GM!
With all the talk about "AI changing everything" (and boring drama about bitcoin price, *yawn*), it's good to read up on some fundamentals. I stumbled upon this great post about the deeper role of social media, which got me thinking about Nostr:
https://justincscott.com/how-to-get-your-content-in-front-of-millions/
I'll just pick out this quote:
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We are living through a second renaissance.
This era will be looked back on as a golden age of innovation, creation, and development.
No human in all of history has had the kind of advantage you have in this moment.
It’s never been easier or more accessible.
Don’t waste it.
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The whole post is definitely worth reading, and helped me be more mindful of my use of social media. I'm also trying to make the jump from (semi-)mindless consumption to using this more as a tool of creation.
Keep in mind the importance of Slow & Steady, Proof of Work and Low Time Preference!
Jaakko Vazha-Kareli
jaakko@nostr.sovereignlanding.com
npub12r6q...sncq
Founder of Sovereign Landing (home finding service for location independent people) and the author of https://www.sovereignlanding.com/GTFO-Handbook/
Notes (5)
Europe is taken over by a suicide cult
I know. It sounds crazy. A suicide cult huh? Isn't that a bit much?
I think it explains a lot though...
This "cult" isn't something that anyone asked for. It's not a traditional cult with a leader who "designed it".
Rather, it is an emergent phenomenon - just an inevitable end result of multiple different extremely harmful ideas.
These ideas are so disconnected from reality, that when you apply them in practice, the end result is slow death and destruction.
It is exactly what happened with the Soviet Union.
Before Gorbachev died, he said that the EU resembles Soviet Union more and more every day.
You need to have some kind of a connection with base reality - common sense!
When this alignment with reality gets out of whack, the more you act, the farther away you drift from anything you actually wish for.
It's the definition of crazy.
That's exactly what's going on in Europe.
A slow, unintended cultural and societal suicide that nobody really wants to happen, but which will keep happening until people understand how & why things went wrong.
If they don't get this, things will keep going downhill, no matter what the politicians try to do.
When I say "nobody wants this to happen", I mean that nobody wants the end result of what this all will lead to (the slow death).
The problem is that European people have such a deep belief in the basic tenets of the suicide cult that they WANT to act in ways that keeps that slow suicide going.
What are these suicidal ideas exactly? There are many, but I'll list the main ones.
-Because CO2 is bad, all energy use is bad
-All cultures and people are the same
-When you import foreign cultures, they will automatically assimilate
-The state is the source of all welfare
There is also a fifth problem, one that isn't an idea, but rather a lack of understanding: the money is deeply broken.
I'm not just talking about the Euro, but rather the fiat financial system in general.
When something can't go on forever, it will stop - sooner or later. The fiat financial system is so unsustainable and has gone on for so long, that we are in the "later" phase.
This is a global problem, but one that Europe is very ill-equipped to meet.
How has Europe gone this far downhill? Again, for many different reasons, but mainly because of the "democratic short-circuit".
For democracy to function well even in theory, it would need to rely on a well-educated populace and a state-independent media.
We have neither: the legacy media is effectively a state propaganda machine.
The population is forced through government schools where they are taught that the state is the source of all welfare, and that entrepreneurship is something complicated, foreign and scary.
Of course that's rarely, if ever, said out loud directly.
Instead, those beliefs are implicit in the education plan and the structure of the whole system.
It's just what you take for granted after you go through that machine - and basically everyone does.
All of the above harmful ideas are so deeply ingrained in the population of Europe that any kind of change is far from obvious.
While the rest of the world is moving forward to a better future, Europe is loudly demanding to go down with slow ideological and cultural suicide.
Not everyone in Europe thinks that way, but too many do.
I'm optimistic that there are solutions, but I'm quite pessimistic about the short / medium-term outlook.
How can we solve this? I have some ideas coming in a later post. What are your thoughts on this?
I know. It sounds crazy. A suicide cult huh? Isn't that a bit much?
I think it explains a lot though...
This "cult" isn't something that anyone asked for. It's not a traditional cult with a leader who "designed it".
Rather, it is an emergent phenomenon - just an inevitable end result of multiple different extremely harmful ideas.
These ideas are so disconnected from reality, that when you apply them in practice, the end result is slow death and destruction.
It is exactly what happened with the Soviet Union.
Before Gorbachev died, he said that the EU resembles Soviet Union more and more every day.
You need to have some kind of a connection with base reality - common sense!
When this alignment with reality gets out of whack, the more you act, the farther away you drift from anything you actually wish for.
It's the definition of crazy.
That's exactly what's going on in Europe.
A slow, unintended cultural and societal suicide that nobody really wants to happen, but which will keep happening until people understand how & why things went wrong.
If they don't get this, things will keep going downhill, no matter what the politicians try to do.
When I say "nobody wants this to happen", I mean that nobody wants the end result of what this all will lead to (the slow death).
The problem is that European people have such a deep belief in the basic tenets of the suicide cult that they WANT to act in ways that keeps that slow suicide going.
