MstrBit

Bitcoin Maximalist, Cypherknight, Class of 2024 ATH. Pleb and #Sats collector. Fun account in the meme wars, front lines warrior.

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

You can either start learning about #Bitcoin and start stacking sats or you will always be late to it.

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@HodlTarantula Not true...

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@MarylandHODL21

[Handre @Handre]

A short history of currency debasement:

Debasement is the oldest con in government. Rome ran it better than anyone until the twentieth century came along and said, "hold my beer."

Under Augustus, the denarius started at 4.5 grams of nearly pure silver. By Nero's reign in 64 AD, the emperor had shaved it down to about 90 percent silver. Nero had fire damage to repair and games to fund. His successors kept clipping. By the time Gallienus ruled around 260 AD, the denarius and its descendant, the antoninianus, carried around 5 percent silver, a copper slug dipped in a thin silver wash that rubbed off in your palm. Prices in the empire rose more than a thousandfold across the third century. Diocletian then responded with the Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 AD, threatening death to any merchant who charged what the debased coins were actually worth. Merchants did the sensible thing and stopped selling. Shelves emptied.

This method never changed, only the technology. Henry VIII of England ran the Great Debasement from 1544 to 1551, dropping the silver content of his coinage from 92.5 percent to 25 percent and pocketing the difference. Londoners noticed the king's copper nose showing through the silver on his own portrait and nicknamed him Old Coppernose.

Clipping coins requires effort. Running a printing press requires almost none, which is why the modern state loves paper and loves screens even more. John Law gave France a preview in 1720 with his Banque Royale and a flood of paper livres backed by Mississippi fantasies. The scheme collapsed within a year. The French liked the lesson so little they repeated it with the assignats of the 1790s, printing until the notes were worth essentially nothing and executing speculators in between runs of the press.

Then came central banking, which industrialized the whole operation and gave it a respectable name. The Federal Reserve opened in 1914. A dollar from that year buys you about three cents of goods today, a 97 percent loss of value, achieved without clipping a single coin. Nixon closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, and after that nothing anchored the dollar except the promises of the people printing it. The Fed expanded its balance sheet from roughly 870 billion dollars in 2007 to nearly 9 trillion by 2022. Your savings account paid less interest than the currency lost.

Debasement transfers wealth from whoever holds the money to whoever prints it first. That is the entire mechanism, from Nero's mint to the Fed's open market desk. The man who spends the new money early buys at old prices. By the time the fresh units reach your wages, the prices already moved. You hold the bag.

Gold held its weight for five thousand years because no committee could vote it into existence, and governments abandoned it for exactly this reason.

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@Greencandleit Is that not what everyone was expecting?! Free energy.

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@MDBitcoin People need to think criticaly and for themselves, that's why. In my humble opinion.

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@RobinSeyr

[Handre @Handre]

Hugo Chávez seized more than 1,000 private companies between 2002 and 2012, and every single one produced less under state control than it did before the expropriators walked in. Not most. All of them.

Take SIDOR, the steel giant Chávez nationalized in 2008. It shipped 4.3 million tons that year; by 2019 output had collapsed below 200,000 tons. Chávez purged PDVSA of 18,000 skilled workers in 2003 and stuffed it with loyalists; the company, sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on earth, pumped 3.2 million barrels a day in 1998 and under 400,000 by 2020. The state also grabbed Agroisleña, the country's main farm supplier, renamed it Agropatria, and fertilizer promptly vanished from the shelves. Cement, electricity, banking, rice mills: same pattern, every time.

Bad luck does not repeat a thousand times. A bureaucrat who faces no profit-and-loss test cannot calculate. Without market prices for capital goods, he cannot know whether the factory he runs creates value or burns it. Central planners lack the information needed to allocate resources efficiently. Venezuela ran that experiment a thousand times over, same result each time.

The managers who replaced the owners were not stupid. They responded rationally to their actual incentives: please Caracas, hit political quotas, skim before the next purge. Output was nobody's problem because output was nobody's property.

If your government starts seizing companies "for the people," the production those companies generate is already gone. Expropriation transfers assets while destroying the wealth those assets once created, and the people it claims to serve absorb the shortage.

[Documenting ₿itcoin 📄 @DocumentingBTC]

The Origins of Money by @NickSzabo4

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@Bitcoin_Cookie Don't remember who did it but ...

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@MitchellAskew I'd say the same...

[Handre @Handre]

Banks do not lend money they have on deposit; they create it out of thin air. When a commercial bank issues a mortgage, it creates a deposit and takes a lien on your house as collateral. The state plays the same game at scale: the Treasury borrows against your future tax payments, and the central bank monetizes the paper. Every unit of new money enters the economy as debt, and debt demands collateral.

Property is the collateral of choice. Roughly 80 percent of British bank lending flows into real estate, and the American picture looks no different. Fresh money hits the housing market first, before wages, before anyone further down the chain sees a penny.

That is why the median American house cost twice the median household income in 1970. The bricks are the same bricks. The money got worse, and it got worse in that market first, because that market is where money is born.

Politicians call this a housing crisis and prescribe subsidies, which means more credit, which means higher prices, which means another round of subsidies. The cycle feeds itself. Your savings cannot outrun an asset class that doubles as the banking system's printing template.

Stop blaming landlords. The lender who conjures the purchase price from nothing sets the bid. Force banks to lend actual savings instead of ledger entries, and housing reverts to what it remained for centuries under sound money: a depreciating consumer good.

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@DrStarHeartsong @LukeGromen A lot of people don't know anything about this.

