Cash_degen

[Benjamin Cowen @benjamincowen]

Hear me out

[Cash_degen @Cash_degen]

@binance <

[david friedberg @friedberg]

why not just raise income tax rates?

because your real intent is not to just “provide healthcare”.

you’re masking that you are proposing the creation of, for the first time in the 250 years of this American republic, an organized government seizure of private property from citizens.

you’re calling it a “wealth tax” or a “billionaires tax” or “millionaires tax” or whatever nom du jour polls well. but at the end of the day, it’s the seizure of private property from citizens by the government. citizens that earned money, paid their fair taxes on those earnings (53% if they live in California) and are now being told they need to hand over after-tax assets because the government has failed to provide promised services with the revenue it’s collected, and are now re-casting their own failure to be a socio-economic inequity that must be justly resolved... a slippery slope that has never gone anywhere good (see economic effects in USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, France and Norway wealth tax etc.)

the American founders fled tyranny in Europe and this amazing nation was populated by immigrants (myself and your parents) from around the world not just looking for a “better life” but for a place where they could have freedom from tyrannical governments that can take what they want from private citizens. a great nation borne of property rights, the rule of law, and endowed freedoms to believe, speak, or act. these principles led to the greatest run of innovations, successes, and widespread increase in prosperity, for all citizens, ever seen.

the citizens, the individuals, not the institutions, delivered this progress. those who invented, who toiled, who bled, who sacrificed, who took risk and persevered, who led, and who changed the world, are not charlatans, kleptocrats, or oligarchs. they’re what made us all better off. prosperity is a measure of america’s success, not its failure.

it is your principle that is so offensive, as evidenced by the broad disdain for your flippant flirtation with the darkest of human fantasy - socialism. you and other neo-socialists have led so many of us to reflect on America’s history and what it is becoming. that now leads so many to consider, so unnecessarily, leaving their homes for a place where everyone stands up to shout down the principle you suggest. because if your ideas are now considered moderate, it’s clear this titanic is sinking.

that a “simple tax” of taking assets that have been earned, through toil and tribulation, rightly taxed, and preserved, should now be unjustly seized, is your solution to a problem of obvious government mismanagement and outright fraud, tells us that your true motivation lies not in giving people healthcare but in cutting down success and deleting the system of prosperity and opportunity for all.

i don’t care, and neither should anyone else, what the sum total market value of a private citizens private assets might be. it is none of my business and should be none of yours. because, again, once you open that pandora’s box, we might as well study Lord of the Flies … there is literally nothing stopping 51% of citizens demanding that their government go out and seize 100% of the private property of the 49%.

want to give healthcare to people in need? do your job and fix healthcare. make it affordable. want to be lazy about it? then do your job lazily and raise income taxes.

want to take private property from private citizens who have paid their fair share of taxes and legally earned their property, then honestly declare that it is envy, not inequity, that you strive to resolve…

[CTO Larsson @ctoLarsson]

The difference between this and the very successful standardization we did with 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G:

You standardize the *next* technology, now 6G.

Not the *previous* one 🤦🏼‍♂️

Standardize a MagSafe style 1 Tbps 250W connector instead.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

@TheChiefNerd Pray for NYC.

[CTO Larsson @ctoLarsson]

I honestly never thought about how politically skewed Wikipedia is until this year. Now I see it everywhere.

This example… like.. what???

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is what I worry Europe will get negatively polarized into: an ideology taking pride in a neat, sanitized online environment free of evil corporate and fascist pathogens.

I hope European govs do not go this way, and instead take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment.

First, what's wrong with the tweet I'm quoting:

The idea that there should be "no space" for something you dislike is fundamentally a totalitarian and anti-pluralistic impulse. It's incompatible with being in an environment that you do not fully control.

This is especially true for categories that are subjective and controversial, because you end up trying to fully remove things you think are pathogens, when other people have good faith disagreements, and because you give yourself the maximalist goal of not even giving them breathing room, you create conflict and end up building the machinery of technocratic authoritarianism to impose your victory in the conflict.

So sorry, if you want to be a free society, you have to bite the bullet that some people, somewhere, will be selling things that you consider dangerous and saying things you consider disinformation and vicious lies.

What is the goal to shoot for?

You want to create an environment where those things don't dominate. This is the problem with twitter today: not that it's a safe space where 1000 people talk to each other in a corner about how heritage americans are the master race and putin is good or whatever, but that that crap gets shoved in our face on a mass scale, and the algorithms actively favor it.

The right metaphor is not castles and walls, but biological - think, why European forests don't have tropical lizards.

Having incentives for social media platforms to have less of those things instead of more is fundamentally reasonable, @audreyt has talked about how Taiwan has done something similar.

You also want to do this in a way where it's clear what the underlying principle is, so it's not a vehicle for imposing arbitrary and frequently changing expert-consensus agendas.

