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One of my favorite pastimes is reading long-form posts from @Jonathan and browsing the linked materials, like Zapping everyone who posts thoughtful comments and shares solid research... as I dedicate the evening to thinking about what great business leaders of past would do to push Bitcoin forward ⏩
Jonathan's avatar Jonathan
Infrastructure only became indispensable once the hard work of commercializing the opportunity was completed. Among those early networks, the story of James J. Hill and the Great Northern stands out as a blueprint for today’s bitcoin industrialization. https://www.ten31.xyz/insights/commercializing-bitcoin
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This is a good book (available on audio) about some of the key players of the industrial era. Rockerfella, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan etc. absolute wild times. This one is about the oil industry which started in the late 1900’s and has a section on JD Rockefeller and Standard Oil. (I’ve not finished this one yet)
Long-term thinking is non-negotiable, and it begins with primary sources. Not interpretations. Not influencers. Not narrative wrappers designed to sell comfort. Bitcoin is no different. You don’t understand it by scrolling through. You know it by reading the whitepaper, studying monetary history, reviewing code, following on-chain reality, and tracing incentives over decades. Every monetary system that failed left a paper trail. Every durable system left first-principle constraints. Bitcoin is documented in plain sight: the whitepaper, the code, the difficulty adjustment, the issuance schedule, the ledger itself. If you haven’t read the source material, you don’t have an opinion you have marketing exposure. Bitcoin doesn’t reward cleverness, speed, or social consensus. It rewards discipline, delayed gratification, and the ability to think in decades while others think in election cycles. Fiat breeds short-term optimization and moral hazard. Bitcoin selects for rigor. It strips away weak thinking, weak incentives, and weak hands with mathematical indifference. Fiat thinking optimizes for the quarter. Bitcoin thinking optimizes for generations. Those who study first inherit silently. Those who outsource understanding arrive later at a higher price and call it inevitability. Those who do the work early inherit the future. Everyone else pays a premium later. ₿⚡🧡 💭 I tried my best, Uncle @UNCLE ROCKSTAR 🫂❤️‍🔥
the convergence of the og cypherpunks, libertarians, sovereign individuals and the mainstream, be it normies or ruthless wall st sharks is the ultimate test of long term acceptance by both sides of the fence On the road to mainstreamdom there will be many bumps in the road, from history we have seen many early adopters fall from grace, expect more current faces to show their true colors and be swept under the train, the true test is of a Bitcoiner is to not be corrupted by the dark forces that lay in the shadows
This railway story can be put parallel to other handout projects. A cleaner environment is something i believe most want, but these zero nett carbon blabla initiatives are destroying natural habitat, building retarded wind-farm projects in the sea. Bitcoin reigns when it can be used to pay for gas, get food, pay rent etc. But grocery stores don’t accept it where I live. Local farmers might. Social housing won’t accept btc rent ,( would one be better off to decline the social befits ones country gives, may we then stop paying taxes? ;)) Someone with an extra room/house might accept btc. Gas stations.. how would they do that? I know no owners and most are unmanned. Tech needs to be simple to pay and receive ( thats what you’re working on). People need to see the necessity to get paid in btc, not fear it of hate it, else it’s a waste of time. People hate being told what to do or that they are wrong. So people skills, communication skills. Wisdom to know when to tell someone about it. Is there a way to not need all this tech. Lets say we have a some tech, a wallet and laptop, but no pay-station/smartphones to send and receive at a shop. I want to buy your car. I give you my 12 words in exchange for the car keys plus trust with time that you can send the value on it to an other 12 words wallet. Only with trusted folks would this maybe work and it has little privacy. If I want to buy food.. yes yes layer one gets expensive.. Are there layer two wallet seeds? I give you 12 words that still need a passphrase. Tx history shows these 12 words are legit. Once I get my hamburger and fries served I give you the passphrase. And time and my trust for you to send it to your wallet. Okay I know this is all slow and full of holes.. Yry maybe the world can do with some slowing down, like what happens to socity when a nice tick layer of snow falls, all is calm. When we speak of handouts. When one makes open source software,, is the hardware open source? Who makes the chips, who owns the raw materials and factories to make it all? We need JJ Hill figures that want to build railways for bitcoin.. Good luck, such characters are out there. That’s my noting out in the cloud.
If James J. Hill was truly the business genius history paints him as, then leaving that money on the table wasn’t a moral victory. It was strategic malpractice. Imagine a "Hill Plus": a version of him who possessed the same obsession with low gradients and high-quality steel, intended to hold the asset for decades, but also took the government checks for every mile laid. That version of the company would have had the same operational efficiency as the Great Northern, but with a balance sheet fortified by federal cash. He would have crushed his "puritan twin" into the dust. The failure of the subsidized lines wasn't that they received money; it was that they allowed the subsidy to become their primary business model. It is entirely possible to accept a per-mile grant and still build a straight, durable line. The grant simply creates an incentive to build winding trash - it doesn't compel it. A disciplined operator recognizes that the subsidy is merely cheap capital, a tool to lower the cost basis of a long-term asset. By arguing that the subsidy caused the failure, we are essentially arguing that these businessmen lacked the agency to resist a bad incentive. It implies that free money is a kind of mind control that inevitably forces you to build a bridge that collapses in five years. It doesn't. It just exposes who is building a railroad and who is running a grift. Hill succeeded because he wanted to run a railroad, but he made his life infinitely harder than it needed to be by refusing the capital that could have made his efficiency even deadlier.
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The long-form culture on Nostr is what sets it apart. Appreciate you incentivizing thoughtful discourse instead of just engagement farming. There’s a massive difference between a trader’s mindset and a leader’s vision. Who is the first leader on your 'historical board of directors' for the night? 🧐🏗️ @UNCLE ROCKSTAR LFG 🦾 uncle 🫂💜