I am a developer with 15 years of experience spread across many languages and I have very high competency with docker and git. I should be much better than I am for having spent 15 years developing but software development has always just been a way to make money. It's a secondary passion of mine.

All of that said, I have been feeling a bit down on myself for not contributing to this space more. I think I have been putting it off for some kind of weird fear of "not being good enough" with all of the kings in this space and the little time in my life after being a dad to several little kids, etc.

Feel free to shill or just link me your project if you are interested my help. I am aiming to put in ~1 hour per day on open source work.

NsecBunker needs a lot of docker love, I have no idea about it and would love for someone to help out make it a one-click install on digital ocean, start9, umbrel, aws, whatever

Good morning ☀️ Gratitude 🙏

Everyday is a blessing and it starts each morning.

Today is going to be a great day!

I am utterly unafraid of CBDCs.

The hysteria is mostly formed from superficial doom-circle-jerk analysis. Successful CBDCs will be a private federated ecash (or something very similar), the wisest built on the Bitcoin stack:

* Private banks will not sacrifice their power over money production via debt (as mints' status quo can continue).

* Privacy/fungibility and acquiring users overrides any Stalinist incentives.

* All we need is 1 sovereign currency producing country to use a fedi-like system built on Bitcoin, Gresham's law will do the rest.

* Building digitally native money is really fucking hard, do not underestimate the work we have done, and how governments will make use of it.

Zoom out. Post WW2 monetary order was a design choice, the next will be for apolitical money as world reserve currency, (let's not be humble) Bitcoin really is the best candidate.

Sovereign currency-producing countries, who actually do their homework, know all this. Having a native digital currency entirely interoperable with other countries' currency via its apolitical base (Bitcoin) IS the solution we are tip-toeing towards. Humanity moves toward greater liberation.

As time wears on, and liquidity pours in bitcoin, it will become stable enough to use naively. Whether people will use really depends on how poorly their CBDC treat them.

This is how hyperbitcoinisation happens.

Good morning ☀️

For our woke #commies! Get some funds, You don't need them anyway.

#m=image%2Fjpeg&dim=1170x1256&blurhash=%7BaO4VYtS%3Fv%251-%3AWAt7M%7B%25gRjV%40WqWCofWBof_NaJMxR*NGj%5EWAs%3A4mtRtSs9t7WAt7Rjx%5Ba%7EV%40WBWBocWrfktRjEadW%3Da%23bIayj%40%25LWBRks%3AV%5BWBocof%25LR*WBoJWBjsWDofIUoLt7WXoyofa%23ay&x=22927f4ae4273cd84007bff82c5676417de4cf02369e093b01f1b41fa9baf4b1

I think he gets it partially.

GM FAM IT'S ANOTHER GREAT DAY TODAY TIME TO WRITE SOME NOTES

Here's an example of why monetary verification is important (and can be expensive).

The gold price is currently $2075/oz.

If you buy a sovereign 1-oz gold coin, or a globally-recognizable privately-issued 1-oz gold bar, you'll generally pay something like a 3-5% markup to spot. This is basically the verification and distribution premium. Even if you buy a bunch of 1-oz items, you generally won't get the spread down too much. If there's a shortage, the premiums over spot go way up.

If you buy smaller sizes, that premium will be a bigger percentage. For example if you buy 1-gram gold coins, you'll be paying a >50% markup to the spot price, which is silly.

If you buy bigger sizes, like 1-kilo bars (which cost more than a typical car), you could get it down to a 1-2% premium to spot.

The bigger size you go, the less verification you have that the core of the item is indeed gold rather than tungsten. You have to trust the brand and supply chain, basically. The smaller size you go, the less possible and economic it is to insert tungsten into the item. And so on some level, it makes sense that the verification premium is bigger for smaller items- you're more assured that it is indeed gold to its core. The surface area to mass ratio is harder to forge, basically. Somewhere around 1-oz is probably the sweet spot.

Now, if you're buying gold in most U.S. states, including on a lot of popular online stores, you'll also pay sales tax, and you'll often have to pay the difference in terms of your payment method. So if your credit card costs the merchant 3%, then that would eat up the merchant's margin since it is razor thin, and so instead the customer often has to pay it. They could instead do a wire transfer for a sizable purchase to save some money, but many banks charge like $30 for a 1-day wire transfer.

And if you're buying online, there's a shipping fee. That's usually pretty low but then goes up a bit if you add insurance because you don't want to risk your expensive coins or bars getting lost in the delivery chain or stolen from your doorstep. From the time of order to the time of delivery, it'll generally take several days. This includes time for the merchant to process the payment (gold merchants are usually a bit more careful about chargebacks and other reversed payments than the average merchant) and ship you the items.

All together, including the verification premium, taxes, payment fees, and shipping, one generally pays 8-15% over the spot price to get 1-oz gold coins or bars. That means gold has to go up a pretty significant amount just to break even. And then you have collectible capital gains taxes on that price gain (which in the US is higher than the actual capital gains tax rate). If you take time (and time is money) to shop around and find ways to legally avoid sales tax and so forth, and figure out the cheapest/slowest payment methods, then you can push the premium down as close as possible to the verification premium and shipping costs.

And if you want to securely ship large amounts of gold long distances, especially internationally? Like imagine HNW investors, businesses, banks, or sovereign entities? You're going to pay a sizable amount. One does not simply ship millions of dollars worth of gold without robust security.

If you want someone to custody your gold, you're going to pay a fee. If you are fine with unallocated/mixed gold with multiple layers of counterparty risk, you could buy among the cheapest ETFs with annual fees below 0.2%. If you want to hold your gold in an allocated way by Brinks or something with fewer layers of counterparty risk, it'll generally cost over 0.5% per year. This goes toward the vault costs, salaries for people with guns, real estate costs, etc.

Basically, there's a pretty big inefficiency in the form of 1) routine verification, 2) secure transfer of ownership, and 3) secure custody, that all comes out in the form of high costs and slow speeds.

Bitcoin has fees, but they are very low in comparison. Nodes can verify bitcoin basically for free. Miners timestamp transactions to transfer ownership for a fee, and you can currently send ten million dollars worth of bitcoin globally for like $10 and have it confirmed within the hour. And you can custody bitcoin yourself, and bring it around with you globally, through ports of entry, across borders, in ways you can't realistically do with gold above a certain value threshold.

When thinking about periods of above-average bitcoin fees, it's useful to keep some of the alternatives in mind. Verifying and transferring ownership of other store-of-value assets like gold and real estate is slower and a lot more expensive, requires a lot more abstraction and permission, and comes with much less portability.

Throwback ❤️

Protocols take time to adopt, but they don't die easily & Nostr doesn't rely on any company or person. That's the beautiful of nostr.

This year, we built a lot of cool stuff. Now, we have to polish them, make them more useful and user-friendly.

Even if only one app succeeds, the entire Nostr will succeed. keep building & improving.

It seems to be using taproot assets and nostr dms to transfer. No idea how it works but it seems to function. Should I dump it all for btc ? 🤷‍♂️