Replying to Avatar HoloKat

Start looking into bitcoin for one. Maybe think about what’s fundamentally wrong with the current banking system 🤷‍♂️ realize that your money is not your money?
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Ferret 2y ago

Thank you kindly for the reply.

🚨I have a proposal for you, or to anyone else that may read this.

Im new, so gentle pls, as my understanding is there’s place on Damus called “nests”, where people can talk to one another. Have a real conversation with words & not just short text.

Would you, or I open the floor to anyone else reading this, that may be interested in “nesting” (or whatever they call it) with me to explain why I should be exchanging all my fiat money to bitcoin.

Chose the day & time.

I understand the various major issues with banking, I’d like to think most realize there is many issues. Issues which I believe can’t be fixed with money, but requires social change. My question are not around broken banking.

But here’s where I struggle & where my lack of education is at.. with the fact that to me I can’t see past bitcoin being anything more than an investment for those that have “larger incomes” & can afford to use bitcoin as an investment strategy, instead of a currency with real actual use. Perhaps many people on here have large disposable incomes, sadly I do not, so for me live & pay bills, fiat is only option. I can’t live off bitcoin, it will not feed, cloth, give me a roof. And I also don’t have extra fiat just kicking around to “buy bitcoin in the dips”, or “stack bitcoin for rainy days”. Fiat money that I have, I need, so to speak.

Last I checked, large percentage of the population lives similar to me. So to convince me to try live off the grid without fiat does not seem realistic or possible.

Bitcoin mining, wallets, storage, and all that goes along with it, is also extremely difficult to understand, no matter how many YouTube videos I attempt to watch on the material. That fact alone is huge deterrent; coupled with fact that most other normies feel the same way, and they don’t understand it either.

And perhaps it’s just my own feelings, but I do feel like I get shamed in places like these when I question things, or don’t understand. If bitcoin folks want normies to grow & swallow the pill, most would like to know what they are signing up for.

So I openly invite you… or another… to teach me on this subject.

I read all the time on Nostr, let’s “pill the normies”, so here I am, who wants take crack at it.

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paulo 2y ago

You don’t have to put all your networth into Bitcoin. Just what you think is meaningful to you and makes you feel fuzzy inside not stressed. You do you. Only you know your circumstances.

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Ferret 2y ago

How can it be that way tho? I don’t see the point if it’s not all-in. Half-in, tenth-in, thousandth-in seems pointless, cause any other attempt means your still weighted & relying on fiat.

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paulo 2y ago

Seeing that point and understanding it is on you and your financial advisor if he/she even understands this. I have not seen any certified financial advisors giving any personal advice here.

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Ferret 2y ago

Not sure whatcha mean?

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paulo 2y ago

It means that only you know your finances and is appropriate to do with your money at any given time. It’s your responsibility to decide what to do with the wealth that your time and effort helped you accumulate.

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Lebanese Hodl 2y ago

Even if you put 1% of your fiat in Bitcoin. That 1% will grow overtime to represent 5%, 10%, 20%, 30% of your fiat 😉

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paulo 2y ago

That’s it!

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Ferret 2y ago

So why bother at all then? Few sats I have isn’t useful to me in any way… other then for zapping a Penny to a friend on here for kicks.

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Ferret 2y ago

99% population does not own bitcoin… so how’s it suppose to take off?

Then there’s the whales that own the 99% of bitcoin in existence. Does that sound firmiliar… a few hundred people own majority of them wealth? Ya.. sounds like fiat.

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paulo 2y ago

I don’t have time for this right now

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HoloKat 2y ago

We’re literally zapping bitcoin to each other here every day. Don’t need a lot of disposable income. I’m not rich, far from it.

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Ferret 2y ago

TY. Omg Wow! That is so many sats! Someone sent me few hundred once & I thought that was a lot

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Ferret 2y ago

Trying ⚡️send your sats back, but keeps saying lighting invoice error. 😆 I’ll keep trying.

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Jeremy 2y ago

peowpeow

don’t need much to throw a few sats

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Chris Tavrou 2y ago

Who says you should switch to the bitcoin standard? Just save some of your money for the future. Even if you're buying with 10 slave tokens per month

Your net worth has absolutely nothing to do with it. Most of us are poor plebs (former fiat slaves) who simply don't want to be robbed of all our financial wealth

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Ferret 2y ago

That’s good point too

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sir_bitcoin 2y ago

Sound like you have ‘paralysis by analysis’. Ive been there.

My advice - Go to a bitcoin only exchange that has lightning enabled and buy $5 worth. Download muun wallet and send it from the exchange to your wallet. Send a few zaps on here. You’ll soon begin to understand.

