Since we can't make fun of gold anymore:

The Bitcoin or Gold psyop is silly and the debaters on both sides are usually clueless. Why wouldn't you own both Bitcoin and Gold? They are both assets outside the system and have different advantages/disadvantages. To mention some of gold's advantages (because everyone here already knows about Bitcoin's advantages): (1) Physical gold has no public ledger. - No historical chain of custody anchored in a global database. - Evidence of holdings is fragmentary: vault records, invoices, eyewitnesses, maybe customs records. - Outside that, the state has suspicion, not a cryptographic audit trail. - The "omniscient ledger" simply doesn’t exist. (2) Harder to geofence at scale from a screen. - Once it is in your physical possession, there is no equivalent "app store ban" or "node-liability" lever that instantly makes it unusable for most people. (3) Gold has no "core devs", no client politics, no mempool policy. - "Protocol" = physics, metallurgy, and a scale. - There is no equivalent of a small GitHub group with agenda-setting power. - There is no "v30" for gold. No client upgrade that suddenly increases storage risk by 1200x. - Coordination burden is basically zero at the "how it works" layer. (4) No need to defend a node/mempool ecosystem. - No nodes. - No mempool. - No UTXO set to bloat. - You don't need an army of volunteer maintainers to keep "gold full nodes" defensible. - Less coordination tax, fewer sociotechnical attack surfaces. (5) Gold expropriation requires physical enforcement, not just data + policy. There is no universal gold UTXO set or "travel rule". Expropriation requires either: - Knowing where the gold is (vault, safe deposit box, storage facility). - Or house-by-house enforcement with massive manpower/legitimacy cost. In practice, enforcement tends to focus on: - Formal channels (vaults, dealers, banks). - Border crossings. - Declarations above thresholds. @Daedalus also opened my eyes to some very significant issues regarding Bitcoin hardware wallets. TL;DR - I'd imagine the government has access to the vast majority of seed phrases. From what I've researched, getting this risk to zero is extremely hard (if not impossible). It can be minimized with multi-sig, heterogeneous devices instead of trusting any single black box. Just one of the many issues are "secure" elements in which many wallets store the seed phrase. A secure element (SE) is: - Closed-source silicon + firmware - Designed and signed off by a tiny number of entities - Certified by processes you don't control (Common Criteria, labs, NDAs) - Distributed at scale into "secure" devices (wallets, phones, SIMs, payment cards) Secure elements are perfect for creating choke points where keys & identity cluster: - Centralized design - Long lifetimes - Hard to inspect physically - Wrapped in "security" narrative So if you assume a serious state-level adversary wants that lever and can get it sometimes, the right prior is: - "Treat any closed-source Secure Element as potentially backdoored if you're defending against a nation-state" That's not the same as "we know for a fact every Secure Element is backdoored". We don't. Lacking verifiable proof is exactly what makes this such an asymmetric control point. Dice-based seeds fix RNG trust, not key exfiltration. If a device ever sees the full seed, a malicious Secure Element/firmware can leak it later. The only real structural defense is collusion forcing: - Heterogeneous multi-sig (different vendors + DIY), - Multi-source entropy (XOR’d seeds), - Passphrases kept off the compromised device, - Independent stacks for different key shares. There is no neat solution that makes you "immune to NSA". The best you can do is: - Make mass, silent theft via one corporate/vended rail impossible, - Force any serious adversary into messy, noisy, manual operations if they want you specifically. A state-level actor can plausibly: - backdoor RNG/nonces, - exfil keys via signatures, - coerce vendor into "minor tweaks", - intercept shipping, - or just use host+legal leverage. (6) Gold doesn't need electricity, internet, DNS, app stores, or routers. - You can transact in a blackout. - You can pay a smuggler without any digital evidence. - You don't care about packet filtering or "crypto port" throttling. There are many more examples of where Gold has an advantage over Bitcoin. And of course, Bitcoin has many advantages over gold (teleportability, shock convexity in a specific Great Taking scenario, programmability for complex, conditional arrangements, granularity in price discovery, verifiability, etc.). That's the point, gold vs bitcoin is a stupid debate. BTC sovereignty is mathematically elegant but socially expensive and perimeter-fragile. Gold sovereignty is technologically dumb but perimeter-resilient and legally fuzzier. Both are useful, but for different failure modes of the system. The same exercise can be repeated for Bitcoin and Monero. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Politics is completely fake and the easiest way to figure out that someone is mentally disabled is when they say they are a republican or a democrat. The republicrats and the demopublicans are equally bad and equally fake. The people you see on TV are actors. They are not the ones making the important decisions. They are the ones who sell you decisions that have already been made. And because this is a midterm year in the US, you often hear: "Trump has to juice markets to win the midterm elections." And because politics is fake, this of course is completely incorrect. In fact, Trump wants to lose House seats. In midterm years, historically, the president's party usually loses House seats and often loses control of at least one chamber. And this is useful to the system (the bosses of these actors) for multiple reasons, but I'll give you the main one. It is a blame machine & excuse generator. If the president's party keeps a big majority: - They "own" everything. - They have no one to blame when they don't deliver what the base wants (and what they've promised). - The gap between promises vs outcomes becomes too obvious. Even the biggest dummies eventually figure out that the game is rigged. When they lose seats and often lose one chamber: They can say: - "We wanted to do X, but the other side blocked us." - "We're constrained by a divided Congress." The opposition gets partial ownership of austerity, rate hikes, and "discipline". So the regime gets: - A durable excuse for why deep structural things never change. - A way to redirect anger horizontally (left vs right) instead of vertically (people vs system). Midterm losses create narrative cover. It's all fake.

