Looking forward to playing around with bitkey CC @jack

Loving the diversity of new joiners on #introductions! Please don’t be shy about posting about other things than #nostr and #bitcoin!

Just received my @npub1tcnv...ctu0

People talk about the free market economy as if they are intimately familiar with it. They aren’t. A system in which the words of one government bureaucrat are the single most important predictor of the price of assets and goods is not a free market economy.

WAR IS A RACKET There are a few pieces of writing that are modern beyond their age. One that comes to mind is Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”, which reads like a self-help book written 2, not 2000 years ago. Another is George Orwell’s 1984, which is prescient in its description of mass surveillance and big data, although it was published only a few years after WWII. Another extraordinarily modern piece of writing is General Smedley Butler’s pamphlet “War is a racket”. Butler was a US Marine Corps General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. “War is a racket” was published in 1935 and mostly pointed to his experience and cautionary tales from World War I. Butler starts off by saying: “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. […] It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” This is as true today as it was then and it is all the more shocking that our public discourse - most recently in the case of the war in Ukraine or even in the Middle East - still treats war as something that our governments wage for reasons related to justice, nobility or our safety. “Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and ‘we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,’. Look no further than the fortunes being made in Russia, Ukraine, the US and Europe to understand the real reasons for this war and why it’s still ongoing. If you think the people at the helm and their lobbyists want this war to end, think again. “[…] fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.” Who’s paying the bill? First and foremost those leaving their lives on the battlefield and their families. “In our government hospitals are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.” And then… way less importantly, we are all paying. All our purchasing power is being diluted and redirected into the pockets of the beneficiaries, by governments funding these wars through money printing. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a blue-eyed pacifist who believes Putin should not be resisted. But let’s call the means of resistance for what they are: The means are selected not to find solutions, not to reduce the number of casualties. They are selected to create another forever war and to fill the pockets of those running this racket. The only thing that is not modern about Butler’s pamphlet is that it was written by a (former) insider criticizing the establishment and yet he was neither locked away nor forced into exile. Next time you hear mainstream media propaganda about the evil enemy, alleged war progress or sanctimonious moral statements from our leaders, think of General Smedley Butler: “TO HELL WITH WAR!”

Aspirational movie scenes Some of the best movies leave us in a state of aspiration. They make us feel there is something more to life than we had so far been aware of and, importantly, that this new something is accessible to us. One surprising way some movies inspire me, personally is when you have a character, who after encountering some important moment in her life, is shown just sitting or standing still — often with a cigarette — pondering or contemplating what has just happened. The reason I find this inspiring (or almost unrealistically romantic) is because most of us actually never take a moment to sit still and consider important events in our lives. We just go on to distract ourselves. So when I see such a scene, I try to embody the experience of the character for a moment and I try to remind myself what it feels like to really. slow. down.

The revered Indian sage Ramana Maharshi attributed his extraordinary insight and liberation to a simple question: “Who am I?” This self-inquiry, if contemplated with openness and intent, can lead to a recognition of our true nature. During meditation retreats, I have asked this question 1000s of times, usually in the form of diades: You’re facing another person and they prompt you with the question: “Experience who (or what) you are and communicate that to me”. You then go on to communicate your experience of self for 5 minutes, then the tables are turned. For the first many times of doing this, I was prompted with the question and immediately my habitual thinking mind became active and tried to answer the question in some cerebral way: “I’m Daniel, born in Germany. I’m human. I’m a curious person…”. There is no limit to the number of things your mind will come up with to answer a question like this. Over and over the teacher would ask us to actually be open to what the answer might be, to actually look for what we are… in our experience right now. Not through intellectual hearsay, but through direct recognition. One day, in between sessions I went for a walk, my mind finally capitulated and suddenly there was a very new, an almost inverted view of self and the world. I was no longer Daniel, up here in my head but I was one with everything: one with the soft breeze in the warm Texan air, one with the sounds of the cicadas and of shoes on gravel, one with my body but not limited to it. Before this day, I had a subtle suspicion that Ramana Maharshi and many other wise men and women before him, were onto something. On this day any last doubts were erased.

