Épisodes

  • #136 Going Dark

    #136 Going Dark
    Aug 24 2022
    “War... Huh…What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again!“Good Morning Everyone,German electricity prices are hitting fresh all time highs and at the same time Poland’s largest chemicals company has halted production of nitrogen fertilisers and reduced output of ammonia due to soaring gas prices. As we know you can print more fiat, but you can’t print more energy. The complacency that exists in respect to the energy crisis really is profound to witness and it’s hard not to see this situation becoming exponentially worse. German Electricity:Dutch Natural Gas:While Germany is definitely toward the eye of the storm, most others throughout Europe are entangled in this mess and depending on each countries individual energy production capabilities, should expect to be impacted in similar ways to varying degrees. This image below from Javier Blas shows electricity costs throughout Europe with many nations paying in excess of €600 per MWh. Where as pre 2020 anything above €75-100 was considered expensive! Incredible. If you find this valuable, Share it.This tweet from @MacroAlf helps hammer the point home even further if it weren’t already brutally clear.This madness is a direct result of insane and catastrophic centrally planned energy policy and it very likely leads to a widespread famine throughout Europe. It also has the potential to be the event that breaks the European Union apart and kicks off monumental conflicts between the neighbouring states, and in turn potentially, the world, as the effects of this begin to really hit home for individuals and families.Absolutely everything is downstream of energy. Once energy costs increase enough the predictable dominos begin to fall. We are starting to see this play out with Poland’s fertilizer production being halted. The dominos do not stop there, however. Nitrogen fertilizer is necessary for food production. If the production of this continues to be impacted or more production comes off-line, this naturally leads to less supply being available. It means the price goes up as there is less supply to meet demand. This leads to reduced food production which only further amplifies the problem. And would trigger further disruptions to the already shambolic food supply chains and even more acute price increases for consumers. Once again, i see a negative feedback loop and the scent of Moloch at play.If you find it valuable, Share it.This forces governments even further into a corner; the likely output of this is rationing!It’s hard to believe that over the last 30 years we’ve gone from having widespread abundant and reliable energy to now staring down the barrel of the most phenomenal energy crisis of our life time. Having written about the potential of a mass starvation event eight months or so ago, it’s absolutely bizarre to see this playing out, almost like it is some kind of train wreck happening in slow motion. On one hand I’m bewildered as to to why governments would not pivot and adjust course more evasively in the face of what, at this point, appears to be the most likely outcome, but then i’m reminded it is just humans at scale following the paths of least resistance. It is simply the incentives manifesting into human behaviour.This problem is not likely to be fixed by the people who have created it. This is a systems level issue, and the issue has been cause by the people with the admin privileges. Awarding them further administrative privileges in the face of this would be akin to the definition of insanity - which is to do the same thing, and expect a different outcome.This issue will not be solved by following morons in perceived positions of power off the cliff. It is certainly not solved by printing more fiat money, which will almost certainly happen in the event rationing and price controls are initiated to attempt to treat the symptoms instead of the root cause, in the typical naive interventionist fashion we have come to expect. Personal responsibility and a bitcoin standard is at the core of our solution. Adopting a monetary standard free of those who have either a bizarre desire to intentionally drive us toward catastrophe, or who are simply cognitively deficient and should be appropriately ignored. We must focus on building circular economies based on the superior monetary standard bitcoin provides and cultivate community. Connecting producers direct with consumers in a peer-to-peer fashion, and work to be as energy and food independent as possible in an effort to insulate ourselves, our families and our communities from the actions of malevolent or mere incompetent actors.You never want to wait to buy the option when you need it. You need to buy the option before you need it!Community is the ultimate hedge against uncertainty. Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.AKPublished Block Height: 750 848 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or ...
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    5 min
  • #135 Digital Panopticon

