A new strategy people seem to be using to self custody Bitcoin. Chain foot print is low and also good privacy.

"What's the cost of freedom?"

That's the question I asked yesterday on X.

I asked because I suddenly had a strange feeling of understanding that this was the most important question that man can ask himself, and that I might be close to finding the answer, or at least an answer that is satisfactory for me.

Rewind back 20 years. Then I was 31. I read several books by Ayn Rand, including two of her masterpieces, "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead". It was then that I understood what freedom meant to me.

It had taken 31 years of my life to find this out.

31 years.

That's a long time of living without knowing what freedom means to you, isn't it?

I realized that, at least to me, freedom meant:

"Absence of coercion."

And it would take a total of 51 years 3 months and 3 days of living until I yesterday realized that the most important question to me is:

"What's the cost of freedom?"

To be more specific, it took me 51 years of reading, reflecting, discussing, completing the writing of three books, coming very close to completing my fourt book (Arrow of Truth) and an invitation to speak at a major conference before I yesterday understood that this question was the most important one.

51 years plus before I understood which question that was most important to me.

That's a loooong time.

Furthermore, it took one additional night with little sleep, waking up at 5 AM this morning, and then enduring one hour with ideas, memories, impressions, arguments and reflections erratically flickering behind my eyelids, before I this morning realized that the answer had been in front of me for almost 15 years.

It has been there - stuck into my face for friggin 15 years as if it was written in large caps on a sheet of paper glued to the tip of my nose - since 2008, before I finally understood 90 minutes ago what my answer to this overwhelmingly important question was.

It has been too close to me, of course, so close that I haven't been able to see it.

And then - boom!

This type of eureka moment has only happened to me very few times before.

I'm not yet going to disclose it all yet, but parts of the answer to the question "What is the cost of freedom" is that:

"It depends."

I guess that not telling you more than this part of my answer will make some of you freak out a little bit, and that's ok, I can live with that.

But I promise, I will share it with all of you in due time.

First I'm going to spell it out as clearly as I can when I go about and complete Arrow.

In the meantime, I hope more of you guys ask yourself the same question.

Have a nice and philosophical day :-)

"What's the cost of freedom?"

That's the question I asked yesterday on X.

I asked because I suddenly had a strange feeling of understanding that this was the most important question that man can ask himself, and that I might be close to finding the answer, or at least an answer that is satisfactory for me.

Rewind back 20 years. Then I was 31. I read several books by Ayn Rand, including two of her masterpieces, "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead". It was then that I understood what freedom meant to me.

It had taken 31 years of my life to find this out.

31 years.

That's a long time of living without knowing what freedom means to you, isn't it?

I realized that, at least to me, freedom meant:

"Absence of coercion."

And it would take a total of 51 years 3 months and 3 days of living until I yesterday realized that the most important question to me is:

"What's the cost of freedom?"

To be more specific, it took me 51 years of reading, reflecting, discussing, completing the writing of three books, coming very close to completing my fourt book (Arrow of Truth) and an invitation to speak at a major conference before I yesterday understood that this question was the most important one.

51 years plus before I understood which question that was most important to me.

That's a loooong time.

Furthermore, it took one additional night with little sleep, waking up at 5 AM this morning, and then enduring one hour with ideas, memories, impressions, arguments and reflections erratically flickering behind my eyelids, before I this morning realized that the answer had been in front of me for almost 15 years.

It has been there - stuck into my face for friggin 15 years as if it was written in large caps on a sheet of paper glued to the tip of my nose - since 2008, before I finally understood 90 minutes ago what my answer to this overwhelmingly important question was.

It has been too close to me, of course, so close that I haven't been able to see it.

And then - boom!

This type of eureka moment has only happened to me very few times before.

I'm not yet going to disclose it all yet, but parts of the answer to the question "What is the cost of freedom" is that:

"It depends."

I guess that not telling you more than this part of my answer will make some of you freak out a little bit, and that's ok, I can live with that.

But I promise, I will share it with all of you in due time.

First I'm going to spell it out as clearly as I can when I go about and complete Arrow.

In the meantime, I hope more of you guys ask yourself the same question.

Have a nice and philosophical day :-)

No-kyc there are few, hodlhodl, robosats or bisq, I would recommend bisq but there are not many offers, the others I don't know.

