🤤🤤
Look at this size of this asian pear! 🥳
Heh, I guess I could just use emoticons, thanks robot 🤣
Anyone have that meme where there's a candle that turns into a light bulb, an ox turns into an oil barrel and money turns into Bitcoin?
Will zap for meme , need it for a presentation I'm giving next week. I swore I saved it but can't find it anymore 😮💨
I think all bitcoiners should consider coming to Taiwan 🥳
Seems many are fans of Spirited Away, Miyazaki got his inspiration for the bathhouse from an area in New Taipei City called 九份 (Jiufen), the area used to be a gold mine
Enjoy some high mountain tea and talk hard money ! If you're coming in the winter, come relax in hot springs too
No. Just by the looks of it.
Seems very familiar too.
Any chance nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg was there for his undercover BSV Meetup?
Or am I mixing something up?
Definitely mixing things up, this is our 13th event, bitcoin only 😤 but we talk about nostr too! ... sometimes there's pizza
Happy for anyone to visit whenever they're in Taiwan, amazing mango shaved ice nearby Bitdevs too 🤤
When I'm thinking about Bitcoin what are other people thinking?🫠
Opportunity cost.
Rewatching Slumdog millionaire (2008), the 20,000,00 INR prize the protagonist struggled for was won ~100,000 blocks before Bitcoin started (2006) , that life changing money at the exchange rate then was roughly 500,000 USD. In 2023 (~block 805,000) that prize money is under 250,000 USD (~9.3 BTC). Fun fact, the movie was released in the UK pretty much the same time Satoshi mined the Block 1 🤯
Bitcoin makes rewatching old movies fun
Thank you for finally getting me on Nostr, nostr:npub1j8y6tcdfw3q3f3h794s6un0gyc5742s0k5h5s2yqj0r70cpklqeqjavrvg!
Welcome ! Gradually then suddenly 🥳
when the autobiography gets to his higher education there's many details to remind everyone that quantum mechanics was such a new field at that time, and those novel ideas were only slightly understood by a handful of academics who basically all knew each other... I find it hard to believe his involvement in the Manhattan Project is a psyop, it'd take a massive global conspiracy, anyone capable of that wouldn't need an atom bomb in the first place 😅
Book aside, Oppenheimer's legacy isn't just the Manhattan project, it's his colleagues and students who learned from him and who go on to make further discoveries, and we take such discoveries for granted today:
For example, we're communicating through hand-held devices manipulating electrons in semi-conductors right now probably across an entire ocean, psyops wouldn't ever make anything 🥳
Apparently the movie Oppenheimer is based on an autobiography "American Prometheus". Saved some sats downloading the book off Libgen. I'm about a quarter of the way through, I will finish it before I see the movie
I wonder who is going to be the Oppenheimer of Bitcoin 🤔 (probably not even born yet). It's fun to read about backgrounds of academics/scientists, I wonder will people be writing autobiographies of early Bitcoin users too?
Where to get the opium though 🫣
Rich men north of Richmond is stuck in my head 😵💫
Your dollars ain't shit~
"All we're doing is catching some fish"
As the murder investigation continues, the Chairman (Mr. Hong) of the corporation behind the fishing company is brought into questioning for surpressing the murder investigation. The audience learns that he keeps his employees and their families quiet with his money and power in order to cover up illegal activities happening on his boats. The government representative hopes that the chairman cooperates with the investigation, she grills him on whether or not his fishing fleets are directed to catch fish outside of international regulations; like fishing out of quota, catching endangered species, or exploiting smuggled workers.
Mr. Hong is unapologetic for his business practicies; whatever happens out on the blue sea is all a matter of survival. What gets caught in fishing nets is out of anyone's control sometimes.
He reminds the representative that while Taiwan needs to abide by international fishing regulations in order to tap into foreign markets to export their goods, Taiwan is only a "Fishing Entity", which means Taiwan's fishing fleets doesn't get the same gurantees and protections of fleets of soverign nations. If a Taiwanese fishing fleet encounters trouble (i.e. pirates), no one will come to their rescue, and the fleets themselves have no bargaining or negotiation power to make deals with other foreign fishing fleets.
"This is an economic food war, the foreigners have long flooded our market with imported meats and grain while putting more and more restrictions on our domestic food production, like fishing. How can we even hope to care about the well-being of foreign wokers if we can't feed ourselves first!"
Taiwan at one point in time received tremendous food aid from the US as a means to achieve social stability because the sudden mass migration of Chinese fleeing from the Chinese civil war had tremendous impact on the mis-manged Taiwanese economy by the Republic of China government. So much food aid that the diet of Taiwan changed from predominately domestic rice dishes to noodles and bread made from imported flour. US Aid was ubiquitos, empty sacks of US Aid flour was turned into outfits for children. Taiwan has come a long way since then, it exports all sorts of delicious food items around the world. Have some boba milk tea and find some pineapple cakes where you are!
