Not sure why the message format got messed up there. We are @cequals on Nostr.

Zaps intensify! TBD has launched our new Lightning Service Provider today! And we’re calling it C= (C-equals). And we are on Nostr! (#[0]​. Congrats to Nick Slaney and the team! https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/tbd-announces-new-bitcoin-lightning-service-provider-c

The French Revolution and American Revolution are both pretty exceptional outliers, yes.

The other error being something along the lines of "everything is so bad right now, why not roll the dice? Could it be any worse than this?" Which stems from a ridiculous failure of imagination. It is, in fact, not hard at all to imagine counterfactuals where it's MUCH worse.

The belief that "revolutions are usually a good thing" by a lot idealists is one of the most ahistorical positions I come across in these arguments.

I don't agree. A lot of burn-it-down moments were giant steps backwards. Like: The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Mao's Great Leap Forward. The Khmer Rouge. The Iranian Revolution, The Cuban Revolution. The Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution. The Arab Spring. Etc.

I believe in liberal democracy, and therefore the existence of the modern state.

However, I do believe that the maintenance of freedom and democracy requires that the power of the state be continuously held in healthy suspicion, and in many cases, actively challenged.

I definitely stop short of holding the goal of "burning it all down", as I think that would unleash untold suffering and catastrophe. In fact, I think this goal is ridiculously misguided.

Soon

Yes

TBD is going to have a big announcement tomorrow ...

Yeah. I don't know why I didn't do it before. Not being exposed to Twitter trolls for a month now has increased my faith in humanity ten fold.

I'm starting to mute people.

I've decided to go against my longstanding position against blocking/muting people I've maintained on social media for over a decade. Ad hominem trolling = Mute.

I haven't! But I just added it to the Kindle!

Yes. But a lot of people think, intuitively, that is wrong. So it's worth unpacking a bit, I think.

I think it about it in these terms, and I have literally no problem getting out of bed in the morning. I’m completely comfortable with this and I’m a pretty happy and content person.

Our understanding of the world is limited to a foveal slice of reality. Nearly *everything* any of us knows comes almost entirely from the testimony of others. Including the very words we write and speak. Our entire concept of reality if path dependent on the aggregation of socially-delivered information, and abstracted into frameworks of understanding. Nobody’s knowledge of the world is solitary in nature. In fact, even where knowledge is derived from evidence, the interpretation of that evidence is almost always delivered through testimony. You cannot escape this. The internet doesn’t make this better.

I will admit, and this might be apocryphal around these parts, but I think the “Do Your Own Research” populist movement to understanding the world is actually epistemically bankrupt. *ducks*

And yes, both polarities of the American political conversation are embarrassingly guilty of failing to do this. Which is not bothsideism. It’s just true. In the context of bitcoin … a lot of bitcoiners are just as guilty as nocoiners of doing this.

I actually *enjoy* debate with nocoiners who make an intellectual effort to criticize bitcoin, or doubt it.

You should welcome disagreement and train yourself to be comfortable with dissent against your most deeply held views. Disagreement is an opportunity for you to test whether you truly believe what you think it is you believe. Whether or not you’re justified in believing it, based on evidence and reason. If you start hurling insults the second someone critiques your views, you’re actually doing yourself a disservice.