Argonaut

Public Key

npub1w5juzyvvffk0x25w0frdd5wc93saheca9vjxkvmgt7fm296g3t2shh5gsa

NIP-05 Address

NIP-57 Address

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs82fwpzxxy5m8n928853kk68vzccwmuuwjkfrtxd59lya4zayg44gpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsu6yftp

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1w5juzyvvffk0x25w0frdd5wc93saheca9vjxkvmgt7fm296g3t2shh5gsa

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-07-17 05:48:20

- reply

Hey Max I wrote a little fairy tale about money inspired by what I've learned from Austrians and Libertarians. If you get a chance I'd love to know what you think:
Really enjoyed your podcast with Preston as well as your panel at cheat code.
https://highlighter.com/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqcasylmf4a20whutxt4gs9qzyq82d6pd7mnxfwj7pkmxnskqgvtjqqv9g6rjv4jj6nrfw36xcefd2p5kwued0fhxzdfhxcnhlpzy

2024-07-01 12:58:44

- reply

GM!

2024-06-20 12:11:39

- reply

GM. Let's go get it today.

2024-06-16 14:30:37

- reply

Really is a great reminder to stay anchored. It is so unintuitive that your mind eventually drifts into a fear state of "what if someone guesses...". And you have to come back here and level set. Thanks!

2024-06-05 00:14:01

- reply

GM! I wanted to let you know I wrote a story we chatted about a while back in DMs. If you get a chance to read it let me know what you think!
#naddr1qq…wlfd

2024-05-27 01:55:53

- reply

2024-05-25 14:13:56

- reply

This was an excellent episode and I appreciate both your professional insights and personal takes:
-the approval process and the selection of coinbase as custodian
-Importance of in-kind redemption
-Likelihood of future in-kind "upgrade", and the cherry on top is that the bank lobby will accomplish it 😂
-norm of in-kind being established for other assets but just de facto denied to Bitcoin because of AP rules
-Idea that in-kind doesn't create a taxable event (but how would that work with retirement accounts--would it be considered a contribution to deposit to one?)
-Tracing out the history of GLD and the idea that the flows and AUM are only just starting (I had to laugh at the proof of reserves selfies in the vault!)
And more personal / individual:
-Donations, opensats, responsibility to open source -- how to size it, and the time commitment
-ETF as top-of-funnel for learning about self custody especially once in-kind arrives
-proof of reserves and how that came about, the learning you did, and the pressure it lets you exert on others in the space ("don't say it can't be done!")
I bought some bitwise etf for a retirement account within a day of finishing the episode. Great work both @npub1jpv…qgsz and @npub1qny…95gx and thank you both.

2024-05-20 19:49:36

Hello #Nostr
I wrote this and I'm wondering what you think!
#naddr1qq…wlfd

2024-05-20 15:13:21

@npub1der…xzpc wondering if you like the little story I wrote:
#naddr1qq…wlfd

2024-04-11 04:18:13

- reply

One of my favorite all time Bitcoin essays. I hope this film does it justice!

2024-03-28 00:13:05

- reply

Respect for walking away from money on moral grounds. I think this is rare.

2024-02-11 13:57:06

- reply

Thanks for the recommendation; just listening now and I've never heard this before. Also, coincidentally I'm reading the three body problem after your rec on WBD from a long time ago so cheers sir!

2023-12-31 01:46:49

- reply

I look forward to reading it! I need to do a better job keeping up to speed with Fedi my info is a year old now.

2023-11-28 02:52:12

- reply

Promoting to the top of the pile.

2023-11-17 04:00:30

Started a book club to serruptitiously orange pill my friends. Lost half of them after Mandibles, but then laid low for a while before suggesting @npub1a2c…w83a's Broken Money. Had the club meeting last week and my boy who was curious but on the fence about Bitcoin was spitting fire and dropping facts about mining energy use, self custody, the circularity of proof of stake, the history of money and the Austrian argument for gold.
My compliment to pay the author is how well-rounded, comprehensive, and grounded my friend was after one book. He's smart enough to know he doesn't know everything, but he is well on his way to being a fully-fledged bitcoiner after this superb book. Brilliant!

