I wanted to make a shareable overview video that people can point their family and friends to about money, banking, and bitcoin. “Read this 500 page book” doesn’t always go over well, but “watch this half hour video” is more approachable. So, hopefully it’s helpful:

Back in 2011, Fed Chair Bernanke told Congress that the Fed's balance sheet would return to its pre-crisis level. It never did, and now it's far larger than in 2011, let alone pre-crisis levels. And by around 2025 it'll level out and start to head up again. It's going up forever, Laura.

Whenever you feel dumb, just remember that there are people who bought negative-yielding bonds.

Bond market = Seagulls View quoted note →

The bond market used to be the smart money, and despite the fact that the era of that is long over, it still rides on that reputation. And mainly why it is over is that it’s just too damn big. The sheer amount of supply outstanding, and the sheer amount of supply coming to market every month, means that even the smart bond trader hedge funds who can forecast and position for things aren’t big enough to move the market much. Instead the bond market is a titan that moves in real time based on flows. The bond market is a laggard now, not a forecaster. They’re all seagulls at this point.

Chaumian ecash is awesome. That’s it. That’s the note.

When something becomes the case in virtually every country in the world, that is interesting signal. It doesn’t mean that it is ultimately the right way to do something, but it strongly implies that it was inevitable for that specific time period at least. Some mix of technology and incentives led to such a ubiquitous outcome, with few or no exceptions.

Both taxes and money-printing redistribute capital, but the difference is that money-printing does it less transparently. With money-printing, the effect works behind the scenes in ways that are harder to quantify. That's why when a government can't find a solution between hard spending choices, they print money. It's the easier method. People know their personal tax rate, they will riot if their taxes are too high, and they know exactly who is responsible for tax levels. But inflation is a more complex beast. It comes with a lag, for starters, since it takes time for printed money to work its way through the system. And when it comes, propaganda built on grains of truth is effective at making it unclear to people who is responsible. "It's the greedy corporations that are responsible for raising prices, not the fact that we increased the money supply 40% over the past two years!" And so money-printing effects people not directly based on their income, their need, or other things, but based on their level of awareness of what's happening. It rewards people who are aware of it, and are borrowing the devalued currency, owning scarcer assets, and denominating contracts in harder currency. It harms people who are not aware of it, who are earning wages in and keeping their savings in cash or bonds. Many of them are led to believe that CPI is the target to beat, which is a false low target. The real target is the money supply growth rate. And capital gains taxes, if the cost basis is unadjusted for the rate of money supply growth, further recoup some of that value from the various harder assets that aware people try to protect themselves with. A lot of MMT advocates act as though they found some grand formula. But really what they have re-identified is nothing new: it's that the less transparent that government spending is, the bigger it can be before people will complain. People will complain about taxes right away, but currency debasement is the sneakier method for which the consequences come with a lag. So it sidesteps hard decisions this year, and leads to bigger issues a year or two from now, when someone else can be blamed and the whole ordeal can be obfuscated. And it's not new, despite how some MMT advocates would spin it. Currency debasement has been occurring since the adoption of coinage. And even MMT-scale currency debasement has been occurring since World War I. It is turned to so frequently because its lack of transparency allows it to occur at times and magnitudes when more transparent taxes would not.

There is a common phrase: “he/she woke up today and chose violence”. I like it. It is funny. But it is imperfect. “Violence” is now a verbal defensive phrase that means too much. To “wake up and choose violence” in the modern parlance of people who know zero struggle means to choose public verbal opposition. Okay, sure. But not really. I woke up today and chose rhetoric. Not violence. I spent years doing mixed martial arts competitively. I know violence. I am trained in a dozen ways to choke someone out, and have been choked out in’s dozen ways. I have had a 200 pound male fireman try to beat me unconscious and fail to do so. Even that wasn’t really violence, since it was controlled. Assholes on my trailer park bus stop in my teenage years were violent. Verbosity isn’t violence. It is rhetoric. I woke up today and chose rhetoric. I woke up today and chose to defend noncustodial privacy tools with language and resources. Coordinating messages between entities shouldn’t be a crime per se. Bitcoin is anti-fragile and will continue to be so, thanks to all the people who work hard for it. But it is not without a fight. Privacy is necessary in a free society in the digital age. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto made this clear three decades ago and is still true.

