You should do Topsy Turvy next.

That's too bad. I wasn't aware they discontinued Bitcoin mortgages. I was waiting for them to come to the USA.

Thank you, that was helpful. Can you do a post on why covenants enable Bitcoin scaling solutions better than Lightening through a mechanism that constrains the spending of UTXO outputs? That bit is not clear to me.

Congrats to you and Paul on Sophie's birth. Cute kid. You were right, the name is Greek not Italian.

I see myself. Is it a mirror?

On Ordinals #It'sOn

I am about to drop some Bitcoin bombs on Nostr. What could go wrong? I am the owner of two NFTs. One on Ethereum and the other on Bitcoin. The Bitcoin one was accidental. I just wanted to see a Bitcoin movie advertised on Blockstream's website when I was purveying some choice hot wallets, Green and Aqua. And yes, you got that right. I was an early adopter of the Liquid side chain. Even if I didn't fully understand it. I still don't. Before you stone me to death, like an adulterous woman in an Islamic regime, I have a good excuse. I love art. Not only do I consume it, I make some, too. Mainly paintings, mixed media. I have dabbled in watercolors, acrylics, oils. I have even done some sculptures with molding clay. Not the Thinker, mind you. I am no Rodin. I just made a beautiful bowl to hold my jewelry and painted it in purple and yellow. Alas, that's all gone now. When I first came to Bitcoin, I did come at it from a technology point of view. Blockchains and distributed ledger data structures. I only bought Bitcoin to test how to do it. As an engineer, I just wanted to see if I could figure it out, I didn't have any idea of the monetary implications, barely noting that it was supposed to be digital money. I used an obscure exchange called sfox which used canned algorithms for making purchases, rather than easy spot buys like on Coinbase. I din't even know that Coinbase existed. Or Binance. It took me forever to get some and I finally had some Bitcoin. I left it on the exchange. Luckily for me, it was not Mt. Gox or Quadriga. I was not rug-pulled. I completely forgot I had Bitcoin until that fateful day when I happened to watch some carnivore diet podcaster, a new one I was trying out, and he had Bitstein on. Needless to say, the proverbial light in my head went on. I looked up my Bitcoin and it had gone up five-fold! I only bought a small amount so I could't yet retire or buy an house. I did not sell which is good. The rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately for me, being prone to technology, I began looking at other blockchains. I was particularly attracted to NFTs. I even considered creating some but never got very far. Thank god. I just bought a token. Next, I got sucked into some plan, called The Plan, to arbitrage small changes in price using bots to accumulate profits. By then I was a Bitcoin maxi and was attempting to short Ethereum and Solana, to go long Bitcoin. I didn't have to time the market, the AI was supposed to algorithmically buy and sell based on some set parameters that should have guaranteed serious profits . As you may already know, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Once again, I thank God the almighty for seeing the light and selling off all my crypto positions for Bitcoin. I did not spent too much time regretting my shit-coining losses. I chucked it up to the price of Bitcoin education. You get Bitcoin at the price you deserve, right? Well, I got mine at the all-time highs and rode the curve down, and up and then sideways. Which is funny because I am terrified of roller-coasters in real life. I won't be caught dead in one. The Bitcoin roller-coaster I can handle. I have diamond hands and continued to DCA and learn as much as I can about Bitcoin. Which brings me to drive-chains, side-chains and ordinals. I admit I have been largely avoidant of these discussions. Maybe it is an over-reaction of my shameful history in shit-coins. Today, I decided I shouldn't ignore it just because it makes me uncomfortable. I watched Pete Rizzo on Peter's show and it was not disappointing. They really get into it and I mean it was threatening to devolve into a fist-fight at one point. Just kidding, it wasn't that bad but it did get contentious. If I understood Pete's argument correctly, he was saying that if you are truly a Bitcoin maximalist, that is someone who believes Bitcoin will make all cryptocurrencies obsolete sooner than later, then you have to accept that technological tinkering and innovations will be the reality on the Bitcoin timechain. Notice how I didn't write blockchain. That was part of my hard-won education. This fact will drive Bitcoin monetary purists up the wall. In fact, the ordinals debate is already doing that. On a spectrum between Bitcoin being a technological marvel and a perfect money, we Bitcoin HODLers are not evenly dispersed on that normal curve. The skewness of that curve, the kurtosis, cannot be ignored. However, given the law of large numbers, and the wisdom of the crowd, the tendency of the curve will literally normalize over time. That is, the "hard-liner" position is untenable and the toxics will have to cede way for "normies" to be "normies". No pun intended. The thing is, normies are not normal. That is, they are irrational and do degen things. That is why I always had trouble with Milton Friedman's Nobel prize win in Economics which was predicated on market actors being rational. I think it was the Expectation Theory. People in real life are not rational. They do stupid things all the time, present company included. Maybe it is the lack of complete information, maybe it is a form of lazy-thinking. I don't know why but purism doesn't work. We can't live in a vacuum. There is always friction in life, it is an absolute. If you value first-principle thinking, you can't get past slippage. This is painful to accept as someone whose least favorite expression is "the perfect is the enemy of good". I want perfection. I want a money-only use case of Bitcoin. I also want a life, a real one. The messiness of life is a feature not a bug. I still don't understand how ordinals really work. I only know that if people want them and are willing to pay a premium for them, they can't be that bad. What I don't understand still and wished I can ask Pete directly, why can't the technological innovation on Bitcoin happen on the higher layers, and not on the base chain? Can't we have our cake and eat it too? A pristine monetary on-chain and all the fun on the subsequent layers. Someone find Satoshi. We have a new "Byzantine General's" dilemma on our hands. This time it is Marie Antoinette. Don't bring back the guillotine just yet Bitcoiners. I want to keep my pretty little head.

