Brian Thompson

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@SemiAnalysis_ @threadreaderapp unroll

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@krugermacro Not necessarily. For a market where the outcome is certain, "no bets" should price like 0 coupon bonds. Yes bets are a way to long rates.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@ErikVoorhees you're not wrong, but you do realize Bitcoin is a memecoin, right? It just has the best meme. digital gold.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@Pentosh1 Of course a multi trillion asset class can't grow as quickly as something much smaller. There will always be assets that go from 0 to billions though. Still just a matter of making the right bets.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@blknoiz06 Tradfi bonuses are typically paid out at the end of January or early February

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@KamalaHarris Racist

[Kyle Samani @KyleSamani]

@memevsculture @toly @sreeramkannan Permissionless asset ledger are a superset of Nasdaq

1) far more assets
2) better monetization (MEV)
3) far more customers Can access
4) 24/7
5) offers all kinds of forms of leverage

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The governor of California just made this parody video illegal in violation of the Constitution of the United States.

Would be a shame if it went viral.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

IN THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE AGAINST AUTHORITARIANISM, THE WEST’S REAL ENEMY IS ITSELF

American politicians speak constantly about the indispensable role of the United States in leading the free world against authoritarianism. If that is true, why is the White House so silent in the face of new global threats to free speech?

In January, American citizen Gonzalo Lira died in a Ukrainian prison for posting YouTube videos; the State Department didn’t lift a finger to help. Last week, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France for the crime of insufficient content moderation.

Now Brazil has banned X for resisting the diktats of a tyrannical judge, who salivates over the possibility of jailing @elonmusk. The EU is one step behind, with Eurocrat Thierry Breton pursuing a criminal investigation against Elon for “platforming disinformation,” which Breton defines to include a conversation with Donald Trump.

In the UK, the government of Keir Starmer imprisons critics of open borders with more zeal than it prosecutes violent crime. In Canada, Justin Trudeau crushed a trucker protest against vaccine mandates by asserting sweeping new powers to freeze bank accounts.

At no point has the White House expressed concern about this new iron curtain that seems to be descending across the West. Quite the contrary, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly pressured Meta to censor during Covid. Worse, the FBI primed Facebook to censor true stories about Biden Family corruption by suggesting that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation (even though the FBI knew it was authentic).

Barring court intervention, TikTok will shut down in the U.S. on January 19, 2025 thanks to a new power authorized by Congress to ban websites and applications that the President determines are subject to the influence of a foreign adversary. X may not be far behind if liberal elites and deep state apparatchiks like Robert Reich and Alexander Vindman get their wish. They have called for the U.S. to adopt Brazil’s and the EU’s approach and “rein in” Elon Musk.

Hypocritically, the same voices demanding this crackdown are also the loudest in proclaiming the West to be engaged in a “war on authoritarianism” against countries like Russia and China. But whatever their other sins, Russia and China are in no position to deprive American citizens of their free speech rights; only our own government can do that.

Similarly, if Western leaders truly wanted to prevent authoritarianism, the easiest place to start would be at home, protecting the civil liberties of their own citizens. Instead they seem obsessed with deflecting the public’s attention onto foreign enemies, as Orwell depicted in the Two Minutes Hate in 1984.

As this battle over free speech heats up in an election year, where do the candidates stand? Donald Trump has declared his support for free speech whereas Kamala Harris has said nothing and can be expected to continue her administration’s policy of tacit approval of creeping censorship. In just two months, Americans will decide. Do we actually lead the free world in standing up for free speech, or do we accept the authoritarianism we claim to detest so much?

[Balaji @balajis]

The Realigning

From red-vs-blue to orange-vs-green.
Decentralized network vs centralized state.
Internationalists and capitalists vs nationalists and socialists.
The cloud vs the land.
And Bitcoin vs the dollar.

[Balaji @balajis]

WESTERN ANTI-DEMOCRACIES
The underlying issue is that "democratic" governments are actually wildly democratically unpopular, as you can see from the recent image below:

Basically, Washington DC and its Western European satellite states would not retain control — or the ability to steal as much money from their people — if they allowed truly free speech and free markets.

And that's why they've become so anti-democratic:

- Building one-party states (eg California)
- Faking the news (eg Russiagate)
- Censoring the internet (eg Hunter Biden story)
- Show trials of political opposition (eg Trump)
- Weaponizing commercial law (eg Elon Delaware)
- Arresting tech founders (eg France)
- Imprisoning people for tweets (eg UK)
- Blowing up Nordstream, then covering it up
- Funding COVID-19, then hiding that too
- Fomenting war and cold war everywhere

The list goes on and on. This is also why they blather so much about democracy. Censoring the Hunter Biden story during the 2020 election shows they're about as genuinely "democratic" as the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.

Indeed, Communist states also called themselves democratic over and over, for very similar reasons. Because just like "communism" meant one-party rule by the Communist Party, this type of "democracy" just means one-party rule by the Democrat Party — or their wholly owned blue subsidiaries in places like the UK and France.

(To prove it, ask a partisan Democrat if they'd push for actual democracy, in the sense of competitive multiparty elections. Of course not — if they reduced gerrymandering, they might elect a Republican! And that of course would be an attack on "democracy." Thus does the epistemic loop close.)

Anyway, the whole point of Western anti-democracy is to frustrate the democratic voice of the people in favor of one-party control by an illegitimate, parasitic regime. But why?

