Bitcoin Audible
1,071 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★★ - 95 ratingsThe Best in Bitcoin made Audible.
Guy Swann makes the knowledge of Bitcoin, the world's most secure, independent money, accessible to everyone. Exploring Bitcoin from an investment perspective, economic analysis, its philosophical foundations, & technological primitives. Reading and distilling thousands of hours of others' works on Bitcoin, Guy explains everything you need to know.
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Episodes
Read_759 - Increasing Interoperability in Second Layer Protocols [Chase Smith]
August 24, 2023 03:35 - 37 minutes - 50.9 MB"Often overlooked is the importance of interoperability between not only the second-layer protocol and Bitcoin but the layer-2 protocols themselves. A second layer, where end-users can leverage several protocols together and move seamlessly between them, creates a healthier, more resilient financial system and an overall better user experience—both essential for mass adoption."— Chase Smith Today we shift back to the current layer 2 protocols to take note of the tools and ideas around maki...
Read_758 - Scaling and Consensus Changes [James O'Beirne]
August 21, 2023 23:10 - 1 hour - 101 MB"When reading a draft of this post, my wife got kind of depressed right around here. Her macabre question, basically, is: “if everyone just winds up interacting with sidechains, and not Real Bitcoin, hasn’t the whole thing failed? At every point you’re dealing with some token that isn’t really bitcoin." — James O'Beirne Continuing the thread of discussions in a series of articles on sidechains and trying to frame our thinking for a Bitcoin future where billions can take advantage of its s...
Read_757 - Putting the B in BTC [Anthony Towns]
August 18, 2023 02:20 - 1 hour - 103 MB"The headroom there isn’t unlimited — expect it to show up as fee pressure and backlogs and less ability to quickly resolve transaction storms. And that will in turn make it hard and expensive for people with small stacks to continue to do self-custody on the main chain. At that point, acquiring new high value users means pricing out existing low value users." — Anthony Towns It's officially Sidechain Week! Because today Anthony Towns takes us through an thought experiment that sets our cur...
Read_756 - Bitcoin, The Trust Anchor in a Sea of Blockchains [Jameson Lopp]
August 17, 2023 01:00 - 49 minutes - 68.4 MB"While bitcoin is still mainly seen as digital currency, it’s essentially a timestamped log with special properties. As such, it can be utilised for far more things than payments and store of value. I presented some of the alternative uses several years ago and the list continues to grow. Brian Deery, chief scientist at Factom, wrote an excellent history of time-stamping, in which he argues that a secure timestamped record wasn’t feasible before the existence of secure digital value." — J...
Guys Take #69 - But It's Just Digital Points...
August 14, 2023 23:15 - 52 minutes - 72.1 MBWith so many common misconceptions about money, how can we possibly make sense of Bitcoin for customers who have spent their entire lives using only a single product, and know almost nothing about it? Without even a means to compare one "product" to another, where do we start? Most only understand money from the context of its network utility - ie. How many places can I spend it at - and have no foundational to make a judgement of its *quality,* which must come before its network adoption. ...
Read_755 - Drivechains
August 11, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 107 MB"A successful blind merge mined sidechain with significant MEV opportunities could offer Bitcoin significant benefits, which could more than offset the disadvantages." - "Blind merge mining works by a third party running the sidechain, building sidechain blocks and receiving the sidechain fees. This entity then creates a Bitcoin transaction, which passes on these fees to the Bitcoin miners in the form of Bitcoin transaction fees." — Bitmex research A trustless, high assurance means of mov...
Chat_83 - Decentralizing Global Markets with Nostr, Pablof7z
August 08, 2023 19:42 - 2 hours - 224 MBWe have an incredible chat today with Pablof7z who is on a mission to make Nostr the global, decentralized marketplace. With highlighter for integrated, universal note taking, data vending machines for micro tasks and shared computing, and using Ai to bring new services and coordination to the ecosystem. Pablof7z dedicates all of his time to building the future. Don't miss our chat in diving down the rabbit hole with him. Links for the many things discussed in the show: • An open system f...
