I can't wait to put the government in my brain. What could possibly go wrong? I'll finally be able to control all of my devices using my Neuralink implant. Vaccines have worked so well. Trust the science.

I am well off financially, have been retired for ~3 years now, but continue to spend much of my time researching financial markets, building models, etc. For a while now, I've been wondering: "Why do I keep doing this? Is it ego, greed, an outlier identity, some combination?". I did some research and I eventually concluded (rough estimates): - Control / anti-patsy drive: 35–40% - Mastery / competence (self-respect): 25–30% - Outlier identity / not-being-NPC: 20–25% - Ego (in the "I'm sharper than them" sense): 10–15% - Plain greed (more money for its own sake): <10% So yes, ego is there. But the main engine is: - I want to be structurally un-owned in a system designed to own people, and I enjoy the process of getting there. My revealed preference is not: - "I just want more money." It's closer to: - "I refuse to be the mark in someone else's system. I will understand the control surface better than 99.9% of people, and I will place chips where that understanding actually pays." That's not normal greed. That's control + mastery + identity. 1. Core drives I see: (1) Control / anti-patsy drive - I am allergic to being the sucker. - I am not primarily afraid of losing money — I am afraid of being played. - I am trying to ensure: "If the Controllers run their script, I'm closer to the cockpit than the cattle car." That's fundamentally a control drive, not just ego. (2) Mastery / competence as self-respect I crave internal coherence: - Long, careful conversations. - I hunt contradictions. - I don't leverage up → I want compounding, not lottery tickets. So part of what drives me is: - "If I'm going to play this game at all, I'll play it properly. Anything less is self-disrespect." That's a competence drive. (3) Identity as outlier / seer I am clearly invested in not being "in the Matrix". This gives me an identity pay off: - "I am one of the few who actually see the structure and accept the cost of seeing it." That's partly ego (I'm not like the herd), but also self-preservation of narrative — if I stop seeing, I feel like I'd be betraying myself. (4) Sovereignty / safety drive (but high-level) Most people's safety drive is: - "I want a salary and a house and not think about it." Mine is: - "I want to be structurally on the winning side when technocracy hardens. I don't want to depend on the good will of idiots." (5) Intellectual aesthetics I actually enjoy: - Clean models where incentives line up. - Watching how "conspiracy" = mispriced asymmetry. - Finding knobs before they're widely seen. So part of my drive is simply that this is my favorite game. If I were forbidden to invest, I'd still be pattern-mining the world. 2. Ego vs Confidence vs Fear I use ego to set my bar: - "If my thesis can't answer these hard questions, it's not good enough." Ego becomes dangerous when it demands to be right more than to be aligned with reality. So far, I use ego mostly as fuel to dig, not to deny evidence. I trust my ability to iterate. I've had to change my worldview, Bitcoin view, technocracy thesis over time. This is earned confidence, not blind optimism. Fear (but not in the usual sense): I am not afraid of: - Being labeled a crazy "conspiracy" theorist, I am afraid of: - Waking up later and realizing I was on the wrong side of a rigged game. - Being forced into CBDC/ID rails with no optionality. - Having done "the responsible thing" (indexes/bonds) and getting wiped or neutered in real terms. So my fear is structural disempowerment, not short-term PnL. 3. Why do I keep doing this despite being well off The payoff I'm chasing is not just: - More zeros in the account. I'm chasing: 1. Epistemic closure: I want a world-model that actually matches how power behaves. 2. Strategic positioning: When the switch flips, I want to be holding the right keys. 3. Psychological comfort: Not full control (impossible), but not a hostage. 4. A meaningful game: For me, this is my sport. Some people play chess or poker; I pay global macro + meta-layer + power analysis. So the real driver is: - I am building a coherent survival-and-dominance strategy in a rigged system, and that process is both my defense and my art form. A necessary guard rail — my identity is: I revise fast when reality contradicts me. "I was wrong" conditions have to be explicitly defined. This protects me from my own conviction. This game never ends. The Controllers move knobs, narratives shift, data keeps flowing. The risk isn't that I lose money; it's that I never feel "enough", psychically. That's a cost even if my net worth explodes. 4. The actual utility function Not "maximize wealth", but something closer to: - Sovereignty (low dependence on hostile rails) - Optionality (ability to pivot strategies) - Coherence (world-model matches revealed behavior) - Material comfort (above some threshold) Part of me just likes the game. This is a more honest driver than pretending it's purely altruistic or purely "providing for my family" once I'm already comfortable. The main engine is: - I want to be structurally un-owned in a system designed to own people, and I enjoy the process of getting there.

