Bitcoin Unlocked

“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 unl

“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 Ba

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 li

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 ow

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

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.“Good Morning Everyone,The concept of truth is far more complex than is generally acknowledged. There is a level of complexity in determining what is true which our monkey brains tend to find difficult. We are often hamstrung by cognitive biases and rush to join a tribe that validates our dogmatic beliefs and provides us with the illusion of safety and acceptance. Given the current nature of life for most, the perpetual acceleration of the hamster wheel, that is the ongoing devaluation of our money and thus the inability to save and store value across time, most aren’t afforded the luxury of time to dive deeply enough into such things to arrive at the realisation that it is less obvious than we would often like to believe.Wikipedia describes truth as:“the property of being in accord with fact or reality.”But what is fact, and what is reality? These terms that once seemed so certain, continue to be exposed as being far more temporary assessments of what we would consider either to be. We’re constantly learning more, and gaining deeper levels of understanding, realising that previously held beliefs, concepts and ideas that appeared to have a consensus acceptance, may infact not be factually accurate and in accord with this thing we call reality.In an attempt to counter our primitive cognition we developed the scientific method. This process can be much more messy than most would imagine, and the potential for error remains. In 1921 the polygraph machine was invented in an attempt to determine whether or not an individual is relaying the information obtained by them from a point of experience and doing so truthfully - without distorting the information. Are they “telling the truth?”.The polygraph machine was created by a Berkeley (California) police officer and was based on a systolic blood pressure test pioneered by a psychologist named William Marston who later become a comic book writer and created the fictional character Wonder Woman. Modern polygraph machines measure a range of physical changes such as pulse and breathing as well as blood-pressure, yet the efficacy of such a device has remained in question almost since it’s inception.Such a technique depends not only on the actual machine and the capturing of physiological information but also on the analysis of this information. But to go even a layer deeper, the information captured by such a machine depends on the beliefs, values and characteristics of the individuals internal dimension of awareness. A space that we understand very little about.The idea that this could have been used and accepted to obtain “the truth“ shows how primitive and dogmatic we are capable of being. We are designed to simply ‘want to believe stuff in our search for certainty.Clown world continues to leverage this deep human desire to believe, whether it be that inflation is good for you, that cow farts are boiling the oceans or that so-called “renewable“ sources of energy are a realistic substitute for the densest form of energy ever known to humans, being that of hydrocarbons.The entire religion of Keynesian economics is built upon the ability to obfuscate the truth, and change the units of measurement used to determine whatever it is the high priests (economists) deem necessary, and to ensure it aligns and supports whatever political objectives are focal at the time. But now we have bitcoin. We now have a tool that calls b******t on this class of rent seekers who intentionally conceal the truth and actively work to gaslight and mislead. A tool they cannot capture. A tool they cannot change the units of measurement of to suit their agenda. A truly decentralized unit of measurement with a supply that cannot be altered. 21m. Never more.While bitcoin very specifically shows the inaccuracies of monetary information embedded in fiat over time as well as the attempts by specific individuals and groups of humans to conceal such information, it also acts as a mechanism to bring into question many other ideas we may have previously accepted as truths. When you identify bad actors and realise a certain cohort of people are nefarious and their intentions are malevolent, you cannot help but enquire more deeply about what other misinformation has been installed in the operating system of societies around the world.Having a tool to expose the misinformation in money is just the beginning.Amplify the signal. Open Networks Win.Hope you have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you next week.AKPublished at Block Height: 748018 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

Good Morning Everyone,As we have discussed many times, incentives are everything, and most people given the choice will follow the path of least resistance. This is culturally impressioned upon us from a young age, and perhaps we’re even biologically configured to do so.In listening to a conversation between Liv Boeree and Tim Ferris, Liv introduced me to the ficticious character named Moloch. Moloch according to the now highly questionable wikipedia is:“a name or a term which appears in the Hebrew Bible several times, primarily in the book of Leviticus. The Bible strongly condemns practices which are associated with Moloch, practices which appear to have included child sacrifice.“I have followed the rabbit hole to a paper she recommended which goes deeper on the idea titled: Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck (Chapter 3: Moloch’s Toolbox). It’s a relatively short read, and highly recommended for anyone interested. Liv explains an easy way to think of Moloch is as the god of unhealthy competition. Moloch is referred to as a fictitious character due to its historical origins as a God or a diety, but i think it is less valuable thinking within the frame of a god and simply paying more attention to what the actual characteristics are, that are associated with this thing called Moloch.From what I’ve managed to ascertain so far; Moloch is a dynamic that can manifest within a system and is built upon bad incentives; and these incentives create a feedback loop which creates compounding sup-optimal, or negative outcomes which then create a new set of sub-optimal incentives and subsequent outcomes. These incentives lead to behaviours being expressed by humans that are typically short cited and obsessed with winning and and they infect the very systems of which they are a part.This flywheel of bad incentives creates a stream of negative-sum games and ultimately leads civilizations to become stuck in an extremely low Nash Equilibria. Nash equilibria is a concept within game theory defined by John Nash and is defined as the combination of strategies in a game, one for each player, where there is no incentive for players to deviate from their current strategy.So a civilization becoming stuck in a bad Nash Equilibria is to become stuck within the grooves of a system of bad incentives, whereby noone can win by changing their strategy and thus everyone remains playing bad games and remaining within a system that continues to assure sub-optimal results.Jeff Booth has talked about this conundrum of being stuck in a system of bad incentives in relation specifically to fiat and central banking and he frames it as a system level issue. One that cannot be solved from inside of a system; rather only an entirely new system that replaces the previous can break the cycle and free us from Moloch’s trap.Bitcoin is this systems level change. It is the mechanism that resolves this feedback loop. It is the mechanism that defeats the ficticious god of bad incentives, and allows humanity - us - to reach an entirely new Nash Equilibrium.It is a complete reimagining of what the technology of money is, and what it can be in the future. It dissolves all the existing power structures that have been errected, and provides us with an entirely novel system that not only breaks us out of the negative feedback loop of negative-sum games, but thrusts us into an entirely new dynamic. Not only one that supports long-term positive sum games, but a system that directly incentives such pursuits and compounds the positive-sum outputs creating new incentives to continue to play positive-sum games. This is a complete and fundamental reorienting of the human spirit and the way in which we orient ourselves in the world. Both individually and also how we organise ourselves collectively as part of the larger whole. Bitcoin not only defeats Moloch; bitcoin turns Moloch upside down and does the complete opposite. Bitcoin is the anti-Moloch device. A system of optimal incentives built upon a system of pure informational clarity. Grateful as ever to be here to witness it.Hope you all have a powerful start to your week. Wishing you well, and look forward to talking to you tomorrow.AKPublished at Block Height: 747 454 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

Good Morning Everyone,The concept of trend is a critically important one. A trend is like an object in motion. When thinking in probabilities, a trend is much more likely to continue than it is to reverse. That’s not to say it can’t reverse, simply that it’s less likely. Whether you are starting a business, changing careers, playing poker or are a trader within financial markets, understanding the probabilities or the odds, is of supreme value, and in most cases you would prefer to get on the side of the probabilities. That is to say if something had a 60% hit rate, meaning 6/10 times you will “win“ with a given strategy, you would much prefer that than something with a 30% hit rate. The human brain typically struggles with this, but we’re often best served by viewing success over a series of attempts rather than just a single one. Just like at the gym, you don’t go to the gym once, fail to get a six pack and then give up. The process of conditioning the body is one that is an accumulation of sustained effort over time.A common turn of phrase amongst many traders is “The Trend Is Your Friend“. Understanding trends is one of the most important things to grasp as a trader. Trends can exist in multiple time frames, from a 1minute or 5min chart, to a monthly or quarterly chart. There are much larger patterns and trends at play that extend far beyond these, and extend over hundreds of years like the long term debt cycle and the Fourth Turning. Patterns are an artefact of nature, and thus they are an artefact of human behaviour. We are nature. Just as any other animal or organism that exists is too. The longer a pattern or trend has existed for, that is the higher the timeframe the trend can be confirmed on, the higher the signal typically is, and the higher the probability the trend would continue. “An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”A major reason why it’s so valuable to properly understand trend is because of the psychological disposition we have to be anticipating its eventual end, and fading it early. There is no shortage of people who have bet against a trend by shorting it and been absolutely rekt. As i said, it’s not that it can’t reverse, but the probabilities are not on your side. Which means over time you lose given enough attempts. Being able to identify this enables a trader to verify once that dynamic has switched around, and then reconfigure their psychological biases to be in alignment with the change. With all that said, US GDP data is out and despite the Ministry of Truth’s attempt to gaslight their own citizens, even going to the extent of redefining what they consider a recession to be, the US has most certainly entered a recession. Along with confirmation of the US entering recession, we also have updated monthly inflation prints which saw inflation in Australia increase from 5.1 to 6.1 - a 20% increase month-on-month, while the US nears ever closer to double digits printing 9.1%. (Yes, as discussed many times. These numbers are as bogus as Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading - the real numbers are waaaaaay higher!)The Aussie inflation chart however is a fascinating one to look at; especially when we zoom in a little and consider the trend and the previous structure. As you can see from the lows which i’ve highlighted below; Every low is a higher low structurally which shows the pressure to the downside is decreasing with each low that has been printed and indicates some what of a consolidation is taking place. The other point of interest is that the previous long term resistance which goes back to the 90’s has been breached and we are now seeing the highest levels of inflation for 32 years in Australia. The final data i’ll highlight is the level around 7% where you can see i’ve drawn a horizontal line. If Inflation data increases and confirms with a further increase beyond this level if i was simply following the trend I would put the probabilities in favour of inflation pumping its way up toward the previous local high toward 10%, and very likely higher over time. But the overriding point i’m wanting to make is simply that until we can confirm otherwise, the trend of higher inflation is not going anywhere. That is not to say it cannot change, but until there are clear signs of a reversal in the data, the this looks more like a major breakout than anything else, and much higher levels are more probabilistically likely. Breaking out of a 32year period of consolidation is not an insignificant thing, and the worst thing we could do downplay it’s significance. It should be best thought of as a coiling spring or a building of pressure. The longer and further the spring is held down, the more significant the expansion is likely to be when that pressure is released.This is what we are currently seeing -a major expansion off the lows.Meanwhile the broad trend with fiat is well established - it trends toward zero in value while the supply of units continues to expand over time. Bitcoin does the

Good Morning Everyone,The ability to solve problems that we face, is perhaps one of the most important capabilities we can posses. In many respects life is simply a series of problems or challenges. While some may associate the word problem as a negative, it’s perhaps better framed as a series of barriers reached that in order to progress to some next potential point, which we deem an improvement from our current position, or even just to maintain our current position, we must resolve some underlying point of friction. It is much more productively viewed as an opportunity.One of the most common mistakes when trying to solve a problem, or series of problems, is failing to correctly understand it in the first place. Depending on the scope of the problem faced, this can lead to a host of undesirable outcomes and potentially be catastrophic. One of the most likely errors one can make when trying to solve complex problems is we can attempt to solve it by mistaking the symptoms for the underlying root cause. This can be disastrous. Not only would we not solve our problem in this case, we would create a host of undesirable outcomes as a result of these actions and create an entirely new series of problems. In this scenario the best possible outcome that exists now, is to accept how and why we failed to solve the problem, and acknowledge the side effects from incorrectly addressing it, go back to the beginning to correctly understand the root cause of the issue and begin again.Unfortunately as is so often the case, humans tend not to like being wrong and in now facing the next problem, instead of deploying humility and doing what is necessary as mentioned above, often people will make excuses as to why it didn’t work, and conjure up reasons why it wasn’t our fault. This is often done by people blatantly lying and completely muddying the waters of what really happened and why we achieved the outcome we did.This is often the case when the incentives are lined up in such a way that we stand to lose significantly from the situation. This is especially true where money is concerned.The topic of whether or not the US economy (and many others) is in a recession has been hotly discussed for months, but critics and commentators have been waiting for the second quarterly GDP print which is due July 28th in order to confirm this. That’s because the term recession had been defined as two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. That date is quickly approaching, and in preparation the Ministry Of Truth™️ have decided that instead of acknowledging reality and accepting the mistakes they have made, that the reaction to COVID and the monetary policy as part of it was wreckless, irresponsible and completely insane, that instead they will take the opportunity to redefine what a recession is. Genius. You can’t be in a recession if you change the definition of a recession.Below is the introduction to the blog post from the White House and it begins:Incredible. Janet Yellen was questioned about it, and urged listeners not to characterise it as a recession, if the Q2 print was to come in negative.“A common definition of recession is two negative quarters of GDP growth, or at least that’s something that’s been true in past recessions. When we’ve seen that, there has usually been a recession and many economists expect second quarter GDP to be negative. First quarter GDP was negative, so we could see that happen and that will be closely watched. But I do want to emphasise what a recession really means is a broad based contraction in the economy and even if that number is negative, we are not in a recession now and I would warn that we should not be characterising that as a recession.“As you would imagine the twitter army had a few things to say about the actions of these delusional central planners. Below are a couple that i enjoyed.Jokes aside though, because this really is beyond a joke. There is a problem, infact there are many problems. What is abundantly clear is that the incentives that exist are not going to sufficiently motivate the unproductive central planning class to miraculously obtain any kind of conscience and acknowledge it. These people are pathological liars and will continue playing games of word salad to confuse and mislead people if it means avoiding acknowledging truth. These people are morally and ethically bankrupt. They are self serving rent seekers wishing to remain attached tightly to the flesh of their host, and to feed on the life source of it. Just like a parasite does.They will continue to gaslight you about definitions of vaccines, and definitions of recession.. These people would redefine what it means to murder someone if they needed to. These are not leaders. They are frauds. Continue to adopt their system at your peril. Fiat is evil, and the fiat pushers that benefit are a burden on humanity. Central planning is toward the core of our problem, and it is not going to be fixed by the very people who continue

Good Morning Everyone,By now most will have seen the situation faced by farmers in the The Netherlands. The Dutch government of central planning lunatics took the WEF Olympics tyranny baton from Canadian Supreme Leader Trudeau in an effort to “fix“ the so-called “climate” - like it’s something you get from Ikea. But this is only on the micro level. Given the significance of Dutch food production (2nd largest on earth) the implications of these actions are far more significant and impact the broader human population in extreme ways.It seems that Supreme Leader Trudeau does not like to be one-upped in the WEF-ONIZE-THE-FOOD-SUPPLY Olympics, and he wants his baton back. The Canadian Government published a paper outlining the WEF plan back in May titled: “Reducing emissions arising from the application of fertilizer in Canada's agriculture sector” and at a recent meeting with provincial agricultural ministers confirmed he plans to move forward with the plan to reduce ferilizer use by 30%.The plan is similar to that of the Dutch (surprise, surprise), to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the use of fertilizer in producing food. To quote the document:“net human caused emissions of CO2 need to fall globally by about 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero around 2050.“So basically the plan is to bankrupt a bunch of smaller farming operations, ensure those small operations are swallowed up by larger ones, and ensure a lot of people are starved of nutrient dense food sources in the process. “You will eat bugs, own nothing, and be happy“The farmers in The Netherlands could see how catastrophic this WEF relay race is, and so too can the Canadian farmers:While local municipalities in Canada have expressed concern and highlighted the obvious issues with this insanity, the Federal overlords wish to continue their reign of terror on the peasant class, and do whatever Papa Klaus instructs. Remember, Klaus runs Canada. Don’t take my word for it - watch the clip below to hear it from the man himself.Anyone with their eyes open can see where this is going, and that it is simply about money and control. Bitcoin may be the most important weapon we have in this fight, especially if CBDCs come to bare, as it provides us with the means to strengthen local communities and enable producers and consumers to interact without all the intermediaries in the middle and trade peer-to-peer and strengthen local communities from the unproductive central planning class.It’s important to realise that no one is coming to save us. It is critically important the individual acts to secure the world we wish to live in. Initiatives like that of the The Texas Beef Initiative are essential and can be pivotal in insulating local communities from being malnourished at the hand of these tyrants. 2030 is not far away. It is 7 short years. These governments, and very likely others, are waging a full blown assault on essential infrastructure in alignment with the WEF Food Hub plan and their 2030 Agenda. But it is more significant than that, they are installing a tyrannical authoritarian regime which subverts your rights and the rights of many by capturing political leaders and short-circuiting local governments the world over to act in alignment with the objectives of unelected pseudo-elites. It is the installation of a world where your right to live peacefully in a way of your choosing is no longer your choice to make. And they are being enabled by fiat.The ideology is that what they believe trumps what you believe. What they want trumps what you want, and what happens is to be decided by them. It is the death of democracy. We saw what happened in Canada earlier in the year when Trudeau’s dictatorship was challenged - he weaponised the financial system against Canadian citizens and created a blacklist of accounts and individuals to target.Adopting bitcoin and building circular economies in our local communities is one of the ways we vote against this madness. To do nothing and continue to support fiat is to support the demise of the livelihoods of many farmers the world over and destroy the decentralized food network that has taken centuries to develop and has been absolutely pivotal to the flourishing of humans on earth up to this point.Vote with your actions. No one is coming to save us. 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

