1/🚨 Warning: @balajis bets a million dollars against 1 bitcoin in just 3 months. Let's discuss what could happen if his prediction comes true, focusing on the hyperinflation of the dollar. Thread 👇 2/💰 Imagine the dollar going through a massive devaluation. What would happen? First, credit would become rarer than a four-leaf clover. Banks would tighten credit like a boa constrictor, affecting digital payments and making cash king.

1/ Hidden dollar expansion, a thread

The dollar is the backstop for every country's inflation. There's only so much Cantillon juice that can be squeezed from the population before they go to the dollar and cut off your theft. 2/ Of course, every country knows this, so they keep a bunch of reserve USD to stabilize their currency when they print too much and their own currency gets weak against USD. It's exactly what a central bank is supposed to do.

How AI will destroy the economics of the internet.

A thread. Fake profiles are proliferating everywhere. The internet is built on free services and obviously they are very cheap to create for the user. Unfortunately, that also means they're very cheap to create for spammers.

Running the numbers on $LUNA, the supply has increased 5400% in the last 4 days.

The reason is a clear arbitrage play. Buy UST for a discount -> Convert to LUNA at $1 parity -> Sell LUNA at market price. If you can execute without slippage, the diff b/w UST/USD is profit. In the last 18m, another Billion LUNA were printed through UST. This will only accelerate as the arbitrage continues.

Fiat Money is Evil and news from this past week.

Bitcoin Tech Talk #284

Money doesn't work the way you think it does. Banks make way more money than you think and most of that is through straight up money printing.

1/x The loans that you get have no opportunity cost as it doesn't come from anyone's savings. You benefit, the bank benefits but everyone that owns the dollar loses.

2/x

Why I'm Skeptical and news from this past week.

Bitcoin Tech Talk #282

US Media is singing from the same song sheet about the Ukraine and that has me worried. This has happened 3 times the last 20 years and all of them were disasters.

1/8 2003 was the invasion of Iraq. 2008 was the bank bailouts. 2020 was the COVID lockdowns. The track record of a unanimous media opinion is terrible. What's going on? Why is this particular issue now front and center of every news program?

2/8

Bad Money Fragilizes and stories from this past week

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #280

Fiat money puts a lot of pressure on efficiency because of sticky prices. People don't like paying more money even when inflation makes their money worth less.

1/8 As a result, businesses tend to get huge to get the cost savings of large scale. This has the effect of making everything really fragile. Instead of a lot of competition, we end up with only a few that can achieve that level of efficiency.

2/8

NFTs and DeFi on Bitcoin.

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #279

Can we get X on Bitcoin is an eternal question, where X is a feature that's getting a lot of hype and marketing on some altcoin. This is the wrong question because Bitcoin doesn't compete with altcoins. Altcoins' value is based on the same thing that fiat money is based on: trust in the central controllers.

Improving Lightning Point-of-Sale and stories from this past week.

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #278

1/9 Most of the third world still operates using cash and their PoS systems are manual and labor intensive. We're used to modern PoS systems which integrate inventory management and accounting reconciliation.

2/9

Everyone's a Bank Now and stories from this past week.

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #277

Running an airline is tough. The economics are not favorable and weather, security threats and public health emergencies make operating at a profit really hard.

1/9 So how is it that they're still operating? They're certainly not innovating and prices haven't increased that much. So what's going on?

2/9

Bitcoin and El Salvador and stories from this past week.

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #275

1/9 I'm in El Zonte checking out Bitcoin Beach. El Salvadorians have been, until recently, embarassed by how they've been known internationally due to the murder rate, corruption and so on.

2/9

Proof of Stake is Useless and stories from the past week.

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #274

1/ Proof-of-stake has been bandied about as an alternative to proof-of-work, but from a CS perspective, it doesn't solve anything.

2/

Jack Dorsey vs. the VCs and stories from this past week

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #272

1/10 @jack has pissed off a bunch of VCs by saying that Web3 is a scam. @a16z in particular tried very hard to convince him otherwise, but ended up frustrated that he held his ground.

2/10

Taproot gives us more tools against practical security threats and #Bitcoin news from the past week.

A thread. 1/8 As @lopp identifies, there are 5 primary security threat models against Bitcoin holders: Accidental loss, Digital theft, Government seizure, Physical theft and Inheritance planning. Taproot gives us tools against all of these. 2/8

1/ Wow, what an essay, trying to distill thoughts from this masterpiece: cdn.mises.org/rae7_1_1_2.pdf

Hat tip: @NSKinsella

The essay is about inflation's effect on culture, through the analysis of a short story set in Weimar Germany. I've selected some quotes and will comment. 2/ "With all points of reference gone, the only law...appears to be perpetual change."

When money changes, everything else anchored on money starts to change as well. Prices being the most obvious one, but crucially, not the only one.

1/6 Announcing a new book! Thank God for Bitcoin is available on Amazon in digital and paperback.

Forward written by our favorite NFL player @RussellOkung

This book makes the moral case for #Bitcoin from a Christian perspective.

amzn.to/3qQApLJ 2/6 The subtitle is "The Creation, Corruption and Redemption of Money" and speaks to money's purpose, how it's been corrupted over time and how Bitcoin redeems the corrupt nature of the current central-bank backed fiat monetary system

Short rant about Quantum Computing breaking bitcoin:

1/ If you study even a little of it, you realize very quickly that the engineering challenges are enormous. Most attempts use temperatures a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, not exactly easy to produce. 2/ What's more, the way quantum works is that you have lots of coherence problems and half-life problems. You need redundancy which adds enormous complexity to the system.

1/ Back of the envelope math for doing a 58 block reorg (current confirmations for the tx that took money from binance):

Minimal cost: 58 * 12.5 btc = 725 BTC (assumes every miner would get roughly the same tx fees in the new chain and that 100% of miners go with this scheme) 2/ If 75% of the network going with this scheme, you would need on average 116 blocks to overtake the current chain, or about 1450 BTC worth of mining rewards.
At 60%, this becomes 290 blocks or 3625 BTC. At 55%, 580 blocks/7250 BTC.

1/ Why I'm advising @LevelInvest:

Executive summary:
- They're disrupting crypto exchanges
- They can make a lot of money $5/user/month at scale
- This is the next level of financial inclusion that we need 2/ A lot of people are asking about my involvement, especially since they're really skeptical of the business model. How is it possible they can charge $5/user/month and make money where other exchanges charge 0.15% per trade? The conclusion they've jumped to is that I'm scamming

1/ How to get rich the right way 2/ Many people look at rich people and think "why am I not that rich?" or "that person must be really lucky" or some other envious thought.

1/ The Path to Meritocracy

As long as there are people that get influence through being rich, having degrees, owning domains, being born into an influential family, kissing up to the right people and getting influence on anything other than their own ability, we are not there. 2/ Notice that all of those activities are essentially rent-seeking behaviors. Demanding some form of influence merely for being, not for doing. Why is this? How did rent-seeking become so prevalent? Why are there so many people intent on extracting money without adding anything?