When reading the news, the only thought that comes to mind is how horrible the coming days will be for my family and friends in #Ukraine.

We live in the new reality.

It’s cold today but still beautiful outside.

Its wonderful to be above freezing again, with bright sunshine. Still in the 30's, but its tolerable now. I feel thankful. #grownostr #texasweather

Okay nostr, what song have you been putting on repeat in February? #asknostr

There can be enough space for men to be masculine and women to be feminine, without rejecting and ostracizing people who don’t vibe with either category. Embrace who you are. If someone rejects that, they can fuck off.

This is true for men in the context of (whichever type of) feminism that rejects masculinity. This is true for women in the face of being pressured to work (or being pressured into motherhood). It’s true for trans people in a world that denies their lived experience.

Indigenous cultures often acknowledge (and respect) an alternative way of identifying oneself, and neurobiological studies show significantly different brain activity and hormones in people who feel different inside vs out.

I have never experienced this feeling, and it would be arrogant to claim that I know much about it.

But I know what it feels like to be a man. It means confidence and standing tall, but that’s very different from abusing your power.

It means respecting (and protecting) the lives and experiences of people around me. It means respecting women’s power, and weakness. It means acknowledging my own strengths and flaws, ones that I share with many of my brothers. Being grounded in masculinity means holding space for the differences between us.

The culture war bullshit is, indeed, bullshit. And pendulums will always swing. But my hope is that, as we move closer to equilibrium, more of us will learn to abide in compassion, and become able to listen without immediately believing OR rejecting the views of those around us, and bring more Light into the lives of those around us. We’re all conditioned by our environment, and it can take immense effort to unravel that conditioning and experience the world for what it is.

I believe in human goodness - it’s why I Bitcoin. It’s why I’m here on Nostr.

But we have a long way to go.

KYC is forever. Once you buy BTC on a KYC exchange, it’s tied to you—no matter how many hops it takes. The best you get is forward-looking privacy.

But what about BTC from non-KYC sources? You could be buying coins that were originally KYC’d, mixed through Whirlpool, or passed through unknown hands.

If you later convert them, could you get hit with AML flags? Or does that only happen if you mix them?

This isn’t just a niche concern—it’s a systemic issue. Most people buying BTC from different sources aren’t thinking about its past. They don’t know (or care) if their coins were mixed or came from a KYC exchange at some point. But regulators and blockchain analytics firms do.

At some point, this problem will have to be addressed. If #Bitcoin isn’t fungible—if some sats are treated differently than others—it undermines the whole system. And if innocent users get flagged just for unknowingly acquiring the “wrong” coins, that’s a major flaw in the current compliance framework.

How do you see this playing out long-term? Will regulators tighten the noose, or will Bitcoiners push back?

The Nostr Lounge at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas is officially happening. The contract was signed today. Thank you for collaborating on this nostr:npub17xvf49kht23cddxgw92rvfktkd3vqvjgkgsdexh9847wl0927tqsrhc9as! More to come!

#NosVegas #grownostr

Patient: “Oh my goodness. You look too young to be a doctor. I’m so lucky to have such a handsome young doctor aren’t I sweetheart?”

Me: 😀

Patient’s daughter: “Yeah so like I saying mom is legally blind and has dementia.”

Me: 😞

When it comes to AI, philosophical people often ask "What will happen to people if they lack work? Will they find it hard to find meaning in such a world of abundance?"

But there is a darker side to the question, which people intuit more than they say aloud.

In all prior technological history, new technologies changed the nature of human work but did not displace the need for human work. The fearful rightly ask: what happens if we make robots, utterly servile, that can outperform the majority of humans at most tasks with lower costs? Suppose they displace 70% or 80% of human labor to such an extent that 70% or 80% of humans cannot find another type of economic work relative to those bots.

Now, the way I see it, it's a lot harder to replace humans than most expect. Datacenter AI is not the same as mobile AI; it takes a couple more decades of Moore's law to put a datacenter supercomputer into a low-energy local robot, or it would otherwise rely on a sketchy and limited-bandwidth connection to a datacenter. And it takes extensive physical design and programming which is harder than VC bros tend to suppose. And humans are self-repairing for the most part, which is a rather fantastic trait for a robot. A human cell outcompetes all current human technology in terms of complexity. People massively over-index what robots are capable of within a given timeframe, in my view. We're nowhere near human-level robots for all tasks, even as we're close to them for some tasks.

But, the concept is close enough to be on our radar. We can envision it in a lifetime rather than in fantasy or far-off science fiction.

So back to my prior point, the darker side of the question is to ask how humans will treat other humans if they don't need them for anything. All of our empathetic instincts were developed in a world where we needed each other; needed our tribe. And the difference between the 20% most capable and 20% least capable in a tribe wasn't that huge.

But imagine our technology makes the bottom 20% economic contributes irrelevant. And then the next 20%. And then the next 20%, slowly moving up the spectrum.

What people fear, often subconsciously rather than being able to articulate the full idea, is that humanity will reach a point where robots can replace many people in any economic sense; they can do nothing that economicall outcomes a bot and earns an income other than through charity.

And specifically, they wonder what happens at the phase when this happens regarding those who own capital vs those that rely on their labor within their lifetimes. Scarce capital remains valuable for a period of time, so long as it can be held legally or otherwise, while labor becomes demonetized within that period. And as time progresses, weak holders of capital who spend more than they consume, also diminish due to lack of labor, and many imperfect forms of capital diminish. It might even be the case that those who own the robots are themselves insufficient, but at least they might own the codes that control them.

Thus, people ultimately fear extinction, or being collected into non-economic open-air prisons and given diminishing scraps, resulting in a slow extinction. And they fear it not from the robots themselves, but from the minority of humans who wield the robots.

nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s and I have a pre valentines date tonight. How much of the time will we spend discussing #nostr? Lol. Wrong answers only. Also feel free to insert other topics here. 💜

it hurts me watch people getting harmed. how much do we assist those who make choices that we would not?

I guess praying, getting sun, and eating natural only goes so far