Second Bailout is my bitcoin blog. The name comes from the message that Satoshi Nakamoto embedded in the bitcoin genesis block:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
Though Satoshi never stated the meaning behind the message, likely it serves both to state bitcoin’s mission, and also to prove that there was no pre-mine.
Bitcoiners often talk about the “bitcoin rabbit hole”. Bitcoin intersects with so many areas that it’s easy to start with a narrow interest (even if it’s just number-go-up) and end up learning about
- technology (Bitcoin white paper, cryptography, distributed systems and consensus, security, scaling, PoW vs PoS, asymmetric attack vs defense, running a full node, multisignature wallets, …)
- economics (nature of money, inflation vs deflation, taxation, debt cycles and crises, gold, …)
- finance (HODL, DCA, technical analysis, on-chain analytics, retail vs institutional, spot vs futures ETFs, yield instruments, …)
- accounting (immutable ledger technology, GAAP accounting and its current shortcomings related to cryptocurrency assets, …)
- regulation (Executive Order 6102, Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering, security vs commodity, SEC vs CFTC, Chinese crypto bans, …)
- bitcoin history (Bitcoin Pizza Day, Stone Man, Silk Road, Mt. Gox, blockchain wars, …)
- world history (rise and fall of empires, history of money, …)
- politics and geopolitics (national security, energy policy, central banks, international financial institutions, social surveillance and control, Canadian truckers, …)
- game theory (incentives around attacking the network, individual vs state incentives, …)
- ethics (time preference and how it impacts law and order, the progress of civilization, making war harder to finance, …)
- so many memes
Before long you’re spending all your time reading books, listening to podcasts, and engaging with the community on Twitter.
My own journey began with the tech. A friend explained how “crypto” solves the scaling problem with layering, much like computer networking solves it with the TCP/IP protocol stack. He also told me about smart contracts on Ethereum. Even though I’d known about bitcoin for some years, ironically it was Ethereum smart contracts that drew me in. I started playing around with Ethereum and Solidity. Someone on Twitter recommended that I read The Sovereign Individual and The Bitcoin Standard as well, so I did. Before long I was gobbling up everything I could about self-sovereignty, macroeconomics, geopolitics and everything else on the list above. I didn’t care about very many of those before I discovered bitcoin. Now it’s fair to say I’m obsessed.
I plan to write about all of it here. Welcome, and I hope you enjoy.