Bitcoin Unlocked

Good Morning Everyone,Alex Gladstein popularized this concept of Bitcoin as a trojan horse based on the story from greek mythology.According to Wikipedia:“The Trojan Horse refers to a wooden horse said to have been used by the Greeks, during the Trojan War, to enter the city of Troy and win the war. The Greeks at the behest of Odysseus constructed a huge wooden horse and hid a select force of men inside, including Odysseus himself. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war.”The idea here is that bitcoin as the trojan horse is not what you think it is. Most people have been lured into Bitcoin through greed, and the desire to obtain more than what they have; as an investment and a way of making money. Many have viewed it as some kind of get rich quick scheme. This is a profound design feature - and not a bug. Bitcoiners refer to this as number go up (NgU) technology. The fact that the price of the asset continues to go up and to the right over time, is the bitcoin protocol’s marketing strategy, completely baked in from the beginning. It’s a design feature based around the predictability of human behavior. Based on our dopaminergic biological and neurological systems that drive us to seek reward and gratification, to accumulate resources for our survival and in an almost preprogrammed way in an effort to rise in the dominance hierarchy. It is this NgU tech that in most cases lures a person in, to acquire the asset, like a bee to honey or a moth to a flame.Once you have been sufficiently motivated and acquire the asset, you continue to learn more about the technology as it appreciates in value and you become more attached to the phenomenal investment you made, and pat yourself on the back for your sound decision making.Meanwhile, inside this trojan horse of bitcoin and this beautiful NgU tech built upon the foundation of true ultimate scarcity, is a hidden feature, that is ‘freedom go up technology’ (FgU). This FgU tech is the greek army on the inside of the mythological trojan horse, and the greek army outside the city of troy on their way back to be let in the gate under the cover of night by their men.This FgU tech is insanely complex and multifaceted. Fundamentally, it is an emergent technology to enable and support societal organisation and cooperation. A tool to align human beings based on our highest values in a completely bottom-up way, and a catalyst to stop power from concentrating in the center and to allow it to be redistributed back toward to the edges. To empower the individual.It is the decoupling of money and state. A completely pure and pristine vision of money. It is the ability to express value and transact with anyone you wish, for whatever good or service you wish, on a completely neutral and open protocol that has no interest in your political views, your ethnicity or the color of your skin. A protocol available to anyone with a smart phone and an internet connection. That is borderless and does not care about the arbitrary lines on a map drawn by humans. A protocol where no entity has the ability to get in the middle of your expression and censor your transaction, that is your speech, because you have an opposing view, because of who you are or because of who you are associated with.This NgU tech is not only appealing to individuals however. There is a complex game theoretic element to the design of this trojan horse that has already begun to propagate in the form of corporations and nation states. Obviously these are simply structural frameworks in which to organise human capital and facilitate cooperation, so the psychological tendencies are the same as above. The difference with this layer is that over time, it will become an imperative for these entities to lead the trojan horse into their city as well, to acquire bitcoin, and the ones that do it soonest benefit disproportionately, gaining an advantage over those that wait.Fidelity Digital Assets team wrote this on the subject in a 2021 wrap up:“We also think there is very high stakes game theory at play here, whereby if bitcoin adoption increases, the countries that secure some bitcoin today will be better off competitively than their peers. Therefore, even if other countries do not believe in the investment thesis or adoption of bitcoin, they will be forced to acquire some as a form of insurance. In other words, a small cost can be paid today as a hedge compared to a potentially much larger cost years in the future. We therefore wouldn't be surprised to see other sovereign nation states acquire bitcoin in 2022 and perhaps even see a central bank make an acquisition.”Powerful stuff. One thing to highlight from this quote is that they don’t say anything about a ce

Good Morning Everyone,I watched a clip last night of Chinese President Xi Jinping address the World Economic Forum, outlining his vision for the world, values he see’s as necessary and some priorities and areas of focus for future. It was quite strange to watch, as his audio had been muted and had someone else narrating essentially what he is saying, rather than providing subtitles to his audio. His primary points included:* Embrace Cooperation and defeat the pandemic* Resolve various risks and promote steady recovery of the world economy* Bridge the development divide and revitalize global development* Discard Cold War mentality and seek peaceful coexistence and win-win outcomesIt got me thinking about Ray Dalio’s framework for the changing world order, outlined in his book titled ‘Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order’, and where we may be in the present cycle.The image below lays out the birds eye view of the cycle from the book, with the second image zooming in a little.While the image above shows where we may be in the current cycle from the perspective of the US, it got me wondering, where are we from the perspective of China? If in fact, Ray’s thesis is on the money.Please understand this is not a judgement on whether or not any of this is good or bad. Where possible, I try to avoid thinking about it in those terms. It’s simply a mechanical assessment of the situation rather than a moral, ethical or ideological one.Whether China are at 5, 6, 7 or 8, it seems difficult to dispute that they are on the rise, while the US is in decline. That much seems difficult to make a case against at this point. As you can see in the cycle above, a loss of reserve currency is part of this cycle. In the last 500 years it happened from the Dutch Guilder to the British Pound and most recently again from the British Pound to the US Dollar. Is the world is going to go through some kind of Yuan-ification? Potentially. We are certainly seeing a trend of de-dollarization that is likely to continue. What i’m confident about, is that money as a technology has no place being controlled by any central government or entity. As i’ve said many times here already, it’s simply too great a power to be allocated in that way, and ultimately leads to the system corrupting, and some form of monetary reset. Over time, it is a fragile architecture.The Chinese President made this analogy, reflecting the collectivist mentality central to socialist or communist styles of governance.“Facts have shown once again that amidst the raging torrents of a global crisis, countries are not riding separately in some 190 small boats, but are rather all in a giant ship on which our shared destiny hinges. Small boats may not survive a storm, but a giant ship is strong enough to brave a storm.”While this is true in many ways; of resources, skills, production capabilities and others, decentralization is a strength and not a weakness. While it is most ideal to cooperate and seek to play positive-sum games, the game of trying to force our values and ways of life on others, in my opinion, is a loosing one. It is anyones guess how things progress throughout the 2020s. I remain increasingly convinced we’re in the throws of a period of rapid change whereby 100 years of change likely happens in a decade. Whether we label it the great reset, the changing world order, or the fourth turning makes little difference. I’m just grateful there is an escape hatch, a mathematically deterministic monetary standard available to anyone that wishes to opt-in and that no one can control. That is open, borderless, neutral and censorship resistant. A global standard to provide some certainty in a world that has never seemed more uncertain.While the values and principles of Bitcoin are clearly in opposition to those of China, it provides the rest of the world with a way out. It will be fascinating to see which countries choose to pull this lever and opt-in and adopt a global monetary standard built on rules without rulers.Hope you have a great day, and i’l speak with 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,Canadian Politician Pierre Poilievre, gave a powerful speech in the Canadian house of commons last month. It’s so strangely refreshing to hear a politician actually make sense and have a thorough understanding of what they’re talking about, rather than just playing words games, deflecting, blaming and a general avoidance and lack of true intention of actually addressing anything meaningfully. It’s crazy this stands out, and even seems novel in the time of COVID hysteria, but it certainly does. I’ve attached the video below. I urge you to watch it in its entirety, as Pierre gives an excellent explanation of money, as it turns out, inspired by Saifedean’s book “The Bitcoin Standard”. The speech was predicated on the following: The government asked parliamentarians to approve another $7+ billion dollar expenditure ($7,000,000,000). Mr Poilievre posed the question to the government officials, the majority of which were from the finance committee. He asked:“Where does the money come from?”After minutes of silence, he received the following response:“The money is within the governments broader macro economic framework, and I cannot speak to that”? This highlights the parasitic culture of dishonesty (and/or ignorance) that has corrupted governments, certainly Canada’s in this instance, but all around the world, which are built upon an experimental monetary system that is predicated on the same underlying characteristics.In this example, you and I, and all the free people of a country are the host, and the government is obviously the parasite. According to the CDC the definition of a parasite is:“A parasite is an organism that lives on or in a host organism and gets its food from or at the expense of its host.”The person that responded is either genuinely ignorant and has no idea, in which case the decision to appoint them to a finance committee should be questioned aggressively or; they do not want to answer honestly.As Pierre clarifies; for those in parliament money comes from 1 of 4 places.* Taxed (theft)* “Printed” (Purchases Government Debt)* Borrowed* Re-allocated spending from 1 of the above.Now i’m no expert on the political dynamic of Canada, nor do i have any interest in becoming one. I’m sure Pierre has flaws, as we all do, and no doubt there is an element of political theatre to his speech, but the crust of his message should not taken lightly.The current monetary system is fundamentally broken. The primary purpose of money, as a technology, is to enable us to transport value across time and space. This system enables government to steal value from the people of that country through inflation with absolutely no accountability to reality, that is to a world of scarce and finite resources. It enables a level of spending beyond what government actually have at their disposal from the population via taxation. This system incentivizes government to print money, that is to increase the money supply, as it is politically the most frictionless option in the short term. In the long term however, it leads to catastrophic outcomes. It enables and incentivizes government to grow beyond what is truly necessary, functional and ultimately in the countries best interest, which manifests entirely new higher order problems, many of which we’re seeing in the world around us today.It is this inflation of the money supply that distorts everything between us, as money is on one level a complex language that communicates and helps us to simplify what is otherwise an extremely complex world. It ultimately leads to major civil unrest and brings out the absolute worst in humans as our systems are corrupted and short circuit as happened famously in Germany in 1933. Bitcoin is the antidote to this broken system, and thus it’s no surprise that many governments have scrambled as to how to deal with it. Bitcoin allows you to transport value across time and space like nothing else that has ever existed. It will preserve value into the future for hundreds of years and many governments do no want you to be able to do that.It is with this tool, that the oxygen will be sucked out of the room for these governments that wish to operate in opposition to the interest of the people, and that has the potential to usher in an entirely new paradigm of human co-operation, over time.It’s never been more critical to get educated and understand what is going on around us. The best tool is to opt-in to the peaceful protest, the open source computer software of the bitcoin network and preserve your wealth across time and space from being inflated away by reckless government actors.Check out Pierre’s speech, it’s well worth the 20 minutes.Hope this finds you well, and i look forward to speaking with 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,In a tweet this morning Jack Dorsey announced his intentions to build an open Bitcoin mining system. Jack first signaled that this was being considered back in October last year, and that the hardware would be based on custom silicon and fully open source for individuals and businesses worldwide, built in the open and in collaboration with the community.Fast forward three months, and it’s now confirmed and is happening. One of Jack’s colleagues posted a thread discussing the companies thinking so far.They discuss many areas of potential focus and improvement, but what really jumped out at me was this comment.This is a big time bet by Jack and his team. Jack is prioritizing his resources, both personally and that of his companies, to build hardware that supports a future that is fully decentralized and permissionless. Jack is not just some random kid on the internet with some crazy hair-brained idea that has as low probability of executing. Jack is a known quantity with a proven track record. He has already built multiple multi-billion dollar companies, and has demonstrated a rare ability to identify trends in technology and in building companies of the future. For example, Twitter was launched all the way back in 2006, before the iPhone or Facebook. So he had a strong conviction that it was of value more than 15years ago. Some people around the world still have never even used the platform. In my opinion, this is a major inflection point. Its estimated 80% of the humans on earth in 2022 have a smart phone. 