Tom Lee

Earlier this afternoon I ran 4 miles (6.5km) to a Portuguese Cafe because I enjoy Pastel de nata and coffee and since I wanted some exercise I thought I’d tag paying the cafe a visit onto a run. My ulterior motive was to see if the owner would be open to a discussion on Bitcoin and accepting it as payment. I asked her if she accepts Bitcoin which threw her massively. She proceeded to ask me if I ‘do Bitcoin’. I didn’t really understand what she meant by that, so I said ‘I like to pay in bitcoin where possible to support adoption.’ She then said I could email her and she gave me her email address. In my head I was like, but I’m here, you’re not busy, so why not ask me questions?!! When she brought me over what I’d ordered I said she is welcome to ask me any questions she might have and I told her that by accepting bitcoin she’ll get a lot more custom since Bitcoiners are good at going out of their way to support the cause. She didn’t seem comfortable at any point of our interaction and she didn’t take up the opportunity to ask me questions, even though she wasn’t busy in the slightest. I then proceeded to drink my coffee, eat my pastel de nata and email her about the merits of accepting bitcoin as payment!!! This was my first real effort at trying to onboard a small local business and it was disappointing how disengaged she was, when in fact I was trying to help her business. I sent her a nice email though, so it’ll be interesting to see if she engages later down the line. Watch this space!!

nostr:npub16le69k9hwapnjfhz89wnzkvf96z8n6r34qqwgq0sglas3tgh7v4sp9ffxj nostr:npub1s05p3ha7en49dv8429tkk07nnfa9pcwczkf5x5qrdraqshxdje9sq6eyhe Really enjoyed listening to your conversation tonight! Many thanks for your positive contributions :)

The monetary education I didn’t get at school!!!

nostr:npub1s05p3ha7en49dv8429tkk07nnfa9pcwczkf5x5qrdraqshxdje9sq6eyhe Hi Jeff. I’m curious as to when you’re releasing your second book? I appreciate your potentially can’t give a definitive time frame but is it likely to be this year? Many thanks!

nostr:npub1d3f4m9dgvkdjxn26pqzsxn6lpfn78sxwllxyt8mp76q0a9zyyjlswhr4xv just finished reading your book - I really enjoyed it so thank you! Let’s get to work to promote Bitcoin for a better world. Brothers in arms indeed! ❤️

