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Anyone else notice how every time a solo miner has found a block this year, an article is written about how impossible solo mining is? It's always framed that way.
Go play roulette with 37 other people, and have each person bet on one number. Then every spin, when someone wins, write an article about how there was a 97.4% chance of that not happening.
He had to make the choice every day, for ~5,000 days, to keep hodling. Simple, not easy.
Hopefully those ~500 coins exist as UTXOs and not as Mt Gox claims...lots of people made the right decision pre-2014, but ended up getting Goxxed.
Powpow & friends dropped the price of dollars again today...When are we set to hear from the orange council of elders on what the bitcoin monetary policy changes will be?
Remember a year or two ago when JPow was asked "why 2% inflation target?" in a congressional hearing, and he danced around, saying how getting people to think it's gonna be 2% makes it more likely to trend toward 2% via self-fulfilling prophecy, and never answered the question of why 2% is beneficial for people?
It's the rate of theft they think they can get away with...that sweet spot of max theft coupled with low enough risk of people catching on.
People fight accepting this fact so hard...
I haven't heard the "I have nothing to hide" logic from someone in a while...I like to ask if they have curtains on their windows, and if they like to close the door when they're relieving themselves in a bathroom.
Do you frequent a business that uses Square POS and want to give them a nudge to enable bitcoin payments? Here's an email template for you:
****Subject: Accepting Bitcoin at Square Terminals
****Mods to make (blanks to fill in): 8, first two paragraphs & signature
{Business/contact name}, my name is {name} and I've been a customer and fan of {business} for a few years. I've been to the {location} location several times and especially enjoy the {unique item} there.
I know that {business} uses Square terminals for your POS system. Early in November, Square made it so that any merchant can very easily accept bitcoin payments. They even put up the website btcmap.org and list business that accept bitcoin payments:
To accept bitcoin payments, there is a change to your Square settings that has to be made and it's really easy. Here's a how-to from Square:
https://my.squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8554-accept-bitcoin-payments-with-square-alpha
It's up to merchants if they want bitcoin payments to be received into their account as bitcoin, get converted to USD instantly, or some custom split (ie 50/50). If you like, you can stick with the default of having 100% of the payments to come in as USD.
As local bitcoin enthusiasts who also support local businesses, we'd be really excited to be able to pay at our favorite places in bitcoin!
I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about this.
Thanks,
{name}
{organization}
Coffee meetup on the East Shore! Two weeks from today.
State run grocery stores went really well in USSR though...people lined up around the corners for that!
Greetings Bitcoiners! Happy White Paper Day!
What's white paper day, you might ask? On Halloween 2008, 17 years ago today, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper on a cryptography mailing list. He/she/they had made references about working on a novel peer to peer money and payments system in this very specific corner of the internet, and October 31st, 2008 is when it was actually released. I don't know about you all...cryptography mailing lists were not one of the places I was hanging out in 2008. Suffice it to say, Bitcoin was not on the radar of many at that time.
In it, Satoshi describes a new network of nodes that allows for peer to peer transactions, in contrast to transactions that necessitate trusting a third party, as is the case for banks, credit cards, and modern fiat payment apps. All of the parts that Satoshi put together were existing technologies. The novel idea was how Satoshi combined digital signatures, peer to peer networking, game theory, economics, and proof-of-work (PoW) to create Bitcoin.
There's a memorable scene in the movie Flash of Genius, which is a biographical drama about Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Ford more or less stole his invention, and Kearns sued them over it. In the courtroom scene, Ford's lawyers argued that the components of the intermittent wiper motor were all standard electronic components that anyone could freely purchase from RadioShack and assemble themselves, therefore Kearns' argument shouldn't hold water, since he only devised a certain way to string them together. Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear) pulled out a copy of A Tale of Two Cities, and read the first sentence..."It was the best of times, it was the worst of times". He argued, did Dickens invent the word "it"? No. Did he invent the word "was"? No, and so forth. Kearns argued, it's how Dickens strung them together that's meaningful in this circumstance, he argued, and this "flash of genius" moment is what distinguishes a novel idea.
