GOOD MORNING NOSTR.

LIVE FREE. 🫡

101 on how gold was confiscated:

You had to turn it in for dollars by a deadline prior to dollar devaluation, and there were massive prison consequences for not turning it in, but little resources in terms of investigating who didn’t turn it in. That would be expensive. So it was fear based. Focusing on illegality and tail risks on edge cases more than enforcement on average.

Institutions had to comply immediately, since it’s all visible. So the government broke liquidity in the domestic gold market, which was enough for their purposes. Gold became a hard-to-trade illegal relic for those that held it.

If a small family hodled some extra bars for 40 years until it became legal again, they did okay.

But can the government track bitcoin in the 2020s better or worse than gold in 1930s for enforcement purposes? That’s the right question.

And don’t just think of confiscation. Think of 70% selective taxes and things like that. Far more within the current rule of law. That’s the sophisticated approach. Don’t take it. Selectively tax it by a lot.

Those are the politics to push against from a bitcoin perspective.

Don’t shitcoin, kids. It’s bad for you.

What is going on here? Wrong answers only.

Reading a physical newspaper with a hot tea in the morning on a weekend is delightful.

I highly recommend a subscription to Epoch Times.

Just read a nice article about Horatius and the associated poem by Thomas Macauley

To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late;

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his gods,

And for the tender mother

Who dandled him to rest,

And for the wife who nurses

His baby at her breast?

Even though many of us here have transitioned our time to a paradigm change that unites 8 billion people on this planet, many of our friends and people we love…have not yet.

Their world view (and maybe partly ours too) is then still infected by a system that preys on them. Extracts from them. Keeps them stuck. If that is true, then it is hard to stay above the noise when the people we love, people they love, and so on, are “experiencing” a pain that is very real.

All around us, unbelievable tragedy and chaos with people taking sides, while believing that they’re or their side is justified in the stealing from, harming, or killing of other people for “their” cause. Our politics, our media, our institutions are all similarity captured by it - leading to further division and righteousness, while people become numb to it all - mostly unaware of how it is hurting them deeply. How could it not?

This is the lens of the world that the majority is looking through, reinforcing, and making stronger through everything they see and do.

Just as real to them….as the truth, hope, and abundance that #Bitcoin imposes on the world is for us.

Yes, we “try” to stay above it because we know that the system problem cannot be solved from within it, and our time is more valuable in bending reality to the new system.

But

it is worth a reminder as we go this chaotic transition that so few understand:

When someone we love hurts, we hurt too.

And there is still much hurt.

Much love to you all!

#Bitcoin

#Nostr

It repeatedly blows my mind, just how fundamentally decent the majority of people here are.

My hope/theory is that it’s not actually “just like this on Nostr”. While it’s true that a number of us have overlapping interests or worldviews, there is also a natural diversity: people from all around the world, with different cultures, languages, philosophies, and experiences, all show up here to say GM.

It’s more of a cultural bell curve, where the majority of people are pretty chill, decent human beings, who generally like each other and respect one another’s differences.

My radical proposition is that this actually reflects the real world, and that the current cultural narrative of unrelenting division - while it has some truth to it, for sure — is drastically overblown, both on a personal level and by the media. On the edges of the bell curve are the very niche, very loud, and very “divided” subcultures. These groups have been given the loudest microphones.

Individually, if we only interact with the toxic, rage-bait algorithms that have come to define modern social/media (because it’s in journalism too), we experience the world through this clouded lens. We’re fed a continuous diet of disagreement, outrage, war, etc., because we click on it and thus the people making the content decisions get paid.

Remove the algorithms, and you remove the illusion of irreconcilable division. Nostr is a perfect case study of this, and so far it’s going beautifully.

I’m cautiously optimistic that this trend will continue when the user base grows 10x, 100x, because my view is that humanity is primarily good. Time will tell, and incentives will matter. But I’m hopeful that on a value-for-value, proof-of-work standard, our better instincts will prevail.

people still email me asking to reset their damus password. oh boy.

University of Southern California students had a #Bitcoin club that showed up at Santa Monica Peer to Pier. They were giving away these hats, a bunch of great Bitcoin books and other stuff. Very cool of them…

Then we asked them for their npubs and got a deer-in-headlights stare. Showed them the Nostrich was already on their hat and encouraged them to get on. Here’s to hoping we purple pilled a bunch of young, passionate Bitcoiners. 🤙🏼

#nostronly

Who was this, that predicted the modern world so perfectly more than a century ago?

Who, and from which of his books?

First correct answer gets 421 Sats

Da moon over da lake 🌕

This chart is kind of shocking actually. A society completely flipped the mechanism for how it deals with people who are problematic for themselves and others.

Consolidated some utxos this morning. Not normally exciting but a couple firsts for me.

1 first transaction singed by my airgapped coldcard

2 first transaction broadcast from my own node via sparrow

The full self sovereign setup isn't that hard. If I can do it you can too. LFG