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Mackay wasn’t wrong to argue that people can suffer from collective delusions, but his account lacks a crucial element: humility. Mackay’s caricatures made it seem so easy to spot bubbles, but it’s not so easy to see a bubble when it’s all around you. The most famous historian of bubbles had a front-row seat for the largest speculative bubble in British history. And he had absolutely nothing to say about it.
$Part I of the two-part series covers the following topics: (1) The History of Debt in Bitcoin Mining (2) Principles of Debt: Capital stack overview, Creditworthiness, Collateral, Covenants, Cost of capital, Back-end financing (3) Debt Products for Bitcoin Miners: Asset-backed debt, Corporate Debt and (4) Summary Comparison.
Tweets: @BraiinsMining @BraiinsMining @emilyjnicolle $Disconnect from price. Secure your bitcoin for the next 10x. Avoid short-term capital gains. Tread carefully with lending opportunities. Develop your own market analysis. If you want to truly change your fortune, use your bitcoin journey as an opportunity for education, rather than a search for overnight riches. Develop new skills. Keep learning about money, technology, economics, and all the problems Bitcoin was designed to solve. The more you understand and appreciate bitcoin, the closer you come to making a splash of your own.
$The US debt ceiling is in the news again due to Congressional gridlock, along with the possibility of a US sovereign default and the unintuitive idea of the US Treasury Department minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin to bypass the problem. This article breaks down some of the nuances involved in this strange situation, which comes up every few years.
$We Bitcoiners are in a race. Perhaps the most important race we will ever run. We are racing against time to drive the adoption of Bitcoin as fast as we can. We are racing toward a future in which the U.S. Government never coordinates a concerted attack against Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. This is a race to avoid a war. Although Bitcoin is destined to win, if we lose the race to avoid the war, victory will be far more costly. This would be the long way — and the hard way. Instead of a sprint to a bright, orange future, we would be embroiled in a long, hard confrontation with a government desperate to hold on to the power of the monetary printing press. If we lose the race, the long, hard path will be a war in which hundreds of millions of people will suffer the decivilizing and impoverishing effects of hyperinflation. So, for those of us alive, for those of us ready and able now, it is vitally important to run this race as well as possible.
$This article explores technical analysis of mining behavior exhibited by an entity that is plausibly Satoshi Nakamoto. The major conclusions are: - Their goal was to keep the "heartbeat" of the network alive while it was being bootstrapped. - They mined on a single machine with a maximum hashrate of 6 Mhps. - They could have easily earned more than twice as much BTC if they had mined at full power. - They did not want to be in a position of dominating the network hashrate, but may have felt it was necessary during the earliest days when the network was far more fragile due to having fewer than five miners. - They cared a great deal about difficulty adjustments. The adjustment algorithm was one of Satoshi's greatest innovations and they opined upon the topic more than almost any other. - They wanted as many people to be able to mine on home PCs as possible (Satoshi decried the FGPA / GPU mining race)
$In any new and developing space, there is bound to be a lot of noise. New solutions both compete for a new market against existing monopolies — who currently own the market, and against other technologies trying to displace them. Technology adoption is most often bottom-up versus top-down. Why: Simply because the people furthest away from monopoly power have the most to gain, and the people closest to the monopoly have the most to lose. If money is just information and money is being manipulated by Central Banks at an unprecedented rate to avoid a credit collapse of the system, then misinformation MUST be growing throughout the system
Tweets: @CedYoungelman $Exasperated with a conversation, I asked my friend directly, "What do you think the probability is that Bitcoin hits $1M per coin?" My friend replied without hesitation, "0.001%." I laughed and said I put it at 80%. We had a conversation about my friend's skepticism, and I wondered if there was some information asymmetry, or if it was self-motivated beliefs. My friend group is full of people like this, highly intelligent and successful, yet resistant to Bitcoin. I've found it to be a topic of fascinated frustration. I believe that my friends are resistant to Bitcoin because of their trust in the current system, and see Bitcoin as a radical departure from it. In contrast, I see Bitcoin as a necessary response to the flaws in the current system and a trust-minimized store of value.
