Chris Battle

Every profile of Michael Saylor focuses on his engineering brilliance, his tech vision, his MicroStrategy bet. Nobody has ever asked about his undergraduate thesis. In 1987 at MIT, Saylor wrote a computer simulation of Renaissance Italian city-states — within the System Dynamics tradition. That detail explains everything about why Bitcoin landed the way it did in 2020. My book The Satoshi Strategy: Bitcoin, System Dynamics, and the Architecture of Sound Money is available now in paperback and Kindle. a.co/d/00P52p0m

TB publishing this sort of essay provides a genuine service, like turning over a rock and seeing the usually hidden critters running free. Reveals to all the normal folk what sort of thoughts run through the minds of the left-wing activist types - very odd and potentially very harmful. Labour politicians need to simultaneously appeal to these folk while ignoring most of their most cherished views when actually making policy in govt.

If your response to a 5,700 word essay on policy spanning everything from Labour to geopolitics, energy to technology, public service reform to defence and the EU is to blurt out ‘war criminal’ or ‘tech billionaires’, you’re a major part of the problem Tony Blair is diagnosing.

@FT @FT if we can not rely on The Financial Times for accurate information, what can we rely on? Chomsky has made the case many times that The FT is the most accurate newspaper in the Western world, does that still apply?

@FT Having read the entire essay on the TBIB website, it is clear that the term ‘delusional’ is applied to the Labour Party at the institutional level. What terrible, inaccurate reporting by the FT. Had the person who wrote the headline actually read the report?

Tony Blair criticises Labour’s Andy Burnham for leftwing ‘delusion’ ft.trib.al/jpQKDY4

Burnham will openly criticise Blair and shore up his position with the party faithful. As soon as he is in Number 10, if he has any sense he will work to a list of priorities very much based on the TB essay. The Corbynista tendency is still very much in evidence in the Labour Party and any serious attempt to govern needs to overcome their malign influence

Burnham accuses Blair of ignoring inequality as he hits back at ex-PM bbc.in/4uCMgxn

@GlenMitchell1 Absolutely. It has also brought out a number of gibbering Corbynistas onto X today to reprise their old faves: 'war criminal' etc.

I’ve read the Tony Blair essay and whilst I don’t agree with all if it the quality of his political analysis is still first rate.

I have read the entire report. It does NOT describe Burnham in those terms. Only the Labour Party collectively at the institutional level, ie retreating to comfortable old arguments and not dealing with the changed world. The UK political editor of a reputable organisation like Bloomberg should frankly be embarrassed for such an inaccurate post on X. In past times the public relied on journalists for accurate information, now anyone can access the source material easily it is trivially easy to see where the inaccurate reporting is. @Bloomberg This is a surprising example of inaccurate reporting by one of your top UK staff

In his 5000+ word essay Tony Blair calls Andy Burnham, among other things, “delusional” and “dangerous.” Extraordinary intervention here: institute.global/insights/polit…

@FT No he doesn’t

@Breedlove22 @RobertBreedlove22 asked the question that unlocked 25 hours of the most consequential Bitcoin thinking ever recorded. Pages 74–77 of The Satoshi Strategy explain why the Saylor Series mattered — and what it changed. 🧵

Back in late 2020, I spoke with Michael Saylor and asked him why Bitcoin destroys every other store of value. His answer will change how you think about money forever: There is $250 trillion in global assets and every single one of them has the same fundamental problem when you look closely enough. Your real estate is immobile, illiquid, and taxed annually without exception and half of all commercial real estate is structurally impaired from COVID with at least a decade of uncertainty still ahead. Your bonds only work when interest rates keep falling and that game has a mathematical floor because the moment rates go negative everyone pulls their money out simultaneously and the entire mechanism that made bonds attractive for four decades inverts overnight. Your equities get taxed at every single layer of existence: > revenue gets taxed as sales tax > cash flows get taxed as income tax > expenses get taxed as payroll tax > trade gets taxed as tariffs (plus regulatory risk sits on top of all of it) And when the price rises by a factor of ten it does not become safer, it becomes more dangerous because it is delaminating from its fundamentals and any disappointment from that point causes catastrophic volatility. Here is what most people never understand about money: Every traditional store of value you own is a vertebrate and if you are a vertebrate you can be killed with a needle because there is a headquarters, a jurisdiction, a regulator, a court that can reach in and end it. Bitcoin is a swarm of hornets with no headquarters to raid, no jurisdiction to exploit, no CEO to arrest, and no regulatory throat to cut because there is no throat. Your money should be a single celled organism, the base layer of the ecosystem, not a vertebrate with a backbone that can be decapitated the moment it becomes inconvenient to the wrong government. Bitcoin is the only asset that structurally solves the problem every other asset you own creates:

