On Propaganda --------------------- A while back, I had a friend that was a pastor and he was railing about guns on Facebook, how they should be banned and so on. What had brought on this tirade was a shooting by a Muslim guy which left a bunch of people dead. In a sense, I understood his anger. At a very surface level, a bunch of people died, so there had to be someone or something to blame. Indeed, every shooting of any kind brings out these emotions, and the powers that be are especially good at using tragedies to further their own agenda. Indeed, that's one of the evil things every authoritarian does is exploit times of vulnerable emotional states to further their agenda. Some would even say they manufacture such instances. But the point is that they further *their*agenda, and not what should be learned. My pastor friend for example had many other angles to approach the topic that he was far more qualified to talk about. He's studied theology and other religions, so he could have talked about radical Islam and aspects of that which led to the shooting. He's also counseled a lot of people, so he could talk about mental health and talk about what puts people in those states of mind. He's also a Christian who knows the depravity of man, so he could talk about how sin and vice lead to these tragic outcomes. Instead, he talked about guns, because that was what the elites were focused on. He had never held or shot a gun and couldn't tell you the first thing about them, like what's considered automatic or semi-automatic. Yet because the propaganda was strong, he spoke exactly on the issue the elites wanted him to talk about and placed the blame on the thing the elites wanted him to place blame on. This guy, by the way, was not stupid. He's an Ivy League graduate and very sharp. But perhaps that's why he was so susceptible to propaganda. His success was largely based around following what the authorities told him. Intellect is no protection against powerful rhetoric. We all outsource some of our knowledge, but the problem with a fiat system is that we all too often are *forced* to trust entities that we had no input in. These entities are the most likely to get corrupted and used for tyranny. We need more interactions, more direct connections so that we can figure out whether someone is trustworthy. That's a decentralized trust model and it's about time we get used to judging such things for ourselves.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but a full eclipse really is an otherworldly event. I can understand why so many people throughout history thought it forebode something.
For free subscribers: self vs mob, totalitarianism, wonks, BTC standard and more! For paid subscribers: SHA-2 Collision, LNCast, Nostrifying LN, Satoshi Email Hack of 2014 and more! #Bitcoin Tech Talk #391
Bitcoin Tech Talk #391
Interesting Stuff
They think we need permission from them when they need permission from us.
Even if you're a fan of Elon Musk and X, here's a reminder that it's still centralized. Nostr has a deep structural advantage and it's only going to grow in the long term. image
Write something that tells me you're not fiat.
image # BTC Investing vs. BTC Standard There's a difference between investing in Bitcoin and being on a Bitcoin standard. It may seem like semantic hair-splitting, but it's not, because the behavior of these two groups is very different, as is their mental model. In this article, I aim to explain what it means to be on a Bitcoin standard. ## The Bitcoin Investors The Bitcoin investors are the people that are looking for a dollar (or some other fiat money without loss of generality) return. Their base money is the dollar and that's how they measure their wealth. That's understandable, since that's how they've been indoctrinated, but such a mentality is rigged from the start. First, it's hard to measure how much value your assets are increasing by. If you use strict dollar terms, you may have gained some percentage (say 30%), but over what time frame? If the asset is something like real estate, that may be over 10 years or 10 months. Obviously, the 10 months is better, but exactly how much of that value is real? How much can you buy with the returns and is the money you got back the same as the money you put in? ## Inflation Because, of course, there's inflation to consider. Investing with the dollar as the base asset means you have to account for it. If you have an investment that goes up 30% at the same time that inflation is 30%, you haven't actually gained anything. In fact, due to capital gains taxes, you likely have lost value. Then there's the question of what measure of inflation to use. Many investors use the CPI-indexed dollar to measure how much they've gained. But this too is flawed because the CPI is a gamed metric. There are [hedonic adjustments](
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Frequently Asked Questions about Hedonic Quality Adjustment in the CPI
Frequently Asked Questions about Hedonic Quality Adjustment in the CPI
) that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts in almost arbitrarily to output a CPI to be lower than the actual prices. So if your investment merely kept up with CPI, you again probably lost ground in terms of purchasing power. It's not a good measure. ## Monetary Expansion The classical definition of inflation is monetary expansion and the M2 money supply is a popular metric to measure that. It was $287B in 1959 and was $19.4T in 2021 (more on that in a bit), so annualized, that's about 7% per year. If you use that metric, most investments look pretty terrible. You're most likely losing ground because it's hard to get 7% every year consistently, even on average. Financial advisors use that 7% number to measure themselves and most don't meet that mark. So if your investment keeps up with M2 monetary expansion, you have merely kept the numerator up in proportion to the denominator. Again, because of capital gains taxes, you've probably lost ground in terms of percentage of money supply. But even here, the stats are not great. The Fed discontinued the M2 in 2021 and came up with something called the M2SL, likely to add more fudge factors that they can use for gaming the metric. Why would they do that? Because investors started measuring their returns against the M2. Especially during the pandemic, the M2 was going up so fast that most of the investment gains were known to be non-existent in M2 terms. So now, we have their modified measure of money supply called the M2SL. There are all sorts of problems with the M2 measurement, and aggregate statistics are notoriously unreliable. Hence, for investors, even this harsh measure is likely being gamed to make their gains look better. ## The Bitcoin Standard So what's left? You can use gold or a cow or a custom men's suit or even a big mac as a way to measure how you're doing with your investments. They're all useful ways to see how much purchasing power you have relative to points in the past, but all of them have flaws, are lagging indicators and are relatively easy to manipulate. For the red-pilled investor, the real measure of wealth becomes Bitcoin because that's the most difficult to manipulate. When you accept this, that's when you are on a Bitcoin standard. In other words, Bitcoin becomes how you measure your investment gains, not the dollar, not the CPI-adjusted dollar or the M2-indexed dollar. ## Conclusion There are undoubtedly a lot of Bitcoin investors. Between exchanges, ETFs, even apps like Robinhood, Venmo and CashApp, there are a lot of people that own Bitcoin. But that's not the same thing as being on the Bitcoin standard. The people that are most likely to hold for the long term are the people on the Bitcoin standard. I know for myself that I finally flipped when I read Saifedean's book by the same name. I have had a very different mentality about money since then and think of the dollar as the depreciating asset that it is. The measuring stick for me has changed. In economics, we would call that function of money the unit of account. It's been amazingly freeing because I don't worry about my investments, mostly because I don't have very many. I'm on a Bitcoin standard and I keep my value in my unit of account. We're so used to being stolen from through the fiat system that we've learned to live with the debasement. Debasement is a continual and never ending burden. The Bitcoin standard frees us from this investing burden. And it's the game-theoretical end state of money. Hardest money wins. You can get there now or get there later. Your choice.