    #135 Digital Panopticon
    Aug 17 2022
    “The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.”— WikipediaGood Morning Everyone,We have discussed many times, the dynamic between money and power, and highlighted the risk and harm caused by centralising such power. This is the fundamental problem bitcoin solves. It is money without a center. And it is money that provides the most fair issuance possible and avoids the common pitfall to disproportionately reward any one entity over another. That is not to say distribution is even or equal. Certainly not. Distribution of anything is never going to be even, and to attempt to do so is at its core a deeply unfair act. To evenly distribute something amongst a cohort of people means that individuals are not rewarded for deploying more effort, for being more skilled, more competent and capable and ultimately doing a superior job than someone else. And likewise for those who are underperforming they would have no incentive to work harder or learn new skills as there would be no reward available incentivising them to do so. This would dissolve and distort the incentives that would otherwise exist and it would seem to be the case from past historical examples, to produce highly undesirable outcomes. At the same time, if instead of distributing evenly, certain individuals or entities were disproportionately favoured and awarded an outsized percentage of issuance due to their proximity to the center of supply, this would install a deeply unfair standard at the core protocol level. If applied to the technology of money this unfair issuance creates a catastrophic dynamic where those who are closest to the center of that distribution have outsized power over all others within the network and this dynamic only accelerates over time.This last example describes the issuance of Ethereum. As Nik Bhatia explains in the below clip. Where bitcoin has no center and has no preferential issuance and you can simply buy, mine or earn bitcoin at a market rate and by doing work; Ethereum does have a center, and It is more like a company than anything resembling a truly decentralised protocol. To quote Nik (who also has a great paid substack publication called The Bitcoin Layer)“Ethereum began in 2015 with a pre-mine. This is a sale of Ethereum tokens in exchange for bitcoin. 72,000,000 Ethereum tokens were issued in this pre-mine. 60m of the coins were sold to the investment public and 12m coins were given to insiders. The supply of Ethereum today is above 120m, which means that almost 60% of today’s total supply was part of that pre-mine process. Data shows that 40% of that pre-mine went to the top 100 customers giving us indication that the ownership of Ethereum is highly centralised. This resembles the issuance of an equity in which the majority of the shares go to the management and the ownership.”The bottom line is the two (bitcoin & ethereum) are just not the same. Most Ethereum supporters seem to either not know this, simply not care, or not understand the significance of it. However it is fundamentally important to grasp. As I mentioned earlier, such an issuance schedule is at it’s core deeply unfair, especially when you consider the profound impact of money on our lives, and with Ethereum posturing to move to a Proof-of-Stake system in September, this significance is only acerbated further whereby those with the most amount of eth staked have an outsized voting right and thus influence on the network. We already have this system. It’s called fiat, and ethereum is just a shinier new version of it. Nothing close to the paradigm shifting technology of bitcoin.Many in the community have been surprised at the SEC’s allowance of protocol’s like Ethereum, when they have been clearly and unequivocally exposed as what are considered securities. This is not to suggest I want the SEC or any government to do anything, just that one can only be curious why they would not have enforced their mandate, in the face of the obvious. At the end of the day we don’t need any central body to assert their authority - the market should be able to work itself out. I have postulated for some time, that I believe the reason for this is because this experimentation of permissioned, centralised “crypto digital assets“ provide central banks and government with the single best opportunity to obtain the ...
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    11 min
  • #134 You'll Need To Rob The Bank If You Want Your Money