8/10. That is a staggering figure. Could we be moving to a world where 80% run bitcoin miners? Call me crazy, but I honestly think it’s possible, even likely. If the hardware is readily available, reasonably priced and “just works” out of the box more and more people will adopt it. People will look back on this time and wonder why no one else had done this already, and that it was so obvious upon reflection. But the truth is it’s not obvious, and it requires an incredible level of vision and conviction to execute that few have. The implications for the network have never been greater. Decentralization is inevitable. The current system is being decommissioned and a new system is being built before our eyes in real time. In the open and in collaboration with the community.Powerful.I hope you have a strong finish to your week, and I look forward to speaking with you on Monday.Before i go - if you’re finding these letters valuable it would mean a lot if you could share with your friends and family so we can help as many people as possible make sense of the shift that is taking place and be best prepared for the future. Appreciate it. Chat to you MondayAK 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,Yesterday in an email to the bitcoin developers mailing list, Jack Dorsey along with Alex Morcos and Martin White, announced the formation of The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund.The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit entity designed to defend developers from lawsuits and unwanted legal issues that may discourage developers from contributing to Bitcoin and related projects like lightning.To quote from the email:“The Bitcoin community is currently the subject of multi-front litigation. Litigation and continued threats are having their intended effect; individual defendants have chosen to capitulate in the absence of legal support. Open-source developers, who are often independent, are especially susceptible to legal pressure. In response, we propose a coordinated and formalized response to help defend developers. The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is a nonprofit entity that aims to minimize legal headaches that discourage software developers from actively developing Bitcoin and related projects such as the Lightning Network, Bitcoin privacy protocols, and the like.”You can read the full email attached below.The fact that bitcoin developers are being targeted legally is wild when you consider many of them contribute for free at their own cost, to what is a completely free and open source community project. It raises many questions that our society is either not equipped to deal with in its current iteration, or seemingly somewhat unwilling to have honest conversations about.How do we consider code legally? Is code speech? Are we free to express ourselves openly and freely? or are we not ? and if not, why not?These are questions that need answers, and we need to think deeply and carefully about the way in which we answer them, as they lead us down diametrically opposing paths, and the impacts could not be greater.Are we really living in a world where contributing code to a free and open source project can bring about legal attacks? Clearly it seems to be the case. How stereotypically dystopian that is.The formation of the fund however shows a powerful level of clarity and commitment from Jack, Alex and Martin to have identified the need for this fund and to have executed on this. Jack said earlier in the year at the bitcoin 2021 conference:“I don’t think there’s anything more important in my lifetime to work on and I don’t think there’s anything more enabling for people around the world.”He went on to say:“Whatever I can do, whatever my companies can do to make Bitcoin accessible to everyone is how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. If I were not at Square or Twitter, I’d be working on Bitcoin. If it needed more help than Square and Twitter, I would leave them for Bitcoin. But I believe both companies have a role to play and I think anything we can do as companies to help find the right intersection between a corporate narrative and a community open narrative is for the best.”Since stepping down as CEO of twitter less than two months ago, Jack’s actions have been in complete alignment with these words. This is yet another powerful intentional action taken.Developments such as this, really serve as a powerful reminder of the mission and how big the vision of Bitcoin actually is. The mission of Bitcoin is so far beyond that of an investment or some kind of get rich quick scheme. As the saying goes, most get into it for number go up (NgU) technology, they stay for freedom go up (FgU).Bitcoin is the trojan horse. This is about freedom. To free our human society from the predatory behaviour of central banks and governments. To install a truly free market and fundamentally recalibrate society from the current short term rent seeking nature, where bad behaviour is incentivized, power centralizes and ultimately corrupts, and those who lie, cheat and steal the best win; to a world where the monetary system - that is the base layer of our society - is in complete alignment with our highest values and is programmed in to prevent the worst in us from corrupting the system.Wishing you all well.Hope you have a great day, and 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,In the early hours of the Australian morning while most were still sleeping, big tech, specifically Google’s video platform Youtube, were busy maintaining their horrific record in relation to censorship.The Bitcoin Magazine channel was deleted mid-livestream overnight.Youtube’s apparent reason for deleting the channel was that to educate people to buy bitcoin is “encouraging illegal activities”. I haven’t seen the livestream, so I have no idea what was being discussed, and while there are obviously rules relating to financial advice, it would appear wildly inappropriate, beyond extreme cases, to simply delete a channel in this way without first communicating with the other party, providing clear and specific feedback about the issue and giving an opportunity for them to correct it.Perhaps in severe cases a warning in the form of a strike needs to be issued, or rare cases of instant deletion may be warranted, but for most cases it is fairly straight forward and is solved through a basic level of communication. It’s important to acknowledge that while people that create channels on these platforms are not owners of the platform, they are in many cases best considered business partners to these companies. Creating content is the basis for platforms like Youtube to exist, and it is off the back of content creators that Youtube are able to sell advertising and profit from this work, and it is the very feature of allowing anyone to create and broadcast content that created the platforms network effect in the first place.The trend of censorship on big tech platforms, like Google/Youtube, Twitter and Facebook is absolutely out of control, and continues to demonstrate the need for censorship resistant platforms, and as will become increasingly obvious to more and more people over time, the need for censorship resistant money.No single entity can be trusted with wielding this power. It is simply too great. While there is every chance that the channel gets reinstated, due to the fact they have a reasonably large following, the bigger issue is that we do not have an adequate structural framework established with theses platforms that maintains a reasonable and fair balance of power. The relationship is completely asymmetric in favour of the platform and against the content creators.While they will get away with this in the short term, due to their dominant market share and the giant tail wind that is the network effect, it’s in the interest of these businesses to address this, or be super-seeded over time by a superior technology platform that addresses this issue and demonstrates a level of respect for their business partners, or better yet, simply does not have the ability to censor in the first place. With each new instance, more and more users are being exposed to the problem and will subsequently seek alternatives. While the problem is not going away immediately, with each passing day we get closer to a solution.Hope you have a great day, and i’ll speak 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,There is a wild situation unfolding in Kazakstan as the country have seen massive increases to the cost of energy, specifically LPG (liquified petroleum gas), resulting in large anti-government protests, with the president of Kazakstan calling on Russia to send troops to support the government in quelling protests. It seems the government had a cap on energy prices and the removal of this allowed prices to increase, sparking violence and disorder across the country, unbelievably with the President ordering troops “shoot to kill” if people do not surrender. Wow.According to an article from January 4th:“It all began with the phased transition to electronic trading for LPG that began in January 2019 and concluded on the first day of this year. The idea was to gradually end the subsidizing of prices for domestic fuel consumers and to allow the market to dictate prices instead.”It would appear that as a response to the protests the president has initiated a near-total internet blackout to limit communications of the people, in an attempt to reduce the populations ability to co-ordinate and organise. I can only presume it would have been the president, given the entire government cabinet resigned last week as a result of the chaos.Netblocks have shown major disruptions since Jan 6th and reported that while it appeared connectivity was briefly reinstated yesterday, it has again been shutdown.This is an obvious measure to be taken by a state actor, given basically all communications these days are via this protocol (TCP/IP) - including a large percentage of phone calls, which operate via VOIP (Voice Over IP). It does make me wonder if we are likely to see this in more countries as a tool, as more and more governments around the world face an increasing level of opposition for a variety of reasons including rising energy costs as well as restrictions in response to the pandemic.What has this got to do with Bitcoin?According to CBECI, Kazakstan is home to approximately 21.9% of Bitcoin mining hash rate (as of August 21) due to the low cost of energy. So the current situation is of particular interest in respect to how the internet blackouts impact mining operations, and the network more broadly.The network hash-rate hit an all-time high on the 1st of Jan, and has since dropped around 19% from 209 EH to just below 170 EH. In yet another demonstration of the power of a decentralized and globally distributed computing network, there has been no impact to the networks ability to process transactions as block after block continues to be mined like clockwork or blockwork perhaps better said.If we zoom out a little the trend is very clear. (see below)Didar Bekbau, CEO of mining operation Xive.io (pronounced Z-ive) based in Kazakstan, posted a great thread to help the community better understand the situation and provide a boots on the ground perspective. He states that the majority of riots are in the south, and the majority of miners are located in central and northern parts of the country and doesn’t think it will have any major impact longer term. Didar posted as recently as 11 hours ago that half their mining rigs are back online, and expects the rest to be online within the next few days.The situation in Kazakstan highlights internet connectivity as a very real attack vector not only for individual mining businesses, but the network as a whole, and while localised attacks like this one have little impact overall, more widespread outages where major nation states coordinated to shut down the internet, could potentially have a very material impact on the network. According to Blockstream CSO Samson Mow, Satellite + alternative broadcasting methods would provide the necessary failsafe to protect from these kinds of attacks in future.To quote Samson:“I think a lot of governments will try to regulate bitcoin, but it’s going to be a very challenging thing to do because the nature of bitcoin it is unregulatable, it’s just information. A lot of people think bitcoin is money, but actually ‘we think’ bitcoin is money. Bitcoin itself is just information.So Bitcoin in order to become the foundation of a global financial system, a new global financial system, has to have redundancy so it cannot be reliant on just terrestrial internet.”The idea behind Blockstream satellite is first of all it’s cool, but secondary it’s also a needed technology. With Blockstream satellite we’re broadcasting these blocks, so even if an undersea cable is cut for whatever reason, a country cannot be cut off from the network because they can still receive bitcoin blocks over Blockstream satellite.”Obviously most of us would prefer to see less aggressive and less authoritarian styles of behaviour from nations states, however as the internet continues to dilute their concentration of centralized power, there are a variety of indications this unfortunately may not be the case; and if the network is to remain secure it would seem like it

