Looks like the Chinese have been reading my notes. View quoted note →

Up next for #bookstr is Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”. An excellent book from which I took a great deal. Le Bon’s writing from 130 years ago was incredibly prescient, foreseeing how socialism and populism would be wielded to ultimately erode Western societies. I want to relay some specific points that made this such a worthwhile read. First, Le Bon discusses how concepts in language can be wielded to focus a crowd toward particular ends. He identifies words like “democracy,” “liberty,” and “freedom” which, being somewhat nebulous, allow crowds to project their own meanings onto movements. He also notes how these words mean completely different things in different epochs, and how easy it is to project our present understanding onto the past when reading, thus arriving at flawed interpretations. His discussion of “race” should be understood in this context, and I found it incredibly compelling - acknowledging the cultural inheritance from our ancestors and how that shapes each people as much as any other factor. This is the kind of pragmatism we rarely find in modern discourse; it’s partly how and why we ignore the entire narrative of the West being “the good guys” in the post-WWII consensus. Le Bon categorises crowd beliefs into two overarching types: great permanent beliefs (e.g., feudalism, Christianity, and Protestantism) and transitory opinions, which are generally born and die within a lifetime. I found this particularly interesting as he identifies not only the difficulty of implanting the former but also what it takes for them to be uprooted. Finally, his discussion of “Prestige,” to which he dedicates Chapter III, was the highlight for me. Incredibly perceptive and set my mind racing down numerous rabbit holes including what “prestige” could and should mean amongst #Bitcoiners I’m glad I finally got around to this one. It’s not a long book, and while it covers many metaphysical ideas, it does so in a succinct and compelling way.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reels off predicted words from Polymarket, where USDC is used to bet on these outcomes, on latest earnings call. USDC’s parent company Circle, is part-owned by Coinbase..

Personally I like the Hollywood version better, it melted an entire generation’s minds and made them completely retarded such that they’d never question any slop fed to them, no matter how ridiculous. View quoted note →

Go go gadget fork!

#Bitcoiners should meme this narrative - Trump is Satoshi. He will pump it to a $Billion, and all the worst people will have fun staying poor rejecting #Bitcoin because of his association with it. View quoted note →

Good luck with your banh mi’s #AUStriches. They cost $1 Dollarydoo here in #Vietnam for a basic one, $2 for a good one, or $5 if you want to go gourmet like Banh Mi Huynh Hoa. Aus could easily still attract Vietnamese labour, but they’ll never be able to afford to buy out existing owners or open a new bakery nowadays; completely inhospitable to small business. View quoted note →

THE THREE TECHNOLOGIES WHICH MADE US HUMAN Language, money, and religion are humanity’s 3 most important technologies. Together, they work to solve the same fundamental scaling problem: enabling cooperation beyond the clan. Language lets strangers communicate across tribal boundaries without shared context or values. The universal substrate for information exchange. Money lets strangers trade without trust or repeated interaction. Without it, “I’ll help you now if you help me later” is a prisoner’s dilemma where defection pays. Collectibles turned this into simultaneous exchange: I give you meat, you give me shells, done. The universal substrate for exchanging value. See:

Shelling Out: The Origins of Money | Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

Advancing and preserving bitcoin knowledge

Religion creates shared ritual, collective consciousness, and moral obligations that bind groups together. It generates the social solidarity that makes people honor commitments, respect boundaries, and cooperate in ways that individual self-interest alone cannot explain. See Durkheim below: Together these 3 form humanity’s scaling architecture: • Language = communicate with anyone • Money = trade with anyone • Religion = coordinate deeply within groups Without them, we’d be just monkeys limited to groups of Dunbar’s number. With them, humans conquered the planet and increased carrying capacity 10x over Neanderthals. Most miss this following Graeber’s debt-money thesis, which only works within societies that already have all three technologies - you cannot run a ledger with people you’ll never see again who have different moral frameworks. That #Bitcoiners can grok this is what puts them so far ahead - they’re the only ones who understand how the game actually works. We’re HODLing proto-money whilst we develop our memetic language and spread the orangepill religion to all corners. View quoted note →