The ith Bitcoin Halvening
I just got one of these stylish sweeties from an Etsy artisan shop.
So, you ask: “WTF does that Bitcoin nerd math mean?”
Here’s BD00’s attempt at communicating the meaning of the sacred Bitcoin money-supply equation by mapping the basic math symbology into words:
So, you say: “This explanation doesn’t help at all. WTF is this ‘Halvening’ jargon?“, and you follow that up quickly with an astute, insightful, haymaker: “You think you’re smart, but you’re not… you’re an imposter.”
One of the divine features of the Bitcoin protocol is that the production of bitcoins gets abruptly cut in half approximately every 4 years. Hence, the new word, “halvening“, was concocted to commemorate those joyous supply shocks for Bitcoin cultists like me (you’re one too, you just haven’t realized it yet).
“Halvening” can be used interchangeably with “halving”. BD00 prefers the former because it’s a new beast, has 3 syllables, and reminds him of those scary “ing” movies: The Conjuring, The Shining, The Thing, Jurassic Parking, Karate Kidding, Schindler’s Listing, Deadpooling, etc.
Here’s what we get when we plot out the most hallowed, disciplined, apolitical, incorruptible, deterministic, terse, honest, “money printing” policy of all time.
The Bitcoin network has dispassionately and automatically executed 3 halvenings since it was launched 13 years ago on January 3, 2009. Thus, the index “i” is currently set at 3 until the next halvening event occurs in 2024. It’s important to note that over 18M bitcoins, or 85% of the total supply, have already been mined to date. It’s important because hard core believers like me are steadfast HODLers (Hold On for Dear Life) that further restrict the availability of bitcoins for purchase over time in addition to the built-in protocol halvenings.

So, what’s so special about the Bitcoin money production schedule? The following composite graph, which led to an abnormally high number of views in a previous post, clearly shows the contrast between the Bitcoin mining schedule and the printing “schedules” of untrustworthy, central bank-printed, fiat paper.
The succession of relentless halvenings executed by the decentralized Bitcoin protocol software eventually drives inflation to zero. The money printer stops forever at 21M bitcoins printed. In fiat-denominated nations, all money units are printed from one source: the country’s “independent” (lol) central bank. In every known case in history, central banks eventually are pressured by their governments to keep inflating the money supply to keep the economy roaring. Keeping inflation low takes a back seat to gorging their donors with free money. Bitcoin don’t give a fuck about donors or governments or central banks. Bitcoin don’t care if you or I use it. Bitcoin just is.
An Easy Choice
Since it took me forever to draw up this “NFT-worthy” picture and I hope it’s self-explanatory, I have no further words to say, which is amazing because I never STFU.
The Pre, The Local, The Central, The Post
At first, we had the pre-banker era. Over thousands of years, the world slowly and haphazardly converged on gold as the most valuable form of global money compared to all other “hard” physical candidates (cows, sheep, shells, beads, rocks, salt, wheat, etc). People and nations exchanged gold more than any other medium of exchange to settle transactions. They “trusted” gold as a medium of exchange not because of any active, internal, functionality it provided (which is basically zero!), but because of the superiority of its built-in non-functional “ilities“: durability, portability, fungibility, divisibility, verifiability, scarce-ability. Haha, I know scarcity is not an “ility“, but I had to mangle the word and tack on the underappreciated “ility” suffix for consistency. The funny thing is that after 30+ years of developing software, the “ilities” have almost always been disrespected by both developers and managers. Everyone wanted the functionality, but no one wanted to pay for the “ilities”.
Over time, the banking industry arose. Rich people, who, by definition, accumulated lots of gold, could store their precious, but heavy, bulky, gold at a bank for security and receive an important-looking paper IOU in return. “Trust us” they said. If you want your gold, come back to us with the paper IOU and we’ll return your gold. LOL. These banks popped up everywhere and they all had their own unique IOU notes. Lots of banks with unscrupulous owners went bust by issuing more notes than gold deposits on hand. When people lost “trust” and they all tried to get their gold back, there wasn’t enough gold for everybody. Social unrest ensued.
After the fragmented local bank era came the illustrious central banker phase where a group of unelected, politically appointed, bureaucratic, oracles surfaced every once in a while to say: “trust us”. LOL
In the future, we will probably still have fiat-spewing central banks that squeeze your purchasing power from their paper IOUs by continuously printing free “money“, but we will also have a parallel, opt-in, Bitcoin-based, self-custodial, banking system in which no trust in third parties is required.
I love the following table and I’ve posted it before. I’m going to keep posting it every so-often because it really shows how Bitcoin wins the “ility” wars against gold, which in-turn wins the war against the worst form of money – sovereign fiat paper.
