Regarding Ver - if you wanna leave the US (denounce your citizenship.) you gotta hand over ~40% of your assets under one billion.

(there is even a renunciation fee of $2,350.)

If you don’t do that - you should expect them to be coming for you - bitcoiner or not.

I have no doubt Ver knew exactly what he was doing when he left - being in Spain was risky and maybe even stupid.

Fuck the govt.

But they’re gonna do their thing.

Outbox

Big relays aren’t a huge issue

Nostr is about optionality

It bothers me that I can’t see it as clearly.

Like with so many things that have made a difference, I’m attracted to it and like it but don’t know why.

Have to look further into it.

Someone recently asked if I was happy.

Sure, I'm grateful to be so privileged that I'm likely in the top 0.1% of humans with regard to quality of life.

But I'm not satisfied. I can not relax until I see the authoritarians driven before me and I delight in the lamentations of their sycophants.

You are to me like a person that says the LN doesn't work. Since I do it EVERY day, any claim that it can't be done, is too hard, etc. is not worth listening to.

I’d be happy to contribute to and use my public platform to bring attention to legal defense funds for people who build open source privacy tools, or for legal attempts to push back on unconstitutional government financial surveillance.

I just need to know that they are credible from people I trust.

So you just make up bullshit and think others will believe it?

I have been running my own mail since the early 2000s. Once in a while you validate for gmail or yahoo, which is the massive skill of clicking a link or cutting and pasting a code.

Stop saying things you have NO KNOWLEDGE ABOUT as though you do.

Run an email server.

The government is acting very desperate right now. Almost as if they know a relatively small rush to the doors could cause everything to collapse.

bitcoin is getting stronger BECAUSE it adapts to the stressors of organized power. whether it's a government agency, an influent miner, a NY agreement or any other existing or emerging monopoly, for bitcoin it's all the same, and part of the evolutionary adaptation to humans

the users and developers of bitcoin CHANGE in order to react to these stressors in an anti-fragile fashion. not just static robustness but reactive adaptation (read taleb)

if you don't believe enough people around the world are knowingly betting on a system that can actively adapt to monopolization, bitcoin isn't for you. buy some real estate

You don’t martyr yourself by dying for something.

You martyr yourself by devoting your life to something.

Feels like the end of an era.

Love that this thing isn’t connected to my phone contacts. No, I don’t want to add Andrea from HR, actually. No shade to Andrea, of course, she probably has a rich and complex interpersonal life filled with many of the same trials and triumphs that we all share. There might even being a meaningful connection to be made with Andrea. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll bring her cookies on Thursday, she seems stressed lately. That said, I don’t really want to connect with her on Snapchat.