You are joking right?

I'll spell it out for you: right now the internet is serves by hundreds (thousands?) Of internet service providers. Dont like atnt? Go to sprint.

Starlink is ONE SERVICE PROVIDER. A CENTRALIZED PROVIDER OF INTERNET COMMUNICATION.

Musk is such a freedom fighter isn't he?

#meme #memes #memestr

Well that’s undoubtedly where it’s headed without a sly roundabout fix.

When a spendable UTXO is worth $1M (in today’s dollars) and a node costs $200 (in today’s dollars)?

If the world is on a bitcoin standard and you are a nocoiner pleb, you'll still be using bitcoin backed services and benefitting from deflationary money. Therefore it would be common sense to run a node if you can, to help further decentralise the network and thereby contribute to a fairer society.

Thank you for engaging in this thought exercise! It’s really useful to play through such hypotheticals and challenge one’s own thinking and biases, appreciate that you’re willing to do that in good faith 😊

We agree a hardfork/rollback ain’t happening in the case of “theft” then. The entity whose coins were “stolen” can try but the fork will not gain any traction. I’m using quotation marks as this scenario could be done via legislation/Executive Order or as a straight up heist, either way, once the coins move is when the game theory kicks in.

If we take your presumption that they do this overtly to known addresses, leaving motives aside, let’s play that out.

We can blacklist or not.

If we softfork to blacklist and burn those coins (ie make them unspendable / not fungible with BTC) we reduce the supply cap by that amount. Existing HODLers benefit as their share of BTC goes from X/21M to X/21M-Burn making their coins more scarce and therefore more valuable. The thief, be it USGov or anyone else, is defunded and goes to zero.

BTC has now demonstrated that the network is not neutral. It can and will boot participants it does not want to hold it. That’s a BIG change.

This could possibly be overcome with the right propaganda but could just as easily be used as a narrative against it. We’re in a different world with adoption/knowledge/state strength etc if this is playing out so it’s difficult to judge how this might go - we’re looking too far ahead with too many variables.

Alternatively there is no softfork.

The world knows the addresses, no hardfork/rollback is happening, no softfork gains any traction.

We now have the biggest honeypot in history.

If it’s the USGov who 6102ed the coins, whoever is in charge is now effectively dictator and can’t be removed (think on the nature of holding the keys in multisig and who would be trusted). No more elections, how can you trust a new guy to come in and not steal that much wealth for himself or his cronies? (Bukele ain’t going anywhere BTW!) They gonna setup a Supreme Court of key holders? 😂

If it’s some private entity who takes the coins before a 6102, I guess it would come down to their motives. Do they want to airdrop it to millions of plebs? Do they want to fund global socialism? Does some bloke want to be a modern day Mansa Musa? Too many scenarios to nail down.

Either way, there is now a massive honeypot of coins which was just proved to be stealable.

Why would they be forked off? To discourage more theft I guess.

What if the network likes what they’re doing? Then maybe it won’t be restricted. And if it’s for something the network doesn’t like (ie the WEF agenda), maybe then it is.

Maybe we’re willing to see them be restolen. Maybe it brings too much heat to Bitcoiners getting wrench attacked in this new dynamic.

Again we’re into too many variables..

I can see paths where your softfork might happen but I think it’s extremely unlikely. Bitcoiners would be super reluctant to change consensus on 21M even if it favoured them short term, they’d probably be so well funded at this point that they could launch their own offence against such an actor and flip things into a different direction, depending on who has the coins and what they try to do with them I suppose.

What's the next big feature you want Amethyst to have?

visionary. and nobody is listening.

Yes those are fair points.

But play through what you said and ask, how?

How would they try to execute this fork? Remember blocks are going to keep being added to the chain whilst this entity realises what has happened, then they have to communicate it to everyone, blocks keeps getting added.

1/3 of the world is offline and asleep at any one time so they won’t see what’s happening for hours at best, those that are online will be laughing, some will be crying, meanwhile blocks keep being added.

Hours in it will become clear the tx can’t be undone as Bitcoin has continued adding block after block after block. Time doesn’t stop.

So I’m not disagreeing they might try something but what is the practicality of the how?

Almost all of finance/investing can be summed up as shorting abundant things and going long scarce things.

And yet, many people spend the vast majority of their effort trying to go long abundant things and short scarce things precisely during the 10% of the time when that works, instead of going to therapy or something.

Yep technically forks can happen, you're right. The problem behind hard forks is that once the opportunity of changing the rules is given, eventually people form lobbies to change other rules. If we just forked away because of government 6102 order, why can't we also include in the fork a supply increase? or a blocksize increase to 32GB? Or a dynamic blacklisting of adresses by miners? Or the seizure of Satoshi's coins? etc.

