And see what sticks

Even the people who don’t

The case to start buying more bitcoin right now

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BECOMING A BITCOIN GOD

$10M (10 million dollars) a bitcoin; not super farfetched–

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The case for Bitcoin! Woot!!!

Or in other quads, the more media you consume, “study” and “research”— the dumber you become?

iPhone SE

The joy of being in the direct light and sun, the joy of being in a big sandpit,

The joy of conquest and battle

Money is solidified money?

Sure! Here’s the Bitcoin Lightning Network explained in emojis:

🌎🐢🔁💸 = Bitcoin world was slow and expensive for transactions.

🧠💡📝 = Two smart people had an idea and wrote it down.

⚡️🔗 = They created the Lightning Network for fast and cheap transactions.

👫➡️📓✏️ = People open a channel (like starting a notebook) and write down transactions.

🔄📝 = They trade back and forth, writing in the notebook, but not telling everyone.

🔚👀📓 = At the end, they check the notebook for final trades.

📢🌎 = Then, they tell the world once about the final outcome.

🚀💨💰 = Now, Bitcoin transactions are fast and cheap!

🎉🍬 = People can now use Bitcoin for small things, like buying candy, easily.

I hope this fun emoji explanation helps illuminate how the Lightning Network works!

How was it invented and explain it to a second grader?

The Bitcoin Lightning Network was created to solve a big problem that Bitcoin had – it was like having a super popular toy everyone wanted to play with, but there was only one of it, so everyone had to wait a long time for their turn. This waiting time made playing with the toy less fun, especially if you just wanted to play quickly.

Imagine you and your friend have a special notebook. Instead of telling everyone every time you trade stickers, you both write it down in your notebook. You say, “I gave one sticker to my friend,” and your friend writes, “I received one sticker from my friend.” You keep trading stickers back and forth, writing each trade down, but you don’t tell anyone else about it yet.

At the end of the day, you look at the notebook together and figure out who owes who stickers based on all the trades you wrote down. If you gave more stickers to your friend, your friend gives you the difference back, and vice versa. Then, you tell everyone about the final trade, just once, instead of every little trade you made.

The people who made the Lightning Network thought, “What if we create a special way for people to trade Bitcoin back and forth like the sticker trades, without telling the whole world every time?” So, they made a “secret notebook” method where people can trade Bitcoin back and forth quickly and cheaply. At the end, they just share the final outcome with everyone else. This makes trading Bitcoin like playing with your favorite toy a lot faster and more fun, without the long waiting.

This “secret notebook” for Bitcoin trades is what we call the Lightning Network. It was invented by two smart people named Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja in 2015. They thought of this clever way to let people trade Bitcoins quickly and without having to pay a lot of money for each trade or wait a long time for it to finish. And just like how you and your friend can trade stickers more easily, people can now use Bitcoin for small things, like buying a candy, without it being slow or expensive.

Bitcoin Lightning Network

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is a “second layer” payment protocol designed to operate on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Its primary aim is to enable faster and cheaper transactions, addressing some of the scalability issues associated with the Bitcoin network’s ability to process transactions. The Lightning Network achieves this by allowing users to create payment channels between any two parties on that extra layer. Here’s how it works and why it’s significant:

Key Features

• Instant Payments: Lightning Network transactions are nearly instant, significantly faster than regular Bitcoin transactions that require confirmation by miners.
• Lower Fees: It offers much lower transaction fees, making microtransactions viable. This is due to off-chain transactions that don’t need to be processed by the whole network.
• Scalability: It can theoretically handle millions to billions of transactions per second across the network, a massive improvement over Bitcoin’s base layer.
• Privacy: Transactions on the Lightning Network can be more private since not all details are recorded on the blockchain.

