With Bitcoin absorbing more and more of the world’s money on its way to becoming the alternate and borderless money for humanity, and now starting to be adopted by institutions, the one somewhat dark spot in the Bitcoin story is its Proof of Work mining which uses lots of electricity.

It’s not all bad though as it is well known that Bitcoin mining heavily uses hydroelectric power, and a recent study found that 39% of Bitcoin mining uses renewables — about 40% higher than the overall global renewable power usage estimated at 28%.

But still, in a world that for…

I really wish people would stop referring to Polkadot as an "Ethereum killer". It has a different purpose than Ethereum. While Polkadot will have blockchains/apps run on it through parachaings and parathreads, these will be limited in number, while there is no limit to the number of applications running on Ethereum (given of course network throughput capacity).

So while they will compete somewhat because they can both have applications run on them, they main differentiating factor for Polkadot compared to other blockchains is its interoperability. Polkadot is meant to connect Bitcoin and Ethereum and other major blockchains together, while also providing its own functionality. It isn't meant to "kill" anything. Ethereum and Polkadot are not competitors. Polkadot makes the case for Ethereum stronger as will allow Bitcoin funds to plug into it. If you want a competitor to Polkadot look at Cosmos, as they is also targeting interoperability.

It is March 25 2021 and Bitcoin is $10k down from it’s recent all time high. In the last bull run, in 2017, every time Bitcoin came off a correction and broke the recent all time high it shot significantly higher soon after. This month it came out of a correction, broke the all time high of $58k, but only went to $61k (instead of $70k or $80k or $90k) and has now slumped down to the low $50,000s. This sort of thing never once happened in 2017, so what’s going on?

What’s going on is that the Bitcoin market…

You can hardly read an article about Bitcoin without the subject of risk coming up. Usually it is phrased in statements like “bitcoin is highly risky”, “bitcoin isn’t backed by anything”, “bitcoin is highly volatile”, “only buy bitcoin if you have high risk tolerance”. But if you really think about what money and risk are, you’ll see that Bitcoin doesn’t add risk to your net worth, it takes risk away, and you take on risk when you move from Bitcoin to any other asset. The reason is because Bitcoin is hard money, the hardest money humanity has ever known.

People…

In the past 24 hours Bitcoin has breached the top 10 list of the largest assets in the world.

There are many historic moments during Bitcoin’s short life so far. It was Halloween 2008 when Bitcoin was first announced by its mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. The Bitcoin network was brought online for the first time on 1/3/09. The first transaction sent from Satoshi to Hal Finney occurred on 1/12/09. The first Bitcoin exchange was brought online on 3/17/10 so that market participants could establish a price for one bitcoin, which started at a fraction of one penny. The first real…

In the Beginning…

The future is bright for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency in general! The first decade or so of the technology saw Bitcoin invented as a revolutionary new monetary system, followed years later by a slew of copy cats and later on novel ideas about how to expand the functionality of Cryptocurrency.

The most successful idea to develop outside of Bitcoin was the idea of smart contracts — taking Bitcoin’s concept of programmable money to its natural conclusion in which programmable money is Turing Complete in which anything software can be coded and run on the blockchain. Just as Bitcoin dominates the “money”…

Four years ago Mitch McConnell made up a rule out of the blue about Supreme Court nominations in an election year. He claimed it was Senate precedent (he lied). It was an unconstitutional and naked power grab that resulted in the Republican party stealing a Supreme Court nomination from a sitting president. It was even more transparently corrupt given the fact that Republicans even talked about refusing to take up any Democrat nomination for the next 4 or 8 years if Hillary won the election. …

For anyone interested in early retirement, what it’s like, how to plan for it, and how to embrace it to live a fulfilling life after you are done being an employee, this story is for you.

I retired from my day job at 36 years old on August 30th 2019, exactly one year ago. I’ll go over some details of my early retirement, my experiences and thoughts from this first year, and where I plan to go from here now that I have a year to judge and plan from.

Retiring Early

After spending my twenties post-college bouncing around taking whatever low…