Good Morning Everyone,Tesla announced yesterday they sold 75% of their bitcoin holdings to improve their cash position, while still holding 25% of the original position. However today’s letter is not about Tesla, and it’s not about Elon; It’s simply to highlight the use of such information by media and attention predators, who wish to tell vulnerable minds nursery rhymes like they’re still three years old to set the frame of their thinking.The simple truth is that bitcoin is the first globally public money we’ve ever had. A money anyone can use and send to anyone and receive from anyone, from anywhere on the planet.. and potentially beyond. A boundless monetary substrate for humanity if you like. The fact it continues to get mixed in with the broader “crypto“ or digital asset space continues to highlight most people simply aren’t getting it. Most still fail to see why it is so important, and the broader implications of a world with bitcoin in it, just as they did with the internet. Let me cast your mind back to the early nineties to remind you what that was like.. check the clip below for a walk down memory lane.“What is internet?“. Think about just a few of the implications of the internet some twenty odd years after the above clip was recorded. It’s difficult to really grasp how different the world is today as a result. Video stores no longer exist, the mobile device (even calling it a phone barely seems appropriate given its capabilities) has replaced your alarm clock, your diary, your maps, your notebook, your music devices like CD players, your video and movie players, and as a result your TV, many around the world are no longer connected to legacy information channels like mainstream news (if you can even call it that) and others, it has replaced books, cameras and obviously it has replaced your landline phone. These are just a small handful of the things that have been distilled from many devices into one, and this is in a relatively short period of time. Imagine in 100 years - 5x more.It has removed entire industries, and created many new ones. It has completely reshaped global society in a few short years, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. The genie is out of the bottle. And many of these changes aren’t even getting close to touching the real significance of what the birth of the internet changes and enables. Without the internet Jullian Assange would never have been able to bring US war crimes in Iraq into the light, and that act, the murder of more than 12 innocent people, would have been able to go completely unnoticed, as no doubt many many atrocities have gone unnoticed prior. The internet changes absolutely everything. To confuse bitcoin with some centralised crypto company is to confuse the internet with an AM/FM radio transmitter. The two are simply not comparable. Below is a clip of former Jaw Boner extraordinaire Fed Chair Ben Bernanke from 2010 explaining to congress his expectations to reduce the fed balance sheet which he states would be back below a trillion dollars. Jan 21st 2010 the balance sheet was 2.25T. Did he really convince anyone they would more than halve it?The current US Fed balance sheet is just shy of nine Trillion, with a T. Not only did it never go back down anywhere near levels prior to 2008, 14 years later it has increased by more than 9x. Benanke’s comments sound familiar though, don’t they? Remember the clip of Christine Lagarde in May explaining how the ECB’s balance sheet will come down? Linked below if you missed it. It’s a doozy.As Rudy Harvenstein beautifully points out, economics must be the only profession on earth where you can make predictions and be consistently wrong and still get promotions and be trusted, believed and even celebrated.While this was true in a pre bitcoin world, it will not be true for much longer. Bitcoin as Luke Gromen describes it, is the last functioning smoke alarm and it has been sounding loudly for 13 years. Imagine ignoring a smoke alarm that’s sole purpose is to let you know the building you are in is on fire for thirteen years.Well this is where we’re at. Elon buying or selling doesn’t matter. What the current thing is does not matter. It will only be used as a lever to influence you. If i were you, i’d be curious as to why that is. QE is never going to end. Just like Bernanke in 2010, and Lagarde in 2022, no matter what these people say, the balance sheets will continue to expand. This is the design of the system, and these people know it. A system that is completely out of control and acts against your best interests and those of your friends and families. A system that simply serves to keep you contained.Bitcoin is not a get rich quick scheme, it’s a get free scheme, and like the internet, it is not going to go away. Quite the opposite. It is the signal amongst the noise and offers us an alternative to listening to the 3 amigos above. An alternative grounded in verifiable truth. The jawboners above will continue to jaw

Good Morning Everyone,I’ve been meaning to chat about Fedimint for a while, and after receiving an email from Ego Death Capital this morning about their investment toward Fedimint it has prompted me to finally do so.Why Fedimint?Despite non-stop attempts by the bitcoin community to help educate the wider community on the importance of self custody - “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins“ - the unfortunate reality is that a dominant percentage of users relinquish custody of their keys to 3rd party exchanges, and this weakens not only the security of the holdings of the individual but the entire network significantly. The primary reasons for this are 1) People lack the technical competence to do so 2) Cost. Many around the world simply cannot afford the price of a hardware wallet and 3) Many people prefer to outsource trust as they do not trust themselves to take responsibility and secure their bitcoin.This basically turns any exchange into a massive honey pot for government and nefarious actors wishing to control, surveil, restrict and censor the use of these bitcoin and could even lead to mass seizure of bitcoin, similar to what happened in 1933 with gold following executive order 6102. Fundamentally this dynamic removes the censorship nature intended, due to the outsourcing of trust to custody ones bitcoin keys.What is Fedimint?Fedimint, short for Federated Chaumian Mint, is a protocol that has the potential to profoundly improve bitcoin self-custody solutions and offers to potentially solve one of the most significant attack vectors facing bitcoin today - that being large percentages of bitcoin keys being custodied by centralised 3rd party exchanges. Fedimint leverages two primary technologies being 1) Federations, or community shared wallets. This can be simply thought of as multi-signature wallets and 2) The use of Chaumian Mints. Attached is a great blog post explaining more around the use of federated mints including how and why they could improve scaling and privacy on bitcoin. Chaumian mints are explained in the post as follows:“Chaumian mints, also known as Chaumian banks, or blind mints, offer a compelling solution to these problems, particularly when operation is federated. Chaumian mints, through the use of blind signatures, have extremely appealing privacy properties. The mint operators do not know the number of users, their identities, account balances, or transaction histories. Additionally, mint transactions are cheap and can be performed at unlimited scale.”What Are The Primary Advantages?Fedimint could offer a superior custody model while maintaining bitcoins core properties, and without sacrificing decentralization. The three primary benefits to leveraging this technology are:* A Superior Bitcoin Custody Solution. Better than trusting an unknown 3rd party like an exchange, and perhaps even better than individual self-custody due to the fail-safes it would provide, fedimint has the potential to be a superior way to self-custody bitcoin which would be widely available to all users. * Privacy. Fedimint can dramatically improve privacy on bitcoin as the use of federated chaumian mints makes it impossible for chain surveillance companies to tell the difference between a normal transaction and that of a federation. While they would be able to see the total balance, they cannot know who is sending or receiving what, and the balances of individual federation members is completely hidden.* Help more people take full ownership of their bitcoin, and enable them to leverage the core properties offered by the protocol, like censorship resistance, that are lost when trusting centralised 3rd party exchanged. The forming of federations outsources the most technical parts of self-custody from the individual user who may not have the technical competence to do so, to trusted members of the federation. Thus making it far more possible than before for these users to custody their bitcoin keys.Below is a timestamped link to Obi Nwosu’s presentation on Fedimint at Bitcoin 2022 Where he goes through the ins and outs of the protocol which i highly recommend watching to understand more.In my opinion the improvement of privacy on bitcoin is the single most important advancement as fundamentally, everything else is downstream of privacy. The priority to ensure user privacy cannot be over-stated. The need for it to be standard procedure is critical. This requires an alternative to solve for the vast number of bitcoin users giving custody of their private keys to centralised 3rd party exchanges.It must be simple for any user regardless of technical capability to utilise, and implemented in a way that makes it robust and common-place when interacting with the network and in my opinion, the promise of bitcoin full-filling the mission to separate money and state relies on such a solution. Hopefully Fedimint is that solution. Time will tell. Just another example of why open networks win. Open Source Everything!Hope you have a g

Good Morning Everyone,Upon watching the original Matrix film from 1999 last night this quote from the end of the movie caught my attention. "I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end - I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.I'm going to hang up this phone, and then i'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world; without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world; where anything is possible.Where we go from there, is a choice i leave to you." — NeoIt caught my attention for a number of reasons.* It’s as if it were written about bitcoin and bitcoiners. “I know you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change“. This is reality for a significant number of humans, perhaps a majority, and this fear against both change and a cohort of individuals championing this change is leveraged. A classic example is in the ongoing attacks on Bitcoin Maximalism, by those trying to defend thieving scammers and who wish to profit from Ponzi schemes like Terra Luna at the expense of others. But this is where the battle is won and lost. It is a battle for hearts and minds. It is a battle of information. It is a meme war. Those that remain in closed states, who fear change and perhaps fear the brazen so-called “toxicity“ of bitcoiners, which is more often than not just raw honesty, often fail to recognise that one cohort of individuals intent is to deceive, distract and control, while the other (bitcoiners) is to free and empower you.* It highlights the ongoing nature of this fight and serves as a reminder that this wrestle for power is not a new one. However it is somewhat novel and more pronounced in the digital age, as we have lost many fundamental rights that were previously non-contentious. The privacy of the individual is at the heart of this, along with freedom of speech. Which is simply freedom of informational transmission. This is not fundamentally possible, however it is possible in a legal sense. It’s possible to create a legal framework opposing free speech if the minds of the many within a society become disturbed enough and distanced enough from the deep truths as to why this freedom of informational transmission is so critical. * It is a poignant reminder of how powerful the technology of bitcoin is, and how so many that have come before us have strived for such an innovation. And it has never been as important as it is now in the digital age. Rules without rulers. The borderless, censorship resistant transmission of information by anyone to anyone.It is impossible to know how this ends, but how it begins is simple. By opting-in. Bitcoin has shown many that a world without rulers over the technology of money is possible. It has shown us a brand new kind of money, that is entirely novel to humans in the digital age. A money that is open, public and decentralized, instead of the closed, permissioned and centralized systems of fiat. Hope this finds you well. Wishing you well as always. Have a great week and i’ll chat to you tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,The concept of a walled garden is not a new one. They have been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. A precious garden enclosed by high walls serves many purposes, including providing protection from animal or human intruders and also acts to create microclimates, which allows for things to grow and flourish inside the walls, that may not otherwise be able to, due to the temperate climate.It’s no secret that the concept of a walled garden is at the core of every major software companies strategy, and they are built around it to generate and sustain a network effect. Any Apple user knows first hand the way you get trapped within the ecosystem, because of both the way their products, like an iPhone and Macbook interact together, but also because of the friction that is introduced when using a non Apple product. This gives Apple incredible power as you see with the App Store, allowing them to control who can enter, and who cannot. It also creates the need for new apple specific products in order for you to maintain a consistent user interface, which is all part of the walled garden approach. The same is true for Google, Microsoft, Facebook and most others. Think about it. Many people use social media platforms like they are the internet. These platforms are masterful at keeping you inside of their gardens, and do everything they can to extend the amount of time you stay within their walls. If it were up to them, you would never leave. Fundamentally they do this by designing incentives. Presumably they try to add value, by making their products as good as possible, so you simply want to use them over others. It would seem the case, they also allow a certain amount of friction to exist in other areas to detract you from exploring other options, and exiting their ecosystem. Apple software interfaces as I mentioned is one of the best examples of this, where many people fear having to ‘learn‘ how to navigate a different companies interface and migrating their images, contacts, messages etc. Thus, due to the incentives, they stay inside the walls. The reality is that as humans, we’re (in most cases) lazy animals, and a dominant majority of people will follow the path of least resistance. Thus we remain within their walls. And over time, the walls begin to look more like those of a cage than a garden.In the same way that these software giants create walled gardens and work to keep us inside them, so to do governments and central banks with the creation of the political fiat monetary systems. Central banks issue money, and government insist this money be accepted. The fiat system is a classic example of a walled garden. Where the difference lies between software companies and governments/central banks, is that outside the walls of the fiat garden, are armed soldiers. Software giants while they do everything to incentivise you to stay inside, and prey on all your vulnerabilities to make it as unattractive to leave as possible. They cannot stop you, and if you exercise your agency, you can easily leave and never return.Not so with the Fiat walled garden though. If you try to leave and venture off to explore outside the walls or even to explore a different walled garden, they want to know where you have been, the reasons for leaving, and every possible detail about your interactions while you were gone. To the fiat masters, it is their business. You are not simply free to explore. The fiat standard is a walled garden, and unlike software companies it is one you are kept within by decree. Which is by force. Outside of this garden is the open, permissionless, abundant environment of bitcoin. The fiat masters are counting on the height of the walls, and men with guns on the other side being able to perturb you from scaling the walls, and exploring the vast abundant land outside of them. What they weren’t counting on however, was the invisible force of bitcoin being able to penetrate and then dissolve these walls, and flourish both inside the garden and outside of it. This invisible force is everywhere and it is nowhere, and it is the key to an abundant future. With bitcoin there are no walls. No borders. The very notion of a walled garden ceases to be possible. Or conversely, it is the ultimate garden with which no walls exist.Wishing you all well. Hope you have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you next week. 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

Good Morning Everyone,This tweet from Arthur Hayes caught my attention this morning. It reads:Arthur was one of the founders of Bitmex, and has worked in financial markets for a long time. He is extremely sharp, and the depth of his understanding of trading and markets is wild. His writings are one of the must-reads for me due to this depth of knowledge and experience, and communicates this in a straight-up and candid way, which i appreciate; and always makes for a great read!His tweet is referencing an essay he wrote back in April titled “The Doom Loop“ and beautifully highlights the bind central banks are finding themselves in, particularly the European Central Bank. If you have not read it, i recommend setting aside the half an hour or so required to digest it, as it is eye opening to say the least. This section gives you a good preview of this predicament.“Now the doom loop begins. Inflation prior to the Russian conflict was already running at 40-year highs across the EU member states. The ECB would love to raise rates and combat this inflation, but it is in a serious bind. If it raises rates and stops purchasing weak member state bonds, then Southern Europe will quickly go bankrupt. The PIGS’ (Portugal Italy Greece Spain) only option at that point would be to go off the Euro so that they can redenominate Euro debt into local currency debt, giving them financial flexibility. That would be the end of the Euro, and would cause massive banking issues for Northern European banks who lent to Southern European companies. The banks’ debt assets would get paid back in local currency, but they would then owe Euros to investors … bye bye, thanks for playing.If the ECB continues to print money so that the EU survives, then citizens of Northern European countries, angered by rampant inflation, will elect populist demagogues who will blame their economic woes on the profligacy of their Southern neighbours, and will run on a EU-exit platform. It’s the foreigner’s fault! (Hmmm… sounds like a familiar play I read in 1939.)The ECB is trapped, the EU is finished, and within the decade we will be trading Lira, Drachmas, and Deutschmarks once more. As the union disintegrates, money shall be printed in glorious quantities in a pantheon of different local currencies. Hyperinflation is not off the table. And again, as European savers smell what the rock is cookin’, they will flee into hard assets like gold and Bitcoin. The breakup of the EU = $1 million Bitcoin.The EU doom loop is a certainty at this point. The degree to which Russian energy flow is curtailed determines the speed of collapse. If surplus countries decide that holding Euro debt assets is not safe, the pace of disintegration quickens even further.”Oof. Powerful stuff.The two charts below show USDEUR and EURUSD which is the same chart inverted. The chart/s show the USD looking insanely powerful vs the Euro, and subsequently the Euro looking insanely weak relative to the USD. The USD looks like it’s heading much higher, and the euro like it may be heading back down towards it’s ALL-TIME LOW. Now, i’m always weary when anything seems certain or is said to be certain. It makes me very uncomfortable because I have very little confidence in our ability to accurately predict the future and process the infinite complexity that exists. The other thing is that traders and financial markets broadly play a lot of information games and are very much in on the meme war nature of our current world, so it’s always to be taken with caution in my opinion, as they may have financial interests motivating their behaviour and essentially be “talking their book“.However, with that said, things look very very suboptimal for the EU (to say the very least) and I think it’s very likely Arthur is right, and the doom loop has infact begun. I definitely agree that “money shall be printed in glorious quantities in a pantheon of different local currencies”. The trend of USD strength and EUR weakness looks like it’s about to accelerate SIGNIFICANTLY. Whether this leads to the dissolving of the EU as we know it, i remain less certain, but i do think there is a high probability he is on the money.Where my conviction is abundant is in bitcoin. And when i consider what Arthur lays out; that we could see the collapse of the European Union, and that countries like The PIGS as he references them (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) would need to denominate their debt in their local shitcoin, it seems so obvious that these nations should be accumulating the most scarce monetary good EVER, and securing their balance sheets with bitcoin as a priority and one of national security.No one said the path to hyperbitcoinization wasn’t likely to be messy. The best thing any nation can do if they have the slightest bit of sense, and desire for a positive outcome, is to stop trying to stop the freight train that is bitcoin and simply opt-in. It really is that simple. Only time will tell how it all unfolds.. but if

“Everytime we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act we become a party to injustice. Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility.“— Jullian Assange, Conspiracy as Governance, 2006Good Morning Everyone,A deep irony exists when we live In a world that has become so deeply polarised and politicised. So much so, an immutable, apolitical system of scarce information, of value, has been manifested into existence. As a protocol bitcoin is absolutely apolitical. It is indifferent to any political beliefs or ideology. It is decisively neutral. Which is a stark contrast to most else in clown world. Bitcoin is neutral to race, religion, ethnicity, gender (trigger warning: of which there is only two 🤣), height, hair colour, skin color, eye color, body type, body shape, name, language, location, wealth or any other myriad identifying and distinguishing factors.Bitcoin will process any transaction from any person and to any person, regardless of everything else except for 1) whether or not you adhere to the rules of the network 2) you pay the appropriate fees to process your transaction - which is essentially paying for the scarcity of the block space. Assuming those two items are met, your transaction will be processed.Where the political paradox lies is in bitcoins very existence. The fact that it has come to be. That it even exists. Which implies that some cohort of individuals sought to create a technology with the very properties bitcoin has. While the protocol itself is apolitical, this act of creation, is a deeply political one. When one see’s bitcoin for the first time it illuminates many things about our current system that where previously invisible. All of a sudden you can no longer see the world the same way. Prior to the inception of bitcoin, we had no superior system or point of comparison. Something that would highlight the characteristics by providing an alternative. We now have something different to compare the current system to. It would seem to be the case, that the creation of bitcoin is the recognition that having a monetary system, a network of value, that is centralized, and enables the weaponization of this network by those with administrative privileges against those without (the users), is a deeply flawed and immoral one. A system of incentives that rewards people for playing political games, specifically those who get closer toward the center of this system by playing these games benefit disproportionately to those furthest away. The zero-sum nature of the design would seem another fundamental flaw in the code of the central banking system. But perhaps to those who designed the system, it is a feature? This dynamic of inequality only accelerates over time as those at the center of the system continue to increase the supply of units at the expense of a large swath of users on the network, and eventually to the demise of the network itself.The very creation of this technology we call bitcoin is perhaps the most significant political act of all time. It is a technology that diametrically opposes the current system, and everything this current system stands for. The notion that someone should be able to get between two individual humans and their right to transact with one another, that any entity or group should have that power over another. Bitcoin rejects this. That you should be required to identify yourself in order to access the network of value transfer, and be subject to surveillance and a loss of privacy for that privilege. Bitcoin rejects this. That the imaginary borders formed by tribes of humans should have any impact over our ability to transact with one another. Bitcoin rejects this. One system asserts that these are not fundamental human rights that are implied as a result of being in a body; but bitcoin rejects this.Bitcoin is a vote in opposition to the current system, and in many of the values this current system has attempted to install within the minds of the many. It is in its very essence, political. The beauty of bitcoin is that it will never coerce you to use it, like the current system does. It will never impose its power upon you or any other, it will simply offer superior incentives, and no one can ever control the network whereby capturing this power. An immaculate system of incentive design, to allow the flow of pure informational clarity from any node in the network to any other, that is owned by no one. Where no hierarchical structure exists and no imbalance in the distribution of this information affords any node power over another as a result. Incredible.It’s impossible not to be completely in awe of its existence, and to marvel at its very nature. An apolitical monetary protocol for humanity birthed in a world so deeply entangled and confused by a captured system of political power, influence and violence. As Jullian Assange hinted at in the quote at the beginning, Once an injustice