Satoshi incorporated various existing technologies in such a way in the white paper. Each component was an existing technology, however, no one ever had the idea or gumption to string them all together in such a way as to make something so profound. A critical component is PoW, invented by Adam Back. Through PoW and digital signatures, Satoshi invented, some say discovered, digital scarcity. Until then, anything digital was infinitely copyable, which made digital cash impossible. Payments relied on trusted third parties to be the arbiters of truth. This is an incredible power that financial intermediaries alone possessed. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man, Satoshi released a knowledge onto the world that could never be undone. If you're familiar with that portion of Greek mythology, and what the fate of Prometheus was for this action, it's unsurprising that Satoshi wanted to stay pseudonymous, eventually disappearing completely in late 2010.
The white paper is only 8 pages long, 9 pages including references. The first 2 pages are pretty easy to grok, and then it goes further under the hood. Page 3 brings up proof-of-work (PoW). Today happens to be the best day of the year to check it out if you never have before.
Don't miss an upcoming hiking and lunch event, at 9am on Sat, Nov 8th! Details below.
Happy White Paper Day everyone!
Proof of Hike, 9am, Sat Nov 8th
Peters Mountain Appalachian Trail
2300 Peters Mountain Rd
Halifax, PA 17032
40°24'43.1"N 76°55'48.6"W
What3words: enchanting.endearing.keys
Lunch afterwards:
Boro Bar & Grille
4425 N Front St
Harrisburg, PA 17110
Standard 22LR or subsonic?
Can't spell crypto without C-R-Y
Which wallets are people using to build <1 sat/vbyte transactions?
Welcome to Nostr nostr:nprofile1qqs2286eg5nhaf0pv6482tgf6h8w8ga7krmt3jyr4m5773pd7ld54kspz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchs6280mx !
"Record high difficulty discourages miners".
Reminds me of the Yogi Berra quote..."nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded".
Great video...I can't remember if Lysiak wrote about overlap between big sugar and big tobacco in Fiat Food, incentives certainly check out though
Don't just do something...stand there!
Since the majority of bitcoin exists in self-custody wallets, the BIS is proposing that the majority of bitcoin should be considered "bad" bitcoin.
Why stop at bitcoin? They should be able to say which cars, houses, pieces of art, or gold coins are "bad" too!
To them, value isn't subjective and determined my market participants...it's whatever the hell they say it is.
TIL that FHE = fully homomorphic encryption
Interesting
Happy Nixon Shock anniversary!
On this date 54 years ago, the US "temporarily" went off the gold standard.
Median income in 1971 was $10k/yr, and gold was $35/oz. Yearly earnings paid in gold was 286 oz.
How about 2025? Median income is $62k/year, and is gold $3.3k/oz.
Yearly earnings paid in gold is 19 oz.
Our median earnings, the average of what our scarce time is worth, dropped 93% in those "temporary" years. Cheers! 🍻
Whether the play store hammer is actually coming down or not, it is a great mental fire drill of what your phone wallets becoming inaccessible would mean.
Some people I've orange pilled (well, up to the point of stacking at least some sats, anyway) have everything on a phone wallet. Gonna reach out to them and tell them to check on their seed word backups...make sure they still have them, and they're legible.
Just did fresh blue wallet install, worked as usual
The few self custody wallet apps I checked are still available on the play store...wondering the likelihood of this actually going into effect.
Yikes...searched for ashigaru wallet on DDG, top search result link (and only one on first page of results that looks like the site itself and not an article on it) goes to what seems like ashigaru's website on first glance. However, if you click anything under "menu" it asks you which shitcoin wallet you use, and please enter seed phrase to connect. Aye yi yi
Heard a great Mark Twain quote this week...
"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one."
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There have been past instances of some company claiming they're now accepting bitcoin/crypto, and when going through the PoS process, you had to either log into coinbase and pay through them, or connect your crypto wallet via some metamask BS...no option to just show an invoice address and amount (or lightning invoice) and pay via wallet of our choice like we're all used to.
Theres the interoperable/sovereign way to do it, and there's the KYC/cucked way to do it.