https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211

So any statement about "Not your keys not your coins" has to be paired with an alternative solution, or a spectrum of alternatives. What if someone can't fit into the one of the only tens of millions of on-chain transactions per month? What if $35 fees is high for the $200 in bitcoin they want to save?

Is holding your bitcoin on an 11-of-15 multisig (Liquid) okay, in exchange for lower fees, faster block times, better privacy, and some additional features? Depending on the amount, I would say yes. It has trade-offs, though, which have to be made clear.

What about a Chaumian mint? What if an app lets a community in South Africa set up a 5-of-9 multisig run by well-known people in the community who would face consequences if they break trust? And the same app can let a smaller community in Guatemala set up a 4-of-7 multisig? And a bigger multi-country 6-of-11 multisig can be set up as well? It's private, interacts with Lightning as seamlessly as Wallet of Satoshi, and can make in-person payments even when the internet is out briefly. Plus, it can be customized via open source add-on modules by the community running the specific mint so that it can also store private data for users, monitor reserves, monitor health of the multisig keys, run applications like Chat GPT payable in bitcoin per usage, run private DMs and group chats, run apps that show you local merchants that accept bitcoin, etc. And what if a user could, within the same app, seamlessly spread their funds out among a handful of different mints that they know pretty well to avoid having all of their eggs in one basket, and then pull into self-custody when above a certain amount?

Maybe there will be more softforks in the future. More flexible scripting to allow more share-ability of UTXOs, for example. But those require consensus, and they tend to come with some trade-offs or code risks, and so they take time.

Bitcoin is an engineering marvel. But it's not magic. It has limitations, and it has a spectrum of solutions for those limitations at any given time. The best solutions solve multiple problems at once: they add scalability, they add speed, they reduce fees, they add privacy, and they add flexibility/programmability all at once, while still being more distributed than trusting some centralized KYC entity.

Bitcoin is peer-to-peer open source money. But it's not infinitely scalable on the base chain. If it were greatly scaled up on the base chain to fit everyone, then only institutions would be able to run nodes and it would be greatly centralized and thus useless. So the solution, known from the start of the Bitcoin Talk forums, is to build additional peer-to-peer open source layers on top of it, allowing for a range of transaction sizes, a range of speeds, a range of privacy, and a range of programmability, all to serve different users' needs, and without compromising the decentralization and security of the base chain. That's the type of statement that needs to be provided along with "not your keys not your coins" for the full context to make sense.

Here’s the presentation: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6pwxs6qm7qljsaexiu6hk/Cost-of-Conventional-Thinking.pdf?rlkey=jkw955y1nlqr4owd31tlulgyx&dl=0

I had been the only customer who paid in BTC for 2 years. The owner was impressed at the price movement of BTC as she watched her stack grow over the year.

We made up a stack of lightsats.com tip cards with enough BTC for a few cups of coffee.

The printable light sats cards are a great way to promote local businesses that support bitcoin.

You should try it in your local area if you are so inclined to give away BTC, or if you can find a sponsor to sponsor the event with ~$200-$500 in free sats.

The best thing about light sats cards is that when half of the people inevitably forget about the card and don’t claim the sats, they come back to your wallet after x days.

This is a highly underutilized orange pilling tool.

Half the people setup a Blink wallet at the cafe, claimed their sats and paid for a coffee over lightning.

It was a great night where we focused more on high level conceptual financial literacy topics and didn’t delve so far into the activism side of things.

The information was received very well as we didn’t get into libertarian views of small government, free speech issues, politics, etc.

We tried to keep it cheerful & constructive as Saylor says.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/twitter-has-complied-with-almost-every-government-request-for-censorship-since-musk-took-over-report-finds/

Musk previously catered culturally more to woke folks, like in 2021 when he said Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin payments only when bitcoin was over 50% “clean”. He needed those ESG vibes back then. But now that the woke trend turned into a based trend, he shifted to ride more on that one instead. He posts way less about the environment and way more about socio-cultural issues now.

Musk is likely not dumb/small enough to be personally against any particular ethnicity or religion of people as a group. He clearly thinks bigger and more pragmatically than that.

Instead, he is just trying to stick his finger in the air, measure the winds, and lean in any momentum direction culturally.

Meanwhile the large corporate advertisers like Apple and Disney advertisers who dropped Twitter/X for advertising are also doing similar. They are pulling back in the heat of the moment to gauge public perception, and then will move forward slowly based on polls and research. It’s the same vibe as when they put up rainbow flags on their domestic Twitter/X accounts but then of course don’t dare do the same for their Middle East accounts. Region by region polling and brand management. Never genuine, always calculated.

Anyway, good morning.