Chapter 4 of the JBP series. Unless noted otherwise quotes are from Jordan B. Peterson. The series continues. If you’ve not yet read parts one through three, you can find them here. The fourth chapter of Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” is titled, “Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today.” The basic premise is that life is not easy and in order to find contentment and fulfillment, one must make progress. Comparing oneself to others, particularly in a globally interconnected world, may not be the healthiest way to do so because you are always stacking the deck against yourself. It makes internal, self-negotiation more difficult and as such, you are inclined to make poorer decisions. Peterson makes clear that value judgments are at the center of all decision-making and that what we aim at, how we negotiate with ourselves and the degree to which we value the future are all critical to the quality of life we ultimately live. I highly recommend reading the entire book of course, and this chapter in particular, if you’re working on yourself. So… how is this related to Bitcoin? The answer in this essay might seem trite, but when I read this chapter, two ideas that came to mind right away: 1. “Bitcoin is self-love.” 2. Bitcoin makes you a better person. A few people have discussed variations of these, including AmericanHODL, and they’re themes I’d like to explore in this two-part chapter of the series, alongside: Time preference. Self-respect. Excellence. Value judgements/evaluation. Behavior. Personality. Maturity. Human action. As usual, we’ll do this by pulling threads and ideas from JBP’s book and expanding on them through a Bitcoin lens, and we’ll likewise take Bitcoin-centric ideas and explore those through a JBP lens. Let’s begin. VALUE, DECISIONS AND ACTION All action is preceded consciously or subconsciously by a series of value judgements. In order to act better, and to forge yourself into a better human you must continually make more accurate and realistic value judgements. You receive feedback from the system you’re impacting or the environment you’re operating within and you then adjust or adapt (i.e., make new value judgements) before you then take subsequent action. Rinse and repeat. All systems, micro or macro, work like this. Those that are stable and effective have high-fidelity information transmission media embedded within them. Those that fail or disintegrate do so because information either cannot flow, has all become noise or the feedback loops are short-circuited. Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action. How we treat the feedback from the system and what we do with that information, whether from perceived failure or success, can over time become a standard. A standard is an abstract rule or Lindy-compatible guideline that emerges through experimentation and iteration. Good standards will enhance feedback loops and make a system more efficient, but there is a price (failure/correction). Poor or no standards might feel more inclusive, but over time means entropy and dissolution. Macro obsolescence is a higher price to pay than micro failures and corrections. Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary. We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. In a world infected by fiat, where notions of correction, feedback and truth are daily being stripped away, where the scorecard of life is a series of meaningless digits conjured up by bureaucrats and standards are “oppressions of the patriarchy,” how is the individual capable of calculating their own worth, whether relative to themselves yesterday or their peers on a regular basis? While it’s not impossible (yet), relative value and worth are certainly difficult to measure and extraordinarily inaccurate. Not only are we wrong, but we are wrong about what we’re wrong about, so we find it hard to correct. Correction is important because as the word implies, it is the process of making “correct” that which is currently not, whether that be a judgment of value, a behavior or action. This requires honesty and a recognition of error! How can you actually know if you’re making better decisions if you either refuse to admit error or are fundamentally unable to? How can you correct something when your measuring stick is broken? You might think what you’re doing is aligned with your highest good, but in reality you’re likely doing damage. Modernity abounds with blind men building structures with broken tools. In fact, the best way to think about the difference between a Bitcoin standard and a fiat standard is the following analogy: “The Blind Man discovers sight: A fiat economy is like a series of blind men building a house with an elastic tape measure, and broken tools. Bitcoin is like eyesight and a fixed, high-quality tape measure was given to the men building that house. The two houses are a universe apart in structural integrity, practicality, resource usage and beauty.” — Bitcoin Fable by Svetski Fiat blinds, and absolute fiat blinds absolutely. Not only is the value we ascribe to things all wrong, but the structures that emerge and the incentives that support them are all distorted and deformed. What starts out blurry one day (if not kept in check) becomes blind. RELATIVE VALUE All value is relative, of course. The Austrians, and in fact praxeological evidence and observation of humans of all walks of life, have proven without a doubt that the subjective theory of value is not just a “theory.” It’s applicable not only to how we value the things and stuff around us, but to how we value ourselves, our actions, our status in the world and all of the same in relation to other human beings. These

