“The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.” — Alan Watts, The Book

When I first learned how to roll a proper joint in high school, my friend advised me, “It’s critical to get the foundation right. If you do that, the rest of the joint rolls easily.” This applies to all of life.

You don’t choose Bitcoin. #Bitcoin chooses you.

A lion does not concern itself with the opinions of sheep. #Bitcoin

“There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg from which the world was hatched. Thus I am not even saying that you ought to break out of your shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you, the Self) will do it anyhow, but it is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to remain unawakened in most of its human disguises, and so bring the drama of life on earth to its close in a vast explosion.” — Alan Watts, The Book

“Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.” — Alan Watts, The Book

“Outwardly, I am one apple among many. Inwardly, I am the tree.” — Alan Watts, Nature, Man And Woman

One thing you notice as a Bitcoiner who’s been through a few cycles is that the FUD never changes, it just repeats, like clockwork. In a bull market, the FUD is that #Bitcoin is a tulip bubble. In a bear market, the FUD is that Bitcoin is dead. After the halving, the miner death spiral FUD becomes popular. Once those are put to rest, quantum computing FUD takes hold. Tune out the noise. Find the signal.

Tl;dr quantum computing is more of an arms race than an exploit. The greater quantum attacks become, the greater cyber defenses become in response. The traditional financial system is at far greater risk of critical failure than the Bitcoin timechain. Carry on. View quoted note →

Quantum computing BTC FUD goes back almost as far as Bitcoin itself. Here’s what Satoshi said on the matter back in 2010—

“The king takes his pattern from the Tao, not the Tao from the king.” — Alan Watts, Nature, Man And Woman

It’s easy to be productive on a Monday morning when you are doing interesting work, when you have a family you love and wish to provide for, and when you are saving the product of your labor in the hardest money known to mankind: #Bitcoin

“I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of “prickles” and the partisans of “goo.” The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They prefer particles to waves, and discontinuity to continuity. The gooey people are tender-minded romantics who love wide generalizations and grand syntheses. They stress the underlying unities, and are inclined to pantheism and mysticism. Waves suit them much better than particles as the ultimate constituents of matter, and discontinuities jar their teeth like a compressed-air drill. Prickly philosophers consider the gooey ones rather disgusting—undisciplined, vague dreamers who slide over hard facts like an intellectual slime which threatens to engulf the whole universe in an “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” (courtesy of Professor F. S. C. Northrop). But gooey philosophers think of their prickly colleagues as animated skeletons that rattle and click without any flesh or vital juices, as dry and dessicated mechanisms bereft of all inner feeling. Either party would be hopelessly lost without the other, because there would be nothing to argue about, no one would know what his position was, and the whole course of philosophy would come to an end.” — Alan Watts, The Book

Two types of Naturalists

All it takes is one big tech giant adopting a #Bitcoin strategic reserve to get all the others to consider it. Game theory at work. $AMZN

#Bitcoin > Real Estate Investing

The greatest fantasy/sci-fi series of all time are, in my humble opinion: Lord of the Rings Red Rising Stormlight Archive Hyperion Cantos Wheel of Time Chronicles of Narnia CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy Zones of Thought Mistborn What else would you add?

It is remarkable how quickly fantasy books went from being nerd-only to as mainstream as Stanley cups.

Local goldbug thinks he can prevent #Bitcoin from flipping gold with a strongly worded blog post.

“You don’t die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.” — Alan Watts, The Book