Bitcoin Unlocked

“War... Huh…What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again!“Good Morning Everyone,German electricity prices are hitting fresh all time highs and at the same time Poland’s largest chemicals company has halted production of nitrogen fertilisers and reduced output of ammonia due to soaring gas prices. As we know you can print more fiat, but you can’t print more energy. The complacency that exists in respect to the energy crisis really is profound to witness and it’s hard not to see this situation becoming exponentially worse. German Electricity:Dutch Natural Gas:While Germany is definitely toward the eye of the storm, most others throughout Europe are entangled in this mess and depending on each countries individual energy production capabilities, should expect to be impacted in similar ways to varying degrees. This image below from Javier Blas shows electricity costs throughout Europe with many nations paying in excess of €600 per MWh. Where as pre 2020 anything above €75-100 was considered expensive! Incredible. If you find this valuable, Share it.This tweet from @MacroAlf helps hammer the point home even further if it weren’t already brutally clear.This madness is a direct result of insane and catastrophic centrally planned energy policy and it very likely leads to a widespread famine throughout Europe. It also has the potential to be the event that breaks the European Union apart and kicks off monumental conflicts between the neighbouring states, and in turn potentially, the world, as the effects of this begin to really hit home for individuals and families.Absolutely everything is downstream of energy. Once energy costs increase enough the predictable dominos begin to fall. We are starting to see this play out with Poland’s fertilizer production being halted. The dominos do not stop there, however. Nitrogen fertilizer is necessary for food production. If the production of this continues to be impacted or more production comes off-line, this naturally leads to less supply being available. It means the price goes up as there is less supply to meet demand. This leads to reduced food production which only further amplifies the problem. And would trigger further disruptions to the already shambolic food supply chains and even more acute price increases for consumers. Once again, i see a negative feedback loop and the scent of Moloch at play.If you find it valuable, Share it.This forces governments even further into a corner; the likely output of this is rationing!It’s hard to believe that over the last 30 years we’ve gone from having widespread abundant and reliable energy to now staring down the barrel of the most phenomenal energy crisis of our life time. Having written about the potential of a mass starvation event eight months or so ago, it’s absolutely bizarre to see this playing out, almost like it is some kind of train wreck happening in slow motion. On one hand I’m bewildered as to to why governments would not pivot and adjust course more evasively in the face of what, at this point, appears to be the most likely outcome, but then i’m reminded it is just humans at scale following the paths of least resistance. It is simply the incentives manifesting into human behaviour.This problem is not likely to be fixed by the people who have created it. This is a systems level issue, and the issue has been cause by the people with the admin privileges. Awarding them further administrative privileges in the face of this would be akin to the definition of insanity - which is to do the same thing, and expect a different outcome.This issue will not be solved by following morons in perceived positions of power off the cliff. It is certainly not solved by printing more fiat money, which will almost certainly happen in the event rationing and price controls are initiated to attempt to treat the symptoms instead of the root cause, in the typical naive interventionist fashion we have come to expect. Personal responsibility and a bitcoin standard is at the core of our solution. Adopting a monetary standard free of those who have either a bizarre desire to intentionally drive us toward catastrophe, or who are simply cognitively deficient and should be appropriately ignored. We must focus on building circular economies based on the superior monetary standard bitcoin provides and cultivate community. Connecting producers direct with consumers in a peer-to-peer fashion, and work to be as energy and food independent as possible in an effort to insulate ourselves, our families and our communities from the actions of malevolent or mere incompetent actors.You never want to wait to buy the option when you need it. You need to buy the option before you need it!Community is the ultimate hedge against uncertainty. Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.AKPublished Block Height: 750 848 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

“The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched.Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behaviour.”— WikipediaGood Morning Everyone,We have discussed many times, the dynamic between money and power, and highlighted the risk and harm caused by centralising such power. This is the fundamental problem bitcoin solves. It is money without a center. And it is money that provides the most fair issuance possible and avoids the common pitfall to disproportionately reward any one entity over another. That is not to say distribution is even or equal. Certainly not. Distribution of anything is never going to be even, and to attempt to do so is at its core a deeply unfair act. To evenly distribute something amongst a cohort of people means that individuals are not rewarded for deploying more effort, for being more skilled, more competent and capable and ultimately doing a superior job than someone else. And likewise for those who are underperforming they would have no incentive to work harder or learn new skills as there would be no reward available incentivising them to do so. This would dissolve and distort the incentives that would otherwise exist and it would seem to be the case from past historical examples, to produce highly undesirable outcomes. At the same time, if instead of distributing evenly, certain individuals or entities were disproportionately favoured and awarded an outsized percentage of issuance due to their proximity to the center of supply, this would install a deeply unfair standard at the core protocol level. If applied to the technology of money this unfair issuance creates a catastrophic dynamic where those who are closest to the center of that distribution have outsized power over all others within the network and this dynamic only accelerates over time.This last example describes the issuance of Ethereum. As Nik Bhatia explains in the below clip. Where bitcoin has no center and has no preferential issuance and you can simply buy, mine or earn bitcoin at a market rate and by doing work; Ethereum does have a center, and It is more like a company than anything resembling a truly decentralised protocol. To quote Nik (who also has a great paid substack publication called The Bitcoin Layer)“Ethereum began in 2015 with a pre-mine. This is a sale of Ethereum tokens in exchange for bitcoin. 72,000,000 Ethereum tokens were issued in this pre-mine. 60m of the coins were sold to the investment public and 12m coins were given to insiders. The supply of Ethereum today is above 120m, which means that almost 60% of today’s total supply was part of that pre-mine process. Data shows that 40% of that pre-mine went to the top 100 customers giving us indication that the ownership of Ethereum is highly centralised. This resembles the issuance of an equity in which the majority of the shares go to the management and the ownership.”The bottom line is the two (bitcoin & ethereum) are just not the same. Most Ethereum supporters seem to either not know this, simply not care, or not understand the significance of it. However it is fundamentally important to grasp. As I mentioned earlier, such an issuance schedule is at it’s core deeply unfair, especially when you consider the profound impact of money on our lives, and with Ethereum posturing to move to a Proof-of-Stake system in September, this significance is only acerbated further whereby those with the most amount of eth staked have an outsized voting right and thus influence on the network. We already have this system. It’s called fiat, and ethereum is just a shinier new version of it. Nothing close to the paradigm shifting technology of bitcoin.Many in the community have been surprised at the SEC’s allowance of protocol’s like Ethereum, when they have been clearly and unequivocally exposed as what are considered securities. This is not to suggest I want the SEC or any government to do anything, just that one can only be curious why they would not have enforced their mandate, in the face of the obvious. At the end of the day we don’t need any central body to assert their authority - the market should be able to work itself out. I have postulated for some time, that I believe the reason for this is because this experimentation of permissioned, centralised “crypto digital assets“ provide central banks and government with the single best opportunity to obtain the technology to install their Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). They can basically let the grifters continue along in their grift, and allow them to siphon funds from the public to do so while they improve the technology, until such time as the technology is suitable to be captured by government and installed more broadly directly by central banks. The risks posed by CBDCs cannot be over stated. They are in my opinion to be considered the most significant threat to freedom and civil liberties, possibly ever, and would be very likely over time to move us toward some kind of digital panopticon. The below tweet from Brandon Quittem demonstrates exactly this. Joseph Lubin who is the co-founder of Ethereum that you’ve likely never heard of, published the document attached specifically for The World Economic Forum in 2020. The document is a “concrete proposal” to those in Davos about the benefits of a CBDC, and why it should be built on Ethereum. It is basically a word salad full of blockchain buzzwords suggesting we should remove cash, enable central banks more control and greater surveillance and that those in less developed nations should be forced to use them. To be honest the whole proposal is gross, but a few of the takeaways from the document are as follows:“Our intention is to give the reader an overview of the potential advantages and the challenges in a CBDC as well as, through a concrete proposal for a specific approach, to move the debate beyond the theoretical.““CBDC can give the central banks more effective, future-oriented tools to allow them to implement monetary policy in more direct and innovative ways and keep pace with technological change.““Widespread use of CBDC instead of private payment tokens could also help central banks retain sovereignty over monetary policy in tokenised assets markets, an important consideration should such markets come to represent significant portions of the economy. Other benefits include potentially new regulatory monitoring and enforcement tools, cheaper cross-border remittances, improvements to the interbank payments infrastructure and innovation in retail markets. CBDC could also be a superior replacement to physical cash, helping alleviate some of the risks and costs associated with banknotes.““Finally, if structured in a way that allows the CBDC to be traced, it could be useful in more efficient sanctions and AML enforcement contexts.““Tokens are powered by smart contracts, which are software applications that live in a distributed fashion in the network. These smart contracts can be programmed rules and business logic that are automatically enforced by the network and can restrict CBDC transfers in any way deemed suitable by the central bank and the regulator. This could make it possible to for instance “hard wire” KYC/AML procedures into the tokens themselves, greatly simplifying and improving the effectiveness of regulatory compliance mechanisms. Tokens could also be pre-programmed with rules that determine exactly under what conditions a transfer can be reversed or assets recovered. Last but by no means least, proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus on Ethereum is not energy intensive and would support a large-scale network at low energy cost and environmental impact.“As you can see, a CBDC would very likely be the end of any notion of privacy in the digital age. Central Banks would be granted full and total control over the technology of money, which to a large extent means to have control over you and I. Regardless of how they first begin you can be assured that over time, even if initially they were not exerting outsized control over your decision making, how and when you spend your slave coin tokens, that over time, there is only one way for a system with absolute power to go. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.This kind of power would be used to silence dissenting voices, it would be used to impose the will of central banks on other entities, it would enable full and total control and surveillance of money and would lead to the increasingly centralised control of all essential infrastructure and resources over time.There is no reason however as we move further into the digital age, that we need lose the fundamental rights that mechanisms like cash have afforded us. It really does come down to individuals voting with their actions. It is critical that the dangers that CBDC’s pose, be made clear to people everywhere. I’m confident that once armed with the information the downside becomes impossible to ignore. There are a number of incentives that could be used to onboard people to the digital slave-coin and lure them into opting into this predatory system. A few that come to mind are 1) Coercion as we saw with the “no jab, no job” vaccine policy in Australia (For all those in the US and abroad - Yes. That really happened!); 2) a one-off initial payment; 3) leverage a UBI-like handout or; 4) leverage the fact that people are deeply indebted and provide some kind of relief in exchange for t