  Bitcoin (BTC) is facing calls for a significant price dip this week, and while some favor $30,000, there may be a safer bottom to long BTC. In a tweet on April 28, on-chain analysis platform Whalemap used whale support to determine where “many” investors should enter the market. Should hodlers hope for “max pain”? With Bitcoin whales in focus at what is the most historically significant consolidation zone in Bitcoin’s history, their buying and selling matters . Last month’s push to near $50,000 was thwarted, among other things, by large-volume sellers, the analysis showed at the time. Now, as $30,000 returns to traders’ radar as an “ultimate bottom,” those whales may, in fact, be primed to help cement a new macro floor for BTC/USD. For Whalemap, coins bought en masse at $27,000 mean that level — just below the 2021 yearly open and bottom from last July — is the one to watch. “25K—27K area is max pain for many,” it commented. “Ideal place to go all in Bitcoin if we ever get there.” Whalemap issued a map of Bitcoin realized price sorted by wallet size as the basis for its potential price target. Realized price shows at what price each Bitcoin last moved, making $25,000–$27,000 a key interchange point for buyers and sellers alike.  The largest whales, meanwhile, also have a vested interest in $34,000. Bitcoin exchanges still busy with buyers Looking at buying habits more broadly, April has not disappointed despite drawdowns. Related: Bitcoin institutional buying ‘could be big narrative again’ as 30K BTC leaves Coinbase Data from on-chain analytics firms Glassnode and CryptoQuant shows that not only has the trend of BTC leaving exchanges accelerated, but reached levels rarely seen. “The 30-day change in the Bitcoin Exchange Balance is hitting negative levels that we’ve only seen a handful of times in the last two years,” Twitter account On-Chain College wrote alongside an annotated chart of Glassnode’s exchange net position change figures. The 21 trading platforms tracked by CryptoQuant, meanwhile, have the lowest combined BTC reserves since September 2018. The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

  This is an encouraging sign, the city of Fort Worth, Texas has launched a pilot bitcoin mining project in their local City Hall. The pilot project may be small, with only three S9s that collectively produce $3.39 worth of USD denominated profit per day — assuming a cost of electricity of $0.05 kWh and that Braiins OS+ is running on the machines. This may not seem like anything other than a marketing stunt, but I think this is a very important signal that the city of Fort Worth is sending to cities and small towns across the United States; bitcoin is something you should be taking seriously and bitcoin mining is something you should consider. This feels like the first step of many that will be taken on the path toward bitcoin permanent funds popping up around the country. Permanent funds that leverage stranded energy sources or excess energy are something that your Uncle Marty has been championing since April 2021. Bitcoin provides small towns, cities, counties and whole states with a mechanism that can be leveraged to turn their wasted or underutilized energy resources to produce sats flows that can flow into dedicated permanent funds that have the sole purpose of holding mined bitcoin for an extended period of time after which the town/city/county/state can begin deploying the mined sats to finance necessities and reduce — or potentially eliminate — taxes. It may seem crazy, but it also may work. One low hanging fruit that comes to mind for your Uncle Marty is orphaned natural gas wells that are sitting on land controlled by the local government. A permanent fund could be spun up by allowing a private sector miner to come in and take over the well for free, allow them to use the natural gas to produce electricity on site, mine with that electricity, and direct a small percentage of the sats flows to the permanent fund as a contribution for being able to take over the well. The local government wouldn’t even need to go through the hassle of becoming a miner themselves. That’s one way to do it. Another way would be to take what El Salvador is attempting to do with their volcano bond and bring it to the municipal level. Local governments could issue muni bonds with the sole intent of raising funds to acquire mining equipment that would be used to take advantage of any stranded or wasted energy plays with bond holders getting made whole first and the mining operations contributing directly to the permanent fund after that. If I were a small town, city, or state looking to attract talent I would be racing to spin up a bitcoin mining permanent fund that allows you to offer lower tax rates and show constituents that you are forward thinking and innovative. Shoutout to the city of Fort Worth and the team at Luxor (who helped coordinate all of this) for pushing this ball forward. In time, my bitcoin mining permanent fund dream will become a reality.

  The multinational financial services corporation based in Boston, Fidelity Investments, has revealed the firm is allowing people to add bitcoin into their 401(k) plan as long as the employer allows it. According to Fidelity’s head of workplace retirement offerings, the company has seen “growing interest from plan sponsors” that wanted to add bitcoin to retirement plans. Fidelity Is Giving Workers the Ability to Add Bitcoin to Their 401(k) Plan Fidelity Investments, the largest 401(k) plan provider in the United States, is now allowing people to add bitcoin to their retirement accounts. According to a report from the New York Times (NYT), Fidelity’s head of workplace retirement offerings Dave Gray explained that the company was noticing demand for adding digital assets to the firm’s 401(k) plans. “We started to hear a growing interest from plan sponsors, organically, as to how could Bitcoin or how could digital assets be offered in a retirement plan,” Gray remarked. The financial services company also noted that the digital assets account will be broadly available by the second half of 2022. The digital assets account will be managed like a traditional mutual fund and employees can designate a percentage of bitcoin to their workplace retirement offerings. According to the NYT report, the percentage will be limited and the retirement account’s fee will be between 0.75% to 0.90% of the plan owner’s percentage of assets. For now, Fidelity will only allow an investment of 20%, but said the allocation percentage could change in the future. Of course, employers also have to approve the plan and allow employees to save part of their 401(k) in bitcoin, and employers will determine the percentage threshold. According to the Boston-based financial institution, the business intelligence firm Microstrategy has already signed up for Fidelity’s bitcoin-infused 401(k) offering.