Read_754 - Bitcoin Is Not Crypto, The SEC Confirms
August 04, 2023 06:03 - 49 minutes - 67.6 MB"Talk to a bitcoin maximalist – someone who believes that bitcoin is the only digital asset with innate value – and, more likely than not, they’ll tell you the world’s oldest cryptocurrency is, in fact, ‘not crypto’ at all. The refrain can be confusing: clearly, bitcoin pioneered the use of cryptography – an ultra-secure type of encryption – with the aim of creating a digital currency. Bitcoin is the archetypal crypto. And yet, in the context of how the digital asset marketplace has evolve...
Read_753 - Bitcoin Timestamp Security [Jameson Lopp]
July 27, 2023 16:07 - 32 minutes - 45 MB"Bitcoin is often referred to as a secure timestamping service. We never had a global record of truth with trustworthy timestamps, so how did this come about? It’s generally due to Proof of Work being combined to a few simple rules by which miners must abide." — Jameson Lopp Can Bitcoin's sense of time be broken? The security and probabilistic assurances of Bitcoin seem simple on their face, but when you dive a little deeper, there is so often tons of nuance and quiet brilliance to unpack a...
Read_752 - Bitcoin Becomes the Flag of Technology [Balaji S. Srinivasan]
July 26, 2023 15:20 - 1 hour - 107 MB"Bitcoin represents the explicit encoding of previously implicit values of the tech community. It's not just software — it is a Schelling point and a symbol. As such, it will become widely recognized as the flag of technology over the course of the 2020s." — Balaji S. Srinivasan Today we cover another read from Anil's Bitcoin Essentials list, this time from Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji has a way with words and always brings a unique, high level mental frame to how the world is unfolding. He s...
Read_751 - Decentralization: Why Dumb Networks Are Better [Andreas Antonopolous]
July 21, 2023 01:18 - 46 minutes - 64.2 MB"Some networks are “smart.” They offer sophisticated services that can be delivered to very simple end-user devices on the “edge” of the network. Other networks are “dumb” — they offer only a very basic service and require that the end-user devices are intelligent. What’s smart about dumb networks is that they push innovation to the edge, giving end-users control over the pace and direction of innovation. Simplicity at the center allows for complexity at the edge, which fosters the vast dece...
Read_749 - Economics of Bitcoin as a Settlement Network [Saifedean]
July 18, 2023 23:15 - 44 minutes - 61.6 MB"The obsession with consumer payments in the Bitcoin community is an unfortunate relic of the fiat money era. Generations that have only known monetary hot potatoes that need to be spent before they devalue have come to view life as a quest of mass consumption." — Saifedean Ammous Today we hit an historical piece from the one and only Saifedean on the economics of Bitcoin for global settlement. While so many fail to recognize the deeper value of money, rather than the shallow service of pay...
Read_750 - Capital in the 21st Century [Allen Farrington]
July 16, 2023 18:57 - 1 hour - 92.7 MB"To do our best to minimize the economics jargon once again, we might simply ask: what are you going to do with your time? Are you going to create or consume? And how do the characteristics of money, as the salable representation of that time, influence your decision? I sincerely believe that this is the killer app for Bitcoin: pricing capital. If there were ever a time to say that Bitcoin Fixes This, here it is." — Allen Farrington On the announcement of AxiomBTC, Allen Farrington writes a...
Read_748 - Bitcoin & the Rise of the Cypherpunks [Lopp]
July 13, 2023 22:04 - 1 hour - 101 MB"While many of the innovations in the space are new, they’re built on decades of work that led to this point. By tracing this history, we can understand the motivations behind the movement that spawned bitcoin and share its vision for the future." Context matters. If you don't know the history of the cypherpunks and where we are coming from. Then you may not really know where we are today. Listen to Lopp's amazing piece from 2016, Bitcoin & the Rise of the Cypherpunks. Check out the origin...
