In 2017 I turned 18 and bought $1000 worth of Apple stock. I remember thinking I was a genius when my “investment” tripled in a relatively short period of time. In my naïveté about markets, I used the opportunity to sell. ChatGPT did the math and those shares, if I had held on and after accounting for stock splits, would be worth $350,000 today! Except, in fact Chat GPT was hallucinating. The correct value today of $1000 invested in Apple Stock in 2007 is somewhere closer to $37,000, depending on the exact purchase date and whether one accounts for dividends. What ChatGPT seems to have gotten wrong is that it did account for stock splits, but it did so with a 2007 price that was already historically adjusted. So this is a post about the power of compounding in investments and one lesson is that if you have a high conviction bet, you should not let your profits lure you into selling or trying to trade. However, this is equally a post about remaining cautious about the output from LLMs. They present their results confidently and articulately and they can be extremely useful, but they often still get simple things wrong… resulting in potential orders of magnitude of errors.

In 2017 I turned 18 and bought $1000 worth of Apple stock. I remember thinking I was a genius when my “investment” tripled in a relatively short period of time. In my naïveté about markets, I used the opportunity to sell. ChatGPT did the math and those shares, if I had held on and after accounting for stock splits, would be worth $350,000 today! Except, in fact Chat GPT was hallucinating. The correct value today of $1000 invested in Apple Stock in 2007 is somewhere closer to $37,000, depending on the exact purchase date and whether one accounts for dividends. What ChatGPT seems to have gotten wrong is that it did account for stock splits, but it did so with a 2007 price that was already historically adjusted. So this is a post about the power of compounding in investments and one lesson is that if you have a high conviction bet, you should not let your profits lure you into selling or trying to trade. However, this is equally a post about remaining cautious about the output from LLMs. They present their results confidently and articulately and they can be extremely useful, but they often still get simple things wrong… resulting in potential orders of magnitude of errors.

Welcome to price discovery phase

Looks like traders who thought they could play a “sidewards move” for a while here are about to get rekt

There are people shorting #bitcoin here in the hope of making money... 😂

@primal I can't seem to post a note that references another note (with the "note:" notation). Any idea why? I'm on MacOS

Pura Vida!

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather" These are the opening sentences of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” published in Davos in 1996. You read that correctly: 1996. The precision of Barlow’s predictions is remarkable. Cyberspace is finally coming into its own with respect to its ability to withstand nationstate government intervention. It is emerging as a realm with its own rules, its own governance and its own sovereignty. Many will argue that the missing piece in facilitating this transition was #Bitcoin. “Cybermoney”, as the authors of the 1997 book “The Sovereign Individual” called it, “reduces the capacity of the world’s nationstates to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual […] and liberates the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation.” We are at the precipice of a new world in which nationstates will struggle to maintain their power, likely culminating in several transition crises. On the other end is a new world: a more just, more egalitarian and more humane society, with significantly greater prospects for human flourishing.

For my German 🇩🇪 #Bitcoin friends: ZEIT on Bitcoin Atlantis

DIE ZEIT

Bitcoin auf Madeira: Im Bitcoin-Paradies

Bitcoin ist so wertvoll wie nie. Auf Madeira trafen sich seine größten Fans. Sie träumen von Überfluss, Weltfrieden, Harmonie – und dem Ende ...

Learning how to move from my toddler: If you have a toddler, I highly recommend considering them your movement teacher. Children move very freely and effortlessly, without all the internal resistance and tension that we accumulate over a lifetime. I notice this in particular when I watch our daughter pick up objects from the floor. Unlike me, who bends down forward to perform this action, she effortlessly squats down. The squat, of course is the much more efficient and healthy way to do this, in fact it is one of the most essential movements and increasingly used as a measure of youthfulness by the longevity community. It is just something we unlearn. By playing with children we can slowly but surely regain our ability to move in an optimal way.

Frank Capra’s “It’s a wonderful life” is one of the most iconic movies of all time. One of its most remarkable scenes is when George Bailey finds out his bank is encountering “all the earmarks of […] a run”, his customers desperately trying to withdraw their balances. “You’re thinking of this place all wrong… as if I have the money back in the safe. The money is not here. Your money is in Joe’s house that’s right next to yours […]” We encountered such a run in March 2023 resulting in the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature Bank. The run would have undoubtedly spread to other banks if the government had not intervened. Of course, the consensus narrative is that a lot of banks are too big to fail and that governments should jump in to save them at all costs. This effectively means that 1) we have invited banks to privatize profits and socialize losses leading to ever recurring cycles of unscrupulous profiteering and 2) the government is now our bank. Not exactly what had been advertised to us as the glorious creative destruction of capitalism. The next shoe to drop is a run on our new bank, the government. Governments are ever more indebted and their creditors have started to decide that this is somewhat concerning. Now, the government has already deemed itself too big to fail and is intervening by buying plenty of its own debt. This is when we know the end is near or at least that it is all downhill from here. #Bitcoin, the ultimate schmuck insurance against government overspending, is trading at all time highs.