  I’m a long-time student of a spiritual practice that has 365 lessons to help us train our minds with a new way of seeing. During a moment of quiet contemplation, one of those lessons came to mind and I realized it could be applied to Bitcoin. Lesson 189 asks us to, “Simply do this: Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy; and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything.” While the profundity of this lesson can’t be put into words I’ve always read it as asking us to approach God with a beginner’s mind. Now you, dear reader, may be wondering why I bring this up. Well, it has become very clear to me that every Bitcoiner must do something similar with bitcoin and money. We must approach bitcoin and money with a beginner’s mind, which is rare for all but the most spiritually advanced among us. I’ve observed that pretty much everyone (myself included) has difficulty understanding Bitcoin at first. Often, we reject it as a scam or dismiss it. Sometimes it’s because we don’t understand money, or more specifically, sound money. Or perhaps we’ve been so culturally programmed our entire lives by fiat that we don’t recognize the cultural brainwashing we received about money. In a moment, I will restate the above so it’s relevant to those of us trying to understand Bitcoin. Only we’ll replace the word “God” with the word “money” or “Bitcoin.” This may not be as heretical as you think. I have long believed that our culture worships money and the people who have extravagant wealth. Even sillier is the fact that almost all of us will vigorously deny that we worship it! However, if you’re honest with yourself, you will probably see this is true. We tend to pay too much attention to billionaires and give their words or tweets press coverage no matter how inane their comments. In my opinion, we will learn far more from studying how other cultures in the world (in places like Africa and Central America) are using Bitcoin. We have far more to learn from them about Bitcoin than they have to learn from us. Here is the lesson from before, only restated for all of us genuinely aiming to understand Bitcoin: Simply do this: Be still and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what money is; all concepts you have learned about money and Bitcoin; all images you hold about yourself and your relationship to money. Empty your mind of everything you think is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy; and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught you about money or bitcoin, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. My call to action is to recommend readers try this: Sit quietly for five or 10 minutes after reading the above and you will be ready to understand Bitcoin with a beginner’s mind. When you get stressed or confused about a financial decision about bitcoin or money, go back and try it again. Rinse and repeat and see if it doesn’t improve the quality of your decisions. One of the common refrains you hear from Bitcoiners is “stay humble; stack sats.” In my opinion, this exercise may offer you a way to stay humble and operate with a beginner’s mind. Another offshoot of doing this exercise may be to help you make right-minded choices about investing in bitcoin. No one can tell you how to think about money or bitcoin. Sure there are many people who can influence your thinking, but you are the one with the ultimate responsibility: making financial decisions with a beginner’s mind means you stay open to inner wisdom. In my opinion, that radically exceeds an expert-level of understanding the technology. I wish you every success on your journey.

  SEC Risks Violating Admin Procedure Act by Rejecting Spot Bitcoin ETFs, Says Grayscale Grayscale Investments’ CEO explains that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) could potentially violate the Administrative Procedure Act by not approving a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF). SEC Approving Spot Bitcoin ETF Is ‘a Matter of When and Not If’ The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has now approved not one but two different structures of bitcoin futures exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This has led to the optimism in the crypto industry that the securities watchdog is closer to approving a spot bitcoin ETF. The first structure utilizes the Investment Company Act of 1940 (40 Act). Most proposed bitcoin futures ETF to date are filed under this Act. The second uses the Securities Act of 1933 (33 Act). The Teucrium Bitcoin Futures ETF was approved earlier this month using the latter structure. Grayscale Investments CEO Michael Sonnenshein explained to CNBC last week: “From the SEC standpoint, there were several protections that 40 Act products have that 33 [Securities Act of 1933] products don’t have, but never ever did those protections address the SEC’s concern over the underlying bitcoin market and the potential for fraud or manipulation.” He continued: “So the fact that they’ve now evolved their thinking and approved a 33 Act product with Teucrium really invalidates that argument and talks to the linkage between the bitcoin futures and the underlying bitcoin spot markets that give the futures contracts their value.” Sonnenshein opined: If the SEC can’t look at two like issues, the futures ETF and the spot ETF, through the same lens, then it is, in fact, potentially grounds for an Administrative Procedure Act violation. The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations. Grayscale filed with the SEC on Oct. 19 last year to convert its flagship bitcoin trust (GBTC) into a bitcoin ETF. GBTC is Grayscale’s largest product with almost $26 billion in assets under management as of April 15. If approved by the SEC, GBTC will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, instead of on OTCQX. The company is waiting to hear back from the SEC in early July about whether the filing will be approved. The CEO has hinted that suing the SEC is a possible option the company will take if the agency does not approve the GBTC conversion. Commenting on whether the SEC will approve a spot bitcoin ETF, Sonnenshein stressed: It really is, in our opinion, a matter of when and not if.

