The Trump admin told us they were looking to acquire Bitcoin with a "budget neutral" strategy.

Well, they may have just found one:

Engineer a short squeeze on gold, revalue the gold holdings at the peak, and buy BTC.

70% of the world's gold is refined in Switzerland.

So what happens when you slap Swiss exports with 39% tariffs, including the gold bars that New York-based Comex accepts for deliveries?

Suddenly the gold shorters in the United States have a much harder time sourcing gold to cover their positions.

Which means they need to buy existing spot or futures, driving the price higher.

An aggressive short squeeze could force gold towards $6,000 an ounce.

Which would allow the US to revalue its holdings to ~$1.5 Trillion, which would then be deposited into the US Treasury's account.

What could they buy with that $1.5 Trillion?

A ton of Bitcoin.

Are the strange 39% tariffs on Switzerland (nearly the highest in the world) a tactic to force a gold short squeeze so they can revalue their holdings and acquire a dominant BTC position?

Let's see 🍿

Come on now zero drawbacks? Everything has drawbacks.

Well, let's start off with Liquid. No sender or receiver privacy (only amount privacy), virtually zero anonymity set because no one uses it, no p2p markets/merchant adoption, and custodial. It's a worse Monero on almost every dimension, besides longterm price, but if you care about that why not just hodl Bitcoin securely?

UX on Lightning sucks. Inbound/outbound liquidity is unintuitive and clunky. The larger the payment the more likely it is to fail at routing. To acheive strong privacy (from both counter parties and third parties) and actually retain sovereignty you have to jump all these hoops which is why vast majority use custodians or LSPs that diminish your privacy, permission your transactions, and the former can rug you.

Liquid and Lightning have different trade offs to Monero, but if it works for you more power to you. There is nothing mutually exclusive about saving with Bitcoin long term, as you said, and using something else as digital cash for the short term. It's been a toss up at shorter time scales as to which performs better.

"You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

I’m not exactly a chart guru, but we’ve barely been above the median so far this entire cycle. What does that tell you?

no, I use Payment At Maturity. i don’t owe money until the end of the loan

I have a negative fiat net worth, get paid in bitcoin, save in bitcoin, pay bills, and never have to sell bitcoin or incur a taxable event with my bitcoin-backed loans.

I live my life on bitcoin and my life gets half off every 1-2 years on average (1.44 years with 50% BTC CAGR to be exact).

Might need to make a video tutorial on this if people don't get it. It is magical.

I never understood this take. 🤷‍♂️

You want it so that you can absolutely verify that the fiat makes its way onto the blockchain; if not you, who else? 💁‍♂️

Use Strike/Square (or whatever service) so it's seamless & then convert as many cuckbucks as you can. You could even include a nice little fact sheet w/the the product that outlines the ethos of the company & why #Bitcoin / #BTC is a part of that ethos to increase awareness in a way that feels like discovery to the user; all this post does is mask bad UX as ethos. 🫴

We can tell each other to go fuck ourselves because we "get it" & it's funny, but abrasiveness doesn't breed normie adoption & limits your business's potential. Go win harder, fam. 🤙

I’ve had a few ppl over the past week, tell me they didn’t order, because I charge sats, and they wanted to pay in fiat.

If you don’t want your fiat, why do I?

Nice clickbait articles that are taking the word of a single shitcoiner (who you wouldn't take at their word, with no evidence, in any other scenario), but I'm asking you to point it out directly through known pool hashrate, leftover unreported hashrate, or orphaned blocks.

It doesn't exist and didn't come anywhere close to what Qubic was claiming even before the supposed DDoS. You can verify yourself with my previous links.

I’m living a nice and wholesome life

I wake up every morning without setting any alarm and do what I love all day long

But I’m still pissed off that I joined a revolution that never happened

Everything we used to say that would happen with Bitcoin went down the drain

Now it’s a stonk, just an instrument to speculate on in hopes of making more US dollars

It didn’t progress towards becoming a currency that competes with the dollar

It didn’t progress technically to encourage freedom fighters around the world to use it

Outside of making more dollars, there’s nothing that it does that other networks do better

It doesn’t have a killer use case anymore

The user experience sucks compared to fintech

All we have is hope that the ship will eventually turn around

But even the OGs who joined for ideological reasons seem to be selling

So who remains to defend the principles of the early days?