Tweets: @BitcoinAudible @sunny_satoshi @sunny_satoshi @epodrulz @stephanlivera @TheGuySwann @petermiyoung @jakeeswoodhouse $Many speculate that Bitcoin’s security will lapse with the end of the mining subsidy. But other factors will continue to incentivize miners. Two prominent and likely factors are: (1) Higher transaction fees due to base layer settlement activity for higher layers which in turn is the result of increased adoption and (2) Bitcoin miners can act as an auxiliary tool for other business practices, an example being the highly-overlooked development in the mainstream involving the Bitcoin miners’ incentive to pursue stranded, wasted or excess energy.
$A rise in financial censorship this year, perpetrated by citizens’ own governments and adversarial nations alike, calls for Bitcoin.
$Bitcoin provides the ultimate form of transferable value because it preserves the encapsulated wealth. This is an opinion editorial by Leon Wankum, one of the first financial economics students to write a thesis about Bitcoin in 2015.
$After years of learning, I now devote a fair amount of my time trying to help others understand bitcoin better. While many people have referred to me as a “bitcoin expert,” I still consider myself a student – I have yet to determine how deep the rabbit hole goes.
$A blast from the past (2018) by Pierre. "Institutional investors should figure out their speculative allocation to bitcoins as a growth currency separately from figuring out their investment allocation to venture funds. These allocations are backed by very different value accrual theses and face different risks."
$As the Fed aggressively raises rates to fight inflation, credit and other financial stress rises. What has the highest risk of breaking as the Fed holds tight? How markets will stomach it is uncertain, but it’s an absolute certainty that volatility will rise as liquidity deteriorates.
$This essay outlines an abridged analytical framework for understanding the global system at distinct scales (micro, meso and macro) and presents a plausible (albeit notional) scenario of how geopolitical dynamics may precipitate a monetary shake-up in which Bitcoin becomes strategically important.
$The precursors of money, along with language, enabled early modern humans to solve problems of cooperation that other animals cannot – including problems of reciprocal altruism, kin altruism, and the mitigation of aggression. These precursors shared with non-fiat currencies very specific characteristics – they were not merely symbolic or decorative objects.
$This article dissects some of the nuances of the commonly held analyst view of DeFi as a solution to debacles like FTX, Celsius, Luna, Voyager and Three Arrows Capital. It grants that certain opportunities exist, but offers a rather critical assessment of the current state of the industry overall. Additionally, it touches on other cryptocurrency industry concepts including Web3, NFTs, tokenized securities, and the broader problem of creating coins that serve no purpose other than to enrich the founders.
$How to manage a Bitcoin LN routing node for a more private use as an "Uncle Jim" Bank for yourself, for your friends and family.
Tweets: @callebtc $Bitcoin represents an unprecedented paradigm shift, and while the world may not be ready to replace fiat, that change is inevitable.
$How Bitcoin Thrives on the Edge between Order and Chaos
Tweets: @dergigi $The same features that make bitcoin so valuable (permissionlessness, censorship resistance, seizure resistance, etc.) also make it attractive to malicious actors. These malicious actors have come up with a wide variety of traps to fool bitcoin users into parting with their money, making bitcoin more challenging to use safely. The internet is a dangerous place, but we have the tools to protect ourselves!
$Some thoughts on FTX... Subprime meets Enron meets Madoff - on steroids thanks to altcoins... A recipe for disaster... Framing the conversation: Key challenges for Bitcoin... Potential negative impacts of the FTX collapse... Ultimately, the impact is very positive... Is regulation the answer?
$Learn the first steps of planning and constructing a greenhouse heated by bitcoin mining heat exhaust in this high-level overview from a miner and farmer.
$The IMF and World Bank do not seek to fix poverty, but only to enrich creditor nations. Could Bitcoin create a better global economic system for the developing world?
Tweets: @LynAldenContact @LynAldenContact @LynAldenContact @gladstein @gladstein @steve_hanke @reuters $I selected these quotes from this amazing book by Saifedean AMMOUS. They offer only a glimpse of the richness of the book that is an absolute must read.
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