nostr:npub1s05p3ha7en49dv8429tkk07nnfa9pcwczkf5x5qrdraqshxdje9sq6eyhe nostr:npub1ahxjq4v0zlvexf7cg8j9stumqp3nrtzqzzqxa7szpmcdgqrcumdq0h5ech Thank you Natalie and Jeff for your discussion. I found it invaluable, so I have created a rough transcript of it, which I am sharing now so that other people can read it at their own pace and refer back to in order to gain a deeper insight into why they need Bitcoin, along with the rest of the world. Most of their discussion is word for word, but there are small bits that I have omitted as I felt these parts didn’t better support my understanding. There are also bits that I have tried my best to understand as certain words were omitted, which I believe would have given greater clarity. This is no criticism. I actually think Jeff and Natalie were unbelievably articulate, but there were a couple of points where I had to interpret what Jeff meant based on my understanding. I hope I haven’t done him a disservice! Here goes: The natural state of the free market is deflation. Everything that an entrepreneur creates to create more value is competing against something that was there before and that people were using. If the entrepreneur doesn’t create more value, they fail. If they succeed we use the thing that creates more value and the output of that is that somebody’s else’s business is impaired and the new business grows. The output of this fact is that prices fall. The thing that happens in the free market is that the scarce thing or the thing that drives more margin, creates more opportunities for entrepreneurs to attack that scarce thing and to provide more value. It’s a natural phenomenon. We trade with people all over the world to gain more value. Every component in all devices rely on that same principal to try to gain more value for people. We are a critical part of the equation that searches for more value. So you ask yourself, if the natural state of that process of us searching for more value is that prices fall and then we create ideas like artificial intelligence and chips in computers made from grains of sand in silicon, to create new and better ways to solve the problem of scarcity (i.e. bringing abundance to the people), then as we create these tools to gain that human abundance, then deflation should be faster and faster because productivity growth moves faster and faster and it should flow to 8 billion people in humanity. As a first principle, you should argue what I said and poke holes in it. Some people will question some things that are scarce such as energy. In bitcoin terms, energy price is falling. There is a free market now in energy that is using bitcoin mining to chase abundant energy to create more energy. First principle to life is that we need more energy. If energy prices are falling in real terms in bitcoin, then (we need to question why) some of the other things that we need are not falling in price. Let’s look at a mine today versus a mine a hundred years ago. Let’s look at how much labour is in the mine compared to the output verses 100 years ago. The labour today is way less as most of the vehicles are automated. AI systems are moving into that. Soon it will be robotics. Measured in energy or output or abundance or growth, then those prices are falling as well. We don’t recognise that those prices are falling. In real terms those prices are falling and they will continue to fall forever. That is what bitcoin is measuring. It is not true that the only reason the free market works is because money is printed. The free market works because there is always something that is stuck and scarce that creates margin opportunity for entrepreneurs to solve - always. Questioned about where the capital comes from, Booth states that rarely does an entrepreneur raise debt when they have an idea. This is because it is too much risk for debt. The only way to raise equity is to find someone who believes in them – someone who believes that the thing that they are going to build is going to create so much value for society, which in turn means that they are going to return more equity. Therefore, it doesn’t require debt. The natural state of the free market is deflation. As we create technology and better tools or digital goods that replace physical goods, those goods, because prices fall to the marginal cost of production, fall faster because it is based on a line of code. The prices of physical goods fall less fast because there is human labour tied up in the goods. As we create more technology and abundance, that means prices should fall faster and faster, meaning there is no inflation rate. There is zero inflation rate. The natural state of the market is not zero, it’s not 2 % or 5%. It is the productivity rate of the world expanding. You cannot measure what I am saying from the system that you are measuring from. The chart shown is not true since everything in that chart is also manipulated by the money supply. Tvs, computers etc would have fallen way faster. Everything depicted on that chart (prices of different consumer goods) would have fallen way faster were they not manipulated by the money supply. That is why you need to be outside of the system to see the real truth of how fast prices are falling. That’s why bitcoin is outside of the system and therefore you can see the true rate of how fast prices are falling. Entrepreneurs throughout history have tried to create more value and they attack the highest margin opportunities because they make more money. They are trying to create the best value for consumers on the planet, where things are stuck the most. We do that faster and faster since we are building on the progress of people that went before us. (Were we to live in a true free market), we would solve problems faster and the natural rate would be complete abundance and you wouldn’t need the job you think you need because the prices are falling so fast. Natalie questions how the producers would make money if prices are falling so fast. Jeff responds saying that the entrepreneurs chase profit on things constantly while competition in the market drives down the profit margin to the point of zero, at which point the entrepreneur moves on to another product to try and gain profit from it. There is forever competition in the free market to deliver more value to society, and if you don’t grab that opportunity to bring more value to society, somebody else will. This is a cooperative process that builds a better world through the process of that competition. You will trade with someone you don’t like because it will give you more value. You’ll say I don’t like how Google is controlling everything yet you’ll use them everyday because they bring the most value. It’s our own need to get more value that drives this and we’ll trade with anyone to get more value. We have never lived in a global free market so we have no reference frame for what I am talking about. The way your brain will compare things is to compare from what existed before and then to try and make an association with what the new thing is. What is happening with bitcoin is that it is imposing a new set of rules and it is ruining people’s reference frame. It is imposing what has just been described. If you are living in Bitcoin, you are living in the start of the first global free market the world has ever seen. The only thing