Good Morning Everyone,There was an incident last week in Lebanon that is worthy of further enquiry. I’ve spoken about it with many people offline, but hadn’t written about it at all and feel it’s important to do so. It’s important first of all to retrace our steps a little before we do, so we can maintain the thread through time, and obtain a clear recognition of the order of events leading to this most recent situation. Eight months ago i first wrote about the situation in Lebanon where the local political money was failing. Basic food and energy costs were skyrocketing due to the rapid loss in value of the Lebanese Pound. Some four months later, the situation in Lebanon again hit my radar having descended further in chaos with the Government & Central Bank capitulating and waving the white flag. The Government & Central bank announced they were bankrupt.Both these letters are worth quickly revisiting if you missed them to get a strong sense of the how the dynamic has evolved over time. Both are linked below.This sequence of events has lead to the most recent development, where a man has been pushed to absolute breaking point. The man tried to withdraw his money from the bank in downtown Beirut and that request was denied. The man is said to have had $210,000 held with the bank, and had requested to withdraw $50,000 to cover medical expenses for his fathers surgery. After being denied to withdraw his “own money”, the man took control of the bank with a firearm taking the bank staff hostage in the process. This hostage situation lasted 7hours and was eventually resolved with him being said to be given $30,000 and he exited with no further escalation or injury. Outside the bank the man was being celebrated as a hero for his actions, and offers a glimpse into the level of distain that exists amongst the citizens of Lebanon and the deeply unstable dynamic currently in the country. The thread below by Joyce Karam covered the situation with many updates if you would like more details.This unfortunate situation highlights how fundamentally toxic fiat really is. He literally had to rob the bank to get his own money!This man doesn’t want to have to rob a bank. He simply wants what is his. He had a significant amount of funds, and like most, doesn’t realise the true IOU nature of banking. His father is unwell and he simply wants to support his family. The fact that he could be pushed in such a way where he would be willing to hold people hostage at gun point serves to highlight how pathologically insane this fiat system really is. This is the level to which fiat is corrupting us and the societies in which we are a part. This system is so morally and ethically derelict at its core. It is programmed into the fiat system at the base layer. Where bitcoin operates based on the most profound truth, fiat operates on falsehoods and lies. It is a system that is predicated on deception. That anyone would consciously choose a system that harms us so deeply is absolutely unfathomable. This man should never have been forced into this situation, nor should any of the beautiful people of Lebanon or any other nation that have fallen victim to fiat. And we haven’t even considered the implications such actions could have on ones family and the higher order effects which could follow.So many people still cannot see the problem, and thus they cannot see how bitcoin fixes this, but this is going to change. This disease and the symptoms we exhibit as a part of it are not exclusive to Lebanon. Lebanon is just further down the road compared to some others. This is a kind of de-civilization and these symptoms can be expressed in every country that is on a fiat standard. Every country that uses a money with no anchor to physical reality where it empowers a small few to control this technology are over time destined for a similar fate. But where fiat fails, Bitcoin will succeed. If this man understood the predatory nature of banking. If he knew about fractional reserve banking and understood that once you hand over control of your money, once you relinquish custody, that it fundamentally ceases to be yours - he most likely would never have given it the bank in the first place. There would have been no need for him to be pushed to the extent he was, and take the level of risk he was forced to take for him and his family. There would have been no violence toward others, and no one would have ever been taken hostage. But when the system of banking works on the surface, it appears to work. It is not obvious that once the broader dynamic changes and we enter adversarial conditions these IOU’s are unlikely to be redeemable. That they become worthless. If you find it valuable, Share itThe people of Lebanon are learning this lesson right now, with 80% of the population now living in poverty. At the core of this is a deeply flawed system of incentives. A system we have called money. But this system is doing more harm than it is good. This system is like that of a casino. It is not our system. When we enter the casino we should do so, knowing the house always wins. We can win a few hands, but if we get too powerful the casino management will take over and assume control. They will either capture us and pull the strings behind our actions or they will forcibly remove us from the building. The same is true for fiat and the government.Bitcoin provides a new system. A system that is built on truth. Not on lies. Bitcoin maintains an ultimate record of truth and of time. A pristine historical record that is indisputable. A record that is no one person or sides opinion, or point of view. It is a system that is no one else’s. It is everyone else’s. A system that empowers you to take responsibility, and to custody what is yours without needing to trust a third party. Without giving that outsider the opportunity to lie to you and to deceive you. A system where your asset is no ones liability. If you hold and use bitcoin in the right way, it can never be taken from you and no amount of violence changes this. It is a system designed for a world where we acknowledge our deeply flawed nature. A world where we seek to illuminate what is real and deploy humility in the face of our failings. A world consisting of a species of mammal with the ever present potential to behave in an adversarial manner.Fiat empowers those who wish to behave in such a way. It provides a system where those who do so, can be rewarded for such behaviour and this distorts our perception of reality in a foundational way. It blurs the line between what is right and wrong, and short circuits our moral compass and the way in which we orient ourselves in the world. Bitcoin disincentivizes any such behaviour. It is the antidote to the fiat disease that is currently tearing us apart. It provides us with the most powerful and transformational opportunity. An opportunity to be empowered and take it upon ourselves to assume responsibility and to course correct as a result of its existence. To rebuild and recalibrate our moral compass, and to enable us to reorient ourselves within the world where someone else does not have to lose for us to gain. To embark together on a co-exploration in search of the highest truth and toward a future where we can flourish together. Where we work to serve one another and that allows us to gain the clear recognition of the value of such pursuits, and the sense of meaning is both obvious and profound to all those operating as a part of such a system. It is the mechanism for a better world. One that i want for my children, and my children’s children, and one that they deserve.If you find it valuable, Share itFiat is predicated on the idea that we can endlessly take from the future, postponing any need to address the implications of such an action and where we can figure out a way to settle the bill at a later stage. The idea that we can defer accountability into the future. And it is a future we may not even be here to reckon with. It offers the potential to completely evade accountability and creates the potential for this to be redirected to someone else entirely. It is a system that not only allows for it, but directly incentives us to do so. It is directly taking from the future of others, and stealing from the very people we care most about. It is the leveraging of our children’s future to enable us to enjoy the present. Bitcoin holds a giant mirror up in the face of fiat. It diametrically opposes this idea and instead of siphoning from the future, it pushes value into the the future. It assures the future for those we care most about, instead of deferring our decision making to others and to an uncertain potential future moment. It forces us to acknowledge reality in the present and take responsibility for it. A kind of radical responsibility. It forces us to align ourselves with the truth, and orient ourselves in alignment with it. We will be provided the opportunity to be better for having done so.Fix the money, fix the world.Hope you all have a great day. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.AKPublished Block Height: 749487 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