On Pictures #It'sOn

A picture is worth a thousand words. And herein lies the problem. An image transmits information under the surface, below consciousness. You can be disarmed, misinformed, manipulated if you don't know what you are looking at. Catfished, as the modern expression goes. But I am not talking about Tinder dates. I wouldn't know where to begin. I am a card-carrying boomer when it comes to online love-seeking. I prefer real life. Interestingly, one of my closest friends, or I should probably say was a friend, wrote the premier book on online dating in Britain, Love at First Site. I got to live out vicariously all her escapades as she was finalizing the book, during the editing rounds before publishing. That's when we first met. I was her upstairs neighbor with a newborn to rear. She loved babies, perhaps not me so much. It was instant love, for my son. That was good enough reason for me to call her a friend. Incidentally, speaking of catfish, she gave me a complete lecture on how to present your profile image on dating sites and not lie with your picture or age. Believe it or not, there is an error rate. There are parameters for fudging your stats just so. Just don't call her Hyacinth. Like a middle class debutante keeping up with the Jones, data shown as charts are a minefield of lies. We have truth in advertising but not in data. We lie with numbers all the time. Some times, unintentionally. The most egregious are the professionals wielding statistical analyses like a weapon of mass destruction. Colin Powell, the deadly uranium was not in Niger. It was in the state-of-the-art science labs just down the street. Scientists have been let loose on the unsuspecting public with their endless studies that prove coffee is bad for you one day, and then good for you the next. How can any of this be right? Easy, it is that famous quote, "lies, damn lies, and statistics". What science has forgotten is the integrity of the scientific method, the importance of experimental design. You have to identify the variables, establish the cause and effect theory which is the hypothesis. Then, verify you have articulated the null hypothesis correctly, which is the status quo, giving you your bearings. Without proper controls, how will you know where you are in the grand scheme of things? How will you ensure you found what you claim you found? Once the experiment has been executed, the steps taken, the measurements recorded, the math has to make sense. The finding must not be a confounding of unrelated events, or inadvertent contaminations. Everything must be controlled and contained, for it to sink up with your statistical model. In science you never prove anything true. Statistics is the language of probabilities, confidence levels and acceptable standard deviation. Instead, we say the likelihood of the finding being a fluke of nature or a false positive is so low (i.e., the p-statistic) that we can take the risk of the theory being wrong. Until someone else proves otherwise. Or someone else arrives at the same conclusion we did. An independent checking of the results is a must. Maybe multiple times if the phenomena is controversial. Science not only allows for the possibility of being wrong; it is inherently an error-based system. Now we have studies that are somehow all statistically significant, proving this and that as if it were a new-found religion. People are actually saying things like "believe in the science" and "trust the numbers". Scary times, indeed. The issue is they do not appreciate the scientific process or fully grasp the skepticism required for the scientific mind. Are you aware of the Stanford mathematician Ioannidis who conducted a review of the math employed by a cross-section of prestigious scientific journals only to prove that most of the  math doesn't check out? Which reminds me of something I have been noodling. Can we lobby the ISO 9000 folks to create a standard template to force standardization of scientific papers? That way, labs, whether they are universities and corporations can't play fast and loose with the method and numbers. I even picked out a number for them. It's ISO 9888. Auspicious, right? This is no joke, we need to force a framework for scientific reporting to disclose their thinking. That way we can spot the crime, the underhand maneuvers, the lie. Our medical institutions and food systems are all based on faulty logic. No wonder our health outcomes are down not up despite the innovations (mostly courtesy of the engineers, btw). When was the last time your planes didn't work, your tech didn't compute? Somehow we accept people dropping dead like flies from bad medicine, iatrogenic for the fancy folks. People aren’t dying en masse from bad technology. Heck, most of the equipment used in hospitals and doctor’s office like x-ray machines and MRIs are made by engineers not doctors. I am an engineer by training so I am biased. Why all the bad science? Obviously, it is bad incentives. There  isn't funding for losing ideas. Corporations aren't funding studies to show their drugs kill. Everyone doing science these days isn't truth-seeking. They are all backing into "the answer". Of course, eggs are bad for you. Here eat our cardboard which is cheap to produce but makes us a killing in profit margins. You body is inflamed from the "inhumane" food. No problem, here is a pill that will fix it. Bad side effects? There is another one. And another one. Until you are dead. Oh well. Plenty more humans to milk for money. I once had a heated discussion regarding bad numbers and pretty pictures that did end in tears at work. The culprit. A simple pie chart. I pointed out that the 3D rendering of the chart, although "sexy" and "pleasing to the eye", is ultimately a false representation of the data. The "thickness" or the sense of volume presented in the picture is arbitrary, without backing in hard measurement and therefore inaccurate. My colleague begged to differ. Even though I was the team lead and I made the final call, she refused to comply. Such insubordination, much disrespect. In the end, I had to call my contract manager (not boss) to handle the whole event and literally calm her down like a kindergartener who missed her nap. Then the manager proceeded to give me tips on how to handle personalities like my team member with exact instructions of dos and don'ts. I was bewildered. I would never treat my teammates like how this woman treated me in a professional setting, let alone a supervisor. Don't get me wrong. I have made the hard sell to managers many times in my life and been struck down without so much as a reason why. But true to my "victorian" upbringing of "children should be seen, not heard" and "if you don"t have anything nice to say, don"t say anything at all", I swallowed my injured pride and kept going. In time, I might have realized the wisdom of my superior's decisions, and said a silent thanks to God. In any case, next time you are swayed by an image, particularly a representation of something attractive, as opposed to the actual thing itself, ask yourself one simple question. Is this true? Odds are, it is not.