Good Morning Everyone,A debate erupted (pun intended) on Saturday with American fiat economist Steve Hanke intentionally mocking El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele over his plans to utilize geo-thermal energy from an inactive volcano to mine bitcoin, and to power the proposed “bitcoin city”. He said in a tweet:Lets be clear. Hanke is the epitome of a fiat economist. His twitter bio states he is also an FX and commodities trader. Assuming he is actively participating in markets as per his own words, it’s important to appreciate his motives, and the incentives at play. That’s not to say what he says is automatically untrue, but in this instance it seems that he is either wildly ignorant to the particulars related to geothermal energy and volcanoes, or has a very strong bias against El Salvador. I don’t know for sure, but my money is on the latter. I view betting against Hanke in a similar vein to betting against fellow washed up fiat slave Paul Krugman who has been ridiculed and basically laughed out of existence online for the last 15 years for his comments comparing the internet to fax machines.Honestly you can’t make this stuff up. I used to connect to bulletin boards from the school library when i was 12yo in the early nineties, and I could have told you that back then that the internet was going to be HUGE. Perhaps he was short a bunch of tech stocks at the time and was talking his book.. ? We’ll likely never know.Anyway…President Bukele fired back highlighting Hanke’s obvious lack of understanding in relation to geo-thermal energy in a high quality twitter dunk.To quote Bukele:Hard to argue against the idea of building a city below an active volcano. Not sure who could possibly think thats a good idea .. ? Hanke’s comments seem to suggest he thinks so. Pretty classic.You’ve got to love the fact that conversations like this can happen on the internet in a completely open way and public way. Pre-internet when a small number of corporations had a monopoly on broadcasting, it was easy for them to discredit those they opposed, and difficult for people to set the record straight and call out the nonsense and counter. Not any more!Just another example of how powerfully the way we communicate globally has changed. Access to this kind of discourse in my opinion is absolutely incredible, and the value of it is certainly not lost on me.The debate continued with Steve Hanke calling for a feasibility study, and stating El Salvador already has a huge energy deficit and that they import 22% of their electricity.President Bukele does not waste a second and unleashes a jordan-esque dunk session on Hanke and shows he is clearly underestimating the Salvadorian President.In a phenomenal thread that i recommend you read as he includes some images and further data, he completely pulls apart Hanke’s attack, and frankly gives him a real dressing down.Bukele highlights the following:* El Salvador does not have an energy deficit. They import energy because it is still cheaper in some respects to do so. Maximum energy consumption in El Salvador is 1,030 MW, while the installed capacity is able to produce 2,065.79 MW* Bukele outlines the $1b natural gas plant project he started at the beginning of his presidency projected which would output 380MW of electricity 24/7, in a cleaner and more economical way than anywhere else in their region.* The plant will start producing as of May this year* This will enable El Salvador to export energy, and remove less sustainable supply.* El Salvador are building a water damn that will generate a further 66MW of clean energy* Despite the countries size (21,000km2), there are more than 170 volcanos.* El Salvador have dug 4 new wells to increase energy production from geothermal, and plan to do more.* Regarding the “inactive” Conchagua Volcano - Bukele estimates a 90% chance of finding a well generating more than 42MW - enough alone to power bitcoin city.Bukele finishes with the following:My main takeaway from this is that Bukele is clearly being underestimated. He is focussed and has prioritized energy which is without question to the benefit of the countries citizens. He demonstrates competence on the topic of energy, and is betting on it. He is running El Salvador like a CEO of a company. He is getting the attention from the world, because instead of talking and playing games, and playing politics - he is executing.Very hard to hate. Especially in a world fixated on case numbers, masks and general covid hysteria.While I have no doubt it’s not all sunshine and roses, ofcourse Bukele has his flaws as we all do, but it’s very difficult to want to bet against him. Especially when his international collegues are making it so easy. The majority of leaders, certainly those in the west are making Bukele look like something akin to a political version of Jeff Bezos. Although it feels like the bar has never been lower politically, and most in the west continue to demonstrate an utter lack of competence

Good Morning Everyone,In a really valuable conversation with Preston Pysh, Nic Carter highlighted the situation in Myanmar, and pointed out what an interesting and telling example it is for the potential fork in the road that more countries are likely to face in the upcoming years as political monies become more and more encumbered and weaponised.For those that are not aware of the situation in Myanmar (Burma), the short version is that the country had enjoyed a brief period of democratic rule in recent years, in amongst a turbulent history. The military had been heavily intertwined within the countries governance structure and in February 2021 a military coup was initiated to take control of Myanmar from the NLD party, and declared a state of emergency within the country. NLD leader and Nobel peace prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi was detained under house arrest following the coup, and in December 2021 was jailed for incitement against the military and for breaching COVID-19 restrictions.Where this gets particularly interesting is in relation to what has happened monetarily following the coup, the role of money, and what impacts the technology of money have in situations of conflict. What qualities and monetary characteristics become more important, and why. There are two opposing local forces - the military and the shadow opposition government. The military have adopted the Chinese Yuan as their settlement currency while the shadow government have adopted Tether, a US-backed crypto stablecoin. Not only is it compelling to see a real world use case of a government adopting a non traditional monetary system as their settlement layer, it’s fascinating given the fact that 10 years ago, it was not possible, or certainly nowhere near as frictionless. So the dynamics at play here are somewhat novel and may provide a glimpse into the future, as to how future conflicts may be impacted as a result of this emergent technology.To quote Nic:“ On the one hand you have the coup government, which is a Chinese-backed coup which happened earlier this year. They de-dollarized their settlement currency. They went from dollars to Chinese Yuan. I think that’s very indicative of the way the world is going, especially in the Chinese sphere of influence, is de-dollarization, and that’s one trend to keep an eye on.The other thing that happened virtually at the same exact time, was the opposition government, the shadow government, that was deposed in the coup adopted Tether officially as their currency. A stablecoin, a dollar backed stable coin. And these 2 things happened at the same time. So on the one hand you have official de-dollarization and Yuan-ification and at the same time from the opposition, you have crypto-dollarization happening because the opposition government wanted to raise capital from the Burmese diaspora worldwide, they needed an efficient settlement currency, but they couldn’t be encumbered by lets say the Burmese banking system. They had to do something outside of that system. I think this was such a telling little anecdote. It’s kind of two visions of the future, and it’s what I would take to US policy makers that are thinking about stablecoins and think about the crypto market. They’re very scared of stablecoins US policy makers, they kind of hate them, they fear them, and they think stablecoins are a threat to the dollar. Some of them think stablecoins are a form of counterfeiting etc… But just look at this little example. You have on the one hand this secular long-term threat to the dollar, which is a competing currency, competing for global reserve status from a rising hegemon; and then at the same time the dollars reach is actually expanding through crypto rails, through stablecoins acting as extensions of the dollar.The stablecoins are backed by dollars and then they’re issuing claims against them circulated on blockchains, and because they are circulating on these credibly neutral infrastructures with no censorship hopefully, depending on the blockchain, that is this frictionless way to distribute dollars to the worlds population, to places that need dollars, and they need dollars in a less encumbered way than sort of the good old US dollar in the legacy system, which is very encumbered, very politically encumbered.. and I just thought that was such a telling little story. Thats sort of like, two forks, and here’s world one, and here’s world two - which one would you sort of rather? “There are clearly some big themes here, particularly in respect to the Yuan-ification of countries within the Chinese sphere of influence. This is something that is only likely to increase.Secondly, is the optionality and potential tool stablecoins could be utilized as by the US in the face of the declining power of the US dollar, and as more countries de-dollarize.Finally, is the need for “money” to be neutral in order to be truly effective and valuable as money. The best form of money has no utility, contrary to common

Good Morning Everyone,Nasdaq-listed company BTCS has announced a world first corporate dividend that has the option of being payable in Bitcoin. They are calling it a Bividend. The bividend will act as a typical dividend whereby share holders on the registry at the ex-dividend date, will be entitled to a dividend from the company which they can opt-in to having paid in bitcoin, or otherwise receive as normal in USD.Interestingly, the divided is not the usual income & capital gains dividend that most would be familiar with. It is a "Return of Capital Distribution” dividend. Meaning there is no obligation for anyone receiving this to pay any tax based solely on it, as it is considered as “a distribution in excess of an entity’s current and accumulated earnings and profits”.CEO Charles Allen stated the companies reasoning for the offering as follows:“We want to reward our long-time shareholders for their continued support and encourage financial freedom by providing the means to enable direct ownership of Bitcoin and other digital assets.”For now this unique dividend seems to be a one-off, and the company have not stated any clear plan for it to be adopted as a permanent standard.“BTCS is very much in the growth phase. That said, the Company is evaluating the appropriateness of future Bividends.”Clearly the development was received positively by traders & the market, with BTCS share price jumping 66% at the high, and closed up 47% on the news.This is an interesting development, and it likely paves the way for other corporate entities to experiment with new and unique methods of capital distribution. It will likely attract plenty of attention and it certainly further legitimises the use of Bitcoin within traditional markets.It’s important to me that i separate myself from the people that use any announcement to hype something up and give the impression that because of xyz -this thing is going to the moon. After looking into what BTCS actually does as a business, i cannot honestly say it is of particular interest to me. It seems like they basically run a heap of nodes for so called “decentralized” Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols, or companies better said, and give investors a way to gain exposure to these companies in a traditional way.The use of blockchain this and blockchain that on their website screams nothing positive to me. There is nothing special about a blockchain as a data structure on its own. It’s a term that has been way over used and leveraged to signal to investors that basically do not know what a blockchain is or does and essentially associate it with bitcoin, to raise capital and facilitate a flow of funds from the pockets of said unsophisticated investors that do not understand the technology they are considering investing in.What is positive however and important to highlight, is the fact that they are choosing to distribute this capital in bitcoin. In a way that encourages participants to custody their own bitcoin, learn about what that means and involves, and likely learn more about the digital asset by doing so. This can only be positive, and it will be interesting to see how the market continues to view this development in the lead up to, and post the companies first bitcoin dividend. I hope you have a great day, and i’ll chat 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 process of phase transitions, that is transitioning from one state to another, is interesting to think about, particularly in respect to money - and bitcoin.Water is one of the best examples. it can exist in four distinct phases, or states.Solid ←→ Liquid ←→ Gas ←→ PlasmaMoney has undergone many phase transitions over time, from animals and produce, to shells and physical objects, to metals, coins and various commodities like gold and silver, to paper fiat money and most recently in the context of history to ones and zeros on private databases.The worlds reserve currency, the US Dollar, has also undergone multiple phase transitions.From physical gold coins (One dollar = 371.25 grains of pure silver = 24 grains of gold), to Paper Certificates backed by gold, to paper backed by nothing. The phase transitions in respect to money seem very clearly defined. The form from say a gold coin, to a gold certificate cannot be confused. But if you think about how the transition will have actually taken place, it would have seemed a little more gradual. There would have been a period of time where both are still accepted as one is being ‘phased out’ and as the newer form gains acceptance, is widely circulated and the new norm is established and the final transition is complete.Thinking about water transitioning from liquid to solid; when precisely does it stop being liquid and become ice? Is it when it is 30% frozen? 50% ? 80% ?Obviously at the completion of the transition it is clearly solid and is unmistakably ice, but there is a period during this transition between liquid and solid states, where it is some of both states in varying degrees.Applying this lens to the transition that is underway in relation to bitcoin helps to provide some valuable clarity, as it can be difficult to discern where we are when we are in-between a phase transition, and are neither liquid or solid, rather some variation of both.People often comment about mass adoption of bitcoin, and for it to be ‘successful’, mass adoption is needed, but what is not well understood is that for bitcoin to become widely accepted as the best form of money, it does not require 100% of people to adopt it, to believe it, to own bitcoin or utilise the network. Infact there will be a descent slice of the population that will not want anything to do with it until there is literally no longer an option. That cohort of people are known as the laggards.The law of diffusion of innovation separates the population into 5 categories as outlined in the image below. I’ve attached a short clip where Simon Sinek does an awesome job explaining this, and why it’s such a powerful concept to understand.As he explains:“ if you want mass-market success, or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18% market penetration; and then the system tips.”Willy Woo estimated the number of Bitcoin network users to be around 135m. I’ve seen other estimates around 200m. Either way, this is a tiny fraction of a 7b+ human population. At 135m it’s around 1.75%.Using the law of diffusion of innovation as a guide, it seems likely that we are passed the initial phase where the innovators adopt the technology and are somewhere in the early adopters phase, although i’m just speculating. From network user estimates it seems clear we have not yet reached adoption from the early majority, but this seems inevitable at this point, given the amount of legacy institutions that have announced various bitcoin product launches forthcoming for their clients.The bottom line is, if we are in the midst of a monetary phase transition, and i believe we are, we are much closer to the beginning of the transition, than the end. 16% of the population will wait until the water has completely frozen to announce it is now ice. By which time the majority of the population have transitioned, and the opportunity to benefit disproportionately has been and gone. As with the internet in the 90s, social networks were inconceivable due to the small number of network users. It was not until the network effect had taken hold, and a critical mass of people adopted the technology, that the use case of social networks became a possibility. In the very same way, it is inconceivable to imagine all the ways in which this transition will transform society and the ways