Read_747 - The Bondholder's Burning Platform [Croesus]
July 11, 2023 21:33 - 54 minutes - 75.4 MB"Since 1800, in 51 out of 52 cases where a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio reached 130%, the country eventually defaulted. The only exception is current Japan, who is frankly in the final stages of circling the drain (e.g., central bank asset purchases and yield curve control). Where is the US now? 129% debt-to-GDP." — Jesse Myers Don't miss this excellent breakdown and visual analogy for the state of government debt and the promises of the US Treasury and the impossibility of a stable or grow...
Guy's Take #68 - Lightning & the Ai Economy
July 06, 2023 20:25 - 1 hour - 135 MBAi agents are going to be able to seek out, delegate, and pay for micro services from an ecosystem of other agents & services. But the resources being share will be delivered instantly, and irreversibly in the form of compute cycles. Only an instant, bearer, and irreversible payment method that scales massively will be able to meet the demands and provide a backbone for the economy of Ai exchange. In this Guy's Take episode, I argue why I think Lightning is going to eat ALL of this ecosystem...
Reboot - Bitcoin and The American Idea [Alex Gladstein]
July 04, 2023 20:30 - 47 minutes - 65.4 MB"Today Americans celebrate 246 years of independence from the British Empire. On this day in 1776 the Founding Fathers made a declaration. It was a bold and risky action. Never before had a colonial state defeated its overlord, especially at the apex of its global power." — Alex Gladstein For Independence Day and for all those travelers out there I'm bringing back an absolutely amazing piece by the one and only Alex Gladstein. If you haven't heard it, then you are welcome for bringing it ba...
Read_746 - Orange Pilling Your Barber [Hector Alvero]
June 30, 2023 03:13 - 34 minutes - 47 MB"Your barber or stylist likely has the broadest network of anyone you know. People from every walk of life, including business owners, accountants, teachers, firefighters and politicians, sit in their chairs, sometimes for hours. It is likely that no one else in your sphere of influence has the amount of time and trust to help others learn about and understand Bitcoin." — Hector Alvero We dive into a great, succinct Bitcoin Magazine article today on a surprisingly ripe, yet untapped resourc...
Chat_82 - The Spirit of Satoshi
June 29, 2023 02:59 - 1 hour - 107 MBWe recently had Aleks Svetski back on at Ai Unchained to discuss the project we hinted at in episode 2 that he made public at BTCPrague. The Spirit of Satoshi. A bitcoin centered, custom built LLM intended to encompass the bias, and the perspective of Bitcoin, cypherpunk, Austrian economic point of view. And why this explicit bias is actually a massive feature of Ai that the establishment has misunderstood. Don't miss it. Don't forget to check out the launch page: https://spiritofsatoshi.ai...
Read_745 - Every Company Will Be A Lightning Company [Graham Krizek]
June 28, 2023 01:39 - 43 minutes - 59.4 MB"Neither a startup nor a bank will ever be able to cost-effectively compete on a global scale with the Lightning Network." — Graham Krizek Today we hit a really interesting piece from the founder and CEO of Voltage digging into the recent decades development of every tech company moving to in-house financial instruments and cards. What the problems are that they have sought to get around, why they still get stuck with a plethora of other banking intermediaries, and why lightning not only of...
Read_744 - How To Position for the Bitcoin Boom, Part 2 [Adamant Research]
June 24, 2023 01:16 - 1 hour - 112 MB"Investing in bitcoin, we believe, is like having the ability to buy shares of a general “Internet ETF” back in the early 1990s, or like being able to buy undeveloped land on Manhattan Island at the start of the Industrial Revolution—it’s the opportunity of a lifetime." — Adamant Research Today we finish yesterday's incredible report on how to think about the market opportunities, risk, and incredible potential rewards as we move forward and how best to secure and protect an investment in t...