You also want to empower users, rather than working against them. People want to see and buy good things instead of bad things. Often the problem is that competition is too difficult in the current market. I actually supported the USB-C standardization mandate; it created more interoperability and thus improved competition and convenience. I would support incentivizing social platforms to be more open, and to be more transparent (eg. my proposal to require algorithms to be continuously published with a 1-2 year delay, with zk-proofs to ensure that the algorithm being used in real time exactly equals the one that gets published later)

Being able to better identify what messages are coming from what communities is also good, though I don't support the direction of banning anonymity of individual posters, rather I would want to see more macro-scale analytics, eg. seeing what communities are most strongly saying and amplifying content that semantically matches a particular idea; this can be done in privacy-preserving ways.

There is a real opportunity to reaffirm freedom of speech in a unique and different way, that emphasizes pluralism and pushes against unbalanced attempts to manipulate the discourse by individual powerful actors. We want to do this, not go down the dark path of having something that claims to support fundamental rights but actually is not trusted by anyone to be anything other than the fundamental right to follow the footsteps of a few technocratic experts.

[Cash_degen @Cash_degen]

@irishsaffer230 Happy xmas

[WLTH @wlthxyz]

https://t.co/hSbrOoZJYA

[Cash_degen @Cash_degen]

@SuperVerse Rekt

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨🇻🇪 VENEZUELAN WOMAN'S RANT GOES VIRAL - REAL GRIEF MEETS CULTURE WAR WEAPONIZATION

A Venezuelan woman in video tells "Western first world communists" to "shut your f*cking mouths" until they experience starvation.

A frustrated message from someone who lived through collapse resonating across social media.

Her anger is real. Venezuela's crisis is real. 7+ million Venezuelans fled the country since 2014 - largest refugee crisis in Western Hemisphere. GDP collapsed 75% between 2013-2020.

Hyperinflation hit 1.7 million percent in 2018. Average Venezuelan lost 24 pounds in 2017 from lack of food.

Hospitals operating without basic supplies, electricity, running water.

That suffering isn't theoretical. It's lived experience for millions.

Western leftists romanticizing "socialism" while sipping lattes in Brooklyn versus Venezuelans eating from garbage cans in Caracas - yeah, that gap breeds rage. It should, too.

Che Guevara t-shirts worn by college kids who've never missed a meal while Venezuelan parents watch children go hungry. That hypocrisy burns.

Celebrity activists praising Maduro's "Bolivarian Revolution" from distance while Venezuelans flee on foot through Colombia to escape it.

Bernie Sanders supporters citing Venezuela as model in 2011 ("American dream is more apt to be realized in Venezuela"), then going silent when economy imploded.

Her message: You don't get to advocate for systems you've never lived under while ignoring people screaming about what those systems actually produce.

Western leftists who aestheticize revolution without understanding consequences.

Activists defending Maduro because anti-imperialism while ignoring Venezuelans begging for intervention.

Academics theorizing about workers' paradise from tenured positions while workers flee workers' state.

That criticism lands because it's true.

There IS a particular kind of privileged Western leftist who romanticizes distant revolutions, dismisses refugees as CIA plants, explains away authoritarianism as defensive necessity, and never has to live with results.

Which is the exact reason why such destructive conclusions can continue to exist at all - they never get contested in real life.

No real consequences for fake opinions.

What gets lost is that her suffering is real and that she is far from alone.

Listen to her. The collapse is real. And her message deserves hearing...

“You know what would be good? That you f*cking communists shut your f*cking mouths."

Source: @visegrad24

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

To make the math simple, the car on the left is $25k. The car on the right is $150k.

That said, the key question in my mind aren’t the design choices each made but how regulators will frame their expectations to have a robust, safe fully autonomous fleet in their city.

I suspect, initially, they start with licenses for both. And as they collect data it will be incumbent on Tesla to show their error tolerances are as good or better than Waymo. Otherwise, it creates a lobbying opportunity for Waymo to convince regulators that increasing the BoM helps increase safety for pedestrians and other drivers. And, as such, their design decisions should be mandatory.

This is the obvious risk. That said, what’s non obvious are the other players who may push for Waymo simply to create a large capital barrier for entry and a much slower payback period.

More generally though, autonomous driving is an incredibly relaxing and increasingly effortless experience. Going from stressed out driver to relaxed passenger shouldn’t be under estimated.

I drive my Model Y in autopilot (or FSD mode) all the time - I always get confused which one is which. Anyways, last week I also took a Waymo 4 times.

Both are marvelous feats of engineering.

[InvestAnswers @Investanswers]

@eurofounder wtf did i just read?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

If you have a womb, you are a woman.

Otherwise, you are not.

[Dank 𓆏 @dank_pepes]

What if we turned social media, partying, and gaming from endless distractions into engines for real financial freedom?

1/🧵

[Kyle Chassé 🐸 @Kylechasse]

REPEAT AFTER ME:

‣ I’m done being exit liquidity.

‣ I shouldn’t be trading with leverage – not until the market CLEARLY shows a directional path.

‣ Nothing is fundamentally wrong with $BTC

‣ I'm no longer trading in a tiny PvP casino.