Choke point 1.0?

Going, going, gone ;)

Why sell Bitcoin? How about a Bitcoin mortgage from Ledn? They are a Canadian company.

On Self-Determination #It'sOn

I remember where I was when I first read the words "self-determination". Yes, I know. I am weird. Still, it is what you want. Even if you don't realize it. You want to be a self-determined entity. A sovereign person. A free state. When I learned that lesson, it was a history class. I was in elementary school and our American school had just been "colonized" by the British. Cool Britannia. Ironically, we were supposed to be learning about American history. Instead, my British teacher, Mrs. Tout, taught us a course on World War II. Otherwise known as European History. As you do when you are a member of the ex-pat community living in West Africa, attending an International private school in the throws of a power struggle between the American Embassy who originated the school and the African Development Bank, who are actually financing the whole operation. The "Africans" wanted Britain. The Americans wanted America. Maybe it was not an American history lesson in the classroom, but it was in practice. The British won and I was plunged head-long into British English, British History and British Math. These were my formative foundations of my education. Anyway, Mrs. Tout, the history teacher, taught us about the process of the "self determination" of Germany. She was a fantastic teacher. She had lived through the war as a little girl in London, with vivid memories of the Blitz. I'm sure it must have been terrifying and the trauma was real. She animated that whole period of history with her firsthand lived experience, explaining how Bismarck, the well-known master strategist from Austria, unified the independent states to form the nation-state of modern day Germany. He used a simple but effective hack that works every time. The common enemy. He conjured up a boogie man, then proceeded to make friends out of avowed enemies to unify the country, consolidating his power in the process. I am sure that was just a bonus; his love of his newly-founded nation was a paramount. Did you believe me, dear reader? Oh dear me. That was sarcasm. Apparently, people do not realize it when I am being ironic or sarcastic. I am forced to announce it, like a magician revealing his method just so his audience can appreciate the show. How unfortunate. My history book stated, that Germany was "self-determined". The point here is I never forgot the lesson. Later on in life, I encountered the concept of Maslow's hierarchy and the top of the pyramid of human survival was the state of “self actualization”. That sounds familiar, I thought. It reminds me of the self-determination of Germany. Will I need a common enemy? How do I get there? What map do I use? Pray tell. Sadly, dear reader, I don't have the answers. Only questions. But I think that's the point. Socrates said "all I know is I know nothing". To me, that sounds like what an enlightened person would say. It is a humbling of one's self before the sheer complexity of life, the totality of knowledge, mostly hidden due to our subjective experience. In the face of this fact, how best to live meaningful lives? Well, first take responsibility for yourself, fully. Don't be King Edward, don't abdicate. Duty, duty, duty. Then cultivate an ego, integrate your shadows. Your darker side. I don't mean melanin. I mean the qualities you possess that are undesirable, deviant and can't be shared with polite society. Like Prince Andrew, if you need an example. No wonder Fergie came running to America. Not Man U, he' Sir Fergie. Not Two Eyes Peas. She's a rockstar. I mean, red-headed Fergie, America's favorite royal refugee until Prince Harry.  Also, Jungian psychology informs us; there is a sweet spot when it comes to ego. Too much, and it is put-off. Too little, then it is easy to put-down like a un-stimulating book or a vapid date. But find the sweet spot of ego and it is hot, hot, hot. Finding yourself, knowing who you are, is the pinnacle of existence. It is the coming into one's own skin, fully assuming the mantle of your being. It is the "I have arrived" moment of your life. What's unfortunate about this occurrence or breakthrough is how late it materializes in real life. Why oh why does it happen in the latter part of our lifetimes. For some, it doesn’t even show up. A kind of stunted growth, you can say. I guess we have to log some life lessons, experience losses and triumphs before we are granted the goods. So life is a proof-of-work currency. Just like Bitcoin. There is no hack, no shortcut or cheat code for the algorithm. You must expend energy, and pay real cost in the form of the electricity of life. As the UK National Lottery slogan goes, you have to be in it to win it. Since we are in the UK, let's visit one of my favourite authors to quote. Oscar Wilde. He famously stated, while living in a hotel in Paris, that "youth is wasted on the young". Spoken like a man who was fully self-actualized, right? He realized how much he had not lived. Said another way, he had just experienced an existential crisis of the "third kind" and proceeded to lament his life decisions had he known better, earlier, sooner. Instead, he died alone and penniless in a foreign land. So not Edith Piaf. A totally, "Je regrette tout" type feeling. England versus France. My Waterloo. It was a running joke in my now-failed marriage that "I know my European history" because of the bizarre nature of my life story and these random trivia I share with you now. The truth is, I barely know anything. I make mistakes all the time. Let's hope that I means that I have achieved a state of "self-determination". If true, then I am happy to report that no enemy is required. See you at the top of the pyramid. The view should be majestic.

I just listened to @dylan on the @petermccormack show, What Bitcoin Did, and he said something I found really profound, in a very off-hand manner. He was taking about transaction fees on the Bitcoin timechain becoming more and more expensive as time goes by (easter egg alert). Then he said that the block space is in and of itself a commodity. Whoa! Mind-blowing. Not only is Bitcoin a commodity (Gensler approved) but it's block size is also a commodity. So meta. No wonder the block size winners, Bitcoiners, won. They intuitively knew in their bones that increasing the block storage limit would make Bitcoin security, not a commodity. I wonder if he realized how brilliant what he said.

