Solicitor General, Rep of the Philippines (2014-2016); Author, Bitcoin: An Introduction.
Macondo
Joined January 2012
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Happy to announce the official release of “Introduction to Bitcoin: Navigating the Future of Money”, available on Amazon and Konsensus Netowrk.
“Introduction to Bitcoin: Navigating the Future of Money” by @fthilbay delves into the essence and evolution of bitcoin, using metaphors to demystify its mechanisms and impact.
It contrasts #bitcoin with fiat money, highlighting its technical advantages and potential for societal transformation.
The book underscores bitcoin's role in redefining value exchange and forecasts its eventual ubiquitous use. #BitcoinEvolution Foreword by: @gladstein 👀
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Hi. Meteorologist here.
This is nonsense. We have not entered a “new age of climate extremes.”
There is no such thing as a “supersized El Niño” and the planet isn’t being “superheated” by climate change either.
First, the correct meteorological term is “very strong El Niño.”
Second, El Niño a natural part of Earth’s internal weather and climate variability. It is just the positive (warm) phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Correspondingly, La Niña is the negative (cool) phase.
The atmospheric circulation component of ENSO in the tropical Pacific is the “Southern Oscillation.” But the resulting warming (cooling) sea surface temperature (SST) response is El Niño (La Niña).
Normally, the thermocline (a transition layer separating warmer mixed water at the surface from cooler water below) in the Pacific Ocean slopes down towards the west. This means that the western Pacific usually has a deep, warm mixed layer of water extending downward from the surface, while the eastern Pacific has a relatively shallow mixed layer. These are “ENSO neutral” conditions.
The sloped nature of the thermocline is maintained by easterly wind stress on the equatorial Pacific ocean surface. The strength of the easterlies is determined by the balance between convection (upward motion) over Indonesia and subsidence (downward motion) in the central and eastern Pacific.
During La Niña, easterlies are stronger than normal because convection is displaced further west. Lower pressure over the Maritime Continent and higher pressure over Tahiti results in a strongly positive SOI index. Higher wind stress pushes even more warm surface water westward, resulting in the formation of an even larger warm pool in the west Pacific near Asia, which steepens the thermocline. This enhances divergence, leading to upwelling of cool, nutrient-rich water in the central and eastern Pacific.
However, if convection moves eastward over the Pacific, the easterlies weaken or even locally reverse (we call these “westerly wind bursts”) and thermocline begins to flatten, allowing warmer water in the west Pacific to slosh eastward, creating a deeper pool of warm water in the central and eastern Pacific. This is El Niño, and this is occurring right now.
The state of ENSO is quantified using the SST anomalies [relative to the most recent 30-year mean; currently, we use 1991–2020] along the equatorial belt. The main area for which SSTAs are monitored is the Niño 3.4 region, which runs from the 120–170th meridians of longitude and 5° north or south of the equator (5°N–5°S, 170°W–120°W). If the three-month averaged SSTA in Niño 3.4 is at least +0.5°C (+0.9°F), then El Niño is declared. If the three-month averaged SSTA is at least −0.5°C (−0.9°F), La Niña is declared.
El Niño (La Niña) events are classified as either being “weak,” “moderate,” “strong,” or “very strong” depending on how far above (below) average SSTs in Niño 3.4 have been for the last three months.
If the three-month averaged SSTA is +0.5–0.99°C (−0.5°C to −0.99°C), then the El Niño (La Niña) is weak.
If it's +1–1.49°C (−1°C to −1.49°C), then the El Niño (La Niña) is moderate.
If it's +1.5–1.99°C (−1.5°C to −1.99°C), then the El Niño (La Niña) is strong.
If it's ≥ +2.0°C (≤ −2.0°), then the El Niño (La Niña) is very strong.
The latest data from CDAS indicate that the Niño 3.4 region is currently +2.9°C (relative to 1991–2020). This means that we are in “very strong El Niño” territory.”
And this has happened several times before. Very Strong El Niños occurred in 1790–93, 1827–28, 1844–45, 1890–91, 1925–26, 1982–83, 1997–98, and 2015–16.
You are nothing but an ignorant, agenda-driven clown.
We've entered a new age of climate extremes:
A supersized El Niño is colliding with a planet already superheated by climate change.
The latest @WMO report shows once again that leaders must get serious by cutting emissions faster, accelerating a just transition from fossil fuels & delivering the finance & protection vulnerable countries need.
wmo.int/news/media-centre/st…
Florin Hilbay retweeted
We could use 6 years of 3 percent DEFLATION year over year. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Thousands of people on Oxford Street helped break the official Guinness World Records title for the most people simultaneously casting a spell during a Harry Potter-themed Christmas lights switch-on event.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Oxford Street is full of people wearing Hogwarts scarves! 😂The security guy at the new Harry Potter shop on Oxford Street tells me there is currently just a ‘short’ wait – only 20 minutes – and that they have had >8000 visitors a day so far
Florin Hilbay retweeted
I fully support an app exclusively for “trans, non-binary and gender diverse adults”. Create as many things exclusively for yourselves as you want. Stay in them for all I care.
All I ask is the same courtesy is given to any app, space & event that is specifically “woman only”…
Florin Hilbay retweeted
The Weimar hyperinflation of 1923 wasn't just an economic crisis; it was the systematic destruction of Germany's middle class and the social order that held society together. When the government chose to finance its deficits by printing money rather than raising taxes or cutting spending, it unleashed a monetary catastrophe that would reshape German society forever.
