Bitcoin Tech Talk #487
Interesting Stuff
Death of Social Media - Ghost of Arthur Powell has written this perceptive piece on social media not really being social anymore. As he points out, what used to be a way to keep up with friends has devolved into short form videos from strangers. Most people use social media to follow celebrities and what little social signal value it has comes from expressing your own opinion in hopes of influencing those that follow you. As he points out, the real social spaces these days are private group chats on telegram and slack and perhaps rightly so, as these spaces are usually not open to the whole world.
Epstein - Frank Wright has a summary of what’s found in the Epstein files. Let’s just say that it’s not pretty and that there is a lot of Mossad involved. The most surprising part is the financial aspect of his undertaking. It seems he claimed to be representing the Rothchilds in several emails, had lots of contracts with them and so on. His network spanned many countries and the current spin by the media is that he’s somehow a Russian spy. There are some notable Bitcoiners caught in this mess, largely due to Epstein being an LP in a fund that Joi Ito led, who in turn was managing MIT’s Media Lab which housed and continues to house the Digital Currency Initiative.
On Warsh - Michael Nicoletos has this thorough read on what Trump is actually doing with the Kevin Warsh nomination for Fed Chairman. The chaos in the markets the last few weeks have centered around his supposedly hawkish stance, which would mean less money printing and high interest rates, depressing asset prices. His reading is that this move is more to support Main Street directly than to subsidize Wall Street speculation. Indeed the latter has been what the Fed has been doing, but in a sense, subsidizing Main Street (in this case, by giving banks bigger capacities to do lending) is not any better. The Trump administration’s strategy maybe benefits different people, but in the end is still funded through money printing.
AI Opportunity - Freya India has this insightful essay on the opportunity of being a real human in the midst of AI generated content. The reaction of so many people that work in all sorts of industries is that they’re fearing for their jobs, knowing that what they produce will get replaced by AI. In a sense, they’re right. The jobs they have are robotic and they fill the role of a cog in a machine that unsurprisingly, machines may be much better at. Yet in a sense, isn’t that a blessing? Don’t we want the things that are more fit for humans? With emotion, experience, conviction and purpose? In a sense, this whole AI panic has exposed the nature of fiat institutions as being not just filled with rent-seeking, but without a soul.
Financial Fraud - Bits About Money has this take on the Minnesota fraud and why it has the properties that it has. For example, why is it Somalians that are largely implicated in the Daycare center fraud? As he points out, fraud tends to scale, as holes are left unchecked, people rush into them to make their money, and tell their friends and family about it, which will tend to be people of similar ethnic backgrounds. The whole article is detailed in how the financial industry treats fraud, which the MN government in particular and most governments in general, do not know how to handle. In a sense, this is to be expected because all that fraud is not paid out of their own pockets, but is ultimately from money printing.
What I'm up to
Treasury Company Panel - I was on stage at Plan B El Salvador where we discussed the question, “Are Treasury Companies Good for Bitcoin?” I had the pleasure of being the only non-CEO on the panel, and argued that they aren’t. It was a good discussion and you can hopefully get why I think treasury companies are GBTC 2.0.
Russell Brand, Max Keiser and me - This was a conversation from 3 months ago at Bitcoin Historico, and I wasn’t supposed to be on stage, but the two charismatic speakers unexpectedly invited me to after getting into a conversation about Bitcoin, El Salvador and Christ. I’ve been on many stages and many panels, I have to say that this was one of the most electric and memorable.
The Bitcoin Podcast - I was on Walker’s podcast to talk about a whole bunch of things, including Bitcoin as method of payment, the controversy around Knots/Core and BIP110, my take on the current state of Core and my opinions around ossification in particular and software engineering in general.
Nostr Note of the Week
