Inflation has been roughly +11.5% per year since 2017 according to ChapwoodIndex.com, which reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 150 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation. I don't think we noticed it until wages stagnated in 2020, but prices have literally doubled since 2017. Some maths will reveal +92% average total inflation from 2017-2023 and a projected +122% to now, meaning a $1.00 item from Jan 2017 will cost on average $2.22 now in Apr/May 2024.

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🤯 44.6% capital gains and 25% "unrealized gains" tax!?! This is literally theft. We must not comply. The states need to fight the federal government and protect their citizens from this tyranny.

Mixing services simply further obfuscate identity in Bitcoin, which is too similar to "money laundering" for the three-letter agencies' taste. The fact is that money laundering is not itself a crime, but a technique to hide other crimes. Theft, fraud, and extorsion precede or are followed by "laundering", and the "laundering" doesn't make the crime worse but only justice more difficult to achieve, which one may call obstruction only in the case that another crime has been or is being committed. (Note: a crime anticipated is not yet a crime. That's another path to further tyranny.) If no other crime is being or has been committed, the "mixing" only protects a user against a greedy tyrant, no matter what that tyrant says.

"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," but when Caesar sees others seeming to not agree with him about what is his, he becomes a cruel oppressor. He will not easily give up his control over his subjects, and neither ought we expect it. Mixing is a technique to obfuscate one's identity when considering transactions, which is as much a protection against tyrants as it may be an evasion of justice. It seems to me to be morally neutral, like owning weapons or driving cars. It is not the provider of the means but the user who should be held responsible, and that is the point. The DOJ is wrong for this. View quoted note →

The obvious solution is to let Bitcoin be the lightweight timechain it's meant to be and install a proof scheme for another data storage mechanism. Keep the supply cap, make sure coins aren't double-spent, publish proofs globally, and that's it. Then, make L2's and L3's to accelerate and expand. Use larger and more frequent blocks on a side chain that get's purged to 1-year, and publish the top-level proof on Bitcoin, including swaps with Bitcoin and sibling chains. Make lightning channels on the side chains, bridge them, etc. Bitcoin get's to stay lightweight and secure while getting scaled. View quoted note →

Hindsight being 2020, might it have been better to make the block reward function a more continuous function rather than quadrennial steps? The fact that the halving schedule exists is important, but the importance is that it is a converging function. If the halving was not a change of block reward, but a change to the rate of change to the block reward, the 4-year cycle would be calmed. Maybe the supply shock is actually good for price action, and that price action is good for adoption. The world will never know. Just for fun, I came up with a few alternate block subsidy schedules. Imagine that the very first block reward starts at 100 units, and the subsidy decreased with each block by 90μ units until block height 1M, at which time the subsidy is 10 units. Then, the subsidy decreases by 9μ each block for the next 1M-block epoch, and this pattern repeats we run out of bits (the unit is biased by 10 or so digits, of course). Subsidy ~= 10^(2 - epoch) - 10^(1 - epoch) * (blocks in epoch)/(epoch length) This is very "base-10"-ish and not very Bitcoin-y, so we could take an inverse approach and calculate a block height that would result in a halving schedule approximating Bitcoin's, just as a continuous function. Br: Block Reward Bb: Block Bias Bh: Block Height El: Epoch Length Eb: Epoch Bias E: Epoch S: Scale Br = (Bb-Bh) % El * 2^(Eb - E) + El*S*(2^(Eb - E) - 1) Eb = floor( Bb / El ) E = Eb - floor( (Bb-Bh) / El ) If you set the Block Bias to 3140165, and the Scale to 10^-8, the Epoch Length being the 210000, same as Bitcoin's, the supply cap is 20999993.36, pretty darn close to Bitcoin's. I'm just a little disappointed that the block height bias didn't turn out to be π-million. That would have been an amazing! Pi turns up just so mathemagically often.