One thing that has been disappointing is watching how Bitcoiners react to endorsements from demons such as Larry Fink, Kevin Warsh, Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump, Scott Bessent, etc. When Kevin Warsh says "Bitcoin does not make me nervous", and that Bitcoin is not a replacement for the dollar, he really means: "Bitcoin is completely captured" and he is correct. Would Kevin Warsh and Scott Bessent say stuff like that if Bitcoin had stealth receive addresses (no address reuse) and sender-receiver coinjoin by default, and if small Bitcoin communities started popping up everywhere and abandoned the dollar? Privacy as a default (no special mode) lowers legal/UX risk for small commerce and defeats trivial chain surveillance that scares merchants. Privacy must be boring and automatic. We see clips of Bitcoiners begging Trump for tax exemption on small payments and the only way we're going to get a tax exemption is by strengthening privacy. Even if they allow for de-minimis tax, it will only be through their captured, full KYC custodians like Square. You probably won't see these demons endorse Monero. And to understand what I mean, you have to look at the Amish who mostly live outside the system. They sell/trade raw milk, honey, meat, fruits, vegetables without pesticides and antibiotics and federal agencies constantly fuck with them "for your safety" (especially the ones who manage to scale). The solutions won't come from the system, the only viable solution is for people to coordinate and stop playing a game they can never win. Are we going to be the retards who HODL themselves into the upcoming AI governance, digital ID, CBDC era from which there is no return for the masses? It certainly looks that way.

Listened to this David Icke interview yesterday (

Bitchute

The ENDGAME Is Unfolding NOW — The SYSTEMS Can’t Hold Much Longer | David Icke

In this wide-ranging podcast, Emilio Ortiz interviews David Icke to explore the deeper patterns shaping human perception, collective behavior, and ...

) and what he said hit hard: "When you open to consciousness beyond the program - what you tend to do is what you think is right. You don't go through this mental gymnastics of "what will people think of me, or say about me, or do about me if I say this", you say and do what you feel is right and you don't make a list of all the consequences of what you believe to be right, you just do it. If you start a list of all the consequences in this world of many things that people do that are necessary to do, you'll reach a point in the list where you'll say: "OK, I'd like to do it, I'd like to do what I know to be right but not that badly.", but if you really mean it then you just do it and whatever consequences come come, because in the end I'm out of here and I'll still be all that is, and that has been, and ever can be. I can handle that."

Quantum computing, like most things coming out of the government, seems like a complete scam. -

theregister

Quantum computers still can

: Computer scientist Peter Gutmann tells The Reg why it

- https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/bollocks.pdf However, Covid also was a complete scam (viruses have never been isolated and don't exist - https://rumble.com/v6rh2e3-there-was-no-covid-virus-how-weve-all-been-duped-by-the-medical-establishme.html ) and it was still used throughout the entire world to further the agenda of the Controllers. As I've shown in these 2 articles, this is also going to be the case for "Quantum Computing": -

Is Quantum Computing a threat to Bitcoin (my take)

Quantum Computing will have a serious impact on Bitcoin even if large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing is impossible (is not cost-effective ...