Learn by doing. We all had to and it’s easier than you think.

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Ferret 2y ago

Haha.. yeaaa sorry. 🙈 Bit of a long over share inside my head.

Thank you🫶

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sir_bitcoin 2y ago

Also, learn to setup and run a node. You’ll have little ‘a-ha’ moments along the way. This was huge for me. I’m a technology retard and I managed to figure it out.

I promise it’s worth the effort.

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Ferret 2y ago

Omgeee this wayyyyy over my helmet! Thank you for thinking im of that computer intelligence!

I can’t setup a node. I don’t even know what a node is.🙈🫣

This website explains how setup node:

https://bitcoinnews.com/set-up-nostr-relay-server/

Here’s the kicker.. I don’t have faintest clue what these directions mean.. let alone the words. Directions from website says: “Setup VM. Choose your preferred VM provider – whether you prefer Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. For this quick guide I used the following setup in DigitalOcean…”.

VM provider?

Azure?

DigitalOcean?

It’s like reading a foreign language where I don’t understand grammar basics skills in.

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Brisket 2y ago

Bitcoin is there to protect people's long term savings.

You're asking what do you do if you have no savings to protect or you need them for the uncertainty that's probably coming?

It's a hard one.

I think for many of us as we start to understand what Bitcoin is & where it's going, we get excited. We feel like we don't have enough sats (no matter how many you have i think). We start weighing the cost of many purchases against sats. We start being frugal & not giving 2 shits about what others think of our car or clothes.

I had to spend 3million sats on a water heater recently. I bought it & installed it myself to save the sats. I will always remember the cost of that water heater. I bought it reluctantly & only once I knew it was required.

Essentially you need to create a fiat surplus that you can funnel into satoshis. You get those into your possession so that nobody can take them from you. Then you repeat.

It's hard to describe what that feels like. Money that can't be taken from you.

Even the cash people stash in their house gets robbed of it's value, as it gathers dust.

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Ferret 2y ago

Thank you for kind reply

Can’t say im at point where I convert sats to fiat. My lil sat collection of few hundred sats does not have me there yet.

Can relate to not caring what others think. Think the internet, esp all forms of social media, including this one, has sad side effects of making people compare themselves to others on every level, both frustrating & sad. If anything this social media may be one of the greater extremes of competitive media’s use in how sats are used as a tool of value. A statement which may anger some im sure, but how can it not when there are even websites designed to see who is getting Nostr zapped the most, top zapped, top tappies.

Bitcoin can still be taken… I think? Examples including, lose of wallet, lose passwords (dementia & car accident brain injuries triggering loss of memory for those that try remember crazy long passcodes), given potential for future court case precedent to handing over keys to spouse in separation, dog eats my cold storage, and various other means.

You mention spending 3 million on water heater. Did the business accept payment for their product in bitcoin? I ask this cause I don’t know any businesses, at least where I live anyways, that accepts cryptocurrency as payment. Read that El Salvador gave each resident $30 worth bitcoin money in a wallet, but after they spent the money in wallet, less than 1% continued to use the wallet, so to me that says it’s not viable long term.

To circle back to conversation about bitcoin as being a long term savings. Is any money actually “safe” in this day & age? Or are we fooling ourselves & just want it to be so. Cause if I had to guess,… if world goes to shit (perhaps it already has, jury & perception is still out on this), then wouldn’t society more likely adopt “trading” as a most stable form of currency? For most of history humans have bartered for things they wanted/needed. I need food, & you need materials to build a house—so I’ll trade you my cow & I’ll give you my lumbar. Simple trade, & eliminated use of money completely.

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Brisket 2y ago

Yeah there are elements of nostr that have carried themselves over from legacy social media & new elements like zapping. I think nostr culture is still evolving as we figure out what this thing can do & what we want it to be. There is also a constant feed of new people trying nostr out that bring their own way of interacting with it. I really like that people can be heard if people want to hear them - there's no algorithms to intercept messages. Nostr was built with the architecture of Bitcoin in mind. Now that it has been created, I don't think it can be stopped.

An individual's bitcoin is essentially protected by a complex secret that's hard to guess (12 or 24 randomly selected words). If I've secured that secret, it's near impossible to extract it from me. Obvious threats are torture/threats/coercion to get me to reveal my secret. At the end of the day, the attacker needs to get the owner to surrender their complex secret. This is a real threat & why many of us do not use our real identities when taking about bitcoin. We believe any amount of bitcoin will become significant with time & we know how that can motivate people.

