My wife turned on the news this morning for the first time in what seems like years….

Once you unplug, you can’t unsee the nonsense and propaganda

We side scrolled eye rolled and abruptly turned it off.

Daylight saving time perfectly captures government logic: nothing in reality changes, but we all have to act like it did.

Want to start a #Bitcoin circular economy in your town?

Here are the biggest lessons I learned building one in mine.

The hidden obstacle that stalls adoption:

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The hardest part of building a Bitcoin circular economy isn’t technical.

It’s social.

Wallets and Lightning are easy.

Making business owners feel safe? That’s the challenge.

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Many business owners aren’t against Bitcoin. Many are curious. Many even like it personally.

But hesitation sets in when they think about going public and associating their business with it. They worry about how it will look - if they’ll face backlash, if people will label them unfairly.

This is the obstacle that quietly stalls adoption.

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They worry:

• “What will my regulars think?”

• “Will people assume I’m political or extreme?”

• “Will there be backlash in the community?”

• “What if there are risks I don’t even know about yet?”

Even if they like Bitcoin personally, that mix of social pressure and uncertainty often keeps them hesitant.

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The story you tell matters.

The narrative matters.

If Bitcoin is framed as “radical,” “political,” or “anti-system,” most merchants back away.

If it’s framed as local money that keeps value in the community and strengthens small business they lean in.

Adoption feels cooperative and positive, even patriotic.

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In the Comox Valley I took action to overcome this hurdle by making adoption feel safe, friendly, and local.

Merchants aren’t “taking a risk,” they are joining the Comox Valley circular economy - a supportive network that celebrates local businesses.

• Branding is friendly and familiar, which softened Bitcoin’s image. Builds a familiar community brand people learn to trust, and are proud to be a part of.

• Merchants join as part of a circular economy - no one feels alone.

• I lead with community-first language (“keeping value local”) (“circular economy”) before saying Bitcoin.

• Merchants can start privately, then go public when confident.

• And when they do, celebrate them - so visibility feels like support, not exposure. And it shows others it is safe to join.

With friendly branding and positive language, Bitcoin doesn’t feel political or foreign, it starts feeling like community.

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Celebrating new merchants isn’t just recognition - it’s visibility.

Most businesses aren’t waiting for better wallets. They’re waiting for proof it’s safe. Proof that others like them are already doing it.

When a familiar business accepts Bitcoin, two things click:

Normalization - Bitcoin stops feeling fringe and starts feeling ordinary.

Social proof - “If they can do it, so can I.”

This flips psychology fast. Even a town that feels against it can swing almost overnight - if just one or two respected businesses lead the way.

Visibility doesn’t just spread the word.

It turns hesitation into confidence.

That’s how circular economies begin.

Create a local group to proudly share and promote businesses accepting!

Give these businesses even more value for joining!

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One thing I found crucial:

When talking with merchants and community members, I never frame Bitcoin as “against” anything.

Not against banks.

Not against inflation.

Not against the system.

I always speak in the positive:

• Local value staying local

• New customers walking in the door

• Community loyalty and pride

• Networking and community cooperation.

Bitcoin adoption grows fastest when it feels like an opportunity - not a confrontation.

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The Takeaway.

If you ignore this obstacle, adoption stalls. If you plan for it, you can make merchants feel safe, supported, and even proud to go public in your community.

The way to do that is simple: step back and observe your community. Every town has its own barriers and dynamics - address those first. Don’t try to “get everyone to use Bitcoin.” Instead, focus on creating a circular economy that genuinely benefits the people around you. Pour value into that, and let Bitcoin be the tool that beautifully facilitates it.

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These are the dynamics I observed in the Comox Valley.

Other towns will be different, but these principles are universal.

Bitcoin isn’t just software.

It’s social infrastructure.

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Remember the real objective, center and align yourself and your approach with it often.

It isn’t just to get businesses to say yes to Bitcoin.

What is your goal? Get clear on that.

My goal: building communities and people that embody what Bitcoin teaches - patience, responsibility, truth, abundance, and voluntary cooperation. Giving people the tools to learn the deeper lessons Bitcoin teaches.

