Definitely! Strike's ability to receive dollars over lightning is huge! Great way to pitch Bitcoin to businesses that otherwise wouldn't care about it.

But you have to run your own BtcPay server, right? For bitcoiners that's fine, but imo the added complexity of accepting Bitcoin in a noncustodial way just isn't that enticing for most businesses (yet). The average business will only be interested in accepting Bitcoin as long as it's really easy, and for now that means using some form of custodial solution. They could use Voltage to host a BtcPay server, but then they lose the self-custody advantage _and_ they're back up to $25 per month in costs.

In a few years' time I can certainly see something like Fedimint become an easy way to accept Bitcoin. No need for lighting channel management since that's left up to gateways, and fees will likely be fairly consistent and low. But that'll take some time.

From what I understand, Zaprite doesn't ever touch your funds. Rather, you can connect it to your choice of both fiat and Bitcoin rails, including your own lighting node if you want. If there's a better option out there, definitely lmk! I'm very excited for when we can start making a bulletproof case for business to start accepting Bitcoin!

Talked to a friend the other day who runs a small business. He's not a bitcoiner but I've talked to him about it here and there. He mentioned how much they have to pay in credit card fees, so naturally I brought up the ability to circumvent that using lightning. I showed him Zaprite and he seemed genuinely interested. At $25 per month for a Zaprite subscription, and assuming that you save 2% in fees and pass half of that savings back to the customer (i.e. you save 1%), you'd need to get $2,500 per month paid in Bitcoin. The conversation ended with "this doesn't quite make financial sense... yet" but I don't think it'll be long until it becomes a no-brainer for most small businesses, even if neither the business nor the customers care about Bitcoin.

Is anyone working on printing physical paper E-Cash notes? The folks at https://noteworthy.ag/ have made paper Bitcoin notes with a visible public key and a scratch-off private key - I'd be interested in something similar but replacing the public key with a federation invite code and the private key with E-Cash. Not the most practical and secure way to hold E-Cash but the tangibility would be cool.

FUCK YOU

Is there a Chrome extension that replaces dollar values with sats? I want to stop thinking in fiat

How close are we to companies viewing a college degree as a negative when hiring?

Of course it depends on the industry, but in general

There are three types of people:

Those who learn by principles

Those who learn by experience

Those who never learn because they already know everything

💯

It might be possible with some modifications to this: https://github.com/Kodylow/hermes

An at-desk treadmill is also huge!

But what would we do without those roads??

But don't you remember? You have rights!

Decentralization is massively inefficient, but for a monetary network it sure as hell beats the alternative

Gresham's law: "bad money drives out good"

I had someone ask me how Bitcoin could succeed given this law. But Gresham's law isn't a law like the laws of physics - rather, it's describing people's natural responses to incentives. If bad money really did drive out good, people would use dirt as money, or perhaps even the words "thank you" uttered by the purchaser. Clearly this isn't a universal law. Instead it is the outgrowth of two different types of money with different intrinsic values being declared by governments to have the same face value. When the US government replaced silver coins with silver plated coins, businesses were forced to accept both types of coins at the same dollar-denominated value. So when someone needed to buy something, they would want to spend the coins that were worth less and hold on to the ones that were worth more.

IF YOU COULD CENSOR OTHERS, THEY COULD CENSOR YOU

I had ChatGPT filter out foreign companies from the list and it looks like instead it created a whitelist that included Google instead of Alphabet. The numbers are still correct but it likely left out some other well-known companies.

There are currently over 22 million people who worked for the US government. This including federal, state, and local (but excludes military). Here is a list of companies whose combined employee count reaches just over 10 million - less than half of this number.

Walmart

Amazon

Home Depot

Target

Kroger

Berkshire Hathaway

FedEx

JPMorgan Chase

IBM

Wells Fargo

Microsoft

CVS Health

Bank of America

Walgreens Boots Alliance

Comcast

Raytheon Technologies

General Electric

General Motors

Oracle

Apple

Boeing

AT&T

Johnson & Johnson

Tesla

Intel

Lockheed Martin

Verizon

Procter & Gamble

General Dynamics

Northrop Grumman

Pfizer

Coca-Cola

American Express

Merck

HP

Goldman Sachs

McKesson

Chevron

Uber

Netflix

eBay

Airbnb

Lyft

Morgan Stanley

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governmental-employees-in-the-us/

https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-of-employees/

THAT WAS PAINFUL