pull down to refresh
6486 sats \ 2 replies \ @plebpoet 6 Jul \ on: Stacker Saloon
does anyone wanna watch my youtube video?
this is in response to questions from @Kontext on my last post #1022138
and maybe @Scoresby will be interested too?
Ugh, this is beautiful, Siggy. What a testament. And I love how you didn't do the normal thing that people do, make your friend sound like some kind of paragon. But rather a messy person, full of virtues and vices, wins and losses, all mixed together. Sounds like me, sounds like everyone I know. He is lucky to have been seen, over the years, with such attention.
I can't remember if it's ever come up how a big newish thing is what smart people expect their jobs to do for them - so much more than pay a living wage. Friends, meaning, status - the last is especially a bitch - all tied up in jobs. It's so fucking dumb.
If you have a marriage where you need your spouse to be your everything, that is a dead marriage walking. It will ruin almost everyone. And yet our culture has largely made it the default belief about career, for a certain breed of well-educated white-collar types. We've made a god of it, built an implicit infrastructure of worship around it. It's hard to think of something more poisonous that people don't taste as poison.
I'm now at the beginning of the fiendishly difficult endeavor of untangling all this. It's so fucking hard in ways I wouldn't have imagined when I was a newb. Maybe bc when you start out you swim up the gradient of more and it's progress you can feel. Once you get enough more that stops working. At least it has in my case.
I've always admired KK bc he seems to have become maximally himself, and with a bit of attention - not too much, it seems like - bent a working life around his own nature, and not the reverse. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to pull that off, but I think many could. Many who are reading this can. It gives me hope.
As far as I know, I can't use Phoenix mobile to do something like receive zaps on nostr or stacker news. Most of the mobile wallets are not good at asynchronous receive. And as far as being an easy onramp for normies, I think this is a pretty huge obstacle. If I tried to run a webshop with a mobile lightning wallet, it wouldn't work because new node wouldn't be on.
Channel creation is also a pain for new people. If I tell a friend I want to send them a zap to show them how it works and they download Phoenix, they don't have any channels open. I thought for a while Phoenix was doing the thing where they would let you accumulate sats until you had enough to open a channel, but in reading over their FAQs just now, it looks like they don't do that. Maybe I'm confusing them with Zeus. Doesn't matter: to meaningfully use lightning, you can't just up and let someone zap you 100 sats or even 1000 sats. Even starting with a 10k sat zap is kind of silly. As far as onramps go, this is another huge obstacle.
In both cases, ecash fixes the problem. I'll admit it's almost the same fix as a custodial account, with the slight benefit that the mint may be blind to your intra-mint transactions. I suppose the advantage of mints right now is that people seem willing to run them like it's the wild west while the custodial people are generally adopting kyc compliance. This gets to your point about jurisdiction being the key, which is a good observation.
I don't think I said/implied that ""ecash is at least as risky as Phoenix." I said ecash is good at onramp, and I think this is true.
So: I agree with all your points except that Lightning solves onramp.
Will my fanciful ai-operated mint fix this? probably not. But I'm open to looking under ugly rocks for solutions.
I’m at the point where I understand it but cannot articulate it. Which naturally, I’ll try now. My subconscious is much smarter than my conscious mind when it comes to economic and sociological stuff, however my understanding, which may be retarded, is that when a credit based monetary system meets a commodity based monetary system, it’s not a big boom head-on crash, instead one slowly bleeds into the other, resulting in a slow deflation of prices, which is in theory good.
For my part I believe this is inevitable. However governments will need to react to this and it is quite hard to predict how that will play out. Their debts are insanely big, mostly driven by their local banks excessive lending, and the bleeding effect would ideally be a slow and peaceful deflation of prices and ideally keep people that have mortgages paying the same monthly repayments, or even paying it down more quickly.
Imo the most interesting thing about this whole thing is transitioning from credit theory of money world to a commodity theory of money system, it’s going to reshape the world. It will not make financial sense to lend money for the sake of interest, the amount borrowed will grow in value thus making the original borrowed amount easier to repay. This is entirely contrary to the system represented by central banking so expect their full force to come down once they realise bitcoin is more than an investment asset.
