Hey, remember that time when the Nordstream pipeline was sabotaged, and then after a while most investigations quietly concluded without reporting on who did it?

Weird.

Anyway, anything good on tv lately? I hear Shogun is good.

Big week. Personally-/professionally-speaking.

Hopefully some resolution and clear direction incoming.

Democracy works on a local level, and local governments serve a meaningful purpose.

Democracy works poorly, if at all, on a national level. In many ways, it is simply "mob rule."

Serious questions:

- Does the federal government serve a meaningful purpose today?

- What benefit does the federal government provide for US citizens that cannot be performed (better?) by local governments and private industry?

- Are the interests of the US federal government the same as the interests of the American people?

Outside of coordinating efforts during WW2, I don't see much (if any) benefit of having a federal government... which is massively bloated and expensive for the American people to maintain.

My opinion?

Decentralization and downsizing of massive nation states--along with their monopolies on violence and money creation and distribution--is coming.

Worst three presidents of all time:

Lincoln, Wilson, FDR

Good morning.

If you slept the prescribed 8 hours last night, the US government borrowed $1.94B in that time. And its Council of Economic Advisors has no idea what that means.

Have a great day.

Back of the envelope numbers: Based on current Gross Profit and Bitcoin price, Block will be soaking up 10% of all new bitcoin produced by miners.

@jack = LEGEND

There is a common phrase: “he/she woke up today and chose violence”.

I like it. It is funny. But it is imperfect.

“Violence” is now a verbal defensive phrase that means too much. To “wake up and choose violence” in the modern parlance of people who know zero struggle means to choose public verbal opposition. Okay, sure. But not really.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. Not violence.

I spent years doing mixed martial arts competitively. I know violence. I am trained in a dozen ways to choke someone out, and have been choked out in’s dozen ways. I have had a 200 pound male fireman try to beat me unconscious and fail to do so. Even that wasn’t really violence, since it was controlled. Assholes on my trailer park bus stop in my teenage years were violent.

Verbosity isn’t violence. It is rhetoric.

I woke up today and chose rhetoric. I woke up today and chose to defend noncustodial privacy tools with language and resources. Coordinating messages between entities shouldn’t be a crime per se.

Bitcoin is anti-fragile and will continue to be so, thanks to all the people who work hard for it. But it is not without a fight.

Privacy is necessary in a free society in the digital age. A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto made this clear three decades ago and is still true.

All of the profits from the first thousand copies of Broken Money went to the Human Rights Foundation, since Alex Gladstein's public research was so useful for the book and I like the work they are doing worldwide.

The profits from the next four thousand copies went to making an animated half-hour video about Broken Money to reach people that haven't read the book, which we released a few days ago.

My graphics/editing team wanted to make sure that the video had good average viewer time in the first week to help with the YouTube algorithm, rather than the video be sent a ton of clicks that might watch it only briefly and hurt the early quality metrics, so they advised me to soft-launch it at first. We purposely haven't notified my email list or my Twitter feed yet, etc. But it's out there.

It's a half-hour video about the technological evolution of money, with animation. We put a lot of production value into it. And for the people who were sad that I didn't narrate the Broken Money audiobook, I did narrate this video.

In the coming weeks I will spread awareness for the video across my platforms, but for starters, it has been found here on Nostr.

Enjoy:

nostr:note14tgqhfxeu05tyalg07pxqhyz3w3zfw8j8jcx27x9zq8p0y2ahdlqvay0am

This hashprice is going to get super interesting the next few months oh man 😬

To all you miners out there, Godspeed 🫡

It’s crazy to think we have to worry about the government and how they react to what we build instead of being able to focus on building the future without fear of possibly being thrown in a cage. For building freedom technology that levels the playing field and brings about the equal opportunity politicians LARP about.

The cycle of widespread adoption of bitcoin mining throughout the energy sector is upon us.

Public Service Announcement: Get Fucked, FBI.

Privacy is normal and good.

There has been an effort among authorities to make “money laundering” and “financial privacy” the same thing. That is, the mere act of moving money privately itself becomes a crime. That’s not okay.

Money laundering is when money that is obtained through crime is concealed by obfuscating it with clean money. The actual crime is the initial non-financial crime (say, mob stuff), and historically money laundering involves manual activity to work with the criminals.

Now that open source tech can make certain transactions private, authorities increasingly equate all private money transfer with money laundering, even if the developer of the open source tech had no direct involvement with criminals. Authorities target them regardless, and sanction the technology itself. Financial privacy becomes synonymous with crime in their minds, and in the minds of the public.