On Labor and Fiat ============= We vastly underestimate what we can do with our physical labor. I just went to build a house with Casas por Cristo in Acuna, Mexico. It's a missions trip to build homes for poor people, where all the materials are ready to build and the volunteers essentially take all the material and build a house. What was amazing about this was that it only took three days to build with about 15 people. And a significant part of that was waiting for the concrete to dry. And that's the house from founddation to roof, electrical to windows, drywall to stucco. While machines and fancy equipment certainly speeds things up a lot, most of what can be done is still limited by human labor. And boy, is it amazing what that's capable of. Sure, it wasn't a huge house (maybe 500 sq ft), but it was fully functioning with insulation, metal roof, windows and doors. The bathroom was an addition that could be done in another couple of days. The big thing is that so much of it could be done so quickly. You can build houses very efficiently and quickly even if the labor isn't very experienced. Which makes you wonder, why is housing so expensive? There's a huge premium on housing because of fiat money being such a terrible savings vehicle, but the rot of fiat money goes much deeper. The labor itself is much more expensive, and there is a significant amount of rent seeking in the form of government regulations, like building codes. There's also the fact that building is considered very blue-collar, and most people aspire to white collar work. That in itself is a cultural norm that has proliferated via fiat money. Blue collar work, the kind that builds and fixes real things with hands, is considered below the people that sit on a computer making powerpoint presentations and word documents. Now not all white collar jobs are bad. But there's no doubt that white collar jobs have proliferated because of fiat money. Look up any bureaucracies in any large industry and you'll see that they've grown like cancer. Health care, education, military, HR, government have bureaucracies that have significantly outpaced the people that do any real meaningful work. This is definitely not market competition and it's the opposite of capitalism. It's socialism that grows steadily from the money stolen from the productive people. Which is why my experience is such a shock. I've become so used to things taking forever to build, that when I see human labor really doing something productive, I'm shocked at how effective it is. We've been so burdened with bureaucratic overhead in almost everything we do that watching people be productive is a shock. One of the things I look forward to in a Bitcoin world is the unleashing of labor. Our work is what builds things, but it can also be used to steal. Unfortunately, fiat money incentivizes much more of the latter and less of the former. When our work is aligned with civilization, we'll really take off. Come for the number go up, stay for civilization go up, beauty go up, building go up.

Technical competence has been getting worse over the last 60 years. That's what happens with fiat money.

Spamcoiners are almost all pro-change. Money works best when it doesn't change. It would be really stupid to trade sound money for a crappy IPFS spreadsheet.

Every bull market, there are rumors of some rich sheik that's going to buy billions worth of BTC. Maybe it happens this time.

I want to write a book to argue against altcoins and for Bitcoin, but I'm not sure it'll do anything because altcoiners don't really read.

Altcoin Redux ------------ In a way, the ordinals scam is an excellent sign. Altcoins have long been associated with Bitcoin through the moniker of "crypto" and have used Bitcoin's good name to scam people through pump and dumps. But as we've seen, this narrative is no longer what it used to be. There are enough people that have recognized the pump and dump nature of altcoins as well as Bitcoin's continued rise that there's a distinction made in the peoples' minds between Bitcoin and altcoins. One is sound money, the other is fiat 2.0. The scam of altcoins, in other words, is starting to fade and the returns aren't like they used to be. That's why ordinals and BRC-20 are becoming more popular. There's little chance of escaping the "shitcoin" moniker by releasing a token on Ethereum or Solana now. The gulf between Bitcoin and altcoins is too wide and crossing that chasm, to scam newbies has become that much harder. But by releasing a token on Bitcoin, now there's a lot more room for confusion. They can claim to be supporting Bitcoin through fees while running the same scam. It's changing names and disguises so you don't get caught. This is the snake oil salesman leaving one town to get a bunch of suckers in the next town. But this is where we need to be even more diligent. The people that are scamming are picking up the verbiage of the people that know what they're talking about. They're going to scam people by looking and sounding like the real thing. They can talk about sound money, self-sovereignty and property rights and even sound pretty convincing doing it. Except, of course, that token they want you to buy. The time to separate the Bitcoiners from the Spamcoiners is now. They are running pump and dumps, just doing it with a new rationale like a new disguise and name. And they'll fool a bunch of people. Indeed, the people they seem to attract are the very people that pumped altcoins in the past. Altcoin-land is a scorched earth they've left behind and they want to run the same policies on "top of" Bitcoin. Don't let them take over. Reject these charlatans and shame them for their chicanery. And if you're someone that's throwing up their hands and saying there's nothing to be done, you're wrong. You can do something by calling these things out for what they are. They're scams and the faster they fail, the better it will be for Bitcoin. And as we saw with altcoins in the past, ignoring them doesn't make them go away. Calling them out and relentlessly exposing their grift is what's needed.

Working with your hands is good for your soul.

Centralized crap always dies, sometimes very quickly.

Nostr and Bitcoin are pillars of a new digital order. This is the way to combat clown world.

Those that would waste your time are really stealing from the limited scarce amount of time you have left to live.