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto - Eric Hughes - March 9, 1993Good Morning Everyone,Freedom of the individual is currently under siege. The war on privacy has been escalating for decades, arguably centuries, and it is heating up massively as we speak. Not only have we seen the the US treasury sanction open source software in the form of tornado cash by placing it on the OFAC sanctions list, the developer of the smart contract software has now been arrested in Amsterdam. According to the Fiscal & Information Investigation Service (FIOD) of The Netherlands, which is basically the Dutch IRS, the developer was arrested on Wednesday and a statement by the organisation begins as follows:“On Wednesday 10 August, the FIOD arrested a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam. He is suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering through the mixing of cryptocurrencies through the decentralised Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash. Multiple arrests are not ruled out. These advanced technologies, such as decentralised organisations that may facilitate money laundering are receiving extra attention from the FIOD. Also in the cryptocurrency domain, the FIOD stands for a safe financial Netherlands and investigates with effect and impact. Today the suspect is brought before the examining judge.” The idea that a software engineer would be arrested for writing code is wild, and it highlights the critical need for privacy in the digital age, and the extent to which governments will go to in order to ensure you don’t have any.It can’t be said enough, but the notion that writing code could be considered criminal, is truly reflective of the upside down world we are living in. If a developer is being arrested because the software facilitated so-called money laundering, why hasn’t anyone from the Federal Reserve and the US Government been arrested yet for creating the US Dollar and allowing it to continue to operate and endlessly creating more of it, given the IMMENSE amount of “money laundering” it has been used to facilitate. If you find it valuable - Share it!There are endless examples which highlight the hypocrisy and absurdity of this. And they help to clarify the true intention behind this arrest, As Stephan Livera pointed out in the tweet below:Anyone that has defragmented their cognitive o/s and doesn’t have their head in the sand can clearly see that this has nothing to do with money laundering. It is about control. And in order to control you, your privacy has to go.There are two primary themes i want to tease out.* That privacy could possibly be considered criminal, illegal, undesirable or be an act that in isolation implies anything untoward or really anything at all is an evil and deeply malevolent proposition. Privacy is foundational and fundamental in the digital age. Everyone is entitled to it, and from a value perspective one should respect another person’s desire for it. As I’ve mentioned previously, everything is downstream of privacy. You cannot be free without it. This idea must be vigorously condemned and this framing categorically rejected. As Allen Farrington outlines below - Words matter.2. The battle over our right for privacy will not be won through self-censorship. Governments are among the most corrupt and fraudulent institutions we have. They would love nothing more than to gaslight people into believing that they are not entitled to privacy. If developers the world over decided it’s too dangerous to write privacy preserving software, users were too scared to use it, and the vast majority of people believed that you have no right to it because you must be an evil money laundering psychopath - it would be game over. We must use privacy preserving software more than ever and create more tools than ever in the face of this attack. This war will be won with more speech. More code. More cryptography. More privacy.To quote from from Eric Hughes’ A Cypherpunk Manifesto:“We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation's border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.Onward.“So Powerful. And the fact this was written almost 30 years ago should speak volumes.The mission that bitcoin embodies has been underway for decades. This story is not new. Only new to some.Many have fought for the incredible opportunity that bitcoin presents, and many of those people may not get to enjoy those benefits themselves. Bitcoin has always been about more than just number go up. More than a mere investment. Obviously for many of us there is a journey that must be undertaken to learn this. You must do the work. This most recent attack, while not on bitcoin directly, serves to demonstrate the intent of government and those closest toward the center of power. These entities do not want a free humanity. They fear it, when really they should embrace it.We must stake our claim, and oppose this tyranny and anyone who wishes to keep us captive. We must reject the idea that anyone would have the right to control the free flow of information in the world. The trajectory has been set for many decades. The commitment to it is unwavering. The right to privacy is non negotiable. As Eric Hughes states, a free and open society is not possible in the digital age without it.So let us defend our own privacy in a way that demonstrates we expect to have it.Onward.Hope you all have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you next week.AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

Good Morning Everyone,The US senate has just passed a bill to fight inflation by creating a program to spend $430 Billion dollars on climate and health care initiatives named the Inflation Reduction Act. I linked to the summary document above which begins as follows:“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030. The bill will also finally allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription drug prices and extend the expanded Affordable Care Act program for three years, through 2025.“I’ve never seen a more apt example that demonstrates how democracy is a 51% attack on the network, as with this this vote. All 50 Democrats voted for the bill, and all 50 republicans voted against it, with Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, casting the tie-breaking vote and initiating a $430 billion dollar 51% attack on the American network.Check out the clip above to watch the completion of the vote, and the pleasure these people derive from “winning“ and beating their enemy which ironically is their countrymen.You would think if the government wanted to spend almost half a trillion dollars then they would need to have that money, but not in a fiat world. Remember the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is just below $9T and government debt is around $30T. To facilitate this bill they (for the most part) will simply take on more debt. What’s particularly absurd about this bill is that they think reducing carbon emissions by 40% in 7 years is in any way realistic, and they plan to increase their taxing capabilities, which is to prey even further on their population, by increasing the head count of IRS agents by 87,000 and increasing the level to which they can capture your proof-of-work. This bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s aimed more toward stripping value from the populace by the rent-seeking unproductive class than doing anything meaningful about TheClimate™️ or for peoples health. Give me a break! They do not care about anyone’s health. It is masquerading as something that they think the mindless majority will support while further enabling them to suck blood from their hosts.This insanity really is as upside down as it sounds. This tweet from James Lavish really hits the nail on the head in my opinion in regard to this failed fiat monetary experiment and the obsession by the supporters of it with central planning.This is the fiat disease. The idea that to “fix“ the problem that has been created in the first place by increasing of the money supply is to impact every other node in the fiat network by increasing this magical number. Essentially forcing a contraction in economic value expression across the network. It negatively impacts the profitability of many businesses which creates many other higher order effects and often leads to less jobs being available. It leads to a concentration in wealth and allows the larger and richer to accumulate and further accelerates the wealth divide which harms society broadly, and ultimately it makes life more difficult for an increasing majority of people. That’s not to say people would not experience difficulty if we removed fiat today, but it wouldn’t be as insanely unfair as what it is today. Fiat is fundamentally zero-sum. It is taking from many and allowing a few to swallow it up. And it is enabled by a small group of corrupt liars who celebrate winning above all else, and completely ignore the truth about how destructive, short sighted and immoral this system really is.It truly flaws me how upside down this clown world has become, and that anyone would consciously support such a parasitic drain on human potential. The idea that a small group of pseudo-elites have this level of control over all other people because of their outsized influence over the monetary protocol is fundamentally wrong, however in the fiat clown world, this is a feature of the system, not a bug.This bill should be named the Inflation Creation Act, because in order to spend this money the government doesn’t have, money will need to be borrowed and thus created. You can see Moloch at work here. Bad incentives, enabling bad outcomes, stuck within a nasty feedback loop enabled by the Moloch that exists inside us all. Bitcoin is the mechanism to enable us to course correct. The paradigm shift, that can enable us to break free of this perpetual negative feedback loop and it begins by disabling the outsized influence of these central planning parasites. Get educated and take custody of your keys - these people would 6102 rug pull you without hesitation.Bitcoin is the mission. Hope you all have a great week. Wishing you well, and i’ll talk to you tomorrow.AKPublished Block Height: 748496 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

