A couple times per year, I have to fuck around and find out.

Because otherwise, what are any of us doing here.

Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.

Testing GIFs in polls.

Every day I think about additional ways we can get tighter Lightning and Nostr integrations to the point where it's so seamless and so easy that the average person can just Zap content and receive Zaps as easy as pressing the 'Like' button. We're getting closer with Nostr Wallet Connect. The #[0] and Amethyst implementation seems so incredibly easily that I'm going to switch from stacker.news as my NIP-57 Lightning wallet provider just to use this integration.

So I'm using getalby and amethyst with nostr wallet connect. I have one tap zaps without leaving the amethyst app. It's pretty awesome.

this is a guy who has clearly come to terms with the fact he's never getting his $44b back.

So what’s the plan to build more fiat on-ramps to Bitcoin with many crypto-friendly banks gone, and clearly a targeted hit on them ongoing?

Tell me an interesting fact I don’t know and I’ll zap a bunch of you. ⚡️⚡️⚡️

Well, I'm stuck in an airport lounge in Boston for the next 7 hours. Given the current weather across the country, something tells me that might be an optimistic estimate, too. 😔

#[0] we've got an idea for the Coldcard Q2:

Attempts to build apps "on top of" Nostr or that "use Nostr" are wrong, harmful and abusive, and will necessarily fail.

Nostr wants open protocols to be built on it, not proprietary shit that is trying to use relays as their private free databases. This behavior should not be encouraged.

My Amethyst keeps randomly crashing since the latest update 😟

At first I was really upset and protective. As time has moved on and I've discussed it more, my opinions have changed. I don't like it. I think it's dumb. And that's okay. I'm allowed to have my own thoughts and opinions. I can't tell someone how they're supposed to use Bitcoin. I trust that the system will work itself out given enough time. Until that happens, I'm looking at this as an orange pilling event. I'm helping NFT fans run Bitcoin nodes, Lightning nodes, and teaching them about UTXOs. It's great for Bitcoin...for now.

That's how this world works though. At least we know that there is a fee market.

i have a problem with people exploiting and abusing the system.