  Paolo Ardoino, the chief technology officer of Tether and Bitfinex, is confident that Tether will preserve its status as the most used stablecoin, despite the rapid growth of competitors such as USD Coin (USDC).  “If you see the volumes of Tether compared to the rest of stablecoins, they are insanely higher. They are even 10 times higher on a bad day,” he pointed out. According to a report from Arcane Research, USDC, the second-largest stablecoin, has been growing at an impressive rate over the last year and could soon overtake Tether in terms of market cap. Ardoino is not worried about this possibility and pointed out that USDC’s growth has been slowing down in the last month.  “In the last 30 days, Tether regained momentum,” he said.  According to Ardoino, one of Tether’s main competitive advantages is its focus on people that have difficulties accessing financial services. “Tether is really perceived as an instrument of freedom, a solution, a tool that helps everyone. It’s not a tool built for the banks, it’s not a tool made for Wall Street.” While USDC has gained a reputation of being more transparent and better regulated than Tether, Ardoino considers this a false narrative. As pointed out by the chief technology officer, since January 2021, Tether has been publishing breakdowns of its reserves, including the rating of its commercial papers.    “I think that we, as Tether, in terms of transparency, we’re in a really good shape,” Ardoino argued.  The rapid development of central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, won’t make stablecoins such as Tether irrelevant, according to Ardoino. In his opnion, CBDCs will likely run on centralized blockchains that won’t allow the same flexibility as open, public blockchains. “One of the things that excite people about public blockchains is the programmability. You can build more complex behaviors.”, he said.  Don’t miss the full interview on our YouTube channel and don’t forget to subscribe!

  Much like drinking from Tamanique Falls, El Salvador’s tallest waterfall, taking in the steady stream of world class information from the last session day of LABitConf is about as difficult as banning bitcoin in the country of your choice. Thankfully, anyone can replay the entire day of sessions here. The most important topics in Bitcoin were discussed by global leaders including John Newberry presenting what to expect from the coming Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), Jameson Lopp teaching about best practices for privacy in Bitcoin, Elizabeth Stark talking about how to onboard millions of people onto the Lightning Network, and Ray Youssef discussing how Bitcoin changes lives through peer-to-peer transactions with Max Keiser. In the best-titled session of the day, “How To Make Programming Bitcoin Sexy”, Aaron Van Wirdum facilitated a great discussion with Tadge Dryja, John Newbery, Eric Voskuil, and Dread to describe the current state of attracting the best developers to Bitcoin. As inevitable as it seems that Bitcoin will continue its march toward world reserve currency no matter what, the panelists explained that just because it’s the top digital asset by far doesn’t mean it is attracting the top developers. “[Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students ask all the time] what about all these other coins that have hackathons and free pizza and send out free T-shirts? That exists; if you’re on campus at MIT there are booths and people sending that out. Bitcoin doesn’t do that.” ~ Tadge Dryja With no marketing team or budget, Bitcoin relies on its innate beauty, ideals, and integrity to bring in a new generation of builders and body guards to secure a hyperbitcoinized world. Despite all the efforts of the endless altcoin carousel to attract the brightest minds, Dread eloquently explained the reason Bitcoiners should be optimistic about the future. “If you think of it as being love, it doesn’t end up being all about the sexy pizza and the sexiness of programming. You’re starting in a relationship with true love and that true love is the sound money that we’ve found. If you get programmers to get that part, to fall in love with Bitcoin, then you might actually have that sexiness that you’re looking for as well.” ~ Dread Though many of the sessions addressed serious topics about the current and future states of Bitcoin, the overwhelming feelings in the air were optimistic and celebratory about how far Bitcoin has come. The festive mood around the Museo de Arte venue was created by hundreds of Bitcoiners from all over the world with over a dozen companies competing to create the best vibe and hand out the best free gear. To end the colorful celebration of freedom money in the country, many LaBitConf attendees will head to El Zonte to see where it all started with Bitcoin Beach serving as the catalyst that would put El Salvador on the Bitcoin standard. Thank you for reading and we look forward to seeing you at Bitcoin 2022!