I had a thought the other day...

Governments get involved in all the financial transactions in order to tax them. Your company makes money, it gets taxed. You get paid a salary from the remainder, it gets taxed again. You spend it on something, it gets taxed again. That company takes it in and it gets taxed again. Over and over, tax after tax after tax. And all of this requires complete loss of privacy, they have to know all of your transactions so they can tax them accordingly, and the accounting and compliance costs spawn a huge financial industry which is actually.... entirely unnecessary.

Instead, all this loss of privacy, all this compliance cost, all the tedious filling out of tax forms where you aren't sure if you are doing it right and they hope you do it wrong so they can also collect fines and interest... the whole thing could go away.

And I'm not talking about anarchy. I'm talking about a funded government that doesn't need to collect taxes.

Just use inflation: The central bank prints 3% more money each year and gives it to the government.

Now before you all yell at me about how inflation is a horrible thing... this is a compromise. It is far better than the invasive tax systems we have today, and if the amount of money government gets is fixed by a constitution, and the fiat system (there would still be one) didn't expand via fractional reserve lending but only by this predictable monetary inflation, it strongly prevents government overgrowth, and also moderates boom-bust interest rate cycles, and still stimulates economic activity because the currency continues to lose value.

This is just the start of a crazy thought. I haven't thought it through deeply. But I do really like getting rid of the invasive tax compliance back-monkey.

Please shill me all projects that you know of that combine Nostr and Cashu.

No matter how big or small. Making a list for my talk at Nostriga. 🙏

My Youtube channel's analytics indicates that most Bitcoiners are around the age of 35-45 and older.

We gotta fix that, so here's the Bitcoin Whitepaper Abstract in gen Alpha. (Courtesy of Claude Opus)

Bitcoin: A Homie to Homie E-Bag Sitch

Vibes:

Yo, check it! 👀 We cookin' up this H2H e-bag sitch that's straight bussin'! 🔥 It's all about slidin' that digital bread 🍞 from one bestie to another without them crusty banks all up in our biz. 🏦🙅‍♂️

We got them digifingers 👆 doin' work, but the real tea is ditchin' that sus third wheel tryna block the double-dip. 🍦 Our H2H squad's got the solution that's gonna make you say "sheeeesh!" 😤

Picture this: a chain of receipts 🧾 that's tighter than your favorite TikTok dance. 💃 It's stamped with time and locked down harder than your parents' iPad. 🔒 The longest chain? That's the GOAT 🐐 - proof of what went down and who's got the beefiest tech muscles. 💪

Long as the majority of our tech fam ain't sus, they'll keep that chain growin' longer than a CVS receipt and leave them haters on read. 📏😎 The whole setup's more chill than a Hydroflask, with nodes bouncin' in and out like they're playin' double dutch. 🏃‍♂️💨

This H2H cash is bout to hit different, no cap! It's the future, and it's giving main character energy. 💁‍♀️✨ #H2HBag #DigitalDrip #NoCapNoCap 🧢🚫

We need to get used to paying for relays.

Free relays doesn't work.

Well I just setup alby, got my self custodial wallet, and now I wanna transfer my sats from strike to alby but I’m getting that error

#siamstr 🔥🔥 บ่ายนี้...

Just to follow up on this... I've had others try to send to my LN address (anon@anon.dev) and it works just fine, which indicates the Alby Hub LNUrl endpoint is working successfully. Good news. Love the product!

Thanks for trying, Roland. I've been looking for someone to test with. I just sent you 1,000 sats, which seemed to work just fine. When you try to send some back to me, what error message do you receive?

I'm 100% certain the error is on my side but not sure where. There's plenty of inbound liquidity and I can receive from other sources. Apparently it's just the inbound zaps that don't work. I'd be open to any suggestions.

My thoughts after using Alby Hub for Windows to connect to an LND node running on the same machine....

(1) There seems to be an issue when LND uses self-signed certificates, which is the default behavior. AlbyHub complains that the certificate isn't trusted, and this happens even if the self-signed certificate is added to the Trusted Root Authorities folder in the Windows Certs console. What I ended up doing was creating a dedicated DNS entry for LND (lnd.mydomain.com), and then getting a free SSL cert from one of the countless free providers, including that DNS name on the certificate. I forced LND to use that certificate instead of the self-signed one and then referenced it in the AlbyHub setup. That seemed to clear up the error.

(2) If you make any errors during the initial setup of AlbyHub, even something simple like a misspelling or forgetting into include the Grpc port suffix (:10009), you can't correct it. You'll end up getting an error along the lines of "the product has already been setup." I believe I sent you a screenshot. To fix this, you have to close the app, delete the alby data folder from both %appdata% and %localappdata%, restart the app, and try the configuration again.

(3) Since this is a UI app, not a service, you'll probably want the default behavior to minimize the app to the system tray when the user clicks the close button, rather than terminating the app. That's the way long-running apps usually behave if they have a UI (see bitcoin-core UI, Telegram, Signal, etc. for example). It's what we Windows users expect. :)

(4) It would be nice to see BTC quantities expressed in BTC instead of sats, or at least provide the option to toggle. Not a deal-killer, just a personal preference issue. Dealing with unwieldy sat quantities (e.g. 78,300,000 sats) instead of more reasonable BTC quantities (e.g. .783 BTC) presents an extra mental conversion hurdle, albeit a small one, that users have to jump through when figuring out how much they want to send or receive. I'm guessing the decision to use sats has something to do with GetAlby's history as a preferred method of "zapping" NOSTR users, which is typically done in micro quantities, like 50 sats at a time?

one question i have is how do i rebalance channels from the alby hub web interface?

nope it's working now i just needed to have at least 2 channels, got two on megalith and two on olympus

i've opened a few more channels now to a couple different peers, hopefully that makes things different... the error i get from wallet of satoshi is no route

hah the routing fee was 10k sats for some reaon on my inbound

Thanks WIll 😎