Blogs & Articles: Soul In The Game đ 3 years ago
- Category: Blogs & Articles | allen farrington on Medium
- Author(s): allen farrington
- Published: 16th June 2021 19:15
totes emosh, guys, totes emosh
photo by Gianluca Carenza, via Unsplash
So that was pretty wild, huh?
Did you guys sleep? I didnât sleep much. To my eternal shame, at one point of my jet-lagged, emotionally-and-physically-drained-lying-in-bed-not-sleeping at five in the God-damned morning, we decided to have a little impromptu international diplomatic summit with the President of El Salvador. I was awake for that and I didnât go because why would I check Twitter at five in the morning when Iâm in my sixth straight hour of failing to go to sleep? To whit: what even is life? Is any of this really happening?
Speaking of which, I think we should declare June 8th, El DĂa Del Salvador. Thatâs how it works now, right? Bitcoiners declare things and the whole world listens? This literally translates as, The Day of The Saviour, but would likely be stylized in English as, Saviour Day. And if the prophetic overtones here arenât really your thing, donât worry, Bitcoin is nothing if not inclusive! Know instead that Dzambhala, God of Wealth in MahÄyÄna Buddhism, smiles upon the good people of El Salvador this day.
Itâs all Jack Mallersâ fault really. What an asshole. I was doing just fine taking years off my life expectancy by strip-mining my metabolic capital with caffeine, alcohol, adrenaline, heat acclimation, and sleep deprivation, until he had to go and throw in dragging the developing world out of poverty.
AND THEN! get this, right: then he goes and has a beautiful family who hug him and they all cry and like, Iâm trying not to cry but Iâm crying and I canât cry because I have to go sing a sea shanty! It was totes emosh, I tell you.
âżrooke on Twitter: "#Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/7HxB5ZWQ3v / Twitter"
Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/7HxB5ZWQ3v
And are they even going to make any money from doing that? I donât know how Strike works if Iâm completely honest, but surely their voracious venture backers are demanding they scalp the El Salvadoreans, right? Not as much as Western Union but ⊠like ⊠surely a little? Like half as much? maybe undercut by 15 bps and corner the market? I dunno, somebody DM me if they actually understand this. Payments isnât really my thing.
woah. I don't know about you but that looks pretty deep. I bet the rest of the talk was awesome too.
So anyway, I sadly failed my covid test and I had to go home, and even though I missed NicolĂĄs âEl Jefeâ Carteroâs inaugural roundtable for the Bitcoin Monetary Fund, I did eventually get back to normal day-to-day life. One might say I grew my metabolic capital above its rate of depletion and hence am verifiably âsustainableâ and ESG-friendly.
I then noticed two things. The first is boring and probably happened to everybody: mainstream coverage of the conference was vapid, vacuous, and tactlessly antagonistic. Butâââand Iâve really thought a lot about how best to articulate thisâââmeh. Câest la vie. Reject nocoiner orthodoxy. blah blah blah.
The second is dope as shit: I had a backlog of content kindly provided by truly amazing and inspiring people I met for the first time in Miami and who were usually shocked to learn that I am neither 50 years old, 13 years old, nor a squirrel. Thereâs too much to shill here lest this drift away from a confessional and into mere anthology, but I will highlight the following as perfectly making the point that follows:
https://medium.com/media/a1da55718bf5b050b6df91ac2fc027fd/href
This is legitimately the single best podcast episode Iâve ever heard, on any show, about anything. Iâve listened to it twice already and I plan to listen for a third time just to take some final notes to follow up on. Not only is Joel clearly brilliant, but Marty catches himself a few times nearly inadvertently insulting Joel by saying itâs weird that Joel is a farmer, and yet he may be the most insightful guest Marty has had on.
(youâre brilliant too, Marty, itâs just Iâve listened to you a lot so I sort of get you now, whereas I just met Joel and it was AWESOME. And Iâll come on TFTC soon, I promise, just as soon as my friendâs submarine resurfaces âŠ)
What I knew he really meant, and he knew he really meant, andâââI think most importantlyâââwhat Joel knew Marty really meant, is not that itâs weird that Joel is a farmer. Itâs weird that Marty had that reaction to Joel being a farmer. And letâs be honest, so did we all. Not because of Joelâââwho is scarily smart and couldnât possibly give that impression on his ownâââbut because everything sucks. Or rather, I canât remember who said this but, Bitcoin Is For Foxes, Joel is an ĂŒberfox, and late fiat society has taught us all to instinctively worship hedgehogs for absolutely no good reason.
