pv ☀️ I am happy I joined you guys last December and at Nostrica; before the arrival of the trolls, the impersonators, and the engagement farmers. I just noticed (😂) I have become too trusting on here, chatting to impersonators.

TL;DR - I will return to #Bitcoin at the end of the post. I am reading ["The Smartest Guys in the Room"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room_(book)) by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, first published in 2003. It is exceptionally well written and provides detailed insights into the successes and failures of a mega-corporation. Although the book is twenty years old, it offers valuable guidance for today's the business and political world. One of my key messages is that "being smart" can be seen as "cool" at one time and then quickly flip to being seen as abusive and arrogant. If, for example, you are successfully trading against other professionals and making a sizable profit, that is seen as competent. If you are trading against the public (i.e., a significant part of the population) and making a thousand times more profit, this can become a PR catastrophe. That is why I would never invest in water or oxygen (if that was already a business). You simply cannot say "no" to a customer who needs the product and does not have the funds to pay for it. Therefore, there can never be a genuinely free market. The second key message of the book is that there is no long-term potential in a company that studies and uses the rules, regulations, and laws to game it. The following sentence summarizes that aspect of the book well: "Enron borrowed from the future until there was nothing left to borrow." While, according to the book, the company was transparent about its accounting practices, it was clear (to me) that the goal was not to produce a fair representation of the state of affairs but rather to increase the share price. Over one or two decades, the public's opinion about what is fair, ethical, and moral can change significantly. For long-term endeavors, more is needed than to be legal. To be safe, they also have to be ethically and morally clean. In this respect, #Bitcoin is unique. Its distribution is fair and broad. While it was unavoidable that its founder accumulated a significant stack before other miners started to provide network security, they have never moved those coins. Even if Satoshi Nakamoto appeared and spent some of those coins, the distribution would still be fairer than for any other tokens as I (or anyone else) could have started mining almost immediately after the publication of the software. I am bullish on #Bitcoin.

pv ☀️

Think for yourself, don't be "[...] the plankton for Wall Stree's whales" - Matthew Piepenburg

What is the meaning of a zap for me? Investment? Sometimes. Unconditional support of life: most of the time 🍀🤙🏻

Are you worried about the #Bitcoin price or the silly political motions against it? Do you think you own too little? Give it two halfing cycles. You’ll be fully on the Bitcoin standard by then where price, political schenanigans, and fiat opinions will have faded into the background.

pv

Don’t be sad that you did not buy more #Bitcoin yesterday or that the USD fx has gone down. Be proud you did not physically lose any sats. Take care of your seed phrases. Use signing devices (formerly known as hardware wallets)

“What does it mean if, in our democratic system, you are either in power or in prison” - freely quoted from Izabella Kaminska @ 33:33 in this interesting episode on democracy and journalism #[0] -

Fountain

Fountain

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pv

Fantastisch geschrieben, hoch aktuelle und umfassend. "Die Orange Pille" ist eines der besten Bücher, die ich über Bitcoin gelesen habe (und bestimmt das beste in Deutscher Sprache). Ich habe gleich ein Duzend weitere bestellt, um einige Freunde zu versorgen 💯 -

Amazon

Amazon

Yes, everything will get cheaper when measured in #Bitcoin. But just because we understood Bitcoin early does not mean everything else will follow automatically. Don't forget to use that solid Bitcoin foundation to start building out other vital 🍀 areas of your life and help others 🫂 on the way.

„A bank deposit, especially above 100k EUR in Europe or above 250k USD in the US, is nothing else than an unsecured loan to a bank.“ - Alfonso Peccatiello,

Fountain

Fountain

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pv ☀️

I am missing Jack Mallers over here

X (formerly Twitter)

Ξmiliano Mendez (@EmilianoMendez) on X

Jack Mallers, Strike’s CEO goes to CNBC to talk about #bitcoin https://t.co/qSb8neHOW8

It is a characteristic of our time that people are incentivized to be locked in their camps. Imagine a central banker talking about the virtues of #Bitcoin (e.g., "unhacked in 14 years", "deterministic supply," or "instant and "inexpensive transactions via lightning"). Would you not start to pay attention to his/her non-Bitcoin statement?