Read_743 - How to Position for the Bitcoin Boom, Part 1 [Adamant Research]
June 22, 2023 23:14 - 1 hour - 103 MB"bitcoin is a protocol stack which we can expect to be expanding for many decades, and its foundation is that lean, simple database defended by the world’s strongest firewall; the bitcoin blockchain. In sum, we recommend to not worry about “diversification” in cryptocurrencies and to focus exclusively on bitcoin. It’s the right tool for the job, so pick it up and add it to your toolbox." — Adamant Research Today we dive into the amazing report from Adamant Research who have marked the key z...
Chat_81 - An Austrian View of US Collapse with Peter St. Onge
June 21, 2023 03:30 - 1 hour - 77.9 MB"...At some point the entire financial system becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the Federal Reserve" — Peter St. Onge Today we dive into the fiat and banking crisis with Austrian economist Peter St. Onge in exploring the insolvencies of our banking and political institutions, how we got here, and where things are likely heading. What courses of action are available for the US government and the Fed and what can we take away from the historical examples of countries taking this same path ...
Read_742 - Trust Me Bro [Allen Farrington]
June 20, 2023 01:00 - 1 hour - 105 MB"Expect BlackRock to turn around and shill this to banks, and in particular big banks, such that JPMorgan, for example, can itself turn around and offer “Bitcoin” to its own clients. Of course, it will be an IOU to the BlackRock Stack O’Sats™ that you can transfer to your friend’s Bank Of America Bitcoin IOU account at your leisure. In other words, in short order, the entirety of the Blue Banks’ asset base becomes a funnel into the matrix of the pseudo-Bitcoin narrative attack vector... on t...
Read_741 - Much Ado About Ordinals, Inscriptions, and BRC20 [Roy Sheinfeld]
June 15, 2023 23:47 - 31 minutes - 43.5 MB"The more wonderful something is, the more passion it will arouse. Bitcoin is among the greatest wonders of the late-modern world, so Greg Foss is understandably very passionate about it. So passionate in fact, that he dropped 11 f-bombs in 31 seconds. Why is such a stalwart bitcoin proponent so concerned? Because two guys in cheap wizard costumes did a cringey Fortnite dance? Surely the stakes must be higher. According to some, there is a battle underway for the future and soul of Bitcoin."...
Read_740 - What Are the Key Properties of Bitcoin [Jameson Lopp]
June 15, 2023 01:04 - 1 hour - 98.6 MB"What is Bitcoin? Many have attempted to answer this question, but I believe that our quest to do so is doomed to continue in perpetuity. The continuing development of the protocol is where the cutting edge of research into what Bitcoin is and discussion about what it should strive to be actually occurs. It can be tricky for newcomers to wrap their head around what sort of proposals are more likely to be accepted for Bitcoin because there are plenty of unwritten rules regarding protocol cha...
Read_739 - The State of Zapvertising [The Same Cat]
June 12, 2023 23:58 - 49 minutes - 67.4 MB"Zapvertising has two forms, and I believe there is a crucial difference between the two. In one version, a company or creator zaps a ton of notes on the Nostr feed. Blockstream has done this for a couple of days at a time, to great success. It is very unobtrusive. Just a gentle reminder that they are there, and it is a way to earn good will that may lead to follows and possibly conversion to sales. This method has already proven itself to be fairly successful, as I think the amount of goodw...
Guy's Take #67 - Withdraw Everything
June 09, 2023 01:40 - 1 hour - 112 MBWith the banking crisis just getting started, with the SEC going after Binance and Coinbase, with rumors of Prime Trust declaring bankruptcy, it is no better time than now to take advantage of the most elegant aspect of Bitcoin, that it is a bearer asset that you can own without the permission or liability of anyone else. There is no better time than now, to withdraw. Today's episode will dig into the recent excellent work from Brad Mills, as well as explore the fundamental reasons for our s...
