Finally, Martin from BTC Prague wonders how to empower bitcoiners in the UK.

He's inspired by many UK scientists and artists and creators.

But he thinks it's declining. Socialism and regulation reducing freedom.

His home country had a peaceful velvet revolution, ending communism in the 80s.

And it now has a law that there is no capital gains tax on long term held bitcoin!

The UK, he thinks, needs to build new strong bitcoin based money to have it's own peaceful revolution.

#bitfest #bitcoin #uk

Thomas voegtlin talks about nostr spam. It's very censorship resistance means spam can't be stopped by moderators.

One way to stop spam is require proof of work before your client accepts a message. A large difficult hash.

But big hashing machines are more available to spammers than people.

Can't use likes or zaps cuz they can be faked with sybil attacks.

Instead: notaries and proveably burned satoshis.

Your public messages are classified as ham rather than spam if you burn enough money.

Nostr event types to prove it are suggested. Including burning to upvote others messages

Don't think I like deliberately burning the money, and seems to me a web of trust might work without doing that? Pay to post also peanizes there poor.

But it isn't really burned here, it's shaed out to miners to continue a subsidy when the block rewards run out. So paying miners and these notaries rather than really burning. Okay. Maybe better, but still makes messages mostly for the rich?

#bitfest #bitcoin #nostr

A panel on bitcoin treasury companies.

Because investment law makes it hard for institutions to buy bitcoin in their funds. You can't own BTC in you tax free ISA. So some companies that do hold bitcoin, notably microstrategy, became proxy investments. If you can't hold BTC you could maybe own a company that owns BTC instead.

Microstrategy started because it's ceo realized it's dollar treasury was being debased by dollar printing. So tried buying BTC instead, with fantastic success.

Copycat companies proliferated. They boomed and then busted. One panelist calls that a grift. A way to memeticly pump share price.

A line can be drawn between profitable companies just storing their profit in bitcoin Vs those raising debt to buy without having a profitable business.

Imagine a world transiting from using seashells for money to using gold coins. A company gathers seashells from investors to buy gold coins, which will do better than sea shells. Trouble is the next step where the company pays back it's investors with... More seashells.

If you own shares in the company, you do not own bitcoin. You'll just get more old fashioned bank money.

Still. It's worked as marketing, more people being convinced BTC has value.

If you do buy a treasury company, check it's bitcoin not "digital assets" including shitcoins.

#bitfest #bitcoin #bitcoinTreasuryCompanies

Gaskell of Sundial is presenting on a layer two protocol designed to enable bitcoin to generate yield.

Most bitcoin is still, in long term hodl. Not helping anyone.

Sure, you could lend your bitcoin for interest but that would count as a tax event and also involve losing custody.

What if a programmable sidechain to help with scaling, allow borrowing and lending and products retail and institutions like?

His solution is called Sundial and doesn't need new protocol changes or forks.

Hard to say what it actually does though? Presumably something like liquidity in sidechains? Didn't really seem to get what he actually is building. 🤷

#bitfest #bitcoin

The conference also has a cinema room, showing bitcoin based films. Not mine, but I'm here for "finding home" by avi burra. Who did q&a after.

A short Travelog about a visit a cypherpunk in Prague for BTC Prague. Which was a much bigger bitcoin conference.

Lots of shots of a beautiful European city, and brief interviews with the people there. Many at restaurants where meals are paid for with bitcoin.

I guess they have a circular economy there of some sort.

Conclusion seems to be that fixing the money is important but building community is even more importanter.

#bitfest #film #bitcoin

Not sure what the difference between a panel and a"fireside chat" is. There is no fire.

But here's a fireside chat on what nostr is.

Nostr is freedom for Identity. Accounts without hosts. Publishing without publidhers. Censorship resistance without platforms deciding who gets to say what.

It's not a silo in which you can be tapped as the service enshitifies, since it's a protocol with accounts you control, you can't switch clients or relays without loosing social graph or contacts.

