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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 38m \ on: Are we turning Bitcoin into the thing we swore to destroy? bitcoin
You can't have it both ways. Many Bitcoiners remind me of the goldbugs I used to be part of....they envisioned a world in which people would bring gold coins to the grocery store to buy bread....when you pressed them on how would this actually work, then never had good answers. (ie. Will cashiers be able assay gold? Will they be able to make change for a 1 oz coin....how with silver? or more gold or both? What if you only want gold?)
My point is, the fantasy of many bitcoiners of grandma running her LND node and enticing her local pharmacy to accept bitcoin is the dream of young unrealistic autistics.
If bitcoin winds up becoming just another rehypothecated manipulated financial instrument, then it was a failure from the beginning.
Personally, I see Bitcoin very much like the Internet itself. Certainly the "promise of the internet" has yielded very mixed results. As someone who was very active in 1990s early internet, the dream of the cyberpunk is both dead yet strangely still alive.
98% of internet use is controlled by a handful of companies (we've just swapped NBC, CBS, ABC for Meta, Google, X, etc) - yet you can still use it in the way the original dream presented it. You can host your own websites and communicate securely, its just that you have to be willing to jump thru the hoops to achieve that.
Same will be case with Bitcoin.
Ha. Seems like he figured out the oft-cited "200000 bitcoins" don't exist and is exiting stage left before the news drops.
Gov retards probably sold it / stole it all.
Another black eye for Trump who talked so big on the subject....
11 sats \ 2 replies \ @freetx 11h \ parent \ on: Claude and I discuss Democrats in Texas Politics_And_Law
Yes, as much as I like Perplexity, it has laughable MSM takes on every remotely political subject.
11 sats \ 6 replies \ @freetx 14h \ parent \ on: Claude and I discuss Democrats in Texas Politics_And_Law
Absolutely. Only saying that Claude's assertion that the entire purpose was to have "working men legislators" probably isn't realistic....
I think the best thing they could do is have strict term limits. I would say 8-10 years would be a reasonable maximum.
In addition TX has some fairly strict rules on "gifts". Like a state rep can't receive more than $100 in gifts annually, or even benefit from more than $100 of "dining and entertainment" expenses annually!
Although they do get a ~$200 per day per diem while legislature is in session. But that has been added on over last 50 years to cover actual inflation driven expenses.
I think the clear intention was to not have "career politicians" but rather make it more a civic duty like serving on a jury....
The negative side of it is that you wind up with wealthy serving as members who don't care about $7200 / yr but instead care about what laws are passed (for personal / business gain).
Its a hard balance to strike, but regardless, I think if you miss work you should be fired.
I think there is a "default" lockup of 60 or 90 days for PIPE investors, but its as good as "no lockup" practically speaking.
Obviously they are going to dump on retail, because a 20x mNAV is crazy high. However, what can be done about it?
I refused to go into Strive because the offer was 2.2x mNAV which I refused to do (MSTR trades at 1.7x and yes smaller companies may have higher mNAVs, but my view is long-term things will compress to match MSTR).
I did some research into the Strive merger (Viveks company that is turning into a BTC). Although I'm not going to invest (mNAV offering is too high at 2.2x) I do think they have some clever strategies.
Essentially they are looking to merge with companies with "stranded capital". As example, take some biotech company that has $70M in cash on its balance sheet but their drug either failed approval or failed in actual testing....that company in many cases will be trading at 0.9 NAV (ie. less then the cash they have). Although counter-intuitive, thats because there are not lots of good options for them....if they simply close up shop and dividend out the money then it all shareholders get hit with ~15-30% tax hit....
What Strive is offering is: We will give you mNAV 1:1 shares in our BTC company in return for your cash. Then obviously putting that cash into more BTC.
My point on this, is I think the innovation and financial engineering still has a long runway.
I'm struggling with understanding how anyone could look at the current state of ai development and draw the conclusion that anything like superintelligence is coming in the next decade.
