Bitcoin is not a movement of any kind. It is not a cult or a club. It will only succeed because people stop hiding under baseball hats and being cowards and thinking Bitcoin is a movement.
The option for Bitcoin to win will not be set by cowards hiding their faces in basements and thinking “podcasts” are Bitcoin. If Bitcoiners were behind the first consumer computers, people would still be using Slide Rules.
Thankfully a small handful of realistic, non cult, intelligent, risk embracing people are working with Bitcoin to make its promise come true. It’s not a game for them. It’s not all hot air and posturing.
Grow up, or fail! Stop dancing the safety dance!
If you’re in Argentina and want to be the subject of a short film on Bitcoin in that great country, let me know ASAP by DM.
The liars at CTC can't do the math and rely on Faulty Appeal to Authority as an argument. They never quote any numbers, and neither does the hysterical Caster who uses foul language like:
"Computationally intensive"
"Bitcoin’s waste"
"a country’s worth of electricity"
"Jorge Stolfi"
There is not a single line in this fallacious, scabrous, vile piece of anti-academic propaganda that deals with any relevant fact about the electricity Bitcoin Minders use (YES "MINDERS"), or a rational argument about the cost effectiveness of Bitcoin.
Believe it or not, Bitcoin is hugely cost effective...when you do the math right.
There are two billion people who are unbanked. And billions more who will benefit by Bitcoin being adopted global as a replacement for fiat.
Not only will this prevent the profligacy of rogue governments, but dividing the number of users by the consumption of electricity means that the amount of electricity per user is very small.
Do you see what I did there? I made a claim without backing it up with any math. If this hysterical harridanic harpie can do it, then so can anyone!
For the record, Bitcoin cannot "Waste Electricity" by definition:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1QdqN9XoAAFGvA?format=jpg
https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-doesnt-waste-electricity-649694ea3605
And the ridiculous Caster is very late to the "Wrong Side of History" party; I guess her name will go down in history for something at least!
"Bitcoiners" who have their stuff on Exchanges, show they really don't understand Bitcoin at all. The whole point of Bitcoin is that you control your own money, and don't allow other people to control it or you.
As soon as you get an exchange account, you're defeating the entire purpose of Bitcoin, and acting like a fiat head. If you're going to keep "your" Bitcoin on an exchange, Binance no less, you might as well just stay in fiat and be a normie. You're not even trying at that point.
What's worse is voluntarily joining an exhcnage, and then whining that exchanges are exchanges when you have the choice not to use them and have full control.
This begs the question; "Why are you 'in Bitcoin' at all?" What do you gain from it? Why are you bothering with it at all?
The reality is that there are very very few real Bitcoiners out there ; most users are not interested in how Bitcoin actually works, but instead, are attracted to the culture, chaos and outsider chic of The Bitcoin Cult. There are also mini me rebels who like to be in opposition - it doesn't matter what they're in opposition to - so that they can throw temper tantrums and fake outrage.
It's like going to an Irish bar, ordering Guinness and complaining that it's black. Guiness is black just as Bitcoin exchanges are dangerous and not for consumers who want everything "RIGHT NOW OR I'LL THROW MY TOYS OUT THE PRAM".
Complaining that Binance isn't sending your "money" quickly is embarrassing. First of all, it's embarrassing that you have an account on Binance. Secondly...well, there is no secondly for Bitcoiners, that's enough.
Once again. Not everyone in the world is fit to be a Bitcoiner, and the vast majority will never be Bitcoiners. They will use Bitcoin, but that's not the same as being a Bitcoiner.
And that is a good thing. To turn a billion people into real Bitcoiners would take one hundred years, maybe more. The power of Bitcoin can be harnessed and deployed globally without everyone using it; the purpose of Bitcoin is to replace fiat, not create new "Model Bitcoiners".
Let's, for the sake of argument, you believe this is not correct. Well, that's fine. You are at liberty to use your powers to spread Bitcoin in whatever way you feel is most correct. What you will find however, is that the people who disagree with this are also the type that refuse to measure the results of their work, even anecdotally.
This is because they know that what they're doing is ineffective, touches very few people, and does not create new Bitcoiners in large enough numbers to cause what they're doing to be distinguishable from random chance; in other words, it would not have mattered had they existed or not.