-

A Quantum-resistance upgrade would be terrible for Bitcoin

A serious quantum-resistance upgrade for Bitcoin would be one of the most complex, politically loaded, and coordination-fragile events in its history.

"Adversarial" countries like US, China, Russia, the EU, UK, Canada are all investing massive amounts of money into quantum computing. And you'll see that most of their "scientists" who work on quantum computing previously worked on nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons don't exist as there is 0 evidence that an atom has ever been split ( ) - so they went from one scam to another. We literally live under a one world government. I'm not trying to fud. Obviously I don't know when they'll decide to pull out the quantum scam, but it's a matter of when, not if. As I cover in this article, a quantum-resistance "upgrade" would be terrible for Bitcoin (and Monero). -

A Quantum-resistance upgrade would be terrible for Bitcoin

A serious quantum-resistance upgrade for Bitcoin would be one of the most complex, politically loaded, and coordination-fragile events in its history.

I have a bad feeling that because it is a more technical topic, we might get a covid-type reaction from the community once the government-funded scientists come out with a paper how quantum computing is going to hack everything in X years. I hope I'm wrong. When I see videos like this 1 from Bitcoin core devs, I kind of lose faith. Obviously, Core is completely captured, but most people will still upgrade to whatever bullshit upgrade Core pushes on auto-pilot. "I believe that privacy is a right and encryption is not a crime. That said, I’m reticent to recommend either Zcash or Monero because they both use elliptic curve cryptography which is vulnerable to quantum computing" There is 0 evidence that Quantum can be engineered to scale cheaply and reliably enough to be broadly useful and this guy is just waiting to get told by NIST (the government) what post-quantum algorithm to migrate to and literally murder the network as MoE.

It is crazy to think that an inflation hedge doesn't exist and cannot exist as the system is designed. By hedging inflation, I don't mean hedging CPI in the official narrative sense, but hedging something closer to: True Cost-of-Living inflation (TCLI): - Housing (owner-equivalent or rent), - Food/energy, - Health/education, - Tax drag & bracket creep, - Plus "mandatory" subscription/rail rents (connectivity, ID, cloud, payments). A universal clean hedge would be a widely available, legally favored asset that: - earns TCLI-tracked return + spread, - can't be haircut or taxed ad hoc, - is safe from FX/capital controls, - is open to the median saver. If that existed: - They couldn't use financial repression to shrink real debt. - Every crisis would require overt default, explicit austerity, or explicit wealth taxes. - Political and legitimacy cost would explode. Therefore, any candidate that approaches this holy grail will: - be taxed, - regulated, - capped in size, - or confined to insiders. That's why: - Real estate gets property tax, zoning, and mortgage dependence. - Gold gets paperization, FX/capital controls and demonization in crises. - Bitcoin gets paperization, KYC moats, surveillance, and MoE friction. Outrunning real inflation is supposed to require speculation, timing and path risk. The system's design enforces it. In other words, inflation hedge is "to what extent does this asset": - participate in inflated nominal flows, - resist being harvested by repression, - survive the policy responses, - and stay convertible into real resources? So a clean, zero-risk, everyone-can-use-it hedge is structurally impossible. As soon as something approaches that, it gets co-opted, taxed, capped, paperized, or regulated into compliance.

Once you start to research the financial system, it really humbles you. You have to start questioning everything you think you know. The official narrative story often diverges from reality. For example, the real cycle is Debt/Liquidity, not Debt/GDP. Almost every "crisis" is: not enough liquidity, at the right points in the plumbing, to roll the existing debt at a politically tolerable price. - "Too much liquidity vs debt" → bubbles. - "Too much debt vs liquidity" → refinancing crisis. In other words, they inflate the currency at will and rug-pull at will. Richard Werner did a good job of illustrating this with his book and documentary "Princes of the Yen" (

Odysee

Princes of the Yen - The Hidden Power of Central Banks_fixed 2014

View on Odysee: Princes of the Yen - The Hidden Power of Central Banks_fixed 2014