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

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

Good Morning Everyone,The concept of trend is a critically important one. A trend is like an object in motion. When thinking in probabilities, a trend is much more likely to continue than it is to reverse. That’s not to say it can’t reverse, simply that it’s less likely. Whether you are starting a business, changing careers, playing poker or are a trader within financial markets, understanding the probabilities or the odds, is of supreme value, and in most cases you would prefer to get on the side of the probabilities. That is to say if something had a 60% hit rate, meaning 6/10 times you will “win“ with a given strategy, you would much prefer that than something with a 30% hit rate. The human brain typically struggles with this, but we’re often best served by viewing success over a series of attempts rather than just a single one. Just like at the gym, you don’t go to the gym once, fail to get a six pack and then give up. The process of conditioning the body is one that is an accumulation of sustained effort over time.A common turn of phrase amongst many traders is “The Trend Is Your Friend“. Understanding trends is one of the most important things to grasp as a trader. Trends can exist in multiple time frames, from a 1minute or 5min chart, to a monthly or quarterly chart. There are much larger patterns and trends at play that extend far beyond these, and extend over hundreds of years like the long term debt cycle and the Fourth Turning. Patterns are an artefact of nature, and thus they are an artefact of human behaviour. We are nature. Just as any other animal or organism that exists is too. The longer a pattern or trend has existed for, that is the higher the timeframe the trend can be confirmed on, the higher the signal typically is, and the higher the probability the trend would continue. “An object in motion tends to stay in motion.”A major reason why it’s so valuable to properly understand trend is because of the psychological disposition we have to be anticipating its eventual end, and fading it early. There is no shortage of people who have bet against a trend by shorting it and been absolutely rekt. As i said, it’s not that it can’t reverse, but the probabilities are not on your side. Which means over time you lose given enough attempts. Being able to identify this enables a trader to verify once that dynamic has switched around, and then reconfigure their psychological biases to be in alignment with the change. With all that said, US GDP data is out and despite the Ministry of Truth’s attempt to gaslight their own citizens, even going to the extent of redefining what they consider a recession to be, the US has most certainly entered a recession. Along with confirmation of the US entering recession, we also have updated monthly inflation prints which saw inflation in Australia increase from 5.1 to 6.1 - a 20% increase month-on-month, while the US nears ever closer to double digits printing 9.1%. (Yes, as discussed many times. These numbers are as bogus as Nancy Pelosi’s insider trading - the real numbers are waaaaaay higher!)The Aussie inflation chart however is a fascinating one to look at; especially when we zoom in a little and consider the trend and the previous structure. As you can see from the lows which i’ve highlighted below; Every low is a higher low structurally which shows the pressure to the downside is decreasing with each low that has been printed and indicates some what of a consolidation is taking place. The other point of interest is that the previous long term resistance which goes back to the 90’s has been breached and we are now seeing the highest levels of inflation for 32 years in Australia. The final data i’ll highlight is the level around 7% where you can see i’ve drawn a horizontal line. If Inflation data increases and confirms with a further increase beyond this level if i was simply following the trend I would put the probabilities in favour of inflation pumping its way up toward the previous local high toward 10%, and very likely higher over time. But the overriding point i’m wanting to make is simply that until we can confirm otherwise, the trend of higher inflation is not going anywhere. That is not to say it cannot change, but until there are clear signs of a reversal in the data, the this looks more like a major breakout than anything else, and much higher levels are more probabilistically likely. Breaking out of a 32year period of consolidation is not an insignificant thing, and the worst thing we could do downplay it’s significance. It should be best thought of as a coiling spring or a building of pressure. The longer and further the spring is held down, the more significant the expansion is likely to be when that pressure is released.This is what we are currently seeing -a major expansion off the lows.Meanwhile the broad trend with fiat is well established - it trends toward zero in value while the supply of units continues to expand over time. Bitcoin does the opposite. The supply is fixed and the issuance continues to halve every four years until the supply cap is reached somewhere around 2140. Political monies trend toward zero, while Bitcoin will trend up and to the right into infinity. Act accordingly.Wishing you all well. Hope you have a great day. Talk to you tomorrow.AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

