13. MONEY / PAYMENTS

Let's talk about money and payments. The legacy financial system provides absolutely no privacy, nor is it an equitable system. The move towards CBDCs will make it even less private and less equitable. So it's of utmost importance that we find a money system that's fair and a discreet payments system.

Stop Using: Credit/Debit cards, Stablecoins (Tether), Shitcoins, Paypal, Revolut, Venmo, Stripe, and so on.

Obviously, we cannot just exit the fiat world... but we can begin to move away on our own terms, whilst the options remain available.

Start Using:

🔻 Let's start with Bitcoin, which is the fairest system of them all, but not private, as it's built upon a public blockchain. It cannot be censored and has no kyc/aml requirement, so you can use it without doxxing yourself. It's also perhaps the only shot that we have of breaking the back of the incumbent unfair system. Everyone should own some Bitcoin.

Privacy & payments on the Bitcoin network are available on a growing number of layer two solutions (notably: eCash, Ark Protocol, The Lightning Network)

Bitcoin Layer 2:

🔻 The Lightning Network is a second-layer protocol designed to enable off-chain Bitcoin transactions, which are later settled on the Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning payments are extremely fast and quite cheap and provides privacy benefits for those who run their own nodes. Nostr Zaps are powered by the lightning network.

🔻 Ark Protocol is a layer-two solution for making off-chain Bitcoin transactions. is a payments system where people can make Bitcoin transactions at very low cost and without requiring any setup. The Ark model very closely resembles the UTXO model, which is a key differentiator with the Lightning network.

🔻 eCash

- Cashu utilises Chaumian ecash, a form of digital cash created by legendary cryptographer Dr. David Chaum in 1982. Ecash was waiting for Bitcoin as a foundational layer, which it now has. Ecash uses a mint, and is a bearer asset that can be transferred peer-to-peer, much like bitcoin. However, a key difference between ecash and bitcoin is that bitcoin exists on a ledger, whereas ecash lives on its holder’s device. Cashu is also available on the nostr network.

- Fedi is is an open-source eCash protocol for managing Bitcoin within a community. It is a system that uses a group of trusted members, called a federation, to hold and manage bitcoin for users.

🔻 Cash is a payment technology that's inevitably going to fail. Why? Society will continue to become more digitised and global, leaving little room for cash to continue. That said, we should use it while we still can, as it has the best privacy preserving properties of all. It's strong on privacy, weak on savings.

There are privacy protecting crypto alternatives like Monero & ZCash, however they have weak stores of value properties, and thus difficult to champion.