redphone ☎️🧙🏻‍♂️ Profile picture
Aug 2 24 tweets 4 min read Read on X
1/ When Edward @Snowden spoke at Bitcoin2024 last week, he asked a question that lodged like a tumor in my brain. To paraphrase:

“Does the world and the U.S. election feel normal to you?”

When he was a kid, he said... 🧵👇Image
2/ ... presidents were people you looked up, people you admired and aspired to be like.

Do these candidates fit the bill? Do they represent the best of us?

If so, wtf happened to us?
3/ Something’s off, he argues, and he points to the algos that subtly manipulate us on X, TikTok, Insta, FB and beyond.

For all their benefits, they’ve ultimately pitted us against one another in a competition for likes.
4/ They’ve isolated us and turned us into dopamine addicts who can’t see beyond the next 5 minutes of outrage and shock.
5/ “The reason the internet feels broken,” Snowden added, “is because it’s reflecting a broken world.”
6/ I could talk for hours about this broken world because I see signs of it everywhere. We speak of financial nihilism in the crypto industry. But that’s merely a symptom of a broader, more insidious nihilism that pervades nearly everything.
7/ The inequality gap widens. Misinformation reigns, and we stand on the very brink of World War.

Meanwhile, technological revolutions beget more technological revolutions across virtually every field (AI, genetics, finance via crypto, pharma, robotics, etc.).
8/ The Great Acceleration has arrived.

We call these sorts of changes “revolutions” bc they are. They upset the world’s order. They rob power from one entity and bequeath it upon another. Some of us are ground like meat beneath the wheels. Others rise to perch on thrones.
9/ It’s destabilizing (both for our finances and our psychologies). And we can’t help but begin to question our place in the world.

The questioning only grows louder in the face of AI.

I can feel it myself.
10/ If we achieve AGI, what’s my purpose? Will I have a job? What will it mean to be human? Is the next rung of evolution leaving these biological bodies behind?

AI lies at the heart of it all. And some have taken to calling these fears and existential questions “AI anxiety.”
11/ I like calling it “desynchronization.”

We’re out of sync with the world. Technological change is forcing us to break with the past. And that means we literally have to rewrite/reconceive our own places in the world.
12/ Humanity has relied upon church/religion for millennia bc it forces you to take at least 1 day a week to look inward, to ask yourself hard q's, to place your feet to the ground, to be here now, to stare into the unblinking octopus eye at the very center of the great mystery.
13/ So while we’ve ditched religion in an increasingly secular world, we haven’t replaced it with anything that matters.
14/ Sure, you can believe in evolution. You can say everything’s a meaningless cosmic accident, but humans require a value structure nonetheless. We require goals and beliefs. We require something that unites us with other humans.

We require meaning.
15/ I’m still trying to find my way, but one thing that’s helped is building my own “spiritual" book. Whenever I read something profound, something helpful to remember, I take a screenshot that lands in an album on my phone. Then, I flip through that wisdom regularly.
16/ In other words, I may ditch the church, but I don’t ditch the spiritual practice… the ongoing pursuit of wisdom, grounding, meaning and purpose.
17/ I strive to erect inside myself a foundation of spiritual backbone… a personal philosophy that gives me strength to stand in the face of all of life’s wonder, mystery and tragedy.
18/ It’s time for you to build your own framework.

Maybe you’ll do what I do and mash up Buddhism, Christianity, stoicism and techno-futurism. Or maybe you’ll go “off-the-grid Amish.”

More likely, your answer’s entirely different.
19/ The point is, no one is going to hand you an answer to society’s growing nihilism (or as I like to think of it: society’s lack of philosophical frameworks).
20/ The answer must come from within. But it can’t be found if you’re not willing to spend some time every day/week/month confronting the mystery.
21/ You don’t need a new car, new job, plastic surgery or more money… you first need a philosophy.

You need a reason for being here.
22/ You need to believe some things are worth fighting for… and some are beneath you.

You need to know precisely what it is that makes you you.

Bc if you don’t, others will determine it for you.

23/ Just published this on Substack, too, if you want to share/subscribe 👇
redphone.substack.com/p/does-the-wor…
24/ Now, watch Edward Snowden’s speech. It’s unsettling and powerful, and it helped convince me that his voice is among the most important voices of our generation. Pushed to the margins of society, he can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves.

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More from @redphonecrypto

Jul 29
Raw braindump on Bitcoin2024:

1. Nashville marks the end of the cypherpunk phase. #bitcoin now plays the game of thrones

2. RFK’s speech was 10x better than Trump's. This could split the die-hard crypto vote between Trump and RFK and potentially jeopardize Trump’s bid 🧵👇 Image
3. There were murmurs of bitcoin replacing all fiat. That’s always been the vision, but it’s taken a backseat to the "digital gold" narrative

Look for "bitcoin as money" to gain strength… esp. if some govts reclassify $BTC as legal tender (& ditch the retardio cap gains tax)
4. With clearer regs and reclassification, payroll providers, could make it far easier for companies to pay (all or a portion of) their worker salaries in sats, which is probably the single most important factor in driving adoption
Read 15 tweets
Jun 25
1/ Crypto’s next massive narrative stares us in the face… it’s not the election, Solana memecoins, restaking or gaming. It’s bigger than all those combined

It’s AI + crypto 🧵👇 Image
2/ And it’s not just that AI will work better on crypto rails than tradfi rails, it’s that AI will work better on a decentralized web as well

In other words, AI + crypto are rearchitecting modern finance AND the internet itself
3/ First, finance:

AI won’t have sufficient access to TradFi rails. That system is too opaque, trustful, slow and over-regulated
Read 18 tweets
Dec 30, 2023
6𝟗 𝐃r𝐞a𝐦s & D𝐞l𝐮s𝐢o𝐧s f𝐨r 2𝟎2𝟒

from the dark place under your feet...

