Imagine being Bitboy, the OG bitcoiner who designed the bitcoin logo and being ashamed to say your pseudonym because of a shitcoin scammer.
A few years ago I wrote stories about people using AI to simplify lawyerspeak. And now I'm doing exactly that with chatgpt.
I can't even write sci-fi anymore.
I'm listening to the Wandering Inn while walking and there are some mages who are offended if someone calls them wizards or sorcerers and I thought that's exactly the obscure kind of distinction we set for bitcoin, not crypto. But normies don't give a fuck.
Should you invest in that altcoin?
I'm a bitcoin maxi, but let's forget about that for a moment.
From a computer science point of view, let's say you invest in an altcoin because of its speed, anonymity, programmability or whatever.
Fine.
Ask yourself this:
Are people running nodes for that blockchain? Are they running miners, if applicable, or validators? Do you personally know people running one? Can you yourself run one without a serious investment of time and capital?
Because I can.
I'm running a bitcoin node and a miner. If everything crashes, I will single handedly maintain the entire bitcoin protocol.
Can your altcoin survive a total system crash or are you just dependent on someone else?
I keep thinking about this argument. I put up my work for sale but a lot of it is also free, available on torrents or with value for value.
We'll see how it goes.
All the people carrying a "Zap me" button at Baltic Honeybadger had it set to show up their nostr npub.
One thing I liked about the whole art and NFT thing is that it finally brought the artist and the fan or the collector closer together.
Same as with books, I don't care much for dead people's creations. It's a new world and we can engage with creators in profound ways, collecting, zapping them, voting on their polls, giving input in their beta versions.
The dead don't reply and usually their work is overrated anyway. Support the living.
I predict a new wave of bitcoin hippies emerging pretty soon. A bunch of millionaires travelling around the world in places like Costa Rica, taking psychedelic drugs, working remotely, having a sort of decentralized memetic governance.
We often compare the network effects of fax machines, phones or smartphone adoption when talking about bitcoin.
But the genius of bitcoin is that the requirements to run it are minimal, you don't even need an extra computer to run a node. You can find computers in the trash that can run core.
The barrier to entry is nonexistent and we're going to see exponential adoption in the global South that will blow our minds.
I'm watching Halt and Catch Fire Season 4, for some reason I had missed the entire last season. And they're making competing search engines, one is a curated database by passionate experts and the other is algorithmic. We all know who won historically, Google dominated the space and yahoo type sites fizzled
But now with the advent of AI-generated content where anyone can create endless amounts of crap, I predict niche, curated sites will re-emerge.
Oh great. Twitter now grabs x dot com links that don't embed on my articles.
But the twitter domain is still the main one. Expect a massive amount of broken links all over the web.
I mirror most of them and copy the text into quotes and so on but not on all of them. It's a mess.
I have plenty of SSDs and a good graphics card, that's the only reason I've been able to work on anything. I'm going to get a machine with dual Xeon processors.
I used to have one years ago and it was my favourite workstation ever.
I decided instead of going to another bitcoin conference to finally upgrade my workstation.
The trick going forward isn't user generated content. 90% of everything people make is crap and they have poor taste.
No, the trick is curated user generated content. Especially now with the advent of AI-generated crap.
Remember that the very opinionated person on bitcoin twitter arguing with you most likely doesn't know shit about how it works.
21energy has plenty. Tell them I sent you.
Nostr is the bitcoin superapp. I have 12 lightning wallets. I don't really need another one.
The existing ones need to add a bunch of functionality into them.
Nobody gives a shit how cool your wallet is.
Breez used to be the lightning wallet I would suggest to people because it has app integration built in, and it solves the problem of "what the heck do I do with the bitcoins you just sent to me?"
Now the app I recommend is nostr..
Okay the nerdminer thing is getting out of hand.
I like it as an educational tool but the hashrate is negligible.
Buy an S9, they're cheap right now. Swap out the fans for Noctua silent ones. Run BraiinsOS+ so you can underclock it.
Demonstrate mining with actual hashrate.
Make RPGs isometric again.
@openoms used the term "Blockdays since Genesis: 4500" and it's so much better than blockheight for human use.
"Please send me your calendly."
Men used to hunt.
People will keep giving you advice to focus on one thing, to keep it simple. Your social media, your book, your product.
Those people are idiots.
Specialization is for insects.
So nooby
I'm at the noob day in Riga, for the Baltic Honeybadger. Am I a honeybadger now?