Bitcoin The Hare Vs. Gold The Tortoise
Just doing some Bitcoin doodling a bit here. 👇
I lost a little mojo recently, but I am rejuvenated (yet) again. The condensed version of the story is that for a few months before this week, I was convinced that the loss of feeling in my right leg and increase in pain in my lower lumbar were a one way street. Now I’m not! After 4 days of physical therapy via the direction of a McKenzie-trained therapist, I’ve felt some reversal of numbness and back pain. It’s a joyful event because it’s been months since I’ve felt this way. And the exercise (yes, singular tense), is stunningly easy to do.
Phew, just another up and down experience for a regular (but not normal) person with cancer ensconced in the patchwork medical system.
I’ll Take The Necrosis, Please!
Each of my last two brain MRI scans indicated some small growth in one of my brain tumor sites. Thankfully, the encroaching Emperor’s orc breeding ground is not the tumor site that has been wreaking havoc on my right leg for 6 years. I’ll have much more to say about my leg fiasco in a subsequent rage-post.
Because of the two successive growths, my neurosurgeon ordered a PET/CT scan of my brain to determine if the tumor tissue had resumed its inexorable growth, or whether the tissue expansion is from radiation-induced necrosis. He said he suspected the tissue to be cancerous because of the images he saw via the MRIs.
PET/CT scans measure how much “sugar” is being consumed in various parts of the body. Ravenous tumors show up as bright areas on the scan where there shouldn’t be any. Here is the report from my scan….
Thankfully, my neurosurgeon’s instinct was wrong in this case. The cause of growth was due to radiation-induced necrosis, not because of the Orc army’s continuous murderous assaults on my physical being, i.e., tumor growth. Hallelujer for necrosis!
Even though the brute-force Orc battalions are being continuously beaten back by my trusty Opdivo infusions, the dastardly clever EOAM is always diligently working upstairs, in the abstract, ensuring to insert plenty of heavy, negative, fearful, anxious thoughts in my mind whenever he can. Fortunately, reading the PET/CT scan report cleaned house upstairs and allowed lighter, more positive, hopeful thoughts to fill the void in my mind.
The Resolute Desk
Dear OnlyFans, checkout BD00’s resolute desk below. Ok, it’s not a resolute desk. It’s a simple end table with a lot of schitt on it. The desk, along with my new, Osaki massage chair, will be cremated with me when the Emperor wins the final battle.
For those interested in WTF all those things crammed onto the desktop are, here you go…
Why No Bitcoin Moon?
Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a Bitcoin whacko. I’m a true “maximalist” who won’t shut up once I start preaching about the arguably most important discovery in human history since fire. But I must admit, the latest price crash from $70k —> $16k was a mind-numbing whopper that nobody, and I mean nobody, famous in the space saw coming. Oh sure, the on-chain analysts and technicians always mention that crashes should be expected from time to time from the juvenile, highly volatile, asset class. Until the crash, technical data showed price volatility decreasing with Bitcoin’s increasing age as more people shed their fear of it and slowly learned of its huge, impending, worldwide importance.
I experienced the $20k —> $3k crash back in 2017, but that crash wasn’t as puzzling or scary as this one. That crash was from irrational exuberance, and Bitcoin was still under the radar of the establishment big guns.
The biggest contributor to the crash of 22 was due to Bitcoin being (wrongly) valuated by the market as a risk-on asset like a tech company with a high “P” but no “E”, as opposed to the risk-off asset it truly embodies, like gold or other commodities. And of course, another contributor to the crash was that a bunch centralized schittcoins scams and fake crypto banks got (and are still getting) rekt; bringing down the whole craptoverse and the honorable Bitcoin with them.
Besides the crash, which is explainable, there’s one other thing that troubles me. It’s about the slow uptake of Bitcoin around the world in these unprecedented inflationary times. This eye-popping inflation chart from economist Steve Henke shows how badly the corrupt and incompetent governments of nations around the world are debasing their currencies.
Are people who are lucky enough to earn more than they spend in these countries “stacking sats“? Why wouldn’t they exchange their excess fiat income into Bitcoin ASAP so it doesn’t lose half its value virtually overnight? There are a lot of countries in that table, so there’s got to be a lot of fiat value capable of jumping out of fiat hell and into Bitcoin paradise. I conclude that if people were moving value into Bitcoin en-masse in these inflation-battered nations, then the crash maybe wouldn’t have happened at all and we’d be halfway to the moon by now.
But wait, it gets worse! As the chart below shows, virtually every country on earth has been printing fiat like maniacs, even the so-called advanced countries – the enemy is us! This could portend a large wall of value flowing into Bitcoin and a giant pop in price soon if everyone personally experiences the Bitcoin epiphany simultaneously, out of desperation from watching in horror as their wealth melts away. It could be like Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity.
Via continuing education, I think the world will eventually realize Bitcoin’s role as the greatest Store Of Value technology ever discovered. It’s just gonna take longer than I would expect because of all the headwinds going against it, or maybe it won’t. I don’t know schitt.