What are these suicidal ideas exactly? There are many, but I'll list the main ones.
-Because CO2 is bad, all energy use is bad
-All cultures and people are the same
-When you import foreign cultures, they will automatically assimilate
-The state is the source of all welfare
There is also a fifth problem, one that isn't an idea, but rather a lack of understanding: the money is deeply broken.
I'm not just talking about the Euro, but rather the fiat financial system in general.
When something can't go on forever, it will stop - sooner or later. The fiat financial system is so unsustainable and has gone on for so long, that we are in the "later" phase.
This is a global problem, but one that Europe is very ill-equipped to meet.
How has Europe gone this far downhill? Again, for many different reasons, but mainly because of the "democratic short-circuit".
For democracy to function well even in theory, it would need to rely on a well-educated populace and a state-independent media.
We have neither: the legacy media is effectively a state propaganda machine.
The population is forced through government schools where they are taught that the state is the source of all welfare, and that entrepreneurship is something complicated, foreign and scary.
Of course that's rarely, if ever, said out loud directly.
Instead, those beliefs are implicit in the education plan and the structure of the whole system.
It's just what you take for granted after you go through that machine - and basically everyone does.
All of the above harmful ideas are so deeply ingrained in the population of Europe that any kind of change is far from obvious.
While the rest of the world is moving forward to a better future, Europe is loudly demanding to go down with slow ideological and cultural suicide.
Not everyone in Europe thinks that way, but too many do.
I'm optimistic that there are solutions, but I'm quite pessimistic about the short / medium-term outlook.
How can we solve this? I have some ideas coming in a later post. What are your thoughts on this?Probably not many people are aware of this, but bitcoin (lightning) payments are just now starting to be on par with credit card payments.
The biggest hurdle until now has been that bitcoin doesn't natively support pull payments, which has made otherwise basic things like subscription payments impossible.
nostr:nprofile1qqsyv47lazt9h6ycp2fsw270khje5egjgsrdkrupjg27u796g7f5k0s8jq7y6 has recently solved this with ZapPlanner: https://zapplanner.albylabs.com/
It allows merchants to request recurring payments from an NWC compatible wallet. The user doesn't have to accept every payment as long as they are within the budget set by the user originally when accepting the subscription.
This alone is huge!
Right now, even bitcoin services and apps such as nostr:npub1v5ufyh4lkeslgxxcclg8f0hzazhaw7rsrhvfquxzm2fk64c72hps45n0v5 are only offering their subscriptions on credit cards because ZapPlanner or nothing like it used to exist (the Fountain guys are already looking into this).
However, the payment amounts are defined in sats, and bitcoin isn't yet a unit of account. This limits the usefulness of this otherwise great system, as the sat amounts will need adjusting as the purchasing power of bitcoin goes up.
Alby itself has already ran into this problem once, as there was Nostr drama about their sat-defined subscription prices getting out of hand when we suddenly got near $100k...
It would be great to be able to define the payment amount in fiat and just do the fiat/sat conversion on the fly. I'm hoping this gets solved somehow.
There is some discussion in GitHub on this topic: https://github.com/getAlby/ZapPlanner/issues/44
To speed things up, I wrote this comment there:
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From a user perspective, if/when they can trust that the sat amount will be defined by the fiat price, higher budget shouldn't be an issue.
There are a couple of issues though: flash crashes (or glitches with the price feed), and short-term dips.
Flash crashes could be solved by using average prices instead of spot prices (averaging from multiple exchanges might not be enough, as arbitrage bots can temporarily spread the crashes from one exchange to others).
If the fiat amount was defined by an average bitcoin price, for example "previous 24h average", then flash crashes would have no effect. Dips would still matter, and it might be annoying if a large monthly subscription hits on a temporary low dip day.
Therefore, I think it would be great to have a "fiat price dollar cost average" as a pricing option. Using a monthly average for monthly subscriptions would solve both flash crashes and short-term dips.
This would mean having three different ways to calculate the sat amount:
1. Spot price according to whatever source (Dangerous! At least some basic sanity checks should be in place.)
2. Short-term average, let's say the previous 24 hours
3. Long-term average price, probably defined by the subscription length, ie. the previous months average price
Having the user decide between these different options is not a great user experience. This adds friction when compared to credit card payments: users don't need to think about these things.
Bitcoin is different though and SOME choice needs to be made. Spot is simple but not great. I think maybe the best option would be for the merchant to suggest a default (with perhaps the subscription length average being the default?), and this could be overridden by the user if they so wish.
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Long post, I know, sorry... any thoughts on how you would like to see automatic sat/fiat conversion to work with subscriptions? :)
Is now a good time to buy bitcoin?
Well, you guys in Nostr probably already know this stuff, but I'll still post this as a pointer for newbies!
Before anything else, you should understand the main reason why bitcoin exists in the first place:
The money is broken.
What you think of as "money" (fiat money), is actually a clever scheme to quietly rob you of your purchasing power - and purchasing power is the whole point of having money in the first place!
