I can’t prove it definitively, but America has 40% of the worlds financial markets. There’s a million+ bitcoin held by American public entities. Many wealthy Americans in SV and Wall Street have claimed to be hodling private stacks. America has the most nodes etc… I’m just guessing but I’d bet close to half of all bitcoin ever produced are in American control already.

Ay, yall got any of them zaps? I think I finally got my lightning thing figured out. Trying to figure out if I did it right.

At a small Princeton event last week, among other panels and speeches, Carole House spoke about censoring bitcoin.

She is the former director of cybersecurity for the White House National Security Council, and prior to that was at FinCEN focusing on cryptocurrencies, and prior to that was in the military.

Some of her main points:

-Energy-related regulation may push some hash rate outside of the U.S., whereas she would rather see more of it in the U.S. so that they can force miners to censor the network on the base layer. She also views international cooperation as a necessary component for successful censorship. She also wants stakers to be forced to censor their PoS networks.

-It's not just about telling miners not to mine certain transactions, but to not even build atop blocks that have non-compliant transactions, so that those transactions don't get anywhere in the chain. A 51% attack, in other words. Her main concern is censoring states like North Korea from being able to participate in the network.

The event was interesting because there were several very different perspectives. On one hand there was Roya Mahboob talking about using bitcoin in Afghanistan, followed by Troy Cross, Craig Warmke, and Natalie Smolenski talking about the importance of bitcoin from an ethical perspective. On the other hand, there were panels about Bored Apes and speeches about how to censor the networks.

What do you say when a friend or investor says “ETH has been a better investment than bitcoin on nearly all time frames” based on this coin metrics chart.

Been hearing this a lot lately from the usual suspects using this chart.

This morning over breakfast, my husband who spends his time on finance/bitcoin only like 10% of what I do, was discussing the news and said we should get some more bitcoins.

Literally the cat breakfast newspaper meme.

Can someone with a glass node subscription tell me how many unique users have been added to Bitcoin vs Ethereum over the last 6 months?

I'm still pounding the table that inflation will continue to be high.

We print money for wasteful government spending at the expense of all working classes.

Inflation is a tax on everyone.

Wonder how many people on Nostr have pronouns 🤔. I’m guessing <1%

My pronouns are Sats/DCA/HODL

This post on Bitcoin just passed 100,000 views and mostly positive comments

*I have very few followers on LI - hardly use it til now, but it is proving a good way to reach precoiners

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My first assessment of Bitcoin was "Speculative asset that does nothing useful but uses lots of energy."

Sound familiar?

What I learnt was that it was only my ignorance, arrogance and inability to imagine the lives of others living outside the West that had me believe this.

The reality is that Bitcoin is in the same pantheon as the smartphone and the Internet itself in terms of its utility. But unlike its predecessors, it helps people in the global South first - the West last.

That's probably why most people (like me) in the West initially fail to see its utility TO THEM, and therefore assume it has no utility TO ANYONE.

Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo estimates there are 100Million+ users of Bitcoin, rising exponentially. Here's a demographic snapshot of who they are and why they use it:

There are 1.2Billion people who are unbanked - 57% of them are women, 90% are people of color.

There are 4Billion people living under autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes, where the financial system can be used against them (eg: state freezing of bank accounts, censoring and surveillance of how you spend money)

There are 8.1M adult women in Afghanistan who are prohibited by law from opening a bank account, starting a business or receiving an income because of their gender

There are >300M people who's economies are experiencing hyperinflation (including Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela)

These are the people who see the utility of Bitcoin first. Not us in the West who take for granted our privilege, human rights, functioning banking system, 99%+ access to banking, and relatively low inflation.

You may be thinking "so what - how does Bitcoin help these people?"

It helps the unbanked, because you don't need a bank. A feature-phone plus some basic Bitcoin education is all you need to receive, save and pay. There's a financial revolution happening in Africa right now: the poorest in the world are leapfrogging the banking sector and going directly to Internet-native money (Bitcoin). This is why the continent of Africa is adopting Bitcoin faster than any other continent.

It helps people in autocratic regimes because they cannot be surveilled, censored, de-platformed or frozen by the State. This is why Nigeria is one of the biggest adopters of Bitcoin. It's driven by human rights activism.

It helps women in Afghanistan, because they can (and do) adopt bitcoin Lightening Wallets, which means state discrimination cannot deny them financial equity.

It helps those living with hyperinflation because it allows them to avoid 10 years of life saving being reduced to 1/2 its value inside a year.

That's why of the top 10 nations adopting Bitcoin+crypto

1. Top 2 nations are experiencing hyperinflation

2. 7 or the top 8 countries were colonised + have heavy IMF/World Bank loans

3. 8/10 are autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes

4. 7/10 from Africa, Latin America or SE Asia

To more than 1/2 the world, Bitcoin is the most useful technology in a generation.

Question…. Why do people pay for, boob pics, dick pics, feet pics, whatever when there is an endless supply of all of these things online?