image # BTC Investing vs. BTC Standard There's a difference between investing in Bitcoin and being on a Bitcoin standard. It may seem like semantic hair-splitting, but it's not, because the behavior of these two groups is very different, as is their mental model. In this article, I aim to explain what it means to be on a Bitcoin standard. ## The Bitcoin Investors The Bitcoin investors are the people that are looking for a dollar (or some other fiat money without loss of generality) return. Their base money is the dollar and that's how they measure their wealth. That's understandable, since that's how they've been indoctrinated, but such a mentality is rigged from the start. First, it's hard to measure how much value your assets are increasing by. If you use strict dollar terms, you may have gained some percentage (say 30%), but over what time frame? If the asset is something like real estate, that may be over 10 years or 10 months. Obviously, the 10 months is better, but exactly how much of that value is real? How much can you buy with the returns and is the money you got back the same as the money you put in? ## Inflation Because, of course, there's inflation to consider. Investing with the dollar as the base asset means you have to account for it. If you have an investment that goes up 30% at the same time that inflation is 30%, you haven't actually gained anything. In fact, due to capital gains taxes, you likely have lost value. Then there's the question of what measure of inflation to use. Many investors use the CPI-indexed dollar to measure how much they've gained. But this too is flawed because the CPI is a gamed metric. There are [hedonic adjustments](
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Frequently Asked Questions about Hedonic Quality Adjustment in the CPI
Frequently Asked Questions about Hedonic Quality Adjustment in the CPI
) that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts in almost arbitrarily to output a CPI to be lower than the actual prices. So if your investment merely kept up with CPI, you again probably lost ground in terms of purchasing power. It's not a good measure. ## Monetary Expansion The classical definition of inflation is monetary expansion and the M2 money supply is a popular metric to measure that. It was $287B in 1959 and was $19.4T in 2021 (more on that in a bit), so annualized, that's about 7% per year. If you use that metric, most investments look pretty terrible. You're most likely losing ground because it's hard to get 7% every year consistently, even on average. Financial advisors use that 7% number to measure themselves and most don't meet that mark. So if your investment keeps up with M2 monetary expansion, you have merely kept the numerator up in proportion to the denominator. Again, because of capital gains taxes, you've probably lost ground in terms of percentage of money supply. But even here, the stats are not great. The Fed discontinued the M2 in 2021 and came up with something called the M2SL, likely to add more fudge factors that they can use for gaming the metric. Why would they do that? Because investors started measuring their returns against the M2. Especially during the pandemic, the M2 was going up so fast that most of the investment gains were known to be non-existent in M2 terms. So now, we have their modified measure of money supply called the M2SL. There are all sorts of problems with the M2 measurement, and aggregate statistics are notoriously unreliable. Hence, for investors, even this harsh measure is likely being gamed to make their gains look better. ## The Bitcoin Standard So what's left? You can use gold or a cow or a custom men's suit or even a big mac as a way to measure how you're doing with your investments. They're all useful ways to see how much purchasing power you have relative to points in the past, but all of them have flaws, are lagging indicators and are relatively easy to manipulate. For the red-pilled investor, the real measure of wealth becomes Bitcoin because that's the most difficult to manipulate. When you accept this, that's when you are on a Bitcoin standard. In other words, Bitcoin becomes how you measure your investment gains, not the dollar, not the CPI-adjusted dollar or the M2-indexed dollar. ## Conclusion There are undoubtedly a lot of Bitcoin investors. Between exchanges, ETFs, even apps like Robinhood, Venmo and CashApp, there are a lot of people that own Bitcoin. But that's not the same thing as being on the Bitcoin standard. The people that are most likely to hold for the long term are the people on the Bitcoin standard. I know for myself that I finally flipped when I read Saifedean's book by the same name. I have had a very different mentality about money since then and think of the dollar as the depreciating asset that it is. The measuring stick for me has changed. In economics, we would call that function of money the unit of account. It's been amazingly freeing because I don't worry about my investments, mostly because I don't have very many. I'm on a Bitcoin standard and I keep my value in my unit of account. We're so used to being stolen from through the fiat system that we've learned to live with the debasement. Debasement is a continual and never ending burden. The Bitcoin standard frees us from this investing burden. And it's the game-theoretical end state of money. Hardest money wins. You can get there now or get there later. Your choice.
A Bitcoiner should be able to secure a seed phrase, run a full node, verify a change address, send a LN invoice, pay a LN invoice, explain inflation, buy non-KYC coins, have an inheritance plan, send to cold storage, hold through volatility, show how altcoins are dumb. LARPing is for rent-seekers.
If you want excellence, bring back patronage.