I don't like the term "FUD", meaning "fear uncertainty and doubt". Or more broadly, I think it's over-used. When people criticize something, a common response is "that's just FUD". But, you *should* feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt sometimes about any given thing. That's healthy. That's what makes you not in a cult. And addressing that fear, uncertainty, and doubt in an honest way, and constructing a sense of probabilities from that, is what builds conviction to move forward and invest time or money into that thing.

Gonna start deadlifting again. Used to do a lot of powerlifting to assist with martial arts competitiveness. I kept doing it for a while after that even though I gave up fighting. Lately I just do a lot of biking, pushups, body weight squats, etc. But my core’s gotten weak from so much sitting and typing. Posture not great unless I am mindful of it. Going to bring back the deadlifts and other things now that my husband has built a home gym, just at a bit lower weight and more reps than I used to. Deadlifts every day til 100k?

I got down to “email zero” on my personal email. Not my business email(s) of course, but my personal email. Cleaned it all out. Today is a good day.

I'm quite bullish on Bitcoin scaling tech and privacy tech. Fee spikes are incentives to build more scaling solutions and to use the ones that have been built. Without fee spikes or the mindfulness that fee spikes can materialize at any time, there is no significant demand to build them or use them. It's painful when it happens but it's necessary to grow. And stress tests help ensure that you are building the tech correctly rather than relying on shortcuts that only work temporarily. Same thing for privacy solutions. Privacy tech has to be like a hydra; if one head gets cut off then it grows more. Privacy solutions behind every blade of grass.

I’d be happy to contribute to and use my public platform to bring attention to legal defense funds for people who build open source privacy tools, or for legal attempts to push back on unconstitutional government financial surveillance. I just need to know that they are credible from people I trust.

One day, it would be nice to see a well-capitalized challenge to the Bank Secrecy Act on 4th amendment grounds. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they saw that people need a license to transmit money, or that the government thinks it has the right to surveil and censor everyone’s money and transactions. The default is privacy. To infringe on someone’s privacy should require probable cause and come with checks and balances. Ubiquitous surveillance shouldn’t be the default, since it enables tyranny.

I’m a hip flexor exercise maxi now. Realized how much more core work I need to be doing to offset how much I sit and type.

Prepare accordingly: View quoted note →

Money used to be private by default. Once it became widely surveilled in the 20th century, attempts to make money more private again were generally criminalized. View quoted note →

The entire developed world tax apparatus that was built in the 20th century and extends into the 21st century depends on ubiquitous financial surveillance. They are not going to give that up without a fight. I have been saying at a number of conferences and podcasts that privacy is the main battleground for the next decade. Back in the 19th century and before, money was mostly private. There were plenty of dictators but there was no major method of surveilling all transactions. Therefore things like broad income taxes were untenable to enforce. But in the 20th century as money increasingly moved around at the speed of light, people needed bank accounts to keep up. It wasn’t all forced on them; they chose it. And those bank accounts were centralized, surveillable, and ruggable. This allowed authorities to switch to income taxes, which require ubiquitous financial surveillance to work. And ultimately it allowed them to switch to fiat currency altogether. Now in the 21st century, Bitcoin and its various layers allow people to hold and move around money globally without permissioned banks. They can do so peer to peer, or they can do so with custodians and open layers, etc. Unlike the base layer of fiat, the base layer of bitcoin is permissionless. But this represents a threat to the entire current system of taxation and financial control. If bitcoin and particularly various private methods on top of it were to be adopted at massive scale, the entire tax structure and other things would need to reshape themselves around that reality. And so they won’t make it easy; they will try to criminalize financial privacy as much as possible while the network is still pretty small. The only solutions are to 1) make privacy tech so ubiquitous that it can’t be isolated and can spread organically in a distributed way and 2) to apply legal pressure when possible so that governments sort of have to operate within the bounds of their own law, like the 1st and 4th amendments.

Privacy is normal and good. There has been an effort among authorities to make “money laundering” and “financial privacy” the same thing. That is, the mere act of moving money privately itself becomes a crime. That’s not okay. Money laundering is when money that is obtained through crime is concealed by obfuscating it with clean money. The actual crime is the initial non-financial crime (say, mob stuff), and historically money laundering involves manual activity to work with the criminals. Now that open source tech can make certain transactions private, authorities increasingly equate all private money transfer with money laundering, even if the developer of the open source tech had no direct involvement with criminals. Authorities target them regardless, and sanction the technology itself. Financial privacy becomes synonymous with crime in their minds, and in the minds of the public.