New month, new LTS grantee! nostr:npub1s6z7hmmx2vud66f3utxd70qem8cwtggx0jgc7gh8pqwz2k8cltuqrdwk4c is the latest bitcoin core developer receiving long-term support from OpenSats. Welcome, Sjors!
https://opensats.org/blog/sjors-provoost-receives-opensats-lts-grant
🎶 Sjors stacks sats, Sjors stacks sats, Sjors. Stacks. Sats. 🎶
Congratulations nostr:npub1s6z7hmmx2vud66f3utxd70qem8cwtggx0jgc7gh8pqwz2k8cltuqrdwk4c 🎉
If the base layer ossified now, custodial solutions will be the only option for most users in the future.
Layer two is not a magic incantation. For layer twos to optimize and improve, new functionality on the base layer is required. Layer twos are literally just things built on the functionality of layer one. The limitations of layer two are a direct result of layer one limits.
It's worth revisiting periodically as it delivers powerful messages about how individuals united in the struggle against oppression are intricately connected.
To me, this movie was perfect.
https://video.nostr.build/12f1aceb27180dcd833c3377f0bf58baf6a57841a3e2e631a65ee1202fecb62d.mp4
One of my favorites as well 💜
To me, this movie was perfect.
https://video.nostr.build/12f1aceb27180dcd833c3377f0bf58baf6a57841a3e2e631a65ee1202fecb62d.mp4
My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?
This piece from nostr:npub1tq7z72r2g859ucwfmr4qne8ft6v2z38c2qlqhmq098q4qpvv5m0svhxzxp is a good start.
nostr:npub139nl9yxvwayl60fr97m3zrq9md6x5v0uup344mkyuyg6mzlusyxs4zkwf4 on the Future of Lightning Payments, Taproot Assets, and River's Lightning Node
https://fountain.fm/episode/fGujz7KzjYIG9RIzfPgk
nostr:npub1pzuqm2zm569vqvvgt6j4t26zhdpzx877nd5sh0g0frqj3halsqysmkl6hp 🤙
Most people are beyond persuasion.
This does not mean we should surrender to the forces of economic illiteracy, or give up trying to win hearts and minds for political liberty. On the contrary, we should redouble our efforts to cultivate anyone interested in civil society, real economics, markets, property, and peace - especially those under thirty. But this is not a numbers game. We should focus on those who can be reached, not some mythical majority. Our task is to reach some people narrowly and deeply, not a majority of people superficially. We stand in contrast to the white noise, and opposed to the superficiality and anti-intellectualism of our age. Mobilizing the few is far more important and far more effective than foolishly trying to persuade the many.
- Jeff Deist
Let us not fear being accused of hyperbole or alarmism. Let me ask you this: what happens if we're wrong, and what happens if they're wrong? What they are doing, meaning central bankers and national treasuries, is unprecedented. Fake money is infinite, real resources are not. Hyperinflation may not be around the corner or even years away; no one can predict such a thing. But at some point, the US economy must create real organic growth if we hope to maintain living standards and avoid an ugly inflationary reality. No amount of monetary or fiscal engineering can take the place of capital accumulation and higher productivity. More money and credit is no substitute for more, better, and cheaper goods and services. Political money can't work, and we should never be afraid to attack it root and branch. We need private money, the only money immune from the inescapable political incentive to vote for things now and pay for them later. If this is radical, so be it.
History shows us how money dies. Yes, it can happen here. Only a fool thinks otherwise.
- Jeff Deist
Here is an unspoken truth: inflation also makes us worse people. It degrades us morally. It almost forces us to choose current consumption over thrift. Economists call this high time preference, preferring material things today at the expense of saving or investing. It makes us live for the present at the expense of the future, the opposite of what all healthy societies do. Capital accumulation over time, the result of profit, saving, and investing, is how we all got here today a world with almost unimaginable material wealth all around us. Inflationism reverses this.
So this very human impulse, to save for a rainy day and perhaps leave something for your children, is upended. Inflationism is inescapably an antihuman policy.
- Jeff Deist
Inflation is nothing less than sanctioned state terror, and we ought to treat it as such. It's criminal. It makes us live in fear. Inflation is not just an economic issue, but in fact produces deep cultural and social sickness in any society it touches. It makes business planning and entrepreneurship - which rely on profit and loss calculations using money prices - far more difficult and risky, which means we get less of both. How do you measure money profits when the unit of measurement keeps falling in value? It erodes capital accumulation, the driver of greater productivity and material progress. So, inflation destroys both existing wealth and future wealth, which never comes into being and thus diminishes the world our children and grandchildren inhabit. And it makes us poor and vulnerable in our senior years.
- Jeff Deist
Austrians stress the time element of interest rates, comparing the lender's willingness to forego present consumption against the borrower's desire to pay a premium for present consumption. In Austrian theory interest rates represent the price at which the relative time preferences of lenders and borrowers meet.
Negative interest rates are the price we pay for central banks. The destruction of capital, economic and otherwise, is contrary to every human impulse. Civilization requires accumulation and production; de-civilization happens when too many people in a society borrow, spend, and consume more than they produce. No society in human history previously entertained the idea of negative interest rates, so like central bankers we are all in uncharted territory now.
Our job, among many, is to bring the insights of Austrian economics on money and banking to widespread attention before something truly calamitous happens.
- Jeff Deist
"Attempts to carry out economic reforms from the monetary side can never amount to anything but an artificial stimulation of economic activity by an expansion of the circulation, and this, as must constantly be emphasized, must necessarily lead to crises and depression. Recurring economic crises are nothing but the consequence of attempts, despite all the teachings of experience and all the warnings of the economists, to stimulate economic activity by means of additional credit." - Mises
The key words here are "as must constantly be emphasized." It is incumbent on all of us to do everything in our power to make the case against central banking, one of the great evils of our time. We must make the case against the Fed loudly and repeatedly, even as the world is in thrall to it. - Jeff Deist