With BTC's exchange rate ending 2025 down 6%, the 4 year cycle of 3 up years followed by 1 down year is officially broken.

On the bright side, Bitcoin has never seen 2 down years in a row. Let's just hope that pattern isn't broken in 2026!

Fjords?

2025 DESTROYED ALL THE MODELS!!!

WE ARE FREE NOW, NO MORE 4 YEAR CYCLE!!! FINALLY!!!

GN

It's because Bitcoin is incredibly well designed. All of the low hanging fruit has been harvested, now we're just trimming fringe along the edges.

OpenAI's new GPT 1.5 will be a pretty big deal for our image aficionados. Live now!

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.

In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.

What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.

I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.

No more "are you human?"

No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.

No more being treated like a child.

Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.

Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.

Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.

Nothing worth having ever comes easy.

But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.

Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.

Here's to nostr.

They plead guilty not due to actual guilt, but because they were blocked from providing nearly all of their items and arguments for defense and because they were looking at having a farce of a case that ended in 25 years in prison. While the very regulator who would determine whether they were a money transmitter publicly stated and directly informed the prosecution that what they did would not fall under "money transmission." Yet the prosecution went forward anyway and simply made it so this essential piece of evidence was not presented in court.

They can't be guilty of a crime that A. its a crime and has no victim and B. when the very authority that would determine the regulatory obligation of the action itself claims they were not in violation.

That's pretty fucked up in my book

With respect you have zero understanding of the British Constitution. Most British people have no understanding of it either as the global Marxist/Socialist agenda, founded by Rome, has for infiltrated every institution to ensure generations have lost their true identity. Rome has one objective: destroy the British Crown so the Pope can become the spiritual head of the world through the UN.

Me and the boys hanging out in the office, jamming to tunes, vibing with Claude.

American tipping culture is out of control.

The other night I took my wife and son out to dinner, and our total amount was $64, which wasn’t so bad until our server asked me to scan a QR code on the table to pay the tab.

The amounts were arranged in a manipulative dark UX pattern, ordered from highest to lowest, with 25% set as the default amount, and the lowest preset was 21%. To enter a custom amount, you have to locate the tiny “Custom tip” option, practically hidden at the top right of the screen, the spot the user testing heatmaps absolutely identified as the least likely for your eyes to scan.

Not to be defeated by a tip shaming tab-splitting app I’d never heard of before, I outsmarted the system by pretending I couldn't scan the code and asked to pay with the handheld Toast terminal, where the presets were more normal, starting at 15%.

Go check out Sunday (sundayapp.com) if you want a laugh, or to feel depressed. Their slogan is (I shit you not), “Turn every payment into profit.”

What are you HODLing for?

Earlier today I hit the perfect ratio

GN

#gm my #nostriches.

Did anyone catch the #bloodmoon last night?

Get ready for 127 pictures of Agami Herons!!!

We got to visit the world's largest rookery (just discovered in May!) last weekend, and I have spent the last week culling and editing 1200 shots. Pretty proud that I narrowed it down to <100 good ones!

#birdstr #bird #photography #birdphotography #photostr

Top 4 reasons I voted for Trump

1) Bitcoin ✅

2) No War 🤷

3) DOGE ❌

4) Epstein Files ❌

Other relays to try today: wss://relays.land/spatianostra or wss://algo.utxo.one or wss://140.f7z.io (again, this is early).

Relays that do automatic curation, manual curation, relays that slurp data from others and filter them, relays that belong to closed or closed-ish communities, relays that have weird incentive models to get people to post. There are many unexplored possibilities.