I always like to describe Taiwan's role throughout history as a pirate island, the tradition continues to live on. Perhaps one of Taiwan's advantages is their domestic markets existing outside of the purview of international organizations, so a risky gray area exists for those who wish to venture out on their own.
"Labor is getting more expensive, oil is getting more expensive, yet we can't catch more fish?"
Oh Mr. Hong, if only he had a mechanism to retain his profits and reinvest them to improve your fleets and improve the well-being of your workers as to not disgruntle them to commit murder. Adopting a Bitcoin Standard fixes this! Mr. Hong could avoid all of the hassles cutting corners in the shadows by measuring the value of his output in sats. It's not the value of the fish that is dropping or the costs to catch fish from regulation that are skyrocketing, its the tool he uses to measure value that is out of wack.
The series seems to ask:
"does survival allow one to exploit others?"
While the characters debate over ethics and struggle with their morals, I'm chewing on an orange pill imagining a system where it is simply not possible to do that.
"How is it that you work so much, and yet have no money?"
The audience learns half-way through the series (Port of Lies) that the public defender's father commited a murder very similar to the main storyline in the past. Whereas the main storyline follows an exploited Indonesian worker's murder of a Taiwanese ship captain, the case in the past was a Taiwanese/Aboriginal worker to a Chinese ship captain. Is it Taiwanese "turn" to be the exploiter now?
On some level I think the series attempts to depict that there is an never-ending cycle of exploitation, but considering the circumstances that Taiwan aborigines have gone through, this statement drives home the heart of "fiat bullshit" rather than some moral compass/character flaw that's gone awry.
While the series only follows one aboriginal tribe in Taiwan, I believe the story is reflected throughout the tribes (there are many!). For the many centuries that natives （原住民）, or as the main character snarkedly prefers, "前地主" (former land owners) have worked under the many flags Taiwan has flown throughout the centuries, the money they earn always ends up worthless.
Whether or not it is the Dutch colonists who forced trade in Florins by gunpoint, then onto the Qing's silver, gold ingots after the Dutch left, then Qing's paper claims on land which then the Japanese colonists would do away with by introducing the expanding Japanese Empire's Yen, then after WWII when the retreating Chinese nationalists blew up everyone's savings hyperinflating whatever currency that was left in the midst losing their Civil War... It's hard to imagine any scenario where an aborigine had any chance for saving the value they worked for that they can keep.
The lesson here outside of the "cycle of exploitation" is that if you aren't using the money of the authority "in power" you have no money to show for no matter how hard you worked.
It sounds hopeless when putting it like that. Perhaps that is why many turn to alcoholism when there's no possibility for upward social mobility through work, then that behavior perpetuates throughout society and before you know it a generation of prejudice against the alcoholic-illiterate 山胞 (mountain people) emerges.
This scene has no answer to this question. All the adults have no response to why they have no money after they worked so hard, the flashback scene ends.
Bitcoin fixes this! My personal thesis is that Bitcoin is made in Taiwan and has a real shot at breaking this cycle of exploitation. Afterall, whether or not it is mining chips or chips for memory or storage, network equipment, or even obscure tooling for mounting hardware and material, all the bits and pieces of Bitcoin we can touch in the physical world have passed through the hands of some Taiwanese.
How poetic would it be that a country not recognized on the world stage be the one to help introduce state-less currency?
I was put on to a netflix series called "Port of Lies" (八尺門的辯護人), it's a great depiction on social-economic struggles happening in Taiwan.
The premise of this courthouse-crime-drama follows a homicide commited by an Indonesian immigrant to an Taiwanese-Aboriginal ship captain's entire family in response to severe exploitation in the fishing industry. The main character is a public defender of aboriginal descent (阿美 A-mei tribe) and the story wrestles with how the Republic of China's (Taiwan) legal system carries out capital punishment. The series takes place in the port city of Keelung （基隆） and contrasts the lives of common-folk outside of the modern city life most associate with Taiwan with those who live a life of privilege and power
The show depicts the inconsistencies in the Republic of China's constitution and how society wrestles with capital punishment (Taiwan still carries out capital punishment by firing squad), but what I find most interesting are the subtle historical bits and pieces that are introduced to explain the character's motivations throughout the generations because it makes the story believable; wouldn't be surprised if parts of the story have already played out in real life.
Looking at this series through an orange-pilled lens is a lot of fun, I think all problems in the show are the result of fiat-bullshit and Bitcoin fixes it all.
The show only appears on Taiwan Netflix (use a VPN) and currently only has Chinese subtitles (there's a diverse mix of languages that occurs throughout the film), I imagine the audience for this series wont be here, but I'll share this story (spoilers?) in hopes to explain parts of the series I find interesting, and perhaps drive curiosity for Taiwan (come visit!)
