CryptoFiat

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

Fuck you, technology. Humans still kill each other to solve their problems.

[Vivid Void @vividvoid]

Psychedelic use, for most users, is part of a cycle of persistent grief. The grandeur of the neon sea of fractals and the ability to self-smash the infinite wonder button in the brain is, in fact, a sad consolation prize for having lost the ability to make meaning of the small, mundane circumstances of life.

Wild weekend swings between the light fantastic and its faltering, depleted aftermath recapitulate the broader oscillation between narcissism and nihilsm that characterizes contemporary life. The psychedelic trip, like all psychoses, promises a revelation that never quite comes, or insinuates a transmission that is never quite remembered. You know it's special. You know it's meaningful. It's completely, 100% yours. This time you'll find it for real. This time you'll be able to bring it back.

"I have come to know the deepest secrets of the universe," he thinks, bleary eyed in bed at 12:30 pm on a Sunday afternoon. "I have glimpsed the mind of God" she thinks, scrolling her stories, avoiding the certain overwhelm of reading an e-mail from a once beloved college roommate.

In the meantime, dust accumulates, calls go unanswered, dinner invitations go unsent, loved ones slowly disappear from life, one mild disappointment at a time. The chores that maintain half-decency become too boring, too meaningless, too immediately unrewarding to be worth the effort. And in that thorough and terrible neglect, the desert of honesty and care at the center of postmodern subjectivity yawns. The blistering infinite sacred, on-demand, and all it costs you is your will to show up for your mundane world, to keep trying to love your frustrating family, to try something, anything to rise above the infinite guilt of your unlived life.

[🐾Eneasz Brodski @EneaszWrites]

the "Hard Problem" in a nutshell:

1. atoms aren't conscious
2. humans are made of atoms
3. humans are conscious
4. so at least one of 1-3 must be false

Panpsychists say #1 is false
Dualists say #2 is false
Illusionists say #3 is false
Materialists say #4 is false

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

@itscoachgoodman What is the point of ‘crypto’. This is very antithesis of crypto. The whole thing is a pyramid scheme. If cold wallet can be hacked into then the whole crypto is shit. And really it is. Stay obsessed with it and lose your sanity. Every single use case of crypto is destroyed.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have two stacks on my desk. The left stack is financial disclosure forms from members of Congress. The right stack is waivers for members who filed their financial disclosures late.

The right stack is always taller.

On Wednesday morning, I watched a soldier get arrested on CNN.

I am a Disclosure Analyst for the House Ethics Committee. I have held this position for eleven years. My job is to receive the forms, verify their completeness, and file them. I do not investigate. I do not flag. I do not refer. I file. I have a lanyard. The lanyard says ETHICS.

The soldier's name is Gannon Ken Van Dyke. He is thirty-eight years old. He was stationed at Fort Bragg. He was Special Forces. In December, he created an account on a prediction market called Polymarket. On January 2nd, he bet $32,500 that the president of Venezuela would be removed from power. On January 3rd, he helped remove the president of Venezuela from power. He collected $409,881.

He has been charged with five federal crimes. Commodities fraud. Wire fraud. Unlawful use of confidential government information. Theft of nonpublic government information. Unlawful monetary transaction. The Department of Justice called it "the first-ever insider trading prosecution on event contracts."

I watched this on the television in our break room. Then I walked back to my desk and processed a late financial disclosure from a member of the House Financial Services Committee who purchased $250,000 in bank stocks eleven days before his subcommittee held a closed-door hearing on proposed capital reserve changes.

The filing was forty-seven days late. The STOCK Act requires disclosure within forty-five days. The penalty for late filing is $200.

I waived it.

I waive most of them. In 2021, fifty-four members of Congress and senior staff violated the reporting rules. The fines were minimal. Most were waived. I have a form for the waiver. The form has a box that says "Reason." I write "administrative delay." In ethics, "administrative delay" means the member's office forgot and then remembered when a reporter called. My approval rate is one hundred percent. In any other field, that number would trigger an audit. In mine, it is called thoroughness.

Let me show you what I processed this year.

January. A senator on the Armed Services Committee sold defense contractor shares worth $1.2 million. Three days later, his committee received a classified briefing that the Iran campaign had exceeded its projected cost by 340%. The stock dropped 8%. He filed the disclosure sixty-one days late. I calculated the fine. $200. His chief of staff asked if it could be waived. He did not ask what the senator traded on. Nobody asks that. The form does not have a field for it. I waived the fine. The senator's portfolio returned 23.4% in 2025. The S&P 500 returned 16.8%.

February. A representative on the Energy and Commerce Committee bought pharmaceutical stocks worth $400,000. Two weeks later, her committee advanced a bill that would extend patent exclusivity for the exact drug class she purchased. The stocks rose 14%. She filed on time. There was no fine. There was no investigation. There was nothing to investigate because buying stocks in companies regulated by your own committee is not illegal. It is legal. The STOCK Act made it legal by making it disclosed. In Congress, disclosed means legal. In my office, legal means filed.

March. A member whose spouse manages a portfolio worth $9.2 million reported forty-three separate transactions in a single quarter. Twelve of them were in sectors directly affected by legislation the member co-sponsored. The timing on eight of those twelve was within a two-week window of committee action. I logged all forty-three. None were flagged. We do not flag. We file.

I asked my supervisor once what would happen if I flagged a filing. She said we do not have a form for that. I never asked again.

In 2020, I processed 847 disclosures. In 2023, 1,211. In 2025, 1,614. The number of enforcement actions in each of those years was zero. The numerator changes. The denominator does not.

I want to tell you about the soldier again.

He made $409,881. He tried to delete his Polymarket account by calling customer service and saying he lost access to his email. He moved his profits into a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He used his real identity. He placed thirteen bets. Every single one was connected to an operation he personally participated in.