On Hate #It'sOn

Calling someone names, hurling insults, partaking in ad hominem is a form of self-hate. It belies a spirit so filled with loathing it needs an outlet much like a valve bursting with unbearable pressure. It blows its top, spewing toxins in all direction, in a desperate attempt to hone in on the object of its wrath. Itself. In an attempt of self-preservation, it finds instead a self image, a lookalike, a doppelgänger. It is quite a sad thing to behold in life. That is not a scathing indictment or a flippant observation. It is quite a profound statement actually, if I do say so myself. Lately, I have been the subject of the most inhumane level of abuse from none other than my own family. My flesh and blood. Much to my surprise, my chagrin, it turns out my sisters don't think well of me. I had no idea. All these years, I thought we were close, a unit, a safe zone of refuge. I was patently wrong,  dear reader. Not only do my sisters not feel the same way about me as I felt towards them, they hate me. There is a big difference between love and hate. Hate is a strong word. It is reserved for the highest order of crimes against humanity; the nazis, the Hutu of Rwanda, the reclusive militias of American backwaters. On the news, we are encouraged to hate terrorists like Isis, and Hamas, who "hate our way of life". The irony is we don't need to go far to encounter hate. It is close by and ever-present. It was staring me in the face, hidden in plain sight. I just never saw it. Maybe I didn't want to. I was willfully ignorant perhaps. I was so consumed with saving my family, including my hateful sisters from destitution, I didn't have time to observe their distasteful ways, their unbecoming gaze. Much less the space to grieve the passing of my Dad at the tender age of 23, right before I finished graduate school. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. It takes your breath away. How can I be so blind? How did I let this happen to me? Why did my loved ones, family and friends, not move to stop it? How can they stand by on the sidelines and watch me suffer day in, day out without so much as a reprieve? What do I do now? I did what any sane person would do.True to my generation X ethos,I fought the machine. Heck, I am still fighting. I cut out my family like a surgeon removes narcotic tissue. I must save the healthy limbs, the cosmic heart. I proceeded then to examine my friends, collected over many years since childhood like found treasure. Guess what, dear reader? They have become corrupted. Like a poison that seeps under the skin and hits the circulation, they are dead to me, stricken with sepsis. I dropped them, too. Perhaps more for their sake than mine. Don't trust, verify. Right? In this case, my friends are unverifiable. They have become a closed-sourced system, cryptic, guarded and psychologically demented. No amount of super-prompting yields a humane response. Just sputtering of quips and nonsense. The machine at work. I don't know about you but I cannot live this way. I will not succumb to hate. On this hill I will die. I am battling the great forces of evil, hoping against hope to save myself and my son. I am Bitcoin, he is Lightening, I tell myself. We must live, we have to survive. The fate of the world depends on it. No pressure. Wish me luck.