in which we operate as a result. All i’m confident of, is that it’s early days, and the tipping point is yet to come.I expect that the move from early adopters to early majority will be absolutely breathtaking.Hope you have a great day and 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,January 3rd 2021 marks 13 years since the Bitcoin genesis block was mined by Satoshi, and this entire shift began. Pretty wild to think about how much has changed in 13 years. The very first iPhone for example was released only 18mths earlier.. Life was very very different.Above you can see the codebase from the genesis block with a message inscribed by Satoshi which reads:“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancelor on brink of second bailout for banks”Here is the image of the newspaper Satoshi was referencing.13 Years on and at the time of writing, block 717,072, is about to be mined. The price of this nascent asset has gone from a fraction of a cent, to a high of $69,000 US shekels, and the market capitilization of the asset hovers around $1T USD with huge adoption from all corners of the world. Individuals all over the planet run the software and verify the networks transactions (these are known as the nodes). More and more mining hash power continues to come online with each passing year to secure the network and in search of the remaining 10% of the 21m issuance.It really is crazy to think about how much has happened in 13 short years. We have seen a nation state in the form of El Salvador adopt Bitcoin as legal tender (let that actually sink in!) along with a host of corporations adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets including Tesla, Square and Microstrategy. These developments were among the first. It is unlikely they are going to be the last.We are now into the 4th halving epoch, and the strength of the network is only moving in one direction - up and to the right. The network has operated exactly as designed producing block after block for 13 years straight, with no traditional hierarchical structure, no CEO, no head decision maker, no HR manager hiring the best talent and no ultimate judge and jury that can be called upon. This point is not trivial.The network is operated by a truly decentralized and globally distributed group of individuals that ultimately believe that this innovation is significant and have chosen to dedicate their time and energy towards furthering it. No one approved them to do this, there was no job application or interview process - it’s simply on the basis of whether or not they add value, and the market determines this. Many do not even operate under their known ‘real world’ identity, they operate under pseudonyms. It is a completely new kind of framework for human organisation and cooperation. A brand new system, unlike any other we have ever conceived in the history of civilization.A completely flat, bottom up structure organised around a software protocol that was first bought online 13years ago, that no one can own or control, or hold physically, with no rulers, that exists nowhere but is everywhere. It really does defy belief. It’s so serendipitous, and the more you learn about it, the more incredible it becomes, and unlikely it seems. Yet here we are.Happy 13th Birthday Bitcoin (for yesterday Aussie time)Hope you guys have a great day, 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,Turkish Supreme Leader Erdoğan is currently walking a path that history has not been kind to. As discussed, Turkey has been the most recent country to cave to painfully high levels of inflation which have seen a flight from the local currency, the Lira, to just about anything else, as citizens seek to prevent their wealth being siphoned away at a record rate. While many will attempt to seek safety in other assets, a likely majority of unsuspecting individuals, that are not educated on these topics, and blindly trust their government to save them, will be crushed as prices for basic goods soar.It’s important to understand for context that Turkey is not nothing. Turkey is a G20 nation with a population of 83m humans, so for the people that live under the delusion that wherever they live is immune to these kinds of happenings, think again. Venezuela was at one point the 4th largest economy in the world!Now it’s 435 trillion Bolivars to 1 USD.When sustained levels of inflation exist it acts as a negative flywheel, or feedback loop. As it persists, more and more people lose confidence in the currency, which further amplifies the problem as more and more people look for a way out to preserve their purchasing power.This leaves government in a very challenging position, having to essentially choose between austerity, whereby they raise rates which is typically very unpopular or redistribution which involves devaluing the currency and can happen in a more stealthy way.Through these periods the propaganda tends to be strong in an effort to persuade the population into believing in the mission, and the importance of making sacrifices for the greater good. It’s typically a very collectivist type of messaging.See below supreme leader Erdogan doing just that as he addressed the nation in mid December:He says:“ Neither interest and exchange rate speculators nor sworn domestic and foreign enemies of Turkey nor a handful of greedy people can determine the future of our country and nation. Together we will make sacrifices and finally we will reach our goals. While the world, developed and developing nations altogether are struggling, and we continue to grow. It means we are close to our goals.Likewise, while all these countries falter not knowing what to do, we are advancing, totally locked onto our goals and close to the victory. “The problem with inflation is the government response doesn’t stop at currency devaluation and redistribution. As you can see in the clip below. The Turkish government have implemented a program for local police to go around to small businesses checking prices, and giving fines if they’re deemed too high.This is a classic example of naive government intervention in the market, and is highly unlikely to lead to any positive outcomes.The mechanism of price in the market is so complex. The price or something is the distillation of so much information. Every cost by each different party involved in producing x good or service. Attempting to manage this essentially by force is just madness. If people are over charging, the market will naturally correct for this and competition will enter the market and drive down prices, and/or people will look for alternate suppliers. If you want to get more deeply acquainted with the history of price controls, check out “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation” here, by Scheuttinger & Butler.Erdogan has now created an incentive scheme to try and motivate citizens holding gold to convert back to the Lira. While it appears that this initially is an opt-in scheme, it will be interesting to see if it becomes a more forceful push and sees the government outlaw holding gold, as the US did in the 1933 when FDR made it illegal for citizens via Executive Order 6102.These actions are typical, and well document. They are the classic symptoms of failing political monies and the result of charging humans with the impossible task of managing a monetary policy. The hubris needed to actually believe one firstly understands something as complex as markets in the first place, then also that knows the exact measure to take to correct the issue, is at this point laughable.How many times will we need to see this story repeated through history to learn the lesson?It’s not that i don’t trust governments ability to manage this. It is that i know that over time, they have a 0% success rate. The time has come for citizens of the world to wake up to this reality, and opt out of this repetitive silliness. Ultimately the decision is yours. Will you choose to blindly trust a government of pseudo-elites to manage the money, and all the likely implications or will you trust in a decentralized protocol that is open and public, and has a predictable predetermined monetary policy backed my cryptography and mathematics, that anyone can verify.In my opinion, it is no longer even a choice. A small select few humans have no place managing the money, and

Good Morning Everyone,The price of Bitcoin at the time of writing this is $47,136 when priced in melting USD ice cubes.From the low in January 21 to now, price is up approximately 69%From Low to high price rallied 147% in 2021Lets compare that to major market indicies…The Nasdaq (NQ1!) which is predominantly comprising of tech & financials, is up 31%, with the S&P (SPY) up 31% for the year. Both have printed new all time highs in the month of December, and look set to print new monthly closing all-time highs while Bitcoin is currently lagging and continues to consolidate sideways in a range.Gold (GLD) is down 7% but has been ranging and consolidating since printing a high in August 2020. Current price of gold is down 12% from the highs. Silver is looking far weaker down 31% from its highs in the same month.Oil (USOIL) was a star performer in 2021 up 79% from top to bottom, and continues to look extremely powerful into 2022. You will notice that i choose not to get too distracted by short term price action in these letters, as i think it is far more valuable to focus on the developments on and around the protocol and to maintain a low time preference in relation to price relative to the US Dollar. This is primarily due to my overarching thesis that over time, the USD as the unit of account (UOA) will change, and the most critical measurement from the perspective of UOA is the number of sats, or bitcoin. 1 BTC = 1 BTCIf everything else is essentially leaking value, or melting, while BTC over time retains it, then to measure your wealth in anything else makes little sense in my mind.The 3 core pillars for something to function as money are:SOV, MOE, UOAStore of value. Medium of Exchange. Unit of Account.Bitcoins initial widely accepted, beyond being something to speculate on is as a store of value. Thought of by many as digital gold - despite my belief this comparison falls well short of the true reality, for many its a useful analog to help people in developing their understanding of the asset.As a medium of exchange the USD is far and away a better tool as MOE for now. But over time, this is likely to change. Whether it be to bitcoin or a variety of different currencies or monies. Bitcoin is primarily addressing the properties needed to make it functional as a medium of exchange in higher layer solutions, like the L2 scaling solution, the lightning network.But in my opinion where the rubber really meets the road, is where Bitcoin becomes widely accepted as a unit of account. Where other items are measured against the perceived value of BTC as a preference to other ‘monies’ because its a better proven SOV. It’s not commonly discussed or really acknowledged, but this process has already begun within the crypto space with other tokens and ‘assets’ being measured in both USD terms, and BTC terms. Vijay Boyapati discussed this recently in an awesome podcast with Stephen Livera. Money is very special. And, and the reason it has this premium is because people value it for the functions of money that it provides society that we really need. We really need the function of a store of value, really need the function of a medium of exchange. We really need the function of unit of account. and I think that the importance of that insight, is that money doesn’t get its value from its utility.Once you make this change in your mind, the reality of what is happening around you becomes much clearer. It’s easy to accumulate things in USD terms (or fill in the blank with any political money), because they are melting ice cubes, but it becomes clear that it is far more difficult to accumulate relative to BTC as the annual compound growth rate of the asset is so powerful. Or atleast it seems so, when everything else around it appears to be depreciating at such a rate.It is still early days for this nascent asset, as the worlds population grapple with trying to understand it and how best to treat it. If you are reading this, you’re already ahead of the wave that is coming. Despite the price in USD terms, it is still very early days in my opinion and there is a ton of work to be done.I could not be more optimistic for a future with bitcoin in it, and feel deeply privileged to be alive during this mammoth transitional phase. 2022 is going to be the year that many people are forced to reconsider their preconceptions in relation to this asset, and I look forward to welcoming them into the community.I appreciate you all. Happy new year!I’ll chat to you in 2022-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 Afternoon Everyone,Following on from yesterday’s letter..Let’s address how much energy the Bitcoin network actually uses.Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index is the most-cited source estimating current annualised electricity usage at 126.25 TWh.To get a perspective of what this means - The entire world uses in excess of 170,000 TWh per year of electricity.This means that the Bitcoin network at peak estimated consumption uses To quote Lyn Alden from an exceptional piece she wrote on the topic: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.Plus, a large percentage of the energy that Bitcoin uses is from otherwise-wasted energy sources.I recommend you read Lyn’s article linked above for a deeper dive.I think it is also extremely helpful to understand why the bitcoin network uses this energy, and the fact that this is actually a design feature of the system, and not a bug. The act of ‘mining’ using the proof-of-work consensus mechanism is what secures the network. It is counter-intuitive but you actually want it to be expensive and thus difficult for any individual to amend the blockchain by adding a block. The immutability of the global ledger is critical. If anyone could easily do so, the network would be vulnerable to easy and frequent attacks and render the system useless. The expense to do so, which is the projection of power, deters would be attackers and thus secures the network. This is necessary for a global monetary system and in actual fact, as you can see below, in comparison to the current system it is wildly efficient, contrary to what you may have heard. According to ARK Invest analyst Yassine Elmandjra:Traditional banking emits 1,368 Megatonnes (Mtoe) of carbon per year and gold mining emits 144 Mtoe. Bitcoin emits 61 million Mtoe, less than 5% and 45% of traditional banking and gold mining, respectively.As Nick Szabo said in his article ‘Unenumerated’ in 2017“Prolific resource consumption and poor computational scalability unlock the security necessary for independent, seamlessly global, and automated integrity.”The other thing to mention in respect to total electricity utilisation that is very much relevant, is the total number of network users. The current number of network users is relatively small compared to a pre-existing technology like the internet, and a common concern is that as this number grows, then so will the total electrical consumption, and the network clearly has plenty of growth likely ahead of it.Estimates of this number vary, and the truth is that it’s impossible to ever truly know the total number of network users - we can only ever estimate. In 2021, estimates show approximately 106m users. An obvious concern would be if the electricity usage increases linearly with network user growth then the resources required to run the network could become more significant - but this is not how the system works. There is limited space per block, and limited blocks mined p/day, and its unlikely for this to change. The scaling will happen on a L2 solution like the Lightning Network, and the base layer is preserved in order to optimize for security.To quote Lyn again:In the very long run, if Bitcoin is wildly successful and becomes a systemically important asset and payment system used by over a billion people at 10-20x its current market capitalization, it should reach several tenths of one percent of global energy usage.The point is that the Bitcoin network is and forever will be a rounding error as far as global energy consumption is concerned, whether it’s successful or not, and its energy usage won’t exceed its long run utility (however high or low that utility ends up being).The next fragment in this conversation is the sources of energy used. Below is a chart showing the global energy consumption by source.As you can see, a very small fraction of total energy consumption is derived from renewables, and anyone that knows anything about the complexities of supplying base load electricity to a grid will tell you that it’s highly unlikely that renewables are going to be able to provide for this any time soon. To rely on renewables for anything more than a minor bump to overall capabilities would commit us to descending back into the dark ages, and i mean that literally. Estimates of Bitcoins energy sources vary significantly from a 2019 report suggesting 73% of mining is carbon neutral while the CCAF indicated in a 2020 report that the figure is closer to 39%.Given that it’s been established that total energy usage is essentially a rounding error globally, the complaint that the energy is primarily derived from fossil fuel sources is trivial

