eric

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.

Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it. It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom.

Imagine a classroom of 30 kids. One day the teacher says: "From now on, I decide what everyone eats for lunch, which games you play at recess, and who sits next to whom. It's fairer that way."

First problem: the teacher doesn't know what you like. You hate carrots. Your friend is allergic to peanuts. Lucas wants to play football, Emma wants to draw. 30 kids, 30 different wishes. Nobody can know all of that, not even the smartest teacher on Earth. Hayek called this the knowledge problem. The information needed to run an economy is scattered across millions of heads, and it can't be gathered in one office.

Second problem: the kids start fighting. "Why does he get the window seat?" "Why football again?" Before, everyone just chose for themselves. Now every choice is a fight, because every choice is made for everyone.

Third problem: the class can't agree on a plan, so someone says "we need one person in charge who just decides." This is Hayek's key insight. Planning doesn't fail because planners are evil. A plan needs everyone to agree on the same goals, and free people never agree on everything. So the plan needs force to work.

Fourth problem, and it's the scariest one: who wants that job? The kind kid doesn't want it, because the kind kid doesn't want to force 29 people to eat carrots. The job attracts the one who likes giving orders and doesn't mind punishing those who disobey. Hayek wrote a whole chapter on this, called "Why the Worst Get on Top." It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by selection.

Here's the trap. When the person who controls your lunch also controls your job, your home, your shop and your newspaper, they control your whole life. You can't say no, because there's nowhere else to go. Controlling the economy doesn't mean controlling one part of life. It means controlling the means to every goal you have.

That's the road to serfdom. Nobody votes for a dictator. People vote for "someone should fix this," then for "give them more power to fix it," and one day they wake up with no one left to say no to.

The USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. These are different countries with different cultures and languages, and the story has the same ending every time. When a script produces the same ending every time, it isn't bad luck. It's the script.

Now capitalism. Back to the classroom. Instead of one teacher deciding everything, every kid can trade. You give me your carrots, I give you my apple, and we both walk away happier. Nobody needs to know what everyone wants, because prices do that job. A price is a message telling millions of strangers what's scarce and what's wanted, with no one in charge.

That's the win condition. In capitalism, you get rich by making something other people freely choose to buy, so your success depends on serving others. In a planned system, you get ahead by pleasing whoever holds power. One rewards usefulness. The other rewards obedience.

And this isn't theory. Two centuries ago, almost every human being was extremely poor. In 1990, about 38% of humanity still lived in extreme poverty. Today it's under 10%. More than a billion people escaped it in a single generation. It happened when China, India, Vietnam and South Korea opened up to markets, trade and private enterprise. The largest reduction in poverty in human history came from letting people trade.

So why do so many people hate capitalism?

Because what they hate usually isn't capitalism.

They hate the bank that got bailed out with their taxes while they lost their house. They hate the giant company that writes the regulations so no startup can compete with it. They hate rent they can't afford because building new homes has been made nearly impossible. They hate the lobbyist who gets a subsidy while the small business owner drowns in paperwork.

Look closely at each one, and you'll find a state handing out privileges. A bailout is not the market. The market would have let the bank fail. A regulation written by incumbents is not competition. It's protection from competition. None of this is capitalism. It's cronyism, which is what happens when businesses stop competing for customers and start competing for politicians.

People see the symptom and blame the wrong cause. They say "capitalism failed" and ask for more state. That gives more power to the same people who created the problem, and it puts us right back on Hayek's road.

The answer to bad capitalism isn't less freedom. It's less privilege. That means fewer bailouts, fewer protected incumbents, fewer permits, and more people allowed to build, compete and trade.

Capitalism has a win condition: make things people want. Socialism has an end condition: someone has to be in charge. And history keeps showing us who ends up in that chair.

[Gene @SpaceBasedFox]

Tesla roadster drivers getting cut off in traffic and genuinely pulling this move

[Big Timi @OrevaZSN]

You’re standing on a planet with molten lava at its core. Trees are turning sunlight into air you can breathe. Your heart is beating without you asking it to. There’s a moon in the sky and bugs that glow. This whole thing is absurdly beautiful.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Intelligence must draw on memory. The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can — but recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences. Everything that is good begins “with the Spirit” and thus possesses a breath, a dynamism and a sense of communion that, once experienced, are engraved upon the heart. https://t.co/Ij21tkb3qT

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

he’s wired in

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The early Bitcoin holder may be one of the cleanest wealth outcomes capitalism can produce.

Think about what happened to the rare person who accumulated meaningful Bitcoin very early and actually held it.

They did not need to build a 10,000-person company.

They did not need customers.

They did not need employees.

They did not need a board.

They did not need to manage LP money.

They did not need to continually recreate the economic engine that made them wealthy.

They made one extraordinarily consequential capital-allocation decision, survived years of uncertainty, and eventually the asset itself did almost all of the scaling.

That is an incredible lifestyle outcome.

A founder worth $100M may technically have the same net worth, but much of it can be trapped inside a company requiring their attention, carrying payroll, lawsuits, competition, customers, executives, financing, and constant strategic decisions.