With that said, it’s already too late.
232 sats \ 1 reply \ @jbschirtzinger 6 Jul \ parent \ on: Seeking advice for finding a good therapist AskSN
One useful activity then is to keep a log or journal of the stuff going on in your life, and what your emotional response is to it. You need to develop your own personal vocabulary--or figure out how the language of your intuition is speaking. That is something that a therapist may or may not be good at, but the good ones are only showing you the stuff that you are saying that you did not realize you were saying.
I started to take pride in this ‘cool girl’ approach to work. I joked about having never been promoted, but could feel my scope, impact, and relationships with colleagues growing. I remember rejecting a (well-meaning) manager’s suggestion to build out a five-year career plan. I scoffed at people who cared about titles, did things for money, and had professional headshots on their LinkedIn.
And then, I’m not sure when the switch flipped, but I started to have a sinking feeling that I had it all wrong the whole time. I looked around and felt I was being outpaced by my colleagues—specifically by the MBAs and the people who chased titles, promotions, money, and building teams. And it wasn’t just a vanity thing. They genuinely seemed to be focused on bigger, more interesting problems. And they were having more impact. They were mentoring young talent, influencing top lines and bottom lines, and had their fingerprints on all kinds of cool industry-recognized work.
Wow, this really resonates with me. I feel like it mirrors my own path within academia.
I tended to be very focused on the work itself. I eschewed the networking and self promotion required to become more well known and have a more prestigious placement. I am respected in the community for my contributions, but I don't actually have much influence because I don't control much money or have a prestigious title.
Now, I am feeling the bite of not having said influence. It limits my more ambitious ideas because by not being at a prestigious university, I don't have access to as many resources, like talented graduate assistants and money for travel. I have to do a lot of the work myself, still. While this is great for keeping me technically competent, it limits my ability to execute on bigger plans. Even if I have a good idea, other teams who come up with the idea later than me can still execute faster because they have larger and more talented teams.
That being said, I think I'm happy where I'm at. The amount of my time and energy (including travel) to become more influential within the community was a price I wasn't quite willing to pay. Plus, I like being able to spend time expanding my horizons to other interests like Bitcoin. I think if I poured myself more wholeheartedly into my career, I wouldn't have as much time for these side interests.
The full minute being cut out is just so egregious. Literally not releasing the video at all would have done less damage than what they did here.
Thanks for sharing this. My aunt died recently -- she was bubbly, social, and gregarious her whole life, and then suddenly stopped talking to everyone but her children and then she was gone. It's put me in the mind of wondering how I'll be when my time comes.
That you can write this reflection on his life in such detail is testament to a life strongly lived.
When the countdown reaches zero, the inflation rate of BTC gets cut in half. Happens every 210,000 blocks (about 4 years). Its the mechanism by which the 21M supply cap is enforced.
I'm so sorry for your loss, Siggy. This is a beautiful tribute to someone who was clearly very complicated and also clearly very loved.
I've been wondering about this too. I met a guy who had been into btc pretty early (2015 ish) and had a real job and had bought a lot of it (dunno how much exactly counted as a lot). Contra the usual narrative, he was no steely-eyed god-king with deep principles, he was basically a dipshit who was in the right place/time to strike it big, but less than average success in all other ways.
Anyway, I think: what if that guy had held until now, and found himself with a hundred million dollars on his laptop? What would he do? My first instinct is to think he'd be scared shitless and would move it to Unchained or something. My second thought is that he doesn't have the sense to be scared shitless so maybe he just lets it ride?
But there must be many such examples of way bigger whales than this guy. Remember that Asian hacker guy who had billions worth hid in a big gulp cup or whatever it was?
Great post.
I often think about how something similar will happen with respect to the entire legacy financial system. Long before hyperbitcoinization, this kind of game theory will force the fiat system to behave itself a little bit more.
The other point that came to mind is that trustworthiness is not a binary. The better self custody options become, the more trustworthy custodians will have to be.