Good Morning Everyone,The energy usage of the Bitcoin Network has been discussed and hotly debated for years. From an article in 2017 claiming “Bitcoin Mining on Track to Consume All of the World’s Energy By 2020“ (which was clearly nonsense and a classic example of clickbait headlines) to Elon Musk tweeting about Tesla suspending Bitcoin payments due to concerns about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining. It is clear that there is still a perceived issue by some, and a lack of confidence for many relating to Bitcoin and the networks energy usage.Over the next 2 days i’m going to put your mind at ease so you clearly understand the nuance of the conversation, as I believe most that are of the opinion the networks energy usage is an issue, do not really understand the nuance and specifics, and are failing to accurately depict the entire scope of the conversation to present an accurate perspective.Before we get into some numbers, I think it’s important to frame what we’re really talking about here.We have a lot of things in the world that use a lot of energy, and contribute huge emissions to our environment that receive little attention and seemingly no one is complaining about. We could debate whether the electricity used by all washing machines or clothes dryers on the planet is an acceptable allocation or the fact that the US alone uses more electricity on Christmas lights than entire countries annually! I don’t hear anyone complaining about the resources deployed to sustain the military forces of various countries around the world. I guess it has been accepted they would rather have some defense capabilities than be helplessly dominated and slaughtered by an opposing force.First of all to be able to pose the question of “is the expenditure of energy worth it?”, you would need to be able to answer what ‘it’ is.In my opinion the entire conversation boils down to the following:Do we value having an immutable monetary network completely separated from ‘the state’ and political actors? A single global monetary network with the properties that the Bitcoin network provides.. A network that is available to anyone, but is owned by no-one. And if so, how much energy as a percentage of societies resources is an acceptable allocation for the benefit this technology affords us as a global people?To answer would require one to actually understand the impacts the technology of money actually has on society. It’s certainly also not to say the impacts are entirely negative. It’s quite a big question, and fair to say it’s something that is difficult to fully answer. While in developed nations you could make the case for the system functioning and providing value, and perhaps the upside negates the negative externalities to the freedom, rights and sovereignty of the populous. However, many people live under oppressive tyranical regimes where the monetary system is used as a tool against the better interest of the people. In the US for example, the wealth gap that exists has become so extreme due primarily to the monetary system and policies of the Political class resulting in major societal friction, division and severe negative higher order effects that ultimately impact everyone to some extent. This creates a level of fragility that may become catastrophic. At minimum it is a major destabilzing force within the society which seems unlikely to be the optimal implementation possible.I’ve attached a chart below showing this, whereby the blue line which represents the top 1% and the share of total net worth held vs the bottom 50%. As you can see, the top 1% now have a greater share of the total net worth than the bottom 50% combined.I’ll leave it there for this morning, and continue this conversation tomorrow.Hope you have a great day, and i look forward to speaking with 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 notion of needing permission and also the psychological dynamic it creates is really interesting to me and something I’ve been giving more and more thought to. It is something that is baked into our cognitive operating systems from a foundational level as children, and certainly expanded upon through traditional schooling and into adulthood and in the workforce.We are built and conditioned for obedience & compliance, and to seek permission from a figure of authority from day dot. As a child in school, you typically need to put your hand up to be able to speak or ask a question - likely even to go to the toilet. As an employee, If you want to take time off you must seek permission. In the time of COVID Hysteria, you need permission to enter shops and businesses and even to travel from Australia during the last 21 months - you needed to request permission and provide your reasons for wishing to travel. At one point permission was revoked to even allow you to visit a park.This extends into the realm of payments, and your ability to interact with another individual and express or receive value. If you want to be able to pay someone for a good or service across some distance whereby cash does not function, a bank account is required. To obtain a bank account you must seek permission from an institution providing this service, and then again to send a payment. If this is not available to you or not granted what do you do?If you are required to seek permission, it highlights your position in a system or a hierarchy. If it were your system, or you were higher or more dominant in the hierarchy you would be the one providing this permission, as opposed to seeking it.If we apply this understanding to our current monetary system, it highlights that this is not our system - it is someone else’s.It is a system we do not control. It is however a system that we participate in. Unknowingly to many, and for the most part willingly.Thinking about the current system of Money via this lens is interesting.While technically we participate in the current system of money by choice, as it’s to our benefit to do so. It’s predominantly a function of it having been the best option available. Prior to Bitcoin, there were very few alternate ways to operate beyond this system. To send gold coins around as payment is slow, it carries greater risk, the fee to do so is higher and most merchants would not accept them nor know what to even do with them. Given how significant the system of money is within society, this seems suboptimal.Money whether we like it or not has a profound impact on how we exist. It is a technology that you interact with likely every single day and often multiple times per day on some level. The amount of money you have determines where you can and cannot live, where you can or cannot go, or travel to. What food you buy. The types of clothes you buy or can’t buy. The type of education your children are afforded, or not. The tools and technology you have access to. The list goes on. This impacts the communities and groups of people you interact with and has a huge impact on you, and others, very fundamentally. Affecting the standards you may accept, the societal norms you learn, the choices you make, your habits, behaviours.. even your thoughts. Extrapolate this for everyone of us, and you have a wild simplification of the impact money has on you, me, and human society as a whole.To suggest that we need permission to express value, which is a fundamental expression, is as absurd as suggesting we need permission to communicate, or that any entity has power over who we communicate with or express value to.We now have a system to enable this. That is no ones system, and it is everyones system. It exists everywhere. It is a system that requires no permission to participate. It is completely flat. No network participant is dominant over any other. It is not controlled or governed by any central group or entity whose permission we require.You can choose to plug in to this system, and operate within the rules of the network, and the network will facilitate your request providing the rules of the system are not breached.One can hardly imagine how this is going to alter our way of life, when you consider the wide ranging implications of the current monetary system and the acceptance and normalization of a hierarchical power structure being built into this base layer technology and conditioning us to seek permission, often without even realising it.Exciting times. Hope you had a great Christmas, and i’ll speak 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,In a fascinating conversation with Anthony Pompliano that i highly recommend you listen to, Jason Lowery, a member of the US Space Force discusses some of the ways that he is thinking about the Bitcoin network and dives in to some wildly powerful comparisons between the role of a military in maintaining the social contract in a society, and that of Bitcoin’s mining security model in maintaining and securing the network from any kind of attack.To quote Jason:“All civilizations - All living creatures, obey the social consensus protocol that those who project the most kinetic power in the most clever way, earn the right to set the state and chain of custody of limited resources”As Jason highlights, this social consensus protocol, which can be thought of as the way in which we establish the pecking order among any animal, including humans, for who controls this state and chain of custody over all property is a completely permissionless system. No one grants anyone else permission as to whether or not they can do this, it’s simply down to who can project the most kinetic joules, or energy over the other. As Jason states:“What’s really really fascinating about bitcoin specifically is that it takes this exact same power projection game, but instead of kinetically derived joules, it’s electrically derived joules and that is really really interesting. It works effectively the same exact way as militaries do.”“What’s the role of the military? The role of the Military is to project so much kinetic power that it’s too expensive not to cooperate with whoever owns that military.”This is blowing my mind at the time of writing this and it’s likely going to take me some time to fully digest how powerful a concept this is and really just triggers me to pause and marvel at the design and engineering masterpiece that is Bitcoin.Basically in the very same way as a physical military, Bitcoins military, the miners, project so much electrical power, via Proof-Of-Work, that by doing so make it so expensive to try and attack the network, that it is essentially a fools game to try. There is also a fundamental asymmetry built into the Bitcoin militaries security model, where by the cost to attack the network is increasing with every single block that is mined, day after day, week after week. To attack the system you have to go back and re-do every piece of work by deploying the financial and electrical resources to do so and be able to provide proof that it has been done and achieve consensus among the network participants - meanwhile the cost to mine bitcoin and secure the network, does the opposite, and continues to get cheaper and cheaper over time thus making any attack exponentially less feasible and also adding to the former issue for any attacker with every passing block.This is obviously quite a complex and nuanced perspective but it provides a very useful framework, to better understand how robust the security model of the network actually is. It’s also worth acknowledging that this is not a new development this month or this year where the network has been upgraded. This has been baked into the system from the very beginning when the genesis block was mined back in January 2009. Pretty incredible.Furthermore when thinking about the network security through the lens of power projection, dominance and war, you notice the system is intentionally designed in such a way to funnel any attacks into a specific known point where it is strongest to again create an asymmetrical dynamic that means the odds are strongly opposed to anyone with an intention of attacking the network, and it continues to get more difficult over time, while being easier and less difficult to support and secure this attack vector - the chain tip.Kody Low explained this really well in an incredible twitter thread which i encourage you to check out.To quote Kody:OK. So lets say we understand that we would be basically wasting our time, money and resources to try and attack the network - what then is the best way to deal with the situation anyone outside of the network finds themselves in, be it an individual or a nation state? It’s funny because it basically comes down to the simple and age old adage - “If you can’t beat them, join them.”Pretty much the simplest most efficient and effective thing anyone can do, is to join the network, support the network to the mutual benefit of all parties, as early as possible, front running the maximum number of people possible, and accumulate as much bitcoin as possible.Super powerful stuff, and difficult to not simply be in awe of the fact that we’re living through the initial phase shift of what is likely to be one of the most significant transitions among humans and the ways in which power is projected in order to achieve a social consensus.Wishing you well this Christmas eve, and hope you all have a safe and happy holiday period with friends, families and loved ones. Thanks so much for listening or

