"I can withdraw cash from my bank account and give it to you, but you can't tell me my bank account number."

pro tip

if you do this "you cant dox my transaction so it must be private" bullshit

you look like a fool and make it obvious you don't understand privacy concerns. nostr:note1lv39ute0ftarna3nsayyev3jq8k7zyqkd99xw3rpnppwkstflu6sdv9awx

I’ll be speaking with Senator @cynthiamlummis this evening.

What questions would you like me to ask her?

TLDR from the Senate Banking Subcommittee:

Self-custodial wallets are Hamas, KYC all the things, Tether is toast, bitcoin below 30k this year inshallah

(article coming tomorrow bc this is my face rn)

Monero surging!

If XMR goes up, then the Bitcoiners cry out "ohhh I thought you guys don't care about price?!?"

If XMR goes down, the Bitcoiners say we're poor homeless bums that can't even maintain price in a bull market

Its a fact that people generally prefer to live with others who are culturally and ethnically similar to themselves.

Its also a fact that pride in your unique cultural is mostly encouraged and considered a positive thing.

Unless you're white.

If you're a *white person* who prefers to live with other people who look like you

and if you are proud of whatever white culture you participate in,

then you're a racist and white supremacist. nostr:note17d8x6urd6g32dduvks205vtmxtnmk40zerhlq5uaft3kgc09cwyqp5eapu

If you help find 5000 people who would subscribe if we do, we will absolutely make it a priority.

Riddle:

Q: Are there tax breaks if you pay in $TRUMP coins?

A: Yes, because you can write off the money you're about to lose.

I can get into why that's a waste of time separately, but let's say you do that - why don't you just use lightning network for the transfer and routing and swap the coins in the wallets for whatever each side desires? That's possible today without changes.

The interesting thing about lightning network is that as soon as sender and recipient confirm that they received what they wanted, the transaction is settled. They could transact cows or bubblegums and the lightning network would settle those.

No, the zaps spec specifically requires sending the transaction details (sender and receiver) to relays. Like that's literally the point of zaps. Read the spec for zaps I shared.

That's why I said that this doesn't really make sense.

People should be free to do whatever stupid thing they want to do, but doing this just complicates the experience for everyone and further it just doesn't make sense.

Clients would have to add code (=bugs) to handle this, UI would have to be redone to make this reasonable, it fractions the network into multiple pieces that will be harder to keep in sync, protocol becomes more complex to implement. Even if you are Monero or whatever supporter you should be able to see how this would hurt a lot of people and make the overall progress slower.

If you need the other coins for whatever reason then your wallet can do the swapping. Like Blink wallet allows you to swap sats for "stable" balance in the wallet. I bet Monero wallets do the same. If that's possible and easy then there are no reasons to update the whole stack just to add couple of these coins.

Reasons to spend bitcoin (incl. Lightning):

1/ It's more secure and private than filling out a form with personal information (e.g. credit card payment on some websites) or 1a/ handing over *credentials* to a waiter, or a POS machine that you don't trust. 1b/ The UI is therefore better (it's smoother)

2/ It's cheaper *maybe* for you, but specifically for the merchant, than credit cards

3/ It (quasi)-settles immediately in LN case and in 10 min on chain; card payments often take 60 days

4/ It has cash like properties but you can pay remotely and immediately

5/ It cannot be blocked by a payments provider

6/ There is no (realistic) limit how small or large the payment can be

7/ Every transaction, especially the more p2p ones, e.g. between friends, but also to companies, adds and improves bitcoin's privacy overall - consider that if we did nothing but move bitcoin to and from KYC exchanges, there would be zero privacy, independent of advanced cryptography. More business or personal transactions without KYC, the less information is in the onchain tracing.

8/ There is no global systemic downtime when some backend fails (this one is more debatable)

9/ Actually using bitcoin is how you learn its mechanics and will give you necessary expertise to not lose it, even if your primary goal is only saving.

10/ Using bitcoin makes it a better money, as you are participating in the process which makes it a viable form of money for others.

#spedn

A blanket statement without specifying the 85% that is actually not better privacy, I think, is more harmful than good. Mention custodians, mention the requirement to run your own node, the need to open channels with nodes that you know won't track. Definitely don't forget to mention your innovation on nostr zaps and the fact that anyone could call up the IRS, look at how many zaps you received/sent from your nostr profile and make the case that these micro transactions were for goods and services. Anyone can ask the IRS to audit anyone on here and the evidence is front and center, not encrypted or hidden. The person who tattles gets 40% of the cut without being taxed on it.

So the Trump's 'crypto* EO is out, and I'm seeing lots of weak bitches cry that its a shitcoin reserve.

Given the fact that the proposed digital assets stockpile would possibly be built on *seized* coins, let me give you a quick introduction to forfeiture law, and why crying for daddy to please please make its pile of flying horseshit "bitcoin only" *literally* the most retarded thing you could be wishing for, ever.

Forfeiture law – or civil asset forfeiture, to be precise – is this fun little game the government plays in which it does not have to accuse you of a crime to confiscate your property.

Instead of accusing you of a crime, the Government claims that the asset itself has facilitated a crime, and can therefore be seized by the Government.

In civil asset forfeiture, there is no innocent until proven guilty. To get your property back, *you* have to prove that the Government is wrong – which turns out pretty complicated seeing how its impossible to prove a negative.

Civil asset forfeiture results in cases that are not filed against a person, but filed against the property itself. This results in fun little cases like US vs. Binance Account XYZ, or US vs. 123 Wilmington Drive.

To extend this idea to Bitcoin, in a civil forfeiture case, the US Government is in theory able to seize *any bitcoin* that has *ever* come out of a criminal transaction.

Made some bitcoin for selling a service? Bought some bitcoin on a P2P exchange? Unless you checked that the UTXO you received has never touched a criminal transaction in its entire history, your coins can be confiscated, and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.

As Cato Institute points out in its piece on civil forfeiture reform, forfeiture law is routinely misused to enrich the Government – Philadelphia, for example, has seized over 1000 homes, over 3000 vehicles, and over $44M in cash over an 11 year period. In 2010, the city tried to seize *an entire fucking house* because a woman's grandson sold less than $200 of weed out of the basement.

If you think that taxes are bad, civil asset forfeiture is straight up evil.

It doesn't matter whether you participated in a crime. It doesn't matter whether you know that someone else participated in a crime. If it involved your property, even if said property was fully legally acquired, the Government will come and take it.

Civil asset forfeiture is the most insane Government funding technique that is out there, and you most definitely do not want this declared as a strategic means to pump the Government's bitcoin bags.

You are *literally* asking the Government to steal your coins with a practice that *every* libertarian advocate wants to see abolished.