Good Morning Everyone,Imagine you’ve been living in a small dark room your entire life, and within this room it has been pitch black the whole time. You’ve been living in this room and all the while due to the nature of it, you’ve never seen a single thing. Almost as if there is no such thing as sight altogether, and the very concept of vision and your visual field where everything appears is a foreign and completely alien-like notion. Then one day, you stumble across a switch on the wall that you have never felt before. You run your fingers across the plastic wall panel, and you feel the positioning of the switch in its place, and also that the switch has a range in which it feels like it can move, like something that can move between being active and inactive. On or off. You flick this switch to its opposing side, and all of a sudden the space in which you have spent your entire existence is instantly illuminated for the very first time. Almost like the feeling of waking up from a dream.It now becomes apparent to you the very nature of your vision and your visual field. Colour and shadow rush in and it is made explicitly clear to you the depth and complexity that has always existed within this space, but has been in many ways hidden from you, until now.This is very similar to the experience one often goes through when they discover bitcoin, and really grasp it for the first time. All of a sudden the nature of the world and our predicament is illuminated in a completely new way, and despite it being all around you from a point of your experience it is as if it has been hidden from you all along in plain sight. Finding this light switch or an experience that facilitates something similar to this is not an easy one. We are often so deeply embedded within this space, or system, that we have become attached to it in a strange kind of way, and there is often a resistance or a lacking of openness that prevents us from seeing what is right in front of us, and all around us. This quote from Morpheus in the matrix very accurately describes the scenario i’m attempting to articulate:“You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inurred, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it“This is one of the reasons that the Numba-Go-Up technology of bitcoin is so important. Many come for NgU and stay for Freedom Go Up, and at the end of the day, this is what it is all about. Atleast this is what it is about for me, and many others like me.Years gone by prior to the internet, and everything the internet has enabled, we didn’t have to worry when we took a photo who’s servers it was stored on, because there were no servers. We didn’t have mobile phone devices capable of tracking our every move, and being able to observe or hear our most intimate conversations, let alone devices tracking our biometric data like heart rate, our sleep timing and cycles and other very specific bodily information. Life was obviously far simpler. Since things have now changed we have lost a lot of the fundamental rights and privileges that were once basic and fundamental, and obviously this dynamic extends pervasively to money and thus our spending habits, movements and preferences as well as our social networks and community interactions.As you can imagine, a tyrannical, authoritarian state actor loves these new capabilities. Like they’re some kind of super power. Very kid in a candy store-eque. And given our current societal construct is very much a hierarchical one enabled by central banks and political monies this poses extreme dangers to us all, as should be abundantly clear having lived through a pandemic of propaganda, lies and coercion for the past 2 years at the hand of these corrupt and destructive regimes.So while the probability of the most verifiably scarce asset in history appreciating in value over time is very high in my opinion, as more people begin to find this light switch and illuminate the dark room of their lives, the reality is, that what bitcoin is offering us is so far beyond monetary gain, to even focus on this almost seems somewhat trivial. Onward.Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,The term cryptocurrency, or crypto for short, is one that in a perfect world would never have existed. Not because it lacks relevance to the cryptographic nature of bitcoin, but because it has been hijacked by a class of grifters who seek only to enrich themselves regardless of who has to lose to enable it. A class of people intent on playing short-term zero-sum games, instead of long-term positive-sum games.Previous musings on the distinction between bitcoin and “crypto” can be found here.Many people get triggered and often angry at quote-unquote “bitcoiners”, when this is pointed out. Typically these people are the “shitcoiners”, whether they realise this or not. I think very often not. It’s not that they are inherently evil, or have consciously nefarious intentions, it’s simply that they don’t know what they don’t know, and they, in most cases, lack the humility to enquire and deploy curiosity toward this.Perhaps this is because they are puppets to sensations and patterns of energy inside them, things we call “feelings” and “emotions”, and the term shitcoiner triggers said patterns of energy and short-circuits their cognitive faculties. Perhaps it’s the fact they’re emotionally attached to whatever b******t story they have been told by these COMPANIES and their marketing teams and it threatens the beliefs they have been GIVEN and since adopted… about how they get their risk-free yield, or how their token is going to change the world. I hold nothing against these people, only love, as I know first-hand bitcoin is not easy to see. In order to really uncover what it exposes requires a deep amount of work, a radical level of openness; and most are simply unwilling or unable to do this, or they just haven’t done it yet… and it can take time. Forgive me father, for i have sinned. I have shitcoined, and realise the wrong doing of my ways, and I repent. Although it was a long time ago, i seek your forgiveness. I am a changed man, father. I now see that none of these companies are decentralized, rather decentralized in name only (DINO). They are simply manifestations of the same existing structures already existing in todays society, and enable the same level of corruption and single points of failure as all other centralized entities, and as a result are completely unsuitable as a form of money. I can see that without this decentralization none of the necessary properties can be assured, the very properties bitcoin makes possible, and without these and without millions of dollars spent toward marketing these scams and deceiving people into believing complete lies, they would never make it on their own merit. These companies are fragile like something built upon quicksand. They require rulers in order to exist. Bitcoin on the other hand is anti-fragile, and requires no rulers. Only rules. The innovation of bitcoin is so alien, that despite having existed for 13 years, most people still cannot see it. I now see how these shitcoins are an attack on this innovation, and are in opposition to the best interests of humanity moving forward. Please forgive me.Over the last couple of months the truth continues to be exposed as one by one the crypto grifters begin to fail. It began with the implosion of Terra Luna, the so-called algo “stablecoin”, and continues to expose the true colours of many including Celsius, Block-Fi, 3 Arrows Capital and most recently some unknown-to-me lending platform called Voyager.There was no shortage of “Toxic Bitoiners” who were willing to point out the truth about these companies, however unfortunately for many, greed is a powerful state of being, and as is often the case, pain is required to wake us up and calibrate us with reality. The simple fact is that these companies people refer to as “crypto projects”, are infact centralized, unregulated and like it or not, illegal securities offerings. The sooner they are exposed as such the better for everyone. As such it was of no surprise to me when i saw an article this morning showing Solana are being accused of violating securities law.It shouldn’t be news to anyone reading this that i’m in favour of free markets as opposed to central planning, but it seems obvious that with the current iteration of society and legal framework that exists, the appropriate thing to happen is for these scams to be treated accordingly. It definitely does raise an interesting philosophical point; should these scams and the soulless parasites that promote them to unsuspecting idiots (of which i have been) be able to continue their grift until enough people have lost money and realised they are infact scams, or not? That is something i will have to think more deeply about, to form a thoughtful view. My initial sense is that if the markets were truly free, then these things would sort themselves out much faster as these people would be held accountable, instead of being able to weasel their way out, enabled by money and a flawed justice system.I

Good Morning Everyone,The political climate is once again hitting a critical point in various regions of the world right now as the parasitic central planners assert their insane ideology on farmers in The Netherlands. An ideology that a small group of pseudo-elites can control every thing and every one. Completely disregarding the incomputable complexity that exists in the world. The dutch political class have taken center stage as they move to halve nitrogen output by 2030 in alignment with the World Economic Forums climate goals, as well as their Food Innovation Hub plans.The Dutch plan led by Christianne van der Wal who is ironically a politician of the People’s Party For Freedom and Democracy, is to reduce nitrogen emissions by 50%, which by the way is one of, if not the most abundant chemical elements in our atmosphere. The plan which i’ve linked to above basically involves removing 30% of dutch farmers in an area based approach. This will directly target small scale farming operations, and lead to a further concentration of infrastructure and food production capability [read: Power].As you’d expect the dutch farmers have rightly taken to the streets to express their distain for the plan of the minister for so-called “freedom” and “democracy” rising up in what is likely to be the largest ever protest in the country.The Netherlands is the second largest agricultural producer on the planet, second only to the US. They are a massive contributor to global food production. Does this mean we need to starve a large portion of the population to deal with the climate hysteria? One can only wonder how long it takes for the dutch government to leverage the playbook of supreme leader Trudeau and enact economic war on the dutch citizens by freezing accounts and creating blacklists.Make no mistake, this is not about the climate, it is about power and control. In this case, control of critical food production infrastructure. The WEF plan to create food hubs and control the entire worlds food supply, if that is even possible. They are leveraging corrupt, for-sale political tyrants to remove your rights and enable the take over. This is not a “theory”, it’s direct from their website. The plan is to create 4 food hubs and It’s highly likely that the Netherlands is one as well as the US. This removal of smaller scale producers will enable the concentration of ownership and production into the hands of a few. It would also mean that if you wished to obtain that food, you would need to use their slave-coin to do so, and opt-in to their network. Classic fiat coercion. This also explains why Bill Gates has been busy accumulating so much rural farmland in the US, having most recently been questioned by the North Dakota Attorney General what he intended to use the recent $13.5m purchase of land for. Gates now owns more than 240,000 acres of farmland in the US!This is not about nitrogen or “the climate™️”. It’s not about abortion and it’s not about Ukraine. It is about control. Control over you and I. Control over what jobs are deemed necessary, what food is acceptable, who can produce it, what you can say and what you cannot say, and what monetary network you must use. Whether or not you can leave your home or remain in lockdown because you have not undergone fill-in-the-blank medical procedure.You have the right to run a farm and produce food. You have the right to move freely, and transact with whoever you like. You have the right to leverage a monetary good that the government cannot take from you and extract the value of via inflation of the money supply and secure the future for your children rather than being trapped on some kind of hamster wheel that continually speeds up.The notion that central planners can account for the myriad complexity that exists in the universe and solve every problem through top-down autocracy is absolutely insane. Free markets while not perfect, are without question the most superior mechanism humans have developed thus far to deal with this complexity, and the future ability for humans to flourish on the planet depends on us being free to operate as nodes within these markets.It’s inspiring to see the dutch farmers rise up in opposition to this insanity, but is it enough? As we saw in Canada there is no length nefarious government actors will not go to in order to maintain power and discredit those who oppose their iron fist. Below you can see a video of dutch police removing farmers from their tractors and arresting them. Sounds familiar.. The Canadian truckers would be waking up in the night having flashbacks!We must present a united opposition to this madness and rise above efforts to separate us and have us turn us on each other. While we are all unique we are far more similar than we are different. The peaceful exit door of bitcoin remains open for anyone wishing to enter. It’s time to stop supporting these tyranny enabling political regimes and their political monopoly money and opt-in

Good Morning Everyone,Jullian Assange is best known to most as the founder of Wikileaks - a not-for-profit publishing entity focussed toward releasing large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials. He remains a political prisoner in the UK and has been used by governments, primarily the US government and all others who bend the knee to them, as an example to deter others from exposing the truth and who dare dissent about these corrupt unelected cartels. He is also an OG cypherpunk, so it’s no surprise he was early to leverage the neutrality provided by the bitcoin network when governments pressured payment processors like Visa and Mastercard to censor any transactions to Wikileaks.In 2006, the same year he founded Wikileaks, he wrote two papers titled “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” & “Conspiracy As Governance” which can be found on Nakamoto Institute dot org’s website. The intro to this paper reads as follows:“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough [to] carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.“It’s becoming increasingly clear to me as a matter of necessity, we must reject the framing by dishonest, incompetent or nefarious actors, be it government or any other entity, that are providing a misleading or blatantly false lens in which to view an issue. We must also provide an alternative frame for people to combat this, and one that is grounded in objective truth.This tactic, often referred to as gaslighting, is designed to lead people to a specific desired conclusion or outcome, and is often used to short-circuit honest discourse and truth-seeking. The Covid hysteria is a prime example. Anyone that was wanting more information around vaccines, or that expressed any kind of curiosity, concern or hesitation was immediately vilified, demonised and banished from society as a heartless antivax lunatic with no concern for other members of their community. Obviously this is, and always was utter nonsense designed to politicise the issue, enable strong control measures to be enforced and distract people by placing a wedge in society and have everyone fight amongst themselves and become very anchored to perceiving the game board in a very specific way. Classic divide and conquer. An oldie but a goodie it seems. Plenty of lindy on that strategy.tRusT tHe sCiEnCe™️This kind of informational and psychological attack on us all is evil - and i mean that in the truest sense of the word. This is the meme-war. It is an attack on our friends and families, on our children and on their futures by a selfish and power hungry class of pseudo-elite sociopaths who seek to accumulate more and more political power, as is the incentive of a system of political money. If normies realised how they had been played they would be livid. This manipulation and social engineering is enabled by the creating of a frame. A lens in which to perceive the current thing, and typically carves out clear paths for us to “choose” that are often, but not always diametrically opposed.The ESG scenario is another prime example of this, but i won’t get stuck on that one right now. I want to focus on inflation. We’ve been on quite the journey this past two years when it comes to the monetary system including monetary and fiscal policy. Given the US’s position as the world reserve currency most of what happens is downstream of the fed. Lets recap the official narrative. “Deadly” covid pandemic hits, everyone must be locked in their homes and that means we need to increase the money supply drastically. In the US this was north of 40% in eighteen months. Meaning 40% of all US dollars in the circulating supply were created in the past 2 years. All other governments and central banks followed suit. Inflation came out of “nowhere” and apparently it was transitory. Nothing to worry about. Then it had peaked and they “had everything under control”; however it has continued to increase seeing 40 years highs month after month in the US (and most other nations).The real version is that the financial system is in the process of falling apart. Whether they keep it limping along a while longer nobody really know, but the underlying fundamentals are cooked. Jerome and the gang had been trying to reduce their balance sheet between 2018 and -19 but things started to break, specifically the repo market, and they changed course very quickly.If you

Good Morning Everyone,Over the last few days I’ve been playing around with a podcasting 2.0 app called fountain. The app has a slick and familiar UI, and offers a custodial lightning wallet built into the app. While this is suboptimal ultimately, in order to onboard people initially and get people playing with the app it is likely the right move in the short term. For a fully noncustodial solution i recommend checking out BREEZ.Having an alternative business model to that of the advertising model is essential to better align the incentives of content creators. When you consider that free-to-air legacy media is simply an advertising machine, it makes sense why the content becomes more and more sensational, as the more eye balls they have, the more ad revenue they accumulate. It’s not about truth. It’s about attention. The “news” is a shitcoin. As i discussed previously when writing about podcasting 2.0:“The primary difference here is that these centralized platforms are typically advertising machines; and advertising, if personalized, entails surveillance. The ability to pay for content you value, in a value-4-value model, via a censorship resistant protocol seems like an obvious way forward.”While fountain itself is just a company building an app utilising lightning for payments and the existing RSS feeds for the content, the actual monetary medium of bitcoin most certainly is, and it’s integrated right into the app. Whats super cool about fountain, is that while they try to attract users to the app they are paying people to listen. So you literally earn sats to listen to something you would listen to anyway, and then get the chance to have a play with the app and stream some sats to people who’s content has provided you value. Win/win.This is a phenomenal way to onboard users, and to get people playing with lighting and to begin to expose the power and capability lightning offers. I’ve been streaming sats all morning, and it’s a phenomenal way to connect with content creators you appreciate and build community.Below are a few images of the app interface. You can find the audio from these letters in there by searching for bitcoin unlocked, and earn some sats for listening. I’ve also attached a referral link to sign up with. @andrewkeir-d79ab36451It’s early days in respect to podcasting 2.0 but the ability of lightning to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions is incredibly powerful. It’s clear as day that the old model relying on advertising corrupts the incentives and ultimately leads to censorship and surveillance (just look at youtubes censorship), however it’s likely to take some time for people to get used to paying for content they value as opposed to it being subsidised by advertisers but in my opinion this is a powerful step in the right direction. I highly encourage you to download the app, subscribe to bitcoin unlocked, and have a play around with earning and streaming some sats to get a feel for the power the value4value model can unlock.I hope you all have a great end to your week. I’ll talk to you on Monday.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