    #134 You'll Need To Rob The Bank If You Want Your Money
    Aug 15 2022
    Good Morning Everyone,There was an incident last week in Lebanon that is worthy of further enquiry. I’ve spoken about it with many people offline, but hadn’t written about it at all and feel it’s important to do so. It’s important first of all to retrace our steps a little before we do, so we can maintain the thread through time, and obtain a clear recognition of the order of events leading to this most recent situation. Eight months ago i first wrote about the situation in Lebanon where the local political money was failing. Basic food and energy costs were skyrocketing due to the rapid loss in value of the Lebanese Pound. Some four months later, the situation in Lebanon again hit my radar having descended further in chaos with the Government & Central Bank capitulating and waving the white flag. The Government & Central bank announced they were bankrupt.Both these letters are worth quickly revisiting if you missed them to get a strong sense of the how the dynamic has evolved over time. Both are linked below.This sequence of events has lead to the most recent development, where a man has been pushed to absolute breaking point. The man tried to withdraw his money from the bank in downtown Beirut and that request was denied. The man is said to have had $210,000 held with the bank, and had requested to withdraw $50,000 to cover medical expenses for his fathers surgery. After being denied to withdraw his “own money”, the man took control of the bank with a firearm taking the bank staff hostage in the process. This hostage situation lasted 7hours and was eventually resolved with him being said to be given $30,000 and he exited with no further escalation or injury. Outside the bank the man was being celebrated as a hero for his actions, and offers a glimpse into the level of distain that exists amongst the citizens of Lebanon and the deeply unstable dynamic currently in the country. The thread below by Joyce Karam covered the situation with many updates if you would like more details.This unfortunate situation highlights how fundamentally toxic fiat really is. He literally had to rob the bank to get his own money!This man doesn’t want to have to rob a bank. He simply wants what is his. He had a significant amount of funds, and like most, doesn’t realise the true IOU nature of banking. His father is unwell and he simply wants to support his family. The fact that he could be pushed in such a way where he would be willing to hold people hostage at gun point serves to highlight how pathologically insane this fiat system really is. This is the level to which fiat is corrupting us and the societies in which we are a part. This system is so morally and ethically derelict at its core. It is programmed into the fiat system at the base layer. Where bitcoin operates based on the most profound truth, fiat operates on falsehoods and lies. It is a system that is predicated on deception. That anyone would consciously choose a system that harms us so deeply is absolutely unfathomable. This man should never have been forced into this situation, nor should any of the beautiful people of Lebanon or any other nation that have fallen victim to fiat. And we haven’t even considered the implications such actions could have on ones family and the higher order effects which could follow.So many people still cannot see the problem, and thus they cannot see how bitcoin fixes this, but this is going to change. This disease and the symptoms we exhibit as a part of it are not exclusive to Lebanon. Lebanon is just further down the road compared to some others. This is a kind of de-civilization and these symptoms can be expressed in every country that is on a fiat standard. Every country that uses a money with no anchor to physical reality where it empowers a small few to control this technology are over time destined for a similar fate. But where fiat fails, Bitcoin will succeed. If this man understood the predatory nature of banking. If he knew about fractional reserve banking and understood that once you hand over control of your money, once you relinquish custody, that it fundamentally ceases to be yours - he most likely would never have given it the bank in the first place. There would have been no need for him to be pushed to the extent he was, and take the level of risk he was forced to take for him and his family. There would have been no violence toward others, and no one would have ever been taken hostage. But when the system of banking works on the surface, it appears to work. It is not obvious that once the broader dynamic changes and we enter adversarial conditions these IOU’s are unlikely to be redeemable. That they become worthless. If you find it valuable, Share itThe people of Lebanon are learning this lesson right now, with 80% of the population now living in poverty. At the core of this is a deeply flawed system of incentives. A system we have called money. But this system is doing more harm than it ...
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    9 min
  • #133 Immortal Cypherpunk

