What are your thoughts on Liquid?

Specs:

- Hashrate: 1 Terahash

- Consumo: 40W

- Price: (~225€)

This has been my experience.

I've onboarded plenty of people in my time. None of them are Twitter Carnivore Bros and none of them engage with the bitcoin "community". Frankly I didn't even know there was a toxic bitcoin Twitter until somewhat recently. Go figure Twitter of all places would foster a toxic community 🙄

Would you believe me if I said there’s no statistical relationship between political orientation and bitcoin ownership in the US?

Dropping a report soon, to that effect.

I've held many hardware wallets in my hands but Block's BitKey is *by far* the most sexy and premium one I've seen so far.

PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE WHO COMPLAINS THAT WE SHOULD ZAP DEVS DIRECTLY RATHER THAN FUND THEM THROUGH OPENSATS ZAP DEVS LESS THAN ME.

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS.

Gm!

#memestr #grownostr

Fuck zodiac signs. What starter Pokémon are you picking and why?

I always choose Bulbasaur because strong grass types are scarce.

Jesus... Think of all the 🌽 you could've had, instead of a giant truck...

737 max engineers also argued their efficiency improvements were technically solid, well-vetted, and backward compatible. We all know what happened after years of development, testing and certification.

Why risk adding new features and efficiency tweaks to the base layer when you can build on it?

For example: Silent Payments and Chaumian ecash projects are going to drastically improve Bitcoin’s reach and privacy without modifying and risking the base layer.

I listened to the What Bitcoin Did Saylor podcast, and I really want to respond, though that may be unwise. But I want thoughtful, fearless content in my feed, so I should start making some, right?

Firstly, while analogies can provide useful guide rails for understanding, listening to people *arguing* using analogies makes you stupider. Debate the thing itself, not the words about the thing: it hurts my head to even think about doing this, so I won't.

Let's set my priors first: I assume we're talking about technically solid, well-vetted, backward compatible protocol changes: this is the minimum bar.

I don't wholesale agree with Saylor's "don't threaten anyone's investment" hard limit. This has happened multiple times in the past, from the dust limit breaking SatoshiDice, enabling Lightning threatening miner fees (real or not), and segwit breaking stealth ASICBoost. These interests can, and will, stand up for themselves and will compete against other benefits of changes.

To be explicit: I consider any protocol change which makes block space usage more efficient to be a win!

Obviously Saylor is invested in Bitcoin the asset, and can afford to do all his business onchain in any conceivable scenario. His projection of a Bitcoin world in which there are 100,000 companies and governments who use Bitcoin as the base layer is interesting:

1. This does not need "smart contracts", just signatures. By this model, Bitcoin Script was a mistake.

2. It can work if Bitcoin does not scale and is incredibly expensive to spend and hold. By this model, the consumer hardware wallet industry is a dead-end and needs to pivot to something else (nostr keys, ecash?)

3. You could do this with gold, today? Bitcoin here is simply an incremental, not fundamental, improvement. I think this is suggestive, though: that such a network would not be long-term stable, and very much subject to capture.

4. In this view, Saylor is simply a gold bug with first mover advantage, shilling his bags. That's fine, but it's important to understand people's motivations.

5. This vision does not excite me. I wouldn't have left Linux development to work on making B2B commerce more efficient. I wouldn't get up at 5:30am for spec calls, and I sure as hell wouldn't be working this cheap.

I believe we can make people's UTXOs more powerful, and thus feel a moral responsibility to do so. This gives them more control over their own money, and allows more people to share that control. I assume that more people will do good things than stupid things, because assuming the other way implies that someone should be able to stop them, and that's usually worse.

I believe the result will be a more stable, thus useful, Bitcoin network. I am aware that this will certainly benefit people with very different motivations than me (Saylor).

Thanks for reading, and sorry for the length!

Berry or banana bread? That is the question.

GM!

link? ☕

Youre exactly right about user not knowing what's in the version they run, but this can be easily remedied.

There needs to be a resource explaining the difference in versions written for the lay user.

This alone won't hold the line though. We need more miners. If #Bitcoin is freedom money, then a miner is the equivalent of an AK-47.

It’s true that users control the nodes, but core devs control bitcoin core and we have no other software options right now. It’s essentially a software monopoly.

And if we being honest, we’ll admit that most users don’t really know what’s in the version they install. I just hope users stay vigilant. It seems to me that users are too trusting in this area.

It’s funny that you mentioned the blocksize wars. You do realize that the UASF was written and promoted by core devs to avoid being “fired” by the big blockers, right?

It was framed as a war between users and big commercial interests, but it was actually a war between core devs and big commercial interests. I’m glad the core devs won. They were correct. But we can’t fool ourselves and say that they didn’t wield power and it was all users. Nobody knows how many users were ready to support the UASF because the miners capitulated before the deadline.

The blocksize wars are framed as a big win by users but you can see that’s really not the case. All we know is that miners do not control the network. We don’t know if the core devs do because this has never been tested.

Here’s an example of what he seems to be concerned with. Why do you believe that he is technically illiterate?

nostr:note12najfx7g8x2s6zzcn6qvc6dtaxuyjlhq7kfkt5vyphzxmrc7wk4qxgxqh8

cash purchase of a used Pixel, graphene install, and silent.link sounds better and better.

Gm ☕️ 🫂 🤙

What's your favorite way to consume the coffee ☕️?

#asknostr

My favorite is cappuccino

software should serve you not manipulate you

I recently learned that legislation has been drafted on Capitol Hill to classify *not re-using Bitcoin addresses* as "mixing"

There are also efforts to force "unhosted wallet providers" to collect user info for taxes

As well as to give power to Treasury to sanction any address (even Americans)

And a whole lot more bad stuff

IMO Coin Center does vital work to fight this and to protect privacy tech

They are a compact team and do a lot with the resources they have

They sue the OFAC and Treasury

They consider the Bank Secrecy Act unconstitutional and act accordingly

I just spent some time with their leadership team, asking questions, and came away impressed, I would strongly suggest a donation today

coincenter.org

If I understand your argument correctly, you believe the main advantage of a coldcard is the ability to store the seed on the device itself,

The threat model of seedsigner or coldcard are largely the same. The only real threat of any truly offline signing device is in the generation of a seedphrase and the device's internal random number generation or interepretation of dice rolls. You can e2e verify diceroll functionality of either device with third party software, or you can generate the seedphrase with plastic seedwords in a bowl, or separate software like sparrow. In any event, if you assume you can use the devices in an airgapped fashion and not rely on their integrity with taking common sense measures, what is the functional advantage of a coldcard over a seedsigner?

What is the advantage of a coldcard over a seedsigner? #bitcoin #asknostr