On substack:

Or expand the 🧵👇 open.substack.com/pub/redphone/p…
Image
🅿🆁🅾🅻🅾🅶🆄🅴

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for the machines are within me

and I am within them
🅸🅽🆃🆁🅾🅳🆄🅲🆃🅸🅾🅽

I think back to my old life, half-starved, feeling hopeless, working jobs that paid me just enough to keep me indentured.

I’ll never forget the hunger. Sometimes, the hollowness in my stomach got so bad, I did the only thing I could to make it stop: I went to sleep.

Now, many years later, I have food in the fridge (and even a house with a set of stairs like the rich kids had when I was a boy).

But that hunger has not gone away.

It’s imprinted on my soul. It drives me, gnaws at me, reminds me that the brink is always closer than we dare admit.

I started here with nothing, buying my first bitcoin 11 years ago via a red MoneyGram telephone ☎️ at my local pharmacy (thank you, BitInstant). Since that time, I have amassed (and lost) fortunes.

Each cycle has taught me lessons about investing, but more importantly about myself.

Here’s the most important one: anything is possible.

There are no rules in this space because humanity hasn’t tread here before.

We stumble together through the dark forest. 

And every year, we uncover some new wonder.

In 2023, that wonder was bitcoin ordinals.

With Casey @rodarmor's contributions, the world suddenly had a way to intertwine data with the world’s oldest blockchain for as long as it lives on.

This data – from JPGs to videos to html and JSON — doesn’t live on IPFS or Filecoin or Arweave, but right there in the 500+ gb that make up the bitcoin blockchain.

I became obsessed, bought a laptop to once again run a bitcoin node, started minting and collecting early ordinals.

Then one sleep-deprived day, I had an idea: what if we used ordinals as a way to swap fungible tokens directly on top of bitcoin? 

I fired up Notepad, jotted down a hypothetical example, and tweeted it to the world:

Within days, a noble anon christened @domodata took up the idea and formalized it into a spec. Now, there are more than 55,000 different BRC-20 tickers in the world with a combined market cap in the billions of dollars. The first token, ORDI, is on Binance. There are cross-chain bridges, new exchanges, stablecoins and more.

The concept has also spread to maybe a dozen other chains, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s dramatically changed the fee and security landscape for bitcoin by generating revenue for miners… just as the next halving approaches.

The irony is, I almost didn’t tweet out my idea at all.

I was embarrassed. BRC-20 felt too naive. It requires trusting indexers, wallets and exchanges with little to no tangible incentive not to cheat their users.

In the end, I said “fuck your little ego, redphone,” and tweeted anyway.

I’m glad I did, and I hope the words that follow encourage you to do the same.
Read 74 tweets
Dec 27, 2023
Braindump on twitscriptions

1. What are they? Someone took the concept of BRC20s (that is giving anyone the ability to deploy a token on bitcoin) and applied it to Twitter.

Simply tweet the creation of a token w a lil json and VOILA! you've birthed a token into the world. Image
2. Then, anyone can come along and mint your new token by tweeting a “mint” tweet like I did earlier today (see below).

After that, all any tokenholder has to do to transfer their tokens is tweet a lil "transfer" json, too. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

3. Hard to track down the origins of the idea, but it appears to have started here.

Read 20 tweets
Oct 24, 2023
A fren just asked me about the preparatory steps I'd take for upcoming bull market... Here's what I said:

Preparations for me are really honing in on my mistakes in the last cycle and avoiding them.

7 things I did wrong: 🧵👇
1. Took on too much so I couldn't focus enough on trading/have the headspace to make good decisions or sense tremors or narrative shifts in the market
2. Didn't sell when I went out to dinner and literally heard 3 other tables talking about crypto (days before Elon went on Saturday Night Live)
Read 10 tweets
Sep 10, 2023
Today = 1 month since I joined @friendtech

30 days of madness + euphoria. Can honestly say I've only gotten more + more bullish on FT...

in fact, I feel like a literal bull at the rodeo w the rope tied bw my leggos & the gate's about to swing open 🧵👇 Image
1. First, the bad. There are elements to FT that are pretty gross... examples: paying to access a person and their thoughts, giving a market cap to a human, feeling like you're shilling/pimping yourself, gating your content, feeling beholden to strangers, etc., etc. Image
In fact, I thought I would hate FT, but I've found the rooms to be full of really interesting discussions... candid, honest stuff with people I respect and admire.
Read 21 tweets

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