    #133 Immortal Cypherpunk
    Aug 14 2022
    Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto - Eric Hughes - March 9, 1993Good Morning Everyone,Freedom of the individual is currently under siege. The war on privacy has been escalating for decades, arguably centuries, and it is heating up massively as we speak. Not only have we seen the the US treasury sanction open source software in the form of tornado cash by placing it on the OFAC sanctions list, the developer of the smart contract software has now been arrested in Amsterdam. According to the Fiscal & Information Investigation Service (FIOD) of The Netherlands, which is basically the Dutch IRS, the developer was arrested on Wednesday and a statement by the organisation begins as follows:“On Wednesday 10 August, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam. He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash. Multiple arrests are not ruled out. These advanced technologies, such as decentralised organisations that may facilitate money laundering are receiving extra attention from the FIOD. Also in the cryptocurrency domain, the FIOD stands for a safe financial Netherlands and investigates with effect and impact. Today the suspect is brought before the examining judge.” The idea that a software engineer would be arrested for writing code is wild, and it highlights the critical need for privacy in the digital age, and the extent to which governments will go to in order to ensure you don’t have any.It can’t be said enough, but the notion that writing code could be considered criminal, is truly reflective of the upside down world we are living in. If a developer is being arrested because the software facilitated so-called money laundering, why hasn’t anyone from the Federal Reserve and the US Government been arrested yet for creating the US Dollar and allowing it to continue to operate and endlessly creating more of it, given the IMMENSE amount of “money laundering” it has been used to facilitate. If you find it valuable - Share it!There are endless examples which highlight the hypocrisy and absurdity of this. And they help to clarify the true intention behind this arrest, As Stephan Livera pointed out in the tweet below:Anyone that has defragmented their cognitive o/s and doesn’t have their head in the sand can clearly see that this has nothing to do with money laundering. It is about control. And in order to control you, your privacy has to go.There are two primary themes i want to tease out.* That privacy could possibly be considered criminal, illegal, undesirable or be an act that in isolation implies anything untoward or really anything at all is an evil and deeply malevolent proposition. Privacy is foundational and fundamental in the digital age. Everyone is entitled to it, and from a value perspective one should respect another person’s desire for it. As I’ve mentioned previously, everything is downstream of privacy. You cannot be free without it. This idea must be vigorously condemned and this framing categorically rejected. As Allen Farrington outlines below - Words matter.2. The battle over our right for privacy will not be won through self-censorship. Governments are among the most corrupt and fraudulent institutions we have. They would love nothing more than to gaslight people into believing that they are not entitled to privacy. If developers the world over decided it’s too dangerous to write privacy preserving software, users were too scared to use it, and the vast majority of people believed that you have no right to it because you must be an evil money laundering psychopath - it would be game over. We must use privacy preserving software more than ever and create more tools than ever in the face of this attack. This war will be won with more speech. More code. More cryptography. More privacy.To quote from from Eric Hughes’ A Cypherpunk Manifesto:“We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. ...
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    9 min
  • #131 Upside Down Problem Solving

    #131 Upside Down Problem Solving
    Aug 8 2022
    Good Morning Everyone,The US senate has just passed a bill to fight inflation by creating a program to spend $430 Billion dollars on climate and health care initiatives named the Inflation Reduction Act. I linked to the summary document above which begins as follows:“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030. The bill will also finally allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription drug prices and extend the expanded Affordable Care Act program for three years, through 2025.“I’ve never seen a more apt example that demonstrates how democracy is a 51% attack on the network, as with this this vote. All 50 Democrats voted for the bill, and all 50 republicans voted against it, with Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, casting the tie-breaking vote and initiating a $430 billion dollar 51% attack on the American network.Check out the clip above to watch the completion of the vote, and the pleasure these people derive from “winning“ and beating their enemy which ironically is their countrymen.You would think if the government wanted to spend almost half a trillion dollars then they would need to have that money, but not in a fiat world. Remember the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is just below $9T and government debt is around $30T. To facilitate this bill they (for the most part) will simply take on more debt. What’s particularly absurd about this bill is that they think reducing carbon emissions by 40% in 7 years is in any way realistic, and they plan to increase their taxing capabilities, which is to prey even further on their population, by increasing the head count of IRS agents by 87,000 and increasing the level to which they can capture your proof-of-work. This bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s aimed more toward stripping value from the populace by the rent-seeking unproductive class than doing anything meaningful about TheClimate™️ or for peoples health. Give me a break! They do not care about anyone’s health. It is masquerading as something that they think the mindless majority will support while further enabling them to suck blood from their hosts.This insanity really is as upside down as it sounds. This tweet from James Lavish really hits the nail on the head in my opinion in regard to this failed fiat monetary experiment and the obsession by the supporters of it with central planning.This is the fiat disease. The idea that to “fix“ the problem that has been created in the first place by increasing of the money supply is to impact every other node in the fiat network by increasing this magical number. Essentially forcing a contraction in economic value expression across the network. It negatively impacts the profitability of many businesses which creates many other higher order effects and often leads to less jobs being available. It leads to a concentration in wealth and allows the larger and richer to accumulate and further accelerates the wealth divide which harms society broadly, and ultimately it makes life more difficult for an increasing majority of people. That’s not to say people would not experience difficulty if we removed fiat today, but it wouldn’t be as insanely unfair as what it is today. Fiat is fundamentally zero-sum. It is taking from many and allowing a few to swallow it up. And it is enabled by a small group of corrupt liars who celebrate winning above all else, and completely ignore the truth about how destructive, short sighted and immoral this system really is.It truly flaws me how upside down this clown world has become, and that anyone would consciously support such a parasitic drain on human potential. The idea that a small group of pseudo-elites have this level of control over all other people because of their outsized influence over the monetary protocol is fundamentally wrong, however in the fiat clown world, this is a feature of the system, not a bug.This bill should be named the Inflation Creation Act, because in order to spend this money the government doesn’t have, money will need to be borrowed and thus created. You can see Moloch at work here. Bad incentives, enabling bad outcomes, stuck within a nasty feedback loop enabled by the Moloch that exists inside us all. Bitcoin is the mechanism to enable us to course correct. The paradigm shift, that can enable us to break free of this perpetual negative feedback loop and it begins by disabling the outsized influence of these central planning parasites. Get educated and take custody of your keys - these people would 6102 rug pull you without hesitation.Bitcoin is the mission. Hope you all have a great week. Wishing you well, and i’ll talk to you tomorrow.AKPublished Block Height: 748496 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus ...
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    5 min
  • #130 Monetary Polygraph

