Honest question that I never have gotten a solid answer to is:

At what point does selling bitty p2p become illegal?

ACTION REQUIRED-

It's #showandtell Saturday. Show us something awesome, and repost so we can see lots of cool stuff. Bonus SATs for an explanation or story to go with it.

What if humanity could find some alien tech and thus greatly accelerate its own technological progress? But what if that tech was hoarded by a small group of people?

Anyway, here's a review of Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. It's a 22nd century hard science space opera set in our solar system, written by a retired engineer. One of the more successful indie sci fi books in recent years. It's also one of the most successful books to have bitcoin in it; it's a small background role, but bitcoin is one of the leading types of money in the solar system.

Marcus, an indebted down-on-his-luck asteroid miner (and secretly, a bit of a space pirate as of late, given how bad things have gotten) finds his ship taken over by a wealthy genetically modified corporate heiress named Miranda. She has bought his defaulting debt contract that his ship collateralizes, and has gained admin access over his ship's computer. And she knows he is secretly a space pirate, which altogether gives her multiple types of leverage over him. She wants him to take her on a mission to the edge of the solar system to do something she won't say, involving unimaginable treasure, and he has little choice but to go along with it. Secretly, however, he plots how to regain control of his ship as they go, because he recognizes how much of a suicide mission it is because of who guards the space out there.

Pros:

-The hard scientific realism in the book is great. The type that basically takes an engineer to write. No wonder he has endorsements from like, the co-founder of Autocad and such. It's also a smooth read, all from Marcus's perspective.

-Although the story mostly takes place on one ship with a few characters, the worldbuilding is a solid start. I assume it'll be expanded later in the series. The technological situation and structure of society are very fleshed out relative to how little we actually see, given the tight setting. The world feels realistic and lived-in.

-High nostalgia factor. Fans of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, and more recently the Expanse, and all sorts of classic sci fi literature over decades, will find a lot of references or similarities in a good way. The author is very well-read on the genre.

-The audiobook is pretty unique and great. Unlike most audiobooks, it has a full-cast production, meaning that each line of dialogue sounds like the person speaking it, rather than just one person reading a given chapter's narration and dialogue. I listened to this one rather than read it. You can only buy the audiobook on the author's website though, not Amazon/Audible. (Amazon/Audible have been kind of shitty to authors lately.) The other version of the book are available on Amazon.

-AI gets a really good treatment here, and the third main character, an AI, is my favorite character in the book.

-There's a lot of suspense throughout. Most of it is not really predictable how it's going to end since it doesn't follow a basic tropey structure. Even if you don't particularly like some of the characters (and indeed they're designed to be rather unlikable), you're likely to find yourself reading further to see what happens.

Cons:

-The book is about 500 pages, and I think 50+ could have been cut out of the middle to make it stronger. The dialogue between Marcus and Miranda gets rather repetitive after a while. And because of the limited setting (mostly on one ship), most of the worldbuilding is done via exposition by Marcus. So if readers hate "info dumps", they'll probably get annoyed at this. I personally don't really mind exposition as long as it's good, so this wasn't a dealbreaker for me (the "don't do exposition!" advice to authors is overdone in my view). I just think the middle could have used a trim. And although most of the book is not predictable, one aspect imo very much is, and that's where a lot of the repetition is.

-There are some unnerving aspects/scenes in it. I can't really say what they are without spoilers. Let's just say being in Marcus's head for 500 pages isn't, uh, my cup of tea. The book is self-aware about it, though. It's an intentional choice to have put these unnerving aspects in, so it's not a con per se but it's more something that will put off some readers. And it's a little more understandable by the end.

Overall, a unique story. And for the audiobook, I do think that over time more audiobooks will be made with this more complete type of cast. Audiobooks used to be very expensive and a small piece of the market, and only in recent years have they become very popular. As they become a bigger and bigger share of the fiction market up to some substantial percentage, I think more work will go into their quality and details.

An absolute historic day.

Bitcoin payments live on Square 🚀

- 0% payment processing fees

- No chargebacks

- Instant settlement in BTC or USD

Making bitcoin everyday money 🧡

Could be they are wired as a branch circuit with a shared neutral 🤔

Yeah, i think I need to take out the plastic screw and clean out that one as well…

The technocrats get their own bank.

nostr:nprofile1qqs22afg9k7epyay82slkpap2mquwn9k0cmh3fxk2y8r4nr7wq6xapsprpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuer0de4hjtnnda3kjctvqywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytndv9uxjmtpvd5hgctyv4kzummjvuwzdz72

These knots guys are low iq non technicals whose opinions mean fuck all. They all try to make these nonsense metaphors or appeals to emotion and have nothing substantive to say.

Calle, jb55, Adam Back and other very smart and very accomplished devs opinions matter infinitely more than all of these schizophrenic random nyms “opinions”. Half of them are probably bots anyways.

Who is awake right now?

What should I do with this?

#asknostr #nostr #nostriches #plebs #plebchain #grownostr

Between this and Saylor platitudes is why Bitcoin Twitter is such a circle jerk

Bitcoin passes Amazon to become world's 7th most valuable asset

Next up...Silver

He is carnivore. He will not put anti nutrients in his body.

Might go buy a new handgun today. What’s your favorite EDC piece? #asknostr

Less than 1% of Americans are violent criminals.

Jail them for life or execute them and we can all live in peace.

Simple.

I'm no expert as I'm more of a Monero guy, but ETH is used in tokenized stocks and DeFi platforms. Also, BlackRock and Robinhood are building on Ethereum for their financial services and operations.

When people cant find their purpose , they make getting to a physical location their goal .. be it a permanent move or random travel !

You can still go ride your BMX until the streetlights come on and you can still do drugs and everything else from the 80s.

None of that stuff stopped existing retards.

Its a Ford though.

I've noticed that too these past years. small RVs or small vans everywhere just parked where ever.

So I guess it is possible but I was thinking more along the lines of at least having a decent life living in van traveling from city to city having parking dedicated to vans and areas that have available cooking areas etc kinda like rv parks.

All those places where vans just hand out because they are homeless are not fun areas and are dangerous and have smelly and scary people.

they arent homeless.

It's not possible. There is no where to park the van as most places don't allow you to hang out in the parking lots all day and night. Where exactly are you supposed to shower and bathroom. The rv parks are also fairly expensive more then paying rent. On top of that you can't power the starlink all day or stove. Those are just some issues, there is plenty more.