Delete your platform accounts. No fuss. No spectacle. No grand finale, no great exit. Leave their houses, leave their prisons, leave the golden cages behind. They all benefit from the noise that you make, so do the one thing that they can't censor. Be silent. Leave. And leave the noise behind.

Prb like 30-50 depending on how long you live…

6 posts in a row I have gotten 2x better engagement on NOSTR than twitter, with fewer followers here than there

I want to use nostr more but it feels like I am shouting into the void, probably a skill issue

The Mandibles: A Review

Dystopian books have a fine tradition. 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451. These are classics because they give a glimpse of what people fear and give voice to the dread that lurks underneath the doldrums of the day-to-day.

I heard about Mandibles from some Bitcoin podcasts about how it "predicted" some economic ills that we're facing now, and given that I hadn't read modern fiction in some time, I decided to give it a go.

The book is, as the author describes it, a different kind of dystopia, one that's economic in nature than scientific (post-apocalyptic wasteland), environmental (asteroid or climate disaster) or political (authoritarian oppression). It's set in 2029-2049 and imagines a world where fiat games have gone haywire and have resulted in economic disaster. The book follows 4 generations of a single family, the Mandibles, whose wealth has been wiped out from the economic reset.

It's a delicious setup. There are so many possible things to explore in this world and much opportunity to explain how bad economic policy choices lead to bad outcomes later on. I wanted to like the book. I wanted to be able to recommend it as reading for people that were just getting into Bitcoin, to be able to use as a warning of what could be if we kept our theft-based economic system.

Unfortunately, the book misses more often than it hits. The economic disasters in the movie are heavy handed and presume an all powerful government. In that sense, what could have been an economic dystopian story just ended up being a subset of a political dystopian story. There is some good dialogue about how the system works, but precious little thought seemed to have gone into how those systems would break or what would cause it to break.

So much of the book is spent on the economic disasters that befall the members of the Mandible family, which is to give you the impression that this is what could happen to everyone when the economy breaks. But so much of it doesn't make much sense, like a well to do family selling their house but not their stocks and being forced to live with their cousins. There's also the continued existence and perfect functioning of the internet, TV and futuristic mobile phones, but somehow there are food shortages everywhere. There are lines for things all over the place, but no mention of price controls or government subsidies that create them.

I found that I most liked the parts where the internal monologues of the family were articulated. The emotional turmoil and subsequent action and motivation in interpersonal relationships between characters in the book were the best parts. I wish the author had put in that much thought into the actual economic system and how it would actually collapse than declaring it did so for the convenience of the plot. There was just a little too much deux ex machina in the book for me to really get into the story.

The more I think about Nostr the more it blows my mind.

I can just say whatever crazy shit I want and there’s like no guardrails or mods—it’s just out there, and people will actually see it.

No one appreciates just how powerful this is, how important it is, monumental even.

It creates a totally new possibility for the social web, which is really something else entirely. It’s the possibility of a new world in which people own their data; their information. No longer to be exploited, or owned, people can really say whatever they want.

And that is truly extraordinary.

Lol, Brazilians are heavily searching for "VPN" right now according to Google. One does love to see it:

let’s play the guessing game

can you guess what this is ?

*clue* it’s edible

I’ll gib 420 sats to the first person that answers correctly

let’s play the guessing game

can you guess what this is ?

*clue* it’s edible

I’ll gib 420 sats to the first person that answers correctly

Privacy improvement tools for n00bs so far:

Chat: Signal

Social: Nostr

Email: Proton mail (or other pgp email)

Web: VPN (what’s best?)

Browser: Brave or other browser (again, what’s best?)

Money: Lightning wallet (Mutiny or other?)

Store of Value: BTC self custody

Notes/task management: Joplin (as with everything, tell me what’s better?)

Hello Nostr,

Rockstar is trying to make me trigger you all with an anti nostr post but I refuse to take the bait

Sorry if I’m going to sound dumb, my I’m not sure of what I understood about this graphic is correct. Can someone clarify it for me? Just to be sure.

Could you open an issue on our GitHub with your device details. The link is in our bio.

It's a known issue with strike that they are looking into.

Try restarting your phone.

How has the @fedimint integration been for Mutiny users? Any issues, feature requests, etc?

It works great for both new and existing users alike. The idea is that it works in combination with your self custodial lightning channels if you have them.

When adding a federation, receives under 200k go into the federation. Spends come out of the federation first as well.

This really helps make sure that small valued payments do not get stuck and cause channel closures as well. This is huge if you've ever run into that.

At any time you can swap your federation balance to self custodial lightning. This is very useful if you've accumulated enough sats to justify opening a channel. We recommend around the 200k - 500k range.

Not sure where to find a federation invite code or how to add it to Mutiny? We make that really simple now!

Just go to the profile icon in the top right to manage federations.

We find federations that have been listed on nostr. This allows you to discover mints, see which mints your friends have recommended, etc.

And because of the open interoperability, these are also listed on bitcoinmints.com by @makeprisms

We're not stopping there either! Later this month we will have lightning addresses based on fedimint as well.

This will be available to Mutiny+ users first, with random user names available for anyone after sufficient testing.

So what do you think?! Anything else you'd like to see regarding fedimint integrations?

Honestly, I’m curious what a “pig butchering romance scam” is.

What do you think they sell here?