Bitcoin Unlocked

#136 Going Dark

“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 get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

#135 Digital Panopticon

“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 technology to install their Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). They can basically let the grifters continue along in their grift, and allow them to siphon funds from the public to do so while they improve the technology, until such time as the technology is suitable to be captured by government and installed more broadly directly by central banks. The risks posed by CBDCs cannot be over stated. They are in my opinion to be considered the most significant threat to freedom and civil liberties, possibly ever, and would be very likely over time to move us toward some kind of digital panopticon. The below tweet from Brandon Quittem demonstrates exactly this. Joseph Lubin who is the co-founder of Ethereum that you’ve likely never heard of, published the document attached specifically for The World Economic Forum in 2020. The document is a “concrete proposal” to those in Davos about the benefits of a CBDC, and why it should be built on Ethereum. It is basically a word salad full of blockchain buzzwords suggesting we should remove cash, enable central banks more control and greater surveillance and that those in less developed nations should be forced to use them. To be honest the whole proposal is gross, but a few of the takeaways from the document are as follows:“Our intention is to give the reader an overview of the potential advantages and the challenges in a CBDC as well as, through a concrete proposal for a specific approach, to move the debate beyond the theoretical.““CBDC can give the central banks more effective, future-oriented tools to allow them to implement monetary policy in more direct and innovative ways and keep pace with technological change.““Widespread use of CBDC instead of private payment tokens could also help central banks retain sovereignty over monetary policy in tokenised assets markets, an important consideration should such markets come to represent significant portions of the economy. Other benefits include potentially new regulatory monitoring and enforcement tools, cheaper cross-border remittances, improvements to the interbank payments infrastructure and innovation in retail markets. CBDC could also be a superior replacement to physical cash, helping alleviate some of the risks and costs associated with banknotes.““Finally, if structured in a way that allows the CBDC to be traced, it could be useful in more efficient sanctions and AML enforcement contexts.““Tokens are powered by smart contracts, which are software applications that live in a distributed fashion in the network. These smart contracts can be programmed rules and business logic that are automatically enforced by the network and can restrict CBDC transfers in any way deemed suitable by the central bank and the regulator. This could make it possible to for instance “hard wire” KYC/AML procedures into the tokens themselves, greatly simplifying and improving the effectiveness of regulatory compliance mechanisms. Tokens could also be pre-programmed with rules that determine exactly under what conditions a transfer can be reversed or assets recovered. Last but by no means least, proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus on Ethereum is not energy intensive and would support a large-scale network at low energy cost and environmental impact.“As you can see, a CBDC would very likely be the end of any notion of privacy in the digital age. Central Banks would be granted full and total control over the technology of money, which to a large extent means to have control over you and I. Regardless of how they first begin you can be assured that over time, even if initially they were not exerting outsized control over your decision making, how and when you spend your slave coin tokens, that over time, there is only one way for a system with absolute power to go. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.This kind of power would be used to silence dissenting voices, it would be used to impose the will of central banks on other entities, it would enable full and total control and surveillance of money and would lead to the increasingly centralised control of all essential infrastructure and resources over time.There is no reason however as we move further into the digital age, that we need lose the fundamental rights that mechanisms like cash have afforded us. It really does come down to individuals voting with their actions. It is critical that the dangers that CBDC’s pose, be made clear to people everywhere. I’m confident that once armed with the information the downside becomes impossible to ignore. There are a number of incentives that could be used to onboard people to the digital slave-coin and lure them into opting into this predatory system. A few that come to mind are 1) Coercion as we saw with the “no jab, no job” vaccine policy in Australia (For all those in the US and abroad - Yes. That really happened!); 2) a one-off initial payment; 3) leverage a UBI-like handout or; 4) leverage the fact that people are deeply indebted and provide some kind of relief in exchange for their joining the network.It is the case, that as of this moment, our only genuine alternative to this digital dystopian communist techno-state installation is the truly free and open market of bitcoin. Where a CBDC would be slave money, Bitcoin is freedom money. Bitcoin (while not perfect) provides us with a far superior alternative where we do not need to be slaves to the central bank in order to eat beef, or use electricity. It allows us to continue to build upon the underlying protocol in the open and to improve our privacy instead of accepting the rule of others and relinquishing it. A CBDC would give the total ability for our transactions to be censored, and could be used to penalise us for any kind of wrong think or to attack dissenting voices. Bitcoin on the other hand gives you the complete freedom to interact and send value to anyone anywhere, and no one can stop the transaction from being processed.One enables top-down total control, and the other allows for the beautiful bottom-up flourishing of human potential.It’s not even a choice.Get educated, and a help those around you do the same. Share these letters around with at least one other person to help amplify the signal.We are going to win.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.AKPublished Block Height: 749817 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

