A short review of a short book for #bookstr This time, “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. Consider this a “replacement” for Desmet’s widely acclaimed “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” which I read and reviewed earlier this year: View quoted note → Desmet’s book remains the worst I’ve read this year. This book does a much better job of explaining that psychology - how it works, why it works, on whom, and by what tactics. It’s all rather simple but when you combine with Le Bon’s “The Crowd”, you can understand why and how that is the case. You could knock this over in less than 2 hours and would undoubtedly come away with a better understanding of how and why totalitarianism works after that than slogging through Desmet’s love letter to Hannah Arendt.

The reality of a 50 year mortgage is disgusting. 30 years to obtain just 25% equity in your home is absurd. You’ll be sacrificing your most productive years from ~25-55 just to own your living room, all whilst the Government takes half your income and redistributes it to their friends and pets who ensure they stay in power and your QoL continues going down. #Bitcoin adoption might seem slow but young people are going to see through the real estate ponzi and opt out of being liquidity for Boomers when they understand just how screwed they are locking in to this system.

Chinese cars are so far ahead of the rest of the world and most people have no idea it even happened. People take time to update their mental models of the world but it will happen. In July we flew via Kuala Lumpur. They had a special service of BMW i7s to transfer between terminals which we took. It was nice. But I’ve since seen 10 cars in #Vietnam that were nicer, all from China (Vietnamese cars aren’t there yet). It takes time for preferences to change but Germany is already dead, as is the rest of Europe bar supercars, and the US won’t be far behind. Japan might survive with Toyota, Worst Korea is 50/50. China is going to eat all their lunches unless protectionism makes the biggest comeback of all time and even then, you’ll likely pay more to get the Chinese car if you can and are shopping for bang-for-buck because they’re just miles ahead of Western car tech. View quoted note →

When did Communism stop being about “the working class” and instead become solely the domain of “the sit on their arse class” who want everyone else’s productivity redistributed to them for being good little online commie evangelists? It’s too ironic to believe.

The “Mag 7” make up so much of the US stock market, which makes up so much of the US “economy” and people’s wealth and pensions, that a backstop at minimum just to keep the skids greased for funding is quite possible IMHO. But once there’s a backstop in place, expect the circular dealing and other shenanigans to ramp massively and blow up the bubble - would be the perfect catalyst to bust this cycle. View quoted note →

Looks like the Chinese have been reading my notes. View quoted note →

Up next for #bookstr is Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”. An excellent book from which I took a great deal. Le Bon’s writing from 130 years ago was incredibly prescient, foreseeing how socialism and populism would be wielded to ultimately erode Western societies. I want to relay some specific points that made this such a worthwhile read. First, Le Bon discusses how concepts in language can be wielded to focus a crowd toward particular ends. He identifies words like “democracy,” “liberty,” and “freedom” which, being somewhat nebulous, allow crowds to project their own meanings onto movements. He also notes how these words mean completely different things in different epochs, and how easy it is to project our present understanding onto the past when reading, thus arriving at flawed interpretations. His discussion of “race” should be understood in this context, and I found it incredibly compelling - acknowledging the cultural inheritance from our ancestors and how that shapes each people as much as any other factor. This is the kind of pragmatism we rarely find in modern discourse; it’s partly how and why we ignore the entire narrative of the West being “the good guys” in the post-WWII consensus. Le Bon categorises crowd beliefs into two overarching types: great permanent beliefs (e.g., feudalism, Christianity, and Protestantism) and transitory opinions, which are generally born and die within a lifetime. I found this particularly interesting as he identifies not only the difficulty of implanting the former but also what it takes for them to be uprooted. Finally, his discussion of “Prestige,” to which he dedicates Chapter III, was the highlight for me. Incredibly perceptive and set my mind racing down numerous rabbit holes including what “prestige” could and should mean amongst #Bitcoiners I’m glad I finally got around to this one. It’s not a long book, and while it covers many metaphysical ideas, it does so in a succinct and compelling way.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reels off predicted words from Polymarket, where USDC is used to bet on these outcomes, on latest earnings call. USDC’s parent company Circle, is part-owned by Coinbase..