There is a movement to encourage users to stop keeping Bitcoin on Exchanges. This is a good thing. Exchanges still make money exchanging, and they get unburdened of the risk of "custodying" other people's ledger entrie...I mean Bitcoin.
In the future, the "Pass Through Exchange" may automate the entire process so that only the user ever has complete control, and the Exchange is just an API shop that you can connect your payment method and wallet to. Or maybe not.
Tea Break is over. If you are reading this on a Nostr client, ZAP ME.
Mind blindness is widespread in software developer circles; obsessive thoughts, inability to empathise, always missing the big picture, lack of human connection, believing that time is always “right now”, awkwardness and other crippling flaws are painful to read about. However…
Anyone who is neurotypical and understands how progress works knows that Lightning is pure genius and a foundational idea. It’s like claiming Xerox PARC, “will never take off” because it’s slow, expensive and “closed source”. Anyone who knows their history and who is not Mind Blind is able to put Lightning into the proper context.
Lightning proves that Bitcoin really is “programmable”. That means that software can be written with it to do literally anything. If you don’t have the imagination (many don’t) to understand what this means, then Lightning can’t make sense to you.
If however you do, then you know that it proves Bitcoin is more powerful than most people, even some genius developers, have the capacity to understand. Everyone should expect detractors to emerge against anything using Bitcoin; it’s an imagination and cultural problem and phenomenon respectively.
Detractors can’t stop Bitcoin or stop people experimenting on it. Billions of people in the world have been using a “fundamentally flawed” operating system (Micro$0ft Winblows) for decades, and it changed the world despite being dreadful.
The purpose of Bitcoin, and by extension Lightning, is to change the world, not to be perfect. The purpose of eating is not to have the peas and mashed potatoes perfectly separate; eating is more than that.
Whenever someone, even a venerated person, complains Lightning or Bitcoin isn’t perfect, try to bear Xerox PARC, Winblows and all other world changing “flawed” software tools in mind, and remember; normal users don’t write their homework assignments on TeX.
https://twitter.com/fiatjaf/status/1679642866484666368?s=46&t=LNe8MN2dQUj_88yB-puY1A
Primal…very optimised…FASCINATING.
“Moral grounds” doesn’t work like that. No one is perfect, everyone makes “mistakes”. That’s in double quotes because when you’re the first in something, there is no model to copy. 20/20 armchair quarterbacking judge jury executioner acts are knot even LULZ.
You’re barely literate, and expect other people to take your grunts as advice. Crazy!
“We” don’t have any routers. And people who know use DD WRT instead of whining. https://dd-wrt.com/
“Let’s stop normalizing big tech voyeurism.”
This is an interesting sentiment. More interesting is the question of WHY these apps are collecting this information in the first place.
These apps are as big as some Nostr clients want to be; what can be learned by “Big Tech” behaviours? Most people are obviously not interested in their privacy; will the Nostr client demographic and Instagram client demographics overlap, or not?
Is the point of releasing apps to get as many users as possible for maximum social impact, or to whine and Virtue Signal about what other people are doing?
On the same subject, why do people who whine about surveillance by apps, never mention the surveillance of The State? Why do they give The State a pass by default?
Without doubt, The State is the worst routine privacy abuser of all time, and yet it gets a pass from Virture Signalling anti-Capitalist whiners who want the success of the world but who don’t want to pay for it.
https://mises.org/library/egalitarianism-revolt-against-nature-and-other-essays
It’s nonsense on stilts. US supplies will not be poisoned with UK garbage; it’s just more paranoid “worst case scenario” fear porn, the same as was seen in the 1990s about PGP/GPG. These losers build nothing, help no one, are boring psychos.
Blocked!
“Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the revolutionary army, another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the revolutionary war.
They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners, men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.
Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.
Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.
Vandals or soldiers or both, looted the properties of Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.
At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. The owner quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.
Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.
John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.
Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Standing tall, straight, and unwavering, they pledged: ‘For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’”
Michael W Smith
https://twitter.com/TRHLofficial/status/1676173206611271681
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0L2pYXX0AAaCfv?format=jpg&name=medium
Man’s nature is fixed, and cannot change without the mercy of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
An act for establishing religious Freedom.
Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;
That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,
That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;
That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;
That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind;
That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry,
That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,
That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it;
That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;
That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;
That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;
And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:
Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities. And though we well know that this Assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of Legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare that the rights hereby asserted, are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Statute_for_Religious_Freedom
“Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. Two lost their sons in the revolutionary army, another had two sons captured. Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the revolutionary war.
They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
What kind of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners, men of means, well educated. But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.
Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.
Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.
Vandals or soldiers or both, looted the properties of Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.
At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. The owner quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.
Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.
John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.
Such were the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution. These were not wild eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. They were soft-spoken men of means and education. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Standing tall, straight, and unwavering, they pledged: ‘For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’”
Michael W Smith
https://twitter.com/TRHLofficial/status/1676173206611271681
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0L2pYXX0AAaCfv?format=jpg&name=medium
What the British don't seem to understand is that there is no such thing as "encryption in the UK". If this bad law passes, everyone in the UK can still get Signal, WhatsApp and other tools from outside the UK, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
This has been going on for decades. Governments in totalitarian states masquerading as democracies countries like Britain and France have long conceded that GPG and SSL cannot be compromised without undermining eCommerce and banking, and so have quietly, grudgingly relented and shrunk away from trying to control those universal tools.
Damien Green is famous for organising the unethical seizure of Facebook company documents:
and so any pretence that Britain is a democracy where the rule of law is in place is absurd on its face, as is the idea that there will be proper controls over who gets to look at private Signal messages. They can "seize" anything they like at any time, without a warrant, believe it or not. And then they BOAST about it:
https://twitter.com/DamianCollins/status/1066613739607261185?s=20
No one in their right mind believes any assurances given by any State when it comes to self control about reading other people's messages. That's just one aspect.
The other aspect is this. No American company will cripple their software at the behest of the Saudi Arabian government. They will continue to make their apps available unrestricted and unfettered, and there is nothing anyone anywhere can do about it.
As long as this is true, anyone anywhere on earth can install an unmodified copy of Signal, and it will not be possible for any State to control the billions of people who are using those apps. It will not be possible for them to know that the apps are being used at all.
The world has changed, and gentlemen like Damien Green are having a hard time coming to terms with it. All the arguments they're able to mount to do with porn and other bad things have been used for decades without any effect. Anyone can Google the Crypto Wars and see that the arguments are exactly the same today as they were in the past.
Read this which deals with this subject from 1985. There is even a physiognomic clone of Gargoyle Gary Gensler taking the side of censorship and fear mongering.
https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-parallels-from-1985-1cb70ca130a4
If the British pass this law, all it will do is further impoverish the people there. They've already all but extinguished Bitcoin businesses in the UK; they're going to make sure that no one starting any sort of business running on the prerequisite of unbroken encryption software or the Bitcoin chain of blocks considers Britain, not even as a bad joke.
America (even with its serious problems) and new Super Contestant entrants like El Salvador will continue to hoover up all the software talent of the world, allow people to launch secure and strong services, and there is nothing INGSOC can do about it. All they can do is make impotent gestures like this scabrous, scandalous, toxic bill that no one will obey and that will cause all developers to run to Heathrow.
The fact of the matter is that these entrepreneurs fleeing Britain will be going to places that have large pools of talent made up of fellow escapees from all over the world, who have moved to where the work and innovation are. If there is no innovation in Britain, no one will set up companies there and no one will be hired there. Everything will move to free countries.
Once the seeds are planted in other countries, it will be nearly impossible to coax entrepreneurs to "Move to Silicon Roundabout" without getting laughed out of the room:
https://medium.com/swlh/priti-patel-is-wrong-about-encryption-5bbfaab62cc1
Britain is finished as a possible "International Tech Hub". They did it to themselves, refuse to take proper advice, and now everyone is leaving. The very fact that this bill is even being discussed is stopping people from considering anything there.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!
https://twitter.com/BigBrotherWatch/status/1676164328146305026
There is no such thing as a “White Supremacist Platform” Gab is a free speech platform; you can go there and say (and read) anything that’s legal to say in the USA. That’s legal, that’s American, and it’s good.
Gab are amazing. Just by existing they invalidated Mastodon’s proposition, proved you don’t need financial rails by adopting Bitcoin, and were ten years ahead of Silicon Valley.
Carter was lied to, to protext the Black Projects and their secret budgets https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0090591708317902
They take it in payment for services. https://pro.gab.com/upgrade?plan=62579f024dc05f1f22291636