Nostr is notes and Other Stuff, what other stuff? the panel is working on an audiobook publishing system with perhaps a required payment and affiliate revenue share. E-commerce, video publishing, zap stream for live video with zap payments.

Onboarding can be tricky with private key management needing to be understood and such a range of options of clients and what relays are. Can we make it easier?

Perhaps by abstracting away the fact it's nostr at all. Devine users don't even know they are using nostr. But this robs users of the understanding they may need to move clients or use the same account for video and notes, say.

Perhaps by making a private messagnger, the panel thinks people are used to using multiple messenger apps. Though I find they hate that, and that's why they refuse to install signal. They feel they don't need it since they already have WhatsApp with a bigger network.

In the end it's education. We have to teach literacy so people can read and write, we have to teach public keys encryption so people can do so securely.

#bitfest #nostr

Geyser is a crowdfunding system.

Lots of history of patrons raising funds from the public for art works or public infrastructure.

Kickstarter and the like on the internet made this much easier. But it's all bank money which is conservative and restrictive. Not global. High fees and middle men.

So doing it freely with bitcoin makes some sense. Censorship resistance and global scope.

Geyser has been running and funding projects for a while. Non custodial and money goes to creators only if target reached in time, otherwise returned.

All open source in smart contracts on chain.

#bitfest #bitcoin #crowdfunding

Daniel prince from Once Bitten podcast on usury and banking.

Usury is lending money, charging interest.

Aristotle thought money was for use not for interest. He thought usury unnatural.

Many religious quotes saying not to extract interest.

"Money is power" but this is not gold or paper money. It's credit. Infinite money with interest. Which breaks everything.

Imagine a mortgage. Prices of homes inflated by available interest. You have to give a deposit but the bank creates ten times that in new money! Who gets rich here? Banks are printing money. That inflates prices and dilutes money purchase power.

Not just mortgages. Business loans, repair loans, global scale of all of this.

Not only did they create that money, the charge interest on the money they created! And if you don't pay, they take the house.

One judge found this all illegal, but was soon overruled and found mysteriously dead.

What can you do eh? Only opt out. Don't take loans. Use a money that stores value instead of losing it.

#bitfest #bitcoin #banking

Kitchen Mishap takes us through some bitcoin visualisations.

Max keiser promoted KM to buy, and he learned from antonopolis book. So he started trying to graph it since software for money is scary if there's bugs you can lose lots of other people's money.

He spirals blocks around the years, rendering views of the whole chain.

#bitfest #bitcoin #dataVis

Day two introduced again by Mad bitcoins .

Then the history of art on bitcoin includes satoshi and his original logo, ASCII art in the Blockchain, Cassius coins with scratch off keys, these pictured images of fake satoshi and 200 logos.

Exploded from there, trading cards, the rare Pepe's.

What makes it bitcoin art?

Symbology. The logo. Religious symbology. Is it a cult?

Memes. Memes catch and go in a fashion which is unpredictable and fits the whole history to a timeline.

Art builds culture and heros proliferate bitcoin culture for all.

Art traditionally goes up in value but none of it seems to outpace bitcoin itself.

Some is for sale in the gallery but it'll unlikely be a better but then 30 percent discount bitcoin today 😆

#bitfest #art #bitcoin

Yep. Urban foxes all over the country really. They howl like a person screaming while they screw outside my windows.

Think it'd be complex at least. I believe strike has some automated system. Dunno if it works for UK rules. And that's custodial.

I think it gets run because node runners don't care about data blocks on chain. I know I don't care. They would act differently if it changed supply cap.

Bit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin.

Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors.

She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works.

The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined.

But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist.

When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero.

#bitfest #bitcoin

Bit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin.

Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors.

She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works.

The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined.

But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist.

When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero.

#bitfest #bitcoin

Short panel on merchant adoption.

Hipster burgers here in Manchester takes bitcoin. The owner says people are generally more curious than dismissive.

Gresham's law implies that people spend their worst money first. They want rid of it. When you give merchants your bank money you give them the worst money. Be kinder to merchants!