that could change what I have just said is if Bitcoin somehow became centralised and insecure. It doesn’t care that I am saying this. It is imposing a free market for us and the world. Everyone else is negotiating against their belief system. If you are not in bitcoin and you believe in your pieces of paper, then it is true that all prices rise for you. It is likely your life is getting worse and worse and it is also true that government is centralising because it has to misallocate more and more capital. It has to do all these things because it is a structural problem. It cannot be fixed from that system. If you are measuring from that system and you are one of the 7 billion people on this earth without assets, you are getting stolen from at such a rate, you think that the solution to the problem is within the system and you are voting for someone you believe will fix the issue that is causing you the problems. If you are one of the 100 or 1000 people with most of the assets, you are wondering why you can’t build walls high enough to keep those bad people out while you are stealing from those other people. This is because our system is based on theft, or inflation, which is based on theft. Those two viewpoints would be true for you but they wouldn’t be true for the new system. Most of Bitcoiners are measuring the system from the US dollar. What would they be saying? They would be saying that I have an asset that is rising at 45% a year with volatility and my other assets are 8%, 5%, 2% and I still live in an inflationary world but my bitcoin is rising faster than inflation, and that would be true for them. What would they be doing? They would still be contributing to a centralised world which is extractive and making that system stronger and wondering why the world is still dividing. If you were in Bitcoin only and understood that prices fall forever in it, then prices fall forever in it and that would also be true. These two viewpoints, depending on the observer of the system, would also be true for each observer and they would think that they were right. People will find Bitcoin in their own time when they are ready to because it is an open protocol. It doesn’t care what people are saying about it. It is decentralised and secure bounded by energy and it is repricing the world. If it stays decentralised and secure then nothing that I am saying right now will change that. It will reprice every single thing. It is outside of the system and is repricing things. Let’s go back to inflation. If the natural state of the free market is deflation, and we sit on top of everyone that has gone before us and all of their work and we fix more and more problems, then that means prices should fall faster and faster and faster and forever. However, we’ve never lived in a global free market. You could argue that the rise of the U.S., protected by the constitution and people’s individual rights and freedoms was the first really local free market. People went from Europe from more of a control system and they moved to the U.S., where free markets are more productive. The productivity of the U.S. bounded by hard currency was the dawn on the U.S. empire. In the late 1800s you had the great deflation where those productivity gains had a rising middle class who were getting richer and richer and richer – the dawn of the U.S. empire. Let’s now look at what always happens with money. If you can control money, you can control everyone else because you can have a little bit of inflation rate and steal the productivity gains from everyone else. The more people in your system, the more you have stolen. We’ve always centralised money – humans have never not centralised money. Gold has always been centralised and repriced. Let’s use the free banking era and what this would look like. You had coins before they were clipped and then you had pieces of paper – a derivative instrument on top of the gold. Then banks centralised the gold and said they were going to lend out your gold at 50% because no one ever comes and gets their gold at the same time, so they would only have half of the reserve. Then what happens? The next bank says I will only reserve 30% and I will give you a higher interest rate. Then the next bank says I will only reserve 10% and I will give you a higher interest rate. That creates a bubble because everybody goes to the highest interest rate. We centralise around that and that bubble creates an economic boom because it is based on faster growth money. As that collapses, because everybody chases the same thing, we go back to the government and say how dare they do this to us. The government comes in and says we will centralise that and then the same thing happens at the government. The dawn of the Federal Reserve was based on trying to solve banking crises. The demand from the people saying you have to protect us from our own errors creates the regulation that creates the co-opted money. Through that process, gold is repriced, or another country is invaded to take their gold. Because this can’t solve the problem of the inflationary monetary system we first divide our countries and point fingers saying it is the fault of certain individuals within the country. Then we point fingers at countries beyond our borders making claims it is their fault. We have global conflict. We devise institutions – the winners of the war – let us never forget. We make claims such as let’s protect this, let us never do this again. The winner of the war resets the currency to a new standard against the same thing and the whole process restarts again. The home in real terms is falling. The home measured against a piece of paper debasing is rising. There is no natural rate of inflation. When you talk of asset inflation, it’s all monetary inflation that drives asset inflation and misallocations throughout the market. It’s a control system that stops the free market from working. If you have a control system that stops the free market from working then you constantly rely on more and more control and coercion because you are destroying the free market with your control system. It’s just a time window and one end of that time window has to end in total control. Think about where AI is going. One system is everything has to be controlled and prices rise against prices falling and the prices rising is stealing from you to control you and you are on a hamster wheel to try and get more and more assets within that creating more control. It has to end in one person controlling everything. Very rarely does it get there. You go to global conflict because it is based on theft and broken systems. Look at some of the dictatorships that look like that due to broken money. You are making that system stronger from broken money trying to get enough. Somebody has to lose for you to win in that system, which is based on exploitation and extraction. There is no inflation. The natural state of the free market in deflation and faster and faster deflation forever. With bitcoin, for the first time in human history we can get off an exploitative path and get on a competitive cooperative path that heals humanity. Inflation might be the greatest lie ever told. If you believe in inflation, what you are saying is, is that you believe there has to be theft in money for humans to be able to successfully trade with