ScarcityMan

Investor, bitcoin enthusiast, hopeful for humanity's future, and looking for robotic enhancements in all the wrong places... Financial commentary, not advice.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@knutsvanholm Still not better than Pussy Galore.

[hodlonaut #BIP-110 @hodlonaut]

Pests don’t like pest control

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@BKendye6 @saylor I think you meant USD.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

Thanks for this write-up and your explanations, they've helped me with some clarity around the STRC/Strategy debate.

To be fair, Saylor is not shy about saying that an investor in STRC needs to believe in two things:

1) The longterm value of bitcoin
2) The willingness of Strategy to continue to pay the dividends

The value of bitcoin over time props everything up, and this is currently valued at 0 by the ratings agencies, which good reason, as you explain. But that's why it's necessary to also believe in the Strategy model and the company's desire to continue to execute on it. Everything falls apart if they don't, and any investor should understand this.

So I think part of the problem is that what Strategy is trying to do here is fairly novel, and there's not a great way to do it without making some compromises. Saylor clearly wants a better rating to attract institutional investors, so it'll be interesting to see what changes are made over time.

The other problem is that if you believe in the two points I mentioned, the risk is mispriced. There is no shortage of companies in history that obeyed, or appeared to obey every rule and regulation and still ended up at 0 due to malfeasance with no chance for most investors to get anything back once they do. Belief in the core structure is always required, no matter what. If you price that in, I think Strategy looks a little better than is being described by its detractors.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

1000%. There's a club of private investors, and most people ain't in it. Modern IPOs are legalized pump and dumps.

[Dom Kwok | EasyA @dom_kwok]

the issue with modern day IPOs is that they make the rich richer, while creating no value for the regular person.

only the world's richest had the chance to invest in SpaceX and Anthropic early.

the general public will now buy at IPO, after the rich have gotten their 1,000x gains and the majority of the upside.

they will then dump their bags on retail (hence why barely any recent IPO is trading above its IPO price).

we need a return to the day when companies IPO'd much, much earlier and let the everyday person participate in the upside!

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@baskinen2 @1MarkMoss But good medium of exchange != performance. The most popular medium of exchange in the history of the planet is the USD and its had abysmal performance against most other assets. Its medium of exchange properties were built by stability.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@1MarkMoss Mostly agree. Opponents love to cite the volatility of bitcoin as a reason it can't be money. HODL now, and in time, the volatility will drop. It is already trending in that direction. More holders, larger market cap, lower volatility, better money.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@MrMikeInvesting Don't worry, he's not going to say it only once... :)

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

I think you're out of your element on this, and you need more time researching what's going on here before you conclude anything. Also, you've done nothing to counter the argument that making things more difficult means less of the thing, which is basic logic and human incentives. So rather than continue to play whack-a-mole with bad arguments, I'd rather ask what your stake in this is?

- Do you not understand the purpose of bitcoin?
- Do you not agree with the purpose of bitcoin?
- Or are you benefiting in some way from its demise?

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

What does information theory say about reducing the size of the paper?

[Cubist_Roy @CubistRoy]

@ScarcityMan @L0RINC @ForrestHODL @GrassFedBitcoin Information theory says you are provably wrong. If an open field exists, data will be stored in that field up to the size of the field. Understand there is no way to hand a person a sheet of blank paper and then control what they draw on it. Period.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

A 4MB OP_RETURN is stopped by capping OP_RETURN at much less than 4MB. No one on either side is arguing that steganography or similar techniques can be stopped. But spam on the network can be made more difficult through various measures, just like putting The Club on your steering wheel or locking your doors at night or putting a fence around a restricted area. All these things can be circumvented with enough effort, but they keep good people honest and deter enough mischief that they're worth the cost. That's the reason I'm able to parse through my gmail account messages instead of wasting all my time wading through spam. The filters work well enough to make email useful. And if you look at non-monetary data on chain, it clearly spikes every time a new avenue is opened, so that's clearly having an impact. This is so blatantly obvious a point that I suspect most people arguing against it are either:

1) Dishonest and arguing in bad faith
2) Want to change Bitcoin into something more like Ethereum
3) Are stupid

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@Providence_777 @i2cjak Agreed, but my larger point is that an LLM's value isn't disproven by single example (like many things). This basic logic eludes the OP.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@CubistRoy No, I'm not talking about blocksize, and neither were the others in the thread. What we're talking about is OP_RETURN and OP_IF (with OP_FALSE and/or OP_PUSH).

