I use amethyst myself.
https://youtube.com/shorts/aNbzjwfpIfU
"If snakes had lips"
Assuming unicorn physiology is similar to typical ruminants, measuring unicorn farts would be a lot more objective...
“The Office for Budget Responsibility calculates that a low-skilled migrant by the age of 80 will, on average, have cost the taxpayer £582,000 and low-wage migration in general will end up producing a net fiscal cost running into the tens of billions.”
Nice to see more coverage from mainstream media that acknowledges that low skilled immigration does not contribute to the economy. The idea that it'll fix declining birthrates is a blatant lie.
Split three ways it's 4 months minimum wage for, say, two weeks of work. That's pretty attractive for someone who thinks they can figure out a way to do it more times.
That's probably why the ransom was set so low: pick a number where it's easier to just pay that resist. Unfortunately for them, the victim chose to resist. A lot of people wouldn't be brave enough to do that.
It'd be good to give the victim a reward for their bravery and execute all three assailants.
“Rare footage of a Ukrainian S-300V long range SAM system engaging a Russian target with a massive 9M83 missile.”
https://video.nostr.build/6c153985e44e9babb0efa9c2a3e863701519cd67fd859c680fd99957d00923d8.mp4
The cameraman never dies.
https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1888567381116502100?s=19
Or they're just poor, worthless, scumbags to whom 25,000£ is a lot of money.
We're a lot richer than the average low life...
Yup. I stayed with a friend for a few days in a suburb nearish Johannesburg. His entire neighborhood was pretty much all off grid. We only noticed the (daily) power outages by the street lights going out.
You are welcome to join us for nostr:npub1p0xmesqhftf7ga2v2hzdzz44ua059e70z7d9htur240p24y3a5xsn0deeh Jan 30 -31 2026
If someone can pay my expenses like last time I'd be glad to attend again and give a talk and/or panel.
Pro-tip: go to South Africa while you still can. I visited a year ago for two weeks or so.
Beautiful landscape. But it's obvious that the place is collapsing due to the mismanagement of their black led government.
It's absolutely mind boggling that big cities like Cape Town and Johannesburg have been experiencing constant load shedding blackouts for years. South Africa is more than rich enough to keep the lights on.
Hell, _Urkraine_ does a better job of keeping the lights on in the middle of a brutal war, in the face of constant Russia attacks on the power grid, and they have a _lower_ GDP/capita than South Africa!
Apartheid is coming back, and Trump is taking action:
“In shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights, the Republic of South Africa (South Africa) recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 (Act), to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.”
It'll be darkly hilarious if this leads to sanctions...
I would have tried it in Canada a few years ago; also possible they had KYC and removed it, or I'm just remembering something else entirely.
Does it still have AML/KYC nonsense? IIRC I tried buying from it once and couldn't get past the KYC screen.
Strict AML & KYC compliance... Not a good sign...
"an un-elected secret group"
Yeah, that's how government works... You vote for the bosses and then they hire people to get stuff done.
Bitcoin Core nodes don't. But it's likely that people are rebroadcasting anyway.
To be clear, there is (currently) no such thing as transaction expiration. While individual mempools will drop transactions, anyone can re-broadcast them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42881367
It's absolutely hilarious how all these Hacker News commenters are going on and on about time-stamping, whining about how roughtime hasn't caught on, and how much they need time stamps. Only one person mentions OpenTimestamps, and they've gotten zero upvotes.
Bitcoin Derangement Syndrome.
Google and Wikipedia still are saying Bitcoin is one of the official currencies of El Salvador... For now.
I have 100k sats in my cashu wallet. I'm not so worried about that getting stolen that I need a complex federation.
It's absolutely lol that Canada's politicians would rather have 25% tarrifs rather than just secure our borders.
...and tarrifs on China are long overdue. We should have never allowed so much trade to be done with such an unfriendly country.
Guess what made it to YouTube Music...
Monday edition of *Car privacy is an absolute nightmare*:
Subaru's employee portal holds a year's worth of location data for all internet-connected cars. 
We know this because it was vulnerable (now fixed). You could pull a year's worth of driving just with a license plate.
Props to Sam Curry & Shubham Shah for exposing it. Pic is a years' worth of Sam's mom's #Subaru locations.
I seriously doubt any owner has a clear idea that this data is being collected on them.
But the same thing is replicated for almost every car mfr (see the #Mozilla foundation report on car privacy link)
Literally no car owner has asked for their whip to be turned into a surveillance portal.
And yet..
Car companies feel basically no pressure to do right by customers, but experience a lot of incentives to mine their movements for money.
Sidenote: same (now closed) vulnerability also enabled remote unlocks & starts and a bunch of other highly undesirable things.
Reading list:
The Subaru research: https://samcurry.net/hacking-subaru
News report on it: https://www.wired.com/story/subaru-location-tracking-vulnerabilities/
Mozilla Foundation's key investigation into car privacy: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/
The engineers and managers responsible for this should spend the rest of their lives in prison, or be executed.
We do not want people willing to do this in society. It's obviously reckless and evil.
Quite likely this would mean the end of Subaru as a functioning company – good chance that knowledge and involvement of this goes all the way to the C-level management. That's fine. Fuck them.
Saudi Arabia is believed to have about 3% of world oil demand in spare capacity that can be rapidly activated. UAE is another ~1%, and Iraq and Kuwait together another 1%. That alone would replace half of Russia's entire production. Which is exactly why convincing Saudi Arabia to produce more oil could do significant harm to Russia.
Russia disappearing tomorrow wouldn't be a big deal.
Anyway, if you're actually worried about that, you should have been preparing for it years ago. It was obvious to anyone with a brain that Ukraine can defeat Russia, and that Russian oil and gas production is highly vulnerable.
This is just one of dozens of videos of Russian oil infrastructure getting blown up that has come out in the past month:
https://video.nostr.build/ef1e4374383a47d83f18ef2a105bfcbbccea987dfd75297e87760c6f1829eaca.mp4
Sites all over Russia are getting successfully hit by Ukrainian drones.
Russia produces ~10% of world oil. That's not very significant.
Indeed, one possible way this war is ended is simply by Trump convincing the Saudis to pump more to push prices below the level at which Russian oil is profitable to export.
One of Russia's largest oil refineries.
It's not hard to stop Russia. Blow up their economic infrastructure, and (ideally) kill the staff working at these plants, and their economy will collapse and the killing will stop.
War is expensive. Russia can't fight without a profitable economy.
Is this a similar concept to phantom channels that nostr:npub19tcpurtt6xulhw0r6sc404j9jraj0h8me2lzs7z2tqewz7l0hpas59nlea uses for Ghost Addresses?
Yes and no. The mechanism I'm proposing to take advantage of it similar. The the reason why I think it's useful has nothing to do with Ghost Addresses.
I created the production version of OpenTimestamps in Sept 2016... right after Isis Lovecruft accused Jacob Appelbaum of rape, and after I noticed she had lied about certain details that I had first hand knowledge of.
One of the first things I used OpenTimestamps for was to timestamp all my communications with Lovecruft. I strongly suspect this is one reason why even though it was damning to her false accusations against myself, she never tried to deny them in court.
Ironically, in one of those damning messages Lovecruft had asked me to timestamp something for her with Bitcoin: https://archive.org/download/todd-vs-lovecruft/pond-msgs/2016-05-01.txt