Often the scammers themselves seem to believe the scam. That doesn’t make it right either.
90% of what passes as “science” is BS.
90% of people who “identify as scientists” are scammers.
The fact that there’s usually a grain of truth in their fantasies or fabrications doesn’t change the fact.
I don’t understand the obsession with relays that curate content and block lists.
It’s just recreating the exact same problems that Nostr supposedly solves.
Unless you can have moderation that isn’t delegated to anyone else — or that at least can be validated to follow an explicit algorithm without any room for manipulation
Then it’s better to go back to Twitter or Mastodon
The “clown world” works by mistaking the signs for the things, the metrics for the results, mistake words for biology, legislation for Law, debt for money.
Mistake the appearance of trust for trustworthiness.
“High trust societies” aren’t “high trust” because people “just happen to trust institutions”.
Forcing people to pretend to trust institutions achieves nothing.
You need the institutions to be trustworthy first — then to earn the trust of people with much effort.
It is precisely by baking skepticism towards institutions into the institutions themselves that you make institutions earn the trust of even the most skeptical citizens.
“You’ll have to trust me or I’ll make you pay ” can only lead to chaos
Yes AI might be dangerous — if people decide to trust it.
Yes, misinformation can be a problem — if people are too gullible to believe anything they hear.
The problem isn’t people or machines being allowed freedom to say whatever.
The problem is our absurd clown world based on “mandated trust”
A world where nobody trusts anything would be an immense improvement over the status quo.
Of course all the usual suspects are now asking for regulation of AI to prevent it from “spreading misinformation”
That’s just more of the same totalitarian censorship mantra.
Let me tell you a secret — you can’t regulate Artificial Intelligence. Just like you can’t regulate gravity or math.
The only thing you can regulate are human beings.
AI is just software. And software is speech.
What they want is to tell you what you can say, what you can code — what you can think.
AI is just one more excuse.
E.g. real estate has in fact bailed out the government for decades — by absorbing a huge share of newly printed dollars and making the devaluation of the dollar less apparent. Real estate bails out the government by absorbing inflation and risk.
Admittedly this is the opposite of the usual story. But fiat needs new money to be created non-stop to kick the can further down the road, and real estate buyers are (mostly inadvertently) bailing out the money printers by taking on that debt.
Perhaps the same will happen to crypto.
Newly printed dollars will flow into crypto (not just BTC, sorry but that’s just the way things are, the big battle of coins will come later).
BTC, ETH and others will appreciate at an astounding rate — and not as much of the new money will go into buying groceries or homes.
I believe crypto has in fact become “too big to fail” and regulators are starting to notice it.
They will fight with reality a bit more. But they can’t win.
I believe at some point in the near future governments will *beg* “crypto” to bail them out.
Yes they will try to force their way. They will tell you to hand over your sats, register them and what not.
But it’s not going to work as well as they *need*.
They will end up **begging**
And some crypto billionaire or fund might well end up de facto owning the government.
And that’s terrifying thing.
But that’s not “crypto’s” — it’s the government that put itself in such position.
In fact one could argue the government has put itself in such position repeatedly— with various groups bailing it out and de facto owning it.
So many people believe they will not be affected if they own BTC.
For starters, if the dollar collapses could you even keep your BTC without having to use it to buy essentials?
And would you be actually able to secure it?
And would you survive long enough to enjoy it in peace?
I really hope they can manage a relatively slow decline for USD.
But sooner or later there will be a point of rupture.
And it’s gonna be terrifying for everyone.
For receiving fractions of cents it’s all overkill.
If your censored or rug pulled on the amazing 1278 sats you received in total — wow that’s worrying!
Privacy-wise you’re probably making all of it public anyway.
I use WoS for this thing and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.
Sounds like “no signatures”.
Which I guess is the opposite of what you want.
Or maybe not.
It wasn’t exactly targeted at Kraken. It’s a consequent of Silvergate thing.
Not sure if that makes it better or worse.
The most important lesson Nostr taught me is that you can achieve a lot starting with zero original ideas, and very little capital — if you have someone excellent at “community building” on board. Nostr has now several such people.
I’m not a community builder.
My thing is identifying hard problems and working on them. Figuring out what’s wrong with other people’s supposed solutions and telling them — and often getting paid for that.
I make good money that way, and will probably end up more wealthy than most people who create successful OSS projects and even crypto startups.
The downside is that I never see my ideas become products— and I feel a lot like Cassandra. It’s frustrating.
If I’m ever to create a successful OSS project or a product I’ll need to learn community building or finding someone who knows it and shares my goals.
Well people seem to have a lot of different ideas of what of “free speech and de centralization of communication” mean.
And there’s a lot of yelling here as well.
I hate paying taxes. I hate even more doing taxes. Paying someone else to do it for me doesn’t completely solve the problem as most of the effort is still mine.
But I wouldn’t mind that much giving up 1/2 of my income if most of that money was to actually help other people, even if badly managed.
Heck, I wouldn’t be too bothered if they just took 50% of my income to enrich themselves and then left me alone.
What is truly infuriating is that they take my money and then use most of it to find new ways of harassing me and other people, dictate what we can or can’t do, patronize, humiliate, and gaslight us, and in general make our lives as miserable as possible.
If you known some place in the world where I can just pay taxes and be left alone I would love to move there.
A society governed by common thieves would be a great improvement over the status quo.
I don’t agree with the argument that every crypto-asset other than bitcoin is a security.
Maybe that’s the case in terms of positive law — aka whatever legislators and courts define as such.
But in terms of logic, if every crypto asset other than Bitcoin is a security — then every asset other than Bitcoin is a security.
Wether cryptography is used for tracking property is irrelevant.
If you created a token that represents a fractional ownership of real estate would that be a security? Why isn’t an apartment a security then?
If the expectation of something becoming more valuable due to the work of others turns that something into a security— then every asset you buy today to sell tomorrow is a security — including Bitcoin and USD.
In fact I can’t see any true essence in the “security” species to set it apart from other sort of property.
It’s just a regulatory fiction to obtain jurisdiction over part of the economy.
We should not encourage semantic creep that leads to inflated regulatory power with statements like “everything but Bitcoin is a security”.
Why is there a question mark after the name of the place?
Is that like asking why you would choose such place?
You can. Problem is validating blocks takes time. If you keep your node behind you might find yourself having to wait several days to confirm a transaction.
Also keeping it online helps others too.