Lyn Alden

Bitcoin & Crypto

npub1a2c...dcw83a

lyn@primal.netwww.lynalden.com/

Founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy. Partner at Ego Death Capital. Finance/Engineering blended background.

Note2d

I was talking to my half-brother about his world travel plans like, “btw if if you ever want to come to Egypt let me know”. And he’s like, “that’s awesome, how about in 3 weeks? Can you be our tour guide for the last five thousand years in the region?” And I’m like, “yeah man, it’ll be fun. Let me, uh, check with our two dozen local relatives and our summer beach plans so we can coordinate between them.” “Checks details.” “…Shit. Alright let’s go!”

Note2d

I wrote a longform piece for Bitcoin Magazine's latest print issue, which includes a series of essays about the world 10 years from now in 2036. They've put up an online version now too: Here's the portion where I talked about risk, about downside scenarios: "If Bitcoin fails to catch on by 2036, I think it will be because humanity didn’t want it, or wasn’t ready for it. The technolog...

Note5d

A really cool (and quite rare) aspect of The Stolguard Incident audiobook is that @nprofile...3py2 and @nprofile...l32v perform full duet narration. In most dual-narrated audiobooks, the male narrator reads all male...

Note5d

GM Not sure why, but I liked the look of this desert sunset last evening.

Reply6d

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Soon on Apple Books.

ReplyMay 23

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The link was down due to a bug on Audible’s end, but it’s back up now! Check out the awesome performance that and put together for the audiobook:

ReplyMay 20

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People were able to buy it but then Amazon broke the link. Will let people know when it’s back up.

NoteMay 20

GM. The audiobook version of The Stolguard Incident is now available!It’s dual-narrated by @nprofile...0fhw and @nprofile...3phq , and they brought their full voice acting ability to this. h...

ReplyMay 10

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I mean, the short cut is just to wear armor. And there are some pretty cool armored clothes these days. Like knife-resistant shirts.

NoteMay 3

So there's this 2025 movie called Dust Bunny that only grossed about a million dollars at the box office. But from the few who saw it, it has good ratings from both critics and audiences. The premise is that a young girl hires a hitman (Mads Mikkelsen) to kill a monster under her bed. My husband and I watched it last night, and it has the most fascinating visuals I've seen in a movie in years. The settings, the costumes, the cinematography, the casting choices, everything. Each individual scen...

ReplyMay 3

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Taking on so much external debt reduces their sovereignty. They have to follow IMF rules now. And those Gulf states finance them as well. If they wanted to strengthen their sovereignty, they should have prioritized investing in energy security and critical infrastructure rather than vanity ghost cities. And they should have attracted more manufacturing companies rather than have the government compete with the private sector and drive them out.

NoteMay 2

A good 10-minute video on Egypt's economy. -Use public resources and debt to build a massive vanity ghost city, prioritizing this over more utilitarian uses of money. -Have the military compete in all sorts of businesses. Hotels, consumer products, stores, etc. The military has inexpensive forced labor (mandatory military service for most young men) and tax/legal advantages vs the private sector. -Then get hit by things outside of their control while they were already self-weakened (Suez Cana...

NoteApr 27

I had a great uncle named Hugh. When he turned 18 in 1943, he decided to enlist in the military and go fight Nazis in WW2. As one does. In early 1944, he found himself as the radioman on a B-17 bomber, as the Americans upped their bombing raids on Berlin. Their bomber was attacked by German pilots, heavily damaged, and the pilot said they gotta parachute out, it's going down. So, Hugh funds himself parachuting over German countryside from a destroyed bomber. Early in the war, it was relative...

ReplyApr 20

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Folks are going to be blown away by how much passion and professionalism Walker and Carla brought to this recording.

ReplyApr 15

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My experience on the PDB show in-studio was positive. The whole team was friendly. I limit travel for shows in general, but have no qualms going on in the future. The challenge was that the format of this part of the show is basically news commentary. It’s not an interview; four of us discuss news items as Patrick brings them up. So, sometimes I’m asked to comment on things I have no major interest/edge in talking about. Other times it touches on an economic topic where I have more to say. The...

ReplyApr 15

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Hopped on the PBD podcast live this morning to talk markets, energy, and the economy:

ReplyApr 13

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One must always tip for good service. We live in a civilized society.

ReplyApr 13

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Awful.

NoteApr 13

-You’ve got to fly somewhere, but the only flight available that day leaves at 6am. You begrudgingly book it anyway. -Then the day before, you get an email from the airline saying “we regret to inform you that your flight has been delayed by two hours” to a far more reasonable 8am.

ReplyApr 13

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Yeah.

ReplyApr 13

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Never. We shall overcome.

ReplyApr 13

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So I found another uber driver final boss. It’s like the secret boss you unlock after you finish the game. This guy has over 33,000 rides. And he’s also an older gentleman who drives a Corolla. Been driving for Uber nearly since they expanded nationwide.

ReplyApr 12

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This is absolutely wild, lol.

NoteApr 11

My half-hour animated Broken Money video now has 500k views on YouTube. Coming up on its two-year anniversary:

ReplyApr 11

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People in-world usually call her Jade. Even cleaner. She doesn’t call herself anything. Doesn’t care what they call her.

ReplyApr 9

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Yes exactly.

ReplyApr 8

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There’s actually a genetically modified character in the book who gets certain abilities only when in ketosis, only when eating a ketogenic or carnivore type of diet.