[Handre @Handre]

Capital flees taxation the way water flows downhill: By the physics of human choice.

When France raised its top income tax rate to 75% in 2013, Gerard Depardieu moved to Belgium and eventually took Russian citizenship. Eduardo Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship before Facebook's 2012 IPO. These were transactions. Rational actors doing math.

Impose a cost on production and you get less production. Impose a cost on capital and capital relocates. The political class treats this as betrayal. Supply and demand applies to jurisdictions.

Cayman Islands, Monaco, Dubai, Singapore: these places didn't stumble into prosperity. They built low-tax, low-regulation environments and capital came to them. Singapore's top income tax rate sits at 24% with no capital gains tax at all. The result is a per capita GDP that buries most of Europe.

High-tax jurisdictions run the same experiment in reverse. You raise rates, your most mobile earners leave first, then your businesses restructure, then your tax base erodes, so you raise rates again on whoever remains. The spiral ends with a population that cannot leave because it has nothing worth taxing.

California has lost over 500,000 residents net to other states since 2020. Illinois has shed population for nine consecutive years. The people staying aren't the founders and investors. They're the ones who can't afford to move.

Tax havens don't cause this dysfunction. They simply make it visible by giving capital somewhere better to go.

[MstrBit @MstrBit]

@gladstein Is that not a standard?!

[Handre @Handre]

Socialism is impossible. Read that again.

Here is why:

1. Ludwig von Mises and the Calculation Problem; then 2. Friedrich Hayek and the Knowledge Problem.

They are distinct, and it's important to understand the difference.

Mises fired first. In his 1920 paper "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he drove a stake through the heart of central planning by showing that rational economic calculation is impossible without private ownership of the means of production. Prices are not arbitrary numbers. They are signals generated by actual bids and offers between property owners who face real profit and loss. Strip away private property, and you strip away the bidding process. Strip away the bidding process, and prices become bureaucratic guesses. A Soviet planner deciding how much steel to allocate between rail construction and tractor manufacturing has no genuine price for steel because no one is buying or selling it freely. He is flying blind. The problem is structural, not administrative. Hire smarter planners, give them faster computers; it changes nothing. The information cannot exist without the market process that generates it.

Communists read this and realized Mises was right. They found a roundabout way to keep going. They would simply use prices from Western capitalist countries.

Then Hayek hit them with his 1945 essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society." His target was subtly different. Hayek accepted that prices aggregate information. His contribution was to identify what kind of information markets process: local, dispersed, tacit knowledge that no central authority can collect. A warehouse manager in Düsseldorf knows that his particular supplier is three weeks behind schedule. A farmer in Kansas knows the soil conditions on his specific plot after last month's frost. A textile merchant in Lyon knows which dyes his buyers currently prefer. None of this knowledge is written down anywhere. Much of it the people holding it cannot fully articulate. It lives in habits, relationships, and on-the-ground experience accumulated over years. No survey, no commissar's report, no algorithm extracts it reliably. You cannot copy it from one country to another.

Mises showed that central planners lack the mechanism to generate rational prices. Hayek showed that even if planners somehow had prices, they still could not possess the ground-level knowledge those prices encode. Mises's problem kills socialist calculation at the structural level. Hayek's problem kills it at the epistemological level. The two arguments are complementary, stacked on top of each other like floors of a building.

The Soviet Union ran this entire experiment in full. Central planners in Moscow set over 20 million prices by the late Soviet period. Shortages and surpluses coexisted everywhere. Bread rotted in one city while another city's bread lines stretched around the block. Planners were not uniquely corrupt or stupid. They were operating inside an institutional structure that made rational allocation geometrically impossible, exactly as Mises predicted in 1920 and exactly as Hayek's epistemology explained in 1945.

Every government price control, every production quota, every centralized allocation scheme you live under today repeats this mistake at a smaller scale. The mechanism fails whether the commodity is steel, housing, or healthcare. The scale changes; the logic does not.

[Handre @Handre]

Victim mentality is a poverty trap.

When you adopt the identity of someone to whom things happen, rather than someone who makes things happen, you outsource your agency to whoever wronged you. That transfer costs you everything. Human action, purposeful behavior aimed at improving conditions, is the engine of prosperity. The moment you stop acting and start cataloging grievances, the engine stalls.

The welfare state perfects this dynamic on an industrial scale. Politicians in Washington have spent $28 trillion since 1965 on federal anti-poverty programs. The poverty rate in 2026 sits where it sat in 1968. Dependency produces exactly what price theory predicts: you subsidize behavior and you get more of it. Victim identity is no different. Cultivate it and it grows.

Compassion and clarity can coexist. Real injustices exist. Rothbard never denied theft occurred; he insisted on correcting it through restitution, not through building your entire identity around the wound. There is a categorical difference between acknowledging harm and weaponizing it as a permanent excuse.

The actor who succeeds treats the world as a constraint to work within, not a conspiracy to indict. Capital, skill, and reputation accumulate through output, not through the sophistication of your grievance. Every hour you spend framing yourself as a victim is an hour your competitor spends building something. The market does not grade on effort; it rewards results.

[The Bitcoin Historian @pete_rizzo_]

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[Documenting ₿itcoin 📄 @DocumentingBTC]

How secure is Bitcoin? Let’s do the math…

[Documenting ₿itcoin 📄 @DocumentingBTC]

Satoshi invented a new type of clock

[River @River]

Bitcoin's last bull market ended exactly one year ago.

Here are 5 reasons why the next bull run could be getting started.👇