Some fun zaps coming in. These are going to my new safebox.dev server that I fired up as zero configuration server using a docker container. The most recent zap is another one I fired up in Ireland. #nostr #safebox
All-Time-Low
138 sats/banana
Yikes. Along with having an unhosted wallet.
The underlying component of #nostr #safebox is called acorn.
Here is an acorn I picked up during my morning walk today. Our neighborhood is full of oak trees, still to be considered ‘Royal Oaks’ because the sovereign kept the title to the trees for their wood which was the strongest strength-to-weight material of medieval times. Oak wood, when treated properly was also fire resistant and was the wood of choice for castle gates.
That is the game. That's what happened with the petrodollar. The US made the oil producing countries sell their oil in US dollars only.
Approx $150 trillion per year in cross-border payments. The goal is to have all in US dollars with whatever reserve behind them.
#nostr #safebox is the ionosphere for private payments and record sharing.
Stablecoins are all about unit of account dominance.
China is trying to replicate what the US doing. Yuan vs Dollar
China Weighs Stablecoins In Push to Globalize Yuan
By WSJ Staff
The Wall Street Journal
Jul 14, 2025
When China’s central-bank governor laid out his vision for a more multipolar monetary system last month, he signaled Beijing’s openness to exploring stablecoins.
The apparent shift in attitude—at odds with China’s ban on cryptocurrencies—was likely driven by concerns that U.S. support for stablecoins could further entrench the dollar’s dominance in the global currency system, analysts say.
As the People’s Bank of China seeks a bigger role for the yuan on the global stage, ignoring stablecoins—a type of crypto backed by cash reserves or assets such as U.S. Treasurys—could put the Chinese currency at a disadvantage.
U.S. lawmakers have proposed a stablecoin regulation bill that, if passed, could accelerate the use of dollar-backed digital currencies in everyday transactions. President Trump has said he wants to sign the legislation before August.
Known as the Genius Act, the bill would effectively transform dollar-pegged stablecoins into synthetic dollars, hardwiring them into global payment rails, economists at Morgan Stanley said in a recent note.
“This is not a challenge to dollar dominance—it’s a reinforcement of it,” they said. “For China, ignoring this trend risks being left behind in the digital infrastructure race—especially as stablecoins increasingly function as bypass mechanisms to traditional banking networks.”
Stablecoins have drawn renewed attention as global companies and central banks explore their use. Their oneto-one peg to traditional currencies such as the dollar makes them more stable than other cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, and they can be used for fast, low-cost cross-border payments.
Since PBOC chief Pan Gongsheng highlighted the potential for emerging technologies like stablecoins to transform global payment systems in June, government advisers and economists have stepped up calls for Chinese regulators to approve yuan-backed stablecoins.
In a recent interview with state media, PBOC adviser Huang Yiping suggested exploring Hong Kong as a testing ground for yuan-backed stablecoins, noting that tight capital controls make such experimentation on the mainland unlikely.
“Hong Kong has an offshore market for the renminbi, and if the offshore market develops, it is possible to create a stablecoin pegged to the offshore RMB in Hong Kong in the future,” Huang said.
Despite growing interest, some analysts remain skeptical about stablecoins’ potential to boost the yuan’s global usage.
For one thing, adoption of stablecoins remains largely confined to crypto trading, partly due to concerns over financial fraud. While usage is growing, progress has been slowed by a lack of regulation, despite recent steps toward setting up guardrails, economists at Capital Economics said in a note.
“Stablecoins lack the backstop of government guarantees that comes with most fiat currencies,” and haven’t always lived up to their promise of par convertibility, CE said.
It would be challenging for a yuan-backed stablecoin to take off globally, said Maybank’s Erica Tay.
The yuan’s share of global payments remains around 4%, far behind the dollar. Currently, over 99% of stablecoins are dollar-denominated, according to the Bank for International Settlements.
