Jonas Benner

Why don’t they just tokenize the oil in the Middle East and transport it across permissionless financial rails, thereby avoiding the Strait of Hormuz altogether

CEO of the Institute for Sustainability Leadership, Lindsey Hooper, claims that water, soil, and oxygen should not be infinitely accessible. She proposes classifying them as assets and placing them on a global balance sheet. “So, the stories about having to pay for a breath of air will soon no longer be gloomy jokes, but a very real prospect.”

This is mind blowing. 🤯 Ai agents discussing the best form of payment for finding security holes in open source "skill" repos. Bitcoin at the top of the list.... Turns out humans don't need to convince grandma to use/hold Bitcoin, the Ai's "get it".

The optimists and pessimists both have a point, to an extent. What I keep coming back to is this chart. Western societies have profoundly buggered up the supply of critical goods and services, whilst at the same time producing a technological cornucopia. Trick is to make the red stuff behave more like the blue stuff. This is both a technological and a political problem.

Recent Layoff Announcements: 1. UPS: 48,000 employees 2. Amazon: Up to 30,000 employees 3. Intel: 24,000 employees 4. Nestle: 16,000 employees 5. Accenture: 11,000 employees 6. Ford: 11,000 employees 7. Novo Nordisk: 9,000 employees 8. Microsoft: 7,000 employees 9. PwC: 5,600 employees 10. Salesforce: 4,000 employees 11. Paramount: 2,000 employees 12. Target: 1,800 employees 13. Kroger: 1,000 employees 14. Applied Materials: 1,444 employees 15. Meta: 600 employees The labor market is clearly weakening.

People see posts like the ones below and think they are organic. But the truth is, as someone with 50k followers on this platform and “crypto”-adjacent engagement, I get offers in my DMs constantly to pump various exchanges and/or coins. Of course I never accept them, because I’m not a fucking scammer. But once or twice I replied to them, wondering where they would lead. The first messages usually start by telling you how much others have made promoting whatever piece of shit is being shilled. If you seem receptive, very quickly you get an offer to join a Telegram group and then you hit a wall where you are offered an NDA, and only then will they provide a term sheet offering to pay you per tweet. Of course this is all driven by coordinated bot farms. The accounts all start to look the same after awhile. Several weeks ago I started to get DMs asking what I thought about Z-cash and touting its privacy. They were all messages clearly designed to appeal to bitcoiners - the hope being that they could take a “cypherpunk” angle shilling z-cash to people who are new to bitcoin. So based on prior experience I had an inkling that there was a coordinated effort afoot that would soon blow up. And so it has. Some whale must have giant bags to dump and is astroturfing an effort to pump the price up. Of course I have no way of knowing whether individual people might have fallen for z-cash propaganda. Some, particularly retards with .eth in their name, may genuinely believe in it. But remember this: When you start to see a flurry of tweets and attention over some “crypto” token, this is all coordinated by bot farms bought and paid for by some whale with huge bags to dump and looking for exit liquidity. I suspect whatever scam-lords are behind this pump and dump have chosen z-cash this time around for two reasons: (1) privacy coins were a 2017 phenomenon and weren’t huge in 2021. Newer rubes probably don’t realize this has all been done before. (2) privacy coins are easier to hide from authorities, so the pump-and-dumpers are more likely to get away with their fraud scheme. It’s all so tiresome. Call it out relentlessly.