2023-09-18 03:15:54

- reply

Much better ranking imo

2023-08-28 16:34:33

- reply

Second image here:
https://cdn.nostr.build/i/2b5d5e9dd5054b0793f3be6c7e9d28bdcde9d7e58ad80d218d952eaa960d08b1.jpg

2023-08-28 16:33:42

I’m reading through @npub1qh5…eh9r's and David Puell’s Cointime Economics paper and wanted to make three observations about chapters 1 -3.
1. The concept: the authors propose to analyze a new aggregate variable of value and time. They call this a “coinblock”, and you can also think of it as a precise measure of BTC∙time (i.e. 1 BTC held for 10 years is equivalent to 10 BTC held for one year). The authors offer this approach as an alternative to the clustering of UTXOs into groupings like STHs and LTHs because that technique relies on proprietary data science; by contrast, this approach uses a universal and simple variable, and the findings of the authors are therefore instantly verifiable and replicable. The paper seeks to establish a new standard unit of measuring on-chain activity.
2. This chart (page 12) really struck me as the first bit of explanatory power of the model. It looks at coinblocks created and therefore its shape looks a lot like the supply curve–this is because the number of coinblocks created on any given day is tied to the supply in existence. For instance, you can see that today’s value is somewhere around 3B coinblocks created per day, which makes sense since we have 19.4m BTC in supply today that is confirmed roughly 144 times per day, thus 19.4 x 144 = 2793.6 or 2.79 billion coinblocks per day.
https://cdn.nostr.build/i/5226dc7ab42729d97ba26e3d74401481fe8d877588777f9f0b4817fe991e6400.jpg
What struck me about the chart is the China mining ban, visible in between the two peaks of the 2021 cycle top. The coinblocks created takes a plunge and appears to be at values as low as back in 2013 briefly. This makes sense when you consider that if blocks come in slower than expected, coindays created will slow meaningfully since they will not get their 144 confirmations per day. The spike down on this chart, and the clockwork return to trend are beautiful indicators of the effect this ban had on the network, and also the resilience in recovery and return to normal.
3. The authors establish measures of Liveliness (the ratio of the sum of blocks destroyed to the sum of blocks created) and Vaultedness (the ratio of the sum of blocks stored to the sum of blocks created) to tell the story of Bitcoin since its inception.
https://cdn.nostr.build/i/2b5d5e9dd5054b0793f3be6c7e9d28bdcde9d7e58ad80d218d952eaa960d08b1
This chart from page 20 shows that Liveliness and Vaultedness (which always sum to 1.0) have gone through several phases as Bitcoin is monetizing. Satoshi’s dormant coins and the lack of exchange price dominated the network until the first blow-off mania, at which point network activity picked up significantly and started destroying coinblocks at a much faster rate. This repeated in subsequent cycles to a lesser extent to the point of today, where the authors argue the plateau of ~60% liveliness and ~40% vaultedness represents stability, maturity, and the development of external markets (derivatives, for example) as BTC settles into its primary use case–and you can observe on the chart how little these metrics have changed despite the fluctuations in price since 2018.
I find this report fascinating and will be back with more after I’ve read the next part!

2023-08-25 01:08:59

- reply

Downloaded. Will read over the weekend!

2023-08-24 13:35:20

- reply

I'll be all over this, and will give feedback too. 18 months is a lot of work, so early congratulations!

2023-08-23 23:19:24

- reply

Ordered and will work on getting my book club to read it.

2023-08-23 05:35:32

- reply

How would we know if we were wrong? Follow up is it more important to contribute to a sound money future win or lose than to be "right" with our families' savings?

2023-08-21 00:31:33

- reply

4 or 6

2023-08-12 02:22:14

- reply

Can you expand on the layer zero part? What sorts of beliefs do you have in mind? I'm trying to construct this layered system and I guess I'm having a hard time in a modern pluralistic society imagining what beliefs are more widely shared than money. Justice? Safety? Morality, broadly construed?
I think your list of improvements money makes possible is great. Perhaps the point from Principles of Economics about lengthening the production cycle and promoting specialization is distinct enough a point to add.

2023-08-12 02:12:33

- reply

Really enjoyed the article. I've followed this story fairly closely over the last few years since learning about Vespene. I'm glad to see it all in one place, laid out clearly and thoroughly. I have hope that this article can help me 🍊 💊 a few precoiners I know. Cheers!

2023-08-04 13:13:09

- reply

I think this is a good point, but the 3% you're describing is spent into the economy, not "generated" as a return. This group might have 70% of the Bitcoin and it might track world productivity to the tune of 2-3% per year so they don't need to work, but they will still have much less Bitcoin over time, they just won't be losing purchasing power.
I agree that the idea of unbreakable dynasties is a worry, but since it's absolutely scarce any spending is gone and irreplacable, even if the remaining sum is equivalent in purchasing power. So I wonder if this isn't actually an issue?

2023-07-22 20:46:06

- reply

Reading Principles of Economics, researching channels to open, and working on a creative written piece BTC-related.
Also teaching my kids to swim in a cottage lake.

2023-07-17 03:47:41

- reply

Beethoven
Bach
Liszt
Brahms
Dvorak

2023-07-07 13:44:59

- reply

Do you think it plays out like ftx?

2023-07-02 19:42:16

- reply

This is such a clever and interesting way of looking at it. Is there a comparable liquid vs illiquid analogy for gold or usd? Like for example treasuries are $51t but m2 is up around $20t so is a large illiquid supply a reasonable ongoing assumption at saturation?

