to biggest risk IMO is the shutting of the on/off ramps before we move to hyper-bitcoinization. this would essentially stop the rest of the world from bitcoinizing quickly and doom them to a death of 1000 cuts with their fiat holdings.
now, they would eventually be able to bitcoinize (get paid for services/products in bitcoin and then turn around and spend it) but this would require us bitcoiners spending our coins, which we won't want to do en masse until the price stabilizes.
so shutting of the on/off ramps is a huge risk and these gateways need to be guarded at all costs so we can retain our ability to port value out of the traditional financial system.
i don't think anyone knows what is going to happen 15 years from now, much less 50.
if you wanted to learn about cycles, then Kondratieff is a good place to start.
Where do you see the best business opportunities with bitcoin related products?
honestly, although "illegal", it would have to be non-KYC exchanges. If people can figure out how to build an effective on/off ramp with fiat that doesn't dox your identity i think that business would make millions of dollars a month. That being said, anyone who makes it will probably attract unwanted attention from authorities
I have not. I am getting interested in Hindu philosophy, and plan to read the Bhagavad Gita at some point.
Let me know if you know of any interesting texts I should check out!
I currently am living in Seattle, WA and in Medellin, Colombia. I have not lived in Peru since 2014, but I will go back and visit at some point!
Absolutely but as I mentioned earlier, it's a matter of degree. The issue is bitcoin does not have enough block space to be the settlement and transaction layer for all transactions in the economy. However, as Nik Bhatia points out in layered money, bitcoin does not need to fulfill this role. It just needs to fulfill the role of base money and settlement and scaling solutions can be built on top of it to handle micro transactions and loans.
buying more bitcoin, and moving it to cold storage. I also bought call options on spy in my Fidelity broker account, I'll use any profit to make there to buy more bitcoin.
I like skiing, hiking, reading books (obviously macro but also history, philosophy and science), and working out.
I also really enjoy movies and video games, although I haven't had much time to indulge in either of those recently.
One thing I have been really getting interested in is researching CIA projects like MKULTRA, FIVESTAR, STARGATE, etc.
I have a lot of friends who have researched these conspiracy theories, and while there are always wild and manic people in these communities I have also met very intelligent and well grounded people who have found out a lot of interesting things that our government has done in the name of national security.
If you consider the SAHM rule, then technically we are already in a recession. I think that it's gonna take more damage to the economy, though to force the authorities and power to admit that we're in a recession or that one is beginning.
The US has a unique economy compared to the rest of the world because we are the global reserve currency holder and therefore have constant investment inflows because dollar surpluses get recycled into our domestic bond and equity markets. That has given us a long leash to be fiscally irresponsible and not suffer the consequences immediately, but this won't last forever as I discuss in the dollar endgame.
Absolutely I think GME is what prompted a lot of people who were normies or just generally financially illiterate to really start thinking critically about our monetary system. The realization that the brokers had turned off the buy button in order to save short hedge funds and in reality save the entire system from imploding was mind-boggling, and raised a bunch of questions for people, including if they could even trust their bank.
A lot of reddit users then started following me down the rabbit hole of bitcoin content and I've privately gotten dozens if not hundreds of DM's saying that my work completely changed their mind around bitcoin and they have come around buying bitcoin and putting it in cold storage.
This sad reality is we don't really own our stocks, the brokers own them for us. The solution to that is to defund the traditional financial system, and put the power back in the hands of the people.
The GameStop saga is still not fully over and I think more and more people will be orange pill as a result of everything that unfolds.
for sure the miners but I would probably have to fly down to Paraguay to set them up in a shop and take advantage of the cheap electricity down there. the other alternative is to go to Venezuela since their energy is subsidized by their government.
Where are bitcoiners in Lima? Are there any events? Do any shops or stores accept bitcoin? yes, there are quite a few shops in Lima that accept bitcoin, and the number is growing slowly. A filmmaker crew called GetBased did a documentary in Peru about the bitcoin adoption of some of the small towns. I'm also part of a group chat for Peruvian bitcoiners, if you want to get more connected with community down there.
I mean, generally they're cheap copycats of Western products because of weak IP laws in China and low amounts of creativity within the Chinese business culture.
However, they're obviously very cheap and can be produced plentifully which is needed for the third world.
It depends on what you mean by winning. If we're talking about bitcoin serving as the global bass layer for large payments in between banks or countries then bitcoin can serve that purpose as it is today. Remember the Fedwire system that underlies our modern financial system only settles 10,000 transaction today or less, bitcoin can handle this level of volume.
However, if we're talking about bitcoin becoming the global unit of account for every single transaction, then clearly we cannot be doing it on the base layer. what needs to happen then is we need scaling solutions like lightning or liquid to handle the micro transactions. an interesting fact about monetary economics is that the size and value of transactions is a pareto distribution, meaning that exponentially more micro payments are processed than large payments. In the US over 95% of transactions are for or less than $1000.
So if we can solve the micro transaction issue, then we solve most of the payment volume issue by default.
Oh, it absolutely has. I talked to quite a few wealth managers, including some financial advisors who serve both normal retail and high net worth clients and what I found is that there was a lot of institutional resistance to bitcoin before the ETFs because it wasn't a "approved product by the SEC".
Now with the advent of the ETFS, the view towards bitcoin has changed quite a bit and it has seen as much more investable and a good alternative as a store of value.
The issue still remains that bitcoin is largely seen as a risk asset. Essentially most wealth managers think that it's a levered version of the NASDAQ or SPY, and so they might be willing to throw some money into it, but their view is that once we enter an economic crisis, bitcoin will collapse in value. I think the real red pill remains to be seen which is where tradfi realizes that bitcoin is both a risk on and risk off asset, basically it goes up, no matter what. That's when we get real FOMO...
There's a lot of Bitcoiners who I would put here, but I haven't met them unfotunately.
The smartest person I met IRL is probably Dylan LeClair. I had a really interesting discussion with him on the Japanese yen and the state of the Bank of Japan at the bitcoin conference last month and he clearly is extremely bright and has really good ideas on how to reproduce the saylor playbook in Japan, which is currently the G7 country that has gone farthest in debt creation, monetary experimentalism, and ZIRP.
this is a really good question. difficult to answer, since i don't know what all other bitcoiners believe, even the most popular/influential ones.
the mind-blowing realization that really made bitcoin click for me was the epiphany that it solves Triffin's dilemma. Triffin's dilemma is an old paradox in macro economics was pointed out by an economist named Robert Triffn in the early 1960s in front of Congress, most of his work had been exploring the interlay of global reserve, currencies, and how they rise and fall, and he famously had predicted that the US dollar would lose reserve currency status because of the fundamental flaw in its design.
Essentially, global reserve currencies have demand outside of the issuer country, which creates a dilemma for the holder of the global reserve currency. They have to choose to either print and meet this demand or not. If they print, they must export more currency units than they import. They have to run trade deficits and print more than they otherwise would in order to keep the global economy running. If they don't do that, then he predicted that there would be a global deflationary crisis because there wouldn't be enough currency units going around to fund global trade be held as forex reserves or settle international payments.
However, this problem only exists for centrally issued currencies. Bitcoin completely breaks the dynamic by being a non-centrally issued currency, instead issued by a decentralized system, which means that it not only solves the dilemma it obviates the need for it ENTIRELY.
This makes bitcoin the perfect world reserve currency for the 21st-century and strips away the superpower hegemonic status of the USA or any other power who wants to rise and dominate the global financial system.