On Safety #It'sOn

Math is safety. It is an absolute, there is always a right answer, even if you don't know it yet. It gives you relief, satisfaction. You can sleep at night. There is no tumult replete with tossing and turning waiting for the morning light to try again. With math, the pain is over and the problem is solved. The solution is at hand. All that is left to do is to execute on the answer, the finding, the insight, or the epiphany. Not so with the written word. Words are cheap. You can't trust them. They dazzle you, seduce you. People use words to beguile and render you helpless under their spell. Or if you are unfortunate, words can be abusive, disordering your very essence with their power, their ugliness and hate. Words have power but their truthiness is always suspect. You can't hang your hat on words. Best to know where you stand with the written and spoken word. I learned this lesson early in life. Born a consummate skeptic, as a child I intuitively knew when something was off and things were not quite so. I felt it in every fiber of my being, down to my kidneys. Most children hate math in school. It is so hard, we are told. Only the smarties are good in math, mostly boys. Wasn't there a famous scandal with Larry Summers when he ran Harvard, our top institution of higher learning, because he said women are genetically predisposed to not being good at math? I loved math. I can arrive at an answer. I feel its finality at the very core of my being and it feels good. I was safe. It is the one time, so-called teachers and educators can't mess with me. They have to bow down to the power of the math and accept its correctness even if they don't like me or are politically motivated to hate me. Like my math teacher in now South Sudan, then just Sudan, who gave me a failing grade on my arithmetic test in the third grade because I was the only northern kid in the entire school. She wanted to make an example out of me. She might have also been annoyed with my Dad who said something to her about the state of the classroom chairs being subpar. Well-intentioned as he was, encouraging the school to seek funds for better equipment as is their right under a government-funded program, he said the wrong thing, unbeknownst to him. My poor Dad. He was such an idealist. Instead, my teacher thought he meant to disparage the southerners and once again point out how inferior the south is to the north. She couldn't see past the north-south frame. The country was at war, the longest running civil war in the world actually, for the trivia pursuit lovers. She was going to teach us a lesson, being a proud Dinka woman. At least I think she was Dinka. They are the predominant tribe in the south of Sudan. Anyway, I brought my test home to my Dad who helped me study for my exam, tears streaming down my cheeks because I had failed. He checked the answers, as one does with math. Thank god. Because, if it had been an essay or a dictation, how can you verify it is 100% correct? It is a matter of opinion. It is a he-said, she-said situation. You would have to make a judgement, render a verdict. For that, you need wisdom, experience, a benevolent heart, a smart brain. It turned out my answers were all correct. My Dad was baffled. We marched into the school the next day and demanded an explanation. Thinking quickly on her feet, my third grade teacher told Dad I was supposed to write the answers on the left side of the page, but instead I wrote the answers on the right. Maybe it was the other way around, I can't be sure. She had no choice but to mark them all wrong, she said. The lesson was not math then, but following the rules. If it had been a math test, as it was advertised to be, I would have gotten a 100%, a perfect score. At this juncture, it has to be said that public education is just that; not about the education but about breeding a class of workers who obey orders blindly. In case you didn't know, our educational system is inherited from the Hungarian-Prussian empire, pre the modern nation state of Germany that we have today. The schools' purpose is to separate children from their parents and create factory workers who run the production of widgets ushering in the industrial age. It was not about schooling at all, but enslavement. The school system sought to break the ties of history and heritage that gave people their fundamental identity. Once schools got a hold of children, like an abusive uncle, they destroyed any sense of wonder and the divine magic of discovery, only to fill children heads with drivel and self-doubt. I would say once again Germany was on the wrong side of history but it was not Germany. It was just a story as old of time. The fight between good and evil. Abel and Cain. Apparently, there is a nuance with that biblical tale; Cain tried again and again to gain God's favor but it was to no avail. He had let in an impurity in his soul. He was a purveyor of sexual deviance. And so it is with our educational system. Any gift to God was permanently tainted. Schools do not educate your children; they brain-wash