‣ Institutional players want my BTC and will happily MANIPULATE price until they take it.

‣ I will not be a crazy degen.

‣ I'll zoom out, buy spot, chill, and self-custody my ultra-precious & super-scarce assets.

‣ I'll live below my means and use my savings to DCA religiously.

‣ I’m not a gambler.

‣ I'm an investor preparing myself financially for a world I don’t yet recognize, but I know will be massively different.

‣ I don’t want to be in the camp that depends on a surveillance state for UBI.

‣ I want FREEDOM, and I’m the only one responsible for my future.

Don’t fuck this up. Tick tock. ⏰

[Dank 𓆏 @dank_pepes]

> encodes the largest internet culture in history on-chain
> distributed ownership organically via mining pools
> built the world's first NFT marketplace
> learned solidity, then implemented a 1:1 UTXO swap to Ethereum
> smart-contract time baby!
> locks tokens for 69 years
> creates the world's best windows XP inspired web-based OS
> builds a streamlined on-ramp for digital artists to mint, list, and showcase NFTs to a global audience
> it's a throwback to MS Paint and Pepe's origins
> dank design
> generates 500 ETH sales volume in less than 2 years
> literally gives artists in financially bankrupt countries more income than any other work
> token evaluation gets sent to 1B MC in 2 months
> builds wells in Africa
> burns $50 million USD of tokens for the culture
> rare coin, gud coin
> builds web3's first browser-based social MMO
> uses the alpha-game to get a listing with @krakenfx
> builds the cleanest MSNM ux inspired encrypted private messenger using @xmtp_
> rocks up every single day to vibe with the community
> 3 bulls, 3 bears, still here
> the definition of an unstoppable force

Has ppc quietly figured out what a real memecoin is meant to be?

[FBB4 @fbb4official]

The Leap of Faith in a Thesis

People always ask how I made life-changing gains with $PEPECOIN.

They assume that I had secret alpha. That I timed it perfectly.

The truth is I didn't and I didn't need to.

In 2021, I first started buying at $0.20. Then I bought more at $0.10. I kept DCA-ing throughout 2022, and then the FTX collapse happened so I bought more.

In April 2023, around the erc-20 bridge, I bought from $0.03 - 0.25. And across 2023 between $0.01 - 0.04.

One of my favorite trades was a buy for $257 that turned into $159K at ATH.

Needless to say, I hold quite a bit of $PEPECOIN.

This is a story about conviction over precision.

I had a macro thesis:
- Bitcoin's global adoption was still in its early innings
- Memecoins tend to follow Bitcoin and they can deliver outsized gains at peak euphoria (as observed with DOGE)
- I needed to have a memecoin position
- People who get shaken out during the bloodiest parts of the crypto cycle are usually the ones closest to the inflection point

I stopped trying to time the top and I started getting serious about holding at the bottom.

When everything black-swanned in 2022... FTX, NFTs, general crypto sentiment, I kept asking one question:

What will still be here when the smoke clears?

The answer I kept coming up with was PepeCoin.

Not $PEPE, the imitation.

I'm talking about $PEPECOIN, the original Pepe memecoin.

There were a handful of others too, but what drew me to PepeCoin was that it represented something rare in crypto. It was a memecoin with roots. It had history and a story.

By the time I found it, it had been through multiple cycles, a name change, and community turnover. It was battle-tested.

The trading strategy that worked wasn't sexy.

I kept building my position, averaging in as the price dropped. Detaching from the daily PnL of my portfolio, knowing my thesis remained intact.

That last part is key because staring at red numbers every day will crush your conviction faster than any drawdown ever will.

Instead, I focused on:
- Big picture
- Lowering my cost basis
- Trusting the broader cycle

You won't catch every move. You won't perfectly time every rotation. The point is to stay in the game long enough to benefit when your thesis proves out.

And with $PEPECOIN, that's what happened.

We're back in chop mode now with $PEPECOIN, but the community is rallying to make noise, and some special players are paying attention.

And just like last time, the question becomes:

Do you believe it's over? Or do you believe this is a great setup?

Because if Bitcoin continues to push further into all time highs, Ethereum follows, and we're going to see memecoins roar again.

Most people quit before the reward. They forget that actions resulting in generational wealth rarely look like genius in the moment.

I had belief in my thesis and that's the real alpha.

What's your thesis?

Find your conviction, then make your move.

[Pepecoin @pepecoins]

🧙‍♂️✨ The Krakening Event – This Weekend

Join us at the Kraken Statue Plaza as Wizards gather to ink the first chapters of Kekspace lore.

📅 Saturday, Aug 30 @ 7PM → Sunday, Aug 31 @ 11:59PM (GMT‑5)
📍 Where: https://t.co/IYPSf9myhn
🎟️ Earn 7 tickets per minute (online + active only)
🧥 Exclusive Krakening robes, hats & pet – never to return

[Prom3theus @_pr0m3theus_]

The first chapters of Kekspace lore are writing before our eyes. The Krakening has begun. @arjunsethi