by
for
I've been trying to figure out MSTR's valuation. You can't strictly compare their bitcoin holding to their market cap due to their USD debt load. As you mention, there's also the underlying value in their business. But there's no good way to square these three aspects. The best I've been able to do is cancel out their business income with the cost of servicing their debt, but that still assumes access to capital at current interest rates, etc..
In the end, it's basically a leveraged play on the price of bitcoin coupled with a short position on their effective real interest rate. Both of those are well positioned right now, but I think there are more factors at play - 61% of MSTR shares are held by institutions. These may be restricted in the types of investments they can make. Perhaps custodying their own bitcoin wasn't an option to them, nor the ETFs. In that case, buying the MSTR bonds may have been a unique opportunity that could result in an increased demand for MSTR beyond the underlying bitcoin price. My thinking is there must be more of these types of investors where MSTR is somehow their best option.
Beyond all of that, there's rampant speculation as well. Something like 21% of the MSTR shares available to trade are held short. This is actually down substantially from previous weeks. This active short squeeze is just another dimension to the puzzle, but it has definitely been boosting the share price.
Conclusion: I have no idea what Microstrategy's fair value really is.
I use https://cursor.sh a fork of VScode with AI built-in. I can highlight a block of code and ask GPT to adjust it. Then I get an inline diff with the option to ACK/NACK or follow-up all without leaving the editor.
I found GPT is useful when:
  • I know exactly what to write. And it would take fewer keystrokes to command GPT to write it instead. All I have to do is review and accept. (Boilerplate, Type/Interface definitions, formating, repetitive tasks)
  • I'm exploring an idea or looking for existing tools/methods. I use the Chat feature like a search engine/wiki to assist in exploration. GPT helps me bridge small gaps in knowledge.
I have found GPT is NOT useful when:
  • I have large gaps in knowledge
  • The work is novel or less researched/documented.
  • Also, I notice that GPT will usually default to the most generic and general way to solve a problem, not necessarily the best way. For example, it will reinvent the wheel by implementing a complex algorithm poorly rather than use a library or existing method that is more efficient. I have yo specifically ask if there are any libraries that would simplify things.
In summary, GPT will not turn non-devs into devs overnight. If however, you already understand a problem and already know how to solve it, GPT will make light work of actually getting it done.
Okay, I picked. First, I was assuming that the travel into the past / future would mean that I went there and stayed there. With that out of the way, here's my logic:
  • I wouldn't go into the future because I think it will be hugely foreign, almost certainly too foreign to adapt to without going mad.
  • I was tempted to go to the past, since, given time, I could probably amass $100m just knowing what I already know, and then could influence the world for the better (or so I believe -- obviously hugely biased.) But I'm assuming I would be the age I am now, and I wouldn't want to wait fifteen years to have a ton of money.
  • So I picked to have the money now, with the assumption that I could be highly useful and do some high-leverage stuff in that circumstance.
A thing that is not understood, and then widely misunderstood, is the role of compression in intelligence.
Many people nowadays are familiar with this idea as pertains to machine learning: a common critique in model evaluation is that the model has simply memorized the training set. This does in fact happen, most often when the model has a huge number of free parameters. It has so much capacity that it can simply encode what you give to it.
The most useful behavior comes when the model has a lot of capacity, but way less than what it would take the memorize the relevant training corpus. So for it to do anything interesting, it has to basically compress reality -- to find patterns in it that it detects with reasonable fidelity. If the system can do this, we say that it generalizes.
This is what the brain does, too. Compression and generalization are at the heart of intelligence. (Early work on this is filled w/ attribution controversy.) The limitation -- the collapse of the vector to a scalar -- is what makes it so powerful. It's what lets you recognize diverse situations as, fundamentally, instances of the same kind of thing.
It's also interesting to note that different kinds of brain damage ruin this ability in a surprising way: by giving the person nearly total recall. So the person can remember everything, but, like the model with too many parameters, can't really think. The most famous example of such a case is memorialized in this Borges story.
Anyway. It's intriguing to consider this wrt money, which is a great compressor, as you and @siggy47 are mentioning. It makes money hugely useful, but dangerous, insofar as what is left out of that invisible hand's grasp may be vitally important.
We talk about leaving out bad consequences as externalities, and there are different attempts to mitigate that, but what about leaving out good things? What happens to a value computation that doesn't include the most important thing about being alive, or systematically leaves out the concerns of millions or even billions of beings, whether they're slaves in 1850, quasi-slaves harvesting rare Earths in Congo, women a century ago, or all the animal life on the planet, in perpetuity?
What do you get, then? This amazing system that computes value, what are the consequences of the value that it computes? And I wonder if there's such a thing as a money that captures too much, like an overfit model, or like poor Funes?
