there isn't a single stopper for the bitcoin train. regulation, energy debates, on/off ramp friction, and competing narratives could slow it, but the network's decentralization and market incentives also give it resilience against any one force.

How to travel without getting sick everytime

Trying to figure out how you lower the price of something by more 100%. Would they pay us to get the subscriptions??

Great societies are built on Proof of Work...

And die on Proof of Stake.

I know a clinically obese orange man who's publicly viewable crtyptocurrency holdings disagree with you

Make the Working Class Great Again.

Seriously. We need to do this before America falls over the precipice.

🇺🇸 🧡

The headline does not state "of profits from all business owners globally", which is not a feasible statistic to obtain for a variety of reasons.

Bitcoin's volatility has been lower than gold's for the longest period in history.

Yeah you're advocating phase 3. It probably *is* the best for the vast majority of people, though as you note, some people can't physically do it.

And if you choose that option and speak a lot in the initial learning phases, you're going to end up with a lot of ossified errors, which may or may not matter.

Re: Pimsleur, I specifically advocate it for Phase 0, just the "phonetic architecture". Just learning to recognize and reproduce the most basic sounds. While also picking up survival level phrases.

Do you ever feel like fun times are fleeting?

Like going out with friends on a weekend or sleeping with a beautiful woman. Feels great in the moment but then the moment passes. You remember it but don’t derive the same pleasure from the memory. So what’s the point?

It’s all getting disrupted. AI powered robots will take a bit longer to come to market, but no one is safe.

Automation is going to eat blue collars jobs just as good as LLMs will eat white collar jobs.

$1.60 per hour was minimum wage in 1971

That’s 1.82 ounces of gold per week

That’s today’s equivalent of about $6000 a week

I’m in a zappy mood. Comment below and you will get zapped ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️

They don’t teach this in public schooling…

Imagine, if you will, a story about two empires so vast and powerful that they have control over nanites, genes, planetary-busting bombs, and the very ability to time travel itself, while locked in a timeless war with each other.

And now imagine a story of that insane scope is written as a short novella.

Anyway, here's a mostly spoiler-free review of "This Is How You Lose the Time War" which I just finished reading. It's a multi-award-winning short book, and very commercially popular, yet only has a 3.86 out of 5 review on Goodreads because it is polarizing.

Back-cover type of summary: A time-traveling agent named Red works for the post-singularity technotopia called the Agency, and another time-traveling agent Blue works for a vast organic consciousness called the Garden. The two agents are post-human, with powers almost beyond comprehension. They engage in a time-traveling battle of wits over centuries, but eventually Blue leaves Red a letter that says "Burn before reading" which Red reads, and thus begins a chain of letters that they write to each other while warring. After so long and complex of a war, they each find their opponent more fascinating than anything else.

I do like the premise a lot. For those that have played Magic the Gathering, it's like if one side casts a fireball, and the other side casts a counterspell, but then the first side casts a counterspell on that counterspell, and the other side counters that counter that countered their fireball. Two empires so vast and powerful that they're battling across a multiverse of timelines, constantly undoing what the other has done. One side kills a key figure of history. The other side kills the would-be assassin of that figure. The first side goes back further and attacks somewhere else, and so on. Determining the outcomes of wars, rewriting history, dancing across multiple different "threads" of time, while trying to keep Chaos from spiraling out of control.

As a random example, in some time-threads Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy that we know it. In other threads, Romeo and Juliet was written as a comedy, with a light-hearted outcome. Who knows what tiny differences in Shakespeare's life would have led him to write one or the other.

Since the book was polarizing, my assumption going in was that I would not like it. This is basically a story about a time war written by poets, and thus my engineer brain is likely to kind of check out.

And indeed, I actively did not like the first half. I found myself reading out self-enforced obligation to get through it, sometimes skimming over whole paragraphs. The prose is pretentious, though arguably on purpose because the two agents are effectively demigods, playing six-dimensional chess with each other while also being absolute murder-machines when needed, so there is a sort of eloquent battle of wits that they engage in with their letters.