each other. You believe that your money has to be worth less over time and that somebody has to be able to make decisions to make your money worth less over time in order for you to be able to trade with other people on this planet. A credit based system has to have inflation to grow and our credit based system is insolvent. It requires higher and higher rates of inflation to remain insolvent or a wipe-out and a collapse and a restart. If there were a reset, every asset, every work, trade, supply chain – everything would collapse. The fear of that collapse has people so scared and so unwilling to look at another type of solution that they remain inside the system and they tell themselves that they need to remain, and that they’re saving the world otherwise the stupid poor people will starve to death. These people are unaware that they are part of the problem. You literally have 7 billion people living in modern day slavery. Take all of these people out of this extractive system and add them to the free market where their minds can add value for us too, and you will have an even faster rate of deflation and abundance for everyone. Some people believe that inflation is required for you to spend. Inflation incentivises you to buy but it isn’t the reason you buy. You buy because you want the things you want. You know a TV gets better as time goes on but you still buy a TV and the same is true for computers and other things that you know will be cheaper in time and better. The other view is that people must buy otherwise more will be stolen from them through inflation. That’s saying to live in a productive society people’s money has to be stolen via inflation to encourage them to spend. It is insane to believe this and it’s tied to housing. People realise that they can’t store their money in money (because it is ineffective at storing their value over time) so they store it in housing as a result. Therefore, housing turns into money and attaches a monetary premium. As an investor, you have to have multiple houses to protect your ‘money’ from being stolen. If you have more and more of these assets, it looks like you are winning while other people without assets are losing at a crazy rate. Relative to the destruction of the world that that causes, you are losing too because you can’t build walls high enough to keep everybody else out if you are doing that. All parties lose in that system. Because money is broken, all these assets become a store of value against money being broken but if you measure these assets from the money supply rate, you see that they haven’t risen at all. They’ve risen the exact rate of monetary debasement. Therefore, it’s not the house going up it’s the money going down in value. Go back a 100 years, people bought a house from their savings and people didn’t have to work 50 years to pay off their mortgage. A packaged home delivered to your land at that time cost $2500. Every component within that pack have faced more and more automation and more and more value and as a result all of those materials would be way cheaper on a hard money standard. Add the inflation rate that makes all of these materials unnaturally more expensive, you can see what has happened. What would happen to all of these houses if the natural rate of deflation were able to happen? The houses would lose their monetary premium and go to their utility value again. People could argue (take China as an example) that debt brought people out of poverty. It did, but that debt has to collapse. Therefore the economic progress looks good in a short window but over a longer term window it has to collapse. People with assets sit on top of a system that extracts so much from other people as their assets go higher and higher. They think they’re immune from that theft. Bitcoin is a state change. It is imposing a new reality and it doesn’t care about your reality that you’ve lived in. The new reality is people are living in a free market for the first time when measuring in bitcoin. By living in a western country like the U.S. that control the money, who extract from other nations around the world, you are able to gain at the expense of others who are having their wealth extracted from them. People left Europe and headed to the U.S.A. in its founding years because they weren’t living in a free market and living in America enabled them to live in a society that extracted from them far less. A lot of the plight of people in Africa and South America is because of the system that exists in the West so it’s no surprise they want to get on boats and escape from a system where they are getting extracted from. People in the west ignore what is happening globally but in an exploitative system, somebody has to lose for somebody to win. People don’t see what is happening until it starts to hurt them. No matter who is in office, there has to be way more manipulation in money. Inflation is wage deflation. Wages are sticky – they don’t go up as fast as deflation. That means people don’t recognise that the dilution of their currency is the dilution of their purchasing power. People can easily be fooled that their salary rise is a good thing when in fact their purchasing power has been diluted way more than that. We have two systems. One (fiat) that is inflationary and the other, Bitcoin that allows for deflation. If wages are sticky, and you have a neutral money, Bitcoin, that allows for deflation, wages are sticky on the way down too. Your company has to come to you and ask you to accept less money. A company is only in business to serve other people, and is competing against other companies, who are constantly trying to provide more value in the free market. Let’s use Costco as an example. You work for Costco and you demand more salary. Therefore, Costco triple everyone’s wages. The impact of this is that product prices rise, and therefore you won’t shop at Costco any more. Somebody else will beat Costco because you’ll change your purchasing habits to get more value. We are hypocrites in this process. We think it’s everyone else. Our purchasing power and the labour inside the company we are working for is the same thing. In other words, how could you want your house to go up in value, but everything else you are choosing to come down in price as you seek more value. We can’t understand we are the labour and the purchasers, so we are two of the same thing. We want our assets (i.e. our home) to rise in price but we want other things to fall in price. It simply can’t happen under the current system. The whole thing comes from our own hypocrisy on a system that is mis wired for us as it’s stealing from us and we are confused. So called experts obfuscate the truth using complicated terms that are designed to prevent ordinary people from understanding the truth about inflation and the fact that the natural state of the free market is deflation. If people start with this fact, then they can start to see that inflation is the greatest lie we’ve ever been told. If you have an inflationary system against productivity in the world, it has to manipulate money. It has to centralise. Therefore, if people leave their bitcoin on an exchange, they massively underestimate the risk of their asset being liquidated and seized. Booth believes that there will almost certainly be a bitcoin backed dollar.

