26 - At the Belgian coast
At last we got a few days fully off - to relax on our own without obligations or commitments - so we chose to do what all the Belgians do at this time of year and went to the coast!
We spent a most enjoyable week in around Nieuwpoort. I did get time to read more books and I even managed to get back into some of my computer projects with some real hands-on time. All of this was combined with nice weather and some long walks along the coast and a few bike rides.
And of course I found some time to write up this week's newsletter. I hope you are finding these interesting and informative - do share your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!
Travel from Antwerp was smooth and on-time - well done NMBS! They currently offer Duo Tickets where two people travel for the price of one - so that was nice! Once you get to Oostende (that I first/last visited on school trip!) you head right out of the station and take the coast tram. It seems to use the same De Lijn tickets as Antwerp - nice!
Book of the week
Book of the week is "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson - first published back in 1992 - some 30 years ago. This fact, alone will blow your mind when you understand the story-line.
The story takes place in some post-crisis world where trust in governments and countries has broken down and the world is made up of territories controlled by various corporations - each of which has their own "passport" and rules. The inhabitants of the world spend their time "living" in the Metaverse (yes - he did coin that term). Of course there is some sort of computer virus that strikes and threatens to end everything - you can imagine how things develop.
I did really enjoy the book - despite it being written in "third-person present tense" which does give it a rather unusual feeling and can be annoying at times. Something else that I really loved were the "data dumps" and discussions with the librarian with references to ancient Sumerian culture and the Tower of Babel among many other things. Without spoiling things, you will be surprised and challenged to read and understand the implications of what he says.
Interesting too is the role that librarians and historians play in so many books that I am reading recently - eg "Guards! Guards!" and Sazed the Keeper in "Mistborn - The Final Empire". You really ought to recognise and understand the importance of learning from wisdom of prior generations. This should be no news to anyone familiar with The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe (first published 1996) - summarised here by Roger Hamilton.
I probably cannot do the story justice - so, I'll point you to Daniel's video review and this review by Michael Gold with nice imagery and yet another review in similar vein that reads to you.
🛠 Update on my Projects
Website
Just a reminder that there are now more than 25 newsletters on the website. I do try to make each of the articles be interesting, useful and self-contained so that you can start reading any of them and get value.
With this body of knowledge, a common need that I have (and some are asking for) is how to search for specific content in previous issues. There are two ways - likely you want the second!
The first is to use the built-in search that you see at the top of the page. This is provided by Ghost (the hosting software) and, to be honest, it is less than I had hoped for. It will only search headings and titles - so you may or may not be lucky!
The best way that I have found is to leverage the google.com "site search". Just go to google.com and search "site:rogerprice.me " and append your search term - eg in the example below I am looking for "blocksize". Lo and behold - it finds the reference in Issue 1. Try it yourself for whatever you want to look for! Feedback welcome in comments below:
If you are concerned (quite possibly with good reason) about using google for your searches you can go some way to anonymising things by using Farside in combination with Whoogle - Try this link.
It is worth to spend a little time to understand how you can compose better search strings - the google syntax tends to work on most alternative search engines.
Remember that you can also now read the newsletters in your own language if you are not English-mother-tongue! Take your pick: Dutch, French, German, Serbian If your language is not listed just pick it from the drop-down on the right - you will be amazed.
If you want anonymised translation then SimplyTranslate may provide some options. This looks interesting with Google and other translation engines (eg Deepl.com) being included. How much further I go on this depends on how much interest there is!
Another thing that I may be looking into is how to provide a button that allow to read the page to you. Thanks to one of my subscribers we are close - just a little HMTL debugging needed - so feedback in he comments below on that too please!
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💰 Bitcoin & Lightning
"Hands-on" is the best way to really learn anything. Reading and watching video explainers gets you going but it is only when you need to make things work by yourself that you really appreciate what you learn from those articles and videos and where the gaps remain. So I was happy this week finally to get some hands-on time where I could work uninterrupted and without conscience or other commitments pulling me away.
Much as I love my M1 Mac, one thing that annoyed me was that the new processor killed off the ability to run virtual machines on your Mac - I had long been a fan of VirtualBox that easily allowed you to spin up instances of Windoze and Linux.