    #130 Monetary Polygraph
    Aug 5 2022
    “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.“Good Morning Everyone,The concept of truth is far more complex than is generally acknowledged. There is a level of complexity in determining what is true which our monkey brains tend to find difficult. We are often hamstrung by cognitive biases and rush to join a tribe that validates our dogmatic beliefs and provides us with the illusion of safety and acceptance. Given the current nature of life for most, the perpetual acceleration of the hamster wheel, that is the ongoing devaluation of our money and thus the inability to save and store value across time, most aren’t afforded the luxury of time to dive deeply enough into such things to arrive at the realisation that it is less obvious than we would often like to believe.Wikipedia describes truth as:“the property of being in accord with fact or reality.”But what is fact, and what is reality? These terms that once seemed so certain, continue to be exposed as being far more temporary assessments of what we would consider either to be. We’re constantly learning more, and gaining deeper levels of understanding, realising that previously held beliefs, concepts and ideas that appeared to have a consensus acceptance, may infact not be factually accurate and in accord with this thing we call reality.In an attempt to counter our primitive cognition we developed the scientific method. This process can be much more messy than most would imagine, and the potential for error remains. In 1921 the polygraph machine was invented in an attempt to determine whether or not an individual is relaying the information obtained by them from a point of experience and doing so truthfully - without distorting the information. Are they “telling the truth?”.The polygraph machine was created by a Berkeley (California) police officer and was based on a systolic blood pressure test pioneered by a psychologist named William Marston who later become a comic book writer and created the fictional character Wonder Woman. Modern polygraph machines measure a range of physical changes such as pulse and breathing as well as blood-pressure, yet the efficacy of such a device has remained in question almost since it’s inception.Such a technique depends not only on the actual machine and the capturing of physiological information but also on the analysis of this information. But to go even a layer deeper, the information captured by such a machine depends on the beliefs, values and characteristics of the individuals internal dimension of awareness. A space that we understand very little about.The idea that this could have been used and accepted to obtain “the truth“ shows how primitive and dogmatic we are capable of being. We are designed to simply ‘want to believe stuff in our search for certainty.Clown world continues to leverage this deep human desire to believe, whether it be that inflation is good for you, that cow farts are boiling the oceans or that so-called “renewable“ sources of energy are a realistic substitute for the densest form of energy ever known to humans, being that of hydrocarbons.The entire religion of Keynesian economics is built upon the ability to obfuscate the truth, and change the units of measurement used to determine whatever it is the high priests (economists) deem necessary, and to ensure it aligns and supports whatever political objectives are focal at the time. But now we have bitcoin. We now have a tool that calls b******t on this class of rent seekers who intentionally conceal the truth and actively work to gaslight and mislead. A tool they cannot capture. A tool they cannot change the units of measurement of to suit their agenda. A truly decentralized unit of measurement with a supply that cannot be altered. 21m. Never more.While bitcoin very specifically shows the inaccuracies of monetary information embedded in fiat over time as well as the attempts by specific individuals and groups of humans to conceal such information, it also acts as a mechanism to bring into question many other ideas we may have previously accepted as truths. When you identify bad actors and realise a certain cohort of people are nefarious and their intentions are malevolent, you cannot help but enquire more deeply about what other misinformation has been installed in the operating system of societies around the world.Having a tool to expose the misinformation in money is just the beginning.Amplify the signal. Open Networks Win.Hope you have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you next week.AKPublished at Block Height: 748018 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com
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    4 min
  • #129 Moloch