The real reason is that the hedgehogs are in charge and they make the rules. Which is actually kinda messed up wh-LOOK BUNNIES CUDDLING SOÂ CUTE!
https://medium.com/media/64b0ddb788b6c75a8811a3a4733922ff/href
One might be tempted to say that the difference between the mainstream coverage and Martyâs podcast is that Marty is right and they are wrong. Or that Marty is smart and they are dumb. Or that Marty is good and they are bad.
But I think the main differenceâââthe most important differenceâââis that Marty cares and they do not. It may sound trite but I wouldnât underestimate this. Aside from anything else, itâs poor tactics: the nocoiners, and even the precoiners, are not themselves stupid. Some of them are frighteningly smart, and almost all of them are still fundamentally good people (I think? like I really do think that but I am prone to naĂŻve optimism so discount appropriately).
The people who run Western Union are almost certainly very smart, very accomplished, andâââI have no reason to disbelieveâââperfectly good people. They are just working with old (fiat) tech that compromises their ability to do as much good as they might and gives them shitty incentives so it likely doesnât even occur to them to try to figure out how to do better.
But there is no chance in hell they care as much as Jack, or Marty and Joel, orâââto really make the pointâââRoss:
https://medium.com/media/caa4b8b83ea237b8dcc2d8db7c3da6bc/href
I had the honor of shaking Lyn Ulbrichtâs hand when I was introduced to her as the keynote speaker soon to present. She introduced herself as if I didnât know who she was, and the very first thing she said to me was to apologize for not knowing who IÂ was.
I mean, come on, like that matters? Really?!? Surely it shouldnât matter in the slightest to Lyn Ulbricht who some random kid is? Some happy, healthy, and free kid âŠ
Except that it does matterââânot because of meââânot in the slightestâââbut because it proves that this amazing, inspiring woman cares.
Joel argued convincingly in the TFTC episode that there are seemingly uncountably many paths to Bitcoin. It doesn't take any specific academic background or professional experience to come to appreciate what is essentially just sound, programmable money and open source freedom. You donât need to have gone to a conference and you donât need to have run Silk Roadâââmuch as these might accelerate your journey. You need none of this because the material is frankly not that hard.
Joelâs route in was farming; mine was capital markets; we had a delightful conversation about the conceptual links between farming and capital markets. So delightful, in fact, that I later bought a book called âDirtâ. Iâm not sure I knew why at the time. I think he incepted me:
proof of stake. proof of work will come when I read it and write about it intelligently.
Whatever your academic background or profession, it has likely been messed up in some or other way by the total perversion of incentives brought about by Federally-and-hence-globally mandated ultra-high time preference. If you donât care then you donât care. I donât know what else to tell you. If you care, you look into it, and if you poke around for long enough or piss people off with awkward enough questions, there is a reasonable likelihood that you will eventually find your way to Bitcoin.
Joel did. I did. You probably did too. Unless you are a complete noob, in which case this is a bad place to start, FYI. Take Martyâs advice and, âturn off Wet Ass P***y and turn on a Bitcoin podcast.â Listening to the one linked to above would be a wonderful first tumble down the rabbit hole.
I sometimes wonder if my Grandpa would have taken such a tumble and become a Bitcoiner. We have a family story about how he threatened to quit his job as chief counsel and vice president of a bank because he disapproved of a new mortgage lending practice he believed to be unethical. The details are somewhat lost to legend now, unfortunately, given he passed away many years ago. But we know he got his way. They didnât do it, and he didnât quit.
This would have been in the early 70s, so very possibly a textbook case of wtf happened in 1971?. His employer was probably starting to feel the pressure of high-time-preference finance but he, as nothing more than a good, strong man, would not stand for it. He cared about his short-term payday a little, sureââânobodyâs time preference is zero, after all. But he cared about his ethics and the effects of his actions on his community far more.