), where he documents how the banking cartel allowed Japanese, South Koreans, etc, to lever up with credit (caused inflation), then intentionally pulled liquidity and rug-pulled everyone into a depression. Think of the global system as a giant refinancing conveyor belt: - The belt carries maturing obligations (bonds, loans, repos, margin). - The operators can spray liquidity foam (reserves, facilities, swap lines, fiscal deficits, regulatory relief) to keep things rolling. - If they over-spray, everything slides too easily → bubbles. - If they under-spray, some pile of debt sticks, catches fire, and they have to choose who burns. Debt/Liquidity = how well that belt runs at any given time. Debt/GDP is the fake, official narrative story (it is stock vs flow), whereas Debt/Liquidity is about timing and plumbing. Every financial crisis is basically a roll failure (not enough liquidity to roll the existing debt at tolerable prices). They can under-inject liquidity by however much they want, whenever they want, to rug-pull whoever they want and bail out whoever they want. Each Debt/Liquidity cycle is another Hegelian loop: - Problem: refi wall + under-injection of liquidity → crisis. - Reaction: fear, political pressure. - Solution: more centralized rails (CBDCs, ID, Palantir-style governance OS, tighter collateral rules). We're basically playing a game we can't win and have been for a very long time. If you think in Debt/Liquidity terms, "macro" stops being a blur and becomes a timing overlay on top of a very stable structural direction: more debt, more crises, more patches, more rails. Michael Howell does a good job of illustrating the Debt/Liquidity relationship with this chart. - "Too much liquidity vs debt" → bubbles. - "Too much debt vs liquidity" → refinancing crisis.

At this point, everyone knows about CBDCs (programmable money) which are basically already here via stablecoins. However, not many people talk about tokenization. This video on the Great Taking by David Rogers Webb is a must watch: -

Odysee

The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb

The Great Taking: https://TheGreatTaking.com

Tokenization is very similar to CBDCs and stablecoins. You can treat tokenization as: turning everything important into machine-readable, permissioned, and programmable state. It's not about "democratizing finance". From the Controllers' perspective tokenization is: - "Put all economically and politically relevant claims into a standardized, queryable, enforceable substrate that my AI and rules engines can see and control in real time." That means: - Every claim (cash, bond, equity, fund share, real estate interest, invoice, carbon credit, benefit entitlement, even identity attribute) Has: - a unique ID - a traceable history - an attached policy envelope (who can hold it, where, when, under what rules) - and lives on a ledger that some small set of institutions can gate, pause, or rewrite under color of law. Once that's true, everything else (UX, DeFi theater, "24/7 markets") is just skin. If you wanted the option of a Great Taking (even as a tail): - You'd want everything that matters dematerialized, held by intermediaries, and expressed as tokens on systems controlled by a small institutional set. You'd want clear legal language that: - distinguishes between beneficial and legal ownership, and - puts token-holders behind secured creditors and CCPs (central counterparties). You'd want resolution / bail-in logic encoded in contracts and, over time, in token standards. Tokenization = the technical implementation layer that makes a Great Taking operationally feasible in days, not years. Even if they never push the red button, the option value is enormous from a Controller perspective. You can think of tokenization as: - State capacity up, latency down. They can see more, faster, and push changes directly through code. - Expropriation gets smoother. Instead of chaotic bank runs and court fights, you get parameter changes on tokens. - Going off-grid gets harder. You don't just opt out of banks; you opt out of the graph where ownership lives. - Plausible deniability increases. They can say "the smart contract did it" or "it's in the prospectus" instead of "we ordered a seizure". Tokenization is basically the bridge that makes a "Great Taking" technically trivial if they ever need it. Whether they press that button is a separate probability question — but the incentives to build the option are very clear. If you look into Ethereum, it is evolving into the programmable sandbox for dollar/compliance rails: - Governance testbed for next-gen money/IDs - Volatility sink for speculative energy - Prototype control rail for tokenization / programmable finance - Moral placebo ("bankless", "decentralized") for the ideologically restless Ethereum is like the R&D lab + casino + early beta for future regulated rails. They use Ethereum as a test environment and build their own prod networks separately - e.g. Canton which recently partnered with DTCC, JP Morgan, etc.

You'll own nothing and you'll be happy (predictive programming)

You'll own nothing and you'll be happy (predictive programming)

“Own nothing & be relatively happy” is not sci-fi; it’s one logical extrapolation of already-revealed preferences.