2023-06-08 02:20:54

- reply

Exactly. Someone believing the truth for the wrong reason doesn't make another person's belief any less legitimate. I'm glad I read his piece and was needled by it, but I think the simplicity of your counter here is elegant.

2023-04-29 23:21:49

- reply

Thanks for this conversation. My pastime during the day to try to inhabit this mindset is to guess the Bitcoin value of all objects I see around me. On the drive to work I pass 1000 cars... How much are they worth? What percent of the world's economic power do they represent? At the moment it's more than 1000 BTC.... But it's one stretch of highway in one city. What do the overpasses cost, what do the streetlights cost? What does the maintenance cost? There are 50+ cities bigger than mine. Even if these 50 cities were the whole world that's 420,000 BTC per city. How would it be apportioned? What fraction would the world's 1.1 billion vehicles command? These kinds of questions help me at least think about pricing in BTC--a true Booth-style BTC standard.
@npub1s05…eyhe I would like to ask whether you agree that one way we could "give people jobs" is to vastly increase human-to-human contact jobs like elder care, schooling, youth development and so on. Is there a future where we can distribute the productivity gains well enough that we could have a prosperous economy from which a system with strong social supports (a sort of free market parallel to the nanny state) could emerge? I agree with your arguments against UBI, but I struggle to see how society will structure itself so as not to exclude the legions of people displaced by tech. Thank you sir!

2023-03-20 03:12:33

- reply

With 3% annual productivity gains, BTC doubles in purchasing power every 23 years. The reverse-halving for your every descendant to draw from the well and leave enough for the next.

2023-03-02 23:50:39

#[0] I was listening to you on #[1]'s show with #[2] and I was struck by your point about concentration of wealth. Do you think there's a worthwhile idea to explore around the idea that the difference between BTC's wealth concentration and fiat's is that the former's is one-time and the latter's perpetual? Let me try an example.
Imagine someone--someone handsome, with a good heart--buys socks for Bitcoin. He will never be able to replace the equivalent BTC in the future and thus the spend is decentralizing in nature. He will have less money and more socks, and when he goes to buy socks again, he'll find that the price he paid last time is outrageous, but that the new price is very low indeed. He will be happy to exchange some BTC for socks even though he knows BTC will buy him more socks in the future because he needs them now. In this world anything you can save for a future person will be of immense value. A person will never have more Bitcoin than he has now, but ultimately it won't matter because every time he wants or needs something he will find the price to have fallen and the money is ample.
In the fiat world, you buy the socks and next time you go to buy them they're more money. So people with money acquire hard things that rise with inflation, while people without money are forced to work harder and harder thanks to society's difficulty adjustment (inflation). In this world anything you save will be of no value (imagine my grandfather burying his life savings so I could have them today) and so the people who can hoard the hard assets have a perpetual motion machine of continual deception and exploitation.
Do you think this could be a productive area to explore? I really think the difference is once you spend it it's gone, whereas in a debt world the ability to borrow against your hard asset is a true perpetual motion machine that means you never really spend anything that mattered, hence wealth concentration.
What do you think?

2023-03-02 23:19:34

#[0] and #[1] on Layered money around the 36:30 minute mark where they are talking about local vs global money there was a great insight. The community adopting Bitcoin is not the same as the historical spread of ideas from a geographic epicentre; instead, there is a new digital society emerging of common values or beliefs. It doesn't look big to any of us because it's so spread out, but already on a global level it's a massive "country" of shared beliefs and significant economic power (even a voting bloc in some places). It made me realize that when adoption happens it won't start somewhere and spread; it will start everywhere, like painting a wall with a million tiny brushes.
Brilliant conversation, thanks so much.

2023-03-01 17:30:43

- reply

Great way to put it

2023-02-27 18:15:57

- reply

Glad you're here, Nik. I'm wondering for your show do you think you can bring someone on to Steelman the "higher for longer" approach? The consensus view seems to be that the government will not be able to afford high rates for a very long time but surely this must have occured to the fed, who nevertheless continue to raise rates. What are they thinking of that we are missing?

2023-02-19 12:35:21

- reply

Welcome, sir!

2023-02-19 02:35:24

- reply

Welcome Larry. You're an inspiration!

2023-02-18 04:11:35

- reply

Such a good point Preston. Every time I see a big parking lot I laugh and think each of those cars is worth a Bitcoin right now....

2023-02-15 01:18:50

- reply

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
-HD Thoreau

2023-02-11 23:40:51

- reply

It is shocking how much of a difference these points make.

2023-02-10 03:28:41

- reply

Never mind, got it!

2023-02-10 03:20:28

- reply

Yeah but lost my username somehow, did I screw something up?

2023-02-10 03:12:58

- reply

Good episode, and timely. I appreciated Pierre's perspective as always. I liked how he casually tossed around the idea that we need to wait five or ten years to let it play out 😁