Who will still want to end the Fed when the Fed is making you more US dollars?

I don’t even see my friends around anymore, they either turned into insufferable suits or else they left the space

It’s depressing, really. This is not what many of us signed up for and I feel deceived

I spent nearly a decade promoting Bitcoin as freedom tech, but now the FBI is allegedly happier when their targets use bitcoin instead of cash (as suggested by Peter Thiel)

I feel sorry for some of the people I onboarded, who used custodial Lightning wallets that probably rugged them

I sometimes feel like a fraud who pushed false advertisement

But ultimately, I wish more bitcoiners demanded a change. Anything that lets developers build cool stuff and new use cases.

CTV, CAT, BIP300, I don’t even care at this point. Just push the boundaries, make Bitcoin technologically exciting again.

The bankers might fuck us, the old cypherpunks might sell out, but at least give the rest of us some cool toys to play with.

But no, “there’s no consensus”

Fuxking bullshit

Over the last 2 years I've bought over 1300 DVDs (and blue rays) and over 600 CD's.

I've also got loads of retro games (from atari 2600 up to ps4) on cartridge and CD.

I want to own my own medi., I've seen too many examples of things being edited, censored or banned, and I want to have the original.

Plus, I don't have to deal with adverts, reduced quality, lack of internet or monthly charges. Most of the films and music I got came from charity shops for virtually free (some shops do 5 or 10 dvds for the equivalent of $1.

Most people think I'm insane :) but they can go do face scans to listen to their favorite metal album on Spotify, I'll carry on doing my thing :)

Buy Monero as an investment or use Monero as a tool?

Normies will just use Monero instead.

Normies will just use Monero instead.

I dont see how that makes BTC more private for the normie.

You are absoluely right - but lets reflect for a moment:

With Bitcoin we are promoting a public, transparent ledger without privacy and where the Feds and CEX know your withdrawal addresses - and therefore all future (and past) transactions.

Custodial Lightning does not make it better.

Looks like Bitcoin is not coming to help us.

I do not know what to do (except moving away from BTC) - do you?

Greyjay or newpipe

Met a couple friends new gf and bf this evening. Lovely people. Totally obvious.

What do you do?

I make videos!

What about?

Bitcoin . Lots of second hand embarrassment, too!

Bitcoin? Isn’t that dangerous.

Convo 2:

Bitcoin videos? Do you get paid by a bitcoin?

Not really. Bitcoin is just a new technology like the Internet or idk, Bluetooth.

So you can be paid by the Internet?

🫠 🫠

Fuck me we’re so early

Still here 🫡 & still here sweating bullets over 1sat/vB transactions no matter how dead it is 😅 to me, this mempool makes me think that lightening & ecash is going to work out… all the bitcoiners I know who didn’t trust lightening last cycle (including me) and were regularly on-chain, are now daily & weekly transacting with Blink/Alby/Aqua/WoS/Nostr wallets etc and doing a LOT less base layer transactions… we onboard newbs directly to lightening first + seeing a LOT of bitcoiners confidently accepting and buying with sats on lightening layer rather than onchain for smaller amounts/anything under $1K… I have to imagine that is a LOT of pressure relief for the base layer… which kind of makes sense to expect… a lot more going on here that a non-tech pleb like me doesn’t understand… but with shitcoining on the base layer at an all-time-low (for the moment) during a bull run, boomers & newbs buying the ETFs aka paper bitcoin, and the daily/weekly transactions of most bitcoiners moved over to layer 2… doesn’t make me worry that much anymore because it just feels like we are winning and maybe a stable and low sat/vB mempool is what we will have until the paper bitcoin explodes… Just an everyday pleb’s 2 sats 🙏🏼🫡

I just walked. No phone. No music. No noise.

It felt wrong at first.

Then it felt necessary.

Just breath.

Footsteps.

And everything I’d been too busy to notice.

My thoughts slowed.

Stress dropped.

And for the first time in days, I wasn’t reacting, I was present.

This is silent walking.

Not a hack.

A reset.

In a world built to hijack your focus, silence is resistance.

And being in the moment, in the present, is power.

Try it.

20 minutes.

No phone.

Just walk.

Then write what shows up.

That’s what I did.

This post wrote itself.

GM #Nostr #Healthstr