Each circular economy is a living node in the greater Bitcoin network.

I want to support you in your town!

Circular economies are where Bitcoin stops being theory and starts shaping the world with hard money.

-Joyce Dawn

Meh, Boomers are bad, but the previous generations that brought two world wars and central banks all over the world were worse.

Bro every time I think about the world the boomers were born into and then look at the world they handed us I wanna break shit.

Interesting to see so many long time bitcoiners flush their reputations down the toilet right before a massive bull run

I'm reading a history of asymmetric cryptography right now ("Crypto" by Steven Levy), and my mind is being repeatedly blown by the origins, odds, and success of the movement. Everything we're doing with nostr started in the 1970's! And yet we somehow still don't have widely-used, decentralized electronic mail that checks both boxes of the original RSA paper:

> we must ensure that two important properties of the current “paper mail” system are preserved: (a) messages are private, and (b) messages can be signed.

The question that keeps coming to mind is this: what happened between 1996 and 2009? Once individual rights to cryptography was established, did the movement die out? Why did no one build out access to cryptography for the average internet user? Yes, SSL is ubiquitous, but it's still controlled by a cabal of root certificate issuers.

I know there was ongoing work that led to bitcoin, and XMPP is an obvious exception, but even so I am stunned that 50 years after the invention of public key cryptography we still don't have widespread, meaningful adoption. Keys are limited to technical users, and encryption is mediated and undermined by centralized platforms.

For those with some perspective on this history: are we in the midst of a cryptography renaissance? Did bitcoin kick off a resurgence of interest in digital privacy? Or is that just my own bias at play?

CONFESSION:

Today I came to the humorous, but accurate, realization that the only reason I spend any time on social media is that my IRL friends have little to no interest in investing, macroeconomics, and even Bitcoin.

Related, the urge to unplug and permanently touch grass is incessant for me now that I am not trying to grow my business and brand.

I have been seeing some claims that "Bitcoin Knots is part of the Bitcoin Core project", that "Bitcoin Knots is just another release of Bitcoin Core", and that "Bitcoin Knots has more contributors than Bitcoin Core".

Bitcoin Core has about 40 regular contributors with over a thousand past contributors. The Bitcoin Core project releases its software on bitcoincore.org. Bitcoin Core releases are signed by several Bitcoin Core contributors and other community members. Releases are attested to by this community.

Bitcoin Core’s source code is released under the MIT License. The MIT License is a permissive open-source license permitting anyone to do almost anything with the licensed code.

Bitcoin Knots is a project fork of Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Knots appears to be developed by a single developer pushing directly to master without peer review. Bitcoin Knots releases are composed of Bitcoin Core’s source code modified with a patch set of about 1400 commits. The same individual unilaterally issues releases. There is no indication that anyone else has ever contributed code or review directly to Bitcoin Knots. Bitcoin Knots is not endorsed by the Bitcoin Core project.

Claims to the contrary appear to be based on a unique individual perception of reality.

Contrary to popular belief among fiat brains…

Despite its forever fixed supply, there will always be enough bitcoin available for anyone who wants or needs it.

The only variable is the price they will pay for each sat.

No sir I will not shitcoin on actual shitcoins like a common scoundrel.

I will shitcoin the traditional way… on Bitcoin stocks like a gentleman.

Here me out, the major toxic voting incentives can be fixed very easily:

If you receive a subsidy, welfare, handout from the govt of any kind, you automatically lose the right to vote. In no world does it make sense for people who receive benefit to get to vote for those who pay for it to have a greater, coerced obligation to them.

Iris ships with a precalculated Nostr social graph for content filtering. It can be recrawled on the client side with a click of a button. In addition to this "web of trust", maybe we should include a "web of likes" dataset for client-side generated content recommendations. "You liked this user's posts, so you'll probably like these as well." Or "web of zaps" if that signal works better.

everyone is making everything up as they go

you can do the same

Zaps represent the only fundamentally new innovation in social media.

Everything else is a distraction.