PSA my Twitter account was compromised.

Any posts or DMs from it are not me, starting from this hour.

Please let people know if you are on Twitter.

now that a little time has passed, what's the official story and/or conclusion about the new jersey drones? is there one?

you have 5 seconds

I used to lowkey be kind of an alcoholic.

I didn’t drink everyday, but when I did drink (usually once a week) I would binge drink (12-20 drinks).

The thing that got me to stop was realizing that drinking was effecting my brain and emotional health during the periods where I wasn’t drinking.

I went completely sober for about a year and went through a period of depression and anxiety for several months as my brain reset.

I kept getting these waves of repressed emotion. Things I had been burying for 20 years and I’d find myself like randomly crying in the milk aisle at the grocery store lmao 😂

It was only then that I realized why I had been drinking so hard in the first place.

It was me coping with difficult and painful emotions and experiences from childhood.

When I realized that I thought to myself “how fucking weak and pathetic” it was.

I told myself be tough and look your problems in the face.

So I did.

And life got better.

No, the gold mining analogy is a good one: you have to do real work, and the results diminish over time as easier deposits get extracted.

You're over-thinking it because that of course is not quite right, but that's the nature of analogy.

But most importantly, this is an abberation: the final state of Bitcoin matches neither the mined nor the discovered analogy. It's all block space market.

The issue seems to be, bitcoins don't exist anywhere, as such. Before or after they're mined. What exists is the value on the network, as expressed by the code. And yes, insofar as their value is accounted for in the code, that value exists before mining. We can think of mining almost like when authorized shares become outstanding shares when they are issued. They exist ahead of time, but they are only considered to have any value (in fiat terms, and in the case of stock, voting rights as well) once they are issued. Just like the issuance of authorized shares into outstanding shares dilutes market value, so too does the mining of bitcoin dilute the market value of outstanding bitcoin (even if we often just express the market cap based on the 21 million figure out of what amounts to sloppy accounting).

Thank you for the description. But I don’t particularly like the auction analogy.

Sometimes the lowest bidder wins. It’s probably closer to buying lottery tickets—more tickets = more chances, but all you need is 1 chance to win.

At any rate, I think the notion of collaboratively mining or searching for the block makes good sense to me.

2.5 years ago I had never surfed in my life

But Costa Rica taught me and helped me understand the beauty of the sport and experience

Now you will find me in the water learning more whenever I get a chance

Pura Vida 🤙

Been thinking about Dhruv Bansal’s idea that bitcoin are not produced or generated — wrong way of thinking about it induced by “mining” metaphor — but rather all bitcoin existed from the moment the network was launched, but are auctioned off to miners as a whole, in exchange for hashes (compute), on an auction schedule of 140 years or whatever it is.

Each miner decides to take the network’s offer or not, by running their machines or not. Collectively, they determine how much that latest round of auctioned bitcoin is worth, in hashes and/or in energy.

Then there’s another market on top of this one which is coincidental but distinct, and that’s the market for block space, where the sellers are individual miners and the buyers are would-be transactors and of course that’s sat/vbyte.

I really do think it’s more accurate than thinking of bitcoin miners as “producing” bitcoin the way a manufacturer produces a product like cars or even discovered like gold miners discover gold. The bitcoin, all 21 million exist, just not on the ledger, from the get go. They only need to be auctioned, like treasuries. We don’t think the bidders on treasuries produce the 10-year! It’s just a weird auction mechanism where you have to prove work and your odds of winning the auction are proportional to your work / the total work by bidders.

I do get it and I think it’s right and I think it helps with a lot of misconceptions once you grok it fully. And as Dhruv says it shows you the formula for how bitcoin disrupts everything which is by making markets where there weren’t any, and building layers of distinct markets, including lighting and eventually the internet.

So, good job Dhruv.

But… it is not so easy to communicate is it? This thing is bloody hard to explain, as someone said once.

While you’re watching the Super Bowl and scrolling Nostr, take 30 seconds to order “The Big Print” by nostr:npub1d3f4m9dgvkdjxn26pqzsxn6lpfn78sxwllxyt8mp76q0a9zyyjlswhr4xv on Amazon.

Heck, grab two copies like I did — Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.

Oooh I would love to play this. Do you happen to have the sheet music and would you share it?

I love Bach

Why I think Nostr is an alternative to people under autocratic regimes like Venezuela:

1) Inmune to Regime Control and censorship, so if the regime blocks social media (like it happened with X in Venezuela 6 months ago), Nostr cannot be blocked.

2) Decentralized and each user will own their account and followers.

3) Nostr is also a payment rail in BTC. This is KEY for freedom activists and regular citizens. At some point billions of $ of remittances will be able to be sent directly, fast and mega low cost.

4) Nostr is a BTC heavy community, these are people that take freedom and privacy very seriously. Freedom is the core purpose of millions who live under autocracy, so Nostr is at the intersection of financial freedom, free speech and political freedom.

5) expanding the community of Nostr people under autocratic regimes will be going to the frontline in the fight for freedom. There will be lots of learning and action.

Woke up and it’s raining.

That’s fine, decided to check the weather forecast to see when it’ll be sunny next.

Answer: literally never.

I'm done with coffee.

Beginning to feel mild pains in my chest after drinking is the last straw for me. Absolutely not going to fuck with that.

I've known it's unhealthy for a long time, but kept coping myself into doing it anyway. Addiction 101.

No more ☕️✌️

Blog post coming soon.