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Sjors Provoost
8685ebef665338dd6931e2ccdf3c19d9f0e5a1067c918f22e7081c2558f8faf8
Physicist turned bitcoin developer aka "shadowy super-coder", author of Bitcoin: A Work In Progress

Great conversation.

Re social media: I like the arena vs. town square analogy.

Re productivity: Throttling the number of in-progress tasks, to reduce context switching, is tricky. I do occasionally prune my project list (in Omnifocus, #GTD), by either dropping things or setting a start date in the future.

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/363-knowledge-work

What's the best Nostr event preview site and when can it be added to nostr:npub18m76awca3y37hkvuneavuw6pjj4525fw90necxmadrvjg0sdy6qsngq955? Found myself struggling today to quickly drop a link on X to an earlier post here.

Say it ain't so...

> Because Ethereum developers realize the expansive and permanent power of AUTH instructions to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), they have decided to limit the EOAs to which users may delegate their assets. Specifically, they have proposed limiting EOAs to a whitelist maintained by pre-approved wallet providers like MetaMask.

https://protos.com/ethereums-eip-3074-upgrade-could-let-wallet-makers-steal-your-money/

I have many issues with these laws, but my point here is that this behavior had nothing to do with the law. It was discrimination and extortion with no legal basis.

Die hebben hun aanval niet twee weken van tevoren via de pers en met tig diplomatieke telefoontjes aangekondigd. En deze keer was niet het halve leger met verlof omdat ze blind vertrouwden op automatische verdediging (en te druk waren met de west oever).

Arguably it was carefully calculated and negotiated to avoid escalation: impressive enough to make Iran look strong, soft enough that the Iron Dome (with some help) could stop it. Spending $1.1B to prevent a war that costs trillions is a good deal. World peace would be nice of course, saves us all a bunch of money - and lives.

I should probably go through my relay list and remove the ones that use CloudFlare - and probably pay for ones that don't.

I totally understand its utility - and I get that info on relays is public anyway - but it's as close to just having the NSA run a relayer as one can get. Especially if you let them handle SSL encryption.

Dutch podcast interviews a few victims of obvious discrimination by ING. They sent a small payment to someone whose first name is the Arab equivalent of "John", and were hit with KYC questions. Both initially refused, but when ING threatened to close their bank account they relented.

They also interview a compliance supervisor at the bank who basically gave the "I'm just following orders" excuse, and is sorry that the victims "feel" discriminated.

The "explanation" given, though ING doesn't confirm it, is that there is some random terrorist out there with the same first name, so they ask everyone who mentions that name for full details. ING then pretends that the law requires this, because there's a "risk". This is utter nonsense in my opinion, and it would never happen if a terrorist had a common Dutch or English first name.

Banks are playing a cynical game here. They know they get a fine if they don't do sufficient anti-terrorism screening. They can probably use these nonsense investigations as a legal defense, using their customers as human shields. Meanwhile they know they'll never be prosecuted for discrimination, or extortion for that matter.

Bitcoin fixes this, but personally I'd like to see these Gestapo compliance officers, and their bosses, behind bars.

https://www.nporadio1.nl/podcasts/argos/106152/discriminatie-of-terrorismebestrijding

Interesting perspective on the latest thing. 300 projectiles is apparently more than Russia ever managed to fire at Ukraine in a single strike. And, more worrying, not a single European country could have defended itself against this.

Where does one buy an Iron Dome? :-)