He's Making a List, he's Checking it Twice
You’re Santa Claus. Gift bitcoin at every opportunity. Weddings, birthdays, namedays, anniversaries.
People in Greece and Russia like to commemorate a big event like an engagement or a wedding with something gold. Turn this custom into an opportunity for orange-pilling. Gift them bitcoin, it’s digital gold after all.
Keep it simple. Just load up a wallet with some sats, write the seed words down on a piece of paper with simple instructions on how to recover the funds and give it to them in a nice envelope along with your best wishes.
When people ask about bitcoin, demonstrate how easy it is to transact with lightning. Get them to download a simple wallet like Wallet of Satoshi, tell them to tap “Receive,” scan their QR code and send them 1000 sats. The number looks impressive but it’s a negligible amount, at least at the time of writing this in 2023.
The whole thing looks like a magic trick from their perspective. Downloading an app, hitting a button, scanning a QR code and instantly receiving sats looks like magic.
Purists and cypherpunks cry out about this, that we’re orange-pilling people the wrong way, we’re not teaching them about self-custody, that Wallet of Satoshi is custodial and that’s not real bitcoin and so on.
Who cares?
Nobody has time to educate everyone.
We’re talking about a 2-minute interaction here. If you’re sitting down with an interested party who’s into learning how to bitcoin the right way, by all means.
Go with a non-custodial hybrid solution like Phoenix Wallet, Breez or Zeus, show them how to write down their seed words, explain how important they are, demonstrate how to recover their wallet.
But it’s in a case-by-case situation. Sometimes you’re in a taxi, talking to the driver. Sometimes you’re talking to a waitress in Prague at the end of her shift and you tell her, “I want to tip you with bitcoin, would you like that?”
And every bitcoiner at the table chips in.
That last bit happened for real after a round of beers with Evan Kaloudis during BTCPrague. It helps having other friends to keep it going, like the passionate KenobiNakamoto taking the opportunity to explain to the waitress where she could spend the satoshis we all tipped her.
My point is, that since you’ve taken up the role of orange-piller, that you’re now the Orange Santa Claus. Set aside a few thousand sats on a user-friendly lightning wallet and when the opportunity arises, gift them to people. If you can’t afford to gift out sats to everyone, show your work on social media like twitter (X) or nostr, tell other bitcoiners that you’ve been talking to this person and that person, post a photo, either with their face or concealed, ask for permission, and get people to zap them some sats over the internet. If you have a good enough following and the timing is right that might be even more effective than just sending it yourself. The recipient might get zaps from around the world. Joe Nakamoto does this quite well.
No matter how you do it, keep it simple, fast and easy. Remember, after bitcoin itself, our time is scarce and limited. You want to tease people to look into bitcoin but you can’t do that work for them. It might trigger a search, they might forget it for years and then come back later as hardcore maxis, they might go into shitcoins, they might ignore it and forget about it the next day.
Keep your time and sats invested into this to a minimum because you’re going to be doing this for a long time.
Read my orange pilling guide. https://georgesaoulidis.com/weneedtotalkaboutbitcoin
I've cancelled my Zoom because it's forcing a TOS on me that can keep my recordings and train AI with them. I don't mind personally but their actions show that they act like they're too big to fail. They're not.
What are other alternatives that can record sessions?
I tried to read some of this guy's @MaxiDerangement arguments. It's good to listen to some opposing opinions every now and then. And all the arguments are lightning doesn't work, nostr doesn't work, I'm anonymous look at me, KYC is bad, monero monero monero, the entire time thinking he's really anonymous on twitter. Which is a joke.
Now I'll go back to using bitcoin lightning 50 times per day, thank you.
Self-custody your own bitcoin keys but make sure you add in a real-world hassle to accessing them. Like splitting multisig in two different houses. Op vault codes where there's a time delay might help as well, allowing you to sleep on it.
I know I am prone to impulsive decisions, I can imagine a scenario where I can be psyoped to do some transaction in haste.
Honestly that's the only thing that scares me with self-custody.
Which one of these looks like progress?
I have to finish my to-do list in time to travel to Riga.
It's the other way around, and if you're not seeing it you're delusional. Monero's use case is supposed to be anonymity, and yet bitcoin, a completely open blockchain that is traceable by anyone is still being used in half the black market transactions where there are real-world concequences to being tracked. That proves bitcoin's anonymity tools do work and that the rest of the transactions are just being carried on because of the monero delusion.