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@ericyakes @mattkratter @SpaceDenver @_DannyKnowles He's using an obvious metaphor and you treated it literally. That's either bad faith, or you don't understand metaphors.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

I asked you because I wanted to know what you thought, not what grok thought.

Thanks for the link. I read it and did some additional research. It does seem probable the the relaxing of regulations by the Ohio EPA will extend additional pollutants to the water sources mentioned by data centers. That's not great, but it's lacking perspective. The water in those areas is already being heavily polluted by other industries and has for decades, and in comparison, the data center pollution rates would be lower than they because data centers inherently don't require as many chemicals to operate in their water systems. They're far safer in this regard than many traditional industries.

So where's the outrage for the bigger polluters? It seems selective, and that's my point. It's as though a huge number of Americans decided yesterday that they care a lot about pollution and water/energy use in their communities, but only when used for AI. My issue with this is that I believe AI is likely to be a far bigger benefit to humanity than the legacy polluters, and everything in the end is tradeoffs since everything we do causes disruption of one sort or another. I think the phrase for this is, "knee-jerk reaction," and it sets of alarm bells for me because it rarely ends well for anyone.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

Arguments against the just-price-out-spam on the bitcoin blockchain talking point:

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

There are some flaws in the logic.

Point the first, you assume economic incentives on behalf of the people spamming and supporting spam, when in reality it may simply be from people trying to attack and destroy bitcoin. There are plenty of nihilists out there who will take advantage of such opportunities with lax rules. Some people just want to watch the world burn, and as a person hoping to pass bitcoin down to my descendants for 1,000 years, this is unacceptable without a fight.

Point the second, any bits of spam that enter the blockchain make it that much more difficult for bitcoin to operate as intended and for people to run nodes and keep the network decentralized. Irreparable damage has already occurred. Before this has time to be priced out, if we ignore the first point, the amount of damage may reach a tipping point. Think about a ship taking on water. At some point, no matter how much you scoop out with buckets, it reaches a critical point and the ship sinks. You may feel comfortable leaving this up to chance, but I don't. Bitcoin is too important.

Point the third, some of what people store on chain may be illegal or morally reprehensible and I'm unwilling to stand by and allow that to happen. Now you might think that moralizing has no place on a neutral monetary network, and you'd be right---if I were talking about uses of money. But I'm talking about data storage, which is not what bitcoin is, and not what I signed up for.

Point the fourth, bitcoin is money. It's clear from even the title of the whitepaper. Any other use cases that compete with this will weaken it as money. Do you think fiat proponents have serious arguments about whether or not their cash is just as useful as toilet paper or for the scribblings of dick pics? Do you think they hope that these use cases are simply handled by the market? No, because they've reached a consensus about what cash is for and anyone using it to wipe their ass is rightfully seen as an idiot with no place among them in polite society. If fiat people knew that this debate even existed in the bitcoin community, they would laugh their heads off at us, and they would be right to. It is embarrassing.

Bitcoin is money. Bitcoin's use as money must be enforced. Bitcoin is too important to allow bad actors and attackers to have their way while we pray that market forces which may or may not exist as incentives for the attackers will magically solve the problem before the ship sinks.

Running BIP-110 on my node to save bitcoin. You can thank me later when your bitcoin is 1,000,000 a piece instead of 0.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@L0RINC @ForrestHODL @GrassFedBitcoin It's not censorship for a bank to reject a check with an 300-page epic poem in the memo because checks are for transferring monetary value, not literature. So it is with bitcoin. Not difficult to understand.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

You don't become a billionaire over night (unless it's inherited). If you got there from nothing, it was because you built something that was worth billions, and you enriched your employees, customers, clients, and government along the way. Once you're there, you have the means to shield yourself from taxes no matter what. How do we encourage more growth, instead of financial engineering? Encourage billionaires to continue creating wealth, and the tax revenues will follow in their wake. These are dynamic systems, and people respond to incentives.

[ScarcityMan @ScarcityMan]

@Monkeyiobe @mikealfred I think this is the point. Taxing billionaires highly is what incentivizes them to seek tax shelters and assets in the first place. What good does that serve? Incentivize them to create income instead.