Greatest accomplishment: beating Dark Souls 3, and yeah I know it's not the hardest Dark Souls.
Oct 8, 2022 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
Cumulative, rolling 12 month federal interest expense is $756.4 Billion. If total US debt is $31 Trillion that's an implied average interest rate of 2.44%. Am I off base here?
This is odd to me. In Q1 of 22, US interest expense as a percent of total tax receipts is a mere 20%. Last time our interest expenses/income was at this exact level was 1968.
Debt/GDP back then was 39.2%.
Nov 5, 2021 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
The government is able to hide the exorbitant cost of it's debt because the maturity of the debt is a lot longer than the political cycle. For example, spending thus far in 2021 for interest expenses alone is $548.3 Billion. So if rates go up this causes a problem right?
1/n
Long term yes. Short term no. Current average interest rate is 1.592% according to fiscaldata.treasury.gov. If Interest rates doubled overnight to 3% then interest cost on total debt would theoretically be over a Trillion dollars, right? Only sort of.
2/n
May 18, 2021 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Every bull market the lie of "faster" altcoins resurfaces. Litecoin is not faster than Bitcoin. Dogecoin is not faster than Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually settles in LESS time than any other cryptocurrency. But to understand why that is, you have to understand what settlement is. 1/n
In a theoretical sense, final settlement doesn't exist at all on any blockchain. What settlement assurance you do get from a blockchain is a function of the energy an attacker would have to expend in order to rewrite your transactions or spend their own coins twice. 2/n
May 16, 2021 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
When the "crypto" world gets noisy I need to take a step back and regard some of my fundamental precepts. These are not in any particular order.
1) There is no measure of price inflation which accurately measures the state of the monetary system.
2) Price inflation metrics themselves were only brought to the fore after the Fed lost the ability to audit or control the money supply.
Sep 24, 2020 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
@edstromandrew has it right. Anyone who makes the MySpace comparison is woefully stupid. I'd like to address why I think this worn out meme is so far off the mark. 1/n
The thesis goes like this: Bitcoin was first, and MySpace was first. MySpace failed therefore Bitcoin will fail. However, MySpace was not first. Friendster was first. If the only thing you base your comparison on is "firstness", then the comparison is already dead. 2/n
Jul 27, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I'm so excited about BTC I can't go to sleep, but the line of demarcation for me is $11,391. If we go above that this week then we are back inside a multi-year trend. Next week the line moves up to $11,578.
Zooming in a little more I can see that the reentry point is actually a few dollars lower at $11,378.00 A few minutes ago we touched it and bounced back down. FYI I drew the blue line about a year ago and have never moved it.
Jul 12, 2020 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
Making my way through Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State. In the context of #Bitcoin many passages really stand out. I'll put those here.
"Obviously, the more the actors anticipate the final price, the further apart will be supply and demand at any price different from equilibrium, the more drastic the shortages and surpluses will be, and the more quickly will the final price be established." p.133
May 22, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
It's interesting to think of Bitcoin as the ultimate unit of account, and for me this reality arrived long ago in real terms. The ever present meme
1 BTC = 1 BTC
is more than just a tautology.
1/6
1 BTC = 1 BTC
is an expression of BTC accumulation as the standard by which all accumulation is measured. And it holds true in stark contrast to dollars, for which the equation is:
1 USD = .97 USD equivalent per forward 1 year interval in real terms
Value decreasing
2/6
May 9, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I'd like to explain the biggest cognitive hurdle I saw people fail to clear when faced with this pandemic in the early days. It wasn't that smart people around me didn't understand the implications. The problem was that they DID understand the implications.
1/7
And at the same time, they were so invested in projects that had taken years to bring to fruition that they couldn't accept these implications.
2/7
Mar 8, 2020 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
My life in the time of coronavirus. I wake up every morning with total exhaustion, as if I never went to sleep. My dreams are filled with stress and I wake up several times a night in a sweat. I dry off and go back to sleep.
My relationship is strained because my wife and I have spent the last few weekends trying to negotiate which version of reality will be the basis for our actions. It mostly looks like this: I beg her not to back to work. She says some version of 'it's like the flu.'