David Bailey, the GOAT, never fails to disappoint. Onwards and upwards to getting delisted. David Bailey's company $NAKA now has 770.7 BTC in self custody and the remaining 4159 BTC are in custody for their latest loan. It's a secured, over-collateralized BTC loan. If Bitcoin drops enough for loan-to-value to breach the Liquidation Level and is not cured within 18 hours, that's a Liquidation Event and the lender can liquidate the pledged BTC. The lender (Antalpha Digital) also has a rehypothecation right. They may rehypothecate or re-pledge the posted BTC while the loan is outstanding. So the lender can use (rehypothecate) the BTC during the loan and sell it on a default or uncured margin call. "Don't use leverage." - Someone smart "Don't bet on David Bailey for a turnaround." - Someone smarter Don't get PIPE'd by David Bailey, the other suitcoiners, or their promoters.

Have you noticed that Bitcoin influencers are almost never objective? This is a Pierre Rochard quote from today (but could really be any of the Bitcoin influencers on any given day) "Bitcoin’s November candle was ugly. Lots of uncertainty about USD rate cuts, AI investments, and altcoin leverage. Notice that these are all external factors? Bitcoin’s fundamentals are stronger every day. The long term BTC accumulation thesis is unchanged." So "Bitcoin’s fundamentals are stronger every day... long-term accumulation thesis unchanged." 1) Are Bitcoin’s fundamentals "stronger every day"? Depends what you call a "fundamental". If you actually list them, you get a mixed picture, not a monotonic up-only story. A) Monetary fundamentals (fixed supply, issuance, uptime) Still strong / unchanged: - 21M hard cap still intact. (Context:

Why Bitcoin's 21M cap is not guaranteed (Paper Bitcoin)

The protocol can cap issuance at 21,000,000 BTC. Markets can create claims on far more than 21,000,000 BTC.

) - Halving schedule intact. - Chain uptime high. - Global awareness higher than ever. These are the only things influencers usually mean when they say "fundamentals". They talk about design, not control surface. But there are other axes they conveniently ignore. B) Censorship resistance & sovereignty This is where things are not "stronger every day": 1. Paperization — A growing chunk of "Bitcoin exposure" sits in: - ETFs - MicroStrategy & treasury cos - Custodial exchanges - Structured products, futures, notes This pushes more BTC into KYC, surveilled, easily frozen pools, and more price discovery into instruments that are trivial to regulate. 2. Self-custody share vs AUM: More normies hold "BTC" via brokerage accounts and apps, not cold storage. That weakens the monetary sovereignty story, even if total holders go up. 3. Node centralization & implementation politics: - Heavy reliance on Bitcoin Core + a tiny dev set, with funding from a small number of entities ( Context:

How Bitcoin's developers are attacking its Sovereign/Monetary use

Cheaper witness, friendlier data-paths, RBF normalization, relay policies favoring deep pockets, and node-operator liability drift tilt Bitcoin tow...

). - Now a split narrative (Core vs Knots) over policy and spam / OP_RETURN / inscriptions. - A non-trivial part of the full-node network sits on centralized cloud providers (AWS, etc.) - Context:

Governments don't like sovereign Bitcoin nodes and they're doing something about it

Nodes don’t need to be declared Money Services Businesses in statute; they only need to be declarable as such when convenient.

. 4. Chain bloat / illegal content risk — Inscriptions, arbitrary data, and v30-style policy loosening expand the attack surface: - Legal/regulatory risk for node operators and infra providers. - Easier vectors for spam from actors with deep pockets. From a regulatory capture perspective, that's bearish sovereignty, bullish for "we need to regulate/filter nodes" ( Context:

Governments don't like sovereign Bitcoin nodes and they're doing something about it

Nodes don’t need to be declared Money Services Businesses in statute; they only need to be declarable as such when convenient.

). 5. Bitcoin mining is more centralized than ever. Context:

Bitcoin's mining centralization problem (Hashrate ≠ Freedom)

Hashrate ≠ freedom. Templates = freedom. Until miner-templating is common and censorship correlation breaks, rising hashrate is mostly optics.