If you think I'm just riffing, look at all the other protocols that hard forked in the past...that is the issue. Once the immutability is broken, you're done with the "immutability" narrative.

> Bitcoin is not gold because Bitcoin can fork.

Yes, but the only "gold-like Bitcoin " is the Bitcoin that technically respected the status quo...all the others are just shitcoin.

Given that if the government steals coins, that means Bitcoin's legitimation, which is a win in itself.

Anyways, stolen coins are still valid coins because...they're just coins, such as stolen gold bars are still gold bars.

The fact that a lot of coins are sitting in one's priv keys, being the keys of a government or an individual, is somehow a natural evolution of how capital works. Bitcoin is not a Maoist dream in which every user holds the same amount of coins...so we must accept the existence of big coin stacks, like possibly a government's stack.

I’ve posted multiple times that I think Coinbase are going to be targeted when BTC goes up - if some group goes and robs Blackrock of 500k coins before the USGov can 6102 them, are we going to blacklist that too?

If the choice is between USGov 6102ing without impact and Noderunners blacklisting addresses, I’ll take the former.

They’ve just created a massive fucking honeypot again that some group can go after, rob, and send via irreversible transaction out of their custody.

No theft of Bitcoin should see wallets blacklisted. “Soft” blacklisted ok, but not via consensus.

So you're saying to blacklist at the protocol level? I don't think that would set a good precedent.

For starters a lot of us are not American.

People steal bitcoin all the time. Would you care to do that if the CCP did that to the Chinese?

21 million is consensus, not 18.9 million.

We gonna get rid of Satoshi’s coins while we’re at it? Which other addresses are we going to blacklist?

Once you open Pandora’s box there’s no going back

You think so?

That would be contentious as fuck

What would that achieve? The only transactions us gov might do is to other nation states.

The US Gov has ~1,158,078 BTC or 5.51% of total supply within 6102 reach.

This is the biggest threat facing Bitcoin and by extension, Bitcoiners. nostr:note1kh8h3vvjrkx3llcsl8dv3cdkqzhyk6yy6h7am5k73l5jy5dh3ewsk8xnk9

For those that are scared of quantum computers:

“If SHA-256 became completely broken, I think we could come to some agreement about what the honest block chain was before the trouble started, lock that in and continue from there with a new hash function.”

- Satoshi Nakamoto

#SlyRoundaboutWay

Reputable Stanford Macro Economist said to me:

"You still can't have effective money without a Central Bank, Regardless of what these people who believe in Bitcoin say".

What say you? #asknostr

The Web is taken.

They control your data: Servers can change anything you send at any time: E-mails, medical records, private family pictures, social media posts, orders etc. You won't even notice it. Not only they can change, but you can also create new content as if they were made by you. Your history is written by them.

Servers do too much: They convinced us we don't have enough processing power and moved all the logic from our applications into servers. Even though a phone has an equivalent processing power than a single server today, we believe we must use complicated server architectures to achieve anything in the web. Phones are the cloud.

Everything is a rental: You don't own your domain name. It's a rental. Your server is a rental. Your digital certificate is a rental. You don't own anything. Your digital identity is a rental.

Data Silos force you to stay: Moving is too hard. They profit on making things just difficult enough to keep your around. After all, it's just 9.99 a month.

Enter the Verifiable Web

Own your keys, own your content. No one can write for you. No one can change what you write.

Sign everything you send. Every little like, every little key press. If it wasn't signed, it didn't happen.

Verify everything you receive. Trust the signer, not the servers in between.

You decide how data gets to you and where it stays. Your digital history is assembled by you.

Welcome to Nostr

#Bitcoin Monetary Policy

European War Bonds, the greatest robbery of the 21st Century

Ursula Von Der Brujen & Company have decided that Europe has no better thing to do than to go into war economy and start producing weapons like there is no tomorrow. To do this she has said that we need to print a trillion Euros, which will take the form of Eurobonds.

These Eurobonds have the peculiarity that they will be backed by the public treasuries of each country (the rowers), therefore they are guaranteed, i.e.: Before we stop paying pensions than Eurobonds.

With these Eurobonds, 65% of the weapons will be bought abroad (i.e. from the United States) and 35% in Europe.

The main European arms companies are already in the hands of the United States, so in practice that 35% will also go to the United States.

At the same time, the Eurobonds will be bought by the big Wall Street companies, which will have a return for their interest and a guaranteed payment of these bonds.

In short: The rowers are going to give the United States a trillion Euros, and inflation will go up a couple of digits.