“hey vlad, you’re a shitcoiner now. why do you keep posting about bitcoin?”
first of all, i’ll always be here just to spite you and the rest of the spooks who don’t want bitcoin to become money.
leaving means that i’ll let you win – which i won’t let happen.
i will fight to keep the spirit that i once knew alive and i will keep my podcast going to remind newcomers what the early days used to be about
and if monero, zcash, litecoin or zano get the job done much better for certain use cases, i will keep using them until bitcoin finally becomes fungible and scales better.
but don’t underestimate my resilience or my willingness to fight. i’m not leaving just because a bunch of assholes act as community gatekeepers and “excommunicate” me after performing their purity tests.
i am staying to spite them and eventually make them historically irrelevant.
the market gives me a strong december 2017 deja vu
if it plays out like that, we’ll get one last altcoin pump until the new year
and then max pain for 12+ months 🥲
not financial advice, just ptsd
woke up to a bunch of e-mails from european bitcoin companies that announce a major increase in their kyc/aml data processing
new regulations come into force on january 1st 🥲
it’s painful & sad that we’ve reached this point
but it was fun while it lasted
the future is p2p
i live the hint of a golden cross pattern in the morning 😍
I should invest in swapping services 😂
For me at least, the term “shitcoiner” seems to have been applied.
Sort of someone who went to Woodstock, but then also attended other small festivals to recapture the same spirit that was lost.
And I’m fine with it, at least I don’t run post-rationalizations to explain that everything is good for Bitcoin and therefore nothing should ever upset or disappoint me.
I came here for a series of ideas/principles, not to shill an asset ticker.
I don’t trust AI, I’m like a chef who wants to cook using his own special ingredients that most people won’t even notice 😂
My journey in Bitcoin felt like our generation’s hippie movement: we all believed in ending wars and starting a peaceful revolution.
Then the big money came in and lots of guys cut their hair, put on their suits, and took roles in institutions they previously despised.
The summer of love is over, eh?
bought myself a neve 1073 preamp & equalizer plugin
and it’s stellar, adds so much clarity to the voice in ways that no 12-band eq did before
not sure if other podcasters edit their own audio, but to me this process of making the guest’s voice sound better is really rewarding 
You work for Edge and still believe that Monero is “fiat”?
Maybe they get activated and the builders get everything done.
But it’s up to the users to make them useful.
If it ends up being as niche as Taproot multisigs… well, I don’t want to hang my promises on one bucket of OP codes fixing everything.
To a certain point, it’s like hoping that you will one day be able to hammer nails with a screwdriver. Doable, but there are other tools that are more specialized to get that job done.
being bitcoin-only in 2025 will be only about defending the ticker and trying to pump your own bags
from a cypherpunk and utilitarian point of view, you should start looking into other coins
experiment with privacy/scaling/contracts tech, embrace a world beyond the 21m meme
i just paid €40 ($42) for a lightning network transaction
it went through without any networking or routing issues
but fuck me, on-chain fees are $1 
will upload the audio version later today
i just interviewed the lead dev of segwit2x 7 years after segwit2x didn’t get consensus & the new york agreement fell apart
the og big blocker, who proposed 7mb blocks in 2010
he’s still excited about bitcoin and works on bridges that extend its features
did you listen?
https://www.youtube.com/live/no_Nj-MX53w?si=cxTUhziRUzT8FkY4
Hope it will turn around eventually and we’ll screw them.
Otherwise, unpopular opinion but we can always hard fork into a more cypherpunk version of Bitcoin that we find more useful. It’s inevitable due to the looking 2106 signature bug, might as well add privacy and some OP codes that builders find useful.
Assuming that the current version of Bitcoin ossifies due to lack of consensus to do anything, of course.
Also, on the topic of who benefited from your work: I am proud of you that you didn’t contribute to MIT’s CBDC pilot (project Hamilton or whatever). Other guys had no issue participating, probably thought it’s an inevitable outcome so they might as well play the game and make an extra buck.
I’m happy that I’m not the only one feeling this way.
Some people tell me that I’m just a nerd who can’t enjoy winning. But there’s so much that I wish Bitcoin could do and I feel like the window of opportunity to add upgrades is narrowing down.
I didn’t come here for banks, large custodians and politicians. I came to escape them, now I find it hard to accept that they want to be friends.
Maybe it happened too fast and we all thought we had more time. But I wish Bitcoin had better privacy to be a fungible currency. I also wish we had proper sidechains/extension blocks.
But the biggest problem is that there are too many voices that downplay this conversation and reject any improvement proposal like it’s an attack.
Now that I mentioned all this, I totally understand why you don’t want to speak publicly… there is so much negative stuff that can come out of it. It’s nice when you have a body of work that’s publicly visible and speaks for itself. But it sucks when other people tell your story and manipulate the narrative to paint you as whatever kind of character they find convenient in the context.
I wouldn’t know, I’m just a Eastern European watching movies 😂
listened to billie eilish on npr’s tiny desk show
(basically today’s mtv unplugged)
i was blow away, the performance was amazing and the songwriting is unexpectedly good
then i searched for the album version of each song and i hate them all
overproduced, borderline annoying
am i just getting old or does music on the radio suck?