That’s a bit premature to say it’s dead. If you buy non-KYC and use coinjoins you get pretty good privacy. If you use Lightning on to is even better.

So, dead? No.

More expensive and not as easy? Probably

IF YOU DO NOT LIKE THE DIRECTION THINGS ARE HEADING. DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

TALK IS CHEAP.

Bend the knee to ESG.

Don’t call bitcoin money.

Tie your identity to the blockchain.

This is how we win.

I'm quite bullish on Bitcoin scaling tech and privacy tech.

Fee spikes are incentives to build more scaling solutions and to use the ones that have been built. Without fee spikes or the mindfulness that fee spikes can materialize at any time, there is no significant demand to build them or use them.

It's painful when it happens but it's necessary to grow. And stress tests help ensure that you are building the tech correctly rather than relying on shortcuts that only work temporarily.

Same thing for privacy solutions. Privacy tech has to be like a hydra; if one head gets cut off then it grows more. Privacy solutions behind every blade of grass.

Which country is the freest right now?

Almost all bitcoiners larp anonymity. What Satoshi did was amazing, there no comparison, all the communication and so few breadcrumbs, even the red herrings he planted, it's a work of art.

simplex is getting better. long way to go. nostr:note1v7egytlgdpcd9axv5gpf3u7qy8tyzgxvajr9z4efn9ecfqcwc5rq6r7ter

“The best idea if you want to make 10x your money is to buy something that everybody in the world needs, nobody in the world can stop, and almost nobody understands.” - @saylor #bitcoin

Podcast from 🇧🇷 youtu.be/LDuilT2I1I4?si… via @YouTube

Why does it feel good? Bc u know u don't have an offramp just like some btc folks might be bumping into soon?

Get out of Monero while you can?

The entire developed world tax apparatus that was built in the 20th century and extends into the 21st century depends on ubiquitous financial surveillance.

They are not going to give that up without a fight. I have been saying at a number of conferences and podcasts that privacy is the main battleground for the next decade.

Back in the 19th century and before, money was mostly private. There were plenty of dictators but there was no major method of surveilling all transactions. Therefore things like broad income taxes were untenable to enforce.

But in the 20th century as money increasingly moved around at the speed of light, people needed bank accounts to keep up. It wasn’t all forced on them; they chose it. And those bank accounts were centralized, surveillable, and ruggable.

This allowed authorities to switch to income taxes, which require ubiquitous financial surveillance to work. And ultimately it allowed them to switch to fiat currency altogether.

Now in the 21st century, Bitcoin and its various layers allow people to hold and move around money globally without permissioned banks. They can do so peer to peer, or they can do so with custodians and open layers, etc. Unlike the base layer of fiat, the base layer of bitcoin is permissionless.

But this represents a threat to the entire current system of taxation and financial control. If bitcoin and particularly various private methods on top of it were to be adopted at massive scale, the entire tax structure and other things would need to reshape themselves around that reality. And so they won’t make it easy; they will try to criminalize financial privacy as much as possible while the network is still pretty small.

The only solutions are to 1) make privacy tech so ubiquitous that it can’t be isolated and can spread organically in a distributed way and 2) to apply legal pressure when possible so that governments sort of have to operate within the bounds of their own law, like the 1st and 4th amendments.