Good Morning Everyone,The US continues its decent into the depths of clown world™️, dragging most other developed nations with it. At a time when any sane human would think the rhetoric would have reached peak absurdity, things seemingly continue to become more insane.Old mate sleepy Joe has been asking gas companies to reduce their prices as the pain from decades of irresponsible monetary policy and naive interventionism hits a critical point seeing record high fuel prices across the country leading to an increase in political pressure on the administration.A week or so ago we saw this stunning clip from the energy secretary basically begging for more supply, while in the same sentence saying we’re committed to shutting down your industry over the next 5-10 years. You really could not make this up. Take a listen below.This is the same energy secretary that basically made light of the situation a month earlier highlighting that if everyone just purchased new electric vehicles the rising prices wouldn’t be an issue. It’s painfully obvious these people are completely incompetent and have absolutely no place having any control over, frankly anything really, and certainly not something as vital to sustaining life, as energy, The recent dialogue from the president directed at the oil and gas industry got the attention of Chevron CEO Mike Worth. He wrote an open letter addressed to Sleepy Joe highlighting the need to depoliticise the problem, and seek thoughtful discussion.“As industry leaders, academic experts and numerous policy makers have pointed out, there are no easy fixes nor any short-term answers to the global supply and demand imbalances aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Addressing this situation requires thoughtful action and a willingness to work together, not political rhetoric.”“Chevron and its 37,000 employees work every day to help provide the world with the energy it demands and to lift up the lives of billions of people who rely on these supplies. Notwithstanding these efforts, your Administration has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry. These actions are not beneficial to meeting the challenges we face and are not what the American people deserve.”In response to this catastrophe sleepy gnome has decided to reduce their tax on fuel for 90 days. Which is odd given that Obama called this out as being nothing more than a gimmick back in 2008. While there is no question reducing the level of theft by government via taxation is a good thing in essence, responding to this issue by focussing on the demand is completely misguided and fails to meaningfully address the problem. The problem is not demand. The problem is supply as Dan Pickering aptly points out:Reducing the level of tax on gas will increase demand, and an increase of demand without meeting that with a supply increase will equal - you guessed it - price increases. This action is purely a political stunt by an army of knuckle heads who are completely out of their depth. To bring more supply online costs billions of dollars and takes years. No company will invest the resources needed when a government are directly and intentionally incentivising the opposite and essentially working as a competitor against them, while also being the referee.The need to defund these idiots has never been more urgent, unless everyone is happy being cold and hungry. Transitioning away from broken political money and to a bitcoin standard has never been more mission critical. Vote with your time and energy. Bitcoin is that vote.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,“Fiat money is a type of currency that is not backed by any commodity such as gold or silver, and typically declared by a decree from the government to be legal tender. Throughout history, fiat money was sometimes issued by local banks and other institutions. In modern times, fiat money is generally established by government regulation.”- WikipediaThe majority of people still do not understand why bitcoin is so important. Most people do not realise what is actually happening at the hand of central banks, and how fundamentally broken the monetary system really is. Most are unaware of how much power has been concentrated amongst a very tiny number of people, and at the expense of everyone else, as a result of the predatory fiat system. Preston Pysh provided the best analogy i’ve heard to explain the nature of central banking in a conversation with Peter McCormack - which you can listen to here from the timestamped position. I highly recommend you take a listen. It’s explanations like these that should be explained to every child or teen. He explains it through the lens of monopoly. Imagine you have 2 monopoly game boards with 4 players at each and while one player is typically the banker, imagine there is a fifth person as the central bank adjusting the money supply as needed. So each time someone passes go and collects $200, the banker tops up the supply to maintain balance, as is the typical rules of the game. In this scenario imagine that the players from either board can go and buy properties from the other board if they wish. So they could own the same property on each board if they wanted to. Now imagine the following scenario where one of the central bankers whispers to the players on that board that instead of collecting $200 when they pass go, they will increase it say $700, and not to tell the players on the other board, thus increasing the money supply on that board significantly in comparison to the other.Lets say that money supply increase is happening on board one. The players on board one begin to accumulate a lot more capital compared to those on board two. After a little while those from board one begin buying properties on board two. The players on board two begin to wonder what is going on. How is there so much currency flowing into our board from the players on board one? They begin to jerry that the players on board one must be cheating. This incentivises them to collude with their central bank as they realise it’s the only way they can compete. So the central banker on board two increases their amount to $1000 when they pass go. Now imagine each board is a country. This very aptly frames where we’re at.This is the dynamic we have with fiat money. This creates the situation where each central bank is essentially in a race against the others to increase the supply of their currency. It’s a race to debase. This is only possible in a fiat world, where there is nothing anchoring the supply to physical reality. When you look at the insane balance sheet expansion of central banks, you can see this clearly playing out. The following charts show the expansions of major central banks from 2003 to today. They’re displayed in their own respective currencies and then compared vs USD below. US CENTRAL BANK BALANCE SHEET$720B - $8.95T (8x increase)EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK BALANCE SHEET$800B - $8.82T (9x increase)CHINA CENTRAL BANK BALANCE SHEET$5.16T - $38.55T (13x increase)JAPAN CENTRAL BANK BALANCE SHEET$1T - $5.62T. Peaked at $6.85T (5.5x increase)COMBINED & ALL MEASURED IN USDFed: Blue / ECB: Yellow / BOJ: Orange / PBOC: CyanThe last chart helps to provide a more apples to apples comparison by measuring the balance sheet expansions using USD and as you can see while in the short term most look to be attempting to normalise, the trend is very very clear.This system is broken, and it is incentivising the parasitic class to do whatever it takes to maintain control, and to do so at the expense of the many. Thankfully, bitcoin fixes this. Reject the frame of central banks. The system does not exist to benefit you. Adopting a bitcoin standard is our way out of this mess, and while there will be volatility in the short term, in the long term bitcoin is the most sound and secure monetary network we’ve ever had. Central banks have no chance competing against an open source, decentralized monetary network for the world. It’s just a matter of time.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,The macro environment has clearly changed over the last 8 months. We’re in the middle of a global energy crisis. The trend of globalisation appears to have come to an end, and de-globalisation looks to be underway. Inflation is at 40 year highs in the US, and there are many indicators suggesting things within the TradFi system are breaking. The fed is posturing like they are going to raise rates until they win the battle against inflation. The costs of living have skyrocketed and consumer confidence is at all-time lows. The bitcoin bears are celebrating the crashing of the price relative to melting US ice cubes, and everywhere you look the sentiment is bearish af. Well, we had a good run. Bitcoin seemed like a good idea at the time. The possibility that we could have a global monetary substrate for humanity that is tethered to the fundamental fabric of life, being energy, that is completely free of human intervention, and entirely driven by market forces as opposed to the artificially engineered system we currently have; where the most important number which effects every economy in the world - the fed funds rate - is decided by 10 people alone in a room - has clearly proven to be inferior.I guess it’s time to hang up the boots. Bitcoin is dead. Excuse the sarcasm on this fine Monday morning, but the emotionality of markets makes me laugh harder than Ricky Gervais or Dave Chapelle. While no doubt everyone would prefer to see higher prices, obviously. The reality is, this is a marathon - not a sprint. People looking at bitcoin as a risk-on tech stock or a get-rich-quick scheme will likely continue to be disappointed. Consider what bitcoin is actually solving for.. Anyone that thinks the separation of money from the state is going to happen overnight, clearly is not grasping the enormity of what is at stake here. The truth of the matter is bitcoin is definitely being traded like a high-beta risk-on asset. Meaning, that it’s like a more the emotional little brother of the broader market. While in the short term this is certainly the case, over the long term it’s the best performing asset of the last decade and over the last two years has outperformed gold, the Nasdaq, and the S&P index by orders of magnitude.Jan 2020 - today* Gold +24%* S&P +14%* NAS +31%* Oil +115%* Bitcoin +200%The reality is, not only is bitcoin alive and well, bitcoin is operating exactly as designed, and that includes having no intervention from a single human to pull the strings - regardless of the situation. When you consider the chaos going on in the TradFi world with the ECB convening an emergency meeting with concerns around Italy, Japan struggling to maintain their peg, the fed in full on firefighting mode and layer on top of that the Terra blow up, which lead to the Celsuis blow up, which looks to have impacted major crypto lending platforms; the bitcoin network looks phenomenally orderly. Given there is no buyer of last resort as there is in TradFi with the fed, this means the market is much more honest in it’s movements which also means volatile, but all things considered the fact it continues to just chug along highlights bitcoins stability in amongst a world of chaos.This clip below from CNBC captures the state of play beautifully, and provides a glimpse of where we’re really at. In talking about the price drop the interviewer comments:“it’s still a lot though for something that we don’t really know what the heck it is”To which Jim Cramer responds:“Well it really isn’t anything”I couldn’t agree more with Odell here. There is no clearer demonstration for how most in normie land are viewing the beast, that is bitcoin. Most are just puppets to the whims of the market. Price goes up, and bitcoin is going to change the world. Price goes down, and it’s a ponzi scam that’s going to zero. Times like these demonstrate who as taken the time to do the work, and who has not. Who was simply part of the crowd following along with the hype of the market. Conviction is a bi-product of knowledge, and you have to have gone deep on bitcoin to have acquired this knowledge. Those that have done the work to understand bitcoin maintain a massive informational edge. Many will buy the feds tough talk and think they are going to be able to continue to hike rates into a recession, however if you cast your mind back to the beginning of the pandemic when every TradFi economist and central banker said there would be no issue with inflation, and pretty much every bitcoiner called this out as absolute nonsense - who actually told the truth?Bitcoin is the truth in a world of political noise, and for the bitcoiners who have taken the time to develop deep conviction, it’s in moments like these where their edge is most apparent.Long live the king.Hope you all have a great start to your week. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, vi

Good Morning Everyone,While in the US the fed has hiked rates by a further 75bps, in Australia the beginning of the energy crisis seems to have begun with the government regulator suspending the energy market nationally. Channel 9, one of the major legacy propaganda outlets in Australia issued a warning urging NSW residents to reduce their electricity consumption immediately to avoid a blackout last night.Only a few days prior this same regulator enforced pricing controls in the state of Queensland. Wholesale prices in Queensland were controlled at $300 a megawatt-hour at 6.55pm after the cumulative total of seven days of prices topped the set limit of $1.3591 million, the Australian Energy Market Operator said.The cap was only for the trading day initially, however was said to be extended if cumulative price threshold was exceeded.This madness is as a direct result of central planning and classic naive interventionism. Pricing controls literally never work. Like clockwork as soon as governments introduce pricing controls, what follows shortly thereafter are shortages. Literally every time, without fail.We are living the effects of this right now, and this energy crisis is not unique to Australia. Energy markets are global.In a free and open market it’s not that we would never have problems, but the problems would get addressed and solved in a more robust way that would sustain more effectively over time. Because the problem presents an opportunity for someone able to solve it, and the incentive is not to create a bandaid solution, the incentive is to create long term solutions as it is necessary to solve long term to recoup the capital allocated to the problem in the first place.Central planners are reactive to isolated events, and completely miss the interwoven complexity that exists. They are at the mercy of political opinion, and are incentivised to create short term solutions to diffuse any political opposition before people move on to the next current thing. This is what free markets do best, they solve this problem, and they do it at no cost to consumers unlike government bodies.As we descend further into this mess, the need to remove money from the hands of central planners has never been more important. Bitcoin remains the most powerful solution to many of our current problems. Hopefully more and more people continue to understand why and how it does so, so we can course correct before we drive ourselves off a metaphorical cliff.Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,Feelings and emotions are fascinating phenomena, but how we interpret them is perhaps even more so. What is a feeling? Where do they come from? Where do you experience them from? Some would consider these extremely esoteric and “woo-woo” type enquiries but i would postulate that a focussed attention toward these appearances in consciousness are of critical importance in cultivating our ability to maintain a more sophisticated mode of operation as humans, and to prevent us from being puppets to these patterns of energy we call emotions.I don’t wanna get too far out on the risk curve here, but I would postulate that fundamentally emotions are information and how we interpret this information is primarily based off of previous experience. Essentially comparative analysis in real time via the memory bank of your experience up until the present moment. This is called unconscious pattern recognition, and it is a process our unconscious is constantly performing whether you are aware of it or not. It is this pattern recognition that will trigger an autonomous response to move your arm or your body if i threw a ball at your head (if in front of you or within your periphery) or if you are driving and have to quickly avoid something on the road. This system is always running.So when we talk about confidence - what actually is it? Britannica dictionary defines confidence as follows:* a feeling or belief that you can do something well or succeed at something.* a feeling or belief that someone or something is good or has the ability to succeed at something* the feeling of being certain that something will happen or that something is trueTypically humans do not like uncertainty. People often associate the feeling of uncertainty with bad, and certainty with good, although in many ways these perspectives are not truly representative of the reality outside of the individuals experience. Hence why nation states have been able to prey so effectively on large populations - they provide people with the illusion of certainty (safety and stability).OK. That all sounds well and good, right? What does this have to do with bitcoin or financial markets?Well we’re currently in the throws of extremely volatile market conditions. Even more broadly in respect to the various factions or tribes of humans on the planet. The geo-political landscape appears to be the most unstable it has been in decades, and many countries are experiencing significant levels of polarisation and division amongst local populations. Central banks are devaluing currencies at record rates. Energy markets are in disarray as a result of ESG zealots and downstream of that is food and agriculture. Which is fundamental to sustaining life and is having dramatic impacts on the costs of living all over the world.All these things are having major impacts on how people are “feeling” about their current circumstance and the level of certainty, or uncertainty they have about the future (the unknown). We currently are in the midst of a major breakdown in confidence.Whatever this feeling is, and however reliable it is as as a source of information, there seems to be a record number of humans in developed countries experiencing it at present. There are multiple data points showing confidence is near record lows. 1. Australian consumer confidence back to levels seen at the beginning of the pandemic, but otherwise not for 30 years.2. Michigan consumer sentiment came out in the US and the last time it was this low, was 85 years ago.3. The bank of Japan seem to have a major problem on their hands, with their currency peg looking on the verge of breaking, despite yield curve control policy which includes unlimited buying of government bonds at 0.25%. This means in an effort to maintain the peg they are devaluing their currency (read: siphoning the wealth of their population) at an incredible rate, with the Yen now reaching back to levels last seen in 2002.4. According to Reuters there was a major protest in China over frozen bank funds totalling $178m. Apparently they cleared the protesters by authorities activating a code red on their health app, which forced them to disperse. Unbelievable5. Despite all of this central banks continue to posture for further rate hikes, while most currencies are getting killed relative to the USD. Inversely the US Dollar looks like an absolute rocket ship which puts further pressure on the US and likely continues to fuel high inflation.6. Not to mention the slew of crypto scams blowing up. Be it Luna/UST, Celsuis, 3 Arrows Capital sound like they may also be in trouble, binance halting bitcoin transactions and also Coinbase limiting transactions and operating in a generally suspect manner.Buried deep amongst this crumbling of confidence is a somewhat comical irony. What does everyone think the money is backed by? That is, that the only thing backing the US dollar, and really any of these political shitcoins is an ephemeral sensati

Good Morning Everyone,I hope those in Australia enjoyed a long weekend despite some wild market price action and volatility. Another “crypto” scam called Celsius blew up in recent days limiting all trading, withdrawals and transactions. Binance also had a 3h block on bitcoin withdrawals! Binance CEO CZ came out and responded with the following tweet:I would be very wary if you use Binance’s shitcoin carousel. Bitcoin has been working flawlessly this entire time. It could be an internal issue at Binance, but it’s also very possible (even likely) that it was an attempt to limit a flight of capital during a period of major market volatility as a result of issuing too many IOUs and Binance operating fractional reserves. Very very shady!In times like these, i keep things very simply. Is bitcoin still producing blocks? Yes. Am I able to send and receive as normal? Yes. Has anything with the underlying network changed? No. Bitcoin remains the most secure and resilient computing system, and continues to maintain a ledger of pristine informational clarity. As long as your are using the network as intended, your sats are safe. Keep it simple. Bitcoin only. Custody your keys. Stay safe out there team. With that said, lets take a breath, center ourselves and discuss some more low time-preference happenings, mainly, how the internet is changing with the introduction of Web5.Over the weekend Jack Dorsey’s TBD came out with a big announcement at the Consensus conference, announcing their intention to build out what they’ve called web5 - a decentralized web platform.Jack said in a tweet:TBD has added web5 alongside their already existing plan to build out a decentralized exchange - tbDEX. The decision to call the project web5 is genius in my opinion. My initial reaction was that it was a little cringey given what a scam so-called web3 is; but after giving it a little thought it occurred to me that as a meme it’s actually insanely powerful. Before i get into that, lets quickly cover off what the plan is for Web5.First off they have outlined the primary issue being that of centralization. Specifically centralization over user identity and the individuals data. The image above is taken from the outline TBD released as part of the announcement. You can view the full web5 outline here. It explains the problem as follows:“In the current Web model, people are users who do not own their data or identity. They are given accounts by companies and their data is held captive in app silos. To create a new class of decentralized apps and protocols (eg: tbDEX) that put individuals at the center, we must empower them with self-owned identity and restore control over their data.”The document goes onto explain:“The Decentralized Web Platform (DWP) enables developers to write Decentralized Web Apps (DWAs) using Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Decentralized Web Nodes (DWNs), returning ownership and control over identity and data to individuals 2 + 3 = 5.. and we all know the highest number wins, right. 🤣The document goes into much more detail, and as always i encourage you to have a read for yourself. The meme in the final slide cuts to the chase. Q: “We’re building an app platform?” A: “Always have been"An internet where everyone runs their own node, storing their own data and protecting their identity in a self sovereign way. A vision for the internet to fundamentally disrupt the current power structures, and reinstall the power of the individual. All built on top of the most secure, decentralized computing network on the planet - and one that no single entity owns or controls: Bitcoin. As for the decision to call it web5 - I think it’s honestly a stroke of absolute genius, and an absolutely classic troll on all the web3 shitcoin scams. My initial reaction was that it was a little cringey and perhaps even giving legitimacy to the whole “web3” nonsense. After giving it a little more thought, the genius of it became more apparent. It can act as a mechanism to release the grip of the web3 meme, and offer an opportunity to refocus the attention of many that have been overcome by greed and short term gains. This is extremely positive. The web3 scam has hurt many more people than it will ever help. Web3 doesn’t even really exist. It’s nothing more than a clever marketing meme someone came up with to entice people into VC funded, centralized scam tokens, run by centralized teams in centralized companies, with centralized points of failure who tell any number of stories to the contrary. So the use of web5 really is the ultimate troll on that entire cohort of grifters. But that’s not even the most important part. As a result of the web3 meme confusing so many people, many discounted bitcoin and failed to do the work to actually understand it. It created a sense of bitcoin being “old” technology that doesn’t compare to that of the new shiny web3 apps. The real genius of web5, is that it can provide a new opportunity to reintroduce people to bit