How It Works

1. Opening a Channel: Two parties who wish to transact with each other create a multi-signature wallet (which requires more than one signature to enact a transaction). Both parties deposit a certain amount of Bitcoin into this wallet.
2. Transacting: Once the channel is open, the parties can make an unlimited number of transactions between themselves. These transactions are not broadcast to the Bitcoin network and are, therefore, almost instant and very low in cost.
3. Closing the Channel: When the parties have finished transacting, they close the channel, and the resulting balance is registered on the Bitcoin blockchain. Only two transactions are recorded on the blockchain: opening and closing the channel.

Significance

• Micropayments: The Lightning Network makes it feasible to conduct small transactions quickly and cheaply, opening up new use cases for Bitcoin.
• Adoption: By addressing the scalability and cost issues of Bitcoin transactions, the Lightning Network could facilitate wider adoption of Bitcoin as a payment method.
• Innovation in Payment Systems: The development of the Lightning Network is an example of innovative solutions to blockchain scalability, offering a model that other cryptocurrencies might follow.

Challenges and Considerations

• Liquidity and Channel Capacity: Channels need to have sufficient funds to cover transactions, which can limit the amount that can be sent or received.
• Network Complexity: Managing and finding efficient routes for transactions can become complex as the network grows.
• Security Concerns: While the Lightning Network is designed to be secure, any new system introduces new vulnerabilities and challenges that must be continually addressed.

In conclusion, the Bitcoin Lightning Network represents a significant step forward in blockchain scalability and usability, offering a promising solution to some of the challenges faced by Bitcoin in achieving widespread use as a digital currency. Its success and adoption will depend on ongoing development, user experience improvements, and integration with existing financial systems.

Fix the energy in the system

Create things which are both beautiful and functional

To engineer is divine

Just do your thing, then get out the way:

Michael Saylor: I’d rather think that the thing that Satoshi taught us is: you should do your part during some phase of the journey and then you should get out of the way. And I think Steve Jobs said something similar to that effect in a very famous speech one day, which is: Death is a natural part of life and it makes way for the next generation. And I think the goal is: you upgrade the world, right? You leave it a better place, but you get out of the way. And I think when that breaks down, bad things happen. I think nature cleanses itself. There’s a cycle of life.

Michael Saylor: The reward for authenticity more than offsets the specificity with which you pursue your mission. Another way to say it is: nobody wants to read advertising. If you were to spend $100 million dollars advertising your thing, I probably wouldn’t want to watch it.

Focus your energy, guard your time, train your mind, train your body, think for yourself, curate your friends, curate your environment, keep your promises, stay cheerful and constructive, and upgrade the world.

100’s T of value for the civilization?

Michael Saylor [timestamp 3:32:42]: I believe that Bitcoin is a massive breakthrough for the human race that will cure half the problems in the world and generate hundreds of trillions of dollars of economic value to the civilization.

the way I divide the world is: there’s investment, there’s saving, there’s speculation, and there’s trading.

Having somebody have to pay money to send an email, a good idea.

Interesting business idea: only let people comment if they paid money or security deposit to prove that they’re real human being?

Or, give people the privilege to post a comment, if they pay real money.

Lex Fridman: So you think it crosses a million — it can go even higher?
Michael Saylor: Yeah I think it keeps going up forever. I mean, there’s no reason we couldn’t go to $10 million a coin, because digital property isn’t the highest form, right?

Lex Fridman: So the Bitcoin price has gone through quite a roller coaster — what do you think is the high point it’s going to hit?

Michael Saylor: I think it’ll go up forever. I mean, I think Bitcoin is going to climb in a serpentine fashion. It’s going to advance and come back and it’s going to keep climbing. I think that the volatility attracts all of the capital into the marketplace, and so the volatility makes it the most interesting thing in the financial universe. It also generates massive yield and massive returns for traders, and that attracts capital. Like, we’re talking about the difference between a 5% return and 500% return. So the fast money is attracted by the volatility. The volatility’s been decreasing year-by-year-by-year — I think that that it’s stabilizing. I don’t think we’ll see as much volatility in the future as we have in the past.

