“There is a 12 words password”, they say!
Even birds can reason.
وَمَا مِنْ دَابَّةٍ فِي الْأَرْضِ وَلَا طَائِرٍ يَطِيرُ بِجَنَاحَيْهِ إِلَّا أُمَمٌ أَمْثَالُكُمْ ۚ مَا فَرَّطْنَا فِي الْكِتَابِ مِنْ شَيْءٍ ۚ ثُمَّ إِلَىٰ رَبِّهِمْ يُحْشَرُونَ
There is not a moving (living) creature on earth, nor a bird that flies with its two wings, but are communities like you. We have neglected nothing in the Book, then unto their Lord they (all) shall be gathered.
Banks don’t run background checks when someone opens an account (so criminals have bank accounts too), however banks cooperate if requested and would signal transactions above a certain limit (I suppose) depending on the country’s laws. So many people are careful on how much money they hold in their bank accounts in comparison with what they legally earn to avoid getting in trouble.
Anyways, this would apply on anyone running a money transfer business that is also responsible for safeguarding the money of their clients because it must be refunded to the clients if lost by the business or bank.
Of course the government have to comply with the law and lawyers usually find ways to get away with most charges if clever enough and get paid generously. Also, any mistake in the process is against the law enforcement and can cause dropping the charges in some cases.
Some words must be banned so that the clients refuse to publish them (rendering the posting button disabled once they are typed) or refuse to get the replies containing them.
If someone is doing something wrong, they are aware of it and of the legal consequences.
Fixing bitcoin is not dangerous although saying half-broken is not exact (to some degree, perhaps).
Keep calm and HODL #Bitcoin.
Everyone seems to be overreacting to the Samourai arrests, the FBI PSA, and Phoenix leaving the US. Here's my attempt to break it down.
Samourai
You have to unpack all of the different elements. Could this be a state attack on self-custody and privacy? Maybe. Probably not.
There are a few components here that need to be evaluated on their own.
1⃣ Samourai was a self-custodial wallet
2⃣ Samourai was a mixer
3⃣ Samourai was providing normal people with privacy
4⃣ Samourai were knowingly marketing the service to criminals and flaunting that fact
Reading the charges, it seems like #4 is pretty cut and dry for this case. Their getting arrested for #4, doesn't automatically mean #1, #2, #3 are under siege as well. If Samourai was a taco stand laundering money and bragging about it, I'm sure they would be taken down too.
They may be accused of running a money transmitter now, but that may or may not stick. We'll find out in the trial.
All that said, we should always be vigilant to attempts to erode privacy and the ability to self-custody. It just does not seem that this fight is *that* fight.
FBI PSA
Seems pretty normal that the FBI would advise people to use compliant services, and the entire announcement seems to revolve around potential disruptions due to Samourai being taken down, and potentially others in the future. Given they took action, they have to post some bulletin about it.
Remember that when people lose funds or have funds stolen from them, they do go to the FBI for help. From their point of view, the best thing for people to do is use compliant services where they can potentially help.
The announcement concludes saying that services that purposely break the law will be investigated - so again we go back to #4 above. This is nothing new, and self-custody is not being criminalized.
Phoenix Leaving
As nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m said, it's feels completely unnecessary. Phoenix obviously is not a MSB and they are not doing anything illegal. In my view, their exit from the US app stores is a complete overreaction.
Keep Calm
Could "they" come after wallets, developers, mixers, nodes, LSPs, sidechains, eCash, VPNs, encryption, etc? It's totally possible. But if you're not breaking the law, you have nothing to worry about.
To my knowledge, there is still rule of law in the US, property rights are still protected, and privacy is enshrined in the Bill of Rights (nostr:npub1trr5r2nrpsk6xkjk5a7p6pfcryyt6yzsflwjmz6r7uj7lfkjxxtq78hdpu).
It would be very difficult to change the law or stretch it to incriminate these things because it's all just information and software, which is speech. Some will try. But as they are trying, #Bitcoin is becoming more and more mainstream and integral to the world's financial system.
