Near Uvita?

I’ll unfollow some noise and pick up some more signal.

Yes I’m trying to do that, clearly need to branch wider. Still figuring out how to use Nostr. Most of the people I follow don’t seem to post anything much.

Speaking my truth and will persist.

The real year doesn’t begin in January, it begins in March.

Nature sets the timeline, not the calendar: with the spring equinox, light overtakes darkness and biological cycles restart.

In ancient Rome, the year began in March, a month tied to action and renewal, and even the names of the months still reflect that original order.

January is an administrative agreement.

March is a real reset.

The end of 2025 marks two years since our family switched entirely to a Bitcoin standard. Two years ago we chose to stop earning fiat altogether, began earning Bitcoin only, spending Bitcoin whenever possible, and saving in Bitcoin.

We are starting this year with more sats in cold storage than ever before. #thankyousatoshi

Bitcoin mining balances grids, mitigates methane, prevents wasted energy and promotes sustainable energy as a byproduct of economic necessity

Once you grok how this works, you graduate to informed Bitcoin mining critic: you realize Bitcoin mining doesn't use enough energy

Bitcoin mining balances grids, mitigates methane, prevents wasted energy and promotes sustainable energy as a byproduct of economic necessity

Once you grok how this works, you graduate to informed Bitcoin mining critic: you realize Bitcoin mining doesn't use enough energy

Good article. You always have to keep in mind that not everyone has technical knowledge, and not everyone enjoys this kind of stuff like we nerds do. If you want to scale, you have to take that into account. Nostr is on the right path. And if not everyone fully gets it, that’s also a feature.

Some people are simply better off elsewhere.

Clearly lots of people on Nostr are excited about Bitcoin.

For this platform to grow outside of a small niche it will need to expand well beyond this central topic in 2026 to encompass a much more diverse range of conversations.

There no better signal than on #nostr 🤙💜🧱

#grownostr

Back in 2016 i did a first snowboard decent of Lo's Gile a 900 vertical meter couloir in Vang, Norway. Since its south west facing the conditions are not allways right and i had aborted two previous attempts back in 2015 due to avalange danger. Then after scouting the line from the other side of the valley a fine day in April 2016 arrived with the right conditions and i made it work. 😅

I've been thinking & feeling around this for a while (about 2 years).

I left my job 2 years ago & so my doing deceased substantially. But my doing was not purposeful. I thought it was but none of it really mattered. It was all devoted to an outcome (earning money) & really didn't reflect who I truly was. It was action based on fear, a fear of not having enough.

That first line rings true, we are not here to do, we're here to be. That is, we're here to discover & remember who we truly are & then express that knowing to the world. We do that so that others may use it as a an example & so help them to do the same.

It's not about the outcome, it's about the purest expression of our highest selves.

💚🫂🌀

#Bitcoin was not designed to be an IOU.

It was designed to remove the need for trusted intermediaries in money.

When you hold Bitcoin through:

– ETFs

– custodial exchanges

– broker apps

– derivatives and paper claims

you do not hold Bitcoin.

You hold a promise denominated in Bitcoin.

That distinction matters.

Paper Bitcoin recreates the exact system Bitcoin was built to escape:

• custodians control access

• regulators control custodians

• price discovery moves off-chain

• users lose sovereignty

If most “Bitcoin ownership” exists as paper claims, then Bitcoin becomes:

– easy to freeze

– easy to censor

– easy to rehypothecate

– easy to politically capture

The protocol still works.

The rules don’t change.

But the people stop using it as designed.

Bitcoin’s security model assumes:

– users self-custody

– nodes independently verify

– transactions settle on the base layer (or trust-minimised layers)

ETFs do none of this.

They increase price exposure while reducing network participation.

That is why ETFs strengthen fiat markets, not Bitcoin.

Bitcoin does not gain strength from number go up.

It gains strength from:

– self-custody

– real settlement

– node verification

– voluntary use

If you don’t run a node, you trust someone else’s rules.

If you don’t self-custody, you don’t control your money.

If you never transact, you don’t participate in the system.

Bitcoin survives paperization.

But it does not benefit from it.

If Bitcoin is treated only as a speculative asset,

it will be absorbed into the system it was meant to replace.

If it is used as money,

it remains outside that system.

The choice is not institutional vs retail.

The choice is custody vs sovereignty.

Use Bitcoin.

Verify Bitcoin.

Hold your own keys.

That is how Bitcoin stays Bitcoin.

In the year 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was led to a stake in the heart of Paris, surrounded by a crowd of thousands. She had been condemned as a heretic—the first person the Paris Inquisition would burn for refusing to recant.

Her crime was writing a book.

