Goddamn that's pretty specific. I've recently moved to graphene which has many features I've yet to discover, but often I wonder if mitigations simply make you more obvious in your divergence from the norms. I've often wondered if the best way to blend in would be to surf from a Starbucks using Safari with no extensions running on MacOS.

How’s you guys hear about this? I just got back from two weeks in Japan and found no Bitcoin anything anywhere and I certainly didn’t know about the btc centre until about a week ago when my x/Twitter feed told me about an event held there recently. Clearly there is a gap in my intelligence.

After pondering the total lvl of Bitcoin I found I realised that in one way Japan has not had need of bitcoin, for the past 40 odd years they have been enormously cash based society that has had very little inflation regarding their domestic consumer prices. The sheer scale of notes in circulation just blew my mind.

Thanks for the write up!

Not particularly helpful tbh. They suck how? Even with considerable local resources they are too slow? Suck in that their output is poor quality compared to the big players?

The first I can attest to, although I have not had the chance to try with something greater than 32GB locally which is probably not adequate.

If the latter, that may be true but his solution ignores why someone would want to run a local LLM in the first place, doesn’t it?

what are your thoughts on the Nekba?

Would a self hosted Alby Hub fall into this category? Any other recommended products/projects?

how sad. i tried to read The Undercover Economist but suprise suprise i didn't finish it, didn't even get past the first chapter. but in that first chapter are some really interesting, practical examples of scarcity and its effects that I marinated on for literally years. usually in the context of pricing, but ultimately it was those same lessons applied that helped me get bitcoin once and for all.

Thanks, I had no idea this was a thing, touring central/reserve banks haha! would've thought!

How long is the waiting list? I will be in Japan in the next year or two and would be keen to do this!

Happened on Texas, USA (I believe), for anyone else curious.

Yes very cool, I paid for a fantastic schnitzel in Vienna, Austria a few years ago and similarly the staff didn’t bat an eye. I did, I thought it was so cool, and I am always on the hunt for opportunities to pay by lightning wherever possible. Fwiw, don’t bother in Japan, at least not in 2025.

Agree, it makes no sense. In filthy fiat that is worth $21 million USD. Nevermind some hacker infiltrating his home network, what exactly was his plan for stopping a wrench attack? Once my modest holdings reached a certain size I racked my brain trying to figure out a way to store my seed phrase so securely that if anyone nasty ever came to visit I literally would not be a able to give them what they wanted. It took a while but I finally came up with a system I am happy with, or rather I could not find a better solution.

I find it so hard to believe that someone so high profile as Luke with such significant holdings was not thinking along similar lines.

It’s possible that he grew up in comfortable settings and his mind and thoughts never really went in that direction, I don’t know. It’s also possible he was so confident in his own technical abilities that he thought his system was unhackable. So, he’s either lying or very naive. In both cases, whatever else he says in the future I will take with an extremely large grain of salt, for he’s either dishonest or an extremely smart idiot.

Yes likewise, I wish you good luck too with this very tough nut to crack.

For my part I oscillate between total despair and determined optimism. We have been saving and investing for a while, and some of this investments have well, particularly Bitcoin, however as we have progressed down the learning path we don’t see Bitcoin as an investment anymore. But regardless, should the need ever arise we could liquidate everything and buy something, somewhere. It’s more a frustration of not being able to buy in one of the nicest places to live I’ve ever come across.

As it turns out we and the generations below us are all in the same boat, thanks to the petrodollar system if the US continues to grow its money supply so to do the governments of Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc. lest they unleash detrimental forces across their entire societies, not just hopeful home buyers. And that money needs to go somewhere.

So, really it’s our own fault for being born to parents living in these countries at the time we were, had we been born a generation or two earlier things would be quite different. But more seriously this problem is baked into our monetary system, it can be managed by governments, to a degree (big prints in the US cause big headaches to other govts), however some governments have mismanaged the problem grossly, usually because of self interested politicians with multiple investment properties of this town who have no interest in any seeing any changes to the current set up.

Alby Hub (self hosted) with Damus or Primal.

Sydney, Australia. One of the most expensive housing markets in the world particularly considering its population density. There is no shortage of ink spilled on the topic, is there anything in particular you’d like to know?

Does Damus freeze sometimes when scrolling? Mine does and it drives me nuts, I want to use it over Primal.

Housing affordability.

For me this is the saddest part. In my country for instance a lot of inflation is being driven by high electricity prices. This is very dangerous because it feeds into almost all input costs. As a result many businesses have no choice but to raise the prices of their goods and services.

In Turn as you have pointed out a consumer’s response to these increased prices as to simply stop purchasing these goods and services.

As a final result so many small and independent businesses are simply going to close down, many people who took a chance trying to escape from the rat race, small mom-and-pop businesses or long-term independent businesses that have been around for many decades are all going to close, some will lose everything.

Just for this reason I feel central banking is truly evil and I cannot wait to replace a small group of people with a totally disproportionate amount of power over society with a system much more akin to a vending machine or traffic lights. I.e. predictable.

Thank you

I usually have a pretty good memory for obscure pop stuff and I have absolutely no memory of this, before my time for sure. What was also before my time was Chuck Berry’s sweet little 16 which if memory serves was definitely a song sexualising 16 year old girls, and that goes back to the 50’s or whenever Chuck Berry was on top.

Yes you're right I remember those times living in Welly and the concept of property ownership and investment really spreading right up until I left in 2007, some of my friends were getting into it and it all sounded like Greek to me. I am 100% biased but I believe overall NZ has the best lamb, beef, seafood and produce in the world. Aussie beef is right behind, but one thing they do have is multiple supermarkets selling rump cap for roasting at home, which is a damn shame because it's a delicious cut and absolutely piss easy to make, hopefully this changes in NZ soon.

Definitely seems to be the case in NZ, and I am not sure about the US and can imagine it very much depends on the specific local market, however as a whole in Australia we are off the races, again, at least for the next few months.

I have a conspiracy theory that after the US Govt bailed out the banks in the GFC, the resultant increase to the US money supply meant other country’s currencies were suddenly very competitive with the dollar, possibly explaining the exchange rates at the time. This would’ve been painful for American importers, I can only imagine how expensive NZ lamb must have gotten for instance. Anyway at this point the US would have asked their closest allies and trading partners if they could also kindly send expand their money supplies too, in order to get exchange rates back to their historical norms. For allies such as NZ and Australia, the only feasible way of doing this was to lend, lend, lend, in doing so creating money/debt and increasing their total money supplies.

I may be completely wrong but comparing the USD/AUD chart with the mean Australian house price between 2010-2020 is interesting.

Genuinely funny 🤣

Wow how did you find all of these places? I paid for an excellent meal in Vienna last year using Lightning but it seemed to be one of the only places in the whole city accepting btc.