I think about this quote often with algorithms and incentives and AI bots keeping people stuck in a system manifesting itself with their attention and fear.

nostr:note163ft2r2jw7wxauchglczqdycsszx3360294d3vgrewm9hzyhs0ns2rx6j4

It's insane to me that the Epstein files are used as a political football by both parties, as well as the voter base of both parties. "Look! Clinton is in the files!" says the red shirt. "Look! Trump is in the files!" says the blue shirt.

It shouldn't matter. Unspeakable things were done to underage girls (and boys) over a long period of time. Incredibly powerful people were (and are) involved. Politicians are implicated across the aisle, obviously, as are three-letter agencies. Some of the kids are ~5yrs old. Some of the photos show toddlers. What the fuck? "Disgusting" doesn't even begin to describe the situation. How broken is the current landscape if the only lens this is viewed through is the political lens?

One thing is worth remembering, however. It used to be a "conspiracy theory". Only a few months ago, talking heads and politicians would try to convince the public that there's no such thing as the Epstein files. Some high-ranking officials said as much under oath, even. What happened to perjury? Is it just a fancy word in today's day and age? I doubt that anyone will go to jail (except to commit "suicide"). And while perjury is a severe crime by most standards, it pales in comparison to what must have happened on the so-called "Lolita Express" that travelled so often to the "Virgin Islands". Oh, how funny. All these names. It would be comical if it wouldn't be so sad. Diabolical, even.

U.S. politics is a joke. The idea of justice as well as the legal system increasingly feels like a joke too. Innocent people are being jailed. Corrupt politicians and other officials are roaming free, because ... what? They are too powerful? Too influential? The system would destabilize too much if things would come to light?

Justitia holds a balance and a sword for a reason, and she wears a blindfold for a reason too. Today's reincarnation has no sword, no blindfold, and the balance she holds is obviously NOT using honest weights and measures.

What a laughable attempt at "transparency". I would laugh if it wouldn't be so horribly, horribly sad.

If I understand correctly the solution being worked on is WoT right now. Is that correct nostr:nprofile1qqsxu35yyt0mwjjh8pcz4zprhxegz69t4wr9t74vk6zne58wzh0waycpzamhxue69uhkzarvv9ejumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcpzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz78f205a?

It's at a point now where it's almost impossible for me to use the "regular" internet. I can't access half the sites. The reason? I care about my digital hygiene and thus use a VPN. Sometimes switching to a different VPN or switching the country of the VPN works; other times it does not. Oh well, I guess I'm not going to watch that video, or read that article, or look at that picture. Whatever.

In addition to that, if I'm not blocked completely, I have to prove that I'm human every step of the way. Captchas, re-captchas, Cloudflare checkboxes, the whole shebang. I am human. I promise. And I am very annoyed. Outright angry, even. I doubt that any robot will ever be as annoyed as I am right now about the current state of the internet.

What annoys me most, actually, is that all these measures don't really work. There's bots everywhere. Robots get access to the stuff anyway, using farms of humans, just like in the good old days of WoW gold farming. The centralized "safety" nets of Cloudflare et al brought down large swaths of the internet multiple times in the last couple of weeks alone, and as things centralize more and more these outages will happen more and more.

I'm very close to breaking up with the legacy internet. I'm human, I can cryptographically prove that I'm human, and I have sats to spend. But the legacy internet doesn't care about that. It cares about farming me and my data, while annoying me to no end. I've been nostr only for a while now, but that was only on the "social media" side. 2026 might be the year where I go nostr-only for everything, or to phrase it slightly differently: permissionless for everything.

No more "are you human?"

No more "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

No more cookie banners, paywalls, and AI slop.

No more being treated like a child.

Even if it means that I'll have to self-host everything.

Even if it means that I'll have to build & maintain stuff myself.

Even if it means that it's a lot of work and pain.

Nothing worth having ever comes easy.

But the easy stuff is not worth having in the first place.

Here's to the year to come, and the new corner of the internet, build on cryptography and webs-of-trust. Real value. Real connections. Real humans.

Here's to nostr.

Just got a notification from X about an update to their privacy policy… Interesting…

“We’ve updated our Terms to explain that in some places, for example, the EU and UK, we may need to remove not only illegal content but also content considered harmful or unsafe under local laws.”