Good Morning Everyone,The ability to solve problems that we face, is perhaps one of the most important capabilities we can posses. In many respects life is simply a series of problems or challenges. While some may associate the word problem as a negative, it’s perhaps better framed as a series of barriers reached that in order to progress to some next potential point, which we deem an improvement from our current position, or even just to maintain our current position, we must resolve some underlying point of friction. It is much more productively viewed as an opportunity.One of the most common mistakes when trying to solve a problem, or series of problems, is failing to correctly understand it in the first place. Depending on the scope of the problem faced, this can lead to a host of undesirable outcomes and potentially be catastrophic. One of the most likely errors one can make when trying to solve complex problems is we can attempt to solve it by mistaking the symptoms for the underlying root cause. This can be disastrous. Not only would we not solve our problem in this case, we would create a host of undesirable outcomes as a result of these actions and create an entirely new series of problems. In this scenario the best possible outcome that exists now, is to accept how and why we failed to solve the problem, and acknowledge the side effects from incorrectly addressing it, go back to the beginning to correctly understand the root cause of the issue and begin again.Unfortunately as is so often the case, humans tend not to like being wrong and in now facing the next problem, instead of deploying humility and doing what is necessary as mentioned above, often people will make excuses as to why it didn’t work, and conjure up reasons why it wasn’t our fault. This is often done by people blatantly lying and completely muddying the waters of what really happened and why we achieved the outcome we did.This is often the case when the incentives are lined up in such a way that we stand to lose significantly from the situation. This is especially true where money is concerned.The topic of whether or not the US economy (and many others) is in a recession has been hotly discussed for months, but critics and commentators have been waiting for the second quarterly GDP print which is due July 28th in order to confirm this. That’s because the term recession had been defined as two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. That date is quickly approaching, and in preparation the Ministry Of Truth™️ have decided that instead of acknowledging reality and accepting the mistakes they have made, that the reaction to COVID and the monetary policy as part of it was wreckless, irresponsible and completely insane, that instead they will take the opportunity to redefine what a recession is. Genius. You can’t be in a recession if you change the definition of a recession.Below is the introduction to the blog post from the White House and it begins:Incredible. Janet Yellen was questioned about it, and urged listeners not to characterise it as a recession, if the Q2 print was to come in negative.“A common definition of recession is two negative quarters of GDP growth, or at least that’s something that’s been true in past recessions. When we’ve seen that, there has usually been a recession and many economists expect second quarter GDP to be negative. First quarter GDP was negative, so we could see that happen and that will be closely watched. But I do want to emphasise what a recession really means is a broad based contraction in the economy and even if that number is negative, we are not in a recession now and I would warn that we should not be characterising that as a recession.“As you would imagine the twitter army had a few things to say about the actions of these delusional central planners. Below are a couple that i enjoyed.Jokes aside though, because this really is beyond a joke. There is a problem, infact there are many problems. What is abundantly clear is that the incentives that exist are not going to sufficiently motivate the unproductive central planning class to miraculously obtain any kind of conscience and acknowledge it. These people are pathological liars and will continue playing games of word salad to confuse and mislead people if it means avoiding acknowledging truth. These people are morally and ethically bankrupt. They are self serving rent seekers wishing to remain attached tightly to the flesh of their host, and to feed on the life source of it. Just like a parasite does.They will continue to gaslight you about definitions of vaccines, and definitions of recession.. These people would redefine what it means to murder someone if they needed to. These are not leaders. They are frauds. Continue to adopt their system at your peril. Fiat is evil, and the fiat pushers that benefit are a burden on humanity. Central planning is toward the core of our problem, and it is not going to be fixed by the very people who continue to benefit disproportionately from it. This system is not going to be fixed from within the system. If only we had a neutral monetary protocol that these space cadets couldn’t touch, and couldn’t redefine. 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,By now most will have seen the situation faced by farmers in the The Netherlands. The Dutch government of central planning lunatics took the WEF Olympics tyranny baton from Canadian Supreme Leader Trudeau in an effort to “fix“ the so-called “climate” - like it’s something you get from Ikea. But this is only on the micro level. Given the significance of Dutch food production (2nd largest on earth) the implications of these actions are far more significant and impact the broader human population in extreme ways.It seems that Supreme Leader Trudeau does not like to be one-upped in the WEF-ONIZE-THE-FOOD-SUPPLY Olympics, and he wants his baton back. The Canadian Government published a paper outlining the WEF plan back in May titled: “Reducing emissions arising from the application of fertilizer in Canada's agriculture sector” and at a recent meeting with provincial agricultural ministers confirmed he plans to move forward with the plan to reduce ferilizer use by 30%.The plan is similar to that of the Dutch (surprise, surprise), to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the use of fertilizer in producing food. To quote the document:“net human caused emissions of CO2 need to fall globally by about 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero around 2050.“So basically the plan is to bankrupt a bunch of smaller farming operations, ensure those small operations are swallowed up by larger ones, and ensure a lot of people are starved of nutrient dense food sources in the process. “You will eat bugs, own nothing, and be happy“The farmers in The Netherlands could see how catastrophic this WEF relay race is, and so too can the Canadian farmers:While local municipalities in Canada have expressed concern and highlighted the obvious issues with this insanity, the Federal overlords wish to continue their reign of terror on the peasant class, and do whatever Papa Klaus instructs. Remember, Klaus runs Canada. Don’t take my word for it - watch the clip below to hear it from the man himself.Anyone with their eyes open can see where this is going, and that it is simply about money and control. Bitcoin may be the most important weapon we have in this fight, especially if CBDCs come to bare, as it provides us with the means to strengthen local communities and enable producers and consumers to interact without all the intermediaries in the middle and trade peer-to-peer and strengthen local communities from the unproductive central planning class.It’s important to realise that no one is coming to save us. It is critically important the individual acts to secure the world we wish to live in. Initiatives like that of the The Texas Beef Initiative are essential and can be pivotal in insulating local communities from being malnourished at the hand of these tyrants. 2030 is not far away. It is 7 short years. These governments, and very likely others, are waging a full blown assault on essential infrastructure in alignment with the WEF Food Hub plan and their 2030 Agenda. But it is more significant than that, they are installing a tyrannical authoritarian regime which subverts your rights and the rights of many by capturing political leaders and short-circuiting local governments the world over to act in alignment with the objectives of unelected pseudo-elites. It is the installation of a world where your right to live peacefully in a way of your choosing is no longer your choice to make. And they are being enabled by fiat.The ideology is that what they believe trumps what you believe. What they want trumps what you want, and what happens is to be decided by them. It is the death of democracy. We saw what happened in Canada earlier in the year when Trudeau’s dictatorship was challenged - he weaponised the financial system against Canadian citizens and created a blacklist of accounts and individuals to target.Adopting bitcoin and building circular economies in our local communities is one of the ways we vote against this madness. To do nothing and continue to support fiat is to support the demise of the livelihoods of many farmers the world over and destroy the decentralized food network that has taken centuries to develop and has been absolutely pivotal to the flourishing of humans on earth up to this point.Vote with your actions. No one is coming to save us. AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

Good Morning Everyone,Tesla announced yesterday they sold 75% of their bitcoin holdings to improve their cash position, while still holding 25% of the original position. However today’s letter is not about Tesla, and it’s not about Elon; It’s simply to highlight the use of such information by media and attention predators, who wish to tell vulnerable minds nursery rhymes like they’re still three years old to set the frame of their thinking.The simple truth is that bitcoin is the first globally public money we’ve ever had. A money anyone can use and send to anyone and receive from anyone, from anywhere on the planet.. and potentially beyond. A boundless monetary substrate for humanity if you like. The fact it continues to get mixed in with the broader “crypto“ or digital asset space continues to highlight most people simply aren’t getting it. Most still fail to see why it is so important, and the broader implications of a world with bitcoin in it, just as they did with the internet. Let me cast your mind back to the early nineties to remind you what that was like.. check the clip below for a walk down memory lane.“What is internet?“. Think about just a few of the implications of the internet some twenty odd years after the above clip was recorded. It’s difficult to really grasp how different the world is today as a result. Video stores no longer exist, the mobile device (even calling it a phone barely seems appropriate given its capabilities) has replaced your alarm clock, your diary, your maps, your notebook, your music devices like CD players, your video and movie players, and as a result your TV, many around the world are no longer connected to legacy information channels like mainstream news (if you can even call it that) and others, it has replaced books, cameras and obviously it has replaced your landline phone. These are just a small handful of the things that have been distilled from many devices into one, and this is in a relatively short period of time. Imagine in 100 years - 5x more.It has removed entire industries, and created many new ones. It has completely reshaped global society in a few short years, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. The genie is out of the bottle. And many of these changes aren’t even getting close to touching the real significance of what the birth of the internet changes and enables. Without the internet Jullian Assange would never have been able to bring US war crimes in Iraq into the light, and that act, the murder of more than 12 innocent people, would have been able to go completely unnoticed, as no doubt many many atrocities have gone unnoticed prior. The internet changes absolutely everything. To confuse bitcoin with some centralised crypto company is to confuse the internet with an AM/FM radio transmitter. The two are simply not comparable. Below is a clip of former Jaw Boner extraordinaire Fed Chair Ben Bernanke from 2010 explaining to congress his expectations to reduce the fed balance sheet which he states would be back below a trillion dollars. Jan 21st 2010 the balance sheet was 2.25T. Did he really convince anyone they would more than halve it?The current US Fed balance sheet is just shy of nine Trillion, with a T. Not only did it never go back down anywhere near levels prior to 2008, 14 years later it has increased by more than 9x. Benanke’s comments sound familiar though, don’t they? Remember the clip of Christine Lagarde in May explaining how the ECB’s balance sheet will come down? Linked below if you missed it. It’s a doozy.As Rudy Harvenstein beautifully points out, economics must be the only profession on earth where you can make predictions and be consistently wrong and still get promotions and be trusted, believed and even celebrated.While this was true in a pre bitcoin world, it will not be true for much longer. Bitcoin as Luke Gromen describes it, is the last functioning smoke alarm and it has been sounding loudly for 13 years. Imagine ignoring a smoke alarm that’s sole purpose is to let you know the building you are in is on fire for thirteen years.Well this is where we’re at. Elon buying or selling doesn’t matter. What the current thing is does not matter. It will only be used as a lever to influence you. If i were you, i’d be curious as to why that is. QE is never going to end. Just like Bernanke in 2010, and Lagarde in 2022, no matter what these people say, the balance sheets will continue to expand. This is the design of the system, and these people know it. A system that is completely out of control and acts against your best interests and those of your friends and families. A system that simply serves to keep you contained.Bitcoin is not a get rich quick scheme, it’s a get free scheme, and like the internet, it is not going to go away. Quite the opposite. It is the signal amongst the noise and offers us an alternative to listening to the 3 amigos above. An alternative grounded in verifiable truth. The jawboners above will continue to jaw bone, while economies around the world continue to collapse as the the US based fiat ponzi does the same. The actions of these people have dramatic social implications and we’re seeing them all over the world. As central banks continue to expand their balance sheets, the wealth divide accelerates and social cohesion accelerates to the downside.It’s never been more important to get educated and to be aware of what is happening. We are living within a pivotal moment in time. A historic pivot. The 4th turning. The great awakening. The end of the long term debt cycle. Whatever you want to call it. Like the seasons, we’re going into the depths of winter, and thanks to bitcoin we can be assured, that while it will still be cold, winter will not last forever. Spring will follow, and it will be glorious. Opt-out of a a system built upon lies and deception and opt-in to the the peaceful resistance that is bitcoin.Hope you have a great day. 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,I’ve been meaning to chat about Fedimint for a while, and after receiving an email from Ego Death Capital this morning about their investment toward Fedimint it has prompted me to finally do so.Why Fedimint?Despite non-stop attempts by the bitcoin community to help educate the wider community on the importance of self custody - “Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins“ - the unfortunate reality is that a dominant percentage of users relinquish custody of their keys to 3rd party exchanges, and this weakens not only the security of the holdings of the individual but the entire network significantly. The primary reasons for this are 1) People lack the technical competence to do so 2) Cost. Many around the world simply cannot afford the price of a hardware wallet and 3) Many people prefer to outsource trust as they do not trust themselves to take responsibility and secure their bitcoin.This basically turns any exchange into a massive honey pot for government and nefarious actors wishing to control, surveil, restrict and censor the use of these bitcoin and could even lead to mass seizure of bitcoin, similar to what happened in 1933 with gold following executive order 6102. Fundamentally this dynamic removes the censorship nature intended, due to the outsourcing of trust to custody ones bitcoin keys.What is Fedimint?Fedimint, short for Federated Chaumian Mint, is a protocol that has the potential to profoundly improve bitcoin self-custody solutions and offers to potentially solve one of the most significant attack vectors facing bitcoin today - that being large percentages of bitcoin keys being custodied by centralised 3rd party exchanges. Fedimint leverages two primary technologies being 1) Federations, or community shared wallets. This can be simply thought of as multi-signature wallets and 2) The use of Chaumian Mints. Attached is a great blog post explaining more around the use of federated mints including how and why they could improve scaling and privacy on bitcoin. Chaumian mints are explained in the post as follows:“Chaumian mints, also known as Chaumian banks, or blind mints, offer a compelling solution to these problems, particularly when operation is federated. Chaumian mints, through the use of blind signatures, have extremely appealing privacy properties. The mint operators do not know the number of users, their identities, account balances, or transaction histories. Additionally, mint transactions are cheap and can be performed at unlimited scale.”What Are The Primary Advantages?Fedimint could offer a superior custody model while maintaining bitcoins core properties, and without sacrificing decentralization. The three primary benefits to leveraging this technology are:* A Superior Bitcoin Custody Solution. Better than trusting an unknown 3rd party like an exchange, and perhaps even better than individual self-custody due to the fail-safes it would provide, fedimint has the potential to be a superior way to self-custody bitcoin which would be widely available to all users. * Privacy. Fedimint can dramatically improve privacy on bitcoin as the use of federated chaumian mints makes it impossible for chain surveillance companies to tell the difference between a normal transaction and that of a federation. While they would be able to see the total balance, they cannot know who is sending or receiving what, and the balances of individual federation members is completely hidden.* Help more people take full ownership of their bitcoin, and enable them to leverage the core properties offered by the protocol, like censorship resistance, that are lost when trusting centralised 3rd party exchanged. The forming of federations outsources the most technical parts of self-custody from the individual user who may not have the technical competence to do so, to trusted members of the federation. Thus making it far more possible than before for these users to custody their bitcoin keys.Below is a timestamped link to Obi Nwosu’s presentation on Fedimint at Bitcoin 2022 Where he goes through the ins and outs of the protocol which i highly recommend watching to understand more.In my opinion the improvement of privacy on bitcoin is the single most important advancement as fundamentally, everything else is downstream of privacy. The priority to ensure user privacy cannot be over-stated. The need for it to be standard procedure is critical. This requires an alternative to solve for the vast number of bitcoin users giving custody of their private keys to centralised 3rd party exchanges.It must be simple for any user regardless of technical capability to utilise, and implemented in a way that makes it robust and common-place when interacting with the network and in my opinion, the promise of bitcoin full-filling the mission to separate money and state relies on such a solution. Hopefully Fedimint is that solution. Time will tell. Just another example of why open networks win. Open Source Everything!Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

