Imagine you were totally surveilled but did not know it. Lived your life as freely as if no one were watching.

Contrast that with living your life as though totally surveilled even though no one were actually watching. Just passive data collection in which no one was interested in you particularly. Yet you were super careful just in case, made sure not to post anything controversial under your own name.

You could say the first person is naive, that it’ll come back to bite them. But the second person is already in a prison of his own construction whether the threat turns out to be real or not.

By contrast, the best way to imprison someone is to do so while encouraging him to believe he’s free. That way he never tries to escape. The one who knows he’s in prison must be held there by force.

So there are four possibilities:

1. Believe you’re free, you are free.

2. Believe you’re free, but adopt all the dogmas and limitations as instructed, become the most easily jailed.

3. Believe you’re unfree, force the jailers to expend maximum energy to keep you captive.

4. Believe you’re unfree when you are actually free, jail yourself.

The psyop pushes people to 2 (normies) and (4) paranoiacs. But you really want to toggle between 1 and 3, wherein you live your life without worry and to the extent you personally are involved in some totalitarianism (e..g, covid), you are non-compliant and therefore expensive to those foisting compliance on you.

Two different images, both repeated twice

The same one, twice, or two different ones?

I just tested positive for having a soul!

😵‍💫🫠🫨

I'm weirdly outside of the age verification debate because I pay for everything, so every website I use regularly doesn't ask me for more information because they already have my dental x-rays and have met my personal FBI agent.

I'm not even anonymous on Nostr.

The irony of the whole situation is that many of the people fighting the hardest to protect online anonymity, aren't anonymous, themselves. Same way that many of us promoting Bitcoin enthusiastically, don't actually have much of it.

It's a conundrum.

I don't know if it's masochism or altruism, to fight this hard to protect rights and assets I hardly use. But, maybe, I might want to use them, one day. And, like, on principle. Or something.

Or — more likely — I am just a useful idiot. The world has never had any shortage of them.

Yes. How many steps removed from real world verification can we go while still being reasonably sure the abstraction is true? Idk. The point isn't to know, its to question.

Is there such a thing as a free lunch?

Is truth more valuable than falsehood?

Then why would you believe something freely given?

Its much better to assume the common knowledge is false. It usually is.

The most based opinion is simply refusing to have an opinion on other people’s opinion about stupid fucking opinions.

Get on with your life.

Owner of a diesel repair and performance shop we we friendly with just announced after a few years of litigation they will be bringing their case with the EPA to jury trial in the beginning of next year.

I wish them the best, very few have the courage and resources to take the federal government to court, after years of bleeding you dry and offering deals that keep you out of prison in exchange for the forfeiture of your business and accounts. That's if you're lucky. Criminal cases can start off with door kicking, arrests and asset seizure (which i've shared shared before)

Trials like this can cost shop owners millions in the long term, regardless if it's a win or a loss. In the meantime they put pressure on shops, owners and employees trying to find anything and everything they can to send you to jail. Even up to this point it cost them tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to pay their attorneys. And still under threat of escalations, seizing bank accounts (business and personal) raiding homes and businesses. That's not including the interruption of business, owners on weekly calls, spending long nights poring through paperwork, all while knowing if they make the slightest mistake they will be taken away from their families without hesitation.

The devil sat across from you in a suit and tie, smiled and asked you how the weather was.

How Bitcoin's developers have failed the community

This will not be a technical post, I can eventually write one on the specifics of how Bitcoin's developers have weakened Bitcoin’s sovereign / monetary (MoE) use.

In this post, I'll cover the predictable chaos that developer have caused.

99% of users should have never had to know what OP_RETURN is — and the fact they do means Bitcoin's developers have failed the community.

The fact that non-technical users have had to learn about these details is a massive failure on the part of the developers.

Now you have users taking sides on a soft-fork debate purely based on their blind faith in influencers without understanding the technicalities.

When UX abstraction fails, politics invades the base layer:

- Money that requires protocol literacy isn't money yet. If non-technical holders must parse mempool policy, witness discounts, inscription hacks, or soft-fork signaling to judge existential risk, you've leaked governance from experts to the masses without giving them power — just anxiety.

- Abstraction debt. Bitcoin's developers are no longer shipping "safe defaults". That created a vacuum where influencers do protocol comms, and users pick tribes by vibes.

- Legitimacy hazard. The minute regulars think "the rules can shift under me", your store-of-value narrative becomes contingent on whoever writes/merges code, not on time. That's a reputational tax that compounds.

In the Bitcoin ecosystem (developers, miners/pools, exchanges/custodians, state/regulators), no actor with power is optimizing for "simple, sovereign Medium-of-Exchange for the masses". They optimize for revenue, deniability, and policy compatibility.

All of this chaos and retail anxiety caused by developers will lead more people to ETFs/custody adoption and will lessen self-custody and MoE use.

