Episode 19: Dale (@btc_shepherd from www.thebitcoinshepherd.com) on discovering bitcoin, orange pilling no-coiners, badmouthing shitcoins, broken legacy system incentives, and finding purpose.
Thanks to our guest: https://twitter.com/btc_shepherd of https://thebitcoinshepherd.com
Host: https://twitter.com/mission_bitcoin
Sponsored by HardBlock: https://www.hardblock.com.au
Notes
- Dale's personal journey into bitcoin after dabbling in law, real estate, and financial planning
- Learning about money printing, inflation, "intrinsic value", and macroeconomics from the likes of Lyn Alden, Paul Tudor Jones, Raoul Pal, and Simon Dixon
- Understanding the philosophies behind bitcoin (e.g., separating state and money)
- Starting The Bitcoin Shepherd (www.thebitcoinshepherd.com) to help orange pill no-coiners and help them with self-custody
- The importance of understanding the economic, technological, and philosophical reasons for bitcoin
- Needing nuanced and adversarial thinking to check your biases
- Bitcoin's value comes from its utility and monetary properties
- Bitcoin provides full risk with full reward, whereas bonds provide a negative real yield with the full risk of default (i.e., no returns, all risk!)
- Finding a niche in bitcoin education and prioritising quality of life (rather than just mining fiat)
- Writing about bitcoin and badmouthing shitcoins as a journalist for www.cryptonews.com.au
- Working with South Africans to establish geographically distributed multi-signature custody options
- Wrestling with the desire to wear bitcoin merch and talk to everyone about bitcoin while keeping good opsec
- Differences in privacy and security risks between South Africa and Australia
- Using multi-sig, ColdCard decoy pins, and decoy passphrases to improve bitcoin security
- Buying property, bitcoin, and/or bitcoin miners and then using the assets as collateral to buy more bitcoin
- Choosing a vocation/career based on what problems do you want to solve
- Non-fungible tokens (NFTs): benefits for artists, hype cycles, wash trading, scams, and money laundering
- How family and friends have responded to transitioning to a bitcoin evangelical vocation
- Mainstream / corporate media: Bitcoin holders are psychopaths, and if you want to buy a house you should save more fiat, invest in stocks, and leverage more debt
- Lightning Network will cut the lunch of expensive, inefficient, and corruptible intermediaries
- Using demonstrations to orange pill, rather than just explanations (although 'what is money?' and 'fractional reserve banking' are always important topics to discuss)
- 4-year political cycles incentivize manipulation of the money supply
- Legacy media is driven by broken incentives (e.g., being first, being sensational to get clicks, and lazy writing that is derivative of other articles)
- There's a fine line between dispelling FUD and giving it credibility by responding in the first place
- Using memes and calling out absurdity
- Benefits of bitcoin mining (bootstrapping renewable infrastructure, stabilising grid demand, rescuing stranded and otherwise wasted energy)
- Most normies will own or use bitcoin without even realising it (e.g., due to superannuation allocations)
- Things to be bullish about: Lightning adoption; hash rate ATH; nation-state adoption; bitcoin development and mining thriving; bitcoiners are honest, motivated, and innovative; and Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen's recent comments about the US dollar and bitcoin
- Threats to bitcoin: cryptocurrency as a distraction, government over-regulation, and privacy concerns
- Topics that tangent out from bitcoin: low time preference.