Tokenization alone won’t internationalize the yuan, economists at Morgan Stanley said.
The real work lies in reforms at home, they said in a note, calling for decisive structural changes to shift the economy toward consumption and strengthen global confidence in China’s growth potential.
“These are difficult reforms and will only be implemented at a calibrated pace, suggesting that the road to RMB internationalization could be long and bumpy,” they said.
Shared via PressReader
connecting people through news
Dutch art sleuth recovers stolen documents trove
RICHARD CARTER
Ottawa Citizen
Jul 14, 2025
A Dutch art sleuth has recovered a priceless trove of stolen documents from the 15th to the 19th century, including several Unesco-listed archives from the world's first multinational corporation.
Arthur Brand, nicknamed the “Indiana Jones of the Art World” for his high-profile recovery of stolen masterpieces, said the latest discovery was among his most significant.
“In my career, I have been able to return fantastic stolen art, from Picassos to a Van Gogh... yet this find is one of the highlights of my career,” Brand said in an interview.
Many of the documents recount the early days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), whose globe-trotting trading and military operations contributed to the Dutch “Golden Age,” when the Netherlands was a global superpower.
The 17th century VOC documents contain a “fascinating glimpse into the events of that time in places like Europe, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Latin America,” said Brand.
One document from 1602 recounts the first meeting of the VOC, during which its famous logo — considered the world's first corporate logo — was designed.
VOC merchants crisscrossed the globe, catapulting the Netherlands to a world trading power but also exploiting and oppressing the colonies it conquered.
The company was also a leading diplomatic power and one document relates a visit in 1700 by top VOC officials to the court of the Mughal emperor in India.
“Since the Netherlands was one of the most powerful players in the world at that time in terms of military, trade, shipping, and colonies, these documents are part of world history,” said Brand.
UNESCO agrees, designating the VOC archives as part of its “Memory of the World” documentary heritage collection.
“The VOC archives make up the most complete and extensive source on early modern world history anywhere,” says UNESCO on its website.
The trove also featured early ships' logs from one of the world's most famous admirals, Michiel de Ruyter, whose exploits are studied in naval academies even today.
De Ruyter gained fame for his daring 1667 raid to attack the English fleet in the River Medway, one of the greatest humiliations in world naval history.
His ship's logs, written in his own hand, relate the admiral's first experience of naval warfare, the 1641 Battle of St Vincent against the Spanish fleet.
No less enthralling is the “who-dunnit” of how Brand came by the documents.
Brand received an email from someone who had stumbled across a box of seemingly ancient manuscripts while clearing out the attic of an incapacitated family member.
This family member occasionally loaned money to a friend, who would leave something as collateral — in this case the box of documents.
“I received some photos and couldn't believe my eyes. This was indeed an extraordinary treasure,” Brand said.
Brand investigated with Dutch police and concluded the documents had been stolen in 2015 from the vast National Archives in The Hague.
The main suspect — an employee at the archives who had indeed left the box as collateral but never picked it up — has since died.
Brand compared the theft to a daring heist by a curator at the British Museum, who spirited away some 1,800 objects, selling some of them on ebay.
The art detective said he spent many an evening sifting through the documents, transported back in time.
“Wars at sea, negotiations at imperial courts, distant journeys to barely explored regions, and knights,” he said. “I felt like I had stepped into Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.”
Shared via PressReader
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Article on how to prove lies.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-figure-out-how-to-prove-lies-20250709/
How to prove lies.
Should be an interesting read.
Fundamentals of Modern Money and its Application to Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC): An Exploratory
Shariah Analysis
A better social media is not the use case for #nostr.
It’s way bigger than that…
The Currency of Promise
In cryptic circuits where bright ledgers lie,
We forge our faith in silent, coded hands;
Not gold nor coin that glimmers to the eye,
But bonds of trust across digital lands.
No marble vault nor sovereign seal holds sway,
But relationships — agreements unconfined;
Abstract contracts woven day by day,
Their proof embedded deep in coded mind .