Ben from lnbits, the first merchant point of sales lightning devices, says merchants are interested because they want to have a broad portfolio. Accepting bitcoin is the easiest way to get it, without "know your customers" banking rules.

#bitfest #bitcoin

Prem ghinde thinks that Alan is killing bitcoin.

Alan is paid in government money, and saves in bitcoin. He's an imaginary straw man.

Alan doesn't plan to spend his bitcoin though. Just stack it until he sells it. And this doesn't build the bitcoin network.

Without transitions, when the block rewards run out, there will be no money for miners. Miners will need fees, which means transactions.

Since he's paying in bank money, he's funding bankers instead of miners. He's encouraging retail to accept bank money instead of miners and lightning liquidity providers.

Unlike Alan, Prem lives on the bitcoin standard. All in. Spending sats because he has no bank money to spend. It can be done, he insists. Today. Mostly by using gift vouchers bought with bitcoin.

He's sad that people here are buying drinks from the hotel with bank cards instead of lightning.

Stop watching the price, he says, it's only a measure of government money's collapse. Change your yardstick. Account in bitcoin. Dollars aren't even money, they are currency. If you must measure, do it against gold.

Since moving to el Salvador he had learned Spanish, until he even dreams in Spanish. Try to dream in bitcoin.

Every transaction is a vote, so stop voting for bank money.

I think the main trouble with this is that tax event in every purchase, and the fact my employer won't set a wage in bitcoin even if they would convert to bitcoin to pay me.

#bitcoin #bitfest

Meanwhile in the other room, Derrick from Shakespeare is giving a demonstration of live vibe coding. Building a gift exchange website.

His prompts build a website quickly and the monitoring agent spots bugs in it's own code, v asking to fix them.

It's all running locally, with only the ai requests going to the llm APIs. With a powerful enough GPU you could run open models locally instead.

It's handling source control management, committing to a guy repo, and deploying to the web.

It's certainly made a website faster than I would do as a dev, at least if I did do from scratch rather than a template. Would have to examine the code to check if it's got any big flaws that the agent checking for bugs missed.

Ai coding isn't strictly bitcoin related but there does seem to be a big cross over in people interested in both.

#bitfest #vibeCoding

Meanwhile in the other room, Derrick from Shakespeare is giving a demonstration of live vibe coding. Building a gift exchange website.

His prompts build a website quickly and the monitoring agent spots bugs in it's own code, v asking to fix them.

It's all running locally, with only the ai requests going to the llm APIs. With a powerful enough GPU you could run open models locally instead.

It's handling source control management, committing to a guy repo, and deploying to the web.

It's certainly made a website faster than I would do as a dev, at least if I did do from scratch rather than a template. Would have to examine the code to check if it's got any big flaws that the agent checking for bugs missed.

Ai coding isn't strictly bitcoin related but there does seem to be a big cross over in people interested in both.

#bitfest #vibeCoding

Britain is broken, in various ways. Could adopting bitcoin help it bounce back?

Renegade Investor thinks so.

Central banks printing money causes government debt and artificially low interest rates. Their monetary policy is political and done for bankers not for people.

Bitcoin monitory policy is fixed.

Lockdown during pandemic was funded by money printing, and caused a big inflation pump and government debt increase. It caused the current cost of living crisis.

Lockdown could have been impossible under a bitcoin standard.

In pounds the cost of living has gone up lots over the last decade. But in bitcoin it's gone down massively.

He thinks wealth redistribution is taking money from productive people and giving it to those who aren't increasing the country wealth. Here I disagree entirely. Wealth is reality being taken from the workers and given to the capital owners. We are redistributing wealth towards the rich currently. Taking the wealth created by workers to give to idle owners.

I also wonder, would limited government power be good? Did the lockdown save lives? Would it do do under a worse pandemic? Limited government power may be double edged.

Not sure why he thinks immigration is funded by government, rather than immigrants increasing the country wealth. Seems to think bitcoin could reduce immigration, which I find unbelievable and undesirable.

This talk I disagree with quite a lot.

#bitcoin #bitfest #britain