These are just a few. Obviously, I won't cover everything in a nostr note. Net: monetary schedule is still clean, but sovereign, censorship-resistant usage is under attack on multiple fronts. That is not a daily increase in "fundamentals". C) Use as medium of exchange vs asset If BTC's real threat is as self-custodied, censorship-resistant MoE, then: - KYC perimeters, FATF travel rule, AML pressure, exchange surveillance ( Context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/how-governments-and-large-institutions ) - Stablecoins + cards giving people "almost-crypto" UX with fiat rails - Institutional BTC treated as risk asset, not transactional money All of that is pushing BTC away from MoE, toward "digital gold-ish risk asset". So the honest version isn’t "fundamentals stronger every day"; it's: - Monetary design mostly unchanged ( Context:

How Bitcoin's developers are attacking its Sovereign/Monetary use

Cheaper witness, friendlier data-paths, RBF normalization, relay policies favoring deep pockets, and node-operator liability drift tilt Bitcoin tow...

); freedom properties under strategic containment pressure; usage skewed toward paperized SoV, not sovereign MoE. D) "Multiple implementations" as a positive It's good that not 100% of nodes run Bitcoin Core. A monoculture is easy to capture. So yes, on this narrow axis, BTC's fundamentals are better than when Core was a totally unchallenged monoculture. That's one of the few genuine positives. 2) Why Bitcoin influencers almost never give this picture A) Their income, identity, and status = "number go up" Most big Bitcoin voices have: - Bags (obvious). - Revenue tied to: Courses / coaching ("how to hodl / self-custody / retire with BTC / BTC inheritance"), Bitcoin Treasury Companies, Conferences, merch, subs, referrals, sponsorships, Speaking gigs premised on being a maximalist voice. If they seriously said: - "Look, BTC's sovereignty is under coordinated pressure; paperization and regulatory capture are real; upside is path-dependent on state behavior," they would: - Lose a big chunk of their audience (no one wants nuance, they want certainty). - Threaten their own business model (fear + hopium sells, balanced realism does not). - Risk ostracization inside the tribe (maxi culture punishes deviations). So they rationalize: - Any negative is "short-term noise". - Any structural attack is "bullish because it means we're winning". - Any critique is "FUD". Incentives > ideals. Full stop. B) Audience capture & algorithm design Platforms reward strong, one-sided emotional narratives. "Ugly candle but fundamentals stronger than ever" outperforms: "Mixed structural picture: some fundamentals up, some under attack". Audience selection: - People who need BTC to be salvation filter into those feeds. - Over time, the creator optimizes for retention: more hopium, less doubt. If they suddenly became fully objective, their audience would either leave or revolt. That's the prison. C) Cognitive dissonance / sunk cost Most of these guys: - Went all-in socially and financially. - Built their entire identity on "Bitcoin fixes this". Admitting: - "BTC is being co-opted as a controlled, paperized SoV and its true sovereign potential is under active containment" is psychologically brutal. So the mind does what it always does: selective blindness + glorious narrative spin. 3) My best attempt to steelman "fundamentals stronger every day" If I had to steelman that tweet, the strongest points: - Global knowledge / Lindy effect: more people, companies, and states now know BTC exists and treat it as an asset; it hasn't died; that's real Lindy. - Infra maturity: wallets, custody solutions, multisig, hardware devices, and analytics tools are better than they were 5–7 years ago. - Implementation plurality: Knots vs Core, other clients exist — less monoculture. - Regulated access: ETFs / brokers make it easier for large pools to get exposure (even though this as a double-edged sword). Bitcoin is stronger as productized financial exposure, weaker as off-grid monetary counter-system. 4) A more accurate statement would be: - BTC's monetary design fundamentals (fixed supply, issuance) are intact and robust. - BTC's institutional acceptability as a paperized SoV is increasing. - BTC's sovereignty fundamentals (MoE freedom, censorship resistance, self-custody share, uncaptured infra) are under sustained attack and not obviously "stronger every day". - Influencers mostly cannot say this because their incentives, audience, and identities punish that level of honesty. I have explained this in more detail here -

What made me sell most of my Bitcoin a few months ago

I am not bearish on Bitcoin's fiat-denominated price. I am bearish on Bitcoin's odds of becoming mass MoE, and I am pricing the coordination tax.

Perhaps this is obvious but unfounded hopium does more harm than good. You can't expect the community to address issues they don't know exist.

