“They came back to us, and they said . . . we believe every asset other than bitcoin is a security,” Armstrong said according to the FT. “And, we said, well how are you coming to that conclusion, because that’s not our interpretation of the law. And they said, we’re not going to explain it to you, you need to delist every asset other than bitcoin.”

I'm trying to transition off of reddit completely and I dislike what they have done. But that being said, I thought it was quite honorable of them to not censor the 'fuck spez', be it comments throughout the site or on /r/Place. They even left the giant fuck spez ending in the official time lapse of /r/Place and the highest ranked post is a screen shot of the same.

They have many reasonable sounding excuses available to censor excessive use of the word 'fuck', and I don't see how they benefit by leaving it up there. It's not like censoring swear words is beyond the pale compared to other things they have done. They didn't even need to do /r/Place, they knew full well what was going to happen but they did it anyways.

I know many people think this is some 4D chess move or a fear of the Streisand effect. They are not that clever.

I just wanted to point out that it does in fact look like they have a line that they won't cross and they are holding to it.

Also, fuck spez.

This explains in laymen terms how Bitcoin wallets work. This is from the 101 Blackboard Series, is an oldy but goody.

I suspect I am probably preaching to the choir here, but I know in the Reddit Bitcoin sub there are a surprising amount of people in the community that still express concerns in the comments because Bitcoin lacks inflation. This is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

The most pernicious claim is that of the "Deflationary Spiral" which is the most cited reason however, it also makes no sense. This is the theory that as the value of money increases, it incentivizes hoarding of cash and harms the economy.

(1) The claim is that as prices decrease, demand will decrease. This is in direct contradiction to the base economic model, no one makes this claim outside of the deflationary spiral argument. They reference human psychology, not math or controlled experiments, yet they have no psychological studies to back this claim.

(2) The same claim can be made in reverse for inflation, with similarly damaging effects in the other direction. Nobody makes this claim because chronic low-level inflation does not trigger a spiral. Inflation artificially promotes spending that would not have otherwise occurred, increasing malinvestment and conspicuous consumption. The central bank actually guarantees debasement of the currency (unlike deflation, where there is no explicit guarantee) which should trigger people to try to get rid of the currency, which should trigger more inflation, which would trigger more people to dump the currency. This doesn't happen because people are not hyper-rational and it is too burdensome for the average person to try to figure out how to protect themselves against such low levels of inflation. If you think about it there are actually more factors that incentivize inflationary spirals than deflationary spirals.

(3) Well-off individuals store a majority of their wealth in appreciating assets, this has the same net effect as storing wealth in a deflationary currency but no one extends the claim to these stores of wealth.

(4) Technology is inherently deflationary, and probably the only sector that has regularly sustained predictable deflation. It is also the most productive element of the economy.

(5) The time value of money states that money with a fixed value is worth more today than it is worth in a year from now purely on the fact that you can spend or invest it now and with no delayed gratification. Compensating those that abstain from spending money is actually the more rational position. There is no natural law that says money must decay over time.

The truth is a currency that goes from stable to highly variable, inflationary or deflationary, is damaging because most economies are built on the assumption of price stability. This includes fixed wages of people, locked-in interest rates, long-term contracts, and psychological expectations, none of these things are actually fixed or mandatory in an economy. One could just as easily tie these arrangements to the value of a basket of goods rather than fiat currency. A low level of deflation, the final stage of Bitcoin, also does not challenge this paradigm.

Inflation also eats away at wages and savings and for that reason enriches the current power structure. Of course, to these people, slowly siphoning off other people's wealth is an integral part of their job and their future wealth accumulation, so anything that threatens that game "threatens the economy". Or rather, threatens "their" economy.

(Copied from the Youtube description) In this video, I discuss Nigel Farage having his bank accounts involuntarily closed down in the context of a wider global government crackdown on free speech, as well as the right for anyone to use money and the banking system, regardless of political views.

Cutting off banking access was once a punishment reserved mostly for nation-state actors (Venezuela, Russia, Iran, etc). Over the past few years, we’ve seen it increasingly used, even in developed countries with rules of law, by governments to target individuals whose political opinions go against the establishment.

“Bitcoin has no use cases except for speculation and gambling” People who say things like this must be blissfully unaware that money and banks have been and will continue to be weaponized against people to stifle free speech, to control the political opposition, and ultimately to control whole populations (like the CCP does to China).

This is news from earlier in June but was overshadowed by the SEC lawsuits that came out at the same time. SWIFT represents critical banking infrastructure and its openness to crypto assets signals a sea change in attitudes among banks. This article is still the lead story on their site, www.swift.com , which is also telling, despite recent regulator crackdowns on tokens.

Bloomberg: The enterprise-software maker co-founded by crypto proponent Michael Saylor acquired 12,333 Bitcoin between April 29 and June 27 at an average price of $28,136, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday

(edit 2023-07-04: it appears I killed the original link when I added the photo, so I have now fixed it so that the original article is now linked to this post)

People keep reporting on the IMF talking positively about crypto, which is funny because they could just link to the blog post and let it speak for itself. Most of the positivity in the post revolves around CBDCs. However, they were fairly neutral on the topic of Bitcoin adoption in the region, which is a clear departure from their past negative statements.

It is important to keep in mind this is just a blog post, not an official IMF statement. So, while it's a positive development, it's important to take it for what it is.

(edit: Link broke when I added the image, I have fixed the link so that it now properly goings to the original article)