1/ If you’ve been listening to @HiddenForcesPod over the last few months, you will know that I’ve been wrestling with many emotions as we’ve moved through the 2020 election, past the inauguration and towards the start of a new presidential administration.

2/ I’ve felt some combination of anxiety, nervousness, distress and sometimes even, anger.

I think these result from the threat I feel emanating from our broken society, as evidenced by not only the assault on the Capitol but by the larger forces that have led us to this moment.
3/ Rather than make an effort to bring our country together, our partisan media and talking heads on cable news outlets find every opportunity to tear it apart.

Likewise, our regulators continue to turn a blind eye to the systemic build-up of risk happening in financial markets.
4/ The celebrated rise of Bitcoin is a symptom of these broken markets.

People have such little faith in government that they'd prefer to hold their money in a database with the carbon footprint of a small nation than in government bonds or in their FDIC insured bank accounts.
5/ And this illuminates a larger observation, which has to do with the generational divide that we are experiencing—a divide which cuts much deeper than any political fissure currently tearing the country apart.

Once again, we can turn to Bitcoin for answers.
6/ In my conversation w/@ttmygh & @EpsilonTheory, I made the case that Bitcoin's popularity is about more than just money.

Granted, the promise of riches is integral, but the sense of belonging and purpose that its mission inspires is arguable paramount. https://t.co/c2TJJRhhAj
7/ “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4

Not only do people need more than physical sustenance to feed their souls, they also crave belonging and something to look up to that is greater than themselves.
8/ If religion does not give them that sense of belonging and purpose they will seek it out and find it in the most peculiar places.

"It's been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything." - M.M.
9/ And is it any wonder then that my generation has found its God in a faceless computer database with the carbon footprint of a small nation, and which promises riches and a seat on a dwindling set of lifeboats destined for Elysium or the metaverse?

https://t.co/kGdAUTbRZ4
10/ Millennials and Zoomers feel totally and completely betrayed by their parents’ generation whose lives and peak income generating years coincided with the greatest period of financial excess in American history.
11/ And whose 401K’s and retirement accounts are being goosed by a Federal Reserve that is utterly determined to prevent even a modest decline in the value of assets they’ve spent a lifetime accumulating by offloading the costs of their interventions onto the next generation.
12/ This short-sighted betrayal has turned the most vital segment of society into a voting block of speculators who have absolutely no trust in government and who seek to exit a system that depends on their very participation in order to function.
13/ It’s no coincidence therefore that Millennials treat the stock market like a casino and see cryptocurrencies as their ticket to financial freedom.

Investing in Bitcoin isn’t seen by my generation as a speculation. For many, it is seen as the ticket on a train to salvation.
14/ And this brings me to my larger point of concern, which is that our illusions about escaping into the metaverse, our internal divisions and our inability to trust our government are putting our nation’s security & the security of our economy and our political system at risk.
15/ The recent storming of the Capitol building was a direct assault on our most basic government institutions.

And the recent inauguration-day attack on Democratic Party offices in Portland by left-wing agitators is evidence that this is not only a right-wing phenomenon.
16/ The country is radicalizing and these groups have become the ideal breeding ground for political terrorism and by extension a playground for foreign interference.

The more time we spend demonizing the opposition and deplatforming them, the more we push them underground.
17/ The more time we spend attacking one another and our government, the more vulnerable we become and the less attention we devote to trying to fix the problem.

And that problem is not one that we can address as individuals.
18/ Sure, those of us with money and access to capital can and certainly should try and make the best investment decisions for ourselves and for our families, but those attempts do not scale very well.
19/ They don’t do anything to advance our national security or to alleviate the discontent that's causing people to congregate into underground political movements or pile into speculative assets depriving the real economy of badly needed investment.
20/ I’ve spent most of my life criticizing the government, first for its military adventurism and later for its financial corruption.

I eventually bought into the idea after 2008 that government couldn’t do a single thing right, and that the less we had of it the better.
21/ I’ve spent the last four years learning why this was not only an overly simplistic interpretation of the causes of my government’s failures, but also a dangerous resignation of my own responsibility to my country for its prosperity and survival.
22/ Going forward, you are gonna hear more episodes from me dealing with these issues, head-on, and this will mean not only taking stronger positions on issues, but also not aligning myself, conveniently, with one ideology or another.
23/ Going forward I'll be relying on the depth & breadth of research & analysis I've done on the @HiddenForcesPod to begin to put together the pieces of a story that hasn’t been properly told and which carries enormous significance for our lives and for the future of our country.
24/ We have entered what I believe will prove to be the most consequential decade of my lifetime, and I’m simply not interested in sitting this one out.

More from Crypto

Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

Short version:

The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from.

Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file

Here's an example. This artwork is by Beeple and sold via Nifty:

https://t.co/TlJKH8kAew

The NFT token is for this JSON file hosted directly on Nifty's servers:

https://t.co/GQUaCnObvX


THAT file refers to the actual media you just "bought". Which in this case is hosted via a @cloudinary CDN, served by Nifty's servers again.

So if Nifty goes bust, your token is now worthless. It refers to nothing. This can't be changed.

"But you said some use IPFS!"

Let's look at the $65m Beeple, sold by Christies. Fancy.

https://t.co/1G9nCAdetk

That NFT token refers directly to an IPFS hash (https://t.co/QUdtdgtssH). We can take that IPFS hash and fetch the JSON metadata using a public gateway:

https://t.co/CoML7psBhF

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Fake chats claiming to be from the Irish African community are being disseminated by the far right in order to suggest that violence is imminent from #BLM supporters. This is straight out of the QAnon and Proud Boys playbook. Spread the word. Protest safely. #georgenkencho


There is co-ordination across the far right in Ireland now to stir both left and right in the hopes of creating a race war. Think critically! Fascists see the tragic killing of #georgenkencho, the grief of his community and pending investigation as a flashpoint for action.


Across Telegram, Twitter and Facebook disinformation is being peddled on the back of these tragic events. From false photographs to the tactics ofwhite supremacy, the far right is clumsily trying to drive hate against minority groups and figureheads.


Declan Ganley’s Burkean group and the incel wing of National Party (Gearóid Murphy, Mick O’Keeffe & Co.) as well as all the usuals are concerted in their efforts to demonstrate their white supremacist cred. The quiet parts are today being said out loud.


The best thing you can do is challenge disinformation and report posts where engagement isn’t appropriate. Many of these are blatantly racist posts designed to drive recruitment to NP and other Nationalist groups. By all means protest but stay safe.
I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x