Good Morning Everyone,It was reported recently that a group of 10 Nations, The World Bank, Bank of International Settlements and the IMF ran what they called a “War game” to simulate a “cyber attack” on the global financial system.“Israel on Thursday led a 10-country simulation of a major cyberattack on the global financial system in an attempt to increase cooperation that could help to minimise any potential damage to financial markets and banks.”There is not much information given about what a cyber attack means specifically, other than saying it’s likely caused by “sophisticated” players where by sensitive data is leaked on to the dark web.Clearly these pseudo-elites are not running this so called war game for fun - they must have some very real concerns that something is likely to happen to the legacy banking system, but beyond a run on the banks, it’s not clear to me exactly what. Using terms like “dark web” simply adds to my suspicion, as anyone that can use a web browser can access this clearly evil and highly frowned upon section of what was intended to be a completely free and open internet until governments realised the re-distribution of power that was happening as a result of this society altering transformation in communication capabilities, they have undertaken a narrative attack to try and steer their highly obedient subjects in the opposite direction.Surprise surprise, as a part of the simulation, and so called “solution” to protect the financial system, more liquidity is required to be pumped into the system to patch over the holes."The banks are appealing for emergency liquidity assistance in a multitude of currencies to put a halt to the chaos as counter-parties withdraw their funds and limit access to liquidity, leaving the banks in disarray and ruin," the narrator said.The article goes on to say:“The participants discussed multilateral policies to respond to the crisis, including a coordinated bank holiday, debt repayment grace periods, SWAP/REPO agreements and coordinated delinking from major currencies.”As if the crisis of 2008 didn’t make the issues obvious enough, it’s an absolute certainty that while the system continues to operate, albeit in this hamstrung fashion, it will not be the last crisis. And with each crisis the outcomes become more and more catastrophic requiring greater and greater levels of intervention to keep the system from ultimate failure. Whats really fascinating is despite the impact of 08 and 2020, most still have no idea what is going on here. It would appear that a large majority of the worlds population still do not even realise why bank holidays even exist - which is to prevent citizens being able to access their capital when there is a run on the banks.A run on the banks is only an issue because banks operate fractional reserves - you can see for yourself what the US Federal reserve contains here - predominantly gold stock and government debt. Even more interesting, the Fed used to track and publish their gold holdings, but as you can see here - this information has not been published since 1949. If every dollar that they claim to hold is requested, there would be a societal level break down in trust. As former fed chair, Paul Volcker explains here - The only thing currently backing the Global Reserve currency, the US Dollar, is confidence, he says. “What backs the dollar today is confidence - that we will maintain reasonable stability in its purchasing power over a period of time. Nothing more than that. It’s confidence.. and not just in the federal reserve and in government, in society.. And we’d better maintain that confidence. There are a lot of things going on that raise too many doubts.”Why do banks choose to do this then? Because this current system, or better described as a monetary experiment, is designed in such a way that never ending growth or credit creation is required for the system to continue to function. Which would seem to be an obviously absurd notion, but is simply the reality. Most likely they just had no better solutions at the time for this system, so this was the path of least resistance.This seems utterly insane to me.We have a system completely manipulated by central banks and governments, that is in complete opposition to the rights and best interest of the worlds population. Whereby if everyone actually decides they wanted to stress test this system, and remove their capital, the system would completely collapse.It is as fragile as a plate in a china store, and the only way it is maintained is by limiting access to your property - something that is rightfully yours - creating more pretend monopoly money, changing of debt repayment agreements and contracts all the while trying to persuade you into believing that it is for your own good, and under the guise of a “public holiday” which is at the expense of businesses. Madness.If a monetary system is not capable of supporting an individuals property rights, requires never ending ma

Good Morning Everyone,Strike CEO and Founder, Jack Mallers, recently presented to the IMF regarding Bitcoin, Strike and the implications for cross-border payments. He posted the presentation to his youtube - Linked here.Firstly, you have gotta love seeing a young individual like Jack absolutely laying down to the IMF in his inimitable style running a hot pink hoodie and a baseball cap giving zero f***s. Phenomenal. He begins his presentation by re-engineering the title, from:Strike - Disrupting Cross Border Payments? (with a question mark)toBitcoin - Disrupting Cross Border Payments (no questions mark) as he highlights: “Ofcourse, you all gave it that title. Not me. You didn’t consult me at all”What a savage!What stands out instantly here; Jack is well across the state of play within the industry of cross border payments. He has a deep knowledge of how these systems work, and how they have evolved. It’s this understanding that provides clarity around the need to update the old system, and at the same time makes the solution so clear.As he mentions the Swift system, developed in 1973, by banks and for banks, is coming up to 50 years old, and while it still carries 80% of cross border transactional volume, it simply falls well short of being an acceptable standard in todays digitally connected world.He does an excellent job of highlighting the flaws within the current system:* Speed (too slow)* Limited transparency and dependability* High Cost thus high fees* Lack of interoperability* Limited coverage* Limited accessibilityThe bottom line here - Bitcoin solves this and Jack just orange pilled the IMF.Bitcoin is Open, accessible globally by anyone. Anyone can send and receive and it achieves cash finality of a bearer instrument to anywhere in the world, almost at no cost and virtually instantaneously.Bitcoin + the Lightning network is so far superior as a monetary system and network, compared with some 50 year old network, which predates the internet, that it makes it almost impossible for me to imagine that anyone could ignore this innovation and in my opinion, it is just a matter of time.I highly recommend you watch the full clip to the end to hear jacks story about tortilla chips, trail mix and the peanut network as he presents to one of the most powerful monetary institutions on our planet. Absolutely inspirational stuff and I cannot get enough.The world is changing. Closed systems with rulers cannot compete with an open and global standard where anyone can join without needing any credentials and the network effect that this innovation is and will continue to create. It’s is literally going to be a tsunami.It gets me so fired up to see powerful young humans rising up in the world and working to make it better for others, regardless of what benefits the existing rent seeking incumbents.Hope this finds you well, and i look forward to speaking with 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 Afternoon Everyone,The Turkish Lira has plunged to new lows, and has now lost 57.4% of its value YTD.I’ve attached a chart showing the devestation.TRYUSD:If you zoom out a little further, the Lira is now down 89% since 2013, as shown below. Pretty wild!Gold has increased by approx 164% since March 2020, as citizens likely look at any way possible to protect their wealth against the collapsing currency. XAU/TRY:Meanwhile Bitcoin, the apex predator, has increased a mammoth 2200% during the same period. Powerful. Chart attached.BTCUSD/TRYThese dynamics are not exclusive to Turkey unfortunately. Lebanon has also joined the highly undesirable club of failing political currencies, while the currency is officially pegged at 1,500 pounds to the dollar, the pound traded on the black market at 27,000 to the dollar - nearly 20 times its value two years ago. Brutal.Looking at Lebanon’s CPI numbers are simply staggering as the cost of survival, let alone what we call ‘living’ is completely out of control. Take a look for yourselfFood prices up 300%, housing utilities up 215%, transportation costs up almost 1400%Prior to Turkey and Lebanon we saw Venezuela descend into hyperinflation. Venezuela had experienced very high levels of inflation since the 80’s, but the hyperinflation really set it in the late 2010s.It’s important to mention the term hyperinflation can mean many things to different people from fast and rising levels of inflation to collapsing local currencies. Regardless of the exact definition, what is important to note is that even at sustained double digits, the numbers are absolutely devastating to your ability to protect your wealth. For example with inflation at 10% for 5yrs, a currency would lose 40% of it’s value. This means if you own real estate for example, the price would need to have increased by 40% to be at parity on a real basis once adjusted for inflation, even if the levels of inflation are not technically “hyper” inflation.I have a few good friends from Venezuela and I’ve spoken with them about the boots on the ground perspective, but I saw this tweet this morning and it really hammered the point home for me.That is 465 with 12 zeros465,000,000,000,000 Trillion. Wow.I’ve mentioned many times when discussing bitcoin with people, that it’s most likely that the way bitcoin is distributed is first to the people that need it first and last to the people that need it last. Meaning most people in developed nations will be last to understand not just the value proposition of Bitcoin, but the need for Bitcoin and it won’t be until they are confronted with the brutal reality of a collapsing currency in real time that they will be able to accept the now certain fate and begin to digest the implications for their families and their children.I think it likely if you asked the average person in Turkey, Lebanon or Venezuela 10yrs ago if they thought their local currency was going to become worthless, they probably would not have believed you. Yet, here we are.As you can see from the charts above, when it starts to become obvious and the majority of people are wise to what is going on, everyone rushes for the exits at the same time. For the fiat world, it is simply a matter of time. There has never been a time in my life so far where the writing has so clearly been on the wall. Political monies are being devalued at a record rate. Getting educated around these topics along with planning and sound decision making are some of the best ways to insulate yourself from the madness. Turkey, Lebanon and Venezuela are just a preview of what is to come in my opinion. Words cannot express my gratitude to satoshi for having provided an exit - and it’s available to anyone with a smart phone and an internet connection. Insanely powerful.That’s it for today.Wishing you well, and will chat 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 | InstagramThanks for reading Bitcoin Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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,Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Avanti, a US bank focussed toward digital assets, and a major Bitcoin proponent in the US, highlighted something yesterday that I had not given much thought to, and think has largely gone unnoticed for the most part up until now. In a really powerful twitter thread, which i encourage you to read for yourself, she highlighted the impact of derivatives markets, specifically the impact to supply and demand, through the issuance of “paper bitcoin” and the way in which this distorts price. Paper Bitcoin meaning “bitcoin” that are not part of the 21m fixed supply - rather a contract via an intermediary for a claim on the value of bitcoins current market price (ie futures or options derivatives). The thread was in relation to why MVRV ratio (market value to realised value) may not be useful in valuing bitcoin, due to the fact that RV is not an accurate number because of the issuance of all the paper bitcoin contracts as she claims many likely run fractional reserves.I’ve attached the MVRV chart below so you can take a look.The basic idea here is that due to the injection of an artificial supply via paper or fake bitcoin, people holding the real pristine asset ie: on-chain bitcoin, are having their asset devalued, and not by one factor, but two fold.