Coin price

if you consider digital property that’s a $100-$200 trillion dollar addressable market, so I would think it goes from $10 trillion to $100 trillion as people start to think of it as digital property.
Lex Fridman [timestamp 3:03:08]: What does that mean in terms of price per per coin?
Michael Saylor: At $500,000, that’s a $10 trillion dollar asset. At $5 million, that’s a $100 trillion dollar asset.

Michael Saylor: We’re 13 years in to this entire activity. I think the risk has never been lower. If you look at all the risks, the risks in the early years are: is the engineering protocol proper? Like, one megabyte block size, 10-minute clock frequency, cryptographies. First, will it be hacked or will it crash? 730,000 blocks in and it hasn’t crashed. Will it be hacked? It hasn’t been hacked. But it’s a Lindy thing, right? You wait 13 years to see if it’ll be hacked.

A billion dollar digital building?

I’d rather own a digital building than own a physical building, because if I had a billion dollar building in Moscow, who can I rent that to? But if I have a billion dollar digital building, I can rent it to anybody in any city in the world — anybody with money. And the maintenance cost is almost nothing, and I can hold it for a hundred years. So it’s indestructible building.

Why freedom then?

Who’s influencing the changes? So what you really want is a very very simple idea — the simplest idea: I’m just going to keep track of who owns 21 million parts of energy.

Important things

No ICO-

I think the lack of an initial coin offering is also important. I think the lack of a corporate sponsor is important. I think the fact that it traded for 15 months with no commercial value was also important. I think that the simplicity of the protocol is very important. And I think that the outcome of the block size wars is very important.

Digital property vs security

The gift

And so I see the entire story as Satoshi giving a gift of digital property to the human race and disappearing.

Permission-less and open

30 pounds of fat, you can go 60 days without eating

On the other hand, three entrepreneurs in Nigeria on the weekend could create a website that would trade in this Lightning economy using open protocols without asking anybody’s permission. So you’re talking about something that’s like a million times cheaper, less friction, and faster to do it if you want to get money to move.

How do you give a full education through PhD-level to 8 billion people on the planet? And the answer is: a digital version of the 20th century thing running on a mobile phone.

The metaphor I think is relevant here, the biological metaphor, Lex, is Type I diabetic: if you’re a Type I diabetic, you can’t form fat, and if you can’t form fat then you can’t store excess energy. Fat is the ultimate organic battery, and if you’ve got 30 pounds of it you can go 60 days without eating.

If you think about the big picture: the big picture is 8 billion people with mobile phones served by a hundred million companies doing billions of transactions an hour, and the companies are settling with each other on the base layer in blocks of $80 million at a time, and then the companies are trading with the consumers in proprietary layers like layer three, and then on occasion, people are shuffling assets across custodians with Lightning layer two because you don’t want to pay $5 to move $50 — you want to pay a twentieth of a penny to move $50.

You don’t have as much optionality with any other form of property on Earth

Kids and children are ultimately not culpable for anything; 99% of their worldview is shaped by their parents.

For example, if society bones the fact that kids are on devices all day, it is because their parents are on devices all day.

As a consequence, if you want to “fix” the kids, you first got to fix the parents!

I am anti fragile things, people, tools etc.

The insane glory of Monument Valley — transports and transcends you into a new world and universe!

Layer One

Michael Saylor: Yeah. So the layer one is the foundation for the entire cyber-economy. And we don’t want it to move fast. What we want is immortal, incorruptible, indestructible. That’s what you want: integrity from the layer one.

So if I give you a million dollars and you want to hold it for a decade, you might go buy a house with it. And the house is low frequency money — you converted the million dollars of economic energy into a structure called a house. Maybe after a decade you might convert it back into energy — you might sell the house for currency, and it’ll be more worth more or less depending upon the monetary climate.

property is low frequency money.

Bitcoin is going to go up forever?

