🏆 Winners:

⚡We were just thinking… 🤔 ⚡

⚡ If we zapped you 1K sats, you could FOMO into a direct buy of 65 TH/s and that would get you a sweet share of $142 if we snag a block reward.

⚡ REPLY TO THIS POST and get a zap ⚡

⚡ Then use your zap funds to get into the #BlockParty! ⚡

:back: Adam Back offers perspective on key nation state adoption moves.

The only reason Satoshi hasn't won a Nobel Prize in Economics & the Nobel Peace Prize is because mainstream thinking is so narrow-minded & sterile that they *still* don't understand that what Satoshi invented is the biggest breakthrough for both categories in 500 yrs.

New UN report claiming mining is a “powerful tool” for money laundering makes zero sense and will be used an excuse to push KYC/AML/Sanctions at miner level – Full story at end of this post.

First, it claims that criminals use “illegal” mining operations to launder money, which literally defeats the entire purpose of money laundering.

Money laundering is done best via businesses that generate quick cashflow – at current hashprice, even if you *did* have free electricity and a all-in hosting cost of 0, one ASIC generates a mere return of ~$6000 over the course of 24 months.

This is particularly true in the fucking LIBYAN DESERT where heat and dust contribute significantly to wear and tear, but I’m sure that the geniuses who wrote this report also take their laptops to the beach.

The amount of nonsense the UN has cooked up here is truly astonishing.

It claims illegal mining operations are hard to detect, which is not just untrue for stealing electricity from the grid, but also for the heat signatures such operations omit.

If you do want to make such operations undetectable, facilities need to be impossibly insulated on the one hand – further diminishing returns on investment – but you also need to utilize off-grid energy.

If these operations use off-grid energy, which the UN names as a power source, then they do not, by definition, contribute to “chronic power outages in Lybia [..] depriving essential services and residential areas”, which the UN also claims, because *they are not connected to the grid*.

An exception to this would be if Bitcoin miners utilized stolen fuel, but then the issue is *people stealing fuel*, not people mining Bitcoin. This further erodes the UN’s claims that Lybia is an attractive destination for “illegal miners” due to low electricity cost, because stolen electricity is *not paid for by definition*.

As widely reported, Lybia’s fuel shortage arises from vibrant black markets. This does *not* happen due to a lack of “anti-money laundering authorities”, or because “bitcoin miners are stealing all the energy,” but because political tensions in the country have ground entire industries to a halt.

If you want to stop people from stealing electricity, maybe next time don’t bomb an entire country back to the Stone Age. You’re welcome.

Bitcoin Giveaway 🍊

Bitcoin Giveaway 🍊

yo #nostr

Exploit netted 60k sats.

Nice. 🤣

This doesn’t even address zapping yourself or using an alt npub to net the bounty back to yourself… ha

Touted as a bitcoin book, the manuscript only mentions the word once throughout. While the interpretation of its reference remains open to debate, the half-cocked comment, “see how that worked out”, and the author’s own admission, indicate it was meant to be dismissive.

Despite this the novel is a kaleidoscope of sound money spawned literary themes complete with evident btc-vocab like “Citadel”. The book tackles the devolution of The United States in a rapidly-inflating economy, the “New IMF” releasing a world wide currency called the “Bancor” backed by gold, copper, and various amounts of consumable commodities (an idea floated by John Nash in his essay, “Ideal Money”, as well as many other Austrian economists), and a general real-world palpability to a society on the decline as framed up though the intergenerational experience of The Mandible Family.

From Great Grand Dad (GGD) on down through young Willing, the chemistry of the characters and the silent turned not so silent role a huge family fortune on the decline plays as a backdrop to all that occurs is compelling, authentic, and believable. Shriver tackles unique characters like a linebacker, and acerbic wit, economic prowess, and a love of the threads that tie a family across time and place are strident throughout.

The book rests on its dialogue, indeed 85% of the book is strictly conversations happening in a particular location or another. The “backdrop” of the dystopic future is more of an afterthought to the foreground of the characters. The plot - which I’m not going to spoil - progresses smoothly and naturally, up until the final section of the book, where an abrupt jump forward in years felt like a truncated and not fully cooked Act III. The novels apotheosis is the family crawling out of NYC pushing a bicycle stocked with the silver cutlery handed down from many generations prior - the vestige of The Mandible Family Fortune - on their way to Uncle Jared’s Citadel (a farm upstate).

As dystopic sci-fi is meant to do, there is some very reasonable forecasting. For starters, predicting the widespread absence of toilet paper prior to The Covid Era must been seen as not only literary foresight but literal forecasting. Reading a novel published in 2016 that discussed swapping roles of toilet paper for entire dinners, and romanticizing of how it might feel to reach up onto a shelf and grab a “cushy 9 pack of squishy TP” has an eerie sense of omniscience from a retrolooking 2025.

Moreover, the literary conceit of a sovereign state within the contiguous United States being located in Nevada also jives with something like what a Texas might still become. Terms like “The Other 49” became common expression in this new self-declared sovereign territory with low taxation and no subsidies.

Finally, the “chipped up” reality of everyone having a piece of tech stuck into their spinal cord at the base of their neck (so it couldn’t be dug out) is just too on the nose for something that could be incoming. All transactions digital, cash aboloshed, auto and instant taxation. The plausibility of such an outcome was well if not swiftly established by the author with the flick of a logical pen. It’s simply Google Maps, plus our Credit Card statements, on auto transmit to the new IRS every single time we transact. Not too big of a leap considering.

On par with other books that don’t really have anything to do with bitcoin but somehow map it’s future rather accurately, e.g., Jeff Booth’s The Price of Tomorrow, Nassim Talib’s Anti-Fragile, or David Rogers Webb’s The Great Taking, this book accomplishes a similar reality but does so in the form of something far stickier than books about economics, it does so with a story.

Willing is by far my favorite character and Shriver’s sense of humor runs through his emotionless drawl. There was a hue of The Glass Family, and young Zooey amidst these pages.

Nice podcast except Danny fucked up the audio 😂

#AskNostr Did you know?

Finding a block is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Breaking a private key is like finding one specific molecule in millions of galaxies.