I half think its all just a perverse marketing strategy. Getting everyone (esp Wallstreet) talking about "should this dangerous new tech be regulated?!?", imbues it with extra-special investing cred.
Sam Altman certainly gives me conman vibes. Thankfully his creations seem increasingly lackluster and long-term OpenAI will probably lose their advantage and become a lackluster offering.
A point to consider: MSTR has basically proved that so far it has been cheaper to use financial engineering to "mine" bitcoin then to actually do it with actual hardware.
From that perspective, they are generating bitcoin more profitably than miners, thus have been rewarded with a 1.7x mNAV based upon that efficiency.
Now here is the big question: Will using "financial engineering mining" be more or less effective in a low-interest rate environment? (To my view it will be more effective with lower interest rates).
I found
gpt-oss-20b better than 120b...especially considering the speed difference when trying to run on local hardware. Not sure what they did to 120b, but I didn't get really good results from it.20b was ok, I even really thought the ansible task I gave it came out quite well. However the "thinking" phase seemed excessive for the final output.
qwen3-235b-a22b-0725
Heard good things about that on the tubes....I'd be interesting to hear what your findings are....I may try to download today and test as well.
Personally, when doing lite programming task (ansible task, bash scripts, python one-offs), I deliberately choose non-thinking models as I find the output the be better.
Lately I've been seeing local models like: devstral and qwen3-coder that produce comparable output to previous "premier" models like Claude 3.5.
I really do think we are going to reach the point where local models are going to be "good enough" for 80% of the routine task people need....and the AI hype craze will die down as the remaining 20% that requires high-end datacenters won't be enough to sustain the enormous hype that we've seen over the last few years.
The curious thing is that we probable do need these datacenters at the moment, primarily to help us train / finetune / distill the next-gen of local open source models being released.
So: how do you develop grit in your children (or yourself)?
In general: I don't praise them when they get an A on a test..likewise I don't criticize them if they get a C on a test. Instead I try to direct my admiration for their effort. When they worked hard to get the A, I praise the effort they put into it. Likewise, if they get a C, and we both know its because they didn't study, I criticize that. If however I know they studied and still got a C, I will still praise the sincere effort.
The basic goal is tie approval to "hardworking / perseverance" and not focus on specific outcomes.
These are the types of cases that we need some organized bitcoin-centric legal non-profit. Something we could donate sats to in order to fund the appeal.
It would do the entire industry good if these "money transmitter" laws are deemed not to apply to wallets
But how much you actively keep saved or “stacked” versus invested, spent, or reallocated can change over time.
Ultimately though everything not consumed is "saved". Post-retirement, having a 2nd home is just "another bank account". Its just allocating a portion away from liquid savings into an illiquid, but physical form of savings.
Personally I think BTC is the best savings technology man has ever made, so I plan to keep the majority of my net worth in BTC forever (to pass on to kids).
Direct investments, compete against BTC....how many investments have matched BTC over the past 10 years? Not many....therefore unless I feel convinced some specific investment would beat BTC, I will just keep stacking.
An aside.
In 1971 a barrel of oil was $3.60 per barrel. A ounce of Gold was $35. So you could buy approx 10 barrels of oil for that ounce....
Today a barrel of oil is $66 and gold is $3360, so you can buy 50 barrels of oil.
If you run those numbers and compare against SP500 returns from same time period you will find that Gold basically beat the SP500....And all those returns had no counterparty risk!
In 1971 you could have sent your money to some NY stock broker, and made sure to check on it every year and hope they didn't steal it....or you could've just put that gold coin in your sock drawer....
The best possible mental approach is to just equate stacking with "savings".
Is there ever a point where you plan to "cashout of all your savings?" Is there ever a point where you think you won't need to have any savings anymore?
Sounds like my father-in-law....
In general I just change the subject as its not worth the fight. However if I really feel the need to make a point I will preface my statement with: "I've heard some people say..." or "I've read that...." to soften it as to not make the situation seem like I'm personally attacking his point.