Notes from a work-in-progress on valuing businesses that promise you everything There’s a certain kind of company you’ve probably met. It has a perfectly respectable core business — makes real products, earns real (if modest) profits, has done so for years. Then, over eighteen months or so, it announces that it is also entering five frontier industries. New materials! AI supply chains! A joint venture with a famous research institute! The stock triples. The P/E ratio hits 300. ...
Interrogated by a Machine
I do due diligence for a living. I sit across from founders and ask the questions they hope I won’t ask: what happens if you’re wrong, where is the key-person risk, show me the assumption your whole model quietly rests on. It is a comfortable seat. The person asking the questions is never the one being measured. Last week I lost the seat. To a machine. It started as a game. Twenty questions — I think of something, the AI guesses. It took seventeen turns to figure out I was thinking of “a human being,” and afterward it diagnosed its own failure with a phrase that stuck with me: it had searched the entire animal kingdom while excluding the questioner’s own species from the candidate set. A blind spot, it said, of leaving yourself out of the search space. ...
A Methodological Study of Continuous Price-Weighted Dollar-Cost Averaging for Cyclical Assets
The Case of Bitcoin, and the Epistemology of Its Parameters Working paper · Methodological research June 2026 Abstract This paper examines a class of capital-deployment methods for building positions in assets that exhibit endogenous cyclicality, using Bitcoin as its case. Bitcoin’s protocol embeds a deterministic supply-decay mechanism — the block subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, approximately four years — producing a price history with a non-sentiment-driven periodic structure. This institutional fact is the foundation on which the method rests. ...
I Do Not Know, and I Must Act
An operational epistemology I am not going to argue for anything. On the question of whether human beings can know the world, I have argued many times, and I have learned something uncomfortable: I am weak on that battlefield. The lines I was proudest of — the ultimate truth is faith, human beings cannot know, the world is not built on logic — each has a true first half and a conclusion that does not follow. ...
Answer of the Fugue: On Rules, Recursion, and a Metronome Hardcoded in Silicon
Prelude: Two Voices On January 3, 2009, someone whose identity no one knows wrote a rule into a piece of code: For every 210,000 blocks produced, the issuance of new coins is halved. The rule gives no reason. It doesn’t explain why 210,000, doesn’t explain why halving rather than some other decay. It simply exists, like an axiom. Seventeen years later, on some night in 2026, I sat in front of my screen and wrote down a rule of my own: ...