Now is a good time to reflect — how did we get here? How did we get to the point where the Bitcoin community cannot widely agree on what Bitcoin is — is it money, is it arbitrary data storage, a combination, something else. If the Bitcoin community cannot agree on what Bitcoin is, then any change to the protocol is not an attack. You are just optimizing for the "arbitrary data storage" community instead of the Bitcoin as money community. As I wrote, in my last article: "I am not particularly bullish on any community, but I’d be more bullish on a community that has a single goal and some courage than a community that is pulling in ten different directions." How did incentives align for the arbitrary data storage crowd to be so successful? What is the incentive map? Who are the real winners of "Bitcoin as random data substrate"? You might've been shocked by just how many people in the Bitcoin space are in favor of turning Bitcoin into arbitrary data storage, but if you map out the incentives, it all makes sense. To understand the Bitcoin ecosystem, you first have to understand the Coordination tax (

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.

). The Coordination Tax — Three Stacked Systems - S₀ Protocol: consensus rules, Proof-of-Work, 21M. - S₁ Policy: relay/mempool defaults, mining templates, wallet behaviors. - S₂ Perimeter: banks, clouds, app stores, ISPs, payment networks, tax law, PR. Security: S₀ is math; S₁/S₂ are sociotechnical. Tax: recurring human + legal + distribution cost to keep S₁/S₂ aligned with S₀'s ideals. Attacker asymmetry: One cheap perimeter tweak (Acceptable Use Policy line, relay/mempool policy, bank heuristic, pool template) can shift millions. Defenders must hold all fronts, all the time. 1) Who really wins from "Bitcoin as arbitrary data storage" 1.1. Direct economic / career winners (a) Miners (short-term fee maximizers) They get: - Higher average feerates when inscriptions/ordinals spam appear - A "fee market maturing" narrative to backfill halvings They do not price in: - Long-term node attrition - Legal attack surface (CSAM, malware blobs, etc.) - MoE utility loss (not their P&L line item) So miners are structurally biased toward: - "If it pays the fee, it's good." Even if that trades long-run decentralization and legal safety for short-run revenue. (b) Exchanges, custodians, and structured-product shops Ordinals, tokens-on-BTC, inscriptions = new casino SKUs: - More trading pairs - Higher churn, higher spreads, higher fee income They also love: - Arbitrary data narrative → ETF / custodian "clean, non-tainted BTC" premium ("let us deal with the messy chain, you just buy exposure") They win when: - Running a full node gets more complex / risky - Self-custody looks scary / legally exposed - People are nudged to use custodial wallets and ETFs instead (c) VC-funded protocol / infra companies Ordinals/NFT infra, L2s, indexing services, inscription explorers, marketplace APIs, "data on Bitcoin" startups: - Need sustained demand for non-monetary blockspace - Need the narrative that Bitcoin is not just money, but a base for rich "use cases" Many Core-adjacent devs: - Work for, or receive grants from, these entities - Build tools that assume arbitrary-data use is legitimate and permanent So dev + VC + product is one economic cluster, not separate. (d) Core / Core-adjacent devs (funded & entangled) They sit at the S₀/S₁ hinge: Funding: - Salaries from companies with economic exposure to fee markets, ordinals/L2s, infra monetization - Grants from corporate/VC-aligned foundations Career capital: - Future jobs at L1/L2 startups, exchanges, "Bitcoin infra" companies - Social capital in conferences / standards bodies Incentives push toward: - Making Bitcoin look more programmable, more general, less "boring cash chain" - Avoiding any stance that looks like "censorship" or "limitation" → which could threaten future roles in broader crypto/tech So the line: - "If you pay the fee, there is no spam" ...is not a purely moral principle. It protects