Oh fuck. That zap zap zap script for the Damus TestFlight is incredible.

The rise of Nostr is bearish for Ethereum

We will have to punch through a few minor but breaking changes in the Cashu protocol before this baby grows up. It will be challenging to coordinate the upgrades in multiple implementations but the pain will be worth it.

Designing a protocol with others is super exciting and working with this growing community of devs is truly a blessing. The first response in the dev chat to my message about the upgrade was

"We love pain 🤝"

🫡 may the nut be with you

Yes, I don’t think they know what any of it really means. They’re just repeating slogans to express emotions. I’d say reach out to the left by letting them know they can eliminate the banking middleman and bank the unbanked. Maybe they will support it. Then one day, the government won’t be able to fund all the bullshit, but their own lives will be better, given improved conditions, less squandering of wealth, and they can tell their kids how they helped bring about the revolution that toppled the corrupt elites. And they won’t be entirely wrong.

By your logic the mafia does not steal, because they exchange it for protection. Just sayin. 😉

Theft & extortion are distinct from trade in the same way that rape is distinct from consentual sex. It's consent that makes the difference. It has nothing to do with what comes after. If i steal your car & then mow your yard, that doesn't make up for the fact that I stole your car. And I don't get to then tell you that you were going to owe me something for the mowing that I didn't want from you in the first place.

When a violent organization monopolizes industries that are critical to survival it's pretty easy to claim people couldn't survive without them, that doesn't make it any more true. The things they monopolize were often privately developed before being taken over.

A slave doesn't owe thanks to a slave master for shelter & food. The slave would have more (in one form or another) on his own. The richest societies in the world were the ones that had the smallest & most restrained govts & also those that ended slavery first. Free markets are the only way to make people better off. Societies that collapse always do so under the burdens of too big a govt. Govt is the only thing left of N Korea or Venezuela or Cuba, it's just a govt & slaves. And with our govt printing trillions that's exactly where we are headed unless Nostr & Bitcoin & individuals with low cost productive tools can turn things around.

So you believe that freedom can be separated from your earnings & your right to self protection?

What amount of what I earn belongs to someone else?

Why do you think theft is wrong?

I think theft is a form of retroactive enslavement. The time it took me to earn a thing (once that thing is stolen) is now going to serve someone else.

Similarly, if I am working half the year to fund an organization that does things I hate & that threatens me with a cage if I don't pay them, then I am 50% a slave. Govts of course want people to believe that slavery is some sort of race based caricature with whips & chains so that their own human tax livestock can't identify what is being done to them.

Why don't you just give away more of your money? Why do you feel the need to encourage authoritarians to take more from others? You don't want the responsibility of deciding what your work helps to contribute to?

I think there are a lot of people who don't like how they make money & as a result they feel guilty for having it.

Ask the engineers and the planners of high speed rail systems and nuclear power plants how difficult their jobs would be without government intervention and let me know what they say.

Government has and always will be a wrench in the engine of society.

I think the laws of economics are a certain as just about anything can be.

You don't have to incentivize people to trade & solve problems & to do what serves them, you just have to get out of the way.

So you don't believe in freedom or basic human rights?

I believe people should have the freedom to devote their lives & the fruit of their efforts only to that which they believe in, or that serves them in some way, & they should be able to own the tools needed to protect that freedom no matter what anyone else says.

Being forced to financially support people who are working to reduce your choices & control your life is just slavery with extra steps.

I doubt that a socialist government would not take over the mint. Lenin famously said that a socialist system must debase the money to deflect the people's attention towards the State.

Fiat money is just corporate vouchers. That's also why the laws of these modern governments, which are all fundamentally socialist, are called "statutes" which is the legal term for rules of a corporation, that apply to its employees.

As a former econ major (with a focus on money & banking) myself, I can tell you that you almost certainly can't learn what you need to know from a university (with maybe a couple of rare exceptions). The contradictory Keynesian nonsense taught at universities is sometimes almost worse than total ignorance.

You have to unlearn a lot of what you were taught, which is harder than learning things correctly the first time around.

My brother has been doing a great job of attacking the foundations of Keynesianism with the Bitcoin Audible podcast. See the episodes about hoarding & saving. The key is to understand that savings is the foundation of society - more things must be produced than consumed. And that Say's law is an absolute. Production enables consumption & investment. You can't build a house with trees you intend to cut down in the future. Everything else basically follows from those things.

The Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek is a good read or a good listen (via Mises.org or bitcoin audible).

A proper understanding of Bitcoin makes a decent antidote to nihilism.

Would the world be a better place if criminals could or couldn't force you to fund things that serve them?

If you think it's better when they can't, then the solution is to give people the tools to stop funding criminals in all forms. Bitcoin & 3d printed guns are among those tools.

Socialists who "support bitcoin" are extremely suspect IMO. Socialism's central pillar is the abolition of money and replacing it with fiat. As in, orders from the - whatever variety is preferred, a council, a union, a computer model, that replaces the function of money as a regulator of production.