The amount of girls that have ghosted me after they figure out I’m a Bitcoiner is ridiculous. Literally 100% hit rate.

I feel so old, but I am precisely middle-aged. So hard, to wrap my head around that.

As much as I think this is a useful development for a lot of people, especially in the developing world - it’s also a huge banner for regulators that says “CHECK HOW OBVIOUSLY MONEY TRANSMITTING WE ARE!”

If Lightning is left to only bitcoin, I think it can be more easily argued that it is separate and unique in construction and should also be in the regulatory framework. But if it’s being used to move dollars around, I think we lose a massive edge in maintaining that perception. All they will see is a dollar payment network where they cannot see into all of the accounts, can’t KYC every user, and can’t freeze the payments. And they will do everything they can to gain that level of control, and far worse likely, if they have such a clear target. nostr:note1c7y74c0zc0w0njarysn59ep9agda2e6r568xfu20s6w7px0rllsqtk3yc7

The Nostr trending algo works backward to Twitter.

It nudges you to talk only about Nostr and Bitcoin, or to post platitudes, famous quotes, sexy pics, and heart-warming pictures of nature and food.

It's an anti-intellectual algo.

An anti-literary algo.

An anti-contemplation algo.

Any original, complex, or unsettling thought gets buried 6 feet down and a pile of GMs gets poured on top, to seal it in.

250 sats to every comment on this post.

Limit: 1 zap per user.

Cap: 10,000 sats total. May extend.

Nostr seems broken, abandoned, woke, or it's turning into a big account echo chamber. I'm shaking shit up to understand why.

Spent all day improving nip10 robustness in damus. We now do nip10 marker replies, so damus replies should always be correct in every client.

I also integrated nostrdb into thread construction, so damus should always be able to reconstruct a thread even if the root thread marker is missing or wrong (many such cases). This had the largest impact, i very rarely see thread loading issues.

I am pushing out TestFlight today for purple users to test, we plan on submitting this tomorrow on AppStore with many more improvements, will drop a video once its live.

Threads have been a pita in damus but this should improve things a ton. Thanks for your patience 🙏

Who are they?

Not everything is a lesson. Sometimes you just fail.

Like people who joined the xrp community.

Whenever you feel dumb, just remember that there are people who bought negative-yielding bonds.

Fees are low. Do your Bitcoin things now. Open channels, consolidate UTXOs (🥹) etc.

i'm a simple man, i design art and resist the state.

i smoke cigars lit with a dupont in the sun,

i wear a swiss watch telling the wrong time.

i eat fine steaks and travel the world to meet with other sophisticated simpletons,

i was early on the next global reserve currency.

i wasn't always like this, but i am now...

thank you, satoshi🏴‍☠️⚡️

I have one about fedimint as well 😉

I don't often talk about this, but with Swan's dive into what is essentially cloud mining, I felt it would be good to discuss this.

About 3 and a half years ago, I decided to mine Bitcoin at home on a small scale. The goals were to deal with noise, heat, and to learn. I ended up heating my house for the entire winter (an all winters to follow) with Bitcoin. Eventually, I wanted more hash power and started to look into options.

Lord Fusitu'a (RIP) saw my Twitter discussions about wanting to buy S19s and DMed me about it. He said that I didn't have to buy S19s and that their was a better way to proceed it I wanted to learn more.

He introduced me to a company called VBit. They were a cloud mining company that sold hash power in different increments. 33 TH, 66 TH, and 100 TH. They supposedly had facilities in the US mid-west and in Canada. They were a Philadelphia company! Go Pennsylvania! I was skeptical, so Lord invited me to on of their meetings to be transparent.

My takeaway from the meeting was that this was essentially the Amway of Bitcoin mining. It was a MLM with sales tiers, partners, and referrals, everything MLM! Very shady.

I asked Lord about this and he said that he's vetted them and been mining with them for 6 months and has on-boarded many Tongans to this company. He said I could just mine and not participate in the MLM portions of the company. He said many people did this.

Again, I was skeptical, but I really wanted to get an S19 and start to mine at a larger scale. It was hard to get an S19 now, with many being in backorder, so I decided to move forward. I purchased 100 TH, an S19, for $12,000. I was able to mine with the hash that I wanted and not have to worry about dealing with the excessive noise and incredible heat production in the summertime.

Because I was skeptical, I didn't use bitcoin for my purchase. I used a credit card. I knew if I had a problem, I could get my money back. Or at least I had hoped.

Everything was great for 5 months or so. I was getting monthly payouts. I was happy.

And then the Shitcoins started to blow up in May and June of 2021. It turns out that VBit was leveraged and trying to earn yield, with customer's funds, at Celsius or another entity that blew up.

But no one knew this for months. All payouts stopped. Zero communication. The company CTO left. The CEO was unable to be found. And then the company changed from names from Vbit to Advanced Mining. 🧐

Well, that was enough for me. I contacted my credit card company and was able to get $9,000 back. Advanced Mining settled with me, saying that I had made $3,000 worth of BTC withdrawals and they didn't need to reimburse me for that. I was was happy with that outcome and wanted this over and done with.

I found a couple Advanced Mining support groups on Reddit and Telegram where so many regular people, that weren't Bitcoiners in the same capacity as me, were completely rugged.

Advanced Mining has since been investigated by the SEC and sued in several states. I don't know what's been going on with them over the past year and a half. I stopped paying attention to them once I was out and happy.

My entire point here is that if it's not your physical device or your hash power, there's a major risk. Please be careful out there.