them from: - Being accused of gatekeeping - Legal responsibility for content - Alienating VC/infra employers who want maximal "optionality" on future use cases 1.2. Status / narrative winners (who win by redefining Bitcoin's "purpose") (a) Thought-leader devs (“protocol neutrality priests”) Psychological incentive: - Be the arbiter of purity: "we don't judge content; we only judge consensus validity" - This role is high status, especially among non-technical Bitcoiners who can't audit the code but trust the persona Social incentive: - You get to ostracize critics as "toxic maxis", "backward", or "anti-innovation" - You create a culture where questioning arbitrary-data policy = taboo This keeps the Overton window narrowed around: - "Free market + neutrality = good. Any resistance is censorship and centralization." Which conveniently sidelines the "Bitcoin is money first" crowd. (b) Influencers, educators, podcast grifters They live on: - New narratives → more engagement - New casino features → more sponsorship deals (exchanges, NFT platforms, L2s) They are rarely: - Running full nodes - Taking the legal risk of infrastructure - Thinking through S₁/S₂ attack surfaces So they amplify: - "Bitcoin NFTs" - "Taproot unleashed innovation" - "If people want to inscribe anime, that's just demand" Even if that makes Bitcoin-as-money weaker, they're making bank on the current hype wave. 1.3. Perimeter winners (S₂ – the real apex predators) Here's where it gets sharp. Once you normalize large arbitrary payloads on-chain, you: Increase the probability that: - CSAM appears - Malware payloads appear - Copyrighted / secret / classified material appears Decrease the plausibility that: - Node operators are "just neutral auditors" - ISPs and clouds can host nodes without legal questions - Politicians can ignore "illegal content on immutable chains" rhetoric That gives S₂ actors: (a) Regulators / law enforcement Narrative ammunition: - "Running a node = distributing illegal material" - "Relaying unlicensed money transmission + contraband data" Policy levers: - Licensing for node operators - Mandatory filters / whitelists / content scanning - Heavy penalties for infra providers who host "non-compliant" nodes (b) Cloud / infra providers Acceptable-Use-Policy leverage: - "No illegal content stored or relayed on our infra" becomes the clause that justifies mass deplatforming Business pivot: - Host only "licensed" nodes (custodians, ETFs, banks) - Cut off hobby / adversarial self-hosted nodes (c) Custodians / ETFs / KYC rails Sales pitch: - "Self-custody = legal and operational minefield. Let us handle the dirty chain; you just buy clean exposure through us." Outcome: - Paperization accelerates - Price discovery moves further off-chain - Self-custody shrinks to a niche "problem segment" that's easy to demonize So S₁ ideological "neutrality" plus S₀ permissionless blockspace becomes, in practice, the perfect S₂ excuse for containment. 2) How can this be so coordinated without a smoking gun? I already told you how: it's the coordination tax vs attacker asymmetry. Defenders (money-first, MoE crowd) need: - Clear doctrine ("Bitcoin is money, not a blob store") - Strong social cohesion - Constant vigilance over every S₁/S₂ tweak Attackers / exploiters / misaligned winners need: - A compelling neutral-sounding narrative ("market will decide") - A handful of influential devs and influencers - A governance culture that treats inaction as "neutrality" Then: - Miners see higher fees → "good" - VC/infra see new products → "good" - Devs see ideology shield + employer satisfaction → "good" - Influencers see new content/sponsorship streams → "good" - Perimeter sees expanding legal surface → "good" No one has to say "let's sabotage Bitcoin's monetary function." They just never prioritize it when it conflicts with: - Revenue - Career capital - Ideological comfort - Regulatory leverage That's emergent capture. 3) Why Core v30-type changes are particularly dangerous I've already written about this here (