Read_738 - The Fruit of the Nostr Tree [Guy Swann]
June 07, 2023 22:30 - 1 hour - 93.3 MB"Nostr isn't just a social network, in a similar way that Bitcoin isn't just a transaction network. Both of these things are true, but they each miss the more significant elements of what they accomplish." — Guy Swann Yesterday I was consumed with a mental thread that I couldn't get out of my head, and so decided to set everything else aside and get this idea out. Today we read my short article posted on blogstack.io, and follow it with a Guy's Take on the possible nuance, where I might be ...
Read_737 - Is Your Money Safe During the Banking Crisis, Part 2 [Brad Mills]
June 06, 2023 22:09 - 53 minutes - 73.2 MB"Much like how two nuclear bombs ended World War II, capital-crushing central bank policy rate hikes and Russian sanctions were like two nuclear bombs dropped on the economy and the banking system. The shock wave took one year to make its way around the world, and now we're dealing with the fallout.European banks like Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse were very intertwined with Russia, and tried to resist cutting ties with Russian business lines as this would inevitably lead to their failures,...
Read_736 - Is Your Money Safe during the Banking Crisis, Part 1 [Brad Mills]
June 02, 2023 18:28 - 56 minutes - 77 MB"Price inflation is the highest it’s been in decades. Labor participation is the lowest it’s been in decades. Wealth inequality is continually going in the wrong direction since 1971 and has accelerated during the QE period. The bond markets are more volatile now than they have been in decades, and 2022 was the worst year for stocks and bonds since 1920. The ballooning of the money supply and growth of the debt-based monetary system is not a left versus right phenomenon — at least in Amer...
Read_735 - When Bitcoin Meets AI [Svetski]
June 01, 2023 22:35 - 1 hour - 84.9 MB"The idea of a language user interface as the next step from the thumb tapping we’ve become used to over the past decade is fascinating, and what we should be thinking about is how to make these tools new “bicycles for the mind,” as Steve Jobs said about computers. It’s very important we push back against doomer narratives that lean the world toward “approved Ai” in order to avoid such tools becoming yet another appendage of the state." — Aleks Svetski What are the true power and limitation...
Chat_80 - Building the Ark with Burak
June 01, 2023 00:11 - 1 hour - 118 MBWith the Introduction of Ark, the new 2nd layer payments and privacy protocol introduced with Read_734. I left with a lot of excitement, but I still had a ton of questions, so it felt like time for a chat with Burak, the creator of Ark. We dive into the bigger picture, how this is similar to lightning, how it is different, and then in an attempt to piece together the working parts we go through a bunch of edge cases and detail exactly how the ASP, past owners of Ark balances, and current own...
Basics_07 - The Basics of Key Management
May 26, 2023 00:57 - 44 minutes - 61.2 MBThis episode will be part review, and part just going over some very practical, step by step ways to think about managing your keys with a hardware wallet. What you always need to do, how to not over complicate things, who you are protecting your keys from, and more. This episode will be good for those who had been considering taking the dive into their first hardware wallet, and still feel a little uncomfortable about exactly what to do to make sure their keys are there when needed. Guy's...
Read_734 - Introducing Ark [Burak]
May 25, 2023 01:27 - 42 minutes - 58.3 MB"Ark is a trustless, distinct layer two protocol with unilateral exit. ASPs cannot steal users’ funds or link senders & receivers. Users retain self-custody and can revert their funds to the base layer if something goes wrong on the second layer." — Burak Today we dive into possibly the most exciting announcement to come out of Bitcoin2023, a genuinely unique layer 2 protocol, for non-custodial, fully anonymous, fast, cheap, off-chain payments. Introducing Ark. We are diving right in and I ...