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

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

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

“Everytime we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act we become a party to injustice. Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility.“— Jullian Assange, Conspiracy as Governance, 2006Good Morning Everyone,A deep irony exists when we live In a world that has become so deeply polarised and politicised. So much so, an immutable, apolitical system of scarce information, of value, has been manifested into existence. As a protocol bitcoin is absolutely apolitical. It is indifferent to any political beliefs or ideology. It is decisively neutral. Which is a stark contrast to most else in clown world. Bitcoin is neutral to race, religion, ethnicity, gender (trigger warning: of which there is only two 🤣), height, hair colour, skin color, eye color, body type, body shape, name, language, location, wealth or any other myriad identifying and distinguishing factors.Bitcoin will process any transaction from any person and to any person, regardless of everything else except for 1) whether or not you adhere to the rules of the network 2) you pay the appropriate fees to process your transaction - which is essentially paying for the scarcity of the block space. Assuming those two items are met, your transaction will be processed.Where the political paradox lies is in bitcoins very existence. The fact that it has come to be. That it even exists. Which implies that some cohort of individuals sought to create a technology with the very properties bitcoin has. While the protocol itself is apolitical, this act of creation, is a deeply political one. When one see’s bitcoin for the first time it illuminates many things about our current system that where previously invisible. All of a sudden you can no longer see the world the same way. Prior to the inception of bitcoin, we had no superior system or point of comparison. Something that would highlight the characteristics by providing an alternative. We now have something different to compare the current system to. It would seem to be the case, that the creation of bitcoin is the recognition that having a monetary system, a network of value, that is centralized, and enables the weaponization of this network by those with administrative privileges against those without (the users), is a deeply flawed and immoral one. A system of incentives that rewards people for playing political games, specifically those who get closer toward the center of this system by playing these games benefit disproportionately to those furthest away. The zero-sum nature of the design would seem another fundamental flaw in the code of the central banking system. But perhaps to those who designed the system, it is a feature? This dynamic of inequality only accelerates over time as those at the center of the system continue to increase the supply of units at the expense of a large swath of users on the network, and eventually to the demise of the network itself.The very creation of this technology we call bitcoin is perhaps the most significant political act of all time. It is a technology that diametrically opposes the current system, and everything this current system stands for. The notion that someone should be able to get between two individual humans and their right to transact with one another, that any entity or group should have that power over another. Bitcoin rejects this. That you should be required to identify yourself in order to access the network of value transfer, and be subject to surveillance and a loss of privacy for that privilege. Bitcoin rejects this. That the imaginary borders formed by tribes of humans should have any impact over our ability to transact with one another. Bitcoin rejects this. One system asserts that these are not fundamental human rights that are implied as a result of being in a body; but bitcoin rejects this.Bitcoin is a vote in opposition to the current system, and in many of the values this current system has attempted to install within the minds of the many. It is in its very essence, political. The beauty of bitcoin is that it will never coerce you to use it, like the current system does. It will never impose its power upon you or any other, it will simply offer superior incentives, and no one can ever control the network whereby capturing this power. An immaculate system of incentive design, to allow the flow of pure informational clarity from any node in the network to any other, that is owned by no one. Where no hierarchical structure exists and no imbalance in the distribution of this information affords any node power over another as a result. Incredible.It’s impossible not to be completely in awe of its existence, and to marvel at its very nature. An apolitical monetary protocol for humanity birthed in a world so deeply entangled and confused by a captured system of political power, influence and violence. As Jullian Assange hinted at in the quote at the beginning, Once an injustice is bought to the fore of our attention, we are offered a choice: Will we be passive and become party to the injustice, and in the process find our character corroded into servility or will we opt-in to a superior system…I know which one gets my vote.Hope you all have a great week. 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,Imagine you’ve been living in a small dark room your entire life, and within this room it has been pitch black the whole time. You’ve been living in this room and all the while due to the nature of it, you’ve never seen a single thing. Almost as if there is no such thing as sight altogether, and the very concept of vision and your visual field where everything appears is a foreign and completely alien-like notion. Then one day, you stumble across a switch on the wall that you have never felt before. You run your fingers across the plastic wall panel, and you feel the positioning of the switch in its place, and also that the switch has a range in which it feels like it can move, like something that can move between being active and inactive. On or off. You flick this switch to its opposing side, and all of a sudden the space in which you have spent your entire existence is instantly illuminated for the very first time. Almost like the feeling of waking up from a dream.It now becomes apparent to you the very nature of your vision and your visual field. Colour and shadow rush in and it is made explicitly clear to you the depth and complexity that has always existed within this space, but has been in many ways hidden from you, until now.This is very similar to the experience one often goes through when they discover bitcoin, and really grasp it for the first time. All of a sudden the nature of the world and our predicament is illuminated in a completely new way, and despite it being all around you from a point of your experience it is as if it has been hidden from you all along in plain sight. Finding this light switch or an experience that facilitates something similar to this is not an easy one. We are often so deeply embedded within this space, or system, that we have become attached to it in a strange kind of way, and there is often a resistance or a lacking of openness that prevents us from seeing what is right in front of us, and all around us. This quote from Morpheus in the matrix very accurately describes the scenario i’m attempting to articulate:“You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inurred, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it“This is one of the reasons that the Numba-Go-Up technology of bitcoin is so important. Many come for NgU and stay for Freedom Go Up, and at the end of the day, this is what it is all about. Atleast this is what it is about for me, and many others like me.Years gone by prior to the internet, and everything the internet has enabled, we didn’t have to worry when we took a photo who’s servers it was stored on, because there were no servers. We didn’t have mobile phone devices capable of tracking our every move, and being able to observe or hear our most intimate conversations, let alone devices tracking our biometric data like heart rate, our sleep timing and cycles and other very specific bodily information. Life was obviously far simpler. Since things have now changed we have lost a lot of the fundamental rights and privileges that were once basic and fundamental, and obviously this dynamic extends pervasively to money and thus our spending habits, movements and preferences as well as our social networks and community interactions.As you can imagine, a tyrannical, authoritarian state actor loves these new capabilities. Like they’re some kind of super power. Very kid in a candy store-eque. And given our current societal construct is very much a hierarchical one enabled by central banks and political monies this poses extreme dangers to us all, as should be abundantly clear having lived through a pandemic of propaganda, lies and coercion for the past 2 years at the hand of these corrupt and destructive regimes.So while the probability of the most verifiably scarce asset in history appreciating in value over time is very high in my opinion, as more people begin to find this light switch and illuminate the dark room of their lives, the reality is, that what bitcoin is offering us is so far beyond monetary gain, to even focus on this almost seems somewhat trivial. Onward.Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

