If I had bought MSTR a year ago (at 71.5% above NAV), I would be way more concerned about the BTC per share accretion: +17.6% Jan-June; +9.4% July-Dec. At that rate of diminishing returns, it may never reach the 71.5% I had overpaid for.
💯 Bitcoin has done 1000x more to advance libertarianism than the Libertarian Party *ever* has.
Inflation IS taxation. That is, the government isn't going to collapse as long as they can just keep debasing the dollar. So, there is no 'tax revolt' unless that includes a dollar revolt.
Of course, bitcoiners are already onboard with opting out of the dollar 😉
Well, obviously, the devil would be in the deails of what is "fair". Though, I get why we can't go into the details of how that would be determined - because the world would never be able to agree on those details.
Personally, I would argue the only objectively "fair" goverment would have to be no government (and I'm not even necessarily suggesting that's what I would want).
You have to keep in mind the tools that were available back then.
I think I found an archived photo of the original designer working with what was considered state-of-the-art at the time:
The government spends trillions every year - much of it on waste, fraud, and abuse. It sucks, but a tax revolt isn't going to change that. The less they collect in taxes just means the larger the deficit - i.e. the more they will just borrow/print/debase dollars to make up the diffence.
Of course, a tax revolt - like everything else - would be good for bitcoin, though. 😉
That being said, if/when a merchant wants to provide a refund, provide a refund.
Regarding chargebacks, I think if it had never been so easy for someone to fraudulently make use of someone else's credit card account, chargebacks would never have been a thing in the first place. As it was, credit card companies had not choice but to offer that feature just to get anyone to be willing to use their fragile, easily exploitable system.
Conversely, I think "no chargebacks" vis a vis "not your keys; not your bitcoin" just makes intuitive sense... at least as much as it does with regard to cash transactions.
I'm not sure how big of an issue that it is people are claiming. It's like a 3-4% issue.
If you're writing off 3-4% of what you charge for your labor, you probably don't consider it a big deal.
If you're baking 3-4% into prices of items you sell at brick-and mortar retail - because that business doesn't have high enough margins to just write it off, then the competitor next door who sells the same items - but doesn't charge 3-4% for non credit card transactions - is, all else being equal, more attractive to those customers. I guess whether or not that counts as a big issue would depend on the customer. Personally, especially for items that I'm routinely purchasing over and over, I tend to notice where prices are higher or lower... I don't bother calculating how much higher or lower, I just choose lower (again, all else being equal).
The worst part is it only mentions the downside trade-offs related to seed phrases... as if Bitkey has no downside trade-offs.
It's as disenguous as claiming
"Dollars are safer
"Here are all the ways you can screw up bitcon:
"....
"....
"The end."
All true. Thouh, to be fair (or at least more complete), raising capital at 10% ineterest via issuing preferred stock and using that capital to buy bitcoin is a solid plan. Nobody would be complaining about the marginal business expenses of managing this wrapped btc if bitcoin had been appreciating just a little faster than 10%.
That being said, It's probably a good thing that the risk involved in this plan when bitcoin is not going up has been made crystal clear sooner rather than later.
One day they’ll get it right. “Bitcoin not Crypto”
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/12/24/pubkey-crypto-bar-to-build-culture.html
They may one day get it right; but only by accident. That is, if/when only Bitcoin is left standing, it will (as it started out) *actually* be synonymous with 'crypto'.
Bad would be like 42K... And even then, by "bad", i mean *only* 50% CAGR since the March 2020 Covid bottom.
Samourai pleaded guilty.
What evidence exits of the charge they pleaded guilty to?
What evidence exists of any other charges that were dropped as a condition of their guilty pleas?
The bottom line is, as a result of their guilty pleas, the prosecution never had to present thir case in court, so the public may never necessarily know the answers to these questions. Instead, we have the obviously self-serving narrative provided by Samourai.
As such, I think we need to be careful about insiting "We have to free them". I mean, it's okay to want them to be free. But, we probably shouldn't be spreading the speculation that the feds will be coming after all privacy software develpers based on an incomplete understanding of what evidence the feds might have had to convince Samourai to plead guilty.
On-chain for savings or larger payments that are not very time-sensative.
Liquid L-BTC atomic-swapped with lightning for meidum-sized, time-sensative payments.
Custodial lightning via Cashu for smaller-sized, time-sensative payments.
* nostr:npub18ull0tdnj9vugtq259k48szg80al44ta7g4fa85nvj3svaq7kt8s9udcl9 wallet is my current go-to for moving funds between the 3 modes.
"Source: Based on social media statements..."
I mean seriously... Why even bother with such a citation?
In case you missed it, within the last week, Strategy diluted MSTR by another ~$750m worth of shares so that they could buy more... well, nothing... they just kept the dollars - and increased their dollar reserve by another ~50%.
That being said, I get why they're doing it: so that they can give credibility to their recently stated intention to continue to pay preferred stock dividends well into the future almost no matter what.
Here's the kicker: The vast majority of their past few issuances of preferred stock has been in STRD. At current prices, they could raise ~38% more capital by instead issuing the same quantity of STRF shares. They come with the same dividend obligation - except that STRD comes with the option for Strategy to choose to just not ever pay any particular dividend. So, to me, by raising less capital to issue STRD than they would by issuing STRF, this signals that when Strategy says they're stock-piling dollars to ensure they can continue to pay dividends long into the future, that doesn't necessarily apply to STRD dividends (because if it did, they'd clearly be better off by just issuing STRF instead).
