I trust science over guesses any day of the week.

I’ve become a Holesail addict. If I can’t just generate a key and connect remotely to my service now, I’m now just looking for a replacement that does let me do this. I don’t even try anymore. It’s either as easy as Holesail, or I’ll find a replacement 🤣

Methods to obtain privacy in Bitcoin:

- Joinmarket (decentralized Coinjoin).

- Payments with Lightning (payments through routing are totally anonymous, good method for example to put bitcoins coming from coinjoins in exchanges, you must open a private channel with a good node and through this route to the exchange).

- Liquid Pegouts with sideswap (it is like a swap and you break traceability)

- Bolts (swaps between chains and you also lose traceability)

- Joinstr (Coinjoin through Nostr, soon to be released on the mainnet).

- Mercury Layer (Coinswaps, soon to be released as well).

- Bitcoin Teleport (decentralized Coinswaps with an architecture of makers and takers similar to joinmarket).

Just the fact that you show a video of money being printed doesn’t mean it’s worthless or losing value. Technically all this could be done to replace damaged bills being taken out of circulation…

☕ GM, today brings a shift, can you crack the riddle?

🔍 Word number 7, it's time to unveil:

In Bitcoin's domain, where fortunes prevail,

Where weights are lifted, and lights are dim,

The missing word is the _ _ _

PrivacyGuides Loves Spyware

One of our readers asked how we differ from PrivacyGuides. So I wanted to outline the technology choices for your benefit.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, PrivacyGuides.org is a website run by Jonah Aragon. And although this post will heavily criticize PrivacyGuides, I must stress that I do respect Jonah and the rest of his team. They are doing a huge service by running their guides as a non-profit. And I encourage anyone who reads their stuff to continue to donate.

That being said, I have huge philosophical disagreements, and the main one is that we view Big Tech as corrupt and oppressive, because of their enormous involuntary surveillance and political censorship. On the other hand, PrivacyGuides appears to just be concerned with low level evasion, where they place large amounts of trust in the very groups we criticize. For example, their forum PrivacyGuides.net is on Cloudflare, their other forum Lemmy.one is on Cloudflare, and even his personal site JonahAragon.com is Cloudflared along with its email. And even just for text and avatar icons with their staff bios, they use Microsoft Github. You can’t afford to host 5 tiny jpegs?

While I genuinely admire Jonah for separating himself from the previous PrivacyGuides site because they sold out to commission links. I do not think his current recommendations have enough adversarial thinking in mind. For example, it’s only when Skiff email was recently bought by Notion, did PrivacyGuides remove it. They never mentioned that Cloudflare can break SSL and see the private encryption keys served to you when you first sign-up.

Over and over, I have criticized Cloudflare seeing the bulk of our traffic and breaking SSL to see data. And so it’s unfair to his readers to not even warn them that on his website, they’re being browser fingerprinted and logged for DDoS purposes when he tells them no data is collected. Especially when his readers are first consulting his website to buy a VPN in the first place. Further, users of their forums and Lemmy, don’t own their identities because CF sees the login passwords. How can you say this doesn’t matter? To quote Jonah’s own website: “Privacy is about power, and it is so important that this power ends up in the right hands”

But not owning your identity, how are readers of PrivacyGuides even supposed to know if Jonah is the one writing on the forums, or if it's really the government? Even worse, it is painful for me to see Jonah Aragon criticize Nostr. When Nostr is the very solution to his identity problem. He said: “I am trying out Nostr and so far am unimpressed. If anyone else is testing it out find me here and we’ll see if this even makes sense as a social network much less one we’d want to recommend on the site lol" [1]

Nostr is truly an amazing place and I urge him to try it again. His website says “decentralization” but I was shocked to see he does not even mention XMPP on his list of encrypted messengers. And when asked on forums, users are told to go to Matrix. [2] I could not disagree more. XMPP is the gold standard of decentralized open source communications and the primary choice for the darkweb. How can he guide us on Tor without even mentioning it?

Now we can debate XMPP’s reliance on government domains vs SimpleX & Session. Those are fair criticisms. But all of these, including Matrix, have centralized development. SimpleX got money from Microsoft. Signal is on Amazon. And while Session is on a blockchain, it’s like a corporation when it comes to changes. While as XMPP is the only one that’s pure & truly decentralized, with nobody in charge. And because hosting a Matrix server is so annoying, most people DON’T self-host, and use the official Matrix server w/ Google captchas fingerprinting your device and Gmail doing the verification. That’s right, Matrix.org is linked to Gmail, which ties your Matrix account to your real name if you were dumb enough to trust them with your real email.

And can you guess what company actually hosts Matrix.org? Can you guess what US-government compliant company sees who you talk to and when? Drum roll... Cloudflare.

