Man I have been so burn out lately. When I look at my emails in particular I’m just like, “No, I don’t think I will.”

I am making a vow to catch up on all my comms next week.

I recently migrated from Standard Notes over to Notesnook. Check it out 👍

Favourite Open Source app that isn't a Bitcoin or Nostr app that you use every day?

#AskNostr

nostr fixes this 🫡

First post 😁

Hi everyone

They say that money is the root of all evil. How do we know that won’t still be the case when Bitcoin is the dominant form of money?Maybe Bitcoin becomes the root of all evil because people will do anything to get it. (?)

Also, Bitcoin separates money from state, but one aspirational aspect of governments are that they are a mechanism to prevent Corporations from enslaving workers. That might sound like communist ideology… but if the state has less power it does seem to me that the power vacuum will be filled with Corporations, who would then become the new overlords.

I spoke at a big bitcoin-adjacent company this week and one of the best questions was from someone who asked what the downsides of bitcoin adoption might be.

I always do appreciate these steelman questions, the skeptical questions, the ones where we challenge ourselves. Only when we can answer those types of questions do we understand the concept that we are promoting.

So the classic example is that in modern economic literature, "deflation is bad". This, however, is only the case in a highly indebted system. Normally, deflation is good. Money appreciates, technology improves, and goods and services get cheaper over time as they should. Price of Tomorrow covers this well. My book touches on this too, etc. The "deflation is bad" meme is still alive in modern economic discourse and thus is worth countering, but I think in the bitcoin spectrum of communities, people get that deflation is fine and good.

My answer to the question was in two parts.

The first part was technological determinism. In other words, if we were to re-run humanity multiple times, there are certain rare accidents that might not replicate, and other commonalities that probably would. Much like steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity, and nuclear power, I think a decentralized network of money is something we would eventually come across. In our case, Bitcoin came into existence as soon as the bandwidth and encryption tech allowed it to. In other universes or simulations it might look a bit different (e.g. might not be 21 million or ten minute block times exactly), but I think decentralized real-time settlement would become apparent as readily as electricity does, for any civilization that reaches this point. So ethics aside, it just is what it is. It exists, and thus we must deal with it.

The second part was that in my view, transparency and individual empowerment is rarely a bad thing. Half of the world is autocratic. And half of the world (not quite the same half) deals with massive structural inflation. A decentralized spreadsheet that allows individuals to store and send value can't possibly be a bad thing, unless humanity itself is totally corrupted. I then went into more detail with examples about historical war financing, and all sorts of tangible stuff. In other words, a whole chapter full of stuff. I've addressed this in some articles to.

In your view, if you had to steelman the argument as best as you could, what are the scenarios where bitcoin is *BAD* for humanity rather than good for it, on net?

So far it's been flawless. Will write up some long form thoughts this week.

Hi, this is my first post on Nostr.

SN is my daily driver.

The one thing that it's missing is a plugin ecosystem imho.

Also, first post in a month because I finally found the time to install amethyst (via apk, since google play asks for a credit card I don't have) and transcribe by hand the hex format of a bip85 derivation from a coldcard. Postponed for so long.

have any of you ditched mobile phone for laptop only?