ReplyApr 8

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NoteApr 8

Here's a Nostr exclusive: the alternative cover of The Stolguard Incident. During the design process, I had two artists design covers, and went with Kim Dingwall's cover. The other one by Joshua Griffin was cool too, but it had "movie poster" vibes and many readers prefer to picture characters the way they want rather than be shown them, so we kept that one as concept art. Still, Joshua's work deserves people to see it. Ava, Stallard, and the Jade-Eyed Witch appear alongside Asim on this versi...

ReplyApr 8

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Really sorry to hear that. ❤️ Hopefully the pain gets under control soon and that can start a flywheel of felling better and more positive. So many people are sending well-wishes, and I wish we could all take a little fraction of the pain to make it go away. 😔

ReplyApr 7

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These headlines/titles kill me though. In context I never say anything as sensationalist as the thumbnail says.

NoteApr 7

I brought out Nostr Lyn a bit in the second half of this chat. Talking macro on BTC Sessions w/ Luke Gromen:

ReplyApr 3

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ReplyApr 3

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The weird aspect of the NYSE trading floor is that the whole thing feels kind of like you're on a set. There's the CNBC recording booth on the floor, there are the market maker stations, there's this bell area. The lighting is perfectly controlled. Security everywhere.

NoteApr 3

A couple weeks back I was at the New York Stock Exchange for some meetings/events, and they were like "let's update your formal pic that you use for things, that's from 2022". So we do the classic "let's take a slick pic under the NYSE bell, the literal heart of capitalism" photo. Because that'll make it all professional and such. The problem is, whenever I smile, I inherently look like I'm trolling. Regardless of the setting, it looks like I'm just there for the lolz. So the pic seems kind o...

ReplyApr 3

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He does great work. Liquidity has mint been great lately, but there’s a big difference between liquidity rolling over and liquidity breaking.

ReplyApr 2

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Yeah. Pretty much the main thing. The gradual print.

NoteApr 2

One of the few things *not* breaking these past few weeks is liquidity, actually. The Fed’s standing repo facility isn’t being used, the Fed’s swap lines aren’t being used, and the SOFR-IORB spread is only mildly elevated. #macro

ReplyApr 2

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Had a great chat with Peter in London! The thumbnail totally makes it look like I’ve started my villain arc, though. 😅

ReplyApr 2

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Over 80% of the chapters are recorded.

ReplyApr 1

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No, but two fun facts: -The earliest version in my head for Asim’s character (over a decade ago) was Iranian-American, but later shifted him to be Egyptian-American since I’m just way more familiar with Egypt. -Mohamed loves detective scenes and has really great taste, so he helped stress-test and tweak Asim’s dialog in his interrogation/conversation scenes, among giving feedback on the novel broadly.

ReplyApr 1

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NoteApr 1

Wow that sounds nuts, someone should write a book on that.

NoteMar 30

Almost nothing in macro currently matters until the Strait of Hormuz opens. That’s the macro. It’s a binary analysis similar to Covid 19.

ReplyMar 29

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Rekt from all angles.

ReplyMar 29

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The epub on Amazon is set to have no DRM. But in the coming months we’ll expand to other ebook platforms as well.

NoteMar 29

ReplyMar 29

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Which step did you run into an issue?

NoteMar 29

Whenever I’m asked about private credit lately. On Fox Business, on podcasts, at conferences:

ReplyFeb 10

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Nope. Not for writing or finished art. I’d have AI do some proofreading to point out grammars errors, which then I’d fix manually (or ignore them if I disagreed). But then it went to multiple human editors, too. And I made AI mock-ups of art to send to the artist to give her a sense of what I’m looking for.

ReplyApr 23, 2025

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It might be shit. Doing my best to make it not shit.

ReplyApr 23, 2025

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Yes I tried to get people from different fields in the first wave of beta readers. This one is an author and an academic on the subject, which was helpful.

ReplyApr 23, 2025

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In the fiat system, loans are made with interest. Lending creates money, but doesn’t create enough for the interest to pay it back. A debt-based system is basically a ponzi that has to keep growing. And so very few years, the world gets short on dollars, and ends up having to sell US assets to get dollars, which causes illiquid, broken markets in the U.S. until more dollars are supplied. It’s not the rest of the world’s fault. The U.S. advocated for this system and collaborated with it.

ReplyApr 23, 2025

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For those unfamiliar with it, there's literally a 4-minute music video out there from 25 years ago of Christopher Walken just dancing weirdly on his own to Fatboy Slim in an empty hotel. One of the best music videos ever made. Walken is a trained dancer too. I'm still pretty sure that era was peak culture. We're never getting back there again.

ReplyApr 23, 2025

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We changed from exporting our gold to exporting our industrial base.

NoteApr 23, 2025

Rising political populism is an immune response to structural imbalances. Many people think this trade war just happened out of nowhere. There's some truth to that, meaning that Trump didn't have to engage in it in the way he did. But you have to look back several steps to get a bigger picture. The way the dollar reserve currency system is structured, the world needs an ever-growing number of dollars, and the US supplies those dollars via a permanent trade deficit. Those two aspects are joined...

NoteJan 28, 2025

We're now hitting the computational milestones expected from various charts from over a decade ago. These trends have been on track. Most of us still don't have robot vacuums since they still kind of struggle, but alas.

NoteJan 17, 2025

GN. Here's a random post to counter what we normally see in social media. In addition to being filled with filters, social media is filled with retakes. People will take a picture multiple times and then only show the best one, which provides the idea that the picture they posted represents the baseline for how that setting looks, which is generally unrealistic. It's the best shot at the best time with the best intentions. The other day I went to NYC, and went up to an office I normally go to...