Frank, like all other Goldbugs, misses step 2.5 Step 1…print money to buy gold Step 2…revalue gold to a much higher price Step 2.5…You’ve just made all of your competitors like China, Russia, India etc who are sitting on a shitton of gold in their vaults, let alone massive untapped deposits, that much wealthier The only way a gold revaluation works is to do it, and then immediately dump it and pump the Bitcoin stack. First half you do super loud, second part as quiet as possible. Step 3 then becomes peg to #Bitcoin Personally I don’t want this to happen and I still thinks odds are low, but if a gold revaluation does happen in the next 12-18 months then this is how I expect it to play out. Goldbugs will mock Bitcoiners and feel vindicated for a few weeks/months and then get massively rugged as it’s value collapses to that of industrial use commodity and Bitcoin moons permanently. The US wants to dominate the global (as much of the globe as possible at least) financial system and they’re simply not positioned to do that with gold, they don’t have nearly enough control, and they’re going to pull back from policing the entire world making it far riskier for gold-backed international trade. That last point is the biggest thing everyone ignores - they project the current status quo into the new scenario and fail to account for the US Navy now only protecting the US security sphere (those under the dollar umbrella) rather than the whole globe, and the amount of piracy that would ensue.

Everyone have fun at Stablecoin 2025? h/t @Lysander

Lightning payments on Square PoS terminals have been announced, rolling out to all Users in 2026 “subject to applicable regulatory approvals”.

Block to roll out bitcoin payments on Square

Block to roll out bitcoin payments on Square

BTC Inc. will be the first to trial new payments feature at Bitcoin Las Vegas 2025

View quoted note →

Full video of Saylor’s nonsense answer for why Microstrategy won’t publish Proof of Reserves. Every time he opens his mouth of late, he’s giving more reason for Bitcoiners to be skeptical. It might fly with financebros, it won’t with anyone who has studied #Bitcoin. View quoted note →

This true @Edward Snowden ? http://www.salem-news.com/articles/january152014/alien-connection.php

An excellent visualisation of the #AUStriches #HousingPonzi No idea when the music stops. Buyers have to come from somewhere and it’s clear that is not average Australians any more.

Everywhere power structures are disrupted, the ensuing vacuum seems to result in massive unintended consequences. Is it better the devil you know? Or the lack of accountability allowing even greater degeneracy?

English allows a degree of precision and granularity unrivalled in other languages I’ve studied, and actually has a fairly high rate of compression in comparison too. There’s a reason it became the most popular language globally and it’s not just “muh colonialism”; it’s the most useful tool for the job that the most people can agree on.

Anyone remember the letsrollforums? #asknostr

My latest review for #bookstr is Desmet’s “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”. This has been on my list since Covid when it was frequently referenced by those trying to explain the collective insanity societies were seemingly going through, it’s where Robert Malone got “Mass Formation Psychosis” from. It starts off interesting with some psychological analysis of what Desmet calls “mechanical ideology” in which humans degenerated into dogma and blind belief through the enlightenment, which led to social isolation as people were disconnected from community and meaning through work, and how science became ideology despite enormous evidence of incorrectness. And then once he’s set things up through the first 5 chapters and begins his explanations in chapter 6 “The Rise of the Masses”, things fall apart. Everything Desmet is describing is statism but he is never able to put his finger on that. He constantly refers to “Nazism and Stalinism” as his examples of the masses being overcome with this totalitarian streak which anyone with an interest in history will just see as weak. Lenin isn’t mentioned once, nor Mao. China’s only mention is in the context of Covid. There’s nothing on pretty much any other totalitarianism other than examples from Nazi Germany and the Soviets under Stalin. He goes from dismissing scientism and making a strong case for not trusting peer reviewed studies due to the amount of inaccuracies, underproduceability, and outright fraud, to invoking points like “the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that one in five people worldwide has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder” when he wants to support his own arguments (like how TF can you rely on that kind of point, how would the WHO possibly know?). I found myself constantly waiting for the crescendo, for the examinations of other regimes and deeper insights into how they bought out the worst in people. Instead I had to slog my way through a heavy reliance on Hannah Arendt quotes, and other than some random facts unrelated to the title theme, came away with very little from this book. The worst book I’ve read this year, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. You’d get more value out of listening to Dan Carlin or Darryl Cooper putting themselves in other people’s shoes than this third hand account which basically explains nothing.

Estimated expected value of each #poker hand when open-raising to 2.5 big blinds from the Cutoff. I play way too many Kings 😂