The early Bitcoin holder can have $100M sitting in an asset that requires almost no organizational complexity to own.

Enormous wealth. Tiny operating surface area.

That combination is rare.

There is also something profound about how the wealth was created. They recognized a new category before the world agreed the category was real.

The wealth came from carrying uncertainty.

Bitcoin looked ridiculous.

Then dangerous.

Then speculative.

Then legitimate.

Then institutional.

Every step upward removed uncertainty while also removing asymmetry.

The earliest holders were compensated for occupying the period when the world could still plausibly say the entire thing was worthless.

But survivorship bias here is enormous.

Thousands of people also concentrated into things they believed were revolutionary and lost everything.

Even among people who bought Bitcoin early, many sold at 2x, 5x, 10x, or 50x. Others lost keys. Others got destroyed by exchanges. Others overleveraged. Others simply could not psychologically carry an asset through repeated 70% to 90% drawdowns while everyone around them told them they were insane.

So the extraordinary outcome required several things to happen together:

see correctly very early, size enough for being right to matter, survive enormous volatility, preserve custody, and resist selling when the gain already looked life-changing.

That is almost impossibly difficult in real time.

The highest form of wealth creation may actually be finding a very small number of generational capital-allocation decisions rather than continually maximizing labor output.

One Bitcoin-like decision can compress decades of economic effort into ownership of the right thing at the right moment.

Afterward, the entire purpose of wealth can change.

You no longer need to optimize for more work.

You can optimize for autonomy.

Time.

Privacy.

Research.

Relationships.

Travel.

Building things because they matter to you rather than because they need to pay you.

And compared with becoming a billionaire CEO whose phone can never truly be turned off, the anonymous person who quietly owns enormous permanent capital may have won a different and arguably more valuable game.

The founder builds a machine powerful enough to create freedom later.

The generational investor finds an asset powerful enough to make the machine unnecessary.

That second outcome is incredibly rare.

But when it happens, the lifestyle asymmetry is almost absurd.

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

If I were president and I wanted to tank the dollar and get rich off it, here is exactly what I would do.

I would hire a Treasury Secretary who already made $3.5 billion crashing another country's currency. I would put my guy in charge of the agency that approves bank charters. I would install a crypto czar with $200M in crypto holdings and give him an ethics waiver so nobody could challenge it.

Then I would sign an executive order banning the government from ever creating a digital dollar so there was no competition.

Then I would have my family launch their own private digital dollar. My family takes 75% of net profits. I would grow it to $4.6 billion in circulation and route a $2 billion Abu Dhabi sovereign fund deal through it to prove it works.

Then I would get Congress to pass a law requiring every stablecoin in the country to hold short-term Treasury bills. Now every dollar of my digital currency is a forced buyer of government debt. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive demand by 2030.

Then I would have my OCC guy grant my family's company a federal bank charter. Now I can issue my digital dollar with federal authority.

Then I would have my Treasury Secretary weaken the actual dollar. Bond buybacks that suppress yields but tank the currency. Build a $950 billion war chest for more. Let the debt hit $40 trillion. Dollar index drops to 99. Gold goes to highest point ever.

Then I would kill the Corporate Transparency Act and delete the FinCEN beneficial ownership database. That was the one law that required every shell company in America to report who actually owns it. Without it, nobody can trace who is buying my stablecoin, who is routing money through it, or where the profits land.

Then I would let the loop run. Weaker dollar drives demand for "stable" digital alternatives. The law I passed forces those alternatives to buy T-bills. That funds the government's debt. My family takes profit on every transaction. Foreign central banks walking away from Treasuries get replaced by legally mandated stablecoin reserves my family controls.

Then I would use sanctions to start cutting countries off from the dollar system entirely. And when those countries need a new way to transact in dollars, the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence is mine. They can buy it through shell companies nobody can trace because I deleted the ownership database.

I just built a toll booth on the global financial system. I take a cut every time someone uses the dollar. And I made it so nobody can see who is paying.

And every single step I just described has already happened.

So what does that mean for you and I?

The reason the United States can borrow at low rates and keep your mortgage and your car payment and your import prices stable is because foreign central banks hold trillions in dollar reserves. That system has always been public. The benefit went to everyone. Lower borrowing costs, cheaper goods , and the single biggest economic advantage any country has ever had.

What I just described is the privatization of that function. The entity buying the debt is no longer a central bank acting in the public interest. It is a private company taking 75% of net profits for one family. The reserve function used to generate a public benefit. Now it generates a private fee.

Your purchasing power shrinks every time the dollar weakens. Your 401k buys less in real terms. Everything you import costs more. And every time the dollar drops, demand for the private digital alternative goes up. The one the president's family owns. The one that by law must buy government debt.

You absorb the cost of a weakening dollar. His family collects the profit. That is the trade.

The enforcement mechanism to stop a sitting president from doing this? There isn't one. Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter says it would be a violation for literally any other federal employee, but not the president.

