I've talked to a few docs about anxiety-related heart problems. At my age (32), none have been concerned.

So now guys 30-45 should be on watch because of "post-pandemic stress disorder?"

standard.co.uk/news/health/po…

https://twitter.com/WeHaveNoRights2/status/1468418285360271361?t=_JcBwof677xInWzt-ahWnQ&s=19

In a nobler time, principle and norms constrained behavior. A government could be "trusted" to maintain a gold peg on its currency because it was obvious to most involved that to undermine that norm would be to liquify the foundations of society. It's a nice thought that at some point people had this kind of foresight and restraint. Whether this was ever truly the case or not is irrelevant, because it certainly isn't any longer. We live in a time that has largely forgotten the hazards of an unconstrained currency.

I really like "have fun staying poor" as a meme because it has a spiritual and intellectual interpretation that is perhaps more profound than the obvious financial one. Naysayers and skeptics of Bitcoin have had more than enough time to introspect and reevaluate their claims, and at least open themselves up to the possibility that they don't have a full grasp of what's happening with this system.

As I was listening to this excellent conversation between @DiMartinoBooth and @EconguyRosie, something dawned on me: the bizarre nature of markets these days has completely upended why people buy assets. (thread)

https://twitter.com/DiMartinoBooth/status/1309202215207403524

For example, I was recently baffled as to why anyone would want to be long bonds with rates so low.

It used to be that you bought bonds because there was actually a sizable coupon; you might expect, say, a 5% return on your money; meaning a 3% "real" return after inflation.

Preview of our future

When you've got a hammer, everything will look like a nail The only way NYC is going to avoid collapse is by issuing a huge round of muni bonds and then doing a grant program to either biz or land owners.

What's the chance of those bonds getting paid back? What would their "natural" rate of interest be?

Great first-time contributions to Bitcoin Core:

- reviewing PRs by building/testing locally,
- adding test coverage, and
- best thing: finding bugs, whether conceptual or in code

Common, well-intended, but often not well-received:

- refactoring,
- reviewing PRs with only nits Development on Core is unlike many other software projects, and so new contributors may (understandably) be confused and behave in ways (with good intention) that annoy burnt out devs.

Been going for walks in the mornings, about an hour to get a coffee.

Seldom these days that we're actually alone with ourselves. The walking is good because I can't intake "networked" information, I'm just alone with my thoughts.

When's the last time you were? Seems rare. If we don't spend time actually, mentally alone (not networked), we don't let the mind cogitate on what we've taken in.

I think there's a good chance we get worse at processing for ourselves, get more accustomed to having other people digest for us, and so get more stupid.

@MartyBent @vandrewattycpa fun convo, thanks for the shout. Minor note: there's a continuing misconception that assumeutxo somehow relies on trusting something that isn't Bitcoin source code, or that it relies on some aggregate of community signatures. Much like assumevalid, assumeutxo just shifts some of the "trust criticality" away from optimizations of UTXO set management code (which few people can ably review) and towards reviewing a single hash included in the source code (which almost anyone can review).

Anyone know if there's a social network for having done code audits? Like a place you publicly attest to having read through a project's source? This thing should exist - would be nice to have a more explicit web of trust for software. Might also incentivize people to read more source if it got you a badge on some nice looking profile page.

One thing that's become clear to me since spending time at home is the big economies of scale to living as a family: batch prep meals, dividing up chores, sharing space and resources. How much effort has been duplicated by often delaying family formation into our late 30s? You could argue that we've been doing this as roommates, but doesn't happen to the same extent & with the same level of depth/commitment. Plenty of us who ultimately plan on being married are living alone - and some people will always prefer that.

@nickgillespie your response to the usually excellent @petersuderman was dead on re: the actions of the Fed. I don't know how Suderman got so turned around, but buying MBS, junk bonds, and suppressing interest rates to keep zombie corps alive (and deficits funded) ... is nowhere near the intended purpose of the Fed, which is (approximately) to "lend to solvent institutions in times of crisis at high rates of interest." Nothing about MBS or junk bonds says "solvent."

whytf is Ubuntu's default umask value 002 (i.e. globally readable)? Debian's is 0022 (group readable). But why isn't the default 077?

002 seems like a very unsafe default. Yet another reason to drop Ubuntu I guess. For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about: the umask value determines the permissions for newly created files. umask 002 means that by default any file you create is readable by _every user on the system_.

Reading Ayn Rand books in the library as a teenager was probably the best investment I'll ever have made. Totally reoriented my outlook. The most important things I got out of her books aren't necessarily about "selfishness" or other common tropes people associate with Rand. They are

- the primacy of creative output
- putting first-hand experience above all
- maintaining integrity at all costs
- agency

I'm early in Silber's biography of Paul Volcker, but already the choice quotes are piling up. Here's a short thread with some of them. amazon.com/Volcker-Persis… "It all sounded too easy. Push this button twice and out pops full employment. All I can remember after that was a word flashing in my brain like a yellow caution sign: 'Bullshit.' I’m not sure exactly where that came from … but it’s a thought that never left me."

Since the start of this crash, Bitcoin has undeniably acted as beta on equities. Interestingly, while movements in gold have tracked as well, it's +6% (instead of BTC's -15%, S&P's -18%).

I attribute this to (i) gold being a more widely recognized inflation hedge than BTC and (ii) BTC being much more liquid, and so more easily sold off in a panic.

Just 3D printed my first thing. Naturally, it's a upgrade part for the printer itself (filament guide end cap) *an d'oh

Prediction for the next few weeks: eurodollar, gold futures will spike without a substantive fall in the equities market.

Markets can bet that central banks will ease aggressively in response to covid19 without tanking stocks.

(not advice & I'm long ED+gold) Gold and ED running

Some news: I'm leaving NYC to move to Tokyo. Still working on Bitcoin (that goes without saying), just doing so at @dglab_official instead of @ChaincodeLabs. While I'm very excited to be joining my friends at DG Lab, I'm very sad to be without my friends at Chaincode Labs for a little while. I'll miss working with them on a daily basis a ton.

For a while I was really worried about #nCoV2019 coronavirus infecting a lot of people in the US. I'm now not so worried about US contagion, though unfortunately I do think the east is in some trouble. Thread on my thinking: The coronavirus uses something called ACE2 as a receptor to hook into host cells. asm.org/Press-Releases…

How many of the Urbit guys are running Dropbox daemons on their personal computers?

If people want to actually decentralize "data ownership," it's worth going after high reward:effort tasks like replacing Dropbox-esque honeypots with usable alts, not trying to rewrite Unix. I'm not trying to slam the Urbit guys for trying something, but it drives me totally nuts when they blame Unix (somehow) for the social media oligopoly or the end of the internet's golden age. This is nonsensical and basically inscrutable for non-programmers.

Bitcoin may take longer to break all-time highs than people expect - eg years - if ever. Tho for all I know it could be next month.

What concerns me is that BTC only has about 10 years left of block subsidy runway. If it isn't obscenely valuable by then, v bad news for security. @RemindMe_OfThis in 6 months