Feb 14, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
86.75% of all Bitcoins that will ever we exist have been mined. But how much of Bitcoin's market cap has been realized?
Let's say that Bitcoin goes 10x, which would be a market cap of 1.89 Trillion. Now let's look at block reward in that scenario. The current block is estimated to have $25,369.00. In the 10x scenario, the fees portion of the block reward alone would be $253,690.00.
Feb 4, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I find it remarkable how Tesla critics, in the wake of the recent parabolic advance, shift their focus from "fraud" and "hidden parking lots" to criticising Tesla because their stock price is TOO HIGH. 1/5
According to their world view, just a few months ago the market was a rational place where smart money could short an obvious dud and expect a profit. But now Tesla is evidence of a broken system, and "not QE" is entirely to blame for Tesla's repricing. 2/5
Jan 17, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is from experience and from the heart. If you've been diligently stacking sats since '17 and never experienced a BTC bull market, this next run may cause a surprising amount of anxiety and discomfort, especially if you've never had wealth before. 1/8
Bitcoin is a unique burden as you will have to secure it yourself in a world where violence is a reality. It's stressful. And for as long as you've been dreaming of the moon, when you finally arrive, there may be moments when you question whether you even want it anymore. 2/8
Dec 31, 2019 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Macro commentators I listen to (and respect) suffer glaring blind spots where bitcoin is concerned. One of my fave podcasters has made fun of BTC while crowing that projects like Hadera Hashgraph show immense promise. Even a year ago it was a bad take. Predictably, now this...
What I find so odd is that they know a lot about Bitcoin. They know a lot about the decline of the dollar. They understand the impossible bind that central banks are in. They've done real homework.
We like to compare the ascension of Bitcoin with other technical revolutions, but it's not the same. In most cases, the things being replaced were not already dying on their own the way government money is. 1/5
I remember when the internet was a curious frivolity. Books were not losing their pages. Phone calls were not being devalued. Fax machines and letters were not losing 3 to 8 percent of the their words every year. And yet the internet replaced them all. 2/5
Sep 12, 2019 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I finally listened to the @saifedean@GeorgeSelgin debate and thought it was great. One thing that struck me was Selgin's repeated misunderstanding of the nature of tx fees. He called them "a fixed cost" and seemed to think that fees are a function of the amount of hash power.
He also used a single Bitcoin tx with his friend Jeff, which he says cost 10% of the value of the tx, as a proof that fees on the network are prohibitive. All of these points were inaccurate.
Jul 14, 2019 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Adding onto @real_vijay's salient economic criticism, is the thorny problem that Ethereum's fundamental purpose for existing rules out the possibility of scale.
The world's appetite for computation is infinite, and the demand for computational resources on Ethereum is also infinite. Making matters worse is the misnomer of "world computer". There is no such thing.
Apr 17, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
@________jeremy @randi_eitzman Great explanations. Overall Randi's critiques are glib and borderline histrionic. She's talking about something that currently works, in production, and under real world conditions, yet her attitude is It'll Never Work, HAHA Total Facepalm!
Which rational universe is this?
@________jeremy @randi_eitzman Just to level set on this. The inner workings of LN are not and will not be for every users to navigate, tweak or, even see. Most retail adoption, like it or not, will be custodial and it'll just be "Bitcoin". They won't know off chain from LN to whatever scaling is next.
Apr 17, 2019 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
For what it's worth I haven't ruled out, for myself, the possibility that Craig Wright was close to the Satoshi collaboration. I can't explain why he wouldn't just do the simple thing and prove it, nor can I explain why all the doctored evidence is floating around.
Despite these gross inconsistencies, as I do more and more reading on the topic, I still think there's a possibility he was involved in some way at some point in time. HOWEVER....
Dec 30, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I see a lot of random naïfs on the internet trotting out the "crypto is dead" or "a joke" narrative in comments sections. This feels eerily similar to the way they used "Tesla is dead" narrative less than a year ago.
It reminds me of this really smug guy I know. I ran into him at a bbq in the Fall of 2015. I told him I'd just discovered Bitcoin and I was really excited about it. He said "Isn't bitcoin totally dead? A few people at the office got some as a joke."