Good Morning Everyone,The term cryptocurrency, or crypto for short, is one that in a perfect world would never have existed. Not because it lacks relevance to the cryptographic nature of bitcoin, but because it has been hijacked by a class of grifters who seek only to enrich themselves regardless of who has to lose to enable it. A class of people intent on playing short-term zero-sum games, instead of long-term positive-sum games.Previous musings on the distinction between bitcoin and “crypto” can be found here.Many people get triggered and often angry at quote-unquote “bitcoiners”, when this is pointed out. Typically these people are the “shitcoiners”, whether they realise this or not. I think very often not. It’s not that they are inherently evil, or have consciously nefarious intentions, it’s simply that they don’t know what they don’t know, and they, in most cases, lack the humility to enquire and deploy curiosity toward this.Perhaps this is because they are puppets to sensations and patterns of energy inside them, things we call “feelings” and “emotions”, and the term shitcoiner triggers said patterns of energy and short-circuits their cognitive faculties. Perhaps it’s the fact they’re emotionally attached to whatever b******t story they have been told by these COMPANIES and their marketing teams and it threatens the beliefs they have been GIVEN and since adopted… about how they get their risk-free yield, or how their token is going to change the world. I hold nothing against these people, only love, as I know first-hand bitcoin is not easy to see. In order to really uncover what it exposes requires a deep amount of work, a radical level of openness; and most are simply unwilling or unable to do this, or they just haven’t done it yet… and it can take time. Forgive me father, for i have sinned. I have shitcoined, and realise the wrong doing of my ways, and I repent. Although it was a long time ago, i seek your forgiveness. I am a changed man, father. I now see that none of these companies are decentralized, rather decentralized in name only (DINO). They are simply manifestations of the same existing structures already existing in todays society, and enable the same level of corruption and single points of failure as all other centralized entities, and as a result are completely unsuitable as a form of money. I can see that without this decentralization none of the necessary properties can be assured, the very properties bitcoin makes possible, and without these and without millions of dollars spent toward marketing these scams and deceiving people into believing complete lies, they would never make it on their own merit. These companies are fragile like something built upon quicksand. They require rulers in order to exist. Bitcoin on the other hand is anti-fragile, and requires no rulers. Only rules. The innovation of bitcoin is so alien, that despite having existed for 13 years, most people still cannot see it. I now see how these shitcoins are an attack on this innovation, and are in opposition to the best interests of humanity moving forward. Please forgive me.Over the last couple of months the truth continues to be exposed as one by one the crypto grifters begin to fail. It began with the implosion of Terra Luna, the so-called algo “stablecoin”, and continues to expose the true colours of many including Celsius, Block-Fi, 3 Arrows Capital and most recently some unknown-to-me lending platform called Voyager.There was no shortage of “Toxic Bitoiners” who were willing to point out the truth about these companies, however unfortunately for many, greed is a powerful state of being, and as is often the case, pain is required to wake us up and calibrate us with reality. The simple fact is that these companies people refer to as “crypto projects”, are infact centralized, unregulated and like it or not, illegal securities offerings. The sooner they are exposed as such the better for everyone. As such it was of no surprise to me when i saw an article this morning showing Solana are being accused of violating securities law.It shouldn’t be news to anyone reading this that i’m in favour of free markets as opposed to central planning, but it seems obvious that with the current iteration of society and legal framework that exists, the appropriate thing to happen is for these scams to be treated accordingly. It definitely does raise an interesting philosophical point; should these scams and the soulless parasites that promote them to unsuspecting idiots (of which i have been) be able to continue their grift until enough people have lost money and realised they are infact scams, or not? That is something i will have to think more deeply about, to form a thoughtful view. My initial sense is that if the markets were truly free, then these things would sort themselves out much faster as these people would be held accountable, instead of being able to weasel their way out, enabled by money and a flawed justice system.Irrespective of this, despite being unfortunate and painful for many, i believe the exposing of these individuals, companies and projects and the subsequent cleansing of nefarious actors offering nonsensical things like yield - let alone RISK-FREE YIELD - is a good thing. It’s healthy. It’s good for bitcoin, and ultimately it’s good for humanity. While the fragile descend into the quicksand they were built upon, all roads continue to lead to bitcoin, and the “old and boring“ technology that is the most sophisticated monetary network in human history continues to produce blocks and facilitate transactions for anyone on the planet, without needing anything from anyone.Onward.Hope you have a great day. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. P.S if anyone knows Saifedean, I applied for a research position with him, and would love if you could put in a good word 🧡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 political climate is once again hitting a critical point in various regions of the world right now as the parasitic central planners assert their insane ideology on farmers in The Netherlands. An ideology that a small group of pseudo-elites can control every thing and every one. Completely disregarding the incomputable complexity that exists in the world. The dutch political class have taken center stage as they move to halve nitrogen output by 2030 in alignment with the World Economic Forums climate goals, as well as their Food Innovation Hub plans.The Dutch plan led by Christianne van der Wal who is ironically a politician of the People’s Party For Freedom and Democracy, is to reduce nitrogen emissions by 50%, which by the way is one of, if not the most abundant chemical elements in our atmosphere. The plan which i’ve linked to above basically involves removing 30% of dutch farmers in an area based approach. This will directly target small scale farming operations, and lead to a further concentration of infrastructure and food production capability [read: Power].As you’d expect the dutch farmers have rightly taken to the streets to express their distain for the plan of the minister for so-called “freedom” and “democracy” rising up in what is likely to be the largest ever protest in the country.The Netherlands is the second largest agricultural producer on the planet, second only to the US. They are a massive contributor to global food production. Does this mean we need to starve a large portion of the population to deal with the climate hysteria? One can only wonder how long it takes for the dutch government to leverage the playbook of supreme leader Trudeau and enact economic war on the dutch citizens by freezing accounts and creating blacklists.Make no mistake, this is not about the climate, it is about power and control. In this case, control of critical food production infrastructure. The WEF plan to create food hubs and control the entire worlds food supply, if that is even possible. They are leveraging corrupt, for-sale political tyrants to remove your rights and enable the take over. This is not a “theory”, it’s direct from their website. The plan is to create 4 food hubs and It’s highly likely that the Netherlands is one as well as the US. This removal of smaller scale producers will enable the concentration of ownership and production into the hands of a few. It would also mean that if you wished to obtain that food, you would need to use their slave-coin to do so, and opt-in to their network. Classic fiat coercion. This also explains why Bill Gates has been busy accumulating so much rural farmland in the US, having most recently been questioned by the North Dakota Attorney General what he intended to use the recent $13.5m purchase of land for. Gates now owns more than 240,000 acres of farmland in the US!This is not about nitrogen or “the climate™️”. It’s not about abortion and it’s not about Ukraine. It is about control. Control over you and I. Control over what jobs are deemed necessary, what food is acceptable, who can produce it, what you can say and what you cannot say, and what monetary network you must use. Whether or not you can leave your home or remain in lockdown because you have not undergone fill-in-the-blank medical procedure.You have the right to run a farm and produce food. You have the right to move freely, and transact with whoever you like. You have the right to leverage a monetary good that the government cannot take from you and extract the value of via inflation of the money supply and secure the future for your children rather than being trapped on some kind of hamster wheel that continually speeds up.The notion that central planners can account for the myriad complexity that exists in the universe and solve every problem through top-down autocracy is absolutely insane. Free markets while not perfect, are without question the most superior mechanism humans have developed thus far to deal with this complexity, and the future ability for humans to flourish on the planet depends on us being free to operate as nodes within these markets.It’s inspiring to see the dutch farmers rise up in opposition to this insanity, but is it enough? As we saw in Canada there is no length nefarious government actors will not go to in order to maintain power and discredit those who oppose their iron fist. Below you can see a video of dutch police removing farmers from their tractors and arresting them. Sounds familiar.. The Canadian truckers would be waking up in the night having flashbacks!We must present a united opposition to this madness and rise above efforts to separate us and have us turn us on each other. While we are all unique we are far more similar than we are different. The peaceful exit door of bitcoin remains open for anyone wishing to enter. It’s time to stop supporting these tyranny enabling political regimes and their political monopoly money and opt-in to the freedom network bitcoin provides. We are going to win. We have to.Hope everyone has a good day, and wishing everyone and especially those in the Netherlands strength and honour in this historic fight. I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com

