I gave someone their first #bitcoin last night.
I technically “paid” a kind young woman attending her first ever meetup for a quick interview.
She taught me the word for non custodial in Turkish is something like soğuk cüzdan.
Anyway, I sent sats and was immediately met with the question I always get:
“Great! Where can i spend it?”
She asked ever so politely but I lost my sh*t.
🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ 😤
I mean JFC.
I tried to calm myself but I ended up yelling at her:
“YOU USELESS PLONKER U DO NOT SPEND BITCOIN.
ITS CALLED HODLING, IMBECILE.”
I then vented on X to my HODL friends and HODLed really hard.
I mean seriously- do people not know how this works yet?
If you want people to adopt bitcoin you just HODL really hard and tweet harder still. https://v.nostr.build/e0G2.mp4
I have had this experience as well. It doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin, the majority of people have literally no concept of saving anything. To them spending immediately is the only thing that makes sense.
I've been working on a family friend who is 18 and I realized that I needed to teach him how and why to save money before he could figure out anything about Bitcoin.
"How can I save in Bitcoin, I don't have any money?" Kid is at Starbucks twice a day and sees 2-3 movies a week 🤦
nostr:npub1excellx58e497gan6fcsdnseujkjm7ym5yp3m4rp0ud4j8ss39js2pn72a nostr:npub1ajlrwgfj4yerhqf7ady03h7wmtk2qr3gs7h3sxcx83k05yld36sswpzx3q
In the spirit of providing feedback for wallet devs and sharing experience with other users, I’ll give an account of an experimental transaction that I initiated today.
Scenario:
My wife using AquaWallet in Hong Kong to off ramp a small amount of BTC to cash in the local currency. There are still street level walk in exchanges in HK, for now at least, that offer exchange to/from cash of various crypto assets without KYC as long as the value is below circa US$15000.
First question to the exchange was do they accept transactions on Liquid network. Answer- No
Ok, so I got my wife to do a quick in app swap of L-BTC to L-USDT, which could then be transacted over either the ETH or Tron network. As this experiment was an attempt at using the lowest fee possible she chose Tron.
Sales girl then asks for my wife’s Tron address in order to do a risk check. She used the term “Risko” (possibly a company that provides a list of black listed wallet addresses?)
As the Tron feature of sending USDT on Aqua is, I think, in the background she wasn’t able to access my wife’s Tron wallet address because it is all labelled as the liquid wallet address in Aqua, but agreed to try with a small USD value and then get the necessary info from the Transaction #.
Transaction was successful, but significantly slower than a direct Tron network transaction.
Sales girl then said that the wallet address that was used by Aqua appears to be a “mixer” and while she would honour the very small transaction, a few USD, the company would not in future accept such a method. It wasn’t clear to me if she meant the Tron address, which was possibly a hot wallet run by Aqua or actually the Liquid address, that was being called a mixer.
This note will upset Western BTC purists. I’m fully aware that today’s on chain fees are quite low so an on chain BTC transaction would have made perfect sense but this experiment was an attempt to look at options when in future fees go mental again. It might also highlight a potential future where exchanges label Liquid network a mixing service.
I will point out that they do accept Lightning transactions but if there was a scenario in future of a much higher value transaction, that doesn’t seem plausible as of now. I’m not sure on the Lightning setup in Aqua as it might also be in the background and not self-custodied, in terms of address, at a user level.
A few questions from this.
Is Liquid considered/flagged as a mixer by exchanges/regulated vasps?
What/who is the company called “Risko” that is providing blacklisted address data to exchanges?
Does the address blacklist have any implications for Lightning addresses/nodes/Lightning “on phone type” wallet providers in the future?
I don't have definite answers to any of your questions and I have no experience with USDT or Tron. But I do know that Aqua wallet is really a liquid wallet and if you want to send it over to any other asset they use swap services. A swap service such as boltz.exchange is most likely what got flagged as a mixing wallet, probably nothing to do with liquid. This is also why the tx took longer to confirm because it needed 2 confirms on the liquid network to send to boltz (2 minutes) then they send the other asset from their wallet (in this case USDT on Tron).
I hope this helps 🤙
"No government can ban Bitcoin, they can only ban their citizens from benefiting from Bitcoin" -Someone I can't remember 🙂
All good on Amathyst 👍
Ya know, I saw this the other day and I was like, "that's cool but it'd be way over my head and I'm not sure I really want to go down that rabbit hole rn"
I see this and immediately want to buy it.
Haven't seen that one before. 🙂
One hour closer to midnight 🔥

Everyone has ideas. Most of them are terrible, but some are amazing. If you never share your ideas with the world, you'll never really know which ones are your winners.
Keep having ideas and sharing them with the world. This will be the only way to be successful on a Bitcoin standard.
To buy Bitcoin? Good call 😁
I'd say most Americans are extremely net negative dollars if you put it that way... No one is keeping dollars on hand that match their debt exposure. Is that what you mean when you say zero net exposure to dollars?
Our next meetup on this Sunday at 6pm in Northampton Massachusetts! If you are in the area, come stop by and hang out with some local bitcoiners!
There it is! 🔥
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GM nostr
Are we going back to 20:00 Moscow Time today?
10k to go!
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