👍

exactly nowhere in nature do hard absolutes exist

Unsolicited advice for my fellow cypherpunks (and developers) on wanting to get credit for your work – don't.

The more used your work becomes, the more injustices you'll experience. If you fixate on injustices, you'll only feed the problem and end up limiting your ability to keep building.

I've been through plenty of dumb situations over the years, and one thing helped me push through is the mantra of: credit is in the outcome.

So focus on that – and if the outcome achieved is not enough to keep you motivated, find something that is, instead of creating a demand that others have to recognize or appreciate the work you've done.

What? Isn't like 90% of hash rate done by few pools which probably have each other in peer list on their nodes?

Or are you talking about sb randomly miming block on bitaxe?

I doubt they care about single digit % increase in chance of mining valid block.

Bitcoin was the hippie movement of our generation

a bunch of idealists who got together and thought we can end all wars and build a better world if we use our scarce digital currency

then a decade later, lots of guys sold out to become useful idiots in mainstream politics

no different from the yuppies of the 1970 and 1980s.

At least the boomers reshaped the entire world, albeit in ways that are entirely different from the flower power ideals of the 1960s

hope we will live to do the same and not be as hated by our grandchildren.

But I cannot shake off the feeling that we already failed. Bitcoin is not as culturally impactful as the hippie movement.

Our art mostly sucks and is a lazy remix of existing stuff (just stick a BTC logo on it and sell t-shirts).

None of the Bitcoin events will be remembered as the Woodstock of our generation.

Our representation in media is mostly negative and we don’t have any “Easy Rider” to morally redeem the movement.

Culturally speaking, we got nothing on the boomers.

They carry your DNA, your values, your stories. It's not just biology it’s legacy.

Are notes always scanned at supermarkets in your part of the world? Germany I think? But also, are they just scanned for fakeness or are you saying serial numbers are checked or something?

Yep. Give no quarter.

Everything that's wrong with Bitcoin in one picture

fxUSD

CRVusd

BOLD

GHO

And more…

Age verification laws are coming fast.

And, from my perspective, opponents are struggling to find impactful messaging to explain to the general public the damage they are about to do to freedom.

Or to propose alternate futures that address the underlying anxieties.

Sure, most folks that are here on #Nostr intuitively understand the dangers... And nod along when we gesture at the dangers of surveillance overreach.

But I worry that the common language for talking about these initiatives typically relies on some priors that are not universally shared outside people that live and breathe concerns about tech.

Saying that something is a surveillance dystopia works on me. But not the neighbors.

I'm guilty of being inside this language bubble too, and it's hard to escape.

Yet, when faced with politicians talking about protecting kids from bad things that parents feel they see right now... I worry that the communities doing pushback are struggling to:

1 -find framing that makes *enough sense* to the vast majority of people that they say 'ok this is net bad' and push back

2- find their own ways to productively connect with the anxieties that politicians are drawing on. E.g. worried parents.

3- offer things that are honest, well meaning alternative paths for the underlying problems

Anyone have thoughts on this? #AskNostr

I never said the subsidy provides censorship resistance. It clearly doesn't.

My thesis is that small scale private and privacy preserving mining is the only way to resist nation state control in the long term. Mining companies are a bootstrapping phase. They won't ever go away completely but if we don't transition to majority pleb mining then I don't see how bitcoin can achieve mass adoption. It will just be gold 2.0 and suffer the same fate as gold 1.0: state capture.

Today, public pressure is what keeps miners from censoring. See Marathon's launch for an example. The block subsidy keeps miners in business, otherwise the industry would collapse and censorship resistance would be a moot point. Ergo the block subsidy is our runway to get enough people using on-chain bitcoin to sustain the mining industry.

I believe demand response and heat reuse will replace the subsidy with economical business models. Great news! Demand for these services is distributed across the Earth according to population density and energy generation capacity. This is how we achieve decentralization. (What's really gonna bake your noodle is how population density will change to match available energy resources after the mining industry stabilizes.)

Modern centralized mining farms are unsustainable. It's a bubble. We will have to deflate it if bitcoin is going to survive. Great news! Satoshi already thought of this and implemented the decay function of the subsidy to do exactly this.

Our challenge is to grow the use of on-chain bitcoin before the bubble fully deflates. This will take a long time, multiple generations. We have a lot of time thanks to the decay function.

It pays miners

The block subsidy is the runway. Plenty of runway left.

bearish af