#Bitcoin is on sale! Why am I happy about this? It means I can keep growing my stack. It means my final wealth isn’t locked in yet. You see, today’s price is not unexpected. How does one expect this price? Extrapolation…it works well, at least for a while. How to extrapolate Bitcoin price? Get bitcoin price data, put it in a spreadsheet, fit curve to price…you’ll find power law models fit best. To refine this in to a “support” or price “floor” model, just eyeball delete bitcoin mania prices…you can delete data points along the width of points above ½ or ¾ max if you want to be rigorous… You’ll get an equation for bitcoin price as a function of date. If you use data from 2011-2016 and repeat this analysis and then repeat again for 2011-2017, 2011-2018, etc, all your equations will be remarkably similar in price prediction for today. Who would have thought that when bitcoin was $600 you could make an equation that was even close to predicting its price a decade later using prior price data alone? Anyhow, here are my back up the truck and load up on bitcoin prices each year in January for the next several years…this model will be less and less accurate, I suspect, as time goes on, but it can be refreshed with new data if necessary or one can just use the model less rigidly… I wish I could save an AI prompt to replicate this analysis and share it as a link…

Here’s a good #AI skills test for you to practice, and it’ll teach you something about #bitcoin price history. And might make you rethink how you stack… (Adapted from a slam post on nostr) Pick a number between 1 and 28 and get monthly price data for bitcoin on that day of the month going as far back as you can and up through today..then open excel, plot it, and fit a power law curve to the data (feel free to try fitting literally any other type of curve to the data, it won’t fit as well)…and have excel report the equation and R^2… If you want to manually delete periods of Bitcoin price mania and run the analysis again, you’ll see the price prediction drop (more intercept than slope) but the R^2 goes up. In fact, the equation is a near perfect fit for the last 9 years in log-log space. Ok, so now that I’ve told you how to generate a formula for bitcoin price as a function of date, you can repeat the process taking data from the beginning to 2016, and then 2017, and then 2018, etc…what you’ll see is these equations are remarkably similar and all do a surprisingly good job of predicting bitcoin price today…literally many years in advance… Should bitcoin be closer to $55,000 today than $150,000? The math says yes. But back when bitcoin was $600 in 2016, predicting price would be $55,000 in 2026 sounded insane. But here we are.

Finally, something blue haired Karen’s and conservatives can agree on: we need to decrease government power. The recently created federal department called ICE (it’s about 20 years old) is somewhat unique among US law enforcement agencies. How so? ICE is largely tasked with non-criminal “administrative” law violations. For these types of violations, because they are not criminal, you don’t get all those rights that come with due process… Congress passed the Posse Commitatus act in 1878, prohibiting the army from being used to enforce domestic law. It also forbids the executive branch to commandeer local law enforcement to enforce federal law. This act was expanded in 1950 to include the Air Force. And rather quietly again in early 2021 to include the navy, marines, and space force. While I’m no fan of illegal immigration of bad people, I’m happy to see newly expanded government powers scaled back.

Here’s an advantage of bip110: by precluding long script hashes, the risk of very hard to verify blocks that could be made using long standing non-data embedding bugs will go away (these take hours to verify but have never happened). I have heard it said that this will cripple bitcoin functionality (ie, you won’t be able to do stuff like use key a and key b if it’s only been 3 months or less otherwise after three months either key a or key b or key c can be used)…but I don’t think that’s true…the script hash is always of fixed length…that’s half the point of a hash! But yeah, for cool tricks like the degrading multisig above the script will be long and long scripts could just as easily be used to stuff data that only gets revealed upon spending the output, not creating it… But I don’t see a downside to limiting script hash length…but I’m not qualified to declare this to definitively be true.

We should be happy that bitcoin is cheaper. Don’t be butt hurt about the fact that if you would have waited 90 days to buy Bitcoin you’d have 50% more. You’re lucky to have as much as you do already! And this is a long game. Did you think you could replace the world financial system and it would be a piece of cake? This dip is nothing. If you’ve been stacking for more than a year, don’t cry about unrealized gains that have decreased…the fact is you didn’t sell before is because you wanted the insurance of bitcoin, not the payout…so buy more while it’s cheap!

Someday I’d love to meet a bip-110 supporter in real life to discuss the issue…I see the core 30 position as obviously the “correct” one (modulo implementation/communication nits)… It is too easy for people to be tribal and caveman-brained when interacting with text only…but genuine debate in front of a live person is so much easier to remain thoughtful and engaged. I would love to hear a legit argument against core 30 relay changes (that remain valid in the long run; obviously there was no rush to rip off the 🩹, but it was thought preferable to making small changes periodically, which is debatable). But I only want to hear it from someone who would be willing to be proven wrong…because everyone entering any debate at any time should be willing to be proven wrong!