#134 You'll Need To Rob The Bank If You Want Your Money

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 is good. This system is like that of a casino. It is not our system. When we enter the casino we should do so, knowing the house always wins. We can win a few hands, but if we get too powerful the casino management will take over and assume control. They will either capture us and pull the strings behind our actions or they will forcibly remove us from the building. The same is true for fiat and the government.Bitcoin provides a new system. A system that is built on truth. Not on lies. Bitcoin maintains an ultimate record of truth and of time. A pristine historical record that is indisputable. A record that is no one person or sides opinion, or point of view. It is a system that is no one else’s. It is everyone else’s. A system that empowers you to take responsibility, and to custody what is yours without needing to trust a third party. Without giving that outsider the opportunity to lie to you and to deceive you. A system where your asset is no ones liability. If you hold and use bitcoin in the right way, it can never be taken from you and no amount of violence changes this. It is a system designed for a world where we acknowledge our deeply flawed nature. A world where we seek to illuminate what is real and deploy humility in the face of our failings. A world consisting of a species of mammal with the ever present potential to behave in an adversarial manner.Fiat empowers those who wish to behave in such a way. It provides a system where those who do so, can be rewarded for such behaviour and this distorts our perception of reality in a foundational way. It blurs the line between what is right and wrong, and short circuits our moral compass and the way in which we orient ourselves in the world. Bitcoin disincentivizes any such behaviour. It is the antidote to the fiat disease that is currently tearing us apart. It provides us with the most powerful and transformational opportunity. An opportunity to be empowered and take it upon ourselves to assume responsibility and to course correct as a result of its existence. To rebuild and recalibrate our moral compass, and to enable us to reorient ourselves within the world where someone else does not have to lose for us to gain. To embark together on a co-exploration in search of the highest truth and toward a future where we can flourish together. Where we work to serve one another and that allows us to gain the clear recognition of the value of such pursuits, and the sense of meaning is both obvious and profound to all those operating as a part of such a system. It is the mechanism for a better world. One that i want for my children, and my children’s children, and one that they deserve.If you find it valuable, Share itFiat is predicated on the idea that we can endlessly take from the future, postponing any need to address the implications of such an action and where we can figure out a way to settle the bill at a later stage. The idea that we can defer accountability into the future. And it is a future we may not even be here to reckon with. It offers the potential to completely evade accountability and creates the potential for this to be redirected to someone else entirely. It is a system that not only allows for it, but directly incentives us to do so. It is directly taking from the future of others, and stealing from the very people we care most about. It is the leveraging of our children’s future to enable us to enjoy the present. Bitcoin holds a giant mirror up in the face of fiat. It diametrically opposes this idea and instead of siphoning from the future, it pushes value into the the future. It assures the future for those we care most about, instead of deferring our decision making to others and to an uncertain potential future moment. It forces us to acknowledge reality in the present and take responsibility for it. A kind of radical responsibility. It forces us to align ourselves with the truth, and orient ourselves in alignment with it. We will be provided the opportunity to be better for having done so.Fix the money, fix the world.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.AKPublished Block Height: 749487 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

#133 Immortal Cypherpunk

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. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.Onward.“So Powerful. And the fact this was written almost 30 years ago should speak volumes.The mission that bitcoin embodies has been underway for decades. This story is not new. Only new to some.Many have fought for the incredible opportunity that bitcoin presents, and many of those people may not get to enjoy those benefits themselves. Bitcoin has always been about more than just number go up. More than a mere investment. Obviously for many of us there is a journey that must be undertaken to learn this. You must do the work. This most recent attack, while not on bitcoin directly, serves to demonstrate the intent of government and those closest toward the center of power. These entities do not want a free humanity. They fear it, when really they should embrace it.We must stake our claim, and oppose this tyranny and anyone who wishes to keep us captive. We must reject the idea that anyone would have the right to control the free flow of information in the world. The trajectory has been set for many decades. The commitment to it is unwavering. The right to privacy is non negotiable. As Eric Hughes states, a free and open society is not possible in the digital age without it.So let us defend our own privacy in a way that demonstrates we expect to have it.Onward.Hope you all have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you next week.AK 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

#131 Upside Down Problem Solving

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 episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com