Marguerite Porete was born around 1250 in the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. She was highly educated, likely from an aristocratic family, and she joined the Beguines—a movement of women who devoted themselves to spiritual life without taking formal vows or submitting to male religious authority.

The Beguines lived by their own rules. They worked among the poor, prayed in their own communities, and sought God on their own terms. This freedom made Church authorities nervous. Women living outside male control, speaking about God without clerical permission, threatened the very foundations of institutional power.

Marguerite took this freedom further than most.

Sometime in the 1290s, she wrote a mystical text called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It was a conversation between allegorical figures—Love, Reason, and the Soul—describing seven stages of spiritual transformation. At its heart was a radical idea: that a soul could become so completely united with divine love that it no longer needed the Church's rituals, rules, or intermediaries. In the highest states of union, the soul surrendered its will entirely to God—and in that surrender, found perfect freedom.

"Love is God," she wrote, "and God is Love."

She did not write her book in Latin, the language of clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French—the language ordinary people spoke. This meant her dangerous ideas could spread beyond monastery walls, beyond the control of priests and bishops.

And spread they did.

Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes, forcing Marguerite to watch her words turn to ash. He commanded her never to circulate her ideas again.

She refused.

Marguerite believed her book had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. She had consulted three respected theologians before publishing it, including the esteemed Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines, and they had approved. She would not let one bishop's condemnation silence what she believed to be divine truth.

She continued sharing her book. She continued teaching. She continued insisting that the soul's relationship with God belonged to no earthly institution.

In 1308, she was arrested and handed over to the Inquisitor of France, a Dominican friar named William of Paris—the same man who served as confessor to King Philip IV, the monarch who was simultaneously destroying the Knights Templar. It was a busy time for burning heretics.

Marguerite was imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months. During that entire time, she refused to speak to her inquisitors. She would not take the oath required to proceed with her trial. She would not answer questions. She maintained absolute silence—an act of defiance that infuriated the authorities.

A commission of twenty-one theologians from the University of Paris examined her book. They extracted fifteen propositions they deemed heretical. Among the most dangerous: the idea that an annihilated soul, fully united with God, could give nature what it desires without sin—because such a soul was no longer capable of sin.

To the Church, this suggested moral chaos. To Marguerite, it described the ultimate freedom of perfect surrender.

She was given every chance to recant. Others in similar positions saved their lives by confessing error. A man arrested alongside her, Guiard de Cressonessart, who had declared himself her defender, eventually broke under pressure and confessed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Marguerite held firm.

On May 31, 1310, William of Paris formally declared her a relapsed heretic—meaning she had returned to condemned beliefs after being warned—and turned her over to secular authorities. The next day, June 1, she was led to the Place de Grève, the public square where executions took place.

The Inquisitor denounced her as a "pseudo-mulier"—a fake woman—as if her gender itself had been a lie, as if no real woman could defy the Church so completely.

They burned her alive.

But something unexpected happened in that crowd of thousands. According to the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis—a monk who had no sympathy for her ideas—the crowd was moved to tears by the calmness with which she faced her death.

She displayed, the chronicle noted, many signs of penitence "both noble and pious." Her serenity unnerved those who expected a screaming heretic. Instead, they witnessed a woman who seemed to have already transcended the fire that consumed her body.

The Church ordered every copy of The Mirror of Simple Souls destroyed. They wanted her words erased from history along with her life.

They failed.

Her book survived. Copies circulated secretly, passed from hand to hand across Europe. It was translated into Latin, Italian, and Middle English. For centuries, it was read anonymously—no one knew who had written it. The text was too powerful to disappear, even without a name attached.

It was not until 1946—more than six hundred years after her death—that a scholar named Romana Guarnieri, researching manuscripts in the Vatican Library, finally connected The Mirror of Simple Souls to its author. The woman the Church had tried to erase was finally given back her name.

Today, Marguerite Porete is recognized as one of the most important mystics of the medieval period. Scholars compare her ideas to those of Meister Eckhart, one of the most celebrated theologians of the era—and some believe Eckhart may have been influenced by her work. The book that was burned as heresy is now studied in universities as a masterpiece of spiritual literature.

Her ideas about love transcending institutional control, about the soul finding God directly without intermediaries, about surrender leading to freedom—these are not the ravings of a dangerous heretic. They are the insights of a woman centuries ahead of her time.

The Church that killed her eventually softened its stance on mystical experience. The Council of Vienne in 1312 condemned eight errors from her book, but the broader current of Christian mysticism she represented would continue flowing through figures like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, and countless others who sought direct encounter with the divine.