I take it backâââI donât wonder if he would have been a Bitcoiner; I know he would have. I just hope he would have been proud of me.
miss you, grandpa đânow, you see, allen, to get a âyieldâ, you must first have a capital stock you nurture and replenish. growth is nice, but diligent maintenance and the duty of care come first. you have to understand that nothing that matters is only about you, but all who came before and all who will come after, as wellâââââI want a pop tart.âââââpay attention, knucklehead! I am a lawyer at a bank, I am your elder, I am very handsome, and I am very wise! this will all make sense and will be useful in twenty years when you are writing pretentious nonsense about bitcoin!â
I recently snarkily tweetedâââas I am wont to doâââsomething to the effect that: I used to wonder why Bitcoiners knew so much, but then I realized, people who know things become Bitcoiners. But itâs more than that. Itâs not just that Bitcoiners care. Itâs that people who care become Bitcoiners. I really donât believe it is all that helpful to say that Bitcoiners care. Itâs probably largely true, but it gets the causation backward.
And isnât this really just a way of making time preference less formalistic and mechanical and instead tangible and emotional? If you have a high time preference you almost by definition donât really care about the things that really matter. If you have a low time preference you almost by definition do.
As I was mulling all of this over, Elizabeth Stark messaged me out the blue and then gave me a call. This is just the kind of thing that happens to me these days, and, given I missed El Jefeâs summit, I kinda felt like I deserved this one.
But seriously (no, actually seriously, I swear!), Elizabeth has been my personal hero for the better part of three years. This was totally surreal.
She is clearly a genius, and as cool as that is, thatâs not why sheâs my hero. Sheâs my hero because she could have spun her intellect into making a bajillion more dollars than she has by selling out to Wall Street or Silicon Valley at pretty much any point in the last seven years. But she never did, and I believe she never will, because there is no doubt in my mind that she cares.
Not to say sheâs a big olâ victimess or anything: she founded and runs an awesome sauce company that has been backed by Jack Dorsey, amongst others. Sheâs hardly poor or unaccomplished. But my point is that she chose the hard path, the better path, and the truer path. She has enough skin in the game to lead a perfectly comfortable life, but she also has something invaluable that nocoiners never will: soul in the game.
And this is why we are going to win.
Thatâs what we talked about (well, we talked a bit about DeFi too but youâll all have to wait for the product of that to drop. Iâd say maybe 1â2 months but donât hold your breath).
We talked about what motivates us. We talked about the times we thought about giving up. We talked about the things we want to build, that we hope we can build, and that we are enormously grateful for having the opportunity to build. We talked about number of people go up. We talked about how it turns out she decided to commit her life to Lightning in Edinburgh, and that I am therefore duty-bound to go to the place in question and talk them into putting up a plaque.
And the single best thing about this piece of history is that there is a feature of this âplaceâ that is just God-damned perfect in terms of tying in with Bitcoin memes, lore, culture, etc.âââbut I canât identify the feature without doxxing the place, which I would prefer not to do. I therefore resort to the following next-generation Zero-Knowledge Proof to convince the reader beyond a shadow of a doubt (and remember, I math real good so this is powerful stuff):
Elizabeth will make an obvious confirmatory gesture in a public appearance in the near future. Keep an eye out. Itâll be totes emosh.
But more importantly than any or all of these details, we just talked.
Like, wtf?!?
If youâd told me this a year ago, I wouldnât have believed you. If youâd told El Jefe a year ago heâd be granted this noblest of ranks by a sitting head of state, he wouldnât have believed you. If youâd told Gladstein a year ago heâd meme volcano mining into reality, he wouldnât have believed you.
meme by me. petition to get Gladstein to change his cover pic here.
If youâd told any of us that Bitcoin would be legal tender a year ago âŠ
⊠I dunno, actually, we might have believed you. Maybe not intellectually. Maybe we wouldnât have bet on it (âproper structuringâ notwithstanding). We may not have been rationally optimistic enough to put skin in that particular game, but Iâm pretty sure our souls have been in it all along.
To whit: what even is life? Is any of this really happening?
Yes. It is. Number of people go up đ§Ą
Totalmente emocional, chicos, totalmente emocional đ
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