.) leave China because it’s generally a pretty hostile environment. Also one of my wildest Clubhouse rooms from memory was one where somebody was giving us the ups and downs on local officials using meth and how gay hookup culture secretly worked lol

Another thing is drugs - usage of drugs and permitting them is hugely taboo. Feels like the Singapore mentality spreading. In Canada, one of the districts that is heavily Chinese immigrant-focused (Richmond) votes Conservative - the tactic that works seems to be giving out pamphlets accusing the left-wing party of being mass drug dealers and maybe taking drugs themselves

I think the payroll providers are pretty receptive to offering it as an option in their ecosystem. We’ve had some initial positive replies on that front.

The way it works is that payroll software does the calculation of salaries net taxes and then there’s payment processing, which can be done with partners. There’s an established play where ecosystem providers extend the capabilities of the underlying payroll software. I think Block Rewards fits squarely into that model.

China has firewalled Hong Kong from the Mainland - for example, Mainland investors are not allowed to invest in the spot ETFs. HK is being positioned to attract capital, though not very successfully in my mind. I think there’s structural reasons why China won’t intervene further - and I think they’re trying the stablecoin playbook in HK in order to understand what it might take to keep external and internal investors interested.

Yes, the plan is to integrate with a bunch of payroll providers. I believe Gusto is on our list :)

Chinese people are already pretty based lol in weird ways. Many who have left have dealt with a harsher government and a lot of different Chinese people have been vocal dissidents, calling Xi the chief dumbass on the regular etc. (though they tend to be out of the country). On the other hand, a lot of the international students have fiat mentality - decked out in brands. But they also don’t fundamentally understand US “woke culture” which I always find oddly endearing

That it’s better than Tether lol and much better than the US dollar. A lot of Chinese people prefer Tether - lower spread and less “volatility". USD safehaven mentality is super strong. Might be a generational thing before that shifts.

I go all over the place on this. I think the fact that elites are so corrupt in a weird way actually helps keep the world together in a sick fashion - they have the most to lose - it occurs to me that Russia and China both have elite classes that would have a lot of incentive to insulate themselves from war.

Having said that, the youth of China have a real nationalistic bent to them, and I’ve heard some crazy shit - like shooting down Pelosi’s plane when she was visiting Taiwan. I don’t preclude it. I do think Taiwan is the main game - and likely China will blockade first, rather than risk outright war.