Good Morning Everyone,It’s incredible to see how the tables have turned in relation to the clown-world narrative about inflation. A couple of short years ago i recall Jerome Powell come out saying we need to generate higher than normal inflation. That they planned to generate significantly above the 2% norm, and would let it run hot for longer than normal. A string of articles followed making this point, and the incredible claim that persistent low inflation was the real danger.Fast forward to the present, and add in a 40%+ expansion of the monetary supply we see official inflation numbers in the US have been in the high single digits. No one actually buys the cooked up official numbers however, as they have continued to move the goal posts in what they include in their calculations. Even the New York post has caught on - publishing an article a couple of days ago discussing the changes to how inflation is calculated. This topic has been completely taboo for years, but it’s now becoming understood by the mainstream.Former RBA big swinger, Ian Macfarlane has now come out of the inflation closet and said that inflation is unlikely to get back to the long-standing target of 2-3% in Australia or the US, and is likely to be much higher.“I find it hard to think that it will just come back to 2 per cent. I think there’s enough scarcity out there, particularly with such a tight labour market both in the US and here, and with the feeding through of all the supply shocks... I think 3-4-5 per cent is more likely. It could go up to 7 or 8 per cent,”The latest clown world numbers in Australia were 5.1% with the US hitting 8.3%. I’ve included a list of inflation data shared by Charlie Bilello below that shows the current state of play in many major nations. More than half of these are above 6%. Countries like the UK, Spain and the Netherlands are between 8 and 10% and 6 countries well into double digits. Remember, these are official numbers, the reality is much much worse.Something that is completely missed when discussing inflation, is the fact that inflation never reverses - It compounds. At a 5% rate of inflation your money loses over 40% of its value in 10 years. It is essentially outlawing the ability for people to save. It’s an unofficial ban on saving. With the unit of account eroding at 40% every 10 years the level of misinformation in our monetary system becomes extreme. It increases our time preference and we will continue to devalue the future at an ever increasing rate.This is a recipe for disaster, and it’s why we bitcoin. If you’re still storing your wealth in political shitcoins, it may be time to reconsider.. If you leverage bitcoin as a savings device, you get the opposite effect. Everything is going down in price over time. Everything is getting cheaper vs sats. Or said differently, any [fill in the blank] political money is buying less and less sats.3 years ago you could buy 13,000 sats per USD. 2yrs ago just over 10,000 and currently around 3,300.The simple truth here is that the system of money has no place being controlled by any single entity. It’s simply too powerful. As Spiderman’s uncle said “with great power comes great responsibility” and as the separation of the monetary system from the state continues, it requires you to take back your power. As you can see from the above, the sooner you do so, the better. Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,The technology we call money is fundamentally a system of information. It is a ledger, that assigns who has what. Bitcoin does not send “money” from one side of the planet to another to enable the transfer of value - it is simply updating information. Modifying numbers between one pigeon hole and another on an open, public, immutable ledger. It does so in a way that ensures no errors can exist in this system of information. A system of pure signal - completely free of noise. A system of pristine informational clarity; of truth. Some would say, the ultimate record of truth.When we compare this to that of the fiat monetary system, considering it as a system of information, the transformational nature of bitcoin becomes more pronounced. The fiat system is almost by definition the opposite. Where bitcoin is a system of truth - fiat is a system of lies. A system of noise. The poor informational quality is baked into the fiat system at the protocol layer as a result of a small number of humans having admin privileges over the network, and being able to inflate the supply with no limit, at the expense of every other node. This inflation of the supply at the hands of a few fundamentally and irreparably corrupts the information in the system. It makes it very difficult to verify the truth, and increases the friction between nodes as they try to interact via the network. The societal impacts of this are all around us right now. No one knows the true price of anything, with risk tolerance being completely perveted across all asset classes [insert ape/rock jpeg]. Due to the design of the system allowing for admins, and the ability of those admins to elect future admins, the system mutates into more of a political system and less of a reliable monetary one. This has never been more obvious than it is today.A year ago Janet Yellen and the rest of the mob lied to the public labelling inflation as transitory after they’d increased the monetary supply by 40%. Last week she said she may have been wrong about inflation. Now in the face of a major energy crisis she has become an expert on energy markets, and said when testifying before the Senate Finance Committee yesterday that “the critical thing is we become more dependent on the wind and the sun”.These people and the system they represent are morally and ethically bankrupt. The US is the largest oil producer on the planet and has every capability to solve the energy crisis if they wanted to. It is entirely self inflicted as a result of incompetent policies and naive interventionism. They are a corrupted file system trying to execute a corrupted program called fiat. Ultimately however, they are just operating in alignment with the incentives of a broken system.Prior to bitcoin we had little option than to rely on closed, private systems, and had to trust the entities that control these systems to operate in good faith. To trust the validity of the information. Thanks to Satoshi, we no longer need to rely on faith - now anyone on the planet has the power to verify the rules of the network, and can verify the information for themselves; and for the information to be clean and pure. Fiat has created monetary misinformation that is deranging our societies and short circuiting our nature to self organise. Bitcoin is the anti virus software that will remove the corrupted information and reinstall the truth. Don’t get lost amongst the fiat noise. Bitcoin is the signal.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,The lightning network continues to experience incredible growth. In my opinion most people are completely unaware of the significance of what is happening on top of bitcoin on the second layer. At the protocol layer transaction volume and speed is limited by block space (the number of transactions that can fit in a block), and the speed at which blocks are mined, and thus transactions added to the blockchain - which is on average every 10minutes. The lightning network is how bitcoin scales. It enables near free and instant transactions. It enables anyone on the planet to send a bearer asset with absolute finality to anyone else, anywhere in the world and with the security of bitcoin. Transactions at the speed of light. Peer to peer, that do not rely on any single entity in the middle to process your transaction, or that can censor your transaction. If you compare this to the legacy banking and financial system, this is such an incredible phase shift, few seem to be grasping the enormity of it. Lightning essentially brings bitcoin to life as a medium-of-exchange, full-filling one of the three primary properties of a monetary good. With lightning you can now stream value peer-to-peer in the same way you can send other forms of information like messages, audio or video over the internet - and most importantly it requires no assistance from a single other entity. 24/7x365. Doesn’t matter if it’s a weekend. Doesn’t matter if it’s a public holiday. Doesn’t matter about your geographical location, your race, your political beliefs, whether you can provide 100 points of ID. None of that matters. A fully open and public payment rail for humanity.Given how little attention lightning is getting, it’s incredible to see the growth of the network. Below are a few charts that illustrate this growth including Network capacity, the number of active nodes, the number of lightning channels as well as the mean or average channel size.Every metric is moving strongly up and to the right, demonstrating that the fundamentals of the network are stronger than ever, despite bitcoins short term price-action volatility. NETORK CAPACITYThe current network capacity continues to create all-time highs - currently reaching 3970.7 bitcoin total. This is up from approximately 1200 a year ago - a 330% increase in capacity in 12 months!NUMBER OF LN NODESThe number of nodes in January 2020 was hovering just below 5000. At the time bitcoin price was around $8000USD. In March ‘22 it peaked just above 20,000. That’s a 4x increase in that time. In the last year the number has approximately doubled. This is consistent with overall node growth since 2018.NUMBER OF CHANNELSThe number of channels open at the beginning of 2020 was 31,000. This number is now around 85,000. In 2021 this number grew at 238% and is currently just shy of it’s highs having peaked at 86,000 - and now around 84k.AVERAGE CHANNEL SIZE The average channel size is currently creating all-time highs. Which stands to reason that this would need to increase to facilitate the same amount of value transfer capability while we’re still utilising the USD as a unit of account. On a bitcoin standard however, this would be less important, and if anything would very likely be the opposite. As the price of bitcoin has dropped, the channel size in sats needs to increase otherwise the overall capacity of the network would drop from a dollar value perspective. A year ago the average channel size was 0.0284 (2.8m sats). The current average is 0.0467 or 4.7m sats - a trailing 12 month increase of 167% When you ignore the noise and look at the actual fundamentals of lightning - the growth is simply incredible. Even more so when you use the network - it’s truly an incredible experience that continues to get better and better from a UI and UX perspective. Near free and instant settlement of a bearer asset with cash finality that requires no intermediary, and is available to anyone, anywhere. The future of money is being built out right in front of us. Closed, centralized legacy networks simply have no chance against the open, global monetary standard that is bitcoin and the lightning network.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,It feels like the US Political apparatus could be about to go full-blown hysteric-mode toward bitcoin mining, in the face of the energy crisis which for the most part is self-inflicted. In an effort to save face in the minds of those still trapped in normie land, i get the sense they are seeking to provide a political sacrifice to the gods, and bitcoin is on their radar.The state of New York has passed a bill to ban bitcoin mining, specifically proof-of-work mining. The bill had been in the throws of the political process over a year ago, and initially failed to pass the state assembly last year; however following continued attempts the bill has now passed, and following being signed into law by the governor will see New York, follow China’s lead and become the first US state to ban bitcoin mining. The purpose of the bill is as follows:“Establishes a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions; provides that such operations shall be subject to a full generic environmental impact statement review.”Whether these actions are genuinely in good faith and with good intentions, and aim to have a positive and meaningful impact on limiting any negative effect on the so-called “climate” boogeyman, or not, is unclear to me at this point, however i’m leaning to it being very unlikely by default based on the historical track record of politicians and central planning generally. What is clear is that regardless of their intentions, the actions taken are phenomenally idiotic, but also deeply concerning; for a host of reasons. * “Miners” are just specialised computers, basically guessing numbers at random. This law is attempting to dictate what you can use a computer for, and is specifically targeting the banning of guessing random numbers.* Anyone running a mining rig, whether it be at home or a larger scale commercial operation is simply running a computer, or a data center, no different to that of Amazon or Microsoft, and are paying for their electricity the same as everyone else. Are we really going to discriminate what an individual or business can use their electricity for? Will the state of New York implement a ban on AWS servers? The hypocrisy is incredible.* Proof-of-work mining is one of the core innovations that underpins bitcoin, and that enables for the first time EVER the property of digital scarcity. Up until bitcoin, everything in the digital realm has by definition been able to be copied in an unlimited way. Until now. Banning one of the most profound innovations of our time seems like a strange action to take, however it is somewhat typical of humans to resist out of fear of the unknown, when they encounter something new.* The reality is, that this is impossible to police, and enforce. It seems much more likely this is political virtue signalling more than anything. * This action incentivises large scale operations to simply move, and move their business revenue along with it to a jurisdiction that respects property rights. This directly harms the state far more than it helps as it removes jobs from the state, as well as revenue. It also likely deters any future operations from being established in the state. Given what a growing industry this is, this seems obviously counter productive.* There is a fundamental malware that exists in respect to this entire energy scam that bitcoin mining is contributing to carbon emissions. Bitcoin mining is simply utilising electricity that is being produced with or without bitcoin mining existing. * Bitcoin mining’s global energy usage is a rounding error. Not literally, but technically; as Lyn Alden explained:“Bitcoin’s energy usage is a rounding error as far as global energy usage is concerned. And I mean that literally; when scientists estimate that the world uses a certain amount of energy in a given year, they can easily be off by a couple percentage points in either direction, let alone a couple tenths of a percent. Bitcoin is estimated to use less than one tenth of one percent.”If the climate hysterics are genuinely wanting to solve something they perceive as a problem, it seems fairly obvious this will not do it. Going after something that is a rounding error is going to have no meaningful impact on their announced goal. This point alone strongly brings into question the motive and validity of the states actions toward bitcoin mining.* Just over a year ago China banned bitcoin mining. At the time China accounted for the lions share of the hash rate, with approximately 65% within its borders. Following the ban, the hashrate saw a major crash from 177 Eh/s down to 89 Eh/s. However it has since recovered to significantly higher all-time highs exceeding 220 Eh/s at it’s peak. What is also of note is that while following the initial ban, the hash rate appeared to move from China, a significant share has since returned or simply been switched back on, now account

Good Morning Everyone,Jurrien Timmer is the Director of Global Macro at Fidelity, which is one of the largest Asset Managers on the planet with an estimated $4.5T assets under management (AUM). He shared a fascinating thread this morning where he revisits the supply/demand dynamics of bitcoin, following the deviation of bitcoins price from Plan B’s stock-to-flow model; and compares network growth to that of mobile phones as well as the internet as a useful analog to help model the exponential growth of the bitcoin network. We previously discussed the growth of bitcoin compared with that of the internet, and believe it’s a valuable analog, but the comparison of mobile devices is a good one I had not looked at previously. The thread begins as follows:The chart shows the stock-to-flow in yellow, mobile phone S-curve model developed by Timmer in blue, the internet adoption S-curve in grey as well as bitcoins price in black. Visually it appears that the price is tracking more in line with that of the internet and mobile phones than the stock-to-flow model. Timmer explained:Given bitcoins issuance schedule is fixed, and known into the future you would think there is little to model on that side but Jurrien makes an interesting point on the potential diminishing returns as a result of the reduced (deflationary) issuance over time. He compares a modified S2F model, a multi-variate modified supply model which tracks more tightly with that of mobile phones and finds when comparing it in hindsight that it tracks more accurately on the whole than the original S2F.Something he notes with both that of mobile phones and the internet is that the growth slows over time, and becomes asymptotic, meaning it begins to hit its limit. With the mobile phone analog it tracks tightly with his modified S2F for the next 10 years before really starting to flatten out. The internet curve began flattening out much more already. Jurrien explains as follows:At the end of the day models are not comparable to reality. A model is by definition a simplification. It’s one of the ways we humans try to understand the complex world. It is impossible to model the complexity of reality which is important to realise when working with models. They can be a guide at best. At worst they’re like having Stevie Wonder as your guide.Is bitcoin’s adoption mature? In my opinion, far from it. Most people that own bitcoin still do not even realise what it is, and the implications of it existing in the world. It’s impossible to truly know what a global sound monetary standard can do for humanity in entirety over time. The gravity of this innovation is way beyond what most people are appreciating i believe. I don’t know which one we have here, whether we have a guide that knows where they’re going or if we’re walking blind but no doubt some fascinating data to look through regardless. It’s particularly interesting to me looking at the adoption curves of various innovations like cars, TVs, radio’s and even VCRs. The thing is to acquire all of those you need money. I believe what we’re looking at will far eclipse all those things combined, and the true power of this technology is not something that can be captured in a model. Alex Gladstein has highlighted that something in the vicinity of 40% of the worlds population lives under authoritarian rule. This technology has the potential to upend this by enabling people with a monetary standard that can not be inflated away, can not be seized and can not be censored. What happens when the global human society is enabled in a way that has never been possible? I can’t say for sure, but i’m willing to bet it will enable a renaissance on a scale that will eclipse anything that has come before it - and i’m here for it.Hope you all have a great weekend. I’ll talk to everyone Monday.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

Good Morning Everyone,The act of intentionally persuading people, or influencing them has long been something i’ve been somewhat allergic to. It’s always felt somewhat disingenuous to me and i’ve opted to take a more neutral approach. One where I’m less inclined to convince others or feel compelled to change their mind on a given topic, while being willing to provide the information that has led me to arrive at a certain position if asked.In thinking more deeply about the current situation we are facing, and how catastrophic the current actions being taken are i’m becoming more open to the idea that there may be a different lens to view persuasion from, and that it may actually be a very necessary strategy, given the fact we currently seem somewhat intent in running ourselves off a metaphorical cliff; where famine is likely to be re-normalised for many if we do not course correct. (No doubt being banished from society throughout the covid hysteria by a tyrannical government and supported by a society of cowards has had an impact as well)This is another one of the ways were I haven’t changed bitcoin, but bitcoin is changing me. It’s become increasingly apparent that there is a war of ideas underway, and the vast majority of those in normie-land are getting led to slaughter. Even worse than this, what appears to be a large swath of the ignorant sleep walkers are cheering for it. Fiat money has enabled the concentration of power amongst a small group of pseudo-elites. It has enabled and incentivised endless wars, and the exploitation of less sophisticated cultures around the world. This small group of pseudo-elites have an outsized level of influence on media, industry and government. Those that benefit from this dynamic naturally oppose anything that could destabilise their bounty of power, so naturally they oppose bitcoin - An alien technology that they cannot control, and that will not conform to their ideologies and beliefs. The harnessing of denser and denser energy sources, specifically hydrocarbons, has led to what is widely regarded as the most prosperous society to ever exist in history. It has been said many times, there has simply never been a better time to be alive. This is due to the ingenuity of humans and it should be celebrated - not condemned. This very small group of ‘haves’ have hijacked the narrative and many unsuspecting minds along with it, and are actively trying to convince everyone that animals (meat) are destroying the earth’s atmosphere, boiling the oceans and are bad. The very thing that has enabled us to flourish is evil, and we need to transition to a far less dense and intermittent energy source in solar and wind, which has lead us to a major energy crisis.The energy debate is a complex and nuanced one, and one that i cannot put to bed in a paragraph or two but in it’s simplest form, in order to be able to transition away from hydrocarbons (which is a truly insane idea) it would require us to be able to create everything from the alternative. Everything. The fact of the matter is that this is simply not possible at present, and seems unlikely to be in any near future. Solar and wind specifically require the power that hydrocarbons afford to create the panels and turbines they require to access this energy in the first place, and the power those alternatives generate is insufficient to perform this. So until that were to change, any notion we should remove hydrocarbons is truly the most absurd malware that only someone that has done zero research into and posses an impressive general lack of critical thinking capability could possibly believe. Ie the normie. For which urban dictionary provides a fairly accurate description.Normie“A person gravitating to social standards, accepted practices, and fads of their own time & geographic grouping without broader cultural perspectives from which they draw.Normies possess a lack of interest in ideas not easily accessible or being outside of their/society's current range of acceptance. A straight. A follower.Most normies adopt a "popularity is the only measure of good or bad" mindset at an early age.Normies typically have a sense of cultural superiority over "counter culture" movements & foreign cultures. They will often try to discredit out cultures or choices falling outside of their majority think claiming those of other dispositions are mentally ill or out of touch with reality.”So what does this have to do with persuasion? In short, it is abundantly clear that the small group of haves, like those at the World Economic Forum appreciate the importance of persuasion and are actively persuading those in normie-land to career themselves off a cliff by de-industrialising and starving themselves of the necessary materials needed to flourish. This obviously includes us adopting some glorious web3-like CBDC slave coin that would render us hungry and malnourished, compliant serfs with the autonomy of a 16th century peasant. Thankfully bitcoin fi