Medium

A wonderful bank run

Frank Capra’s “It’s a wonderful life” is one of the most iconic movies of all time. One of its most remarkable scenes is when George Bailey…

Frank Capra’s “It’s a wonderful life” is one of the most iconic movies of all time. One of its most remarkable scenes is when George Bailey finds out his bank is encountering “all the earmarks of […] a run”, his customers desperately trying to withdraw their balances. “You’re thinking of this place all wrong… as if I have the money back in the safe. The money is not here. Your money is in Joe’s house that’s right next to yours […]” We encountered such a run in March 2023 resulting in the collapse of Silicon Valley and Signature Bank. The run would have undoubtedly spread to other banks if the government had not intervened. Of course, the consensus narrative is that a lot of banks are too big to fail and that governments should jump in to save them at all costs. This effectively means that 1) we have invited banks to privatize profits and socialize losses leading to ever recurring cycles of unscrupulous profiteering and 2) the government is now our bank. Not exactly what had been advertised to us as the glorious creative destruction of capitalism. The next shoe to drop is a run on our new bank, the government. Governments are ever more indebted and their creditors have started to decide that this is somewhat concerning. Now, the government has already deemed itself too big to fail and is intervening by buying plenty of its own debt. This is when we know the end is near or at least that it is all downhill from here. #Bitcoin, the ultimate schmuck insurance against government overspending, is trading at all time highs.

Medium

A wonderful bank run

Frank Capra’s “It’s a wonderful life” is one of the most iconic movies of all time. One of its most remarkable scenes is when George Bailey…

I can’t handle Bitcoin’s recent volatility

This week I had the great privilege of attending a group session with Dick Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS) at Blue Spirit in Costa Rica. IFS is a form of therapy I have been fascinated with for a while because it so deeply resonates with some of my own meditation experiences. In IFS you identify distinct parts of your mind that play different roles to help you manage your life. In many of us these parts are overburdened or excessive and they can often be confused with our identity leading to suffering and confusion. IFS is a system of techniques to unburden these parts and live from Self-leadership, i.e. guided by our true nature. The session I attended was an unburdening session in which a person from our group sat with Dick and he helped her unburden a real part she is encountering in her life. The session was powerful to say the least, both in its impact and the short time in which it was accomplished. IFS is deeply complementary with the practice of meditation because both practices aim to recognize self-essence or awake awareness. The unburdening of parts is very beneficial to this project.

Pura Vida … from Nosara airport

This is big! Kyrill Sokoloff, who is one of Wall Street’s most famous investment strategists and has some of the wealthiest individuals in the world in his client list, just doubled the weight of Bitcoin in his list of high conviction ideas.

At meditation retreats, the group naturally asks the teacher a lot of questions, usually about their experience or practice. An interesting phenomenon is that what the typical answer to these questions boils down to is something along the lines of: “I think you need to be intimate with it”. Sure, there are pointers and abstractions and an excellent teacher will have a tremendous impact on the student’s practice merely through their presence, but when it comes to gaining a deeper understanding, the only way is through one’s own contemplation. Only through greater intimacy with whatever blocker we’re encountering can we make progress. One teacher I have had would always say: “Don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself”.

I used to apologize a lot. It’s ok and important to apologize for doing something wrong. It’s not ok to apologize for being ourselves. And yet that’s what we do a lot of the time, implicitly or explicitly. Our culture has conditioned us to be very worried to offend someone, hence a lot of us walk through life in a constant, pre-emptive posture of apology. This is suffocating our ability to self-express… through art but even in day-to-day situations. Think about how much more enriching your interactions could be if you weren’t so worried about offending someone… even in little ways. And then create a little bit of space for that possibility.

My comment under the FT’s most recent cope piece

This week I’m attending a meditation retreat in Costa Rica and in conversations with some older participants one thing that is becoming clear is that most of them wish they had practiced meditation earlier in their lives. Why is that? I believe it’s because there is no more important practice in life than becoming intimate with consciousness and experience. Most of us think we can get what we want first… and then be happy. That’s not how life works. If you are not a person that knows how to live a meaningful and fulfilled life now, money and success are not suddenly going to make you one. On the contrary. If you have had to compromise your health, integrity and relationships in order to become successful, these capacities are awfully hard to restore later in life. And if these capacities are compromised, familiarizing yourself with consciousness increasingly becomes an uphill battle.