On the importance of incentives In 1995 Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s brilliant lieutenant, gave a speech at Harvard titled “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment”. One of the most famous quotes from the speech is “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome”. This is an incredibly valuable framework for predicting outcomes in the world. One expression of this principle is Clayton Christensen’s “innovator’s dilemma” which describes why very successful incumbents in business often find themselves struggling to fend off competition using disruptive technologies. I witnessed first hand how Google, one of the greatest businesses of all time, set up internal incentives that make it increasingly difficult for the company to compete and innovate. To be very specific: the incentives at Google are increasingly oriented towards winning internal politics and this clashes increasingly with external outcomes. We are seeing the beginning of this clash as Google struggles to adjust to competition from challengers in the space of artificial intelligence. Another area where Munger’s model of incentives applies perfectly is in the area of predicting outcomes where politics interfaces with the private sector. Politicians generally are not incentivized to produce great outcomes for society, they are incentivized to win elections. This is the reason most politicians nowadays are not experienced technocrats but seasoned actors. As a result, wherever politicians interact with businesses, bad incentives arise (this is the reason libertarians advocate for a small government). One area where incentives and hence outcomes are particularly toxic is in healthcare. Pharmaceutical companies are incentivized to maximize profitability and politicians are incentivized to pursue populist politics. This inevitably delivers catastrophic outcomes as regulators that are half asleep at the wheel approve harmful drugs and as doctors are incentivized, nay sometimes even forced to prescribe treatments excessively, erratically and irresponsibly. Munger’s incentive framework has also been helpful to those who have been holding #Bitcoin with conviction for years despite its significant volatility. In order to do so one had to understand the context and incentives of a few key players: Government: They have to raise money in order to fund their lavish spending as well as interest payments on the nation’s debt. Taxes are unpopular so the better way to do this is to print money. Institutional Investors: They are looking for returns to beat and ideally exceed inflation. As valuations relative to earnings reach all-time highs, they have to look for alternative assets to potentially provide a source of return as well as diversification. Retail Investors: They are primarily incentivized to not be left behind (FOMO) and ideally to look for opportunities to get rich quickly. This creates a perfect storm of incentives for an asset like Bitcoin: Increasing liquidity in the system due to the expansion of the money supply, institutional investors desperately seeking yield and retail investors looking to FOMO into the market. It explains both the short term volatility and reflexivity of Bitcoin and the steady longer-term increase in its market capitalization

Throw on your tinfoil hats In her masterpiece “Atlas Shrugged”, Ayn Rand describes a society in economic decay with widespread business failures, decreased productivity and shortages. In the book this decline is exemplified by accidents in the US railroad system and the fictional railroad company Taggart Transcontinental. If you’re looking for early signs of the decline of the US economy beyond fiction, look no further than Boeing. Boeing, and particularly its 737 MAX plane, have had numerous issues and accidents in the past with this last week marking a new wave of incidents. A lenient interpretation is that these incidents are still marginal in the greater scheme of Boeing airtaffic and that the company merely needs to refocus on engineering quality over profitability. More scrutiny, however, seems to suggest that the US government is failing to regulate air safety and that this is one of many prominent examples of regulatory capture and the revolving door between many US industry giants and their regulators. In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.) has over recent decades introduced a practice of delegating some of its inspection functions to Boeing’s own engineers. Design issues with the 737 MAX, which was rushed into production to compete with Airbus’ new A320neo, were known and documented but arguably glossed over by F.A.A. oversight (more here). The part of the story where we should throw on our tinfoil hat is where John Barnett, a former Boeing quality-control-manager-turned-whistleblower was found dead by apparent suicide two days ago. This happened a couple of days before Mr. Barnett was scheduled to give legal interviews linked to his whistleblower retaliation case against Boeing. In the words of the Charleston officials: “No detail can be left unturned”.