Good Morning Everyone,The base layer of everything is energy. The universe and its contents are all made from energy. You are energy. Everything you acquire is energy, and made from energy. We consume it, and we generate it. Currently within clown world there is a malware installed which seems to imply using energy is bad, and we should try and use less of it. The counter to this would be that the effective harnessing of denser and denser energy sources (hydrocarbons) is what has enabled us to innovate to our current point, and it is unlikely that we will advance and survive over time by using less of it. We would certainly get pretty cold in the process if we try.I’m of the opinion energy use is good; and that bitcoins energy use is good. I’m pro human. Furthermore, i look forward to seeing bitcoin use more energy over time, not less.A primary driver to enable this energy use is going to be the merging of the energy sector with bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining is the ultimate load balancing tool. It can be turned on and off in an instant. Due to the genius of proof-of-work, the work being done when mining, or hashing, is completely random. Meaning each hash is independent of the next - there is no progress. Due to this under-appreciated thing of beauty it means there is nothing lost by switching off from a progress point of view. You can simply restart and continue hashing again at random. Bitcoin mining can also capture stranded energy like nothing else, and convert the energy from local megawatts to global megawatts - accessible from anywhere. Not necessarily just anywhere on earth either! It also requires very little infrastructure to do so. Obviously it doesn’t transform the energy literally - it uses it - and then by using it, and mining - you mine some percentage of bitcoin. The beauty of bitcoin is that it can be directly monetised, and a growing liquid market exists for it. This fact enables that which was previously uneconomical - thus not possible - and not only makes it possible, but directly incentives people to go and do it. This is an insanely big deal. The reason the load balancing is so important, is for energy companies to be incentivised to generate power, say electricity, they need demand. If the demand is too high, prices go up, and they need to either reduce load or bring on ancillary power supply (backup), otherwise they will not meet the demand and people will experience blackouts. If demand is too low, and there is no one wanting to purchase it, then they are just wasting the resources to have generated it, and are at a deficit for doing so.This incentivises them to reduce supply, but then if demand increases a new problem emerges. You can imagine what a balancing act this would be.Bitcoin mining is the ultimate buyer of electricity in this scenario, and that can turn off in peaks or other scenarios as required. There is a previously unforeseen level of flexibility available. Because of this, i believe that energy markets all over the world will look to integrate bitcoin mining into their operations. How this all plays out is anyones guess. But I believe this leads to the eventual merging of energy markets and bitcoin mining. The incentives for this to happen are clear. What is so incredible about this is the fact that for us to live, and for us to thrive, we must consume energy. It is fundamental. Bitcoin is incentivising humans, broadly speaking, to harness more energy and to source it more efficiently, and to use it (bitcoin) to support this endeavour; and by doing so creating a positive flywheel-like effect, a feedback loop, where it also incentivises us to adopt and support and strengthen the bitcoin network at the same time. Incentivising, and enabling, the use of the most sophisticated monetary network in human history, and for the network to become increasingly secure, and for energy to become increasingly abundant. OMFG.The rabbit hole just went a layer deeper!Some humans may not be ready for this, but this is the most incredible innovation of our time; and over time, this is going to enable the most sophisticated version of human society yet. If those humans want to complain about it, at least they’ll be able to do so from a warm and comfortable environment :PHope you all have a great day. I’ll speak to everyone tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,The history of money is a deep and fascinating rabbit hole. In order to understand the primary dimension of bitcoin, this knowledge is fundamental and helps to provide much insight as to why many of us believe bitcoin is the most pristine iteration of money ever invented and why, when referring to money, bitcoin truly “fixes this”, This morning I stumbled upon an incredible resource (shout out to Marty Bent!) that has been created by a guy named Matthew Mežinskis at Porkopolis.io which tracks the global monetary base. To quote from his website:“The Monetary Base is a Basic money, High-powered money, Outside money, and Reserve money, among other names. The Monetary Base is the ultimate asset of settlement, the most irreducible form of ‘Money’ in the financial system.”Matthew’s research is incredible. It compares the global base money on a quarterly basis which includes the top 50 fiat currencies (sourced directly from their central banks) as well as looking at historical money stocks like gold and silver. He also includes bitcoin in his analysis given it’s potential of being future base money and frames their intention as follows:I highly recommend you take a look for yourself in detail at the thread, i’ve linked it below.Here are some of the major takeaways from the data:* The USD, Yen, Euro and Yuan are the four dominant currencies. * Gold no longer acts as base money, with central bank holdings on the whole being reduced dramatically since the early 1980’s. * Central Bank gold reserves-to-issued base money today is less than 7%.* Bitcoin is ranked #7 for Global Base money. Ahead of the Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, India, and trailing Switzerland, UK, China, Japan, US and The Eurozone nations. (see chart below)* Inferred bitcoin prices needed to rival the dominant base monies is shown on the chart above, and is compelling! At just over $70k bitcoin would exceed the UK. At just over $360k it would exceed them all.* Bitcoin’s issuance currently comparable to that of gold. Following 2024 halving this will obviously be much lower.* Graph below shows current value of all basic monies. The block on the right includes gold, silver and bitcoin with the fiats. Bitcoin is in Orange @ $0.6T* Bitcoin’s predictable programatic issuance is unlike any base money in history. Of all the base monies it is the only one that is known into the future and can be counted on at a protocol level. (Yes, we know!)* The graph below also shows 80% of fiat currencies have been printed since 2008 !! That is a stunning number.The inflation data included is absolutely fascinating and shows that basically all fiat currencies are growing at atleast 1% per month or MORE. They are very clear to distinguish inflation as inflation of money supply - not pricing inflation which follows the inflation of money supply. Given the growth rates of most fiat monies and given they are on average doubling at a rate of every 6 years - which is a mindblowing statistic - and considering bitcoin will continue to become more scarce, the current trend feels more like a steam-train and one that is highly unlikely to stop.As i said the analysis is incredible. The fact that it is shared completely free and open sourced on twitter is incredible. There is so much data in there, i highly recommend you take a look for yourself. While it’s still early days for bitcoin, to see that it has already surpassed the Aussie Dollar shitcoin as well as that of Canada, Hong Kong and India as a base money is pretty incredible, with the rest of the dominos in clear sight. It will be really interesting to continue to track this data over time, and see how things evolve. No one can predict the future. But bitcoins issuance is the only base money we can know - no need for predictions. This lays the foundation for the most transformational base money and monetary substrate that will enable human flourishing into the future.I’m here for this.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow. 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

Good Morning Everyone,Earlier this month saw a major milestone moment occur in the small country of El Salvador. According to a tweet from President Bukele:The countries represented were all developing nations. I won’t read through the list, but you can take a look below.While we do not know the specifics of their discussions or any outcomes from the meeting, it’s an incredible thing to witness as 44 nations are on the brink of unlocking financial sovereignty, perhaps the first time. Some people will rush to point out that China aren’ there. Russia aren’t there. That is true. No doubt these are all less well-known and are less developed countries. But to think like this would be to miss the point. These countries currently have little power or influence in the world. However the potential that exists for this to change by plugging in to a decentralized, global sound monetary standard would be the most powerful aligning force imaginable, and while individually they may be less significant - make no mistake, collectively they are anything but. I did some rough math to establish the total number of humans represented by these countries, and the number flawed me. These countries represent in the ball park of 1.2 billion people! That’s 15% of the entire worlds population. Incredible.It’s been said for along time that the people that need bitcoin the most will understand it the fastest. Those in the affluent developed nations are more likely to struggle to see the value as their systems appear to work reasonably well (at least on face value and if you are completely asleep at the wheel). This is playing out in front of our eyes in real time. Major countries have no incentive to adopt bitcoin if they think short term - and they do. The game theoretic element to this is that those who adopt the technology earliest, benefit disproportionately compared to those who wait, and comparatively as a result, the wealth gap between the two shrinks. Meaning the poorer countries are likely to be enriched by their early adoption relative to the larger more powerful countries, that do not want to release their grip on control of the money.While the normies are numbing their minds with whatever mind sludge they’re fed and and focussing on the current thing, El Salvador is presenting bitcoin to the world. And the world is paying attention.Onward.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.AKI’m on a mission to get this information to as many people as possible. Please support this work by sharing, liking and following on twitter, youtube and instagram to help wake up as many people as possible and support the adoption of a system that enables humans to flourish! Appreciate you being here! 🧡Twitter | Youtube | Instagram 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

Good Morning Everyone,Back in 2019 there was a leadership change within the European Central Bank. The leadership role transitioned from Mario Draghi to Christine Lagarde. Wikipedia describes Mario Draghi as:“an Italian economist, banker, academic and civil servant who has been Prime Minister of Italy since 13 February 2021. He previously served as President of the European Central Bank (ECB) from 2011 until 2019. Draghi was also Chair of the Financial Stability Board from 2009 to 2011 and Governor of the Bank of Italy from 2006 to 2011”Before she assumed the big swingers position at the pointy end of the ECB pyramid scheme Lagarde acted primarily as a politician. Wikipedia describes her story as follows:“a French politician, economist and lawyer who has been President of the European Central Bank (ECB) since 1 November 2019. She previously served as Chair and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2011 until 2019. Lagarde also held various senior ministerial posts in the Government of France, most prominent as Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry from 2007 to 2011.”I remember the time of Lagarde’s appointment well, as it was a curious choice for the ECB to make; to go from having a seasoned banker in the top spot to a politician/lawyer - but it was a decision that was made with clear intention. It was clear in 2019 that the economic machine was, for use of a better word, in a bad spot, (read: in deep s**t). The ECB needed someone that is good at talking, persuading and essentially lying to the public and convincing them that “everything is fine”. Basically just treating the peasants like mushrooms.Fast forward 3 short years, and you would probably agree they made a gReAt hiring decision, as they have needed to influence and persuade A LOT! Mario Draghi did not raise rates once in his entire tenure which lasted 8 years, with rates hitting 0% for the first time in 2016. They remain at zero.The other thing i want to highlight before moving on is where Mario Draghi went after finishing his role at the ECB..? He became the prime minister of Italy. It’s important to highlight this to demonstrate the intertwined and incestuous nature of banking and government. The two go very much hand in hand. Because this system you think of as a monetary system is not only a pure monetary system. It is a political system. Fiat money is political money, or political energy, if you like. All these sharks swim in the same circles be it the IMF, the World Bank, some branch of Government or even the supreme leader of a country. It wouldn’t be a shock to see Lagarde become the French PM once she is done pretending at the ECB.Building on this short, incomplete and likely somewhat flawed history lesson, take a listen to the following clip of big swinger Lagarde as she is asked about the state of the ECB balance sheet. I don’t want to ruin it for you; but suffice to say - you cannot make this s**t up.She is asked about the ECB’s balance sheet and whether or not the ECB have a gigantic bubble being inflated in their balance sheet. First off she feels the need to clarify there are no crypto assets in their balance sheet - which is ironic because if they had bought bitcoin with their monopoly money, they would be profoundly better off. She then explains that you have to think in counter-factuals to understand it. Ie: something that is impossible to verify. Perfect.She is basically saying, imagine if we didn’t do this, image what would have, or could have happened. OK. Let’s say you’re buying that one. The next part will squeeze some jam into your donut. She’s then asked how the balance sheet will be reduced. How it will come back down. I give her response a 10.“It will come. It will come. In due course, yeah.In due course, it will come.”As she grin-f***s the interviewer indicating her desire to move on from this question which she doesn’t want to answer honestly, for whatever reason.The truth is, that it will not come down. Not over time. Infact, it will continue to expand and we will continue to debase and devalue the currency, stripping wealth from anyone that saves in our political shitcoin, and continue to inflame the wealth inequality across the region in alignment with the need to expand our balance sheet further into infinity.This is how the story goes with fiat currencies. The supply must expand forever, Laura. The impact this is having on markets all over the world is so catastrophic as the unit of account is corrupted at the protocol layer. This is corrupting and distorting the insanely complex mechanism of price, across all assets. Which is distorting society more broadly.It’s a sad and to be perfectly honest, pretty pathetic society when the so called “leaders” cannot operate in an open and honest way instead opting to lie directly to the face of the youth and the next generation of potential leaders and powerful individuals. Even some people that may look up to these mutants and actually beli

Good Morning Everyone,Stories of good and evil have been told all throughout time by humans. This dichotomy is baked in deeply to us all and thus is reflected in most religions and cultures throughout history. From psychology to the arts - the story of diametrically opposed forces continues to be reverberate through time, evident by the endless list of books and movies based around it; be it The Lion King with Scar and Simba, Gladiator with Maximus and Commodus, Superman with Clark Kent and Lex Luther or StarWars with the force and the darkside.This archetype of two directly opposing forces is deep within us all individually, and thus in our societies.It’s difficult to imagine a more poignant manifestation of this deep and complex dimension of the human condition than what is currently taking place in Oslo, Norway and in Davos, Switzerland.The gathering of the worlds pseudo-elite is currently underway in Davos, as the World Economic Forum convenes. While at the very same time in Norway, The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) hosts the Oslo Freedom Forum.The fact these two events are running alongside one another in time is somewhat fitting, and it offers us a clear picture of just how opposing the values, intentions and ideals of the two are.One seems desperate to control, and the other seems committed to empowering.One has the humility to acknowledge we can not control everyone and everything, and the other acts as if it is almost a god given right.At the WEF it’s all about web3, crypto and blockchain, while in Oslo at the Freedom Forum it’s all about bitcoin.One is championing closed, centralized and permissioned networks that can be controlled by a few, and where you need approval to join; the other favours open, decentralized networks that no one can control, and that anyone can join. If you want to see just how clearly these two forces oppose one another, take a look at this clip of Julie Inman Grant who works for the Australian government as Australia's eSafety Commissioner. Prior to this role she had worked in the tech industry at Twitter and Microsoft.She says:“We are finding ourselves in a place where we have increasing polarization and everything feels binary when it doesn't need to be. So i think we're going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online, from freedom of speech to the freedom to be free from online violence or the right of data protection to the right to child dignity.”One entity is literally called the Freedom Forum and is organised by the Human Rights Foundation, the other full of sociopathic pseudo-elites at the World Economic Forum are talking about “recalibrating” human rights. Wow.The WEF’s influence over the the world cannot be over stated. It is impossible to ignore given what we now know, and especially what has transpired off the back of the COVID hysteria - perhaps best highlighted by the insanely creepy parroting of the “build back better” slogan by so-called leaders the world over, and the clear alignment in decision making by leaders who have attended the WEF’s global future leaders program - Most notably the sociopathic leaders of Canada, France and NZ. Old mate Klaus’ performance at Harvard University gloating about how they penetrate the cabinets of governments also should not go unnoticed.The reality is that the freedom to transact is a human right. We do not need some organisation of people to give us that right. It is by design as a human. The fiat monetary system has been designed in such a way that enables the weaponization of the technology of money, essentially modifying it from being an effective monetary system to a system of control and one that enables tyranny. The moment the system is used for anything other than the neutral facilitation of transactions, is the moment the system begins its decline toward being obsolete. This decline is well underway, and the WEF puppets know it. It needs to be said that if these pseudo-elites actually solved problems, i’m sure their would be far less skepticism and more support for their initiatives. But when you look at what they do, as opposed to listen to what they say, it seems somewhat naive to ignore the glaringly obvious truth. There is either somewhat of a controlled demolition of the US based monetary system underway, and subsequently an attack on the family nucleus and the resources needed for humans to survive and thrive in order to maintain control, or there is a level of incompetence that exceeds most peoples wildest imaginations. Joe Rogan framed it up perfectly:If the fact that the US president being focussed on flying in baby formula using C-17s doesn’t give you a bit of an idea where things are at, I’ve got bad news for you. Years gone by the US and other nations would fly in aid to other countries in support, now we see them having to fly in support to their own people! (and boasts about it on twitter!!)The fight between good and evil is the most pronou

Good Morning Everyone,Toward the end of my letter on Friday I touched on a point that I believe is extremely important to bring to the surface, and largely goes un-noticed by most at present. That in order to survive in the world you must choose a monetary network. Let me quickly recap for anyone that missed it:“For centuries fiat currencies have been created and destroyed, and many lives along with them. Never in our civilizations history was there a viable alternative that would sustain through time. Until now.No one is going to force you to adopt bitcoin. Thats the beauty of it. It’s a peaceful resistance, and you can choose to opt-in to the network - or not; and when you consider the fact that in life, you have to be a node in a monetary network of some kind in order to be able to survive, and your choice is between one where admins have special privileges compared with you - like in fiat, or you can choose a neutral network of only users - no admins. Where no user in the network has any power over another, with a cryptographically fixed supply that can not be changed. Compared with a system where some admin who lies to the population like it’s a sport, can just arbitrarily create more at the flick of a switch, stripping value from you and your family at will.Once you frame it up, It becomes increasingly bizarre to consider that many people are actively choosing the fiat network as their preferred monetary network at present.”When you realise this it changes everything.Whether you actively choose or not, you are going to be a node in a monetary network. So it would seem somewhat obvious that it is absolutely within your interest to choose; and to choose wisely. If you appreciate the significance the technology of money has on your life, the gravity of this decision can not be over-stated. Think about it. You likely interact with money everyday. Directly and indirectly. If you are turning on lights or running an appliance - energy is needed, which you will need to pay for. Money determines where you can afford to live, and of equal importance - where you can’t. It effects where you can go to school. These factors effect which other people you are likely to interact with. So there is a direct impact and relationship between money and the people you associate with and very likely your closest relationships are impacted by the technology of money. It effects the clothes you can buy. It determines whether or not you can travel beyond your local municipality. It impacts what food you can eat. Which is how many nutrients you can consume, and the quality of said nutrients. This impacts your state of being in a very direct way. The list goes on and on, but what becomes apparent, is that if you think of society as a technology stack, then money is the base layer of society, above the hardware layer of our bodies and the environment. ie Meatspace.So if our monetary network impacts our lives so significantly - and it does - it stands to mind, that making a choice between which network we wish to be a node within is an extremely important one and certainly one we should make with a clear intention, and with our eyes open as to the implications of our decision. In many respects it could be the most critical decision you make in your life and many other occurrences will be down stream of this choice.So how do we choose? What properties do we value? What makes one system preferable over another?I shared the below table in an earlier article. It outlines the key properties needed to perform the role of a monetary good, and helps to clarify how gold, fiat and bitcoin compare.This chart is looking at the fundamental properties of what makes a good money. Clearly given the fact that we’re on a fiat standard at present, what makes a good money doesn’t necessarily determine which money will be adopted over a short period of time, If it did we would never be on a fiat standard. So there is a layer of complexity beyond the monetary properties alone and the length of time we consider.Something that this chart doesn’t capture is transferability and the level of acceptance of a monetary good. This property, which could loosely be represented by the number of users of the network, has a significant effect on the ease to which someone can exchange a monetary good, for a good or service. The smaller the network, the less people that are likely to accept the monetary good. The larger the network the more people that will accept it. If the network is growing, this creates a network effect. Meaning as more users join the network, the value of the network increases, attracting more users, and creating somewhat of a flywheel effect.At present given how young the bitcoin network is, its definitely early days as a medium-of-exchange. There is little doubt in my mind however that over time as the network effect continues to compound and the number of users grow, that this will change. The lightning network is the mechanism that enables bitc

