To be honest, I think the bitcoin ETF is the most boring thing about bitcoin right now. Whenever I get asked about it I'm like, "meh".

Yes, the ETF should be good for price and liquidity, since it gives large pools of walled-garden capital more access to bitcoin exposure.

But in my view, the most important thing about bitcoin right now is all of the little hubs popping up around the world. Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Lake, Bitcoin Jungle, Bitcoin Ekasi, Africa Bitcoin Conference, Indonesia Bitcoin Conference, etc. As well wallets and other technologies that help them localize their custody of bitcoin rather than keep it all stashed in the giant Binance honeypot or wherever, and any solutions that help link to them all together for payments or that help them trade peer to peer or onboard from fiat to bitcoin in distributed ways.

The rise and connectivity of those hubs is impressive and is worth supporting.

On the way to a wedding where I only know just one person, my gf. 💒

Gonna try to keep bitcoin to myself at lest until after the speeches.

On a mission to test self-custody Lightning wallets.

For the #FOSS fans, particularly those using #Graphene:

What is your solution for GPS navigation? Or do you just avoid it altogether and go old school maps?

If you had $200 total worth of on-chain BTC, and it was your life savings, what would your strategy be to hodl it going forward—knowing that L1 fees will continue rising with adoption?

Update on my journey to only running open source tech.

Sold a iPad Gen4 and managed to purchase with the funds:

1. Thinkpad T480s (running LMDE)

2. 2x Thinkvision displays

3. Thinkpad Gen2 dock

Locally hosting on an encrypted drive instead of Nextcloud and securing over https. Too much hassle over Nextcloud for <50GB

Bought a few Yubikey's to ditch goggle authy

Ditched Youtube for Freetube

Switched to Standard Notes

Bitwarden with KeepPassXC as local backup

Hardened Firefox with tweaks and Ublock

Configured NextDNS for my PC and Router

Using Thunderbird as an offline back up for Proton

Started using tab containers in Firefox

Nextup is ditching the IOS mobile for google pixel running Graphene. When I have a faraday bag, mission complete.

#freedomtech

#opensource

#linux

#e2e

#locallyhost

#opsec

#lmde

GM Nostr 🧡⚡

What was your favorite podcast from the past week?

Is there some kind of app or website you wish existed?

Please give me free business ideas to steal.

Not bitcoin or nostr related, something your normie self needs

I'm making an art piece to personify four different monies.

Lord Sam, usurper of gold, known merely as “the Uncle” to many, sits at the Cantillon Source and wields the mighty dollar. Liberating in his youth, now oppressive in his age. His power reigns supreme but shows increasing signs of decadence, decay, and defiance.

Lunch time

Losing someone young, or losing an older person while you are young, is always hard.

When my father passed away from cancer while I was in my early twenties, it wasn't surprising at all. This fact had been coming for two years, slowly. But when it came, it hurt just as bad. And till this day it still hurts.

I was at work and got a call; it was a hospital. They said my father had been suddenly transferred to hospice, and it wasn't looking good. He probably had a week at most. He was in another state. The doctor transferred my father to me on the phone and my father was weakly like, "hey...." and I said hello, and I said I'm coming now. He said, "No don't... uhh.... don't worry... you are far and have work... I'm fine...." I asked then why was he transferred to hospice if things were fine. He was like, "uh well... well you know.... uh.... it's fine...." And I was like, "holy shit I'm coming right now."

So I went to my boss and looked at him. I had previously told him that there might be a moment where I would have to just immediately leave without notice, no matter how important the meetings and such, because of my father. So in this moment I literally just looked at him in the middle of a busy day and was like, "I gotta go" and he was like "of course". So I drove there, two hours away and went straight there. My father weakly said on the phone not to go, but he never sounded like that, so I went immediately.