them. They bore and distract your kids so they won't think for themselves; they just swallow what's given to them hook, line and sinker. They tell them things like "math is hard", "it is only for boys", "it is only for smart people", and then "it is only for Asians if you live in America". The rest is up to the imagination. How you string together your psychological "put-down" to limit your mind is up to you. Well, thank you very much. It is to ensure people don't develop a taste for the hard truth and get grounded in immoveable absolutes. Schools short circuit the frontal cortex of precious young minds, levying daily lobotomies to remove any hint of critical thought let alone original ideas. I once took two friends who were not "good at math" having flunked their tests in elementary school to an "A” grade just by re-teaching the lesson in my own words, as I understood it. And our teachers were actually good; we attended a privileged, private, international American school in west Africa. La Cote D'Ivorie, to be exact. Our children survive the school system like children of a hidden war, pervasive and subversive. Some of them are the better for it but that's because of who they are, their personality. Not what they are, smart. A physical manifestation of Nietzsche’s well-known saying “that which does not kill you only makes you stronger.” Indeed, the whole "smart versus stupid" paradigm is itself one of the torture tools employed by the school system against civilized society. It is a "divide and conquer" strategy used by the British to sow the seeds of conflict like in Africa and the Gaza strip which was peaceful and prosperous until the UN decided to intervene. Under the auspices of the British crown, they tricked the world that they were doing good by creating a Jewish state for God’s lost flock and chosen people. It was just another underhand move to eliminate the undesirable state of peace in the middle east, turning the key on perpetual profits extracted from the war machine well into the future. We will never solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not because it is too hard. But because it is a glorified family-feud with both sides being egged on to keep up the fight for money and entertainment. How else will the media channels fill the news and find content to look and sound serious, grave, learned? Those pundits on the news are not impressive and erudite. They are the face of evil. Before I lose you to too much darkness, there is hope. It is Bitcoin. Bitcoin marries math with words to perfection. For those who don't know about Bitcoin, or know a little but not a lot, fear not. Bitcoin is a network of people using their humble computer, nothing fancy or special purpose, to do the math every ten minutes. If the math checks out, the Bitcoin node operator, accepts the running sum total. If the math is wrong, the Bitcoin network rejects it. It is that simple. No hurt feelings, no misunderstandings, no political tit-for-tats. Just math. For security in cyberspace, you don't need guards like meatspace, or anti-virus software like your IBM machines. All you need is math. This time the formula is not a lowly summation worthy of a third grader. It is cryptography which to be fair is advanced math. Heady stuff. Don't panic. That's where the words come in. These are 12 words you can easily memorize and actually trust. That is, there is a correct answer you can verify. It is called a seed phrase. Unlike the seed of dissent, like the US dollar that takes you into the pit of hell, the abyss of despair with math that never adds up, Bitcoin seed phrases rely on a Bitcoin Improvement Protocol, BIP for short, number 39. It takes the cryptographic key which you use to sign a Bitcoin transaction and translates it into words. This transformation is an exact science, it is an absolute. Your English teacher can't argue the result, or edit your words arbitrarily to her liking. Your school overloads can't intervene and force grades on you like a life sentence. The key will either work because you have the right words, or not if the words are wrong. It is binary; it is black and white; it is clear-cut. No shades of grey; just pure heaven. Dear reader, do please be reminded these words are speech, guarded by the first amendment of the United States constitution. BIP39 words are special, they preserve your life, they protect you from a fate worse than death. That's right folks, we are talking about rape. Yours actually. The daily in and out. You have been anesthetized to not feel it, with your loins made numb, courtesy of the government. Bitcoin does not debase you while you are sleeping. Bitcoin respects your body and values your humanity. To do that, it doesn't even know need to who you are (like banks), where you come from, what religion you believe in, which passport you carry, what color your skin is, and what cultural background you identify with. It just works. Each and every time. It is all math. Be safe. Buy Bitcoin. Take custody of it with a hardware signing device. Memorize your words. Goodnight. Sleep well.