Good Morning Everyone,Yesterday May 22nd, was bitcoin pizza day. The story goes that on this day 12 years ago a person by the name of Laszlo Hanyecz made it known on an internet forum called bitcointalk.org, that he was willing to purchase 2 large pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin.At the time the value of the bitcoin was $41. Four days later, the transaction took place. Jeremy, another user on the forum took Laszlo up on his offer, and had two large pizzas delivered to him in Florida in exchange for the bitcoin. This day has since been known as bitcoin pizza day, as it signifies the first documented purchase using bitcoin.It’s obviously pretty wild to think about in hindsight, and given what is now known. Someone has created a cool little site called bitcoinpizzaindex.net to track the current market value of 10,000 bitcoins, and serves to highlight the deflationary properties of the issuance schedule and the impact this has on the value of bitcoin over time.The current market price for Laszlo’s 2 large pizzas is $295,160,257 Almost $300 million for 2 large pizzas. Insane.If you think bitcoin is dead at $30,000 - good luck to you. Treat yourself to a pizza and ask yourself what another 12 years will do to the value of bitcoin..For those of you that think the trend is likely to continue, bitcoin pizza day may offer a useful perspective of how things can change over time. Obviously no one can predict the future. I like to keep things simple, and believe that an object in motion tends to stay in motion.I believe the exponential rise of bitcoin is just getting started.Hope you all have a great week. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.AKI’m on a mission to get this information to as many people as possible. Please support this work by sharing, liking and following on twitter, youtube and instagram to help wake up as many people as possible and support the adoption of a system that enables humans to flourish! Appreciate you being here! 🧡Twitter | Youtube | Instagram 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

Good Morning Everyone,We’ve descended so deep into clown world at this point, that it almost feels as if no one with any kind of influence or power is either paying attention or has any idea what they’re doing.We’ve witnessed Lebanon’s central bank blow up, as their currency essentially hyper inflated into oblivion leaving many broke, homeless and hungry.We’ve more recently seen the central bank of Sri Lanka default on their obligations. Yep. They’re broke as well. This has led to major societal unrest in the country as they’re experiencing an energy and food crisis as well as a result. Lets not forget Turkey. As discussed back at the very beginning of the year - Turkey have been experiencing extreme levels of inflation leading to the implementation of pricing controls and capital controls. Naturally we sore capital rush to gold and bitcoin amongst others, as the countries local currency became increasing worthless internationally with inflation printing almost 70% last month. Wild!Next up on the clown world winners list is New Zealand. New Zealand’s government have been amongst the most insane during the COVID hysteria, perhaps only outdone by Canada and the crack-pot drama teacher, and it doesn’t look like sanity is going to be reinstalled in NZ any time soon. Apparently the New Zealand government have decided to combat their inflation issues and rising costs by inflating the money supply and handing out some fiat currency to bribe their population and keep them compliant and submissive. According to this article from the abc, the payments are aimed to support families as the inflation crisis peaks.“New Zealand’s government said Thursday it will hand out an extra few hundred dollars to more than 2 million lower-income adults to help them navigate what it describes as “the peak of the global inflation storm.”It’s difficult to believe this is even real, given how incredibly absurd it is. But i guess the clown world is only going to get more clowny. I’m genuinely starting to be open to the possibility that this is actually a coordinated and controlled demolition of the financial system to make way for a new and improved iteration via CBDCs where a whole new level of control can be exerted upon populations, as the measures taken are just too outrageous. It’s nearly impossible to believe that the people implementing these measures do not understand the ramifications of the actions they’re taking. Or perhaps it’s just a natural course of action as a result of the varying incentives that exist. The NZ Dollar is currently down just shy of 30% from its highs in 2014 and while that’s a period of 8 years and there has been some ebb and flow, the chart is not looking good. Infact it looks a lot like the chart of a shitcoin as the rolling hills of distribution are starting to look well established and its in an 8 year downtrend on the monthly. Brutal.The simple reality is that inflation, and specifically the ability to inflate the money supply is at the root of our problem. It is not the solution. Trying to fix this s**t show by printing more money, is akin to being completely broke and thinking you can solve your problems by getting a new credit card. The fact that we are being blatantly lied to about this should scare you. ‘The inflation will save the day’ propaganda is only going to continue to ramp up, meanwhile country after country continues to tell a different story as the dominos fall one by one.This tweet from Saifedean is on point:For centuries fiat currencies have been created and destroyed, and many lives along with them. Never in our civilizations history was there a viable alternative that would sustain through time. Until now.No one is going to force you to adopt bitcoin. Thats the beauty of it. It’s a peaceful resistance, and you can choose to opt-in to the network - or not; and when you consider the fact that in life, you have to be a node in a monetary network of some kind in order to be able to survive, and your choice is between one where admins have special privileges compared with you - like in fiat, or you can choose a neutral network of only users - no admins. Where no user in the network has any power over another, with a cryptographically fixed supply that can not be changed. Compared with a system where some admin who lies to the population like it’s a sport, can just arbitrarily create more at the flick of a switch, stripping value from you and your family at will.Once you frame it up, It becomes increasingly bizarre to consider that many people are actively choosing the fiat network as their preferred monetary network at present.But over time, I believe this will change. It’s just a sign of how early we still are. The world has never had an immutable network with the properties of bitcoin. In years to come, we won’t be able to imagine a world without it.Hope you all have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you next week.AKTwitter | Youtube | Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like

Good Morning Everyone,“Don't Listen To What They Say; Look At What They Do”I first heard this heuristic from Nassim Taleb and it refers to the fact that words are cheap. There is far more signal in peoples actions than in their words. Simply put people can say whatever they like. And they do. People talk all kinds of bs with little concern for accountability. Especially with the pace of informational transmission with the internet and social media, the news cycle is so fast these days, that the attention of most people is in an absolute tsunami of content and most things are forgotten as quickly as they came.Markets topped back in November 2021 as the Federal Reserve narrative pivoted and began to posture that they would cease increasing the money supply - something they like to refer to as “easing” - to fight inflation - the exact inflation that they caused as a result of increasing the money supply and not letting people leave their homes to go to work. Funny that. Who could have possibly guessed that such insane measures would trigger an economic disaster?! This coincided with markets adopting a risk-off posture. While selling in the short term was clearly the move, I want to postulate why i think listening to what the fed says is far less valuable compared with paying attention to what they’re actually doing.It’s important first off to understand the feds fundamental position. They have something in the vicinity of $9T in assets, and now in excess of $30T in debt. So they have a debt to asset ratio of around 70%. In other words for every 1 unit of assets, they have 3 units of debt.They’re deep in the red obviously. But in the fiat system this is the case for most users that are considered “rich”. They’re up to their eyeballs in debt. The difference for the fed compared with the average user in the fiat network, is that the fed can just arbitrarily increase the money supply, and essentially print away their debt, or at least the value of the currency and thus enable to them to pay for their debt with newly printed US shitcoins. Since the 2008 financial crisis, it has been pretty clear that this is what they’re going to do. The chart below shows M1 which consists of currency outside the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve Banks, and the vaults of depository institutions (amongst other things). The chart speaks for itself.So while the fed are saying they’re going to tighten and increase rates, and markets have reacted accordingly by selling aggressively since November, they have actually only increased rates so far by 25 basis points (0.25%), and 50 basis points (0.50%). Most of what the fed does is political theatre. They’re in between a rock and a hard place, whereby they have so much debt, that they cannot increase rates in a significant and sustained way over time, as they have too much debt to service. But they have to pretend that they care about inflation, as it starts to hit families and enters the overton window within the media and the political landscape. But the reality is they want inflation. Infact they need it. The only way they’re ever going to service their debt is through currency debasement. Just like the UK did before them with the british pound, and the dutch did with the guilder before the brits.This story has been told before throughout history. Even back to the roman empire it is clear that the wheels fell off once they began to devalue to denarius. So in the short term they can raise rates a little and pretend like they care about inflation. But i believe the fed is extremely limited as to the extent to which these actions can be sustained. Especially when you consider the level of household debt, and the fact that the vast majority of people have little to no savings. There will likely be some "extraordinary” catalyst that will be blamed as to why we must get back to printing and increasing the money supply. Maybe it’ll be Putin, maybe another pandemic. Who knows.But they have talked the talk. Now we will have to wait to see the extent to which they can actually act, and walk the walk. Meanwhile… 1 bitcoin = 1 bitcoin.If your unit of account is sats. You’re sitting pretty in the most powerful and pristine monetary good to ever exist. Don’t get tricked into worrying about the fluctuations relative to melting usd ice cubes. It’s simply an opportunity to accumulate. One currency is going to be printed into oblivion, despite what they might say, and the other can never be changed.Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to you all tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,The concept of saving is likely something few people give much thought to. It’s somewhat intuitive. If we eat all the food in the fridge and have no money saved, then we cannot buy anymore food until we get more money, and if we get hungry in the interim this poses an issue and will likely cause us some discomfort. Suboptimal. So we have to either save some food or save some money to maintain some level of certainty about the future in this very small example.The concept of saving is predominantly linked to our time preference, which is our ability, and the extent to which we prioritise delaying gratification. That is the extent to which we prioritise the future over the present or vice versa.Saifedean talks extensively about time preference in his book the fiat standard, and identifies it as the primary negative externality of being on a fiat standard as opposed to a hard money standard. That as a society we have less certainty over the future and our time preference increases, whereby we begin to discount the importance of the future and shift out preference to prioritise the present. This is the fiat disease. A modification of our time preference from a low time preference or a low sensitivity to time (ie: prioritising the future), to a high sensitivity or high time preference whereby we prioritise the present.As a result of inflation via a corrupted and flawed monetary system our ability to save value across time diminishes. This leads to a number of undesirable higher order effects, but one of the primary symptoms of the fiat disease is that it perverts our risk tolerance and pushes people further out on the risk spectrum in an attempt to preserve wealth. “This has manifested to produce what many of us would refer to as clown world. Where lying is the norm and deception has become a core business tenant.”It used to be that if you gave a bank $100 of your money to store, that they would then be able to leverage that capital and earn a yield. For this opportunity they would pass on a small amount of this yield and you would earn $5 on your $100. Nowadays if you place $100 in a bank in many parts of the world where negative interest rates have become the norm, not only are you getting killed by crippling high inflation, but the bank does not only operate in opposition to your best interest invading your privacy, your rights and facilitates a full scale surveillance racket which targets you and every person or entity you interact with in a population and around the world, the bank will also charge you $5 of your $100 for the privilege of using their service and storing your money within their predatory establishment. Insane right? Only in a clown world could something so clearly absurd and absolutely mental be normalised and accepted. Where a large swath of the population have been fed so much fiat information (read: lies) that they have lost the ability to disseminate the truth from the fiat noise, and infact many of which actively defend the nonsensical mind sludge. Thankfully, Bitcoin fixes this.Jack Mallers gets it right in this little rant. I’ve included a clip below.“The federal reserve has perverted risk tolerance across all assets; and here’s what i mean by that. No one knows the price of anything any more. No one even knows the true rate of inflation right now, and no one can now save in dollars - whether you know that; or whether you’re on Tiktok and you’re seeing the guy with the nice car as the one that bought AMC at the right time. It is implied through human behaviour, through societal behaviour and just through mathematics that you have to hold other assets if you want to preserve and retain wealth.”The fiat system is going to continue to try and deceive you into remaining a slave to their centralized and predatory surveilance system which masquerades as a monetary system - and they will apply force to do so.If you are ok with this, it’s probably wise you unsubscribe from this letter as it’s almost guaranteed that the content here within will trigger you and you’ll blame me for hurting your feelings and dissolving your delusional sense of certainty provided to you by this system of slavery. On the other hand, if the fact that your sovereignty as a human being born into a human body is being violated, and attempts are being made to further enslave you and to trap you within a predatory system does not sit well with you, and you generally oppose the clown world, then you would welcome the fact that a mechanism, a technology, a tool now exists whereby you can peacefully opt-out of the madness and cast your vote as a human being on the planet of earth that you believe in-order for humanity to survive and thrive across time, and the fundamental behaviour that has led us to the present moment right now is our ability to maintain a low time preference and prioritise the future over the present.On one hand you have closed, centralized hierarchical network that preys on the many

Good Morning Everyone,Understanding financial markets whether it be from an investing or trading perspective is not easy. There is myriad complexity despite what you may hear or some people may have you believe. The mechanics of how the system actually works are opaque at best and the incentives that exist as a result of how the system operates given the complexity of incentives at play, and also the positions of different entities or nodes within the network, differ significantly and alter the end result.This is one of the points where the bitcoin network and fiat network differ most significantly. Obviously the bitcoin network has incentives for miners, and those incentives differ from that of a user, and these incentives are likely to evolve and mutate over time given that we’re still operating in a kind of limbo in between two competing systems. One system that has been well established and installed within the operating system of society for over 100 years - fiat; and the other only a short 13 years in comparison - Bitcoin.Our external systems have advanced significantly. There is absolutely no doubt that the level to which the bitcoin network is superior to that of the old legacy fiat installation of money is not even a question at this point (for anyone that understands it). One thing however that has not undergone the same level of technological advancement is the human hardware. Meatspace. Us.We have figured out how we can outsource some of our processing and cognition via computers, like our memory via storage devices that can store infinite calendar entries, notes, photos and videos of past experiences - our actual brains though and more specifically our emotional responses to extreme events at scale appear to have remained fairly consistent over time.The two main malwares that effect our cognitive operating systems are those of fear and greed. This quote from Warren Buffet is well known, and while he is a massive cantillionaire and has been a huge beneficiary of the fiat system, I’m of the belief he still did a lot of work to understand himself and his own mind which is what gave him his primary edge. The realisation of the two primary psychological diseases of fear and greed. His primary skill was to develop simple heuristics (alongside partner and fellow rat poison believer Charlie Munger) that enabled them to make decisions when facing uncertainty. An absolutely key competency when it comes to trading and investing, and also perhaps most significantly, in life. The quote is from 1986 and reads as follows:"[O]ccasional outbreaks of those two super-contagious diseases, fear and greed, will forever occur in the investment community. The timing of these epidemics will be unpredictable. And the market aberrations produced by them will be equally unpredictable, both as to duration and degree.Therefore, we never try to anticipate the arrival or departure of either disease. Our goal is more modest: We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful."This likely sounds simple and intuitive to many when you read it now, but thats the thing with brilliance. It appears simple. I can assure you to execute this “simple” strategy when operating under the complexity of experience, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that its anything but.Right now within markets, fear is at extremes. There is a crypto fear and greed index that has been operating since 2018. As this index accumulates more and more data the efficacy of it will become more or less apparent. A couple of days ago it showed a 10 read and today is at 8, which is one of the most extreme fear reads since the index was created.If you go back and reference this chart alongside price action it makes a fairly interesting case. I’m not going to do this now, but if you’re curious it’s worth a look (below).My interpretation of the chart is that if this is a macro bottom, which will only be confirmed in hindsight, it’s likely to take its time and more than anything is likely to trade sideways and lull people to sleep.Most people are not traders. And most assets are not verifiably scarce.In my opinion (and this is by no means financial advice) the best thing we can all do is just accumulate and hold bitcoin, and times like this while fear is at extremes, are a phenomenal time to do so. Especially if you think old mate Warren has any clue at all. It’s obviously not guaranteed to go lower in the short term, but in my opinion its very likely to go higher in the long term as more people begin to actually understand the technology, join the dots and start stacking sats.To some they still think of it as “crypto”. Good luck to those people. For the initiated, it is the most advanced version of money ever invented. If you believe this as i do, then it’s a game of accumulating as much as you can while we try to help wake up as many normies as possible to the impending collapse of the fiat ponzi. Like I said, this is cert

