Bitcoin Audible

"In this X post, I said I don't know the consequences of BIP-110. Plenty of people called that incompetent, cowardly, or both. Others praised it as humility. It's neither. It's just true. I don't know the consequences, and here's my claim. Neither do you."

~ Jimmy Song

I am reading Jimmy Song’s latest piece and things get a bit heated today. The debate around BIP-110 has everyone absolutely certain they know what will happen ...

**"Keeping Bitcoin running is the primary concern here. Making sure that Bitcoin is available to be used as money by everyday people, any actor who wants to come onto Bitcoin and send one UTXO from one to another. That's the most important piece for me when thinking about defending Bitcoin. **And the biggest difference, of course, is that this is a decentralised system. There is no central controller. There's no central control r...

The whole crew is back for another roundtable, and things get wild right out of the gate. I sat down with Steve, Mechanic, and Jeff to talk through the absolute mess that is the current state of things. Jeff shares an update on his Canadian immigration purgatory, which spirals into a bigger conversation about living like an outlaw and whether any of us are truly free from the system.

But we couldn't ignore the recent news. We talk ...

"Bitcoin is being embraced by the U.S. and the U.S. financial system and it is it being embraced by Iran and the Iranian regime at the exact same time and both of them know that they can use it without the other one threatening it. And that puts it in an insanely unique place in a world where there are no monies that work like that anymore."

~ Guy Swann

We live in a world where global money printers are silently bleeding your savin...

"Generation X and the millennials both tried to do everything right, according to what the boomers told them was the path forward: save money, study hard, get a ‘job’. At every stage we got rugpulled. Most of us have nothing to show for any of that.

Zoomers looked at what happened to Gen-X and the millennials and said, quite rationally, fuck that."

~ John Carter

What happens when you raise an entire generation on the pr...

"The peso scam is around a thousand times larger than the Libra scam, and its victims are the poorest, about 95% of Argentines."

~ Saifedean Ammous

Javier Milei swore he'd burn down Argentina's central bank and dollarize the economy. Two and a half years later, the money supply has quadrupled, the debt has ballooned, and a quarter-trillion-dollar carry trade is hollowing out the nation. Is the self-proclaimed Rothbardian actually r...

***"Our little home controller, building controller, it knows our electric rate, it knows the way that electric rate changes based on the time of day. It knows the PV flux, the solar flux from the solar panels. So it knows if there's excess power that the building's not using.

It also knows our natural gas rate. It also knows the Bitcoin price and the network difficulty. This is all just in our software.

And in real time, our...

"If you think of River or Gemini or Coinbase or whatever, think of all of those as silos and how people custody Bitcoin. If some sort of compromise were to come into the Bitcoin ecosystem at the private key generation level, that could create an incident that could set Bitcoin back by 10 or more years because it would be almost indistinguishable from a protocol compromise and that we would be talking about Bitcoin being hacked agai...

"It's often discussed that arbitrarily lowering interest rates and the zero interest rate policy era leads to massive recklessness and unethical and irresponsible behavior. But there's something even more sinister that actually occurs. A lot of people notice how massive corporations are just buying up all of the hard assets and then renting it back to us. […] Zero interest rate policy isn't merely something that leads to rec...

"If your money isn't sound, it is not reflecting any proof of work. It is not reflecting anything about who should be able to consume, or how much there is available to consume. It's just being corrupted, it's being defrauded, so that certain people get bad price signals. And this will incentivize them and everyone else to literally make economic decisions that appear to be economically profitable, that are actually destroying the ...

"It is not markets that made money possible. It is collectibles, which we now call money, that make markets possible."

~ Nick Szabo

What if everything we've been told about how money emerged is backwards? Nick Szabo's first article in nearly a decade tells the story of a stolen canoe, a tribal feud, and a string of shells – and uses it to challenge one of the most repeated ideas in economics. Did money come from barter, or di...

In this roundtable, we sit down with Steve, Mechanic, and Jeff, and honestly, we struggle to stay on Bitcoin for half of it. Our catch-up quickly turns into a rant about LLMs acting like corporate yes-men, and the frustrations of running AI locally.

But we do get back to the money. We talk about the St. Louis Fed literally copyrighting Bitcoin price data, France tracking self-hosted wallets, Steve’s update on UTXOracle, and w...

"They say the ruler is bent, then use the bent ruler to measure the table.

They say the clock is broken, then solemnly read out the hour.

They say the instrument is false, then ask it, with perfect seriousness, for one final certification.

This is, in itself, a form of bondage.

To measure gold in fiat terms is, in Jung’s sense, to deny the shadow: to denounce the paper system in public while continuing, in private, to let it ...

"When you really dig into the heart of how finance, how our monetary system and how our political system work, and how deeply married they are, you begin to see something that's pretty disturbing. That cheating and manipulation aren't simply something that arise in bad behaviors. They're fundamentally required by the system itself. They're baked in. They are the standard. It is the law. And if that is our reality, then the only way...

"The whole point of libertarianism is that we should recognise that we don't know how to plan the world. We don't know what the solution is going to be. You can't have a central planner decide it.If it was really just that libertarians understood how the world worked, then you could have a central planner. You would just need them to be libertarians. That's not how it works at all. **It's antithetical to the whole concept. **

**T...

"The idea that some authority can deduce the correct level of this balance is not merely wrong, it is not even wrong, it is methodologically incoherent. Asking for the 'correct' interest rate is like asking how much the color orange weighs."

~ Allen Farrington & Sacha Meyers

What if deflation isn't the economic boogeyman we've been told to fear, but the very *signal* that progress is happening?

In Part 2 of Allen Farrington an...

"The fiat economist universally chooses to set the printing press to brrrrrrrrrr. While the enlightened elite watch their stock portfolios moon and their debts disappear, the common man is told to be thankful that he was 'this close' to the horror of living in a world where his wages bought more every year, and his government respected his private property. Imagine how hard it would be for that government to raise debt in such a wo...

**_“what matters now is not belief, but endurance.

__bitcoin does not promise comfort. it does not promise justice. it does not promise to save anyone. it offers one thing only: a set of rules that do not bend to price, politics, or persuasion. whether that is valuable depends entirely on who is holding it and why.

_the mathematics will almost certainly hold long enough. the question has always been whether we will.&rdq...

"I think there will come a point where you get excessive, you swing too far on the individual side of the spectrum, and then it becomes advantageous to group together again, and you become more fulfilled, more happy, more culturally flourishing in collectives again."

"I think there's a resurgence of the desire for people to build tribes, communities, even fucking network state, even microstates, and saying that we're going to do th...