If you can get ln-btc non-kyc you can exchange it for l-btc for 0.25% in boltz.

You have several options, if you have BTC you can make the pegin yourself to get the same amount in Liquid or you can use for example boltz to transform LN-BTC (lightning) into L-BTC (Liquid). You can also buy Liquid in Bisq.

Are you prepared for a high chain fee environment?

Liquid has been undervalued for a long time, here are the advantages:

- You forget about incoming liquidity problems.

- Confidential transactions

- Used in the same way as bitcoin, you forget about being "online".

- No known security flaws.

- Possibility of cold storage.

As disadvantages:

- It is federated, even so it is much more secure than an exchange or a lightning custody wallet, and if you use cold storage it is more secure than a hot wallet.

- In terms of scalability it is not a panacea either, it is just that now few people use it and that is why it is viable.

Some blockstream people advocate moving the ordinals to Liquid but if we do that then it will be Liquid who will suffer a high fee environment...and it will be Liquid functionaries who will earn that money in fees.

In short, it pays to know how to use and move in Liquid as well as Lightning to successfully deal with a high fee environment, but neither is a panacea.

Liquid is simpler to use than Lightning and has fewer bugs, has good privacy for both the receiver and the sender from an outside observer, on the other hand Liquid is federated and is not as scalable as Lightning.

And one of the points why I think Ligthning has had more adoption, is that with lightning you work directly with Bitcoin, it's not a sidechain, with Liquid you work with a token until you do the pegout, it's a sidechain.

That said, you need to use both, right now we don't have anything else.

What is your favorite local llm? Running on what specs?

No electronic fiat transfers. Peer to peer or non kyc atm.

Will they make the non kyc illegal like weed is illegal, like prostitution is illegal, like software and movie piracy?

You seem to overestimate the state...

#Bitcoin is electronic cash.

The real cash is usually without KYC

So let's always use that „better cash“ bitcoin without KYC too!

My running thesis is being verified at every step. In the next phase they only let you have BTC with one of their approved custodians. It's effectively EO6102 in a different dress. Then comes CBDC where its impossible to operate in black market / parallel economy without getting nabbed by the AI gestapo. What's your solution? Side pot till it runs out? Second passport? Off shore and pay the piper to repatriate? Or just keep on meme-ing aka virtual picketing?

Yup. So then what’s the play when we see EO6102 events or regs that prevent hold keys in qualified accounts (similar to PMs) or _____? They’re going to try to force everyone into their bolshevik banking cartel approved custodians or else. Do folks really think you’re going to have a parallel black market economy with their non-KYC stack? That seems naive. It will be pretty easy for the man to programmatically hunt and kill in the era of AI and 8k fresh IRS agents. So it seems like one either needs a side pot or a trusted custodian with a shared worldview or be faced with leaving the country or achieving second passport with a way to repatriate offshore investment earnings (assumes min level of wealth) or some other hack that I’m not smart enough to figure out yet. Or we continue to slug it out earning fiat till the inevitable rise of BTC and the USofA sees the orange light… that ain’t gonna happen until after a lot a lot a pain (GDII, war, famine, CBDC, etc). What can we do to preemptively get ahead of these possible attack vectors? Maybe high profile folks like Lynn don’t wanna go on record discussing which I understand. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Buuueler?

No, because 0 confirmation is a thing on Monero at least for a coffe.

Still experimenting, I'm currently using llama.cpp including their fine tuning scripts. I have changed all the frameworks several times.

I'm programmatically creating question and answer data (it helps that I've written several books) by prompting a larger model (currently nous-hermes-llama-2-70B) and then some cleaning of the data, converting to alpaca format and finetuning (I currently fine tune the 13B version of the same model).

You need at least Apple Silicon hardware with lots of ram or a few nvidia gpus (vram more important than speed). Amd has shitty tooling.

I use both several nvidia cards and apple silicon. Nvidia and CUDA was probably forged in hell, Apple ecosystem is not so mature, but growing rapidly.

To anyone who’s thinking “If things get too bad, I’ll just leave.”

Borders are still a thing in the 21st century and it’s actually not that easy to move to another country.

So if you’re actually serious about leaving, make sure you start putting together a plan B now.

Geographic arbitrage is a thing but only for those who are prepared.

It’s not a real LN wallet and largely unusable in a high-fee environment