* Price drops due to fake supply being created and also, and perhaps more critically;* Price drops or is impacted further, due to demand for the real asset dropping as demand is catered for via the artificial supply instead of the scarce bearer asset.So this phenomenon is not just increased supply, but also decreased demand. The fact that this impacts Bitcoins price in the short term, is not what is most i found most interesting however.What really stood out to me was the level of fragility this creates and how much more pristine holding the real asset actually is. The risk of a run on the market where there is insufficient bitcoin held by exchanges to satisfy the claims being made by market participants could lead to a number of failures, or blow ups. The only way to be insulated from this is to hold the true bearer asset.So basically a number of players are falling into the same traps that in part leads us to this new system. That is re-hypothecation and fractional reserves.At the end of the day, the market has a way of working these things out, although it can take much longer than you think and often creates a lot of pain in the process as the market educates participants on risk, and risk management.One of the primary reasons Bitcoin is so powerful is the fact you can securely hold it yourself, without any need to trust an intermediary to store and secure it for you. Unlike when you store money in a bank, or own stocks via an exchange or gold, silver or diamonds in a vault - in these instances you are trusting that when you want to take possession of these commodities, that the 3rd party will oblige.Bitcoin is a bearer instrument or asset. Fully secured by proof of work, whereby no one can create a counterfeit. It is fully secured via unbreakable SHA256 cryptography and you do not need to seek anyones permission to access it. Forfeiting these properties and essentially handing over ownership of your assets and trusting an institution carries significant risk, and for most people should likely be avoided in my opinion. As to do so dissolves the very qualities that makes Bitcoin so powerful in the first place.As the saying goes, “Not your keys, not your coins”.The simplest thing is often the hardest when it comes to investing. Lowering your time preference. Let time do the heavy lifting. Let your winners ride, and allow them to compound over time. Where there exists opportunities for what seems simple often carries significant hidden risk. Storing your keys offline in a secure way is a process that every bitcoin holder needs to go through for themselves. My hope is that it’s in a proactive way because they understand the asset, it’s qualities and what’s at stake, as opposed to being reactive and learning the hard way.Hope everyone has a great start to the week, and I look forward to chatting 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 | InstagramThanks for reading Bitcoin Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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,An article from the Guardian circulated yesterday titled“Bitcoin could become ‘worthless’, Bank of England warns”In classic legacy media fashion, this is the usual clickbait we have come to expect from most corporate media institutions, as their business model is not truth or “news”, their business model and the way they pay their employees is by selling advertising. The more eyeballs, ie clicks, the more the cost of the advertising real estate to their advertising customers.I wanted to address this, as I know many people that do not understand the technology and the transition that is taking place and have not done to the work to develop conviction, can be easily swayed and influenced by this kind nonsense. First of all, could bitcoin become “worthless”? Sure. I mean, anything can theoretically become worthless. So this is not saying anything really - hence clickbait.Is it likely to become worthless may be a better question. What is the probability?At $48,870 USD right now, i think it’s a pretty comical statement, as it’s almost as close to $100,000USD as it is to zero. However it is certainly not a zero probability. Could the GBP become worthless? Could the USD become worthless? Could any political money become worthless? The answer is yes - and year by year they are.Below is a chart showing the value of the Pound Vs Bitcoin (GBPUSD/BTCUSD)Since the inception of Bitcoin, the Pound has lost 99.99% of its value - its purchasing power - vs the worlds most pristine asset, Bitcoin. I’ll let you decide which you believe is of greater risk to hold.I could show you the same chart for pretty well every political money in existence today. It is by design that all fiat currencies go to zero over time. These are not opinions, these are facts. Without the anchoring of value to the physical world, like a peg to gold for example, where scarcity exists and work or effort is required to obtain it (mine it), or in Bitcoins case energy is used to perform Proof-Of-Work to mine bitcoin, there is nothing to prevent human nature corrupting the system and simply creating more monopoly dollary-doos.Since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913, which by the way is neither Federal, nor has any reserves - the US Dollar has lost over 96% of its purchasing power; its Value.So if we want to focus on things becoming worthless, i’d suggest focusing your attention on what has happened to political money, where it’s not a maybe. It’s a certainty. And it has already happened right before your very eyes.I’ve attached a chart showing the erosion to the US Dollar over time and a link to a site that dives a little deeper on the devaluation.What is happening here is an attack on the citizens of the world and our ability to own property - I do not mean Real Estate, although that can be included - but i mean any property. Your money is your property. And through the rampant and predictable devaluation of your governments political money, the value of it is being syphoned away and preventing you from storing your time, which is your energy, across time and space. The only way out of this bind is to hold assets. Which is what central banks do when they “print money” - they buy assets - which injects liquidity into markets. So while central banks are accumulating assets, they are artificially inflating the prices of these assets and distorting the pricing signals in the market. Bitcoin is the only asset immune to the reckless and predatory behaviour of central banks. Once you hold bitcoin, and you take it offline and store your keys in cold storage, it’s virtually the only property on earth that cannot be seized and taken from you. Where the purchasing power will be maintained across time and space.This is a big deal. It’s hard to fathom how big this shift actually is. Sometimes i try to check myself and my conviction and challenge my views. Every time i do this, i almost always end up coming to the conclusion that i’m actually underestimating how big this shift actually is. It’s upto you to decide for yourself. That’s how free markets work. Don’t get tricked by the narratives of central banks - the data speaks for itself.Hope you have a great finish to your week, and I look forward to talking with you on Monday.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 | InstagramThanks for reading Bitcoin Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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 was announced on Friday Whatsapp are running a pilot program in the US and Guatemala to enable payments via Novi Financial, which as it turns out is actually owned by Facebook.In a December 8th announcement Novi said:“Starting today, a limited number of people in the US will be able to use Novi to send and receive money right within their WhatsApp chat.”A couple of things stand out to me here. First, this is the beginning of facebooks attempt to move to capture market share of global payments. Despite apparently zero fees, as you have hopefully already learned, if there is no cost - you are the product. They received a lot of push back from their Libra announcement a while back, but this has gone along much more quietly, and i would expect is only the beginning and they will aggressively look to expand and develop a lot in this area.Second, this will introduce a lot of people to a new way to pay and transmit money. Third, this is a direct attack on traditional banking institutions, and with an estimated 2 billion person user base Whatsapp have a serious edge. 4. Convenience wins. The convenience of paying direct in a messaging app without needing to exit the messaging app and open a banking app removes a lot of friction. Not to mention potentially removing the need for a banking app over time. We are lazy animals, and drive-thrus work for a reason. This fact is not trivial. 5. Chinese company Tencent saw huge success and adoption with this model via Wechat, and it is used as a government surveillance tool - will this be different? I am extremely skeptical.Lots to think about here..Ultimately while this transition is inevitable, it further highlights the critical need for a decentralized, open, public, borderless, neutral and censorship resistant form of money. Whether products like Whatsapp look to incorporate bitcoin over time or not is not certain, but I tend to think it is likely. Ultimately in my opinion, it does not matter. If they did, would I want to use them as a 3rd party to my transactions? No. Absolutely not.Irrespective of the fact while it will offer plenty of convenience and it likely has its place as a layer of the traditional existing centralized system, it is in no way an alternative, or any kind of threat or competition to the king. Bitcoin.As we have discussed - money is far too powerful a technology for a centralized entity, especially one like facebook, to own that data, to be in the middle of our transactions, and have any kind of surveillance capability over that information or ability to censor our transactions for any reason.It’s important to understand the game that is being played here and act accordingly. Educate yourself and accumulate Bitcoin - that’s my plan.Hope you have a great day, and I will chat 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 | InstagramThanks for reading Bitcoin Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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’re living in a strange world right now where the censorship appears to be at an all-time high. We have formerly “mainstream” media or perhaps better labelled corporate media that is proving day after day to be untrustworthy and in many places around the world appears to be operating almost as an extension of government at this point. Certainly a significant divergence from the primary purpose and importance of having a free press or free media.Whether it be regarding the enormous protests in Melbourne that have been running for more than 6 weeks straight with one of the protests it was estimated there were upward of 400,000 people while corporate media downplayed the numbers by many orders of magnitude or simply just completely ignored it altogether.We have seen absolutely rampant censorship on tech platforms like youtube where channels have been demonetised or received strikes and/or channel suspensions for many reasons including notably criticising COVID responses or mentioning Ivermectin - which not only won a nobel prize in 2015 but also appears to have had a profound impact on the implications of SARS-COV-2 in both India and Japan following both nations adopting it as part of their recommended treatment.In the US we’ve seen Jack Dorsey step down as CEO of twitter and within days of Jacks exit some very dubious account suspensions including @trackertrial and @NancyTracker.One shared updates relating to the case of Ghislane Maxwell - perhaps the highest profile case in US history in relation to a child tracking and pedophilia ring involving a who’s who list of psuedo-elites. The account aiming to inform the public as the corporate media were seemingly silent. The second, an account tracking Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio holdings that simply made already public information about the portfolio holdings of a senior US public official easier to find.What seems clear is that there is an ongoing attack on information and the truth. Our ability to transmit information is a fundamental human characteristic, and not a right that we are granted or can have taken away. It is as fundamental to being human as it is to breath. The notion that some overarching power structure can suppress us from transmitting information is preposterous, and ultimately over time, I believe it will be the increasing decentralization of technology that will make it not just difficult to attempt, but self destructive for anyone that tries. These issues are just a symptom however of a larger problem. A core issue is the formation of centralized power structures, with insufficient mechanisms to check and balance the weilding of this power. The other is the incentives structures that exist within each system or entity.The topic of centralized vs decentralized is all about what we are optimizing for. It is not a simple binary situation where we want everything decentralized or vice versa. There are myriad examples where a centralized system provides better outcomes - where to decentralize the system would simply slow things down and fail to add value.Money is without question one such instance where it is not just beneficial, but at this point in history it looks to be essential for the technology of money, that is our ability to transmit information to one another, to actually function and provide net positive outcomes for our global society. What we see in the world right now can largely be viewed as higher order effects of a broken and corrupted monetary system, and an accumulation of power within a small number of centralized entities.As Lord Acton, a British Historian wrote in his letter in 1887 “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”The transmission of money is the transmission of information. It is an expression. It is a language. It is speech. The notion that any 3rd party should have any capacity to censor this human expression is in complete opposition to the vision of a free and open human society.Thankfully Bitcoin solves for this, and is the ultimate and most pristine abstraction of money to date. The silver lining is that the more censorship there is, the more the free market is motivated to solve the problem and offer up solutions, and the more users are motivated to exit platforms that facilitate such behaviour. It is this very behaviour that ultimately leads to the entities demise and redistributes this power. Absolute power corrupting absolutely. Somewhat poetic.While i’m optimistic the issues around censorship improve, decentralized solutions couldn’t come soon enough. It’s only a matter of time. Stay optimistic, ignore the noise. Bitcoin is the mission.Wishing you all the best, and hope you have a great day.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