Happy day! New kid on the block is UTM that beautifully packages Apple's hypervisor, QEMU. I have got to recommend this - it comes with a Gallery of starter images that you can quickly work with. My preference is Ubuntu Server (for a minimal, stable base) with XFCE (for the user interface) - clean and easy. I did find an annoying glitch that sometimes networking completely stops working. A bit of googling surfaced that this is indeed a strange but know thing - and the fix is easy.
There is no shortage of cloud hosting services that let you easily spin up instances of whatever Linux you want but I do appreciate the advantage of having this flexibility fully under my control on my computer and with my own backup and security procedures in place - and it's free!
The physical system of choice for me is the Raspberry Pi - currently the model 4 is the go-to system but the demand for these has sky-rocketed (among other things, to run bitcoin and lightning nodes!) so the supply and price have responded as you would expect in today's supply-chain-constrained world. I run Ubuntu server on the Raspis and this simplifies moving between VMs and real machines.
Next piece of essential software is Docker - I have it on the Mac and it also runs in the Ubuntu VMs. This continues to amaze me. It really is in a league of its own. I like it because of how easy it makes it to install and update (or even remove) software with many dependencies while keeping strict change control. Reminds me of that other piece of incredible software that is git!
This week was spent getting all these things reinstalled and working and re-familiarising myself with them. Also updating xcode, VSCode and Android Studio as well as refreshing my Flutter configuration (allows easy building for iOS and Android). I did build a few simple projects under git change control just to get my feet back on the pedals.
⚡️ A Look at the Lightning Network
I did also take time to work through Lyn's amazing review and you should too. It is a fabulous explainer from that will take you from understanding why and how bitcoin acts as store of value and how this is fundamental to any monetary network and how scalability is added through layers, of which Lightning is one. You will find examples of how lightning transactions work pretty much instantaneously and and almost zero cost and how even micro-payments become possible (payments of fractions of a penny/cent).
Read A Look at the Lightning Network or listen to Guy reading part1, part2 and part3 - best at 1.8x speed.
🎓 Reading, listening and learning
Below are some more interesting sources that I came across, or was reminded of, in the past week - for your enjoyment and edification:
💰 Macro Economics and Investing
Guy sees trouble ahead (already there in fact) in and from China financial situation
0:38 Bad Economic Numbers 4:39 Real Estate Woes 8:17 Bubble is Popping 12:11 Banking Sector 16:13 What it Means For You
Before you "celebrate" what is happening in China - look nearer to home - in Europe for example
Weekly: Crypto News: Market Dip, Merge Risks, Regulation, CBDCs & More
CTO Larsson: Explains MTGOX and what will happen - we are nearing the end of the decade-long bankrupcy of the exchange and creditors should be getting something in the coming month or so. This is the best explainer I have found and I expect something similar will transpire with Celsius.
You can count on Arthur Hayes to spot interesting things and his latest article unearths some things to reflect on. Ellio (quite a vocal entrepreneur) has picked up on this too and is making and sharing his plans.
Fascinating analysis from James about the Bank of England and the situation in the UK. As he says, this applies to all countries that have a Central Bank. Don't say that nobody told you!
⚠️ Ethereum Merge continues to dominate the news
People seem to be waking up to what intelligent people have been saying for a while, but the madness of crowds persisted. Without judging the outcome we can be sure there will be extreme volatility in the month ahead.
Read Lyn's article from January on how Proof-of-Stake chains can be all too easily captured: Proof-of-Stake and Stablecoins: A Blockchain Centralization Dilemma
🤔 You might want to give this some consideration
Max Igan wonders: Can things Get Any More Stupid? ... only to conclude that it certainly will as long as people keep accepting the nonsense.
In similar vein: have you ever encountered the Hegelian dialectic? Perhaps you have...
Recall that we discussed how wisdom from End of Empire Times are well documented but surprisingly widely not taught or forgotten: Empires Rise and Fall extracts and summarises from John Glubb's paper of nearly 100 years ago, The Fate of Empires . You should recognise many of the traits he mentions in Max's walk-and-talk.
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