#Bitcoin is freedom technology and it will continue on.
Go outside this weekend and think about why you're here.
If the developers of Phoenix are not doing anything illegal, they should have nothing to worry about. If they panic and run before getting caught, they are doing something illegal.
It’s better to discuss it without bias so it becomes for the common good.
It’s better to make a new navy.
A primeira coisa é sair dessa faculdade aí.
Agora, se você não sabe nada nada de programação faz um curso básico qualquer desses da internet. Tipo este: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfscVS0vtbw. Depois que vai seguindo uns tutoriais para fazer qualquer coisa em qualquer linguagem e vai modificando os exemplos e tal, fazendo qualquer coisa que lhe interesse. Procure em inglês.
I have followed many coding courses on different websites. I have started to study computer science, then I stopped… I don’t know if I would ever study coding again.
Jack got bluesky funded when he was CEO Twitter, it’s an independent public benefit corporation which has since received VC investment. As far as I know Jack never contributed code to bluesky. I do know that from our Odeo days many eons ago, that he’s an incredibly talented programmer. He’s CEO of a publicly traded company and that requires a lot of meetings and interruptions of your work day which makes coding hard.
When it comes to Nostr? He’s also not contributed any code that i’m aware of. His github account doesn’t show any activity, which we’d see if he contributed code to Nostr. https://github.com/jackjack
What he has contributed to Nostr is both immaterial and material. Jack’s attention on Nostr helped elevate it from a project a few bitcoiners and enthusiasts of social media protocols knew about to something that Elon tried to block and a lot of people started paying attention to. Then Jack started providing material support with funds to fiatjaf to share with the community, funding the conferences, and endowing the OpenSats fund with money to pay developers. This support’s been a huge boost to making sure Nostr matures and develops by providing time for developers and designers to really focus on Nostr projects.
I spent years working on Secure Scuttlebutt which was an inspiration for Nostr, and it didn’t have funding to support the developer community. We’d constantly get great dev’s, designers, and community members in who would contribute for a while, then have to quit in order to work to support themselves. Earlier this month one of the cores of the community, Andre Staltz had to stop working on it in order to focus on doing dev contracts to pay his bills.
https://www.manyver.se/blog/2024-04-05
Nostr doesn’t suffer from that cycle of burnout, and it’s amazing.
I think it’s better to leave nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m say his own side of the story; we can’t be sure otherwise whether he is currently coding or not.
This is the best in-depth dive in to how bluesky works from a code / infrastructure perspective that I’ve seen. I think anybody trying to understand and build Nostr should take a look. In a ton of ways atproto and nostr are siblings in how they work. It’s all the same stuff but slightly tweaked and in different proportions.
We have relays, they have relays. Their events are defined by signatures of the event and so our ours. They’ve got some differences, Nostr does casual ordering by timestamp whereas they’ve got a kind of merkel tree as part of the event. Their clients talk to a PDS server which holds keys similar to nsec bunker, but it also acts as a personal relay, which we have but not everybody uses. Our labelers are any nostr user or bot, whereas theirs a specific cloud service middleware. We’ve got DVM’s and other middleware which can generate custom feeds, but it’s not needed, clients can do their own thing or decide sorting. Whereas custom feeds in atproto are more core and extensible.
They plan to add payments and a DVM type service, but haven’t gotten to that yet, where as we have zaps already.
Because of the way bluesky has control over who can connect to their relay and submit data to their servers, users on the main bluesky network have to receive their content with their moderate bot labels via both AI and the Ozone app.
Bluesky supports arbitrary datastructures and lots of kinds of apps beyond the twitter like microblogging, but as far as I know nobody’s built one. Where as Nostr has tons of weird interesting apps.
I think nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m helped coding bluesky and he helped with the user interface too.
The context is important to specify each random conversation while dealing honestly with other people in the same way as in a real conversation or generally speaking in real life.