Hi Tony. Thanks for helping me with my missing funds from Strike. Thank goodness it wasn't a lot of money...yet. It might be one day like the 10k Bitcoin pizza lol. I wrote a whole post on the US Dollar being a security. Check it out :)

Well, all men are born equal but some are more equal than others. Oh wait, that communism. Never mind.

On Linguistics #It'sOn

Have you ever been struck by a language purist? The kind so rigid, they think there's only a limited space to maneuver, in a manner of speaking. They are here, in a self-appointed capacity, to defend the veracity of speech, ensure its "correct" meaning? I remember having a somewhat heated argument with a friend visiting from London, England over the warning on the sign in our building's elevator, which cautioned against "lighted cigarettes." In that special brand of disdain she reserves for Americanisms, she said "surely it is "lit", not lighted". And then ensued our usual "American" versus "English" debates that always got under my skin and felt as if I was fighting for the honor of my country and countrymen solo. No pressure. We would even sometimes veer into French, but we were both non-native speakers, so we would abandon it pretty quickly. I considered her a word nazi. Which reminds me of my middle school English teacher, Mrs. Hampton from South Hampton. No relation. That was a joke. Lest you think I am British, I am not. But I did grown up moving countries a lot so it gets dicey sometimes. Mrs. Hampton had a go at me over my usage of the phrase "the sun was on top of my head like spilled orange juice."  I think the lesson was similes and metaphors. She did not get it and it seemed to have offended her delicate English sensibilities. Oscar Wilde was a favorite. But he was no delicate English rose. Anyways, anyways. To be fair,in Arabic, this expression makes sense. In fact, it is a common turn of phrase across many Arabic speaking countries.  I was still "new" to English since I was a recent gradate from a course on English as a Second Language (ESL).  I was in the habit of translating from Arabic to English,as you do when trying on your spanking new adopted tongue like a new set of wheels. But that idiom translated literally into English sounded odd to her. Not to me. I still stand by what I wrote all these years later. There is an entire book on the fact that we "live in metaphors." We are repetitive, rehearsed, and pedantic. We also speak in templates, a sort of "fill-in-the-blank" meme containers where we slot in the operative words as tropes for wit and cleverness. It is a trap of the zeitgeist, a sign of the times. There is a way to sound like you are from a bygone era, quaint and most likely eloquent. And another to be painfully hip, so "du jour" you are on the bleeding edge of culture. So how do you break the cycle? How can you become an original? I read somewhere that the more languages you know, the more "intelligent" you are (supposedly) because it promotes new modes of thinking. A breaking of the cultural mold, if you will. One idea I have been flirting with for years is the fact that to move language forward, one has to "invent" new words or lines of reasoning. But first, you need a solid foundation. To break the rules, first you have to know the rules. Really well. Really, really well. Then you can riff off the script to the "unbeaten path". People will intuitively grasp your deeper meaning, the hidden message. The untenable, the ambiguous "state of the soul" you are trying to convey. Do you know your favorite saying, your crutch, your handicap? Can people "identify" you through a series of sentences? Mine is "vive la difference." When language moves forward in this manner, by coining new expressions, you tap into an inner sanctum, one that most people don't even know exists. They are surprised by it, caught off guard, completely unawares. It is a beautiful thing to experience, maybe even life affirming. That's how much we long to be understood. We yearn to be known at a fundamental level. Such is the power and glory of words. Language is our humanity's base layer, It shapes how we view the world, how we exist in the here and now. Words have the power to change us in just one instant, one moment. I remember where I was when I heard the expression "switched on", spoken about a colleague who is quick-minded. I wanted to be switched on, I thought. I remember falling instantly in love with the turn of phrase, a "relationship in sips" about star-crossed lovers in Chimamanda's book, "Half a Yellow Sun." A book about the real life war fought over the power of the purse, this time in Nigeria. Bitcoin fixes this. The words you speak are a seminal part of your identity, your core, your being. Socrates  says to "know thyself." The words you speak, are who you are. Make them kind, make them beautiful, make them saturated and dripping with meaning. Then the world will be a better place with you in it.