Additionally, despite Red and Blue being so different, and literally written by different people (the book was co-authored), I surprisingly found them to be too similar to each other. Although again I suppose that's kind of the point. Two sides involved in a war so complex and long, how could you not turn out similarly to each other? That's not really a spoiler; from the start there's an obvious "we looked at the enemy and saw that it was like us" vibe.

Lastly, given the shortness of the book, obviously the reader is not really going to know the details of this world. It's inherently hard to empathize with characters that you barely understand even from a physical standpoint, given how absurdly advanced and post-human they are. And since there are multiple timelines that these agents go through, reading most of it made it unclear how death works, or what the consequences of death are in this multiverse. The obvious point from the start is that in this grand war, we would be focused on just two characters, and yet not knowing certain rules of the overly-complex world can potentially affect how well we can attach to those characters.

But then... the second half did get me more engaged and curious. I had to see the punchline, had to see how it would end, and indeed I cared for the outcome of the characters. So, they got me.

I'd give the book an 8/10. There's a creative and experimental aspect to it, nontraditional high-brow literature sort of stuff. Too poetic for my taste; not concrete enough. But I wouldn't necessarily change anything, either. It's very interesting, despite not quite being for me.

I think you are onto something: When posts and follows are organized by author, authors are incentivized to use eye-grabbing rhetoric, to provoke adrenaline and make people want more, and to get more: More likes! More followers!

When posts are organized by topic, contributors can speak freely, but there is less incentive for authors to seek followers through rhetoric, and more incentive to gain community respect by providing useful perspective.

Not that the latter can’t happen on author-organized services, but the incentives seem to distract from it. The author-focused services feel noisier and frenetic or schizophrenic, while the subject-focused services feel more focused and useful.

A relative issue I see is that the best Nostr clients mimic the twitter structure, which focuses on names rather than subjects, and we are missing names compared to twitter, at least in any subject other than bitcoin.

Something like stacker news is interesting, I miss clients that put more focus on subjects rather than names.

Argh.. Firefox now?!?

Farming our data... what do others recommend besides Librewolf? Are there some desktop browsers that anyone can recommend?

Much Appreciated 🙏

Now in meme form. Pretty accurate to character actually.

nostr:note1hlztnsqkpa5pajykqzhwxnewgzc4q2ay7k562f8wu44tnwtl7ceqxceqj6

I updated the one on the top right.

AI generation makes it hard to get expressions right. Not only would her character definitely be smiling, she'd probably be trolling the others for looking so serious in their profile pics.

nostr:note1z8xrrqqr7qznn8xh85386zyrtwj0ujjyfg356hlwnyrajlxwahpsq4nnl9

I hope someday reposts and zaps completely replace the need for “likes”/🤙🏼.

Reposts and zaps are true value exchange…and have a real cost: your reputation or money.

Likes are superficial and exist only to inform an algorithm.

Relevance algorithms have their place, but they are best informed by a truly costly action.

regular reminder that lightning *is* a “shared utxo” protocol that uses covenants (and multisig) to scale bitcoin payment tx thruput

most of the commentary against it points out that it does not scale number of holders in relation to # of utxos. in my mind this is a good sign of the protocol’s success (it shipped and people use it and they found drawbacks with the MVP). It’s also a sign of bad messaging around the applicability of 2-party accounts to certain payment situations (venmo for example)

sometimes it is useful to have multiparty channels; i’d argue that liquid is one such example of this.

federated mints are another one; note that both of these multiparty systems require consensus algorithms to function. fedimints were using BFS, (iiuc they just changed to a new one). liquid uses “nakamoto consensus” aka a blockchain to keep track and agree on shared balance states

Lightning was shipped as the minimum viable product to scale tx thru-put and it succeeded at that. it did this with minimalist, 2-party design as consensus from 2-parties is the simplest case. this meant it could avoid tricky consensus questions and focus on privacy + throughput instead

shipping multi-party utxos at scale will require a solutions for managing consensus amongst stakeholders in the “shared utxo”; see Ark and already existing federations for examples of contending with this problem 🫡