Satoshi’s invention is poetry! A whole new money game https://youtu.be/lpfnTeW9ruQ

It took thousands of years for humans to go from hunter gathers to farmers to trading folk. Bottom up economics using gold as a universally agreed upon medium of exchange was adopted due to its sound properties and it worked. Then rulers came along and replaced bottom up economics with top down economics, exploiting people for their unscrupulous gain. It blows my mind how Bitcoiners are taking the power back thanks to Satoshi’s selfless genius. What Bitcoin has done in 16 years is phenomenal but it is just the start. This protocol is going places!!

Why I value Bitcoin? Bitcoin stores economic value securely and it can be traded for goods and services. It doesn’t require trust, it cannot be exploited and it is fully verifiable. Swap your fiat for it for yourself and for humanity for future prosperity.

You can go so deep into economic theory. I love how simply nostr:npub1s05p3ha7en49dv8429tkk07nnfa9pcwczkf5x5qrdraqshxdje9sq6eyhe sums it up: “we trade with people all over the world and we try to get more value. Through that process prices fall. That’s economics. Full stop.”

Take a bus, meet Bitcoin 😁

Give way to Bitcoin!! It’s the only way ❤️

This is my Bitcoin poem entitled ‘a whole new’ money game. I had the honour of performing it to fellow Bitcoiners at Cyphermunk House. I was truly humbled by the positive feedback. Let’s all keep doing what we can to promote #Bitcoin nostr:note1dnpavfl9pzhz8tkqpyvd95hvc54d5s3nu86496u9pa5j3arssvks0l92f9

Introducing the talent that is Ren to anyone who hasn’t stumbled across him. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq3Z6D74dSA&pp=ygUKbW9uZXkgdGllcw%3D%3D

Love love love this! ❤️❤️😀😀 nostr:note15hlg2yyy5zs3dpqy4655tzvqrwe24z2mhnwy0wh99dca8ldkrpssyk5a2l

Morning all Bitcoiners! Gresham’s law is currently in play allowing you to spend inferior fiat whilst stockpiling the good stuff (#bitcoin ). That makes you incredibly fortunate since today you can accumulate way more bitcoin than people will earn in the future - earning it will be the only way to obtain it then. Therefore, whatever the fiat price is doing, just be thankful that history puts you in a place where you can obtain a lot of sats for relatively few dirty pieces of paper!! Stay humble and stack, whatever you can manage. Much love people.

When I first heard nostr:npub1s05p3ha7en49dv8429tkk07nnfa9pcwczkf5x5qrdraqshxdje9sq6eyhe say that people who are trading their time for fiat money are merely trading it for pieces of paper, it hit me like a bolt out of the blue! It’s insanity that people are blindly still doing this. No judgement though, as being brainwashed by a system you’ve only ever known is a powerful phenomenon and it takes a lot of education, thinking and courage to follow a different path. For me it has come down to this simple question. Do I want to use a dishonest ledger or do I want to use an honest one. The latter every time #bitcoin #freedom

I’ve been thinking about Bitcoin security, particularly single sig vs multi sig. I personally have a single sig set up. I was thinking about dividing my 24 word seed phrase and giving each of my 4 trusted family members 6 of the words for safe keeping. That way I don’t have the technical obstacle of educating them about multi sig, which is much more involved than single sig. If someone discovers the hiding place of my seed phrase, they will only have a quarter of it and therefore won’t be able to gain access to my funds. Thoughts?

This type of image will be increasingly common place as people wake up to the idea that banks and physical cash are superfluous to our needs #bitcoin