If node policy changes keep enabling more and easier illegal payloads, pressure lands on runners/miners first.

Captured developers is the most asymmetric attack vector - it hits sovereign users hardest, while leaving institutional wrappers unaffected.

Developers have to start treating Bitcoin's users as stakeholders, not an audience they have contempt for.

The only way out of this is for the users to start working on a rough draft of constraints that should be imposed on the developers.

I might write a very rough version eventually.

"The most powerful sexual state is not the climax, but the sustained, vibrant, full-body experience of desire itself."

Seems this needs to be said out loud.

reading the vomit of weferiums and monerans, claiming their shitcoins are legit, and that bitcoin has no privacy, makes me want to vomit.

bitcoin has lightning, and pseudonymous UTXOs shut the fuck up privacymaniac. lightning is more private than a fucking public blockchain. you can't do lightning on monero, sorry. oh yeah they are trying but the whole point of lightning was exactly about creating privacy, but people think it was only about the speed of clearance.

and the weirdo anorexic hippy rainbow homo tech bro ethereum crowd, are such an obvious bunch of patsies for the banksters.

and that jameson lopp, they already bought him in 2022 when he decided to add ethereum to casahodl.

these people are so brazenly full of shit i can't even.

Para hacer buenas preguntas necesitas tener buena información.

As much as you wanna help someone, some people don't deserve the help because they're not appreciative. This is the problem with nice people. We always get stepped on. So sometimes we just have let them burn.

Before understanding bitcoin we experience hyper-competativeness with high time preference.

After understanding bitcoin we experience hyper-competativeness with low time preference.

After crossing the accumulation apex we experience cooperation with low time preference.

Follow the science

Taxation is theft

Fiat is fraud

The state is criminal

War is the health of the state

Money comes from the market

Rights come from reason

Freedom does not require proof

Property rights are human rights

Power corrupts

Popularity is not a determinant of truth

No state is the best state

Legality is not morality

Something that Libertarians (and Bitcoiners) can be rightly made fun of for is the fact that those who believe in these things don't take to the streets or participate in picketing or violent revolutions. I personally admire it and like it, but it can definitely be laughed at.

Could be because of the fact that they don't want the means to contradict the ends. How can one be an advocate of the non-aggression principle while aggressing on a peaceful individual's person and property? They can't.

And they know that mobs are never rational in how they go about things, hence they do not form one.

Emotional appeals are often avoided because, being rationalists, they understand that emotions muddle the process of arriving at the truth.

Instead, they write, publish and say a lot of words through podcasts, lectures, books, debates, discussions, articles and conferences. It's the right way to go, but will take an enormous amount of time, energy, patience and investment.

Above all, since all of this is a low time preference endeavour, the kind of people who would be receptive to libertarian ideas are also often the kind who won't protest in the streets or participate in violent revolutions, strikes or picketing.

They're too busy with their jobs, businesses, families, kids, side hustles, main hustles, moonlighting, earning, saving, building, etc.

It's like God is making fun of us 🤣

A state should exercise only the minimum amount of power necessary to secure conditions in which its individual citizens can thrive.

Prosecuting/deterring violent criminals and protecting against foreign invasion is probably 90 percent of that.

Bitcoin is amazing but looking for interesting non Bitcoin-centric accounts over here. Any suggestions?

What’s crazy is that if someone sees the same thing as you and has a different takeaway, neither of you is (most likely) stupid or necessarily even wrong

GN

You’ve been #Krugman’d

nostr:note155c59qvhunylueqcemarmel25ke78tl97que6tgfrsndqfq9jcfq2yjmke

Maggie is a Block??

I think privacy (and anonymity?) is like a school of fish. It protects the little fishes and not the big fish entrepreneurs. The big fish entrepreneur has the incentive to sell the most things to biggest amount of people, to doxx himself/herself. Big fishes are who produce the most in a free market.

If privacy doesn't work for the people that produce the most, then I could say its success is and will always be limited. The thing we should not ignore is providing physical security to everyone, including big productive entrepreneurs

new term i expect to start seeing more of on the internet:

KYCwall.

where a site blocks your access without getting a photo of your fucking identity card.

One group of people normalized : killing, starving, dehumanizing another group of people.

How the fuck is that normal?!

Like what the fuck?!

We allow bullies to tell us straight into our face that because Arab lives matter less then Israel has the right to kill them all.

Insane!

Does anyone else think that there's going to be huge demand for privacy-preserving Bitcoin services in the future?

I'm talking demand from non-ideological users that can enable 'privacy entrepreneurs' to make substantial profits.

User-friendly privacy is definitely a service on the market I'd pay for.

Yes. The best medicine is limiting the power of any entity and person no matter what

I am learning that guys secretly adore cute things just as much as us ladies do.

Y’all don’t need to put up such a tough front. Unguarded is best. It lets us feel safe to surrender.