After years of pseudo-anonymity and 24/7 operation,

Bitcoin now has physical branches.

You can now go and wait in line Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and make an appointment with an official agent to discuss your decentralized investments!

Cloudflare down and I'm posting to 180 servers around the world.

That’s 100% of users tho…

So fuck off back to twitter then nostr:npub198auqkkwueclk4u3st9r8v8yrdz4hv0e2e9epg7c7teemm3lyausht0p3g

higher

With Starlink it became less fragile than ever before?

> Nostr does not fix this

and yet you posted that here because you cant post on x

Then how are you seeing this and commenting on it right now mister smarty pants??

The place where people go to comment about [CENTRALIZED PLATFORM] being down is where people eventually migrate.

nostr:note1atuvgyle6yjurg0964uq96mxkhjm9u7lnpx56qq5qg86j0vlnhjs953way

I’m gonna be honest I don’t even know what that is

Here is an updated version of my email to the bitcoindev ML, which fixes a typo:

Hi list -

I was hoping to post this on the PR, but it's still locked so I will post it here. I don't really have any other methods of addressing the public as my X account has also been suspended due to trolls reporting it. I did create a Nostr account, but Nostr doesn't seem to have many users.

There is a wild misconception floating around that the BIP I am proposing is a "legal threat from Ocean Mining". This could not be further from the truth, and I suspect this nonsense is being pushed by people who would love to see Bitcoin become a data storage service.

I would like to take this opportunity to correct the record.

Though I am in direct communication with some Ocean employees (and the BIP was originally drafted by one of them), I am not affiliated with Ocean in any way. I am just a Bitcoin dev who is concerned about the implications of Core 30 having been released and gaining adoption.

The references to "legal risks" in the BIP are not "threats". They are warnings about a major legal and moral threat that has been created by Bitcoin Core 30's officially designating Bitcoin as a storage service for files up to 100kB. Specifically, there is an unknown level of risk that node operators could be classified as sex offenders (or some other type of criminals depending on the content) for possessing and distributing toxic content.

This threat does not come from me, or from Ocean, but rather from Core 30 and its effect on node operators themselves, their consciences, and the communities in which they live. Core 30 forces every single node operator, from the moment toxic content is posted to the blockchain until the end of time, to be complicit in sexual (or other) crimes via possession and distribution of illegal data.

So now that Core 30 is gaining adoption, it's very likely that, given the choice of whether to participate in Bitcoin or not, most normal people will simply choose not to participate, and then Bitcoin becomes just another BSV. If Core had just left the OP_RETURN limit where it was, no significant legal threat would exist, and no consensus changes would be urgently needed.

I am not saying "I'm going to sue you if you don't support the fork". That is ridiculous.

I am saying "you probably want to support this fork if aiding and abetting sex offenders (and potentially being one yourself) does not appeal to you, and you may not want to run a node once Core 30's new default policies become the standard (which is about to happen)."

Most Bitcoiners I know signed up for permissionless money, and believe strongly in the freedom to transact, even for people who do things we don't like, since the vision of a maximally neutral monetary standard is why we're all here in the first place. Because Bitcoin's purpose is to be permissionless money, simply storing and forwarding a record of an "illegal" purchase is acceptable to most node operators, because that is the price of entry for trustless, digital money.

Storing and forwarding actual illegal content, in the clear, however, is not a problem Bitcoin was ever intended to solve, nor something in which Bitcoin node operators are interested in participating. Indeed, permissionless censorship-resistant data storage is probably not a sustainable idea, without some kind of periodic payment to the person tasked with storing the data.

In any case, forcing all Bitcoin node operators to knowingly commit crimes totally unrelated to the operation of Bitcoin as permissionless money, for the rest of eternity, is obviously a foolish idea and will quickly lead to node centralization and irrelevance if we do not act. Yet this heavy-handed and completely unnecessary imposition is precisely what Core 30 achieves, unless it is enthusiastically opposed by the community. Even in the best case, Core 30's new default policies set a terrible precedent that must be immediately reversed.

Since almost all forms of illegal data can be avoided by limiting data fields to 256 bytes, BIP-444 seems like a no-brainer to me, because it neatly dodges the dark fate that awaits us down the data storage path.