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...

) but I'll give you a TL;DR. Mechanically, with looser OP_RETURN policy and witness patterns: - The cost (in dev time + sophistication) to embed problematic payloads falls - The bandwidth and storage footprint for that garbage rises - The plausible deniability of node operators and infra shrinks Resulting effects: 1. Node centralization - More resource requirements (disk, bandwidth, RAM) - Cloud hosting becomes the default → easier to regulate - Fewer hobby / adversarial nodes → surveillance easier 2. Legal wedge - The probability that multiple jurisdictions challenge node legality goes up - Precedent gets set in one place, exported everywhere via "global best practice" 3. Narrative inversion - Before: "Killing Bitcoin would be politically costly." - After: "Regulating unlicensed content distributors & unlicensed transmitters is public safety." That is exactly how you turn a pure S₀ protocol into a S₂-governed commodity plumbing with minimal blowback. 4) Does this mean Bitcoin "fails as money"? Yes, directionally, not instantly. Path looks more like: 1. MoE path is gradually taxed and harassed - Fees volatile and often high - Self-custody more legally risky and UX-hostile - On/off ramps heavily surveilled 2. SoV path is narrowed and paperized - ETFs, trusts, notes, custodians = majority of flows - Self-custody share stagnates or declines - Regulatory capture of "good actors" (KYC wrappers) is complete 3. Monetary identity fragments - No shared mission ("is it money / settlement / blobstore / NFT chain?") - Any attempt at refocusing is framed as "censorship" or "maxi extremism" Bitcoin continues to exist, may even appreciate a lot in fiat terms, but not as a serious mass MoE competitor to CBDCs/stables. It becomes: - High-beta, tightly supervised, partially neutered digital gold with an ETF umbilical cord. That's exactly the scenario I've been writing about: upside in fiat terms, but structurally contained as money. Sadly, many devs are economically and career-wise entwined with the very interests that benefit from making Bitcoin weirder and more attackable. You don't need to assume every Core dev is "captured". You only need to notice: their ideological purity on S₀/S₁ creates perfect leverage for S₂. The coordination tax + incentive asymmetry I described is not paranoia; it's the correct model. S₀ can stay mathematically pristine while S₁/S₂ steer Bitcoin away from being money and into being a tolerated, contained asset class. 5) Fragmented identity = attack surface, not strength As I previously told you: - If the Bitcoin community cannot agree on what Bitcoin is, then any change to the protocol is not an attack. You are just optimizing for the "arbitrary data storage" community instead of the Bitcoin-as-money community. This is key. Hard money needs a simple charter. For money to be robust, it benefits from: - A simple shared story: "This is sound money, optimized to be cheap, robust, self-custodiable cash / reserve asset." - Clear red lines: "We don't turn this into a generic compute/data substrate if it harms monetary function." Instead, Bitcoin today has at least 4 overlapping tribes: 1. Sound money / MoE maximalists 2. Digital gold SoV-only crowd 3. Timechain / ordinals / data canvas crowd 4. Pure decentralization aesthetes ("if it pays the fee, it's fine") When these tribes share the same S₀ but have different objectives, then: Any proposed change is always: - "an optimization for some group" - and never clearly an "attack" agreed by all So the argument becomes: - "You don't own Bitcoin's purpose. If some people want to use it as a media store and pay more, that's just the market." At S₀ this sounds "neutral". At S₁/S₂ it's a huge coordination failure: - Node cost goes up. - Legal risk goes up. - Monetary utility goes down. - Social energy is spent fighting about "what Bitcoin is" instead of defending S₁/S₂. As I wrote in my last article (

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.

): - Bitcoin's survival and adoption depend on whether its most committed users can detect, coordinate, and counter inevitable policy, market, and social attacks. This is what I called the coordination tax: - you spend scarce social/organizational bandwidth on internal civil war while the perimeter moves in. No one needs to say "let's all wreck Bitcoin as money". They just each follow their own incentive gradient, and the aggregate effect is: - 'Bitcoin is increasingly a supervised, high-friction asset with ambiguous purpose, best consumed as paper exposure." That's the S₀ vs S₁/S₂ mismatch. Recall: - S₀ Protocol = math, PoW, 21M, consensus rules. - S₁ Policy = mempool defaults, relay policies, miner templates, wallet UX. - S₂ Perimeter = banks, clouds, app stores, ISPs, payment networks, tax law, PR. Right now, you roughly have: - S₀: still robust, sound, conservative. - S₁: being "opened" in ways that: * prefer arbitrary data (witness discount, OP_RETURN policy changes, tolerant relay) * emphasize "market neutrality" over monetary function - S₂: slowly moving toward: * treating nodes/wallets as regulated endpoints * pushing users toward custodial/KYC interfaces * framing self-hosted infrastructure as risk vectors Coordination tax shows up as: - Defenders needing unanimity and constant vigilance to say "no" at S₁. - Attackers (or just misaligned incentives) needing only a simple majority + a narrative like "we're just letting markets decide". S₀ can be perfectly sound while S₁ and S₂ gently steer the whole thing into a neutered, supervised role. The coordination tax + incentive asymmetry make it very hard for Bitcoin to remain a credible, mass medium of exchange in the face of CBDCs + regulated stables. The direction of travel is: - MoE suppressed, - SoV tolerated (especially via paper), - self-custody increasingly path-of-most-resistance. Bitcoin's ceiling as a civilizational MoE is being capped, not because S₀ is broken, but because S₁/S₂ are being steered. Bitcoin's MoE path is being quietly taxed to death, while its SoV path is being slowly paperized and supervised. S₀ remains mathematically pure; S₁/S₂ do the containment. Am I too pessimistic? I don't think I am. I am just applying incentives > ideals to S₁/S₂ while most of the space stares only at S₀ and quotes the whitepaper. More context on the Coordination Tax:

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.