Good Morning Everyone,The topic of digital scarcity has been discussed at length in relation to Bitcoin. Plan B’s Stock-to-flow model does a good job of quantitatively modelling Bitcoins scarcity. To quote Plan B:Surely this digital scarcity has value. But how much? In this article I quantify scarcity using stock-to-flow, and use stock-to-flow to model bitcoin’s value.Approximately 7hrs ago at block height 714,000 the bitcoin network saw the percentage of supply issued, reach 90%. Bitcoin’s Genesis block was mined on January 3, 2009, at 18:15:05 UTC. Some 12 years after the genesis block was mined, only 10% of total supply now remains.I’ve attached an image that shows the block height alongside the percentage issued below, taken from Clark Moody Bitcoin Dashboard, with a link attached.You may notice the block height had not actually reached 714k yet in the image above due to a rounding error. As Jameson Lopp explained in a twitter post earlier today. So without getting stuck in the weeds too much here, what we are witnessing is humans via the mechanism of free markets attempt to determine the value of digital scarcity for the first time in history, in real time. It feels like to me that this is quite something to be witnessing. What is more, is that i do not think it has really hit home for the vast majority of people how insanely scarce this asset actually is. It is completely inelastic. This concept almost feels alien to us in the developed world in some respects. We have such a level of outrageous convenience in todays world, where it’s almost impossible for most to truly grasp. If we run out of food at home, we can just go to the shop and buy some more. We have a seemingly endless supply of movies and content thanks to platforms like netflix. This goes for most things that you can think of. The list goes on…But with Bitcoin, not only is it the first, and only digital scarce asset ever, it is completely transparent in its issuance schedule. The entire world and every person on it, can access that information. It is not hidden, secretive, or governed by a central authority or only known to people with a certain level of access, power or influence.It is completely open, public and programatically deterministic. It is in the systems very nature to be this way. Completely by design. So we know only 10% of Bitcoins total supply is left to be mined. We also know roughly how long until this remaining supply comes online. Although it is not until the year 2140 that the last bitcoin block reward will be issued, the vast majority will be mined well ahead of this point. As you can see below, half the remaining supply (5%) will be issued in the next 4 years, between now and Dec 4th 2025. With 99% issued by 2035. Leaving just 1% of 21,000,000 to be mined over the next 100 or so years.So in 14 years time, only 1% of all bitcoin will remain to be mined. There can never be any more created. We cannot deploy more resources and go out and find more bitcoin mines, like we can with Gold for example. This is it. And it is certain.This means that after 2035 while miners battle it out for the final 1%, the only way to acquire bitcoin for the most part is to purchase it from someone else. And a significant % of people hodling bitcoin, aren’t selling. Ever.To me this screams of a supply shortage like nothing we have ever seen before. The only way to acquire bitcoin will be for the price to continue to rise until it triggers supply from old hands to come on to the market and transact to new hands. That threshold will be different for different people obviously. All I know is, that despite this information being fully public and transparent, i do not think at $47,000, the majority of individuals or investors have properly digested this reality. It is going to be very interesting to see how it plays out as the market, and the world tries to assign a price tag to the first and only, truly scarce digital asset in real time. It feels like a privilege to have a front row seat to see how this plays out. As always, wishing you all the best and hope you have a great day.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 | InstagramThanks for reading Bitcoin Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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,6 months ago China made what I believe will turn out to have been one of the most significant geopolitical errors of this century by banning Bitcoin Mining. At the time Chinese mining operations were responsible for securing a majority % of global hash power. According to CBECI, at the beginning of 2021 53% of total network hash rate was from China. Down from 72% at the beginning of 2020. China had long occupied significant share of the hash rate due to considerable access to cheap energy in areas like Sichuan and Xinjiang where renewable sources like hydroelectric, solar, and geothermal are common.In April 2021 China banned all mining operations. These mining businesses were forced to relocate their operations. At the time there was a high level of uncertainty as to how this would play out, which was reflected in the Price as this coincided with bitcoin printing a top at 64k and over the next 3 months retracing to as low as $29,000. Despite the short term impact to price, this catalyst served as a powerful demonstration of resilience of the bitcoin computing network as some 50% of all mining rigs were taken offline while there was zero noticeable impact to the stability or security of the network. Pretty incredible stress test when you think about it. Tick tock, next block as the saying goes.The US has been the main beneficiary of this exodus from China as Texas saw an influx of hash power. The US is now responsible for 34% of total hash power as of August 2021. Chinas dominance of the hashing power has long been a head wind and concern amongst the community. Would the CCP try to take control of it and would that impact the security and stability of the network with them previously having well in excess of 51% ? Thankfully, we’ll now never know.Fast forward to December 2021 and the hash rate is back to the levels prior to this exodus, and has recovered in a V-Bottom style demonstrating the robust nature of this system. It was in the interest of these miners to find cheap energy, and find it fast. What other technology incentivises humans to source the cheapest energy on the planet, and also provides them with a way to monetize the energy if it is geographically inconvenient or not cost effective to do so? This is one of the Bitcoin networks super powers.Pretty wild to see just 6 months later the mining hash rate is back near all time highs. While price currently lags this metric at around $50,200 - almost 30% below that of April. I cannot predict the future, but i do know that hash rate typically proceeds price. It’s a leading indicator, while price is often a lagging indicator. With the end of 2021 coming to a close it’s anyones guess what happens from here, but i’m betting Q1 of 2022 is likely to be explosive. Regardless of the fact, the resilience and the robust nature of the worlds most sophisticated monetary system has been on full display this year running a clinic in free and open, decentralized systems. It’s an absolute pleasure to be alive during this time to witness it. This is history in the making. The market is not even close to pricing in the power of this technology in my opinion. Wishing you all the best, and hope you have a great day.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 | InstagramThanks for reading Bitcoin Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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, I want to take a couple of minutes to dive into the why in relation to why Bitcoin, not crypto. Having been following bitcoins development since price was around $300USD, i understand the temptation of shitcoins.. excuse me.. highly esteemed pieces of technology often referred to as alt coins, or crypto currencies.They seem so much more dynamic and exciting. People use flashy terms like Web 3 and often have a great story to tell as to how this new thing is going to change the world. Whether it be supply chains, collectibles, identification or doggie meme coins that are going to go to a million bazillion, in dollar terms.When they move in price, they are best thought of as an emotional younger sibling to bitcoin. So when they go up they go up in a more emotional (volatile) way, and likewise when they go down - it’s normally a fairly nasty face melting affair.People often want to assign a reason why something is going up or down, it’s in our basic nature to do this so as we crave certainty. X is going up today because fill in the blank about some news that is circulating. But the truth is that markets are made of millions and millions of different participants. All we can be sure of is that price is moving because of an imbalance between buyers and sellers. More sellers than buyers, price goes down. More buyers than sellers the inverse is true.This demonstrates the roll psychology has on driving markets. As it is by influencing your beliefs about the world, that drives you to want to buy or sell something. In my opinion, many, infact the vast majority of “Crypto” projects prey on this vulnerability of unsophisticated market participants by telling great stories and doing heaps of marketing to hype up xyz crypto shitcoin. This is not to say you cannot make money buying and selling these things, but the reality is that most will not. Compared to this Bitcoin can look a little less exciting to some.This works when you don’t properly understand Bitcoin and how powerful it actually is, but once you do, your mind just like an operating system is much less vulnerable to these speculative attacks compelling you to purchase the latest dog coin.Simply put, bitcoin is the most sophisticated monetary network that has ever existed throughout human civilization. From a technical point of view most notably Bitcoin solves the double spend problem, but is really an accumulation of 40+ years of innovation and solving computer science problems. It is the very first ever realization of true digital scarcity. The decentralized architecture of the bitcoin network fundamentally seperates it from all other crypto projects. Bitcoin has no CEO. Bitcoin pays no marketing team. No one “owns” the network. No single party controls the network. There is no Bitcoin founder to call up when there is a problem. Bitcoin is not raising Venture capital from individuals that may wish to influence how the network operates or the properties it can exhibit, like creating more bitcoin for example beyond the 21m supply cap. Bitcoin can not be subpoenaed to appear in any court or to explain itself to any minister or member of parliament or Congress. There has been no preferential treatment as to who can or cannot mine bitcoin and giving unfair advantages to anyone over any other network participant. It is a truly decentralized and distributed network that anyone can opt-in to at anytime, or exit at any time, and is completely neutral to any such interactions. Despite this, bitcoin has run basically flawlessly for 13 years. Block after block continues to be mined. Transactions sent and received. The rules of the network continue to be adhered to. The protocol continues to be developed and built upon in a completely free, open and public way. And as more people start to realise the significance of this innovation, the price in USD terms continues to appreciate. As this happens not only is the level of decentralization maintained, it actually increases as more and more participants join the network.https://bitnodes.io/ is a great site to see the distribution of nodes visually. It is this true decentralization that fundamentally separates bitcoin from all other “crypto” currencies, and the lack of a centralised point of failure that gives it such wide reaching implications and is a big part of the reason it can serve as the most sophisticated form of money we have ever had. It is a system maintained by tens of thousands of nodes all around the world, that is growing faster than the internet in the 90’s, and there is no off switch.For the first time you do not need to trust a 3rd party to secure your wealth, and the purchasing power of your wealth can not be scraped away from you as an invisible tax in the form of inflation. We have a vehicle that can truly preserve purchasing power without leaking value, across time. This change can fundamentally reorganise how we prioritise issues individually and within society from focussing on the

Yo, Let’s do this!My content here is going to focus primarily on Bitcoin, and the developments in and around Bitcoin to help keep you up to date on what is going on and to offer my honest perspective as opposed to just blindly believing the circulating narratives. Ya know, because sCieNcE.. I believe bitcoin is the most important innovation of our lives. I do not think there is anything more meaningful I can do with my time, that to empower you and as many people as possible with the knowledge to understand money, and thus bitcoin and working to create a more free and open society.This quote below comes to mind in times like this.. “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”- EpictetusThe talk around CBDCs globally continues to increase with Australia’s treasurer yesterday mentioning in a local media interview that they are going to be working with the RBA to look into the feasibility of a CBDC in Australia, which he says would be a world leading initiative.CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currency is something that we in the bitcoin community have seen from a long distance away on the horizon looming closer with each passing day. China have made their intentions clear to roll out a CBDC along with many other nations including Singapore, Malaysia and of course the US.The questions that come to my mind are:Aren’t most currencies already digital? Why are governments wanting to roll out CBDCs? How does a CBDC differ from what we already have? What are the advantages of using a CBDC? Who benefits? What are the incentives?First lets cover off what a central bank digital currency is.A central bank digital currency is a centralized database or ledger containing all account information including account name, holdings, transactions to and from, maintained and controlled directly by a central bank.Currently a number of seperate banks and/or institutions hold this information and share it with a select and mostly unknown to us, group of institutions. So a CBDC is more of a marketing exercise than anything else as we currently already have a digital currency for the most part. Most estimates I’ve found indicate 90/10 split between digital and physical cash. It likely means the system becomes even more centralized with a central bank holding this information.So why the ongoing circulating narratives relating to CBDCs? Governments around the world realise their monopoly on money is under threat, and they are undertaking a marketing campaign to attempt to remain relevant. This is only my opinion of course. But it’s important to realise that this is more of a technological update as opposed to any significant type of innovation or architectural change.The most obvious positive a CBDC could offer is the ability to directly transfer stimulus to individuals as opposed to legacy methods like cheques. This would be handy if governments moved to some kind of a UBI system to combat automation for example. During the pandemic here in Australia, this has already happened with the current system however so from a user experience perspective it’s no noticeable change.The negative effects seem fairly clear. Increasing financial surveillance, the ongoing erosion of privacy, and an increased ability for financial censorship if you haven’t been behaving, or scanning the QR code before you go to the toilet, or wish to send money to someone ‘we’ do not like.The best way to view a CBDC is to compare against the critical elements of an open and public protocol like bitcoin. Best popularized by Andreas Antonopolous, the 5 core pillars are: Open, public, borderless, neutral, censorship resistant.Basically a CBDC has none of these properties. It is closed, private, bordered, potentially combative/weaponised and willing to censor as needed.Ultimately my view is that bitcoin is inevitable regardless of what any government does at this point. The network effect is too strong, and once you really swallow the orange pill and wash it down with some water to help it dissolve, it is impossible to see the world through the same lens ever again.CBDCs are just a refreshing on the current broken system. This offers no significant step change improvement to the current broken fiat monetary system that continues to fuel an ever growing wealth divide between the rich and the poor as a result of the cantillon effect, whereby those closest to the money supply benefit disproportionately.I choose to opt out of this madness with Bitcoin. My best advice, is get educated. Understand what is taking place, and how it impacts you and your family. The government are not going to do that, and are not here to save you, or I. We must help each other and save ourselves.Wishing you all the best, and hope you have a great day.AKThanks for reading Bitcoin Unlocked! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support this work.I’m on a mission to get this information to as many people as possible. Please support this work by sharing, liking and following