Hi there,
First of all, thank you for your work! I have two questions:
  1. Why did the blog post yesterday have a future date? 😂
  1. What are the main differences between V1 and V2, and how will it improve communication between miners?
Thanks
Speaking from my perspective, I won't make it into the first 64 positions for the month-end rewards
You are wrong. You can do it. You just didn't find "your way" up. Keep going. What many noob stackers still do not get it is that it doesn't matter how many sats are you zaping or receiving... Is more about WHAT are you doing with those zaps. zaps not equal sats ! This is not a contest of "who earn more sats", but a contest of who zap, comment, post more.
a lot of SN users (especially newbies) will lose their interest and will leave the forum. And I'm not sure if this is a good thing for SN.
As I said many times: Bitcoin is not for the weak, only for brave.
but now I am talking too much...
Is it worth it to try it with s9 homeheaters? What is your recommendation for those plebs who are mining with hosted services? Should we try to band together and ask the hosting company to upgrade? Or wait for more stable release?
@k00b @kr @ek I got notified saying that ~culture and ~AI had been transferred to me. I've just checked and they haven't, but it did highlight a potential problem. If someone transfers you a territory should there be an accept or reject option on that, if you reject it goes to archived? Just to prevent anyone from accidentally getting billed for territories that have been erroneously assigned to them.
FML. Went to Japan and my SN routine got jacked up. 😢 Too much shit to do in this amazing country.
Congrats to whoever jumped into the top 10 because of me.
Damn I missed this. I'm going to be honest right now because I know you value that, but I'm taking a chance too because I'm not sure if you want my opinion. I remember kicking myself for complimenting you for your daily zero something posts, because I feel like you being told how much we all enjoyed it made you self conscious and didn't let your shit flow. You're back! Keep it coming.
🚫 Dwindling bitcoin capacity ✅ Getting more capital-efficient
🚫 Expensive to receive money ✅ Startup costs are amortized during the life of a channel
🚫 Channel freezes and other Lightning Network bugs ✅ Can be mitigated today. Could be solved by covenant soft fork.
🚫 Significant developer departures from Bitcoin Lightning ✅ Many new devs are building on LN
🚫 A growing list of Bitcoin Lightning complaints ✅ A growing list of LN companies/communities to support you
Day 328 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.
__@_'-'
Still working (and ready to share a link this time) on Satonomics, a free and open-source alternative to Glassnode (Bitcoin on-chain data) which will be in the future self-hostable.
Quit me (first) job to work full-time on this in November and it's been going great ! I'm not sure yet how I'll earn a living but I guess we'll see.
Sadly, I just realized that while I wanted to minimize the network transfers. Height datasets are too slow, there aren't perfectly optimized but still, I'll have to move the datasets logic to the back-end which will take some time. The silver lining is that I'll be able to add a dashboard similar to Clark's much more easily !
@Car - Here's an update since you were interested !
Of course not, that would make it custodial.
The mobile keys are only held by the client and their designated recipient.
For the ultra paranoid, we offer the option to use a second hardware key in lieu of a mobile key.
how was your experience asking for grants and donations?
One thing that's great since project's inception is that we're all funded by different entities. Thus far we had: Spiral, HRF, OpenSats, Foundry, Bitmex, Galaxy. Some of the entities even allowed their employees to work on SRI.
It's tough, but back when I started doing FOSS Bitcoin 7 years ago, situation is much better. There are now so many entities that recognize good and valuable work. I would say that each and every one of us first added some proof of work, before applying for a grant.
Situation can always be better, as someone handling this side of the things for contributors of SRI, one thing that could be better is mullti-year support so that contributors don't have to worry every 6-months or 12-months if their grants will be renewed,
were there any important lessons you learned that might be useful for other FOSS builders looking for grants to support their work?
  1. Put in proof of work, even if it's in spare time and ensure community recognizes the value you're adding
  2. When writing application always ask core contribution team to validate your ideas or areas you can be useful for the project
  3. We need multi-year grants in this space asap, dealing with sustainability insecurities and constant renewals takes a toll on people.
This is the kind of discussion I like to see. Not the tweet you link to but bitcoiners thinking about possible problems with the status quo. There are some good comments in this post (@027c352e45, @elvismercury, @DarthCoin & @Scoresby).
  1. We do need more clients than just bitcoin core
  2. A written spec does make sense to me for a project this important
  3. We have other clients but usage is limited
  4. We are still very early. Things can and will change but you make a strong point.
I've been working on FOSS for about 5y now. I was on the shitcoin world until recently, but now I'm a grantee with Spiral and my experience towards a grant consisted of several factors:
  • Joining the Discord server
  • Joining SRI team calls
  • Following tutorials from stratumprotocol.org
  • Exploring codebase on github
  • Exploring issues and PRs on github
  • Reading the specs, and writing material to summarize my learnings
These items above helped me get context on the team activity. It is important not only to be willing to help, but also to understand what kind of help is needed, and what are the current priorities.
Eventually I saw SteveLee/moneyball mention on SV2 Discord that the SRI team needed experienced Rust devs to join the team and Spiral was willing to give out more grants. So I reached out to him and started talking. Some key points of our interaction were me sharing my CV and him telling me to join some calls with @pavlenex and @Fi3 to agree on what the project's roadmap needed more hands and how I could commit myself to helping it.
This article tries to summarize all the options, their pros and cons and the best practices.