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Beyond equipment and an electricity bill? As well as a stable Internet connection? That's not $0.00.

Not true. Perhaps you’re confusing mining with custody. It costs nothing to park bitcoin in a software wallet, and you can buy one of the finest hardware wallets in the world for $60. You can sign transactions offline on self custody wallets, and it doesn’t need to be a ‘stable’, 24/7 internet connection. You just need an internet connection of some kind. It could be your mobile device.

If you’re supposing a large internet outsge, it doesn’t affect your bitcoin. It sits there waiting for you for when you can connect again, and if it’s some kind of major, region wide internet outage, that’s not likely in any real sense. That’s not really how the internet works, but even in that case, a Starlink terminal solves that completely if you’re preparing for a total, Mad Max-style Apocalypse.

Sure, keep a lot of cash on hand for emergencies, but cash is not a store of value. It loses 12% a year.

It will certainly depend on whether the digital infrastructure will be maintained during said economic collapse.

There is no digital infrastructure to maintain with bitcoin. As long as there are nodes running somewhere on planet Earth, everything is safe. I'm not sure what you think the alternative is in some sort of super unlikely apocalypse. Corporate banking? Equities? Bonds? Commodities? I'm sure you could stockpile barrels of oil or frozen concentrated orange juice, but good luck offloading it with no trucks to haul it off or digital banking to pay for it. Equities? With no stock exchanges, what good are they? These things are all destroyed much more completely in the event of some sort of global digital blackout, and good luck lugging around hundreds of pounds of precious metals, or exchanging them for anything of worth if there's no power.

Do the various hacks of exchanges or crypto company collapses not count as a potential risk?

No. These are not actual crypto holdings. Your crypto is held in large wallets controlled by the exchanges and sitting in a faux-wallets that can be compromised as easily as anything else with an Internet facing login. An actual bitcoin wallet can't be 'hacked' in the traditional sense. Someone has to have your private key or seed phrase, and this can only be compromised by sloppiness or carelessness.

You can euthanize a dangerous dog.

But everyone here acting as if it’s 1925 and your only option is shooting $1,000 hunting dog in the head “down in the gravel pit” is your only option for a dog, while you’re living on a $2 million ranch, is postering.

Jesus, amazing to see all the latent psychopaths on FR come out of the woodwork to admit that they shoot dogs.

Not today, Deep State. No thank you to your FUD.

(and whoever is really running Obama)

This is key. Obama is an idiot. He isn't running anything.

This whole idea that he is running a third term behind the scenes is a smokescreen.

If you watch this video, he's describing what he would envision as a third term where's he's running the country by feeding the answers to a placeholder President:

Obama Third Term Interview

But in reality, I think he's betraying exactly what his role was; a stand in who takes orders...

We can’t complain about woke robots, why?

Of course you can, as Elon has stated that it’s not the technology that is dangerous, it’s who’s controlling it.

But the author clearly, at least in my estimation, believes that AI is one giant robot that everyone uses. He doesn’t understand that AI is simply a catch all term for countless different models programmed to do different things.

He keeps talking about ‘A.I.’ as if it’s one giant computer someplace that everyone is using.

I agree.

Why are all of these AI critics referring to “A.I.”, as if it’s some giant server facility being run out of a university or the White House?

There are countless different models. I just asked the AI I use (Claude.ai) and it gave me a completely different answer.

Does the author actually think “A.I” is just one giant central hive mind, and not millions of different models doing different things and written by different people?

Stop it while we can, or we may never have the chance again.

Stop it while we can? What the hell is he talking about? Ban AI?

The author is an uneducated fool.

He got pwned in his debate with Shelly Kagan, which was the only time I saw him completely out of his element and unable to respond with his usual tricks.

He used to be the most respected apologist who debated Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and other atheists.

He was a one trick pony in the debates, using a Lincoln-Douglas style point-counterpoint-fall method that gave many the impression that he ‘won’ those debates.

He's a Biblical determinist who has said some other dumb things like “animals don’t feel pain”.

Was this article written by a retard? Since when does China have a ‘border’ with Taiwan?

I’m finishing up this special tonight on HBOMax. It is dark in a way that is almost unfathomable.

I have friends who are deep down the conspiracy rabbit hole beyond even myself, and they believe that Hollywood itself is nothing but a giant child trafficking operation pretending to be a business. I can’t say that they’re totally wrong.

Many thanks to the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China.

But I think I’ll stick to my fasting routine.

There's not one fight scene in any of the Connery or Moore movies that equals this. You could reshoot this scene shot for shot and it would still work today.

Peter Hunt directed OHMSS and was the editor for previous Bond films; he knew how to edit a fight scene, and Lazenby himself was a bruiser:

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) - Hotel Fight

I don’t understand the hate for Lazenby either. I loved him as Bond and wished we’d have seen more. He had a bad agent; he actually quit the role since his agent told him Bond was a dying brand.

Lazenby was the most physical Bond. Without shaky-cam or modern fight choreography, the fights in that movie are fast and brutal.