Bitcoin's early community worked like a genetic bottleneck. A small founding population whose convictions got written into the protocol permanently. Nike's believers can be priced out. A currency's believers can be inflated away. Bitcoin's founding beliefs are now enforced by consensus mathematics that no government, institution or single actor can override. That's a different category of thing from a swoosh.

"Bitcoin has no intrinsic value." Let me translate that. Nike shoes cost $8 to make. They sell for $180. The difference? A swoosh. A story. Collective belief. A Picasso is paint on canvas. A Rolex is just a clock. A Louis Vuitton bag is stitched fabric. You have never once demanded intrinsic value from anything you paid a premium for. "Intrinsic value" is a phrase people reach for when they haven't thought about where value actually comes from. It comes from belief. Always has. Bitcoin's believers are just the ones who wrote it into unbreakable math.

@saifedean Evidence that a good book is still one of the most powerful forces for change in the world

Florida Man Reads The Bitcoin Standard; Buys 4% of All the Bitcoin

When I learned that @saylor wrote his MIT dissertation in System Dynamics, something clicked. It explains everything about his Bitcoin pivot: the feedback loops; the accumulation logic; the long-run thinking. This clip with @jordanbpeterson hints at it. I thought: that would make an interesting book. So I wrote it. 🔗 youtube.com/shorts/mAII-kS… #Bitcoin #TheSatoshiStrategy

@michaelshermer Your brother is even more impressive: he solved some issues in biology that a nasty woman stole and won the Nobel Prize with, and now he has uncovered gaping flaws in Darwinian evolution!

I made a break-through discovery in physics that overturns not only Newton & Einstein, but shows how we can travel faster than light by bending spacetime. I would share the evidence but it's classified. I would publish in peer-reviewed journals but the system is broken so I refuse to use it. I would show you my work but then someone will steal my ideas. But you should take my word for it because I have a Ph.D. and I do a lot of podcast interviews. What? You're skeptical of my claim? Why? Could it be that evidence & reason still matter?

@FondOfBeetles Excellent, clear presentation of scientific facts. Exactly what this platform needs more of!

On Hantavirus: a (non-technical) thread. Disclaimer: I am a biology PhD, but not virology/epidemiology. Husbandman is a virology PhD. But I’m told I’m good at communicating science, so here’s my take. #Hantavirus

@emmacowan11 @PeterMcCormack @garyseconomics Makes a lot of sense...

@sciencetao @PeterMcCormack @garyseconomics LSE was founded by the Fabian society.

1. Not an economist 2. Emotionally rather than reality driven

@londonette A very interesting read.

I have written about the late Dame Jenni Murray. A feminist icon - but very different behind the scenes. open.substack.com/pub/sarahdeech…

Why not do a podcast episode where you actually walk through the costs and profits of the coffee shop? Literally showing how much this costs, that costs etc because many people on here do not seem to grasp the point. Many people think the cost of a coffee shop business is just paying staff wages and cost of beans etc, have no clue about business rates for example. Helping people understand all of the up-front investment involved and the nature of taxes like business rates will open a lot of eyes! Unfortunately someone who works in a PAYE role does not see any of this and just perceives taxes as something taken off before you get your money. Little do they appreciate that your shop (and every other) needs to pay business rates BEFORE it has even taken a pound in income!

This argument would only have the mildest credibility if the minimum wage was the only thing the state mandated. In a world of rising taxes, regulation, inflation and energy costs, which are all the fault of the state, only a dummy blames the business owner.

The SD community has a remarkable opportunity here. Bitcoin represents one of the most tractable complex systems in modern economics — observable, data-rich, and governed by explicit feedback structures. The terrain is almost entirely unoccupied by SD researchers. @systemdynamics_ — this is a field worth entering.

@systemdynamics_ Most Bitcoin analysis ignores the intellectual framework that explains it best. System Dynamics — the discipline pioneered at MIT by Jay Forrester and developed by John Sterman — gives us the clearest lens available for understanding why Bitcoin accumulates monetary value. A thread. 🧵