    #129 Moloch
    Aug 1 2022

    Good Morning Everyone,

    As we have discussed many times, incentives are everything, and most people given the choice will follow the path of least resistance. This is culturally impressioned upon us from a young age, and perhaps we’re even biologically configured to do so.

    In listening to a conversation between Liv Boeree and Tim Ferris, Liv introduced me to the ficticious character named Moloch.

    Moloch according to the now highly questionable wikipedia is:

    “a name or a term which appears in the Hebrew Bible several times, primarily in the book of Leviticus. The Bible strongly condemns practices which are associated with Moloch, practices which appear to have included child sacrifice.“

    I have followed the rabbit hole to a paper she recommended which goes deeper on the idea titled: Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (Chapter 3: Moloch’s Toolbox). It’s a relatively short read, and highly recommended for anyone interested. Liv explains an easy way to think of Moloch is as the god of unhealthy competition. Moloch is referred to as a fictitious character due to its historical origins as a God or a diety, but i think it is less valuable thinking within the frame of a god and simply paying more attention to what the actual characteristics are, that are associated with this thing called Moloch.

    From what I’ve managed to ascertain so far; Moloch is a dynamic that can manifest within a system and is built upon bad incentives; and these incentives create a feedback loop which creates compounding sup-optimal, or negative outcomes which then create a new set of sub-optimal incentives and subsequent outcomes. These incentives lead to behaviours being expressed by humans that are typically short cited and obsessed with winning and and they infect the very systems of which they are a part.

    This flywheel of bad incentives creates a stream of negative-sum games and ultimately leads civilizations to become stuck in an extremely low Nash Equilibria.

    Nash equilibria is a concept within game theory defined by John Nash and is defined as the combination of strategies in a game, one for each player, where there is no incentive for players to deviate from their current strategy.

    So a civilization becoming stuck in a bad Nash Equilibria is to become stuck within the grooves of a system of bad incentives, whereby noone can win by changing their strategy and thus everyone remains playing bad games and remaining within a system that continues to assure sub-optimal results.

    Jeff Booth has talked about this conundrum of being stuck in a system of bad incentives in relation specifically to fiat and central banking and he frames it as a system level issue. One that cannot be solved from inside of a system; rather only an entirely new system that replaces the previous can break the cycle and free us from Moloch’s trap.

    Bitcoin is this systems level change. It is the mechanism that resolves this feedback loop. It is the mechanism that defeats the ficticious god of bad incentives, and allows humanity - us - to reach an entirely new Nash Equilibrium.

    It is a complete reimagining of what the technology of money is, and what it can be in the future. It dissolves all the existing power structures that have been errected, and provides us with an entirely novel system that not only breaks us out of the negative feedback loop of negative-sum games, but thrusts us into an entirely new dynamic. Not only one that supports long-term positive sum games, but a system that directly incentives such pursuits and compounds the positive-sum outputs creating new incentives to continue to play positive-sum games.

    This is a complete and fundamental reorienting of the human spirit and the way in which we orient ourselves in the world. Both individually and also how we organise ourselves collectively as part of the larger whole. Bitcoin not only defeats Moloch; bitcoin turns Moloch upside down and does the complete opposite. Bitcoin is the anti-Moloch device. A system of optimal incentives built upon a system of pure informational clarity.