We homeschool our three kids in Texas and whenever I hear descriptions about homeschooling in the EU, it sounds hard. Many US states have regulations around homeschooling (NY is rough), but none of them are as onerous as what you are describing. Texas is completely hands off: we homeschool, don't have to file any paperwork, nobody checks on us.
As far as what to do now: I'd put a lot of effort into finding families with kids the same age that share your values. Not an easy thing to find, but kids are shaped by their friends.
Another option is to see what you can do about your space so it encourages the friend groups to hang out there. I know parents who intentionally make their homes the cool place to be (usually via amenities like playstations or whatever) and it gives them a lot of soft influence over their kids friends.
first off, i should say I didn't come up with this concept, so I can't claim credit for how fun it is to think about.
- I'm not as afraid of criminals accruing power as I am my government. I live in the US, so I benefit from a very stable and safe political landscape. No doubt I would sing a different tune if I was living somewhere with less strong government. Nonetheless, in my lifetime the trend has been towards ever-increasing power. This power is the kind that I find very hard to escape. And when I look ahead, the big danger I see is my government getting stronger and gaining control over more aspects of my life. I'd like to limit that.
Additionally, I get to choose how much power I will cede to it by choosing how much to keep in the mint. Governmental power is already exerted over my life, and I have to actively work to reduce it. I don't have as much choice in the matter.
Getting rugged by a criminal is containable. Getting rugged by a politician is less so.
- The hardware is the hard problem. If it could copy itself, maybe it could stay one step ahead of the cops, like a software Jason Bourne running through cyberspace, paying for server time from any service that will accept its money, keeping a number of servers from different services running and jumping to new ones when they get taken down. If it was small enough, It is admittedly a fantasy, but I've bought hosting and paid for server time with nothing more than a lightning payment, no kyc -- so that's a tiny start, at least.
To have any de minimus exceptions are better than none though I guess
I don't understand why they didn't just use the existing "de minimus" exemption that IRS already uses for Forex.
If you travel abroad, and you "make money" on your forex (ie. price changes so that you profit between when you buy / sell), you are allowed a $200 per transaction allowance.
That means that as long as the profit was less than $200, there is no reporting required....and that is per transaction. So theoretically you could gain $199 in profit every day and not need to report.
This to me seems better than whats being offered. It would also seem easier to implement as I'm not even sure a new law is needed....simply get IRS to declare coverage of existing forex rule to "crypto"
I'd argue that the problem is the
standard, not the gold.As long as govs make up some kind of standard that they then break because they spend more than they got, shit shall hit the fan. Since this has been the case since forever, shit shall simply hit the fan, no exceptions.
Reminder for those combining the truly incompatible word
bitcoin with such principle of a monetary standard that is enforced by govs: for someone that is in debt, NgD is super important. And guess who are always in deep, deep debt? Governments. They have another standard, where govt debt is measured against GDP - which includes the fruits of your and my labor - instead of revenues, to make it look as if all is fine. BUT IS IT?Don't fall for their scams.
I would say the reasons why an OG would consider such things are:
-
Inheritance. I know there are native bitcoin solutions, but its just so much easier and straight-forward when dealing with normal stocks. There are basically 100 years of laws and infrastructure to support this.
-
BBD strategy. The mega-rich all use "Buy Borrow Die" strategy. That is you buy some asset when its very undervalued (ie. Amazon, MSFT, whatever)....and as it rises in price you borrow against it and live off the cash, never selling the original asset. Again, yes there are "bitcoin native" solutions but frankly they all kinda suck. The margin lending rates for stocks in much much lower than anything offered in bitcoin-land. I think even Robinhood offers something like 6% margin rates....which obviously means as long as 6% is less than the rate of appreciation of your asset, you can basically do this forever....
Very good analysis here. Thanks for doing the work. As more territory tools are rolled out (hopefully soon) there could be more collaboration similar to what @grayruby and undisciplined have set up informally by trusting each other. I look forward to sat splits with territory marketers, content writers, etc. I know we're a long way from that now, but it should be the goal in my opinion.