Bitcoin's cultural mythos celebrates the HODLer as a paragon of deferred gratification, a being of superior moral fiber who resists immediate consumption in favor of future reward. "Have fun staying poor," they tell the uninitiated, certain that mere possession of an appreciating asset proves they have mastered the ancient virtue of patience. They invoke the concept of time preference, borrowed from Austrian economics, to frame their inactivity as civilizational achievement. The framing contains a fundamental error that reverses the meaning of the very concept it deploys. View article →

Government debt differs fundamentally from private debt: politicians pledge not their own resources but ours, and creditors who buy Treasury bonds are investing in future theft. With the national debt at thirty-eight trillion dollars and climbing by seventy thousand dollars every second, nobody knows what to do. The proposals on offer range from implausible to fantastical. There is another option with a long history and principled foundation: repudiation. View article →

The cypherpunks solved encryption decades ago, yet private digital commerce remains marginal. The missing piece is not better cryptography but better institutions for managing trust between pseudonymous parties. This essay explores how trust can be treated algebraically: quantified, distributed, pooled, and traded like any other commodity. The result is a framework for building the institutional layer that Bitcoin and Nostr still need. View article →

I'm a simple man. You upload a new video of Rothbard speaking. I watch it.

A consortium of libertarian legal scholars has published the Universal Principles of Liberty, a systematic codification of libertarian jurisprudence designed not as a constitution but as a voluntary framework for decentralized justice. Drafted by Stephan Kinsella with Alessandro Fusillo, David Dürr, and Patrick Tinsley, the document establishes property rights, competitive arbitration, and customary legal evolution as foundations for societies without coercive monopoly. For builders of parallel institutions, this provides what has long been missing: serious legal architecture for the experiments already underway. View article →

If my writings don't put you to sleep, Avi's soothing voice and the gentle background music will do the trick! View quoted note →

Bitcoin has outlasted every attempt to destroy it because there is no action available to any adversary that stops the network. China banned mining, blocks continued to be produced and the hashrate recovered in six months. The architecture makes enforcement not impossible but futile. View article →

John Boyd's OODA loop taught fighter pilots that tempo wins fights. But the deepest insight isn't cycling faster; it's blinding your enemy so they can't cycle at all. Privacy through encryption does exactly this, inverting normal attack/defense economics. When defense costs pennies and attack costs millions, the adversary can't afford targeting you. View article →