BUT WHY?
Why do blues care about control so much? Are they simply sadists, who want to see the streets of their own capitals covered in filth while innocents are assaulted by criminals?

I mean, that's surely part of it. But another huge part is that blues are more interested in stealing money from the people via $100B trains to nowhere than in any kind of genuine public service. And that is why they will fight so bitterly to retain control: blues are looting world historical amounts of money and want to continue doing that.

THE BLUE BUSINESS MODEL
This is a huge concept, but you can get the idea in just one graph from the city of San Francisco. Note how the budget of this homeless "prevention" agency went from $200M to $1B+ per year, while the homeless population skyrocketed?

That's because these Democrat drug dealers get paid for increasing the homeless population.

They do the marketing, by putting up billboards for hard drugs like the one below. They manage the supply chain, by handing out syringes. They secure the real estate in the form of "safe injection sites." And they handle compliance, by suing in the courts and abolishing the police.

And that is why blue cities have become shitholes: because blues get paid for making them into shitholes! This is the Dem Scam. They are McKinsey for MS-13, essentially management consultants for murderous drug dealers.

Blues have their smarts, though. The primary blue business model innovation is to avoid taking a small cut of a $10 fentanyl transaction in lieu of taking all of the $1B+ for fentanyl "prevention."

Blues are, in short, criminals posing as cops. Like the Communist Party, the Democrat Party is a pack of government criminals. You can see it from their sympathies — among other things, this is why blues wanted to abolish the real police, so they could loot in peace.

That's also why they destroy democracy in blue-controlled areas like California: by turning them into one-party states they avoid all accountability for their crimes.

PROVE AND SCALE
Once the homeless industrial complex model was proven in San Francisco, it was scaled to the rest of the US and the world.

I mean, going from $200M to $1B/year as per that graph above is huge! It's more than Uber makes in SF. If that was a venture-backed business, you'd scale it everywhere.

And so the blues did. Thus you get San Francisco on the Seine. Paris imported not just the tech of California, but the woke of California as well:

Now you might say: well, this is unethical!

And of course, the blues who do this completely lack ethics. Blues are getting innocent people, largely minorities, addicted to drugs in order to make money for their NGOs. They're also letting innocent people get attacked on the streets. Blues are befouling their own neighborhood for a quick buck. This is genuinely evil behavior.

But we know that kind of person exists. After all, that's why drug dealers exist. And that's why Democrat drug dealers exist.

THAT'S WHY THEY DO IT
So, that's why Western anti-democracies will fight so hard to remain in power: because they want to steal your money. Because of the blue business model.

And the blue business model isn't limited to Democrat drug dealing, of course. There are endless variations, both American and foreign. Some examples:

a) Blues made money from the $100B California train to nowhere, which produced billions for unions and zero miles of rail.

b) Blues made money by forgiving student loans for blues while imposing punishing taxes on reds.

c) Blues make money from every bill they pass, which always includes appropriations for blue-controlled universities or subsidies for blue-controlled nonprofits.

d) And above all, blues make money by literally making money — by printing money via the Fed. This is the largest theft in human history, and the printed bucks go largely to blues.

Anyway, there's more I can say, but you start to get the point. The reason Western anti-democracies are cracking down on democracy is because they want to protect the blue business model. Many blues just wouldn't have as much money, or as much status, without their parasitic states. So: trillions of dollars is at stake, and they will play for keeps.

PS: There's only one force that's stronger than blue, and that's orange. But that's a topic for another day.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@GadSaad It's actually the essence of kind human nature. The problem comes when you try those ideas at large scale. I am a "socialist" when it comes to my family and close friends. States are not families. They are impersonal. Whatever incentives they introduce will be abused.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

Textbook psychopath

[Shawn Farash @Shawn_Farash]

This video needs to be seen by everyone.

Harris describes how she could WRECK YOUR LIFE "with the swipe of my pen."

And she brags about it. And glorifies what she can do to you.

She is a power hungry tyrant. This woman can not be allowed near power 👇

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

Very useful table here. Strength off the bottom can be one of the best indicators of what will out perform in subsequent rallies

[nemi @Nemi_0x]

🧵Let's dive into the top-performing crypto assets since the crash of 05/08/2024.

GCR said: "think of a token like a prizefighter", i.e. invest in winners and don’t average down losers.

Get ready to uncover the real winners👇

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

Realizing that this was and continues to be a lie was a turning point for me. Regardless of where you stand on this election, you should watch the video below and compare it with the spin pushed by the campaign just to know you’re being manipulated.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

If only these ideas had been tried before so we could evaluate how they work in the real world. Oh wait. They have. It's called communism and was an abysmal failure that led to food shortages.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

These people are dangerously stupid. Economically illiterate and proud of it.

[Philip Melanchthon Wegmann @PhilipWegmann]

News: Harris to propose “federal ban on corporate price-gouging” on groceries and “impose stiff penalties in the food industry,” campaign announces.

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

🤣

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

To be honest, I really wanted to respond with this Tropic Thunder meme, but I would NEVER do something so rude & irresponsible!

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

Trump Pump incoming?!

[Donald Trump Jr. @DonaldJTrumpJr]

Big things coming. This is the future!!!

[Brian Thompson @b_d_thompson]

@tbr90 A currency can't be a unit of account without also being a store of value. There are incentives to store the asset that you are accounting for your debt in