Good Afternoon Everyone,I’ve spent the day on the road driving from Melbourne to Moruya for skydiving event i’m coaching at this weekend. It’s about a 9 hour drive. I was pleasantly surprised when i loaded up youtube to find a new discussion with Dr Saifedean Ammous and Lex Friedman on Lex’s podcast. Here is a link to the podcast. I cannot recommend this enough. It’s is easily the best pod i’ve listened to this year. One of the best I’ve ever listened to, and without question my new go-to to orange pill anyone new to bitcoin.This podcast was the perfect companion for a long drive as it was over 4hours long and went deep into economics and specifically differentiating between the fraudulent Keynsian version as well as the perspective of the Austrian school of economics. Obviously bitcoin was at the heart of the discussion, and both Saifedean’s books were discussed and unpacked as well as some phenomenal explanations and clarifications on why shitcoins are shitcoins, why proof-of-work is so profound and why proof-of-stake systems are essentially a scam.One snippet from the conversation that i wanted to zoom in on was Saifedean’s clarification on why bitcoin is the superior monetary good humans have ever invented.It can be summed up in simple terms as the title suggests:“Harder than gold and faster than fiat”.Saifedean delivers perhaps the best explanation I’ve heard of bitcoin when asked to explain what bitcoin is. Here is how he responds. Also as i’m on the road there is no audio from me today, so I’ve included audio from the conversation as quoted below.“Bitcoin is a software and it's a distributed software to operate the peer-to-peer network between members who are all equal on the network - they're all peers - and what this software does is that it allows you to operate a payment network between those peers and that payment network has its own currency and that seems like just a simple software game, but the reason this is such a big deal, is i believe bitcoin is the most advanced form of money ever invented and the reason for that comes from two properties that this network has.The first one is that the currency is the hardest money ever invented. It's the money whose supply is the most resistant to inflation. it's the first monetary asset that we've ever invented that is guaranteed to be fixed in its supply that cannot be increased beyond a certain number. So there's only ever going to be 21 million bitcoins and that's a qualitative leap forward in our technologies of money.All of our monies leak essentially because people can always make more and more and more of them. The best money is the one that leaks the least which is gold because it only leaks one and a half percent. In other words your share of the gold stock is diluted by one and a half percent every year. Ideally you'd like it to be zero. Bitcoin is currently at around one point eight percent headed towards zero, so it's the first money that we've ever had that goes to zero in terms of terminal supply. So there'll never be more than 21 million bitcoin.I think that's a huge deal because as i said earlier money is always whatever is the hardest to make and now bitcoin is the hardest thing to make, and then the second property which is extremely important as well is the fact that it operates without the need to trust in anybody.It doesn't have a party that is in charge of it. It doesn't have a central authority. As i said it's peer-to-peer so it only has users - it doesn't have any admins. There's no authority in charge of bitcoin that can take your bitcoin; that can stop you from using bitcoin; that can change the rules of bitcoin. They can't make more of it so it's fixed; it's available for anybody in the world. It's the hardest money ever invented and I think it is absolutely an enormously enormously significant invention; because if you read the fiat standard and the bitcoin standard as well, you'll see my perspective for why i think a very large number of problems in the world are caused by easy money; are caused by inflation. Are caused by government having access to essentially an infinite recourse to people's wealth. I think bitcoin fixes this because it allows us to have money that has the saleability of gold across time meaning it holds its value across time. Like gold, but much better than gold; but also it is similar to fiat in that fiat can travel quickly - but bitcoin can travel even faster than fiat. So it combines gold's saleability across time with fiat’s saleability across space in one immutable package that nobody can change and nobody can control.”If that is not the most powerful explanation of what bitcoin is, then i do not know what is.This absolutely blew me away and i’m sure i’ll continue to simmer on it for the next few days. I urge you to listen to the podcast in full when you can allocate a full 4hrs to immerse yourself in the learning. So unbelievably powerful to consider the content is freely available too!Hope you h

Good Morning Everyone,The hopes and dreams of many shitcoiners were shattered yesterday as Terra - the so called algorithmic stablecoin - lost its peg and went into freefall. It went as low as 0.61c and has since “recovered” slightly and is hovering around 0.70c at the time of writing.It’s a rare day that I would waste a seconds energy on a shitcoin, but this scenario is simply too comical not to discuss, and while it sucks that many people likely will have lost a ton of money gambling on this rubbish, it should serve as a valuable opportunity for those of you that have broken free of the fiat mind disease and see these scams for what they are.For those that have never heard of Terra let me give a tiny bit of background. I first heard about it a couple of months ago, and the only reason i likely did is because it was using bitcoin to collateralise it and back its peg. It was created by a South Korean named Do Kwon. Do Kwon did the rounds making a ton of noise and creating hype to launch it, and presumably to attract capital - touting it will usher in a “new monetary era”.According to their website the protocol is explained as follows:The protocol consists of two main tokens, Terra and Luna.* Terra: Stablecoins that track the price of fiat currencies. Users mint new Terra by burning Luna. Stablecoins are named for their fiat counterparts. For example, the base Terra stablecoin tracks the price of the IMF’s SDR, named TerraSDR, or SDT. Other stablecoin denominations include TerraUSD or UST, and TerraKRW or KRT. All Terra denominations exist in the same pool.* Luna: The Terra protocol’s native staking token that absorbs the price volatility of Terra. Luna is used for governance and in mining. Users stake Luna to validators who record and verify transactions on the blockchain in exchange for rewards from transaction fees. The more Terra is used, the more Luna is worth.Do Kwon had made a statement back in March that he wanted to be the largest BTC holder aside from Satoshi, which triggered my scammy spidey senses at the time. Do yourself a favour and click play on this video.I didn’t pay any attention beyond this until now, as it seemed kind of self explanatory that it was just another scam leveraging bitcoin to try and promote their racket. But the speed at which this thing went from:“We will be the largest BTC holder in the world” to “UST stablecoin peg breaking”and Is just too classic.This clip of Raoul Pal as he is informed of the peg breaking captures the moment perfectly. Wait for it.Jokes aside for a second, there are a couple of genuinely interesting points to note out of this s**t show. The first is that bitcoin is a transparent public ledger, and the fact that UST was backed by bitcoin means that we can see the bitcoin being sold to try and prop up the peg. I’ve included a couple of tweets below that include the addresses if you want to take a look in a bitcoin block explorer.You also have to marvel at the beauty of a decentralized army that collates and researches in real time and shares information via social media in these instances. The capability of a decentralized community to monitor and track a scenario is really an incredible thing to witness and stands out to me as being a major positive force to have come out of the advent of the internet and social media more generally.There is a more technical side to how this stable coin lost its stability, and it’s articulated well in this tweet below for anyone interested in understanding in a little more detail.From my perspective the specifics are less interesting as this is simply another centralized shitcoin pretending to be something the world needs, and a predictable basket of greedy humans that fall for it and are left holding the bags.The sad reality is that this really was so tediously predictable as Nic Carter says:Anyway, enough timewasting talking about this scam for today.I’ll leave you with this beauty from Mike Novogratz.You really cannot make this stuff up. In the words of Matt Odell, stay humble and stack sats.Hope you have a great day. I’ll chat to you tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,As most of you know i tend not to talk too much about bitcoin price action in these letters, as i view the price relative to USD shitcoins as more of a distraction than anything else, as the true unit of account in my opinion is bitcoin or sats. Measuring this truly inelastic asset against something that has and will continue to be created into infinity makes little sense in my mind, and it’s not until you replace your UOA for sats that the true state of play begins to become clear. However I realise the USD price can be a vacuum for the attention of many, and particularly those early on their journey down the bitcoin rabbit hole so i wanted to make a couple of comments as the price breaks down below $31,000USD.The first thing I wanted to note is that for the class of 2021 that purchased in or around the 60k level, being at a 50% drawdown can be psychologically challenging. There is no way to make this process easier, and infact, there is much to learn about ourselves in these moments if we are willing to pay attention. One thing that must be said however, is that the situation can definitely be made worse by capitulating and selling your bitcoin due to the perceived psychological discomfort you may experience as a result of price fluctuations.It’s important to recognise the mind game of markets. The market as you perceive it, measured by prices on a screen, is designed to trigger you psychologically to press a buy or sell button. But the market cannot touch you, or move you arms or legs, or physically force you to do so. It does so by triggering you emotionally. Which is to say you do it to yourself. However if you train your attention, you can choose to channel your focus elsewhere and become agnostic to the whims of the market. This ability is a super power, and a necessary one to be successful over time.This quote from Charlie Munger hits the nail on the head:“If you’re going to be in this game for the long pull, which is the way to do it, you better be able to handle a 50% decline without fussing too much about it.”My advice for anyone in this phase is the following:* Zoom out. Get clarity on your thesis, and write it down on paper.If you are worried it’s often because you’re suffering from the fiat disease of a high time preference. Zooming out and gaining clarity over your thoughts and expectations will help you in deploying patience. Your inability to do this also offers a hint for what you need to do next. It highlights your lack of conviction;* Build Conviction by learning.If you are worried, you lack conviction. This typically indicates you only really entered at the prospect of price increasing and being able to sell to someone else at higher prices. Pure speculation in other words. This is not on it’s own a bad thing, it’s only an issue if you are suffering from a level of self deception and don’t realise it. If price is all you are thinking about, you do not yet understand what bitcoin is. Focus on learning. Stop looking at price and do the work. Read the books instead of fixating on price. Conviction = a low time preference.* Focus On The Lows, Not the Highs.This flipping of perspective can be a powerful reframe to help you have a more realistic and productive frame of reference over the variability of price, and to provide a vantage point that is more conservative and less euphoric.* Perspective Is EverythingThis tweet perfectly articulates the typical failures of the human mind in truly grasping time and the changes that occur over it. In 6 short years, as the next halvings are in 2024 and 2028, the block subsidy or issuance of bitcoin will be reduced to 1.56 bitcoin. Meaning the reward that miners earn for securing the network in 2028 could be purchased today for $53,000. Zooming right out and looking at how the deflationary model of bitcoins issuance changes over time, is a powerful tool to visually capture the alien concept of true digital scarcity.* Get Your Bitcoin Off Exchange & Custody Your KeysThis one is pretty self explanatory, but it’s of the upmost importance. It’s extremely likely that there are many more IOUs that exist for bitcoin, than actual bitcoin. If you hold your bitcoin on an exchange all you own is an IOU. In the event that everyone wants to redeem their IOU at the same time, ie a run on the bank or exchange, anyone that has given the privilege of custody of their keys to said exchange is exposed to counter-party risk, and risks loosing their bitcoin in the event the exchange fails under this stress test. It is only those that custody their own keys who are truly immune. Personally, I choose to view this phase of the market cycle as necessary, healthy and unavoidable. When we have capital being allocated to jpegs of rocks and apes, and the average “investor” thinks shitcoins are anything other than a scam, these phases of the market in my opinion are the naturally occurring mechanism to help educate us and expose our delusions and recalibrate the

Good Morning Everyone,Back at it after a short break. I was away travelling for a couple of weeks skydiving in outback Queensland, and then managed to get myself the flu (yes covid), so I’ve been resting up for a week while my energy levels normalise. Pleased to be back to 100% now, so lets waste no more time.A lot has happened over the last 2-3 weeks. Risk markets have continued their risk-off posture and asset prices have acted accordingly with powerful moves to the downside being sustained. Unfortunately bitcoin price is not immune to this market dynamic with price looking weak - currently trading at $34,200USD. However for anyone that understands the nature of this truly inelastic asset and the fact that it is literally the most pristine monetary good to have ever existed, these times should serve as an opportunity to accumulate and stack more sats.Back in March i highlighted the situation in Argentina, whereby the IMF offered another predatory loan to the country with a number of conditions including a clause to crack down on “cryptocurrencies”.The French African colonial bank is next to get in line, sending a letter to Central African Republics President after introducing a bill to make bitcoin legal tender in the nation. The letter warns adopting bitcoin as legal tender will have “significant negative impact” on the colonial franc system.I wasn’t aware of how deeply imbedded the French were in Africa and actually how much they have preyed on many of the small nations until I listened to this discussion from the bitcoin conference with Alex Gladstein & Farida Nabourema (timestamp 15min) where Farida does an incredible job of articulating the lay of the land historically. I highly recommended you give it a listen in order to gain some proper perspective on the situation.The short version is that these countries are not in control of their money, and are essentially operating as part of a non-neutral network and one that enables censorship. They are less powerful nodes in the monetary network enabling actors with more power (the french) to devalue the money and strip value from the less powerful nodes in the network - the people. So it should come as absolutely no surprise that now with the advent of bitcoin, countries like the CAR wish to adopt a neutral monetary protocol. A protocol that does not give any node in the network power over another. Just like the IMF in Argentina, the French African Colonial Bank should be expected to continue to take action to deter the use of bitcoin as it threatens their business model, which is predicated on their ability to prey on every node that connects to the network. Given how poor the nation is, it looks like more of a trojan horse than anything to me and one that likely spurs others in the region to challenge the status quo.It’s hard to believe sometimes that we live in a world where entities exist that want to oppose your right to choose your money. That is for the free market of free humans to decide. Sadly they do exist. Thankfully, we have bitcoin, and bitcoin most certainly fixes this.Have a great start to your week everyone. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.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

Good Morning Everyone,Markets are a funny thing. They’re insanely complex in many respects, and they can also be boiled down to a pretty simple truth about someone having something to sell and a separate person looking to purchase that something. Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about “a market” is that they emerge more or less spontaneously. They can emerge for myriad reasons but they only really survive through time if there is ongoing supply met with ongoing demand. What I find really interesting to think about is the phenomenal level of hubris of the human mind, to think that we can control something that emerges spontaneously out of infinite complexity that we can only begin to understand in hindsight. This desire runs so deep within our species, and no matter how many times we try and fail, typically via our compulsive naive intervensionism, create extremely undesirable unintended consequences which damages and impedes a market over time, we seem to be struggling to get the message.The number of examples of this are endless. Something as simple as serving drinks requires some kind of a license, or to be able to serve them beyond a certain time requires a license. This kind of thing is just beyond absurd in my opinion. If person A wishes to run a business selling drinks at 5am, and person b wishes to purchase drinks from person a at 5am - who is anyone to tell them otherwise? If there is no market for it, person A will simply shut up shop having received clear feedback from their so-called market. It requires no intervention. Unfortunately however, this neurotic and obsessiveness to over control has been well and truly normalised within our current iteration of society and this parasitic malware is likely to attempt to spread to, and attempt to infect the bitcoin ecosystem, as it has most other areas of our society.There was an interesting conversation from the bitcoin conference about mining that included some discussion about regulation. Marty Bent hit the nail on the head in my opinion where he said something to the effect of:Bitcoin and bitcoin mining has been running flawlessly without regulation for 13 years, and implying that if it has been running without the need for intervention to date, what would give anyone the impression it requires government intervention now.It’s not obvious to me when it became anyone else’s business to dictate to another person what they could use their purchased electricity for. But it does appear that when it comes to bitcoin, people of this pathological belief exist. This rule from Jordan Petersons book ‘12 Rules For Life’, comes to mind when i think about this insatiable desire to unrelentingly & naively attempt to control everything and anything. Of course with the exception of our selves. “Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World”Bitcoin and the industry it has spawned around mining is an unbelievable and in many ways inconceivably huge net positive for the world - if we just let it be. The notion that we would even contemplate telling a business what they can and cannot use their electricity for is beyond insane and there should be absolutely zero acceptance of such a ridiculous utterance. If person A is creating value as determined by person b, and person b is willing to purchase said item from person A at X-price there should be no need for any further conversation. If someone thinks there is a better way to provide this service that is more in line with their values, this is an opportunity, and they should create the offering and be rewarded by the market for their efforts, if correct, rather than complaining and trying to over-control others. The time for this kind of primitive human behaviour needs to be left in the past. We need to move to a more sophisticated mode of operation where we can deploy a level of humility. Where we are open to the possibility we may not be capable of fully understanding and perceiving the complexity. That if something can emerge entirely on it’s own and in a spontaneous fashion, perhaps it does not require our intervention and the best way to allow this to be solved is within the dynamic of a free and open market.I believe that bitcoin is in the process of reintroducing what a free market is to those that have been living within a corrupted and distorted society for too long. This changing in perspective cannot happen soon enough.The following sums up my thoughts.“You don’t change bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you.”With that said, below are a few content suggestions for the easter weekend. I hope you all have a great easter and share it with special people and family. Wishing you all well, and i will talk to you next week.AKArticle: True Names Not Required - Der GigiThis article blew my mind. I recommend exploring Gigi’s site and reading through pretty much everything he has written as it’s filled with genius and mind expanding clarity.Pod: Cult Of Central Banks - Ricardo B. SalinasThis man gets it.

Good Morning Everyone,Inflation in the US has been at 40 year highs for the last number of months and the most recent ‘official’ numbers came out this morning with the trend continuing -printing 8.5% month-over-month inflation. Of course the propagandists would have you believe that this is not from increasing the money supply or disrupting supply chains and commerce globally in response to the flu - it’s all Putins fault of course. “The Putin Price Hike” is the official inflation slogan coming out of clown world to deflect any kind of accountability from the lunatics at the levers of power. The political class are waving the peak fiat flag as they blatantly lie and gaslight a population. This kind of propaganda is so decoupled from reality it really is beyond belief and demonstrates the extent to which our current system is broken - if these people are considered ‘leaders’ or ‘elites’.6 months ago it was transitory. Then it was the fault of greedy corporations. Then supply-chain bottlenecks. Now everything is just Putins fault.The thing with these inflation numbers is that they’re a simplification of an incomputable complex world (at-least for the time being). The fed has a formula in which they measure CPI (consumer price index), which identifies a basket of selected items and tracks the changes between these items over time. As we know though, the formula has changed, so the historical data and any subsequent comparisons of changes over time become distorted. If they were still tracking the same basket of goods, and utilising the same formulas these numbers would be MUCH higher!Shadowstats.com is the best known site to show what the true numbers are using the unchanged model, and is run by John Williams. If you want to dive a little deeper to better understand how and why these changes have been made he explains it here in a pod from last year. The true numbers would be well into the double digits! (site currently down so unable to get exact figures)The other part about inflation is that our preferences are not all the same, and thus we do not all purchase the same baskets of goods. So there is a technical argument to be made that we are all exposed to different levels of price inflation which is certainly true, but there are some broad typical commonalities where we tend to generalise.For this primary reason, i find CPI as being less informative and prefer to focus on one specific kind of inflation which i think drives all others. That is inflation of the money supply.Simply put, if we increase the money supply by 40% then we should expect somewhere around a 40% increase in prices, as the value of the money is essentially reduced by the same number. This rings true for real estate, meat and food broadly, oil and many essential commodities and other items.It’s wild to reflect on how truly deranged and distorted our society is becoming under the clown-world dynamics. Propaganda has been fully normalised. Lying and gaslighting citizens is standard procedure; meanwhile truly critical priorities that we should be fully aligned on and actioning with the greatest of openness, honesty and intention barely seem to make the cut. The average family right now is struggling to afford to fill their fuel tanks and nourish their children with nutrient dense food, while the political class continue to lie, distort and distract and play absurd and dangerous games. It really is as if reality has been forked and we’re running two different implementations of the ‘reality software’. The sooner we can remove these dangerous and divisive lunatics from positions of authority and power, the sooner we can let the beauty of human intelligence and ingenuity rise up, and charge toward a better future. The importance of fixing the money has never been on greater display than it is right now - meanwhile the most sophisticated monetary network is waiting idly in the background and slowly being adopted one person at a time. Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.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