Everyone dies alone. Don't get together with someone just to be with someone.

All valid points, but I am certainly a lot less skeptical towards Apple given their income is from hardware and cloud services, not data processing. Yeah – they are legally obliged to pre-scan all content before encryption and compare it to known databases of illegal images etc., but their business model is about selling expensive physical products.

On the other hand, Google's entire business model is around harvesting and selling data to third parties, and services such as Chrome, Chromebooks, Pixels etc. are to extend the capacity to gather data to sell more of it and train their AI with it so they can sell that too.

If a normal person who values convenience wants to improve their privacy, I would personally recommend Apple over Android or Microsoft any day. iOS is also notoriously difficult to breach, especially because updates are often forced, meaning most users are on a similar, recent version of the software. You can't say the same about Android or Microsoft, which leaves these devices vulnerable to known exploits.

From just the image (haven't read the book), I think the answer to why he likens the technology to god is in the second paragraph – he's talking about the fanaticism. In the context of monotheism and monostatism, his "mononumism" (a blind faith only in one coin and complete disregard / disdain for others) is negative.

My takeaway is that religious and state fanaticism never led to net benefits to society, which something I subscribe to. Maybe he makes a completely different argument in the book, but just this quote gives me this vibe.

Sadly most of these people don't have access to reliable internet access and/or mobile devices.

In a circular economy. Even if you get paid in bitcoin, as long as you still have to exchange to fiat to pay at the grocery store or for your rent, it will remain just a pipe dream.

...which just highlights the importance of onboarding merchants, service providers and employers you use so you don't have to sell bitcoin, but use it in a circular economy

Once the volatility settles down, it won't be any different to adjusting to a different currency on a holiday.

On the other hand, their recent shift to AI despite rebranding to Meta and claiming to focus primarily on AR/VR from on then doesn't show very clear focus. Sure, they need to stay relevant in an AI boom, but specifically Facebook has seen dropping numbers in users for years now, young people don't use it at all, and Instagram will hopefully soon be widely recognized as the mental health cancer that it is, and at this point it's trying too hard to be TikTok. Still they cannot afford to drop these legacy products because they are what makes them money for AR/VR R&D.

I see their refocusing on developing accessible AR/VR headsets as a good move as even though they are still seeing massive losses on it, they are spearheading the hardware development and creating a market. The software (apps, games, experiences to explore) is still absolutely terrible though. Whether or not they will manage to be the top driver in this field remains to be seen, but I wouldn't bet on it. The massive rebranding and developing every product possible seems more like a crisis of vision to me. They are stretched thin and that's not good positioning before an economic downturn.

Got my girlfriend to set up a bitcoin non-KYC DCA

true if big

Widespread adoption by businesses, merchants, shops, restaurants etc. so it can be actually used for payments.

The video is great. Is the guy using the original iPhone? That's some backwards compatibility, def bullish on BricsPay security.

I don't think that's necessarily to the detriment of the argument. This is how knowledge is created in fields which are difficult to quantify, but I appreciate your critical outlook on his method. Either way, his writing is very clear, founded on historical data, and aims to offer a practical understanding of the complex contemporary world. My qualm would be that the view that human history is bound to keep repeating is somewhat cliché, as I'd like to believe we can learn from it. Naive, yeah, but maybe books like these are the means to just that. Doubt US policy makers read it.

I would also argue he does go as far as he can to present his "data" in a systematic manner to infer some tangible knowledge. In an era when we're so used to most science being based on mathematics, the only evidence / repeatability of an experiment / theory / hypothesis (which is what his model is) lies precisely in how much you believe his method, and it's not an easy text to argue with given his conciseness.

If I were to meet you from where you're coming from, I'd keep in mind that Bitcoin wasn't created from nothing – it is part of history, and it was created for a purpose. Understanding Bitcoin involves understanding what preceded it, and why it exists. The content I shared gives great insight into both, in a digestible format, and doesn't really argue for anything that you are going against here. We're in the same boat, know your enemy etc.

Good point, he is really mostly working within the framework of nation-state power relations. That said, the "internet" also isn't only a decentralized network – state actors exert huge influence over it and exploit it to advance their goals. The sort of naive Y2K view of the internet as a tool for freedom has been intensively questioned by its use by authoritarian regimes, not unlike to how bitcoin's price is still swayed by whales.