A Freshly Inked Maximalist
With Bitcoin at $20k and the whole scummy craptoverse in tatters (which is a good thing for Bitcoin!), people are schittin’ bricks. But as any true student (100+ hours of sincere investigation) of Bitcoin knows, the hardest money ever discovered in human history is unstoppable. Hence, my fresh ink….
Cheers!
Bitcoin Before Bitcoin
When I first discovered the divine invention that is Bitcoin from an obscure posting on the nerd site slashdot.org, I performed the proverbial deep, speedo-less, dive into this strange, new, multi-discipline (economics + computer science + cryptography) idea that grabbed my attention by the cajones. My first question was “how the feck can this digital monetary network be technically sound?” My second was “how the feck can Bitcoin be ‘decentralized’ (with no single point of failure or no benevolent dictator like Linus Torvalds in charge)?” My third was “what the feck do ‘trustless’ and ‘permissionless’ mean?” The questions came fast and furious out of nowhere. They were piling up inside my head and pushing every other thought overboard. Based on my gut feeling that there was something special brewing, I was primed and juiced to learn and understand the Bitcoin protocol.
Being an overpaid software engineer and not knowing anything about “real” money, I chose to go down the technical path first by downloading the C++ core source code from GitHub, compiling it, running the test suite, and then running the node software. I watched in wonder as the node software proceeded to synchronize with the worldwide Bitcoin network and download the entire blockchain. Every transaction that ever occurred over the network from t == 0, which was Jan 3, 2009, to t == now was written to my hard disk! I also interacted with some of the fiercely dedicated core developers on the web and I even submitted a simple aesthetic code change to the core development team (that was rejected, lol).
When I finally surfaced from the technical dive, I was convinced that Bitcoin was a brilliant work of original, intellectual art; the ninth wonder of the world. I developed a deep respect for, and a warm feeling of gratitude toward, whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was/is. I knew(know) that Bitcoin was(is) going to provide equal economic opportunity to billions of “unbanked” and inflation-ravaged people around the world. I just didn’t know how it would play out or how long it would take. Sadly, people who don’t understand Bitcoin from this worldly viewpoint either think of it as a scam or a speculative, profitless, stock.
One of the pleasant fringe benefits of diving deep into the Bitcoin protocol was discovering the obscure field of “Austrian Economics“. Despite taking the cookie cutter macro-economics course as an undergrad many moons ago, I never heard of this weird, heretical, way of thinking about money. Instead of classical economic growth through inflation, Austrian economists advocate for growth through deflation. Blasphemy!
The best thinkers in this reviled school of economic thought argue how something that the vast majority of us take for granted, the control of a nation’s money supply, should not be left in the hands of the rulers (politicians + central bankers). They will, as history has shown without exception, irresponsibly debase the nation’s fiat money (fiat means: you must use the paper money we control to pay taxes or else you will get rekt) over time by printing more of it whenever it’s politically expedient to fund their pet projects and wars instead of having the guts to impose taxes to pay for them. The pic below shows what inflation, via central bank and government collusion, has done to the purchasing power of the US dollar over 100 years.
Inflating away the purchasing power of fiat money happens in every country with a central bank. That’s a lot of feckin’ countries! It’s just a matter of how fast the debasement takes to destroy a nation. It’s faster for the citizens of developing countries (Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey) and slower for the citizens of developed countries.
Before my obsession with Bitcoin took hold, I took it for granted that government should control a nation’s fiat money supply. Hey, we should “trust” those we elect to be doing the right thing with our taxes and savings, no? That is the way it’s supposed to be, damnit! After diving deeper, I found that history has repeatedly shown that because of human nature (you know, that pesky Dawkins selfish gene), a nation’s rulers always manipulate the money supply and disrupt free markets not to “promote the general welfare” of its citizens like you, but to enrich themselves and their cronies at our expense.
The Austrian economists saw through the political charade. They learned that the only way for a nation’s citizens to truly flourish was to “take” control of money out of the hands of centralized governments and distribute it amongst the citizenry that honestly earns it through work. But what does “take” mean in the context of “take control of money out of the hands of the government?” How can anyone/group have any chance of pulling that off against a giant, multi-tiered, energy-guzzling, law enforcement apparatus? Unlike Bitcoin, which is backed by diligent Proof-of-Work, Government-controlled fiat money is backed by coercive Proof-of-Force.
One of the leading Austrian economists, Friedrich Hayek, brilliantly envisioned the blurry outline of Bitcoin, before Bitcoin, as the solution to the intractable “take” problem in 1984, 24 years before Satoshi Nakamoto conceived of Bitcoin in 2008.
It’s sad Mr. Hayek isn’t alive today to see that Bitcoin is his sly and roundabout way to “take the thing out of the hands of government“. And they can’t stop it.