Personally I like the Hollywood version better, it melted an entire generation’s minds and made them completely retarded such that they’d never question any slop fed to them, no matter how ridiculous. View quoted note →

Go go gadget fork!

#Bitcoiners should meme this narrative - Trump is Satoshi. He will pump it to a $Billion, and all the worst people will have fun staying poor rejecting #Bitcoin because of his association with it. View quoted note →

Good luck with your banh mi’s #AUStriches. They cost $1 Dollarydoo here in #Vietnam for a basic one, $2 for a good one, or $5 if you want to go gourmet like Banh Mi Huynh Hoa. Aus could easily still attract Vietnamese labour, but they’ll never be able to afford to buy out existing owners or open a new bakery nowadays; completely inhospitable to small business. View quoted note →

THE THREE TECHNOLOGIES WHICH MADE US HUMAN Language, money, and religion are humanity’s 3 most important technologies. Together, they work to solve the same fundamental scaling problem: enabling cooperation beyond the clan. Language lets strangers communicate across tribal boundaries without shared context or values. The universal substrate for information exchange. Money lets strangers trade without trust or repeated interaction. Without it, “I’ll help you now if you help me later” is a prisoner’s dilemma where defection pays. Collectibles turned this into simultaneous exchange: I give you meat, you give me shells, done. The universal substrate for exchanging value. See:

Shelling Out: The Origins of Money | Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

By Nick Szabo, 2002

Religion creates shared ritual, collective consciousness, and moral obligations that bind groups together. It generates the social solidarity that makes people honor commitments, respect boundaries, and cooperate in ways that individual self-interest alone cannot explain. See Durkheim below: Together these 3 form humanity’s scaling architecture: • Language = communicate with anyone • Money = trade with anyone • Religion = coordinate deeply within groups Without them, we’d be just monkeys limited to groups of Dunbar’s number. With them, humans conquered the planet and increased carrying capacity 10x over Neanderthals. Most miss this following Graeber’s debt-money thesis, which only works within societies that already have all three technologies - you cannot run a ledger with people you’ll never see again who have different moral frameworks. That #Bitcoiners can grok this is what puts them so far ahead - they’re the only ones who understand how the game actually works. We’re HODLing proto-money whilst we develop our memetic language and spread the orangepill religion to all corners. View quoted note →

Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) has speculated that Nick Szabo is Satoshi in his latest Grey Mirror article:

US 60/735,250 and the roots of Bitcoin

"I decided to save it in this cheap, reliable, secret way."

Yarvin is not nobody on this subject. He discusses his 2005 provisional patent application which hints at fixed supply “tokenomics”, and how he similarly had something like the precursor to React patented. He also links to conversation threads he had with Nick pre-Bitcoin on the topic. He is also the founder of Urbit, a Thiel-funded radical attempt to rethink computing (interesting, but destined to fail) and highly influential in that circle (Thiel/Andreessen/Vance et al - Silicon Valley “little tech” types) for his political and philosophical ideas. Not sure why he’s decided to dredge up this history now; he set it up with the React thing a few months ago, and could have made the point of his article without the Szabo commentary. I’ve listened to and read Yarvin for years, he is very intelligent and extremely well-read but I’ve long thought he is a snake in the grass - reading this gave me a bad vibe.. View quoted note →

Nick Szabo is once again dragging Adam Back who has found himself on the wrong side of the #Bitcoin spam debate. One can only assume Adam has something in the pipeline from which he will personally benefit with Core now bending over for L2s and inviting spam onchain. View quoted note →

Buy a Trump Gold Card US Visa for $1 Million - or buy a second passport for a quarter of the price? View quoted note →

I’ve seen a lot of anti #Bitcoin takes over the years, but this one is new

Where do the Jewish “Bitcoiners” align on the question of Core v30 v Knots? #Bitcoin Zionist Mossad agent Udi was predictable. How about @gladstein?