In terms of ethics, I want to make one more point: I might say to you Lex, I think Bitcoin is the best, most secure, most durable crypto-asset network in the world, is going to go up forever, and there’s nothing better in the world. I might be right, I might be wrong, but the point is: because it’s property, it’s ethical for me to say that. I

common property which is fair is Bitcoin —

Nation agnostic

The US Government, if they took 1% of the money they spend on the department of education and they simply poured it into digital education and they gave degrees to people that actually met those requirements, they could provide 100x as much education for 1/100th of the cost and they could do it with no new technology — that’s a marketing and political challenge.

technologist-philosopher

debt— bleeding of money:

Stop the bleeding. Single first thing, right? You show up after any action, I look at you — stop the bleeding, because you’re going to be dead in a matter of minutes if you bleed out.

The term “iatrogenic” comes from a combination of two Greek words: “iatros,” meaning physician or healer, and “genes,” meaning origin or source. Thus, iatrogenic refers to any condition, disease, or complication that arises as a result of medical treatment or advice. Essentially, it denotes an illness caused by the medical examination or treatment itself, not due to the underlying condition of the patient.

This term is used across the medical field to describe outcomes that are not necessarily the result of medical error, but rather are unforeseen or unavoidable consequences of the treatment process itself. It underscores the complex nature of medical care, where interventions aimed at healing can sometimes lead to new health issues.

iatrogenic: attempting to do something good will actually yield more bad.

Michael Saylor: They will attempt to do good and they will and they will do good imperfectly and they will create oftentimes more damage than the good they do. Most government policy will be iatrogenic: it will create more harm than good in the pursuit of it — but it is what it is. The secondary issue is they will unintentionally pay for it by expanding the currency supply

What is inflation?

We’d have inflation as long as we have government that is capable of pursuing any kind of policies that are in themselves inflationary, and generally they all are.

Michael Saylor: The significance of laser eyes is to focus on the thing that can make a difference. and if I look at the civilization, I would say half the problems in the civilization are due to the fact that our understanding of economics and money is defective — half, 50%. I don’t know, it’s $500 trillion dollars worth of problems? Like, money represents all the economic energy in the civilization, and it kind of equates to all the products, all the services, and all the assets that we have and we’re ever gonna have — so that’s half. The other half of the problems in the civilization are medical and military and political and philosophical and natural.

Here are the visualizations of Plato’s Cave, illustrating the concept of perception versus reality. These images depict prisoners interpreting shadows on a wall as reality, unaware of the actual source of light and the true nature of the objects casting these shadows.

I have a passion for the light, physiologically literally and let us not forget that photography means painting with light.

For me, one of the greatest joys in life is just having direct light, the direct sun on my face and my body. I’ve also realized that having the light directly on you is 1 trillion times different than “reflected light”.

Even worse, some buildings, cars, the tint is so strong that even if you’re getting some lovely light that’s coming in, the tint blocks most of it.

Certainly tint is useful if you live in Arizona or Nevada and it is 120° outside. But, if it is just a moderate 70°, you want as much light, sunlight and direct light as possible!

Taking this further as an analogy, I wonder if the majority of civilization, adults kids etc., everyone is just devoid of the light. Everyone is living in Plato‘s cave, and what we think is light, it just reflected light, refracted light, or worse artificial light.

If you had put a hundred thousand dollars in this house you would have 305x return over 92 years.

But if you had put the money a hundred thousand dollars in a safe deposit box and buried it in the basement, you would have lost 99.7% of your wealth over the same time period. So the expansion of the currency creates a massive inefficiency in the society — what I’ll call an adiabatic lapse. what we’re doing is we’re bleeding the civilization to death.

This is why money is so bizarre; let us say that you just took $1 billion, and put it into a very simple 10% yield fund. Your money will naturally grow, $100 million a year — by sitting on your butt and doing nothing. And that number will continue to expand indefinitely.

10% of a billion dollars is $100 million.

My passion

It seems that in the world of bodybuilding, the general ideas that the more you eat, the better. However, I think a better way to think about it is about nutritional density. For example, better to eat 1 pound of 100% grass fed beef liver than maybe even 4 pounds of typical ground beef.