Thank you very much. I found the second hour especially interesting. By the way, Saylor describes a marvelous example of "Soros Reflexivity" in the second hour.
I've got The Alchemy of Finance, and was a little confused after the first read. Read it again, and still felt a lot of this was silly bull. Decided maybe someday I'll try it a 3'rd time because I may be missing the obvious. Then I read one of Taleb's books where he tore Soros's book apart, and I realized that Nassim was bringing the same points up that were troubling me all along.
In every Ponzi system there are winners and losers. I can only see that, from the people who liked your post, nobody was able to retire already thanks to crypto's. At least one is even losing money. If things don't change he might even be forced not to retire at the normal age but will have to continu working. From all BTC adresses 99.64% are smaller than 10 BTC. So these adresses have surely not enough money to retire. Big numbers have statistical value, small numbers have no statistical value.
I saw that book earlier today, but because of this thread I decided to grab it now for curiosity. In the meantime I just have the problem of getting enough time to read it.
It's an eye-opener for me on the history of money and the its role in the society and civilization and the powers in-control I'm pragmatic about it, especially with Bitcoin and cryptos now available to us, can choose to be aware and not suffer... for me and my family Audible has been an awesome tool for me, finished many books in the last few months, last one is the "The Fish that ate the Whale" which I highly recommend Listening to a book is not as good as reading, though, imho. I find it's not as easy to remember many details, but I guess I can always go back and re-listen
If your time is short and have space for audio, Guy reads crypto books to you; https://twitter.com/TheGuySwann?s=20 Listening to the episode on 21lessons.com started my BTC journey in earnest.
Nick Szabo's article on the History of Money is a great one and should be included in the discussion; https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
Re: Taleb, I used to be a big fan but no longer a fan for more reasons than him being a bitcoin-hater Taleb is on the foreword of the original "The Bitcoin Standard" but has been replaced by Michael Saylor on the new one. I may purchase the new edition hard copy of the Bitcoin Standard just for that reason Saifedean is also from Lebanon which is why he let Taleb do the foreword, even though Taleb obviously did not read the book. Saifedean was very upset about that There are twitter posts from over 2 years ago telling Taleb that the financial system in Lebanon was in danger of collapse, but Taleb attacked everyone saying they're idiots for thinking that and Lebanon banking system is safe Taleb cost a lot of family members, friends and followers in Lebanon to be financially ruined. They could have just bought Bitcoin PS: Taleb also attacked Lyn Alden with insults even when she was respectful in presenting her counter-arguments. Eventually, Taleb like a child blocked Lyn
Maybe 10% of the population has the ability, patience & willingness to use Monero properly. It's highly technical
1) It's a "decentralized" distributed ledger, nothing more. It's essentially an evolution of "shadow banking" aka eurodollar system, but now accessible to anyone willing. Code & internet eliminating the centralized middlemen in this structure is MAJOR value. 2) If you are talking about BTC, Proof of Work is an idiotic & wasteful system. It's also very limiting on the supposed intention of Satoshi's whitepaper & writing. At the end of the day, the creators of BTC saw that there is much more money to be made & with much less work via "Number Go Up" strategy 3) Stop using so much common sense, it no longer applies, LOL. But yes, and even Satoshi's whitepaper & communications repeatedly hammered the same point. Multiple other cryptos have attempted to focus on the payment system factor, and still try. Noone really cares. At the end of the day, USD system reigns supreme.