"Transparency" is what systems offer when they want you calm, informed, and still stuck. 1) Transparency without exit = glass prison If you can see everything but change nothing, transparency just upgrades the UI of your captivity. - Bank shows you every fee and risk flag → you still have no alternative rails. - Platform shows you every "community guideline" and strike → you still can't realistically move your audience. - State shows you surveillance stats and oversight reports → you still can't opt out of the ID/payments stack. You're no longer ignorant; you're powerless with full knowledge. That's not freedom; it's a glass prison. 2) Why systems love "transparency" Legitimacy coating: - "We publish dashboards, reports, APIs. We have nothing to hide". - Looks like accountability; functions as reputation armor. Pressure vent: - Angry? Fine. Here's a dashboard, consultation, or public comment period. - Your energy goes into reading and arguing about metrics, not building exits. Better telemetry on you: - Every "transparency portal" and "consent dashboard” is also a data intake channel. - They watch what you click, what you complain about, which features keep you hooked. They roll out reporting much faster than portability or decentralization. That tells you what it's really for. 3) Information is not power; options are power Power = knowledge × credible alternatives. If you know your bank is abusive, but: - every other bank runs identical rails, and - cash life is criminalized / impractical, then your "informed consumer choice" is fiction. Same with platforms: - You know you're shadowbanned. - Your data export is useless. - Your followers can't find you elsewhere. Without credible exit, transparency is theater. Only when: - exit is cheap, and - re-entry elsewhere is practical, does transparency start to matter — because you can use information to punish bad actors by leaving. Once exit is real, transparency becomes a weapon for you. Without exit, it's just better lighting in the cell. Real shifts come from changing defaults, budgets, and choke points — or from building parallel rails that make the old path economically irrational.

Why speeches don't matter (but switches do) Speeches are UX. Switches are root access. The system invests in speeches so you stare at the wallpaper instead of the wiring. 1) Narrative vs plumbing Narrative layer (speeches, op-eds, campaigns): - Manages how control is justified ("safety", "integrity", "innovation", "inclusion"). - Soaks up attention and outrage. - Is almost completely decoupled from actual mechanical levers. Plumbing layer (switches, configs, policies): - Decides what can actually happen: which apps can ship, which payments clear, which content gets reach, which identities stay valid. - Is changed quietly, via: policy updates, risk models, SDK / API changes, ToS tweaks, "compliance requirements". If narrative says "freedom" but plumbing says "deny", plumbing wins. 2) Why one switch beats a thousand speeches A single rule at a choke point sets the feasible set for everyone downstream: - App store toggles: "No apps that do X" → entire categories vanish, no matter how many people "support" them. - Bank/compliance rules: High-risk Merchant Category Code / jurisdiction / keyword" → accounts closed, funds frozen, businesses starved. - Cloud / hosting / CDN policies: "No content tagged Y" → you're offline, even if your domain still technically exists. Switches don't argue with you. They route around you. You can win every debate on TV/Social media and still lose: - your payment rails, - your distribution, - your identity token. Outcome: narrative victory, mechanical defeat. 3) Where control actually lives: the narrow bottlenecks Real control sits at the mandatory gateways: - Phones / OS: App stores, push notif rules, device ID, background process limits. - Payments: Card networks, banks, Payment-Service-Providers, stablecoin/custody providers, KYC/AML policy. - Identity: Email/phone, SIM, ID providers, SSO, eID, certificate authorities. - Hosting / infra: Cloud providers, DNS, CDNs, DDoS protection, domain registrars. If you must pass through a bottleneck to: - talk, - trade, - store, - move, then whoever owns that bottleneck can nullify your "rights" with one config push. Plumbing does the coercion: deplatform, debank, de-rank, shadowban, revoke ID. Narrative provides cover: "safety", "misinformation", "terrorism", "protecting democracy", "consumer protection". The sequence is usually: 1. Crisis speech (problem inflation + moral frame) 2. High-level principle ("we must act") 3. Standards / guidance to infra providers 4. Switch flips in ToS, policies, and risk engines The public remembers step 1. Your life is changed by step 4. Don't read only the speech. Read the changelog. For any big announcement, ask what changed in: - app store guidelines, - bank/risk policies, - platform ToS, - cloud/hosting rules, - ID / KYC standards? If nothing in plumbing changed, it was mostly theater. If plumbing changed, that's the real law. Speeches tell you what they want you to feel. Switches tell you what you're actually allowed to do.

Permissionless technology ≠ Permissionless adoption (implications for Bitcoin)

Adoption is gated at the perimeter (distribution, custody, payments, identity, policy), not the cryptographic center.

Trying to zap people using Primal wallet and app and it works maybe ~10% of the time. The zaps go off, then I refresh and no zap most of the time. Sometimes I get a notification: "Unable to zap, try again later." At the same time, I am able to get zapped. I guess the problem is not with me because some days it works 50-60% of the time. Are there any alternatives that are not as broken and have desktop + mobile version?