    Grateful as ever to be here to witness it.

    Hope you all have a powerful start to your week. Wishing you well, and look forward to talking to you tomorrow.

    AK

    Published at Block Height: 747 454



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com
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    4 min
  • #128 The Trend Is Your Friend

    #128 The Trend Is Your Friend
    Jul 29 2022
    Good Morning Everyone,The concept of trend is a critically important one. A trend is like an object in motion. When thinking in probabilities, a trend is much more likely to continue than it is to reverse. That’s not to say it can’t reverse, simply that it’s less likely. Whether you are starting a business, changing careers, playing poker or are a trader within financial markets, understanding the probabilities or the odds, is of supreme value, and in most cases you would prefer to get on the side of the probabilities. That is to say if something had a 60% hit rate, meaning 6/10 times you will “win“ with a given strategy, you would much prefer that than something with a 30% hit rate. The human brain typically struggles with this, but we’re often best served by viewing success over a series of attempts rather than just a single one. Just like at the gym, you don’t go to the gym once, fail to get a six pack and then give up. The process of conditioning the body is one that is an accumulation of sustained effort over time.A common turn of phrase amongst many traders is “The Trend Is Your Friend“. Understanding trends is one of the most important things to grasp as a trader. Trends can exist in multiple time frames, from a 1minute or 5min chart, to a monthly or quarterly chart. There are much larger patterns and trends at play that extend far beyond these, and extend over hundreds of years like the long term debt cycle and the Fourth Turning. Patterns are an artefact of nature, and thus they are an artefact of human behaviour. We are nature. Just as any other animal or organism that exists is too. The longer a pattern or trend has existed for, that is the higher the timeframe the trend can be confirmed on, the higher the signal typically is, and the higher the probability the trend would continue. “An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”A major reason why it’s so valuable to properly understand trend is because of the psychological disposition we have to be anticipating its eventual end, and fading it early. There is no shortage of people who have bet against a trend by shorting it and been absolutely rekt. As i said, it’s not that it can’t reverse, but the probabilities are not on your side. Which means over time you lose given enough attempts. Being able to identify this enables a trader to verify once that dynamic has switched around, and then reconfigure their psychological biases to be in alignment with the change. With all that said, US GDP data is out and despite the Ministry of Truth’s attempt to gaslight their own citizens, even going to the extent of redefining what they consider a recession to be, the US has most certainly entered a recession. Along with confirmation of the US entering recession, we also have updated monthly inflation prints which saw inflation in Australia increase from 5.1 to 6.1 - a 20% increase month-on-month, while the US nears ever closer to double digits printing 9.1%. (Yes, as discussed many times. These numbers are as bogus as Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading - the real numbers are waaaaaay higher!)The Aussie inflation chart however is a fascinating one to look at; especially when we zoom in a little and consider the trend and the previous structure. As you can see from the lows which i’ve highlighted below; Every low is a higher low structurally which shows the pressure to the downside is decreasing with each low that has been printed and indicates some what of a consolidation is taking place. The other point of interest is that the previous long term resistance which goes back to the 90’s has been breached and we are now seeing the highest levels of inflation for 32 years in Australia. The final data i’ll highlight is the level around 7% where you can see i’ve drawn a horizontal line. If Inflation data increases and confirms with a further increase beyond this level if i was simply following the trend I would put the probabilities in favour of inflation pumping its way up toward the previous local high toward 10%, and very likely higher over time. But the overriding point i’m wanting to make is simply that until we can confirm otherwise, the trend of higher inflation is not going anywhere. That is not to say it cannot change, but until there are clear signs of a reversal in the data, the this looks more like a major breakout than anything else, and much higher levels are more probabilistically likely. Breaking out of a 32year period of consolidation is not an insignificant thing, and the worst thing we could do downplay it’s significance. It should be best thought of as a coiling spring or a building of pressure. The longer and further the spring is held down, the more significant the expansion is likely to be when that pressure is released.This is what we are currently seeing -a major expansion off the lows.Meanwhile the broad trend with fiat is well established - it trends toward zero in value while the supply of units...
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