By November 1923, it took 4.2 trillion marks to buy a single US dollar. Teachers, engineers, and civil servants who had saved their entire lives watched their nest eggs become worthless overnight. A lifetime of prudent saving couldn't buy a loaf of bread, while speculators and debtors who had borrowed heavily found their debts evaporated by inflation.
The psychological trauma went far deeper than the economic devastation. The German middle class had built their identity around thrift, hard work, and delayed gratification. Values that hyperinflation made not just useless but actively harmful. Those who had played by the rules were punished, while those who abandoned fiscal responsibility were rewarded.
This wasn't merely monetary policy gone wrong, it was the foundation for the political extremism that would follow. When money loses meaning, society loses its anchor, and people become desperate enough to embrace radical solutions. The lesson remains: sound money isn't just about economics, it's about preserving the social fabric itself.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
On November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power Russia, promising “peace, land and bread” to the people. Over the next 74 years the people were starved, killed by death squads, thrown in work camps and gulags, and other things unrelated to “peace, land and bread”.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Today is the National Day for the Victims of Communism. Communism killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century.
This memorial, The Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Prague, powerfully captures what communism does to the human person.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Friendly reminder to the entire world that Imane Khelif is a MAN and all of you helped him to physically assault and psychologically abuse Angela Carini
You watched this lying man beat up a woman and steal her Olympic medal, and you formed mobs to mock, bully, and humiliate her
Olympic boxing champion Imane Khelif of Algeria, who was engulfed in a gender row at the Paris Games, will make her professional debut next month u.afp.com/Syjz
Florin Hilbay retweeted
The men who wrote the Constitution owned guns, distrusted bankers, and believed taxation without consent was worth dying over. They would not recognize the country operating under their name today.
Federal spending crossed $7 trillion per year. The income tax, which the founders explicitly rejected, now reaches into every paycheck you earn before you touch a dollar of it. The Federal Reserve, a central bank of the exact type Jefferson warned would strip citizens of property through inflation, has spent the last two decades aggressively expanding the money supply and handing you the bill through rising prices.
The founders drew the federal government's powers in a short, specific list. Congress could coin money, raise an army, and regulate interstate trade. What it could not do is not in that list, because the founders assumed the limits were obvious. They were wrong to assume that.
Today the federal government licenses your profession, subsidizes your competitor, dictates your health plan, and surveils your financial transactions above $600. The administrative state, staffed by unelected bureaucrats at the FDA, SEC, EPA, and an estimated 430 other agencies, writes rules carrying the force of law without a single congressional vote. Madison called this precise arrangement tyranny in The Federalist Papers(No. 47).
The founders risked hanging to escape a government that taxed tea at 3%. You hand over 30 percent of your income and are supposed to thank the state for the privilege of keeping the rest.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Chinese proverb:
An unconventionally bent tree lives its own life.
A conventional tree becomes timber.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
The single greatest thing we can do for humanity is make energy cheap, abundant, and reliable.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Keynes gave governments the intellectual permission slip they had always wanted:
Spend during recessions, stimulate demand, prime the pump, and prosperity follows. It doesn't work. Ludwig von Mises explained exactly why before the ink on the General Theory dried.
The core Keynesian error is treating consumption as the engine of wealth. Keynes fixated on aggregate demand, the total spending flowing through an economy, as the variable governments must manage. Boost it artificially, and you rescue the economy. Production precedes consumption. You cannot spend your way to wealth any more than you can eat your way to a full refrigerator.
Government stimulus spending doesn't create resources. It redirects them. When Washington borrows a billion dollars and injects it into infrastructure or green energy, it pulls that capital away from whatever private actors would have funded. The seen benefit (the bridge, the solar panel factory) obscures the unseen cost: the businesses never launched, the technologies never developed, because the capital was conscripted first.
Keynes also treated interest rates as a policy lever rather than a price signal. Central banks suppress rates below what the market would set, and businesses respond by launching long-term projects that the actual pool of savings cannot support. Mises called this the business cycle. Cheap credit manufactures a boom built on false signals. When the central bank eventually tightens, the malinvestments collapse. The 2008 housing crash followed this script precisely: a decade of Federal Reserve rate suppression funded mortgages the underlying economy could never sustain.
The Keynesian model endures politically because it flatters the powerful. Every recession becomes a reason to spend more, hire more bureaucrats, and expand government reach. Mises simply followed the incentives and found the fraud.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Putin awards the Pushkin Medal to South Korean Dostoevsky translator Kim Jung Ah, who was viciously attacked for simply doing her work.
"Dostoevsky entered my life when I was 18 and never left since".
Delightful news, and proof that great art transcends it all.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
DEVELOPING: 🇵🇾 Paraguay’s President has resigned after the collapse of Ueno Bank locked roughly 3 MILLION people out of their accounts.
Protesters flooded the streets demanding access to their savings as the country’s banking crisis spiraled into a political crisis.
Florin Hilbay retweeted
Do you remember this?
I do.
I’ll never forget it.
#istandwithangelacarini
Italian boxer Angela Carini says 'I quit to save my life' after stopping Olympics bout with 'biologically male' opponent Imane Khelif just 46 seconds into first round trib.al/13eraRP
