I wish someone could explain to me in non-racist terms why South America is not part of "the west".

#bitcoin

YOU BECOME WHAT YOU GIVE YOUR ATTENTION TO.

GOOD MORNING. 🫡

Only thing worse would be your kid joining the XRP army.

#introductions #helloworld

Hey Nostr community! 🌐

I'm excited to join this decentralized platform and share a story that's been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I have a unique claim to fame: I'm the child of the infamous D.B. Cooper. Yes, *that* D.B. Cooper, the man who hijacked a plane in 1971, parachuted into the night with $200,000, and vanished without a trace.

Growing up, I always knew my dad was different. He was a quiet, meticulous man with a penchant for adventure and a deep knowledge of aviation. Here are a few interesting tidbits about him that you might find fascinating:

1. **Aviation Enthusiast**: My dad had an extensive knowledge of aircraft, particularly the Boeing 727. He knew the ins and outs of the plane, which is why he chose it for his daring escape. He often spoke about the technical details of planes, which I later realized were crucial to his successful hijacking.

2. **Parachuting Skills**: Contrary to popular belief, my dad was an experienced skydiver. He had practiced numerous jumps and was well-prepared for the night he leaped into history. He even chose the best parachute for the jump, the Navy NB-8 container with a C-9 canopy, known for its reliability at high speeds.

3. **The Tie Clue**: The black J.C. Penney tie he left behind on the plane was a deliberate move. He knew it would throw off investigators, and it did for many years. The tie had traces of rare earth elements, which led many to speculate about his profession, but it was all part of his plan to mislead.

4. **The Money**: While only $5,800 of the ransom money was ever found, my dad had a clever way of hiding the rest. He buried it in multiple locations, some of which we visited during family trips disguised as camping adventures. He always had a knack for blending in and staying one step ahead.

5. **A Man of Mystery**: Despite his criminal act, my dad was a loving father and a man of principle. He never hurt anyone during the hijacking and always emphasized the importance of family and integrity. His actions were driven by a deep-seated grudge against corporate greed and a desire for financial freedom.

I'm here to share more about my dad's life and the untold stories that have been kept within our family for decades. I'm excited to connect with all of you and dive into discussions about one of America's greatest unsolved mysteries. Feel free to ask me anything! I might have answers 😜 (to an extent for obvious reasons)

Looking forward to engaging with this fascinating community.

Cheers,

D.B. Cooper's Kid

Son has just become an adult.

This shit is a parents worst nightmare.

You can’t avoid risk so you may as well embrace it and get good at managing it.

Some people have grown cynical with democracy (and various types of representative government broadly, e.g. including constitutional democratic republics that enshrine certain rights to protect liberty against the masses), viewing this method as promoting short-term leadership with bad incentives.

I have a different take.

Prior to the printing press and then the telegraph and radio, running a democratic society over long distances wasn’t even feasible. The concept of having people democratically participate in their government relies on people being relatively connected information-wise so that they can use their access to information to know what’s happening and to then select between different options, which you couldn’t do across the entirety of a country before people were literate and election materials or other publications could be mass produced. In the pre-press age of handwritten books, making written documents was expensive, and so literacy was a niche skill.

So, that era was ruled by kings and queens, council oligopolies, and so forth. Representative government, to the extent that it existed, only applied to small city states where people could literally gather in a town square, or to “elites” in a capital. There was literally no way to run an election over very broad distances on a regular basis. The printing press helped change that, and then the telegraph, radio, and other tech further reinforced it.

But ironically, as I discuss in Broken Money, those technologies also started to break our money. The printing press and telegraph allowed the transaction layer (the movement of IOUs between individuals and entities) to grow exponentially more efficient both domestically and globally, while our settlement layer (gold) remained basically unchanged. This broadening gap between fast transactions and slow settlements was increasingly bridged with centralization and credit, and the gap eventually became so wide that every nation dropped the settlement layer of gold almost entirely, except as a reserve asset.

So the same technologies that enabled widespread representative government also enabled the proliferation of softer money. Prior to these technologies, broad democracy wasn’t possible. And after these technologies, sound money was too slow to keep up. Oof.

But over a long enough timeframe, our technology became good enough that we finally figured out how to do fast settlements as well. Bitcoin. People can send value to each other quickly over long distances, in ways that no central entity can prevent or reverse, and with a unit that no central entity can debase. The first sound money of the Information Age.

If Bitcoin is successful over the coming decades and becomes a much larger and less volatile money, than it is now, fully entrenched in society, then that would be the first era where technology is at such a state where broad democracy and fast sound money can coexist. Or put more universally, it will be the first era where information spreads quickly without breaking the money, and thus both fast information and good money could coexist.

I, for one, would be curious to see how that develops.

The urge to exit fiat mining is rising.

So are we raging against the existence of ecash over here? Or is there actually a measured appreciation?

I'm sitting at the "old man counter" at a local restaurant having a coffee. I'm not sure how I feel about this...

🎧🎧 WHAT IS THE BEST UNDERRATED PODCAST ? 🎧🎧

zapping 420 on each answer 👇

😶😶😶