All that consumption waste is great for China's economy, though.
'bug' or 'feature' is ultimately a matter of perspective... and the community - through the collective decisions of its independent actors - will eventually settle on a resolution (or it won't and fork).
I'm not sure what you mean by rolling back a 'consensus change'; but, as I indicated, nodes don't have to be in alignment on recognizing "OP_RETURN" or not in order to avoid a chain-split. As such, introducing OP_RETURN wasn't a change to the consensus rules in the first place.
The debate was always about scale - which resulted in a compromise from each side on their principles... but yeah, witness-data stuffing (e.g. inscriptions) are a separate issue.
The specific Satoshi filter is that prior to OP_RETURN, data of an unknown content type was rejected from being relayed (i.e. filtered).
However, a transaction sent directly to a miner with data of an unknown content type could still be mined... the miner could even call the output an "OP_RETURN" (or any other op code unknown to anyone else) if he wanted to. The difference is, when all the other nodes validate a block containing a transaction with an op code that it doesn't recognize, it just assumes it's unspendable - which was convenient for the introduction of OP_RETURN (also unspendable) since it didn't change node behavior vis a vis block validation (and thus, no chain-split)
The net result of OP_RETURN was to allow data of unknown content type to be relayed; and consequently, way more likely to get minded - then when it was previous being 'filtered' (i.e. 'picky') from being relayed in the first place.
This smacks of desperation by Samsung to milk the last ounce of whatever positive name recognition they have left.
Thank you for the quick response! All is good!
Yeah, Cashu.me looks fine now... probably never went down... I was typing "cashu.me" - which I swear used to get me there... but I need to be typing "wallet.cashu.me" instead. My bad.
Basically, this is correct. As long as you want your node to serve as a source of truth for the blockchain, once data gets in it, you can't really get rid of it. That is, after a node has verified each block, it could conceivably prune all the op_return data, for example; but then, the node would be useless for anyone else to subsequently download a block and verify it for themselves.
This is, of course, a strawman argument. Virtually no one argues that node policy filters make it impossible for undesirable data to make it into the blockchain; but filters that are practically ubiquitous (at least until Core 30 goes live) do obviously hinder it - requiring, as of yet, non-standard measures to evade.
A consensus rules 'filter' could potentially be a different story - but that would likely come with opening a Pandora's box that I doubt there's much, if any, serious appetite for.
In short, *IF* we GenXers are less interested in participating in the recent vlog craze, the disproportionately younger age that appears in a typical vlog may be distorting our sense for the age of the typical nostrich.
We've had our test case... and it was indeed not a good idea... for the diverging implementation (i.e. Bitcoin Cash).
This is why neither Knots nor subsequent versions of Core have any incentive to diverge from consensus.
That would be awesome! While we're at it, can we just go ahead and obsolete phone numbers, please?
Slick website. One small complaint: if a mint is down, the reviews for that mint are no longer accessible on your site. For example, lnwallet.app currently appears to be down. It would be nice to be able to leave a review on your site to warn others; and/or check with your site to see if anyone else is reporting similar issues (and for how long they've been reported). But your site just reports "Error Loading Mint Info. Network error: Could not connect to mint.lnwallet.app." - with no ability to read or write a review for that mint. Consequently, I have no idea if I've been rugged; or, if this mint is possibly just having temporary network issues.
Nunchuk (iOS) definitely has it... I use it all the time. "Recover existing wallet" reveals several options including "... using QR code" and "... using BSMS/descriptors" - each of which will generate a 'watch-only' wallet (i.e. not a 'hot' wallet).
... I'll take another look at Blockstream.
Absolutely! As far as I could tell, watch-only wasn't available on blockstream? (though, maybe a different story if I paired it with a Jade?) This IS a deal-breaker.
Agreed on nostr:npub1cvqlzvmjercdn0ypsmv8f7j9lge6ahsnueh5rparh53wuswftv4q49yjt3. It works very well for me. There are upsell/account options available; but it's not at all in your face after your initial login "as guest". Though, as best I can tell, the iOS version isn't open source (no Github like there is for android or desktop)... Not a deal-breaker for me, though, since I don't use mobile wallets as the sole transaction signer, anyway.
I find nostr:npub1jg552aulj07skd6e7y2hu0vl5g8nl5jvfw8jhn6jpjk0vjd0waksvl6n8n way less intuitive (and way more cluttered with junk)... maybe I just need to be using it with a Jade. 🤷
Bluewallet was my first, and is a great simple ux, but I ultimately abandoned it completely due to no testnet support - which has become a huge pet peeve of mine for wallets in general (nostr:npub1cvqlzvmjercdn0ypsmv8f7j9lge6ahsnueh5rparh53wuswftv4q49yjt3 definitely handles testnet the best, IMO).
Cove looks like a very promising Bluewallet alternative, but is clearly not yet ready for prime-time.
PS. When you actually promise shareholders a dividend; so, you sell even more new shares so you can keep that promise to the earlier shareholders, and so on; then, that's called a "ponzi scheme".
Unfortunately, no one is really going to get orange-pilled simply by offering another payment option alone. Now, if Steak n Shake demonstrated how Bitcoin is actually a less expense payment option by offering like a 2% Bitcoin discount, then, that might get some attention from the pre-coiners.