When he throws a punch it looks as real as any movie from that era.

Jason Mamoa was doing the same thing, but he finally cut it off with Lisa Bonet, who was 12 years older.

It’s certainly a weird fad. Makes me think they’re probably controlled.

Well, aside from all of that, bitcoin is the exit. It’s the endgame.

Evaluating it next to the dollar is part of the conceptual problem of bitcoin critics.

The US dollar is going to zero in the long term. For someone from 1924, the US Dollar has already essentially gone to zero. For someone today, the USD in 2124, or even 2074, will see a USD (if it hasn’t already collapsed by then) as essentially gone to zero.

Knowing that, and barring some kind of drastic change in global monetary policy away from hyperinflationary fiat currencies, assets of some kind are the only way to preserve your wealth.

Show me a better asset than bitcoin, and I will listen. Show me an asset that costs $0.00 to store and manage. Show me an asset I can pick up with me and carry with me at all times. Show me an asset that is only available via keys that I can store in my head. Show me an asset that could easily survive the collapse of the US and/or global economies. Show me an asset that can’t be seized by anyone, and that I can swap with another asset holder with literally no middleman and no counterparty risk.

There simply isn’t one.

Anything you hold as any sort of investment only has value when you liquidate it.

This is simply untrue. I guess you’ve never run up against the AMT, or calculated your net worth.

The whole idea that the only value one has is whatever cash you have in your bank account is simply not the way anyone on Earth calculates value or wealth.

If government paper is how you measure your financial value or wealth, no one can stop you from thinking that way (nor do I desire to talk you out of it). But this is your own highly subjective methodology that no one in the world uses.

USD and other fiat currencies are objectively the worst way to calculate your wealth considering that cash is highly inflationary, probably into double digit percentage points if our treasury leaders were truthful. So, the value at that time might be a lot less than at the current time is actually guaranteed for cash, whereas just about every popular and reliable asset or commodity enjoys the OPPOSITE status.

If you think that USD in your bank account is a safe way to preserve value, all I can offer is a foreboding Good Luck.

But if he’s never sold any, it means he is not yet reaping the benefits - in the same way that if you have ten million dollars worth of Microsoft stock, but have never sold any, you have not yet “realized” its value.

This isn't really how wealth is recognized, legally or philosophically.

If he's sitting on substantial bitcoin holdings (bitcoin being the most liquid asset available, above all precious metals and equities), why does he need to sell them to "reap benefits'?

Having tremendous liquid wealth available for a later date or retirement may have substantial effects on his daily life; how he saves, how he spends, how he borrows (perhaps he's offering up the bitcoin as collateral for loans), how his mind works when he goes to sleep, knowing his financial future is secure.

Dumping valuable assets into hyperinflationary paper trash and/or spending lavishly is not my idea of wealth or realizing value.

The purchaser just transition their crypto to fiat then make the purchase?

Expensive and slow, for both buyer and retailer. It’s adding a step that’s not necessary if you can accept crypto directly.

If you’re a retailer that allows people to monetize their gains directly instead of selling off first, you open yourself up to a huge community.

Its hugely popular in the big ticket luxury goods, from jewelry and designer clothes to Ferraris, yachts, and real estate.

If you have a $1 million real estate transaction that can be settled instantly via crypto (plus a day for settlement via wire or ACH), it reduces counterparty risk on both sides, and cuts out banking transaction fees and KYC for one of the stops at a bank. Every time you move lots of money, financial services companies take a piece.

The modern banking system is essentially decades, maybe centuries behind other technologies. We move money very similar to how it was moved prior to WW2, just with shinier networks. But the nostro/vostro reserve banking system is essentially the same. One of the biggest sources of FUD against bitcoin is the banking industry. 90% of them would probably be out of work in a blockchain world.

Critics of bitcoin are essentially Internet critics from the mid-90s, “What would it be used for? Yeah sure. Who’s going to trust their banking to the Internet!? Using the Internet for stocks and investing? Haha, no way. We have trading floors for that!”

Its huge outside the US. While lots of people in the US hold crypto, we’re very much behind the ROW when it comes to using it for transactions.

Time will tell. I think it’s already lasted longer than tulips did, right?

16 years. If you study and follow the arguments, you’ll find that anti-bitcoin partisans have been lying. They always lie or mislead, either out of ignorance or loyalty to shiny rocks and paper, or because they’re trying to quell the market while they buy it up on their own.

All the worst type of horrible Deep State MMTs are against it too. When Gates, Munger, and Buffet are on one side, I don’t even need to know what the argument is; I’m son the other side, since I’m against the forces of evil.

My new tagline should be Bitcoin : 1 - Charley Munger: 0.

But digital assets and digital money are here, and they’re not really new. It just took decades to figure out how to do it, and another decade to mainstream it.

But pick your best bitcoin criticism and put it on a short time horizon, simply as a test. You’ll find that 100% of the time, the anti-bitcoin forces are proven wrong. This isn’t a prediction, but a verified fact based on historical track records.

Anti-bitcoiners are batting .000.