Bravo Johnson

@bravojohnson

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The problem for the Dems is that there isn’t a single figure in the party who can learn the new moves fast enough to put a face to this. Maybe Pete Buttigieg—but my sense is that the resister crowd has been burned badly and isn’t in the mood for more gig economy with venture capital talking points, spinning inequality into an exciting new “opportunity.” Or Silicon Valley techno-optimism with a BeReal filter, trying to look authentic while keeping the real benefits at the top. Or yet another round of AI-generated prosperity gospel in a Discord server, promising abundance for all but only delivering it to the early adopters.

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Abundance is just trickle-down economics in Patagonia fleece and Allbirds—cozy, sustainable vibes while selling Reaganomics with a Substack subscription, still catering to the top but with a personal essay explaining why the same old supply-side stuff is actually good for everyone. This late I’m the game pitching a deck of faux YIMBY-ism for tax cuts—full of flashy slides and disruption jargon—served up like an oat milk latte: smooth, trendy, and ethical-looking, but still delivering the same old caffeine hit of deregulation.

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On one hand, the blast radius of this thing will vaporize the savings of millions of retirees from Bangalore to Brussels, making the 2008 subprime crisis look like a warmup act. The forced adoption of crypto-sovereign hybrids will inject radioactive debt into pension funds and sovereign wealth portfolios, setting up a slow-motion detonation that could ripple through global markets. On the other hand, the resistance won’t be a direct fight—it’ll be a waiting game. Entrenched financial systems have seen this play before. Instead of confronting it head-on, they’ll just let it burn itself out. Bureaucratic inertia, slow-moving regulations, and institutional skepticism will drag the rollout into the mud, ensuring that by the time these instruments implode, the damage—while catastrophic—won’t be evenly distributed. The result? A financial collapse engineered by leverage and hubris, met with a passive-aggressive shrug from those who saw it coming but chose to survive it rather than stop it.

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I think Trump SV MAGA’s strategy will be to weaponize instability with a crypto wrapper. They’ll offer bastard financial instruments—part cryptocurrency, part sovereign debt—designed for maximum leverage. These won’t be sold on merit but forced onto pension funds and sovereign wealth managers across Europe and South Asia. It will work like this: Create an impossible-to-value derivative that’s essentially radioactive waste with a AAA rating sticker slapped on it. Then, instead of promoting it, they’ll wield it as a threat. “Nice retirement system you’ve got there. Shame if something happened to it.” The implied warning: buy our crypto-treasury bastardizations, or watch your currency get hammered and your trade deals collapse.

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https://warpcast.com/bravojohnson/0x6a62a741 Technically, the same dollar could be represented in multiple places at once, creating a form of double-spending across systems. Regulatory” oversight and attestations, which are themselves trust-based systems aren't fundamental innovations in the monetary model - they're just additional layers of the same trust assumption. the promise that something of value backs the currency that users cannot directly verify.

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The token represents a claim to $1 in reserves, just as the denarius represented a claim to a specific silver content. The actual backing might not match what's claimed (similar to reduced silver content). Users can't easily verify the backing without trusting external validators (just as ordinary Romans couldn't easily test silver content). Market can maintain the peg even when backing is questionable, until a crisis occurs

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https://warpcast.com/bravojohnson/0xf76a7295

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Stablecoins aren’t a revolution. They’re a reenactment. A high-frequency redo of every monetary collapse since Rome debased its denarius. The actors change—suits to hoodies, gold to GPU farms—but the script’s the same leveraged systemic myopia.

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People keep talking about inflation—can you believe it? They say, “Sir, prices are up.” Well, guess what? The stock market, folks, has never been lower. Just tremendous, really. Stocks are down! Way down! Some of the lowest numbers in history—since I’ve been president, at least. So really, shouldn’t we be celebrating? I mean, if you think about it, everything is cheaper… if you’re buying companies instead of groceries. Very simple. Basic economics. But the fake news won’t tell you that! Very dishonest people. Very sad!

