The Impostors Way

Easy money leads to unsustainable growth. It disincentivises profitability and incentivises the emergence of monopolies (or monopoly-like entities). Monetary policy (printing money and lowering interest rates) have acted like industrial grade fertiliser in the field of business. A intended manipulation which has short term benefits but just as the depletion of the soil in farming, it might very well have detrimental effects on the sustainability of the business ecosystem.

Speculating keeps you humble, it reduces the amount of BS in the world. Speculation is making an educated guess. It is an opinionated take of how the future will look. A clear invalidation of this educated guess exists, meaning that one can know when the opinion was wrong. Speculation therefore needs to be differentiated from idealistic hopes for the future. In this essay I want to make the case for why adopting more of a speculative mindset reduces dissonance in oneself and contributes to a better understanding of the world. Further I want to put forward that focusing less on idealistic visions does not decrease the importance of morality in ones life or action.

This episode is about what boxing taught me about avoidance strategies.  When going through life we often get away with being ambiguous. We can  avoid being wrong by not investing ourselves into any view of what the  future will bring. But every now and then, and inevitably so, life  forces us to take a stance. Then we need to be nimble yet firm in our  opinions. These two modes of operation (running from a fight vs. not  getting hit) require completely different skill sets.

As is usual in December I am getting into a reflective mood as the year ends. For this "mood" to be for any value to you I’ll focus on a few key concepts I’ve learned and otherwise let smarter people talk. Quotes from four impactful books I’ve read this year shall be my guide through this episode.

Transcripts and links to the book can be found at: https://theimpostorsway.com/23

Let me give you a 15 min run-down in simple words. I'll simplify things to get the point across, so you can decide whether or not this topic is worthy of further exploration for you. Check out the reading material if you want to get to the nuances here: https://theimpostorsway.com/2021/12/12/22-inflation-in-simple-terms/

Transcript including sources and further reading: https://theimpostorsway.com/2021/12/11/21-what-is-the-metaverse/

Facebook recently renamed itself to 'Meta' and like many you might be wondering what the hell that means.

What is a or the Metaverse, Meta for short. Why is Mark Zuckerberg so creepy and why this change has very little to do with Facebook. All this, tonight, for you, in 15min.

To get to that understanding let's explore:

• Historical origin / buzzword
• Why are facebook and other companies like Nvidia moving in that direction?
• Are we going to live in the Metaverse anytime soon?

Exploring the question: Why does Bitcoin reduce violence?

You'll learn about the nature of violence, property rights and Myanmar.
In short, Bitcoin reduces the incentive of violence by ensuring that the holders wealth cannot be seized or stolen.
Bitcoin offers peaceful, defensive property rights that persist any government change, any policy change and are valid internationally. They are trust-less and cannot be broken because of your religious beliefs, race, sexuality, etc.

Bitcoin offers real interest rates, a real savings tool. It gives the  saver a greater sense of confidence that every sum she is able to save  today will be buying her more in the future. Bitcoin has grown in  purchasing power year by year on average and offers a real interest  environment.
This reduction in uncertainty motivates long term thinking.
The  tradeoff with the future self is worth it. It pays off to avoid buying  shoes now that I don’t really need if I know I’ll be able to buy more  with that money in five years.

What makes us so short term oriented?
We are literally down to 6 sec videos now on Instagram and TikTok. There is not much further we can push this.
Fast food, fast fashion, fast money. What makes us so addicted to having things now? So impatient?
The answer can't be to blame social media companies. Let us explore the concept of time preference and see what psychologist and economists can teach us about delayed gratification.

Ideological Bitcoiners believe that giving individuals all around the world and no matter how rich or poor they are access to sound money is an important humanitarian goal.
The reason for that is that historically powerful entities (kings or governments or central banks) have always used their power to manipulate the money until things turned bad. And many are seeing the signs of excessive manipulation happening in the US Dollar and Euro right now.

We've learned that everything from sea shells over salt to silver coins were once money. Some of those "moneys" did their job better than others but all were products of their time and served their purpose. They were the tools at hand serving in the functions of  "being a medium of exchange", "storing value" and  "being a unit of account".

To get to this functionality the tool of money should have a few characteristics. Checking for these characteristics can be our checklist to compare moneys.