The hot water heater was paid for by my credit card in fiat. I converted the fiat cost to sats out of interest & because it's what it essentially cost me (the opportunity cost). There are still few places to spend bitcoin here either - most people haven't touched bitcoin yet.

Is any money safe? Great question to ask - it leads on to - what is money?

I think we're at the end stages of a fiat currency experiment. I think all fiat currencies will lose most of their value this decade & that people will look for an alternative way to trade & save. Some will choose gold, silver &/or bitcoin, while others will accept the CBDC replacement. Barter will always occur, but it is terribly inefficient & slow for trading. I think it will occur but that bitcoin will be more preferred & readily accepted for trading.

I would encourage you to look at money through a neutral lens. What are the properties of money & how does bitcoin stack up against them? It's weakest aspect is how old it is (only 14 years) & it's level of acceptance. To me that is just indicative of how early we are on bitcoin. The future is uncertain & there is a chance a better option will be settled upon (I just can't see it though).

People tend to settle on a single form of money & that tends to also be the hardest money to create. For the last 5000 years humans have settled on gold as money, but it has a lot of flaws (transport, storage & verification primarily). Time will tell what happens, but it might just pay to have a little bitcoin in case it catches on.

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Ferret 2y ago

Thank you again for great reply!

Awesome! You know your history!

You mentioned something really interesting.. silver & gold.

Do you think that will make a comeback?

Where we start stacking physical sliver & gold coins/bars. Know people that do this very thing, they also preppers & stock food, ammo, that kinda thing… but they educated me value of how physical silver/gold can also be used as barter material. Mind you, keeping full cabinet of grocery rather smart thing to do to, def see value in that, & think its smart to plan ahead (within reason). Esp lost art of home canning with salts & vinegars fruits/veggies we grow ourselves.

Folks I talk to that buy physical silver/gold hoard the material. Almost like a bitcoiner mentality in that it’s form of “money”. And yes agree definition “money” is loaded question. Now I can def get onboard with idea of buying silver/gold, perhaps even other rare earths like platinum. Diamonds, rubies, jewels.. absolutely no. They not rare, they not special, I could care less for hubby to gift me with diamonds 💎, I personally see zero value in them.

So ya, tell me more on your thoughts with silver & gold. Do you think that will be more popular with time? Perhaps on par or better than bitcoin?

Side note. Something that makes me nervous on bitcoin is part where it requires “internet” to function. No internet, no power, = no bitcoin. IF, war was to break out cause Russia decides it wants attack over here, if we lose power, internet, data connection.. bitcoin is absolutely useless technology. Then what? Then the silver & gold folks are prepped & better position then most.

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Ferret 2y ago

Also… isn’t it well known that Jack gave large sum bitcoin to Will.. so if what you say is true, about torture to extract bitcoin from people, then should Will be posting his location photos in Costa Rica? Or those large conventions I seen them talking about coming up in CR.. there’s large group bitcoiners all in one place ready to be hijacked and tortured to reveal their bitcoin passwords! Yikes! Just realized this now 🧐

Avatar
Ferret 2y ago

Thank you for kind reply

Can’t say im at point where I convert sats to fiat. My lil sat collection of few hundred sats does not have me there yet.

Can relate to not caring what others think. Think the internet, esp all forms of social media, including this one, has sad side effects of making people compare themselves to others on every level, both frustrating & sad. If anything this social media may be one of the greater extremes of competitive media’s use in how sats are used as a tool of value. A statement which may anger some im sure, but how can it not when there are even websites designed to see who is getting Nostr zapped the most, top zapped, top tappies.

Bitcoin can still be taken… I think? Examples including, lose of wallet, lose passwords (dementia & car accident brain injuries triggering loss of memory for those that try remember crazy long passcodes), given potential for future court case precedent to handing over keys to spouse in separation, dog eats my cold storage, and various other means.

You mention spending 3 million on water heater. Did the business accept payment for their product in bitcoin? I ask this cause I don’t know any businesses, at least where I live anyways, that accepts cryptocurrency as payment. Read that El Salvador gave each resident $30 worth bitcoin money in a wallet, but after they spent the money in wallet, less than 1% continued to use the wallet, so to me that says it’s not viable long term.

To circle back to conversation about bitcoin as being a long term savings. Is any money actually “safe” in this day & age? Or are we fooling ourselves & just want it to be so. Cause if I had to guess,… if world goes to shit (perhaps it already has, jury & perception is still out on this), then wouldn’t society more likely adopt “trading” as a most stable form of currency? For most of history humans have bartered for things they wanted/needed. I need food, & you need materials to build a house—so I’ll trade you my cow & I’ll give you my lumbar. Simple trade, & eliminated use of money completely.