Having engaged many principled Bitcoiners on this topic for a long time, I can confidently say that Bitcoiners overwhelmingly support keeping Bitcoin as permissionless money, and overwhelmingly oppose Bitcoin's block space being used for data storage. Limiting large data storage in consensus, as BIP-444 does, is the easiest way I can see to give everyone what they want.

So even if BIP-444 does not activate in its exact current form, I am dedicating myself to helping Bitcoin re-affirm its commitment to permissionless money while re-affirming its opposition to data storage. I am incorporating all feedback I am hearing (which is a lot!) into the next draft of the BIP.

Thanks again to everyone for your thoughtful and respectful engagement on this matter critically important to the future of Bitcoin. Together we will find the way forward.

Sincerely,

Dathon

Unpopular: you can and should have everything you want in life.

Space operas set 20,000 years in the future and spanning half the galaxy are pretty cool.

Anyway, here's a review of Demon in White, which I just finished. It's book #3 in the Sun Eater series, which is a 7-book epic space opera.

The crazy thing about this series is that on the first page of book one, the narrator tells you how the whole 7-book series ends: the protagonist blows up a star, which genocides an entire race of evil aliens and kills billions of humans in that solar system including his own emperor, but saves the rest of humanity throughout the galaxy from that alien threat.

So the whole series is basically a deadly serious version of, ::record scratch:: "I bet you want to know how the hell we got here, huh?"

For worldbuilding, I'd give the series a 5/5 so far. It's not hard sci fi, in the sense that there is ample use of faster-than-light travel, "high matter swords" which have some similarities to light sabers, "Royce shields" which people and ships can shield themselves with against most projectiles, etc. The author himself views it more like science fantasy, although there's more of a tech focus than, say, Star Wars. Humanity has spread across about 40% of the galaxy, and although they can travel faster than the speed of light, it's not instantaneous, and instead takes years or decades to cross a big chunk of the galaxy and they cryo-freeze themselves during the trips (they travel 100s or in rare cases 1000s of times the speed of light).

But what's cool about the worldbuilding is the culture. Kind of like Dune, AI was destroyed and outlawed long ago in a great war (and Earth was decimated by atomics in the process). The Sollan Empire, which is modeled after a blend of the British and Roman empires, spans millions of worlds. They operate with a conservative aristocratic culture, and are the most harsh against AI or cyborgs to preserve order, although their nobility are still genetically modified to live centuries and avoid most diseases. The Principalities of Jadd are culturally similar but managed to separate themselves and remain aligned with the empire, and they push their genetics a bit further. The Demarchy of Tavros is a somewhat egalitarian/communist culture that is more receptive to cyborg adaptations and computers. The Extrasolarians are basically anarcho-capitalists; they live on the edge of civilization and more fully embrace AI/cyborgs/computers and extensive body modifications to whatever extent is possible. And then there are the alien Cielcin, the main adversaries at war with humanity. There are also some god-like or cthulhu-like beings out in the vastness of space and time. The series explores the interactions between all these cultures and more.

For writing quality, I'd also give it a 5/5. It's written in first person by the aristocratic main character, Lord Hadrian Marlowe, and has a rather sophisticated aspect to it.

For pacing, I'd give it a 3/5, and that's a trade-off from the above point. Hadrian himself is wordy and melodramatic, and that colors his first-person writing of the story. So he'll make all sorts of historical or philosophical references in the middle of a fight, which makes the whole project feel reflective rather than in the moment. The books are long and could be cut by 20% or more if a more direct prose style was chosen.

Plot/characters so far are a 4/5 in my view. The plot is interesting, and there's a huge array of interesting characters. Hadrian himself is very dynamic (the reader at times is not sure if they're supposed to like him or not), a cyborg named Valka is really unique, and then all sorts of supporting characters from emperors and cyborg gods to plebian soldiers round out a big cast. Sometimes the cast is too large so that otherwise interesting characters don't get as fleshed out as much as they could. And the author consciously embraces the "chosen one" trope, which can be polarizing from a plot perspective.

Overall, I'd rate it 4/5. I've read Empire of Silence, Howling Dark, and now Demon in White. I would note that the first book, Empire of Silence, is a lot more setting-limited and character-focused than the others; it's not until Howling Dark that the series expands to a full-on space opera.

Zaps ⚡️ being tax-exempt was not on my bingo card!

Amazing opportunity for Nostr growth.

its all coming together fam

our children will live free 🫡

Hypershitcoinization