• Money is generally accepted
• Money is portable
• Money is divisible
• Money is durable
• Money is recognisable (hard to counterfeit)
• Money is homogenous (same denomination everywhere)
• Money is scarce

Money is a tool to measure things. It's a language tool to express value on a linear scale. Like the temperature. We have some people expressing the temperature in Celsius and some in Fahrenheit and some in Kelvin. Okay, different unit of measurements exist. We have to make sure we do not get lost in translation.

Learn about what storing value means. We take the example of a/your grandma selling a hectare of land in 1950 for 100,000 dollars. If your grandma would have kept the money under her pillow and passed on paper bills those would be worth 1000 times less today.

That's why knowing what money is is important. It can inform decisions in our lives. And one of the most important decisions is where we store our value.

Transcripts, sources and further reading can be found here: https://theimpostorsway.com/2021/09/26/13-store-of-value/

So what is money? What does money do for you? It's a great question to ask because we use money every day.
It's also a good question to ask what is "good money" and what is "not so good money". Just like we ask ourselves in other areas that touch our daily lives, such as what diet is good for us.

Lightning is for sure is the most real world application of Crypto right now on a large scale. Real world meaning in physical space, face-to-face. Of course people are transacting and moving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value on Blockchain based systems every day but having a (small) country try to replace their payment system is something else.
It has to work for people living daily lives. Paying for gas and groceries. So that is exciting to monitor.

So this is my non-investment advice. Don't be stupid just because other people are and some of those people made money being stupid.

Why do you get paid monthly? Why should you care? What can Bitcoin do about it?

Today is about streaming value. It is very closely connected to the understanding that money should flow where value is created. That we've established in the chapters about financial markets and how guitar playing musicians can get paid by the minute.

Open protocols can provide services like companies do and are built just like other products are. But they do not have a central decision maker. They don't have a CEO, a board of directors or similar structures. Until they do. But as you can imagine the cyberspace native version of a board of directors looks very different to the meat-space version.

The general concept behind a digital pseudonym is to build coherent relation to identity without doxxing oneself. Doxxing is the act of publicly revealing previously private information about yourself.

For this pseudonym to be useful it needs to show a proven track record in order to build reputation. Only then an employer can hire you for a freelance project or will your followers buy some of your books. Your pseudonym has to be able to build trust through its actions over time.

Learn with me about 'digital public goods'. What are 'public roads' of  cyberspace? How we make sure they are accessible to all members of  society? Namely we'll cover decentralised social media as one very  interesting use case of blockchain based applications.

Covering NFTs, "tokenising people" and "direct marekts" in this chapter. The question we want to answer is: How can blockchain help creatives to get paid for their work?

In my personal opinion the creative space on blockchain is one to watch. Reason being that creatives have suffered to monetise their work in a digital world. And art and music are at the heart of our culture. This makes blockchains solutions relatable and creatives can bring them into the mainstream.

The simplest summary I’ve heard here is that “fintech is building the new frontend for the financial system while blockchain based protocols are replacing the backend”

Read up: https://theimpostorsway.com/2021/07/18/blockchainland-chapter-4/

Agreeing on truth with lots of involved parties that act on eye level is hard. Hierarchies and a central point of authority help here. Blockchain technology explicitly wants to avoid this authority figure and therefore had to solve the 'finding truth problem' which is also called 'permissionless or trustless consensus'. There are several ways of achieving consensus and different blockchain projects are trying them out. Each consensus model comes with risks and benefits. For Bitcoin it is 'proof of work' which makes sure the ledger (who owns how much and transferred value to whom) is kept intact and can't be manipulated.

The opportunities for how to use digital scarcity are endless and are currently being explored. Digital gold is just one use case. Because a lot of money is involved it is also the one that attracts most of the attention. Obviously applications of digital scarcity haven't arrived in the broad mainstream yet. They will in some form or another at some point. And I hope I could tease your minds a bit with the underlying concepts so you have some time to get used to the idea until it does hit our daily lives.

I dove into the deep oceans of crypto and blockchain. Reemerging from this very wild journey I want to share my observations while they are still fresh. I think this is the best tribute I can pay to the space that has sucked me in.

This is not about making quick money.

Long term speculation is more interesting than short term speculation.

This is for the curious.

No technical knowledge required.