You don't want money for the sake of having money, you want the things that money will buy you. Money is just an option to get other stuff later.
Fiat money (dollars, euros etc) buys you ever less. I'm sure by now you've noticed this!
Money is half of every trade, and it being broken affects everything in our societies negatively. We can fix it - but it is up to each individual.
You need to put on your own oxygen mask first. Nobody's coming to put it on for you.
The stock market is also broken
While the causation here is quite complex, the correlation is extremely clear and tells you everything you need to know:
The stock market as a whole isn't going up in purchasing power - it only goes up with the amount of money that is printed.
In other words, you can maintain your purchasing power by investing in stocks. That's essentially saving, not investing - but you do still have to carry the risk of owning those companies, many of which are zombie companies.
Savers shouldn't have to suffer that risk!
What about bonds?
If you "invest" in government paper (bonds), you can count on your purchasing power getting diluted.
The governments are essentially bankrupt, and are mathematically unable to do anything else than to pay you less in purchasing power than what you originally gave them. Not a great trade!
Real estate?
This is a longer story, but the base logic is the same as with stocks: you can perhaps maintain your purchasing power, but carry risks that savers shouldn't have to think about.
Real estate is more often saving than investing.
Well, is now a good time to buy bitcoin?
The thing is that nobody can answer that for you - not necessarily because there wouldn't be an answer, but because of an ironclad rule I've observed over the last 10 years:
Those who do understand bitcoin (at least well enough), can and do hold onto it and are able to maintain and increase their purchasing power.
Those who don't understand bitcoin, are unable to hold onto it and get burned by the volatility: price goes temporarily down after they buy, they panic and sell at a loss, and blame whoever convinced them to buy.
There are very little exceptions to this rule, so you just have to study bitcoin to understand it. Don't just "ape in".
Asking people to buy it before they are mentally ready for the ride is a recipe for disaster, so I won't do that.
You can earn sats through zaps right here in Nostr - that's the best way to get bitcoin!
This post was a short version of my blog post, in which I answer the question:
"If the government can print money, why do you need to pay taxes?"
...among other important things. You might want to read it!
https://www.sovereignlanding.com/high-future-preference/is-it-time-to-buy-bitcoin-ultimate-answer/
Well, you guys in Nostr probably already know this stuff, but I'll still post this as a pointer for newbies!
Before anything else, you should understand the main reason why bitcoin exists in the first place:
The money is broken.
What you think of as "money" (fiat money), is actually a clever scheme to quietly rob you of your purchasing power - and purchasing power is the whole point of having money in the first place!
You don't want money for the sake of having money, you want the things that money will buy you. Money is just an option to get other stuff later.
Fiat money (dollars, euros etc) buys you ever less. I'm sure by now you've noticed this!
Money is half of every trade, and it being broken affects everything in our societies negatively. We can fix it - but it is up to each individual.
You need to put on your own oxygen mask first. Nobody's coming to put it on for you.
The stock market is also broken
While the causation here is quite complex, the correlation is extremely clear and tells you everything you need to know:
The stock market as a whole isn't going up in purchasing power - it only goes up with the amount of money that is printed.
In other words, you can maintain your purchasing power by investing in stocks. That's essentially saving, not investing - but you do still have to carry the risk of owning those companies, many of which are zombie companies.
Savers shouldn't have to suffer that risk!
What about bonds?
If you "invest" in government paper (bonds), you can count on your purchasing power getting diluted.
The governments are essentially bankrupt, and are mathematically unable to do anything else than to pay you less in purchasing power than what you originally gave them. Not a great trade!
Real estate?
This is a longer story, but the base logic is the same as with stocks: you can perhaps maintain your purchasing power, but carry risks that savers shouldn't have to think about.
Real estate is more often saving than investing.
Well, is now a good time to buy bitcoin?
The thing is that nobody can answer that for you - not necessarily because there wouldn't be an answer, but because of an ironclad rule I've observed over the last 10 years:
Those who do understand bitcoin (at least well enough), can and do hold onto it and are able to maintain and increase their purchasing power.
Those who don't understand bitcoin, are unable to hold onto it and get burned by the volatility: price goes temporarily down after they buy, they panic and sell at a loss, and blame whoever convinced them to buy.
There are very little exceptions to this rule, so you just have to study bitcoin to understand it. Don't just "ape in".
Asking people to buy it before they are mentally ready for the ride is a recipe for disaster, so I won't do that.
You can earn sats through zaps right here in Nostr - that's the best way to get bitcoin!
This post was a short version of my blog post, in which I answer the question:
"If the government can print money, why do you need to pay taxes?"
...among other important things. You might want to read it!
https://www.sovereignlanding.com/high-future-preference/is-it-time-to-buy-bitcoin-ultimate-answer/A dollar buys less than a 1000 sats... sat/cent parity next!
After that, hopefully some more meaningful measurement of purchasing power?
After that, hopefully some more meaningful measurement of purchasing power?