Read_733 - Mint the Future With Taproot Assets [Ryan Gentry]
May 23, 2023 15:41 - 1 hour - 100 MB"an unbounded number of assets can be minted and/or moved in a single on-chain transaction. This off-chain first design enables asset minters and transactors to enjoy the permissionless nature of the bitcoin blockchain and scale their businesses without running into bitcoin’s scaling constraints. Users will soon be able to integrate their assets into the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low-fee transactions. This leverages existing network effects and the install base of wallets, ...
FEATURING - AI Unchained_001 - A New Frontier, with Jeff Booth
May 16, 2023 03:25 - 1 hour - 131 MBWelcome to the first episode of AI Unchained, a new show exploring how AI technology can be a means of empowering the individual, rather than a system of control, and all the tools and perspectives that enlighten that journey. Our first guest is none other than Jeff Booth, the author of "The Price of Tomorrow" on the incredible deflationary force of technology and why our only choice is to embrace it, not fight it. If you are trying to make sense out of the change that is being unleashed, y...
Read_732 - We Need More Apps With Lightning, Not More Lightning Apps [Roy Sheinfeld]
May 12, 2023 21:24 - 1 hour - 102 MB"Permission can only be denied if it is requested. Direct, peer-to-peer interaction obviates permission and equalizes market power. Don’t request permission to transact; transact. Don’t tinker with the system; supersede it." — Roy Sheinfeld Today we dive into a great piece just dropped from Roy Shienfeld with a great way to think both about Bitcoin and lightning adoption by the mainstream, and also about the path and direction forward to bring the most utility to the most people. Don't build...
Read_731 - Let's Grow Nostr [Jack Spirko]
May 11, 2023 00:59 - 24 minutes - 34.1 MB"The biggest complaint members of my audience make about Nostr is the sheer dominance of Bitcoin content. This is understandable. Nostr uses a means of identification and account management very similar to Bitcoin, it has Bitcoin Lightning integration and Bitcoiners tend to be somewhat techy nerds and early adopters. Hence mostly Bitcoin type folks were the first to see Nostr’s potential and get on it. There is a finite limit to growth though with any topic on social media and instead of comp...
Read_730 - High Fees? Bitcoin is Working as Designed [Matt Odell]
May 10, 2023 00:52 - 34 minutes - 47.2 MB"Bitcoin transaction fees limit network abuse by making usage expensive. There is a cost to every transaction, set by a dynamic free market based on demand." — Matt Odell Is Bitcoin broken, are the high fees the end of Bitcoin as money? Are the fees themselves even the problem? How does this relate to not wanting people to be pooping in the park? Today we dive into a short, but solid post by Matt Odell to make sense of what is going on with fees, and then a Guy's Take to clear up some previo...
Read_729 - BRICS, USD, and a Multipolar World [James Lavish]
May 09, 2023 01:51 - 50 minutes - 68.9 MB"This very dominance is causing certain countries to seek a way to be less dependent on the USD and the UST. To extract themselves from the whims and needs of a central bank that lives a world away from their own economy. Yet still finds a way to dominate it." — James Lavish Today we take a ride through a twitter thread by James Lavish, exploring the major developments in the splintering of the world monetary and banking system. While the dollar remains dominant through sheer inertia, the tre...
Read_728 - Who Controls Bitcoin Core [Jameson Lopp]
May 06, 2023 16:48 - 1 hour - 88.9 MB"The question of who controls the ability to merge code changes into Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository tends to come up on a recurring basis. This has been cited as a “central point of control” of the Bitcoin protocol by various parties over the years, but I argue that the question itself is a red herring that stems from an authoritarian perspective — this model does not apply to Bitcoin. It’s certainly not obvious to a layman as to why that is the case, thus the goal of this article is to exp...
Guy's Take #66 - Pooping in the Park
May 03, 2023 23:47 - 1 hour - 87.6 MBBitcoin is a public good. The maintenance and stewardship of the network rests on the conviction and work of 10s or 100s of thousands of node operators who work to validate and ensure consistency among the rules and the truth of the data propagated throughout. NFTs and BRC tokens have come to the Bitcoin timechain, stamping large amounts of data to the chain, and causing bloat in the UTXO set, as well as validation and bandwidth costs. Is the sky falling? Is this totally unimportant? Or is t...