On spiritual bypassing and psychological underpassing: Spiritual bypassing is all the rage. It refers to engaging in all kinds of spiritual practices without resolving any more difficult aspects of our identity and without actually getting closer to living an awakened life. It’s the proliferation of the casual use of psychedelics without integration, it’s the hollow hippie attire and burning of incense, it’s the very commercial yoga retreats. It’s spirituality without grounding. There is less talk about the psychological underpass, but this appears to be equally common. It refers to an excessive engagement with psychological concepts and “scientific” literature without ever getting closer to transcendence of the conceptual domain. It’s perfectly understanding your big 5 personality traits, it’s using your love languages to decide how to interact with others, it’s trusting articles that write about “the recipe for being happy at work”. All of these things have value. But they can never lead to an effortless and authentic engagement with reality. This type of engagement requires the seeker to take a third path, one of gracefully accepting the inconvenience of grounding while courageously facing the fear of transcending.

wen scheduled messages on @primal?

Starting to get the first random private LinkedIn messages from very old acquaintances on whether they should buy #Bitcoin

Proof of Work Today I’m going to steal with pride from to take a moment to describe what I’m currently doing with my writing on Medium and Substack. The goal is not to accumulate millions of followers and sign brand deals. The goal is to write and publish every day without fault in order to 1) clarify my own thinking and 2) commit to putting something out in the world that will hopefully lead to some positive spark in someone else, no matter how marginal. After a little over a month of doing this, I can already feel this potentially evolving, taking on a dynamic of its own and leading to other, more impactful projects. What’s your proof-of-work?

what do you all thing is the best angle to convert ETF holders to self-custody?

Separating money from state On October 31, 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the doors of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, initiating the heretofore elusive separation of church and state. On October 31, 2009 the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin Whitepaper, initiating the heretofore elusive separation of money and state. The date Satoshi chose for his publication is no coincidence, he was evidently a student of history and well aware of the parallels between his and Luther’s discoveries. Not only was the Protestant Reformation a process of emancipation from the dictatorial regime of the most powerful institution in the world at the time, the Catholic church. It was also a process of decentralization: Luther told his followers that they could reach salvation without the need for mediation by priests and without the need for rituals or indulgences. Today, the movement around Bitcoin is in the process of emancipating us from the oppressive regime of central banks and the banking system. Like the protestant reformation, one of its central theses is one of decentralization: Participants do not need permission from a central entity to transact value with each other. The implications of this are as subtle and yet profound as those of the reformation. Like the reformation, the power shifts triggered by the invention of Bitcoin will undoubtedly lead to crises and potentially even wars. Today Bitcoin is trading at a new all-time high. As it continues its seemingly inevitable rise, look out for people from the old system yelling, kicking and screaming as an indication that tectonic power shifts are occurring before your eyes.

Just realized that #bitcoin 's bull run may be the last opportunity in history to get wealthy without doing work

Did y'll see gold is trading close to all time highs?

Seeing is receiving: One of the most powerful meditations I have yet come across is Loch Kelly’s meditation on seeing. Seeing is our most prominent sense, our brain devotes a significant portion of its resources to processing visual information. This mirrors our experience of the world. Seeing is much higher resolution and arguably more useful than the other senses. Our eyes help us scan for danger and they are historically strongly tied to our fight-or-flight response. As a result, we have built significant experiential artifacts around this sense. Watch your experience: Pay attention to hearing. When we hear, we receive sounds. It’s a relatively passive act, though of course we can influence which sounds we pay attention to to a degree. With seeing it’s different. Most of us go through life perceiving seeing as projecting our attention into the world. It’s much more active. Our eyes are usually focused on specific details in our visual field that are relevant or scanning for potentially relevant content. They are rarely in a passive state of just panoramic receiving like our ears or our touch. This habitual pattern of constant focus can be relaxed through targeted meditation. For me this immediately relaxes my mind’s grip on my experience. It’s a powerful tool to put things into perspective and take a step back. If you’d like to try it out, please get in touch!

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.