The fact they allowed this lady to go on podcasts absolutely blows my mind 😂 "I didn't learn economics at all, so I don't know how to talk about Bitcoin from a monetary standpoint." - Bitcoin Core lead maintainer It's all good, as long as you learned about DEI, you are equipped to "touch the protocol" of the most important peer-to-peer electronic cash system in the world. But you didn't really need this lady to state the obvious, you could've just looked at their actions. How Bitcoin's developers are attacking its Sovereign/Monetary use

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...

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.

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.

I've been building a very advanced liquidity tracker and a few other models. It's a lot of work but it's been fun. Basically finance + logic + conspiracy theories. The type of stuff that nuked my Substack from search engines. I was getting search engine traffic up until I wrote my One World Government article 😂 ( https://controlplanecapital.com/p/rivalry-between-countries-is-curated ). Ever since I started doing a deeper dive, I've been shocked to learn how blue-pilled financial analysts are (they are incentivized to be blue-pilled). From time to time, I watch the more popular youtube analysts on 2-2.5 speed and man, they are absolutely clueless, or at least pretend to be. Even the darlings of Bitcoiners — most are absolutely clueless. Often, when they are right, they are right for the wrong reasons (assuming the stated reasons are what they believe in).

Governments love humiliation tests. A humiliation test is a small, pointless obedience drill that trains you to nod first, think later. It's not about the content. It's about proving the system can make you do or say something you know is dumb, petty, or disproportionate — and you'll do it anyway. 1) What humiliation tests buy the system A) Dominance proof: "If I can make you do something obviously unnecessary, I know you're safe for the serious stuff". B) Sorting mechanism. Humiliation tests are filters: - People who refuse: marked as "difficult", "non-compliant", "not a culture fit". - People who swallow it: marked as "safe", promotable, eligible for sensitive roles. No need for ideology diagnostics; a few small, dumb asks tell the system who will bend when it matters. C) Precedent for escalation. Once you've complied with something you privately saw as bullshit, the system has: - A precedent: "You agreed before; this is just more of the same". - A leverage point: your prior compliance can be used to shame future hesitation. 2) What it does inside your head Humiliation tests weaponize cognitive dissonance: 1. You do the thing (sign, chant, click, recite) because saying no is costly in the moment. 2. You feel the internal conflict: "That was dumb / exaggerated / dishonest". 3. To reduce that tension, your brain updates the story: - "Maybe it’s not that bad". - "Maybe they're right". - "I'm not the kind of person who just submits for no reason, so this must be reasonable". You move from "I complied under pressure" to "I basically agree" to protect your self-image. Each petty concession burns your doubt and rewrites your narrative a bit more in their favor. Humiliation tests are small, symbolic and public. Over time, the people remaining in key positions are those who've repeatedly signaled: - "I will override my own judgment and self-respect to keep my place in the system". That's what the system wanted all along. When something feels petty, compulsory, and performative, assume it's not about the surface issue. Ask: - "What larger narrative am I validating by doing this?" - "What future request does this make harder for me to refuse?" - "If I comply now, what will my next self be forced to defend, to avoid admitting I caved here?" That's the real permission you're being asked to grant.

Defaults decide outcomes. They are soft law. Most people live inside them and call it "choice". At scale, safety/ease beats sovereignty unless the latter is defaulted into UX. Opt-out vs. opt-in can 5–10x adoption with no persuasion. This is how governments and platforms steer behavior at scale. Defaults lower cognitive tax and social risk — so people call them "convenient" while locking into long-term paths (payments, news feeds, storage, wallets). He who sets the defaults: - defines what "normal" looks like, - defines what "consent" is presumed to be, - defines who has to spend effort and social capital to deviate. For most people, "My preference" = "whatever the default made least painful". Defaults are the main interface of coercion that still looks voluntary. Governments and platforms don't need to ban competitors; they just set defaults so that exiting them is slow, confusing, or socially suspicious. If you care about real agency, treat every default as a deliberate bet against you, unless proven otherwise. Assume defaults serve: - the platform's revenue, - the state's control and stability goals, - and only incidentally your convenience. Design your own personal defaults instead of accepting whatever someone selected for you. If you're not actively setting or resisting defaults, you're not "choosing", you're being routed.

In one of Bitcoin Mechanic's videos, he said "Nothing survives the normie, and the normie is coming" Fuck dude, this is so true 😂