I got there, and my father was in a hospital in the death ward, and the guy who greeted me was a pastor rather than a nurse, which was not a great sign. I asked what was going on and he told me straight up that this was not good, that my father was likely dying within a week. So he brings me to my father. My father is barely awake. His memories and statements are all over the place, but I just hold his hand and tell him that it's fine and I love him. I'm just there. He kept fading out and I was like, "it's okay, just relax". He could see me and talk in a rough sentence or two and thanked me for coming, but started to fade away.

And then after like 30 minutes, he went fully unconscious. He was still roughly gripping and shaking the bed headboard and so forth but wasn't conscious (and I was like, "Are you all giving him the right pain medicines, this doesn't look good", and even the pastor was like, "yes I have seen many and this is not comfortable" and I was like an angry 23-year-old so I went out in the center area like, "what do all of you even fucking do here?! He is shaking the bedframe and looks in pain, and even the pastor agrees. Holy shit." So I went and got medical attention to deal with this, but felt slow and ineffective at this. They gave him more morphine and it calmed him down, but while it relaxed him, he ultimately didn't wake up again.

I spent the next couple hours there, and then left and called various family members for my second round when he was unmoving. I said if they want to see him, come now, in the next day or two.

But a little while later after I left, I got a call and was told he had died. Only I (and the nurses) saw him while he was still briefly conscious.

During that call itself, I was stoic. I was like, "Yes, I understand. Okay." and then hung up. And then I sat there for like five minutes in silence... and then cried. I got over it quickly and we did the funeral in the following days. My father had been struggling with cancer for years, so this wasn't fully surprising.

But what lingered was the memory. It has been 13 years now, and yet whenever I am in my depths I still think of my father. The memory never gets weaker. I think of his love, or I think of how attentive he was, or how accepting he was, or what he would say about my current problems.

People we love, live on through us. We remember them so vividly, and we are inspired by them.

If he was a lame father, he wouldn't have so many direct memories 13 years later. But because he was a good and close father, he does.

All of those memories are gifts. All of them are ways of keeping aspects of that person alive in our world. It's how we remember them in the decades that follow. Their victories, their losses, and everything in between. Virtues they quietly did that you find out later. Virtues you realize only in hindsight how big they were.

Sharks have survived for around 450 million years. That makes them older than:

North Star, aka Polaris (~70 MYO)

Saturn's rings (~100 MYO)

The Atlantic Ocean (~150 MYO)

One galactic orbit (200-225 MY)

Trees (390 MYO)

I see a lot of posts about Thanksgiving discussions on bitcoin. It’s usually from the American-style perspective, like trying to convince your normie drunk uncle and aunt, and they often don’t see the demand since they have top-tier money and their downsides are subtle. They are like, “why the fuck does someone need a BitCoin?”

Meanwhile, my husband’s equivalent Thanksgiving discussion will be far easier, since he is in Egypt with our family managing a new property build-out for nine people that we are doing, and their bank just blocked my payments to them for the next capital infusion for no stated reason. So now we have to do a bunch of janky high-fee remittance workarounds for a time-sensitive payment (like making your mortgage) and then expend our human capital to go to the bank in the US and figure out where this got blocked (our bank didn’t specify, but implied on Egypt’s side). Every bank sucks here. None of them were clear, which means the customer has to investigate.

The idea of self-custodial global open-source money would be inherently interesting to my family’s dinner if it catches on and starts to have more liquidity points in Egypt like it has in Argentina, Turkey, and Nigeria.

Meanwhile drunk Americans will be like, “What does a BitCoin do, lol?”

Elon fighting with major corporate advertisers.

Altman pushed out of OpenAI.

Meanwhile hundreds of open source contributors continue to build out nostr without permission.

All of my financial stuff seems to end up on Twitter, and all of my based stuff seems to end up on Nostr.

It’s like talking to my followers vs talking to my friends, at least for as long as this dichotomy lasts.

The day that talking to my Nostr friends feels like too many people, would be the day that Nostr has won.