For years now, every time a govt agency or politician says they need to do something to “protect democracy” or “bring freedom to…” blah blah, I instantly know they are full of sh*t. Whatever they want, it’s a lie & it’s going to make things worse and it’ll give them more political power.

Literally every time.

Fiat money is just an exploit:

It's arbitrage between the security & immutability of physical gold, & the insecurity and reversibility of it's virtual replacements.

#Bitcoin is simply a technological solution to end the massive, destructive, wasteful political industry and rent seeking structure that has been globally constructed around this arbitrage.

Love my new lockscreen! Thanks nostr:npub12hcytyr8fumy3axde8wgeced523gyp6v6zczqktwuqeaztfc2xzsz3rdp4

The final archvillain is not the boring one you assumed.

Instead, it's the one you knew from the beginning of the movie, that you kind of liked, because he was really good at getting your attention. But that turned bad and fraudulent retroactively the more you learn from him, and he grew bigger than any villain you could have anticipated.

That's the final archvillain.

Let's fucking go.

👀

They use coinbase because Saylor is a pussy and the stupidest smart guy out there. Armstrong is a crook and a low moral scumbag and will fuck him given the opportunity.

They should set up their own corporate self custody and compliance system and charge future companies to consult / sell end to end hardware software solution.

Not to mention set a good example.

People are so stupid.

Going to be hilarious when Microstrategy tries to get its Bitcoin annnnd

I’m loving Midjourney 5.2

It’s not really permissionless if you have to have your governments permission to use it

I wonder what will happen when a fragile monetary system runs head long into an anti-fragile one?

Obsession with scale is a fiat disease.

Seeking to get big when you're profitable makes a lot of sense. You can make even more money by scaling up. But what's really odd these days is that a lot of people want to scale even when they're not profitable.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense can figure out that this is not a good idea. If you multiply a negative number by a large number, you get an even bigger negative number. You're only going to lose more money. And that's true. You will lose more money, in a sound money economy.

In a fiat economy, things are a little different. If you're growing, that can be leveraged for additional loans on the potential to make a profit eventually. There's a lot of newly printed money floating around and it debases constantly, so more people are willing to take risks with their money. So malinvestment is common and unprofitable companies can suck in a lot of it.

Not all of these companies are bad, of course. Amazon famously made no profits for years to scale up. But for every Amazon, there's buy.com, boo.com, pets.com and so on. It's a gamble like with any unprofitable business. Sometimes you hit, sometimes you don't. The point is that the new money entering the economy often goes to stupid things and big things are what get attention. Thus everyone tries to scale massively.

Under sound money, profitability is first. You don't want to be losing something that's scarce. Thus, delaying scaling to maintain profitability is the logical choice. Businesses grow more slowly and cash infusions are much less common. That means they are generally much more hardened to market disruptions, because they last.

Family businesses used to last many generations. Heck, many last names today reflect the occupation of the ancestors that had a long-lasting business. A profitable venture that lasts is something you hold onto. It's also what we should be focused on instead of the fly-by-night, scale fast, rent-seeking culture we live in.

Sound money businesses will be very different than what we're used to.

Bitcoin and Me (by Hal Finney)

“I thought I'd write about the last four years, an eventful time for #Bitcoin and me.

For those who don't know me, I'm Hal Finney. I got my start in crypto working on an early version of PGP, working closely with Phil Zimmermann. When Phil decided to start PGP Corporation, I was one of the first hires. I would work on PGP until my retirement. At the same time, I got involved with the Cypherpunks. I ran the first cryptographically based anonymous remailer, among other activities.

Fast forward to late 2008 and the announcement of Bitcoin. I've noticed that cryptographic graybeards (I was in my mid 50's) tend to get cynical. I was more idealistic; I have always loved crypto, the mystery and the paradox of it.

When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs. They tend to have a knee jerk reaction.

I was more positive. I had long been interested in cryptographic payment schemes. Plus I was lucky enough to meet and extensively correspond with both Wei Dai and Nick Szabo, generally acknowledged to have created ideas that would be realized with Bitcoin. I had made an attempt to create my own proof of work based currency, called RPOW. So I found Bitcoin facinating.

When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I grabbed it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin. I mined block 70-something, and I was the recipient of the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent ten coins to me as a test. I carried on an email conversation with Satoshi over the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.