Good Morning Everyone,Jullian Assange is best known to most as the founder of Wikileaks - a not-for-profit publishing entity focussed toward releasing large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials. He remains a political prisoner in the UK and has been used by governments, primarily the US government and all others who bend the knee to them, as an example to deter others from exposing the truth and who dare dissent about these corrupt unelected cartels. He is also an OG cypherpunk, so it’s no surprise he was early to leverage the neutrality provided by the bitcoin network when governments pressured payment processors like Visa and Mastercard to censor any transactions to Wikileaks.In 2006, the same year he founded Wikileaks, he wrote two papers titled “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” & “Conspiracy As Governance” which can be found on Nakamoto Institute dot org’s website. The intro to this paper reads as follows:“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough [to] carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.“It’s becoming increasingly clear to me as a matter of necessity, we must reject the framing by dishonest, incompetent or nefarious actors, be it government or any other entity, that are providing a misleading or blatantly false lens in which to view an issue. We must also provide an alternative frame for people to combat this, and one that is grounded in objective truth.This tactic, often referred to as gaslighting, is designed to lead people to a specific desired conclusion or outcome, and is often used to short-circuit honest discourse and truth-seeking. The Covid hysteria is a prime example. Anyone that was wanting more information around vaccines, or that expressed any kind of curiosity, concern or hesitation was immediately vilified, demonised and banished from society as a heartless antivax lunatic with no concern for other members of their community. Obviously this is, and always was utter nonsense designed to politicise the issue, enable strong control measures to be enforced and distract people by placing a wedge in society and have everyone fight amongst themselves and become very anchored to perceiving the game board in a very specific way. Classic divide and conquer. An oldie but a goodie it seems. Plenty of lindy on that strategy.tRusT tHe sCiEnCe™️This kind of informational and psychological attack on us all is evil - and i mean that in the truest sense of the word. This is the meme-war. It is an attack on our friends and families, on our children and on their futures by a selfish and power hungry class of pseudo-elite sociopaths who seek to accumulate more and more political power, as is the incentive of a system of political money. If normies realised how they had been played they would be livid. This manipulation and social engineering is enabled by the creating of a frame. A lens in which to perceive the current thing, and typically carves out clear paths for us to “choose” that are often, but not always diametrically opposed.The ESG scenario is another prime example of this, but i won’t get stuck on that one right now. I want to focus on inflation. We’ve been on quite the journey this past two years when it comes to the monetary system including monetary and fiscal policy. Given the US’s position as the world reserve currency most of what happens is downstream of the fed. Lets recap the official narrative. “Deadly” covid pandemic hits, everyone must be locked in their homes and that means we need to increase the money supply drastically. In the US this was north of 40% in eighteen months. Meaning 40% of all US dollars in the circulating supply were created in the past 2 years. All other governments and central banks followed suit. Inflation came out of “nowhere” and apparently it was transitory. Nothing to worry about. Then it had peaked and they “had everything under control”; however it has continued to increase seeing 40 years highs month after month in the US (and most other nations).The real version is that the financial system is in the process of falling apart. Whether they keep it limping along a while longer nobody really know, but the underlying fundamentals are cooked. Jerome and the gang had been trying to reduce their balance sheet between 2018 and -19 but things started to break, specifically the repo market, and they changed course very quickly.If you zoom in around 2019 on the chart above which shows the US central bank balance sheet you can see that pre-covid they had already begun to reverse course and begin increasing their balance sheet once again beginning in September 2019. Covid or not they were going to print, but it gave them a beautiful nursery rhyme to lull people to sleep with while they did.Now Fed Chair Jerome Powell has spilt the beans at the ECB forum and basically said they have no clue what they’re doing.“One way to say it would be I think we now understand better how little we understand about inflation”It’s impossible to know if he’s telling the truth at this point or just playing more political games - code for lying and actively deceiving the public - and it is merely a distraction to bother to find out. They have been so consistently wrong - they’re either 1) grossly incompetent or 2) they’re lying through their teeth. The fed employs around 400 PHDs. The probability that they are this wrong consistently is an extremely low one.Regardless of the case, what should be abundantly clear is that these people have no place controlling the money of the world. The notion that a small number of people can just arbitrarily decide the fed funds rate, a number that effects every node in the fiat system and is derived from an incomputable level of complexity is absolutely absurd. Money is a market good. What we have courtesy of central banks is a political system and one that enables control. It is time to categorically reject the central planning class and adopt a superior monetary good of the market and for the market. One with a predictable issuance schedule that is known into infinity rather than one chosen by a few chimps sitting at a fancy table. These people have been leaches on society for long enough. If we are a free society then reject the frame that central banking is necessary and lets freely choose our monetary network that will support an abundant future for humanity.It’s time to remove the muck in the middle between peers like banks, payment processors and corporations and reap the benefits of a peer to peer global monetary network that just does what it says on the tin, instead of wasting time trying to interpret the signals from these idiots.Government and central banks only weapon in this fight is coercion. Over time the notion that a small group of liars ever had control over something as vital and influential as money will seem as primitive as traveling via horse and cart.It’s time to reject the frame of these parasites and their network of surveillance and control and opt in to the freedom network of bitcoin.Hope you all have a great start to your week. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.AK This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unlocked.substack.com