Jonah, I’m not attacking you. I’m trying to make you realize that they are attacking us. And instead of being at each other’s throats, we can empower our readers to take control of their digital lives. That’s why I applied to write for you when I first started. And my offer still stands.

I really don’t get the equating of CTV with either the “too much complexity” or the “this is about shitcoins” argument. This is a basic primitive that seems to me that it will very likely help to reduce, not increase, the complexity of L2 designs at scale. And I can’t see how it does anything to help shitcoins or why it would matter. nostr:note18k3ayydxy3cttdjezh0zdyd49p98mxn3p7mywr6hnc737m8akk3sdhz83a

I don’t get all the doom and fear about the ETFs. I was told bitcoin is for enemies too. Anyone afraid of this does not have enough confidence in Bitcoin.

These are also the orange pillers that sold the bottom, so makes sense I guess

If I announced all the things that look funny to me, the USA democratic court would put me behind bars for 10k years for violation of stupid tolerastic rules they use for dividing people over there. I am being frank enough here on Nostr already.

Sorry if that appeares offensive, but I did not mean it that way. I do not find young or lost offensive, it is rather an acknowledgement that I have been in those stages myself. Thank god I never was a communist. This one is a straight calling out of an enemy type.

We are both anonymous. Is it wrong to try guessing something about one another in a not insulting manner? Note that in the same messages I also appreciated our discussion. I really do. I wish there were more people engaging in honest discussions like we do here now. We both learn something, and the readers do. Everybody wins.

On the other hand, it is insulting to point finger at hat and thrown that the man was born into. He did not invent them. And in any recent times he has not even used those things to oppress anyone. I am quite sure it would not work in present time even if he tried to. We assume they were used for evil purposes in the past as you describe, but not by this king, not by all kings, and these assumptions are based only on history books that we do not know if they are true. So when we really come to the verge of submitting ourselves to the mercy of this king, then it makes sense to shake his hat and throne and gold really well. Now he is just another old man bumbling something that nobody including PM is obliged to listen to.

If I was a normie royalist I would call you racist for doing this. You are pointing at stuff he was born into and saying that that makes him dangerous. Same thing is calling somebody a negro and saying you do not believe his sincere concern in you because you know that biologically there are stronger muscles under black skin and that makes him dangerous to you. Sorry for harsh comparison, but that is how paranoid normies think, I believe.

Well, that's how one makes his enemies. You tell a person what you do not like in his message, and he might thank you one day. Tell him that his message is rubish and so is his hat, and wife looks like ass, and his king and pope look like clouns - 99% you produced an enemy for yourself.

Also, in my other recent note I pointed out the evil of complicating things. Kill the dollar (i.e. also all fiat) is a clear message. But when you add "we also hate royal hats", it complicates and confuses things. So yes, it is not only unimportant, it is evil.

I would not defend King of England ever, if it was not our side attacking monarchy in general and doing it in a wrong way. I see now that you are either a young person, or a bit lost, or a communist whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Good looking, or rich looking or openly proud people have not been our enemies in our lifetime. What happened prior to our lifetime - we do not know, and what we think we know is a lie. The fake caring, modest or sick looking devils like Bush, Obama, all Bidens, all the powerful of corporate world but hiding outside of MSM world, all UK PMs, all open commies, and all undercover commies of the mostly Spanish world (a.k.a. socialists) are the enemy. Before they are dealt with, we have no time to waste on anybody's hats. And we are in a winning position now, therefore we have no need to desperately shoot anything that moves.

Like I said, criticize the wrong message of Charles, but don't make a cloun nor untiroyalist of yourself while doing it.

BUT, the bottom line is that whether you are an untiroyalist or a commie, I do not care - as long as you are stacking sats, we are on the same side.

Pleasure discussing with you and through that searching for a greater good.

If it was as simple as you say, than you would be right. But it isn't. He did not invent the throne and the hat yesterday. This was built up over milleniums. So he is normal, not weird for wearing that. Therefore his looks and clothes are the least important topic. And you should not bring up least important topics before the important topics are resolved. And if you do that, it means you are deverting the discussion, and that means acting sneaky. I know you may have had no such intentions, but I am just saying, whether intentionally or not, you are playing into the hands of communists.

Have you tried living in some proper monarchies or close to that, like Dubai, Thailand? Almost any other arab monarchy works if you can understand and accept muslim tradition. Tell me which democracy feels better to you? N.b. if you have mentality like work hard, achieve hard stuff for future generations, your own life does not matter - you are excused. This type of people are the root cause of all the troubles of mankind since the start of so called civilizations.

I am not saying we cannot do better than monarchies, we can, but monarchy is better than democracy.