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And yet, many still can’t see it—because seeing it means admitting that crypto was never an escape from the system. It was just another yield-chasing instrument, made possible by the same cheap money that fueled everything from unprofitable tech startups to WeWork-style Ponzi schemes. If crypto was built for a world where the future was cheap, then what does it become now that the future has a price?

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But belief is a function of liquidity. As long as money was cheap and abundant, narratives like “Bitcoin as digital gold” or “DeFi as the future of finance” didn’t need to be proven—they just needed to be believed long enough for more capital to enter. The endless flow of new entrants made everything look sustainable. The forever subscription model held because nobody was really paying the bill yet. Then interest rates rose. Capital stopped sloshing around and started demanding returns. Suddenly, the “forever” part of the model started breaking down. The networks that were supposed to be self-sustaining began to shrink. Token values collapsed, yield mechanisms imploded, and the liquidity that had masked every structural weakness dried up.

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The whole crypto ethos was built on the idea that it’s an escape from traditional finance, a revolution that supersedes the old system. But the reality is that it was a product of that system—specifically, a product of zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP). Crypto thrived in a world where capital was desperately seeking returns. With rates at zero, institutional money had to move further out on the risk curve—tech stocks, venture capital moonshots, and eventually, digital assets with no intrinsic value beyond the belief that they’d appreciate. Crypto wasn’t a hedge against the system; it was the system, just in a more volatile, deregulated form.

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I mean culture seems to always oscillate back after periods of concrete brutalism (software being a class of brutalism)

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Historically, in civilizations: - a culture without infrastructure is like a ghost, a soul that wanders through eternity with no body (think Byzantine Empire) - infrastructure with no culture is like a machine -- what is that? I'd say something akin to the Soviet Union, but even that had culture itself. Or the Cultural Revolution could also be seen as an attempt to reorient culture and infrastructure toward a new vision, but - once again, it isn't that it didn't have culture, or a soul - just something radically different than what was before

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The thing about forever subscription models is that they only thrive when money feels free—when interest rates hug the floor and capital sloshes around looking for somewhere, anywhere, to land. In that environment, the future doesn’t feel expensive. The cost of keeping a system alive indefinitely? Practically an afterthought. The time value of money gets blurred, stretched, deformed, until nobody’s really thinking about the long haul. That’s why crypto and subscription model proliferated in the zero-interest era—because the psychological cost of commitment was low. People signed on, not because they crunched the numbers, but because the numbers didn’t seem to matter. The bill was always in the future, and the future was cheap. But when the tide turns—when rates rise and capital hardens—suddenly the upkeep starts to feel like a weight, not an afterthought. That’s when the cracks show.

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The thing about crypto being immutable is that it's a digital problem, not a real one in the sense of Philip K. Dick's idea of reality. Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop thinking about it. Cold mediums like records, paintings, and sculptures don't need that upkeep. They persist whether or not someone maintains them. A vinyl record warps, a painting fades, a sculpture crumbles, but they don't disappear the moment a network goes down or a consensus protocol fails. Crypto, by contrast, is built on digital fallibility—what's called "immutability" depends on an infrastructure that demands constant energy, maintenance, and belief. It's a forever subscription model. The moment you stop paying into the system—whether in attention, in computing resources, or in raw belief—it starts slipping away, like a lapsed domain name or an abandoned MMO.

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Time for an exclusive, luxurious, totally tremendous series of fine wines—Shar-done-ayyy, Chardunnae, Sharnduhnay, or Charduh-nay. Only the best. The greatest. Everyone says so.

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Google is AT&T with the soul of Blockbuster but propped up with better servers

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Here’s 10 1. Productivity – The entire modern focus on efficiency, streamlined labor, and maximizing output comes from this analysis. 2. Human Capital – Free education repackaged as “talent investment.” 3. Growth Incentives Through Taxation 4. Healthy Competition Through Anti-Monopoly – 5. Consumer Purchasing Power –6. Brand Strategy as Ethical Labor 7. Real Estate Market Expansion 8. Economic Shock Absorbers 9. Business Enabler Public Infrastructure – State-funded, privately exploited. 10. Innovation – Most criticisms are valid and eventually incorporated into capitalism

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