Read_727 - The Banking Crisis Stays, & the Treasury is Broke [Nik Bhatia, Joe Consorti]
May 03, 2023 15:58 - 39 minutes - 54.8 MB"The fall of First Republic Bank was the second-largest bank failure by assets in US history, putting us in the 2008 conversation. Times are different, but the bank failures are relatable in size. The total assets of three 2023 failures have already eclipsed the total assets of all the banks that failed during the Great Financial Crisis" — Nik Bhatia, Joe Consorti Today we dive into a short breakdown of the breakdown of the banking system with The Bitcoin Layer. The banking crisis is here to...
Read_726 - The Nostr Privacy Paradox [L0LA L33TZ]
May 02, 2023 00:00 - 1 hour - 94.6 MB"If Tor is an anonymous remailer, meaning a protocol facilitating the anonymous forwarding and receiving of messages between peers, Nostr can function as an anonymous bulletin board. CoinJoin coordinators can publish their services via a Nostr event type, and CoinJoin wallets can be enabled to automatically pull from those relays to display within their clients." — L0LA L33TZ Today we dive into a really cool topic on how major privacy concerns can be thought of in relation to our interaction...
Read_725 - Operation Choke Point 2.0 is Underway [Nic Carter]
April 27, 2023 19:17 - 1 hour - 147 MB"Banks are highly regulated public-private partnerships in an environment where new charters are excruciatingly hard to obtain, and as such remain de facto arms of the state. It has been and remains trivial to deputize them to carry out political objectives. If there was any doubt, it’s now evident that the Obama administration and its successor in Biden’s regime are comfortable circumventing the First Amendment by engaging nominally private companies to do their dirty work." — Nic Carter To...
Read_724 - The Virtue of Selfishness - The Objectivist Ethic [Ayn Rand]
April 26, 2023 20:19 - 1 hour - 155 MB"The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that i hear once in a while: "Why do you use the word 'selfishness' to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?" To those who ask it, my answer is: "For the reason that makes you afraid of it." But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies, yet who are unable to formulate my actual reason or to identify th...
Read_723 - Alchemy - Everything Divided By 21 Million [Knut Svanholm]
April 24, 2023 20:29 - 34 minutes - 47.5 MB"Central Banking is successful alchemy in this sense. The money- issuing institutions of the world have found a way to create new money with no cost. No mining is required. They are the alchemists of our era. The Central Banks’ promise of stable prices is as absurd as the alchemists’ promise of cheap gold. The whole point of a value- measurement tool, or a type of money, is in its costliness. It has to somehow connect to reality because of the subjective nature of value. Money created without...
Read_722 - Purple Text, Orange Highlights [Dergigi]
April 19, 2023 02:35 - 1 hour - 91.7 MB"I believe that in the open /attention/ information economy we find ourselves in, value will mostly derive from effective curation, dissemination, and transmission of information, not the exclusive ownership of it." — Dergigi Today we dive into another great piece from Gigi exploring more possibilities and incredible shifts in the dynamics of information, censorship, and control with the addition of Nostr and open social protocols in tandem with Bitcoin and Lightning. Piece by piece, the rev...
Read_721 - IMF Unveils New Global Currency "Universal Monetary Unit" [Tyler Durden]
April 18, 2023 01:19 - 52 minutes - 71.8 MB"Can you imagine a world in which you are restricted from buying meat for a while because you have already used your “carbon credits” for the month? Your “financial privileges” could potentially be restricted at any time at the whim of a government bureaucrat, and if you are a big enough troublemaker you could be “de-platformed” from the system permanently." - Tyler Durden Check out the original article at: IMF Unveils New Global Currency Known As The "Universal Monetary Unit" To "Transform...