Florin Hilbay

Happy to announce the official release of “Introduction to Bitcoin: Navigating the Future of Money”, available on Amazon and Konsensus Netowrk.

Kevin Spacey had two Oscars when he signed on. Jeremy Irons had one. Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto. Every one of them took the lowest wage their actors' union allows because they read this script and said yes on the spot. The whole movie cost $3.5 million. The Wolf of Wall Street cost $100 million to make. The Big Short cost $50 million. Margin Call cost $3.5 million and still grossed close to $24 million. The director, J.C. Chandor, wrote the script while sleeping on a couch in a borrowed office. Couldn't afford an apartment. His dad was a career banker at Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest firms on Wall Street. Chandor sat down to write in the days after Lehman Brothers, another massive bank, went under and helped trigger the 2008 financial crash. The CEO in the movie is named "John Tuld," a mashup of two real bank CEOs from that era: John Thain at Merrill Lynch and Richard Fuld at Lehman Brothers. 80% of the movie was shot on the 42nd floor of One Penn Plaza in Manhattan. The offices had just been cleared out by a real trading firm. They made a movie about Wall Street collapsing inside a building that Wall Street had already walked out of. Chandor could have had more money. Investors showed up with bigger checks, but they wanted the ending rewritten. The CEO hauled off in handcuffs, the good guys walking out in protest. Chandor turned them down. He wanted the version where everyone compromises and goes home. That refusal is why the budget stayed at $3.5 million. He had his own close call with the crash. A bank handed him and some friends $10 million to buy a building in New York before 2008. Almost no questions asked. A former banker he knew told them to sell fast. They got out right before the bottom dropped. The film hit theaters in October 2011. That same week, Occupy Wall Street protesters were camping out a few blocks from where the crew had filmed. The producers put it on iTunes and cable the same day it opened in theaters. Around 500,000 people rented it for $6.99 each. That was roughly $5 million that a traditional release would have left on the table. Matt Levine at Bloomberg called it the best finance movie in 2022. David Denby at The New Yorker said the same thing when it premiered in 2011. A movie about a bank pulling the coldest trade of its life turned out to be one of the coldest trades indie film has seen.

discipline and respect in a high trust society.

Rick Astley & the Foo Fighters perform "Never Gonna Give You Up" in the style of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", after Dave Grohl spotted Rick on the side of the stage and just pulled him up to do the song

Eric Clapton is 81. He was ground zero for letting people know about the potential dangers of the jab, after his own poor reaction to it in early 2021. And he was - of course - vilified by the brainwashed. Just for warning people to be careful. Glad he survived.

Today's ruling by the IOC means a welcome return to fair sport for women and girls, but I'll never forget the scandal of Paris 2024, when people who consider themselves supremely virtuous and progressive publicly cheered on men punching women.

Oddly Garfield played Winston superbly in the Audible version of 1984. Shame he didn’t understand the book.

If America would embrace capitalism and reject cronyism in health care, agriculture, military contracting, insurance, media, technology, and banking, we would experience a renaissance unprecedented in human history.

Keanu Reeves was clearly unbothered when he found out his bike had been vandalized. He was seen reporting the incident to someone on a video call. Thank God it wasn’t his dog. 😳

An 18-year-old Japanese classical guitarist, Haruna Miyagawa, performs Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, a technically demanding violin piece arranged for guitar, highlighting its sequence of variations and arpeggios in a contemporary concert hall setting.

I am entirely fed up tolerating the intolerable.

They tried to silence me for testifying on behalf of a patient. Now, I’m suing back. The hospital filed a complaint against me the moment I stood up for my patient's rights in court. This isn’t just about my medical license—it’s about a doctor's right to speak the truth without fear of retaliation.

Bitcoin is money. And that’s all that it needs to be.

🤔

also, any idea or belief-system that cannot be criticized is a religion.

CEO of World Economic Forum resigns. You’re welcome.

This week I will introduce the “No Immunity for Glyphosate Act” to undo the recent Executive Order which promotes glyphosate (Round-Up) and insulates manufacturers from liability. #MAHA

In 1920s Soviet Union, planners decided Moscow needed more nails. So they ordered factories to produce tons of nails—literally. Clever factory managers made huge, heavy nails to hit their weight targets with minimal effort. When planners caught on and switched to counting nails by quantity, factories cranked out thousands of tiny, useless pins. This wasn't incompetence—it was inevitable. Without market prices, socialist planners had no way to know what people actually wanted or what resources truly cost. Ludwig von Mises predicted this exact chaos in 1920, showing that rational economic calculation requires genuine market prices formed by voluntary exchange. Today's central planners face the same impossible task, just with fancier computers and bigger bureaucracies.

Reading J.R.R. Tolkien in order 1) The Hobbit 2) The Fellowship of the Ring 3) The Two Towers 4) The Return of the King 5) The Silmarillion 6) Beren and Luthien 7) The Children of Hurin 8) The Fall of Gondolin 9) Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle Earth 10) The History of Middle Earth vol.1: The Book of Lost Tales Part 1 11) The History of Middle Earth vol.2: The Book of Lost Tales Part 2 12) The History of Middle Earth vol.3: The Lays of Beleriand 13) The History of Middle Earth vol.4: The Shaping of Middle Earth 14) The History of Middle Earth vol.5: The Lost Road and Other Writings 15) The History of Middle Earth vol.6: The Return of the Shadow 16) The History of Middle Earth vol.7: The Treason of Isengard 17) The History of Middle Earth vol.8: The War of the Ring 18) The History of Middle Earth vol.9: Sauron Defeated (The End of the 3rd Age) 19) The History of Middle Earth vol.10: Morgoth's Ring 20) The History of Middle Earth vol.11: The War of the Jewels 21) The History of Middle Earth vol.12: The Peoples of Middle Earth 22) The Nature of Middle Earth 23) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 24) The Adventures of Tom Bombadil 25) Bilbo's Last Song 26) J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator 27) The History of The Hobbit 28) Tales From The Perilous Realm