What the flames could not destroy was the truth she had grasped: that love, in its purest form, is greater than fear. That no institution can ultimately control the relationship between a soul and its source. That words born from genuine spiritual insight have a way of surviving every attempt to silence them.

Marguerite Porete spent her final years in silence—refusing to speak to those who demanded she deny her truth. But her book has been speaking for seven centuries.

It is still speaking now.

Artificial Intelligence is often described as a revolutionary source of knowledge — something that can think, create, and reason beyond human limits. Many people approach AI expecting it to provide insight they did not already possess. In practice, AI behaves very differently. Rather than introducing entirely new ways of thinking, it often reflects and amplifies what the user already brings into the interaction.

A useful metaphor comes from the Harry Potter book series. In the story, the Mirror of Erised is a magical mirror that does not show a person’s physical reflection. Instead, it shows their deepest desire — what they most want in their heart. The mirror does not judge or guide; it simply reflects. Some characters become obsessed with it, mistaking what they see for truth or destiny, even though it is only a projection of their inner wishes.

AI functions in a similar way.

Most modern AI systems work through prompts — written instructions or questions provided by the user. The AI responds by generating text based on patterns learned from large amounts of data. This means the quality and direction of the output are heavily shaped by the input. Clear thinking produces clear results. Vague or confused prompts produce vague or confused answers. AI does not independently decide what is important; it follows the path laid out by the user.

Because of this, AI tends to act as an amplifier. Someone who is curious will use AI to explore more deeply. Someone who is creative will use it to generate more ideas. Someone who is misinformed may receive well-written explanations that reinforce incorrect beliefs. In this sense, AI does not transform the user — it magnifies them. It gives people more of what they already are.

There is an important limitation hidden in this process. It is extremely difficult to get useful information from AI about topics you have never considered or questions you do not know how to ask. AI cannot easily take you outside your existing mental framework, because it relies on prompts that are constrained by your current understanding. You cannot request an idea you cannot yet imagine. As a result, AI often explores the edges of a person’s knowledge rather than opening entirely new territory.

This creates a common illusion. The fluency and confidence of AI responses can feel like genuine insight, even when no new understanding has been gained. Just as the Mirror of Erised shows desire rather than reality, AI can reflect beliefs, assumptions, and biases back to the user in a convincing form. Without critical thinking, this reflection can be mistaken for truth.

The real value of AI emerges when it is used differently. Instead of asking only for answers, users can ask AI to challenge their assumptions, explain opposing viewpoints, or highlight what experts in a field take for granted. These meta-questions help break the reflective loop and turn AI from a mirror into a tool for learning.

AI does not automatically provide wisdom or understanding. What it offers, first and foremost, is a reflection of the user’s mind. Whether that reflection becomes a trap or a stepping stone depends on how the mirror is used.

You've got 1 BTC to dedicate to boosting Bitcoin adoption.

A) Start a local Bitcoin education hub

B) Fund Nostr development

C) Sponsor a Bitcoin art exhibit?

What's your move and why? 👇

Growing grassroots communities through Bitcoin adoption isn't just a goal, it's our reality. Together, we'll pave a new way for humanity! 🌍

You can never verify this without trust Chris, and you know it. 😉

These charts are still in dollars. The underlying unit of account is still dollars. We don't seem to know how to measure outside it.

Here’s the brutal truth: the fiat system’s OODA loop is broken by design.

Central banks will keep printing. They have to. The math demands it. Government spending exceeds revenue. Deficits accumulate. Someone has to buy the debt. When no one will, the central bank prints. This cycle has no off switch. It repeats forever until the system collapses.

This has nothing to do with Gnosticism versus the faith tradition created many years later in the name of Jesus... though, they didn't even get that right. His name wasn't Jesus.

The name Jesus came from a series of translations and transliterations. He was known in Aramaic, his mother tongue, as Yeshua Bar Yosef (Yeshua, son of Joseph).

We haven't even begun to talk about Gnosticism.

Anyone who has studied mythology and symbology for any length of time will immediately recognize the motifs running throughout the Bible. These patterns show up across cultures and spiritual traditions, centuries before Christianity existed.

You're quoting John 8 to interpret Genesis. I'm reading Genesis as it stands.

Genesis 3:22: God confirms the serpent told the truth. "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil."

You can interpret that through later theology created by the founders of Christianity and the religion they created ABOUT Yeshua, or you can read what the creation myth of Genesis actually says.

The Genesis narrative has multiple source traditions woven together. Scholars identify at least two distinct authorial hands in the text, though some argue for four separate sources commonly known as J (Yahwist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomist), and P (Priestly).

The tale is rich with ancient symbology that predates later theological interpretations, similar to how the story of Noah and the great flood is not unique to Judaism or Christianity. That story has been used throughout multiple spiritual traditions to symbolize the washing away of the old and the ushering in of the new.

The gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written 40 to 70 years after Yeshua by anonymous communities, not by the disciples themselves. This is standard teaching in seminaries.

The names were added in the second century by church tradition, which is often done in religions to manufacture scriptural authority. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Reading a book rich with symbology, mythology, and parable as literal fact is to miss the mark. And that book, those teachings of Yeshua, are about you.

Hamartia (ἁμαρτία) is a Greek archery term that translates to missing the mark, which has been translated into the English word sin. Think about that.

To combine the Tanakh (Old Testament) and what has become called the New Testament in the same book is also to miss the mark.

The Tanakh speaks of the Judeo Father God who gets angry, becomes wrathful and vengeful, who teaches an eye for an eye.

The teachings of Yeshua were much more radical for the time. He taught to love one's neighbor as oneself, to help the needy, the concept of agape love, and that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

These teachings are much more in alignment with the Buddha, who lived 500 years before the birth of Yeshua.

These two books do not come from the same religion. When Yeshua referenced the Tanakh, he did so as any Jewish teacher would, citing scripture while teaching his radically different message of self-realization and enlightenment.

Yeshua himself never wrote anything. He wasn't a Christian. He knew nothing of the religion that would be created in his name in the years and decades after his death.

He was a Jewish mystic teaching direct experience of the divine, showing others they too could realize their unity with God.

Yeshua explicitly taught this.

Luke 17:20-21: The kingdom of God does not come with observation, nor will they say see here or see there. For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.

John 14:12: Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.

Psalm 82:6, which Yeshua quotes in John 10:34: I said, you are gods. You are all sons of the Most High.

1 Corinthians 3:16: Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in your midst?

But the religion created later flipped his message. Yes, he taught you how to awaken. Yes, he said the kingdom is within you and you're capable of what he did, and greater.

But the institution said forget all that. You're a sinner. He's special. You're not. Just believe in him, accept the sacrifice, and he'll handle everything. No inner work required.

You are God's beautiful creation... tainted at birth by original sin. You'll never be what Yeshua taught that you already are, but do your best. Show up. Tithe. Let the institution mediate your relationship with God.

Yeshua spoke Aramaic, not Greek. The gospels were written in Greek decades after his death by people who never met him.

Most English Bibles translate from those Greek texts, which means the words attributed to Yeshua have already passed through one language barrier.

The Peshitta preserves an Aramaic tradition closer to the language Yeshua actually spoke, but the version most English speakers read has been filtered through Greek theological concepts that didn't exist in his Jewish mystical context.

Just like the Buddha 500 years before, they turned a teacher of self-realization and enlightenment into an object of worship; declared that his attainment was beyond your grasp, and called anyone who actually followed his teaching a heretic.

🤔 If Eden was just the necessary prelude to enlightenment, then Christ’s entire mission makes no sense. Why would God become flesh, suffer, and die to reverse something that was actually good? The cross is either the redemption of something truly broken, or it’s cosmic theater.

Scripture doesn’t present the fall as graduation. It presents it as catastrophe requiring a Redeemer.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The serpent is there to indicate that this event had to do with a chakra activation, specifically the solarplexus which has to do with the spiritual accomplishment of self-awareness.

The whale that sold 80,000 Bitcoins for circa $9 billion usd remains unknown

1) this is privacy vs secrecy playing out perfectly. The ledger knows the transaction is done with certainty, we can see it, but the owner of the address remains private. Love it

2) a trade of this size 5 years ago would have totally smashed the market to pieces. Daily volume these days though is 60/70 billion usd remains

This is extremely bullish, both for capital growth potential, the bid is just there, crunching away, but also as a technology tailwind

So you didn't address any of the arguments in the posts and are coming out with more diversion and wishful thinking logical fallacies.

Do you know for how long people have been calling for a hyperinflation type scenario?

Maybe it will happen in Nigeria or Zimbabwe, but the US dollar system is about to get reset with stablecoins/CBDCs.

Either way, good luck.

Agree with your points. But it would take a serious pump now to smash through 200k in the next few months. Literally going vertical 😆 I do love a god candle,.but its unlikely or what's your take?

200k looking improbable for 2025. Charts dont lie.

We don’t need a perfect party or a perfect candidate. We need a critical mass of individuals committed to the simple proposition that peaceful people should be left alone.

Like Bitcoin’s network effect, this starts with each of us choosing to live by these principles and encouraging others to do the same.

The path forward isn’t through politics, it’s around it. Through voluntary association, peaceful resistance to overreach, and the patient building of parallel institutions that respect individual sovereignty.