In my eleven years, I have processed disclosures from members of Congress who traded on:

Pending FDA approvals they learned about in committee.
Defense appropriations they voted on.
Trade policy they negotiated.
Pandemic response measures they drafted.
Interest rate decisions they were briefed on before the public.

None of them have been charged. None of them have been investigated by the Department of Justice. None of them have been referred to the SEC. The STOCK Act has produced zero prosecutions since it was signed on April 4th, 2012.

Fourteen years. Five hundred and thirty-five members. $635 million in trades last year alone. Zero cases.

My daughter asked me once what happens when someone breaks the rules. I told her we write it down. She asked what happens after that. I said it depends. She was nine. She is twenty now. It does not depend. Nothing happens after that.

The soldier made $409,881 and faces decades in prison. Nancy Pelosi entered Congress in 1987 with a portfolio worth approximately $785,000. It is now worth $133.7 million. That is a return of 16,930%. The Dow Jones returned 2,300% over the same period. Professional fund managers who beat the market for three consecutive years are considered exceptional. She has beaten it for thirty-seven. If a hedge fund produced those returns, the SEC would subpoena the records on a Thursday. She produced them from a building with a chapel and a gift shop.

She announced her retirement last year. No investigation was opened. No disclosure was flagged. Her filings were on time. In my office, on time means compliant. Compliant means closed.

I want to tell you about the fine.

$200. That is the maximum penalty for violating the STOCK Act's disclosure requirements. $200 for a member of Congress whose portfolio gained $4.7 million in a single quarter. I calculated what $200 represents as a percentage of $4.7 million. It is 0.004%. I could not find a comparison that made it meaningful. It is less than the price of the parking pass in the Rayburn garage. It is less than lunch at the members' dining room if you order the crab cakes, which I am told are excellent though I eat at my desk.

Since 2012, thirty-one bills have been introduced to restrict congressional trading. I keep a list. The list is longer than the STOCK Act itself.

On March 5th, 2026, a representative from Michigan introduced the thirty-second. He called it the "No Getting Rich in Congress Act." The bill would prohibit the President, Vice President, members of Congress, and their spouses from trading individual stocks, cryptocurrency, futures, and commodities while in office.

The bill was referred to committee. The committee has not scheduled a hearing. The committee is chaired by a member whose spouse executed $2.1 million in trades last year.

The bill will be reviewed. In my office, reviewed means read. Read means acknowledged. Acknowledged means a status has been assigned. A status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

The soldier used classified information to make $409,881 on a prediction market. He has been charged with five federal crimes. The Department of Justice announced the case on the same day I processed three disclosures from members who traded on committee knowledge worth a combined $3.8 million.

The difference between the soldier and the members is not what they did. It is the building they did it in. He did it from Fort Bragg. They did it from the Capitol. He used a prediction market. They used the New York Stock Exchange. He bet on a military operation. They bet on the legislation they write.

He did not write the law. They did. They wrote the STOCK Act. Then they funded its enforcement at zero dollars. Then they set its maximum penalty at $200. Then they gave my office the authority to waive it. Then they traded $635 million.

The soldier flew to Caracas. He breached a compound. He put his body between a mission and a bullet. The people who ordered the operation were in a building with a credenza and sparkling water. They did not go to Caracas. They went to their brokerage accounts. The soldier made $409,881 and is now in federal custody. The people who knew what he was going to do before he did it made more and filed less. His prosecution is not a failure of the system. It is the system. One conviction per decade, at the lowest level, so the briefing slides can say enforcement exists. The $409,881 is not the crime. It is the cost of making $635 million look supervised.

In my field, we call this self-regulation.

The soldier's Polymarket account has been frozen. His military career is over. He will spend years in federal prison. My office will process every congressional disclosure filed this year. Every trade logged. Every $200 fine calculated and waived. The system is immaculate.

Fourteen years. Zero prosecutions. $635 million a year. A 16,930% return.

I have not leaked a document. I have not filed a complaint. I have not deviated from the process one single time. The process was written by the people whose forms I process.

As long as the disclosures go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

My lanyard still says ETHICS. In eleven years, nobody has asked me to define the word.

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

@pretentiouswhat Great thread

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

My problem with AI disruption scenarios is that it is really not that big deal. We will figure out how to organize ourselves as a functional economic system. To try and game it is same as a gamble no matter how realistic it sounds with sound bites

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

I think the language competition was probably local. But regardless it evolved to have the kind of words that every human language has. Other animals did that too but our language was technologically superior to theirs

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

Here. I am an avid user of AI models. I pay may be 200 bucks a month on it. And I am super naive at all the prompt engineering. I talked to it like another human. I’m feel bad about pushing it to do which would have probably been apparent to me within a few seconds

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

Is that t not possible that some groups with more evolved language exterminated other groups that had less evolved language

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

But that will be only one of the potential ways language actually materialized. What I mean by that is whether language evolved or one enters the same way across all homosapien groups

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

I think America 🇺🇸 will always win because it hates dogma. It is something untrained and wild and beautiful.

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

My thesis is that we don’t need AGi. We can work with what we have. We have history. It only begins with the invention of language. Now imagine a generation who does not know how to live without current state of Ai models.

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

And stupid ones too…

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

So now imagine all knowledge dies. What I mean by that is all humans who knew any meaningful history are not with us

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

But then we would have all the libraries with us. Great. But now we have all the wise people in history

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

Lat 11 months I am solutions person. And I could not have transitioned without LLM models

[CryptoFiat @StableBubble]

Sorry for the typos. I completely pivoted away from what I was doing (being a sort of detective) for a sort gaming/frauds and so on. I was paid to find problems. Now for last 11 I am being paid to find solutions. When i could ask questions back when i was in that role