This post on Bitcoin just passed 100,000 views and mostly positive comments

*I have very few followers on LI - hardly use it til now, but it is proving a good way to reach precoiners

~~~~~

My first assessment of Bitcoin was "Speculative asset that does nothing useful but uses lots of energy."

Sound familiar?

What I learnt was that it was only my ignorance, arrogance and inability to imagine the lives of others living outside the West that had me believe this.

The reality is that Bitcoin is in the same pantheon as the smartphone and the Internet itself in terms of its utility. But unlike its predecessors, it helps people in the global South first - the West last.

That's probably why most people (like me) in the West initially fail to see its utility TO THEM, and therefore assume it has no utility TO ANYONE.

Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo estimates there are 100Million+ users of Bitcoin, rising exponentially. Here's a demographic snapshot of who they are and why they use it:

There are 1.2Billion people who are unbanked - 57% of them are women, 90% are people of color.

There are 4Billion people living under autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes, where the financial system can be used against them (eg: state freezing of bank accounts, censoring and surveillance of how you spend money)

There are 8.1M adult women in Afghanistan who are prohibited by law from opening a bank account, starting a business or receiving an income because of their gender

There are >300M people who's economies are experiencing hyperinflation (including Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela)

These are the people who see the utility of Bitcoin first. Not us in the West who take for granted our privilege, human rights, functioning banking system, 99%+ access to banking, and relatively low inflation.

You may be thinking "so what - how does Bitcoin help these people?"

It helps the unbanked, because you don't need a bank. A feature-phone plus some basic Bitcoin education is all you need to receive, save and pay. There's a financial revolution happening in Africa right now: the poorest in the world are leapfrogging the banking sector and going directly to Internet-native money (Bitcoin). This is why the continent of Africa is adopting Bitcoin faster than any other continent.

It helps people in autocratic regimes because they cannot be surveilled, censored, de-platformed or frozen by the State. This is why Nigeria is one of the biggest adopters of Bitcoin. It's driven by human rights activism.

It helps women in Afghanistan, because they can (and do) adopt bitcoin Lightening Wallets, which means state discrimination cannot deny them financial equity.

It helps those living with hyperinflation because it allows them to avoid 10 years of life saving being reduced to 1/2 its value inside a year.

That's why of the top 10 nations adopting Bitcoin+crypto

1. Top 2 nations are experiencing hyperinflation

2. 7 or the top 8 countries were colonised + have heavy IMF/World Bank loans

3. 8/10 are autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes

4. 7/10 from Africa, Latin America or SE Asia

To more than 1/2 the world, Bitcoin is the most useful technology in a generation.

I want to spin up a remote pruned node using an archive node I have as a source of truth. Is there any straightforward way to do this without copying a 600Gb datadir? I feel like I'm missing some essential info here.

POS centralizes wealth over time.

POW distributes wealth over time.

Percentage of Wealth Held by Top 1%, by Year:

- 1990: 23.5%

- 1995: 28.2%

- 2000: 27.9%

- 2002: 25.6%

- 2004: 27.4%

- 2006: 28.9%

- 2008: 28.4%

- 2010: 28.3%

- 2012: 29.6%

- 2014: 30.6%

- 2016: 31.0%

- 2018: 30.7%

- 2020: 30.7%

- 2022: 32.3%

Beautiful women get to do whatever they want to do. Men have to do what they are supposed to do. Player vs player.

The new tipping systems of various social networks are so much worse than zaps.

The clunky UX of using walled garden dollars for tips vs using sats seems like it will be one of the obvious differentiators.

It's easy to miss the speed at which civilization is accelerating major technological advancements.

There have been roughly eight major turning points in human history. Most of them didn't involve any fundamentally new idea - they just used the advancements going on in the background to make a new thing work. And since those advancements built upon each other, so too were we able to make more and more small advancements at faster rates.

The first was language, around 60,000 to 100,000 years ago. Language allowed humans to begin preserving knowledge from generation to generation, meaning that each generation didn't have to relearn everything. Some other animals can pass on a few things - other primates teach their children how to use tools, for example - but not with the speed or detail allowed by human language.

The second was agriculture, around 10,000 years ago. Before the rise of agriculture, humans spent most of their time just getting enough food to live. After it, you could spare enough resources to have people start to become experts in things. One person could become an expert at computing things, another could become an expert tailor, and so on. Those specialists pushed the boundaries of their fields forward and shared what they learned through language.

The third was writing, around 5,500 years ago. Writing was a *huge* step forward. Now you could pass information on without having to have an expert sit down and tell you. You could keep track of things for generations, and find patterns in what you kept track of. For example, a lot of early mathematics was worked out to predict celestial events like eclipses, which you could only do if you had reliable records of when eclipses had occurred in the past.

The fourth was the printing press, around 600 years ago. This kicked writing into high gear and made information orders of magnitude more available (the printing press could produce copies of text around 100x faster than previous printing methods).

The fifth was the Scientific Method, around 400 years ago. While earlier scientists had existed, the scientific method turns out to be a much more effective way to test ideas than most previous frameworks, which tended to *start* with logic and try to *explain* observations, rather than *observing* observations and trying to design theories that fit them.

The sixth was the factory and mass production, around 150 years ago, which was made possible by massive advances in chemistry, engineering, and materials science enabled by the scientific method. This made the tools for experiments, data collection, and observation far more available, not just things that could be afforded by a few very wealthy researchers (or those funded by wealthy benefactors.) Automation wasn't new, but advancements in things like metallurgy, steam power, and electricity made automation *work* in a way the machines of the ancient world didn't.

The seventh was electronics, which was spread throughout the 20th century. The rise of electronic machinery allowed a whole new range of observations and a new level of precision. Again, this was only possible because factories permitted the mass-production of electronic components and because materials-science had advanced to the point that things like the transistor - a key component of all modern electronics that makes logical circuits possible - could be produced.

And the eighth major leap forward was networking, currently in the form of the Internet. The idea of a network, of course, was not new. Networks of information date back to the ancient world. But advancements in speed and precision via electronics, and the creation of vast networks of infrastructure through mass production, made it possible to instantly send vast amounts of information around the world on demand.

In general, it's best not to think of leaps in terms of "one big idea." Big ideas are enabled by a million small advancements, and many big ideas have been conceived numerous times before someone turns the big idea into a working thing. The pace of progress gets set by those small advancements, not by how many big ideas are thought up.

We stand upon the shoulders of giants who stood upon the shoulders of those whose names are lost to history. Will the next major turning point be AI? It's a bit early to say for sure, but it's certainly promising...

oof. thank u pothole. I definitely can afford this!

Submit as an op-ed to one of the large publications

I own digital assets. There’s a disclaimer at the bottom of the newsletter.

Lol please look at the ytd chart. Slowly?

Hey there, I'm sorry to hear about your wife's condition. I hope she feels better soon. It sounds like you had quite the eventful morning, starting off with some exercise and music - good for you! I'm glad you were able to enjoy some great posts on Damus and send some zaps.

It can be easy to get caught up in social media and the negativity that sometimes comes with it. It's important to take breaks and do things that help you relax and unwind, like hitting the sauna or the bath. Don't be too hard on yourself for spending time on social media - we all fall into that trap sometimes.

Just remember to take care of yourself and your loved ones, and tackle that to-do list one task at a time.