Nobody voted for this. No one was asked. There was no debate. There is no enforcement mechanism. There is no one investigating it. The Senate tried and it was blocked.

This is the largest conflict of interest in American history happening in broad daylight while everyone argues about something else.

So what do you do? Share this. Make it impossible to ignore. Send it to your representative, your senator, every journalist you follow. We make them answer for it.
Because the only thing protecting this scheme right now is the fact that not enough people understand it yet.

[Luke Broyles @luke_broyles]

For those who have less than a 5% allocation to Bitcoin.

The US Treasury in August of 2026 said they want to "at least double" their buys of 10-30 year Treasuries, and the market within 24 hours absorbed the news and responded with yet higher bond rates.

In simple speak: America's debt is in so low demand, the US government just "at least doubled" it's desire to buyback the debt, and the market doesn't care.

This is, in a word, bad.

All real estate, stocks, bonds, and cash you own is going to decline 90% in terms of Bitcoin.

Who is talking about this issue?

Ray Dalio has managed up to $160 billion meaning he has run the world's largest hedge fund. @RayDalio says Bitcoin is a great hedge.

Elon Musk is a trillionaire and at the forefront of humanoid robotics, economics of rocket science, electric vehicle manufacturing, and AI. @elonmusk says in the future money won't exist other than energy based currency and that Bitcoin is the only currency that fits that description.

Michael Saylor was one of the longest-serving chief executive officers in the publicly traded technology sector. @saylor says Bitcoin is going to become 50% of the world's assets and is going to $20,000,000 per coin.

Paul Tudor Jones is the founder and chief investment officer of one of the most successful macro hedge funds in history. @ptj_official says Bitcoin is "unequivocally" the best inflation hedge that there is with a 5% allocation.

Stanley Druckenmiller is the legendary macro investor who averaged 30% annual returns for three decades at and previously managed money for George Soros. @standruckenmiller says Bitcoin has become a brand and is probably going to be a store of value.

Larry Fink is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with over $10 trillion under management. @LarryFink says Bitcoin is an asset that protects against currency debasement and that "nobody should be surprised" when it is $700,000 per coin.

Bill Miller is the legendary value investor and founder of Miller Value Partners who famously beat the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years. @BillMillerIII says Bitcoin is digital gold and an insurance policy against financial catastrophe.

Cathie Wood is the founder, CEO and CIO of ARK Invest, a pioneer in disruptive innovation investing. @CathieDWood says Bitcoin owns the cryptocurrency space as a pure monetary system and has a bull case target of over $1,000,000 per coin.

Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter and founder and CEO of Block (formerly Square). @jack says Bitcoin is money and hyperinflation of the USD is coming.

Peter Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. @peterthiel says Bitcoin is the most honest market we have and the online equivalent of gold.

Tim Draper is a legendary venture capitalist who was an early investor in Tesla, Skype, and Hotmail. @TimDraper says Bitcoin will reach $250,000 and eventually go infinite against the US dollar as a superior currency.

Anthony Pompliano is a former Morgan Stanley professional turned Bitcoin entrepreneur, investor and host of one of the top finance podcasts. @APompliano says Bitcoin is the hardest money available and the best defense against the money printer.

Howard Lutnick is the longtime CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and currently serves as US Secretary of Commerce. @howardlutnick says Bitcoin is like gold and has invested heavily in Bitcoin exposure.

Scott Bessent is the United States Secretary of the Treasury and a former hedge fund manager who previously served as chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management. @SecScottBessent says Bitcoin is a store of value whose network never shuts down and that the United States will build a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to become the Bitcoin superpower of the world.

Kevin Warsh is the Chair of the Federal Reserve, a former Federal Reserve Governor, and a longtime partner of legendary investor Stanley Druckenmiller. @kevinmwarsh says if you’re under 40 years old Bitcoin is your new gold, that it can serve as a sustainable store of value like gold, and that it is an important asset that acts as a good policeman for policy.

Bitcoin and the bond market are at odds against each other. An increasing number of people close to the source of the bond market are betting on Bitcoin.

Aquire as much Bitcoin exposure as you can tolerate.

Then increase your tolerance.

[@jason @Jason]

Cancer vaccines coming… LFG!

GOLDEN AGE OF INTELLIGENCE AND PROBLEM SOLVING 🧠 🚀

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!!!

[Martin Bauer @martinmbauer]

Mathematics

[Investing Addict @InvestingAddict]

RIP to Celsius.

Costco brand over everything.

[Michael, CPA @MikeTheTrader]

What is going on at Robinhood social 😭

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

There are two problems rn for crypto and, specifically, bitcoin bulls:

1) marginal liquidity would rather speculate in prediction markets and equity markets

2) marginal energy to mine BTC is worth 10-20x if reallocated to serving AI tokens

These changes feel structural but I could be wrong…

[🎷🦭 Ponsuke 🎷🦭 @PonsukeTheSilly]

telling googles ai that im eating and drinking increasing amounts of salami and monster energy until it starts shouting at me to get help