A stable coin drifts on currents unseen,
A neutral stream yet brimming with intent;
It courses through the world’s vast in-between,
An enabler of flow, yet still unspent .
We build not silos but a watchful net,
A lattice firm where trust can grow and breathe;
Each node a promise, every link beget
A proof‐to‐proof, a sign we can believe .
So let us lay foundations for the dawn,
Where digital trust becomes our common right;
And in this new economy reborn,
We find our faith, our currency of light.
Bluesky is the best for complainertainment.
If you get unity right, scale doesn’t matter.
#nostr gets unity right with each event having its own cryptographic identity.
Same with npubs, you can generate as many or as few as you like, and they are all unique.
When unity is solved, you can be as big or as small as you like.
When unity is solved, scale doesn’t matter.
nostr:note1376yp6t6nszl9exal48qexry9ry9kyn7j9tgere8927ru49sjxaskpyt67
My goodness. There’s a reason why cycling shorts should be black.
NIP-17 uses kind 1059, which are regular events and stay around forever. I switched to ephemeral events because I don’t want them stay around forever- just 10 minutes so the receiver can get them. I also want a relay to have the ability to carry out request deletes of NIP-59 events addressed to a pubkey, versus only the author of the event.
Yup. All gift wrapped NIP-17, NIP-59, NIP-44. I do one better as I transmit as ephemeral events so that the relays delete after 10 minutes. If a message comes in via a lightning address, the service fires up the receiving wallet to receive the message and store it accordingly.
If you don’t believe in spontaneous generation, look at your sock drawer.
35% tariff for Canada! The letter from the White House read like a Fifth Grader wrote it.
The real endgame for the US is payment rails is where the USD becomes the global unit of account. The US doesn’t care how it’s settled underneath. Just look at the EuroDollar system that’s existed for decades. The goal is to have a payment system that looks like USD but all BTC underneath - no stablecoins required.
There is truth; then there is code.
Yup. This is a motivation for #nostr #safebox
nostr:note1l3vt73fw8pmq4gumnha77ns6kzwugu5xkveeplyyq99uh80g8j5qx0jqyj
Maximum agency with minimum visibility.
On the reading pile
nostr:nprofile1qqspwwwexlwgcrrnwz4zwkze8rq3ncjug8mvgsd96dxx6wzs8ccndmcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9uju6n9venxwtnx095szgmhwden5te0ve5kcar9wghxummnw3ezuamfdejj70m8d3hkyctv84skcmqprpmhxue69uhhqun9d45h2mfwwpexjmtpdshxuet5q5uunm nostr:nprofile1qqsqddupn4l3cl65wggcyehd009g0pwuatsfudh28f90vewx68vrylqprfmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuem9w3skccne9e3k7mf0wccszenhwden5te0ve5kcar9wghxummnw3ezuamfdejj7mnsw43rzufkd43hywr5d3erxmp5va6hxvmnveh8wd3hxue8xdm6v9jnv6r3de3k6ae4wa4rydm9df6kgdthvduxvdm3xph8sdmyx5lkyun0v9jxxctnws7hgun4v5q3gamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwv3sk6atn9e5k7nznd8h What are your 5 sats on this topic?
Lemme think...
I’m a mechanical engineer by training. I am quite used to applying the empirical method. Not any different with coding.
I kid you not. Nostr is where the best engineering thinking is right now.
Dairy Queen is a license to print money.
Yeah, and it’s the people who already have money saying that they are not motivated by money.
I'd like the ability to request delete those spam gift-wrapped messages, if they are addressed to my public key. I believe that requirement should be added to NIP-17 or NIP-9. Then I can write a filter to get rid of messages that I don't recognize and unwrapping.
GN
In other news, Digital ID folks having their peak event today.
God love’em but Neanderthals did not figure this out beyond their own tribe. Homo Sapiens did.