Today, Satoshi's true identity has become a mystery. But at the time, I thought I was dealing with a young man of Japanese ancestry who was very smart and sincere. I've had the good fortune to know many brilliant people over the course of my life, so I recognize the signs.

After a few days, bitcoin was running pretty stably, so I left it running. Those were the days when difficulty was 1, and you could find blocks with a CPU, not even a GPU. I mined several blocks over the next days. But I turned it off because it made my computer run hot, and the fan noise bothered me. In retrospect, I wish I had kept it up longer, but on the other hand I was extraordinarily lucky to be there at the beginning. It's one of those glass half full half empty things.

The next I heard of Bitcoin was late 2010, when I was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value. I dusted off my old wallet, and was relieved to discover that my bitcoins were still there. As the price climbed up to real money, I transferred the coins into an offline wallet, where hopefully they'll be worth something to my heirs.

Speaking of heirs, I got a surprise in 2009, when I was suddenly diagnosed with a fatal disease. I was in the best shape of my life at the start of that year, I'd lost a lot of weight and taken up distance running. I'd run several half marathons, and I was starting to train for a full marathon. I worked my way up to 20+ mile runs, and I thought I was all set. That's when everything went wrong.

My body began to fail. I slurred my speech, lost strength in my hands, and my legs were slow to recover. In August, 2009, I was given the diagnosis of ALS, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, after the famous baseball player who got it.

ALS is a disease that kills moter neurons, which carry signals from the brain to the muscles. It causes first weakness, then gradually increasing paralysis. It is usually fatal in 2 to 5 years. My symptoms were mild at first and I continued to work, but fatigue and voice problems forced me to retire in early 2011. Since then the disease has continued its inexorable progression.

Today, I am essentially paralyzed. I am fed through a tube, and my breathing is assisted through another tube. I operate the computer using a commercial eyetracker system. It also has a speech synthesizer, so this is my voice now. I spend all day in my power wheelchair. I worked up an interface using an arduino so that I can adjust my wheelchair's position using my eyes.

It has been an adjustment, but my life is not too bad. I can still read, listen to music, and watch TV and movies. I recently discovered that I can even write code. It's very slow, probably 50 times slower than I was before. But I still love programming and it gives me goals. Currently I'm working on something Mike Hearn suggested, using the security features of modern processors, designed to support "Trusted Computing", to harden Bitcoin wallets. It's almost ready to release. I just have to do the documentation.

And of course the price gyrations of bitcoins are entertaining to me. I have skin in the game. But I came by my bitcoins through luck, with little credit to me. I lived through the crash of 2011. So I've seen it before. Easy come, easy go.

That's my story. I'm pretty lucky overall. Even with the ALS, my life is very satisfying. But my life expectancy is limited. Those discussions about inheriting your bitcoins are of more than academic interest. My bitcoins are stored in our safe deposit box, and my son and daughter are tech savvy. I think they're safe enough. I'm comfortable with my legacy.”

– Hal Finney (Posted Mar 2013)

nostr:note1j2zgj2sugdahkgzyx34wpnfjkxsfldv02w45fhsxdh7kl4xneuks2345tz

Banks continue to fail, and the deep state finds itself in a precarious situation. With their true motives exposed, it's evident that their primary concern is retaining power rather than adding value to the lives of the people they govern. Even in our current kleptocratic and gerontocratic society, there are limits, and those boundaries are rapidly being approached.

The present trajectory indicates a shift towards a more authoritarian state, as this is the only viable means of sustaining the ongoing grift in the absence of a functional democracy. To achieve this, however, they must control the money to prevent rebellion. This necessitates the implementation of a CBDC.

While it's not being suggested that the recent spate of bank failures is intentional, it's clear that those in power are capitalizing on the situation. We are moving towards a world where each country has a single central bank with one true member. This structure is the perfect breeding ground for a CBDC.

Cum 💦 and check me out! You won’t be disappointed boys! #zap #plebchain #nostr #coffechain

GM 🌧️ #nostr friends 💜,

it's 36:10 Moscow time.

Fiat mind cannot grasp that #Bitcoin is backed by nothing.

It doesn't need to be backed by something, because it's a pure monetary premium with no counterparty risk.

The Bitcoin ledger is protected by the wall of the encrypted energy.