Note to self, it's timechain not blockchain

On Birth Height #It'sOn

As a thought experiment, I calculated my "birthday" in Bitcoin block height. Assuming a cadence of 6.3 blocks per 24 hours, I was born on Block Height -2,759,400. Can you figure out my age?

On Fringes #It'sOn

Apparently there is a conceptualization of our reality courtesy of nordic folklore via Jordan Peterson's book, Map of Meaning, that presents the dynamic between entropy and order as one of emanating particles. Things move from a state of order to disorder, as we know from thermodynamics. Put another way, nature finds a way to take back what's hers. That is, life really is transient and ever-changing. It is less about matter, and about more water. It is fluid, it ebbs, it flows. There is a truism that at the center, order reigns. The center must hold. But as we move outward, things become looser, less tight, not so defined. The realm of disorder. We are fast approaching an important election in the world's most famous democracy, America. It is a constitutional republic where citizens vote for representation using the electoral college system, which in turn "picks" the winner for the executive branch, the President. This is by design to limit the tyranny of the majority over the minority. That's how much the founding fathers of our nation did not trust man's darker tendencies to dominate over the weak in society. They also bootstrapped other features in the foundation of America's founding. Did you know that the constitution advocated for Senators to be "elected" by the House of Representatives rather than being voted directly by the citizens as is done now. That was another safeguard against tyranny, ensuring that senators are truly answerable to the people rather than using their high office to perpetually stay in power to promote their own wealth. How much is your state's senators worth? How good is your life these days? Are you hopeful about the future or just waiting for the shoe to drop? Now our most sacred duty, voting, has become "gamified" with spin doctors and "angel of death" type figures who use their smarts to tilt the power structures in their favor, whether that is by gerrymandering, marketing, or just good old-fashion door-to-door canvasing, having spoon-fed the public their "sound bites" and "talking points". It is less about the soul of the nation in the true sense of the word, and more about the win, the glory and their personal brands. We are far, far away from "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Anyway, this post is not about railing on and on about how much our country is in danger of being lost. This post is actually about conservatism and liberalism. Conservatives are traditional people who are resistant to change and new ideas. They are risk-averse and guarders of the faith. So order. They give us steady ground, footing on which to stand. This requires high energy from the thermodynamics view of the world, for those in love with first-principles thinking. Conservatism is the "slow and steady" wins the race. At the periphery, we encounter disorder, true liberalism. They are the builders of worlds. Maybe these types live in a reality of their own making, so much not in keeping with the physical world that one wonders how they escaped the annealing force of natural selection. But remember, dear reader, the arc of time is long and patient. Along the way however, we find the middle ground, the "sweet spot". These are the innovators, making the most of entropy and chaos theory, but grounding it in physical reality. Making connections where none exist. That is how our society moves forward, how we become civilized, sophisticated and modern. We have become conditioned to self-identifying as one or the other. Us vs. Them. Them vs. Us. But that's not how nature functions. That is not life. To be in harmony with nature is to live in the present, which may be order and then disorder, or disorder then order. Life is ever-shifting, and surprising. How you choose to live says more about your "posture" than about virtue or vice. Are you battling cosmic forces using up all your life force? Then maybe you are in disharmony with nature. Or is life too easy you are nihilistic and unfulfilled? Then maybe you are way out on the disorder curve. Time to reel back in. Your life story is perhaps a manifestation of your bodily composition and more about from which far off star you hail from, instead of what your "genetics" are. We cannot help who we are. We should be more accepting of others, try to understand them, and if we can't, let them be. We belong to the stars, not other people. We are the aliens we are looking for, Enrico Fermi. It is not a paradox. Just the wrong frame. We are the fringes. Bangs, warts and all. Them are not the strange ones. Us is not the good one. The answer to the saving our failing "American republic if we can keep it" is Bitcoin. It is not voting harder; it is the money, stupid. Bitcoin is not the fringes. It is the answer to the question. Bitcoin fixes this.