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CTV+CSFS, Hashpool, Triangle BitDevs

....still fighting this fight

If only there was some easy to implement universal tool to stop or at least slow down the scammers. Why, I'm sure if such a tool existed all communication platforms would immediately jump to adopt it to solve all of these tangential problems! They would have to be insane not to!

Replying to Avatar Keith Mukai

Whew... I've been quiet the last few weeks because I've been BUSY with my other passion project: coaching -- and helping to RUN -- high school boys gymnastics.

Y'all out on social media don't have much visibility into this side of my life. High school gymnastics MADE ME WHO I AM. I love being a coach now and trying to offer a similar experience to a new generation of kids. And this year demanded more of me than ever.

Please read on to understand why I'm so fucking proud of what my small gymnastics community accomplished.

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Last year the state dropped Boys Gymnastics as a high school Varsity sport. So coaches across the state took it upon ourselves to start our own league. I was part of the 9-member Steering Committee that made this season happen.

We spent MONTHS working out our own process for training and certifying our judges, organizing Sectional meets, and running our own STATE MEET.

AND WE SUCCEEDED!!! We ran a full season that concluded this past Saturday with 142 gymnasts from 33 different schools competing in our State Meet!

The meet ran smoothly, the gym was packed (by our standards; this isn't TX football...), and the kids had the high energy, high stakes State Meet they deserved.

I volunteered to create and run the scoring for the meet. Had to write 5000+ lines of code, work out all the coordination logistics, do all the ENDLESS data dumps and filtering along the way to figure out who qualified and how to slot them into the meet, train the workers, brief all the coaches and judges, and -- most importantly -- oversee and troubleshoot the entire process during the meet.

It was STRESSFUL. My code drove our leaderboard displays as well as provided live web-based results. I'd take quick glances up at the display board and pray it wouldn't be showing an http 404 or 500 error.

(pic doesn't do it justice; the leaderboards looked AMAZING!)

The State Meet was in my hands, on my shoulders. If I fucked up, the meet would be a disaster. Thankfully there were NO problems. Coaches were AMAZED at how well everything ran.

We had to figure out EVERY aspect of this meet. Managing who qualifies, who pays for what, selecting officials, how does the host school break even or possibly profit, all the day-of logistics, designing and ordering the trophies and medals, even produce the freakin' meet decorations, signage, and souvenir program!

ENORMOUS amount of work. But at the end of the day, we ran a PHENOMENAL, professional State Meet.

In many ways it was even better than previous years, because the coaches collectively got to make the calls and run it how WE wanted.

ps - all these photos are courtesy of coach Abi Diaz who shot the meet with my camera. We ended up with ~850 RAW images I then had to cull through and process. Yet another monster task!

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In addition to all that, I had OTHER responsibilities in the closing weeks of the season.

COACHING:

Our team fought and scraped our way to earn a TOP TEN berth to the State Meet! We also had 11 individual event qualifiers, the most of any school in the state. I strategize and optimize our routines for our rulebook and I'm the technician in the gym who refines the most subtle / difficult aspects of our key skills. Unfortunately I couldn't be with our team during the meet since I was so busy running the scoring.

JUDGING:

I judged 2 of the 4 Sectionals meets (head high bar judge!) which determine who qualifies to State. Plus a ton of dual meets throughout the season, Varsity invites, and culminating Varsity Conference meets. I'm usually voted by the coaches to be one of the top 12 judges in the state and therefore asked to judge the State Meet, but obviously had to decline this year in order to focus on my other duties.

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ONGOING:

I'm on our Rules Committee which is just starting to gear up to review and revise our rules for next season. And volunteered to remain on the Steering Committee to do it all again in 2025.

Congrats Keith! It is abundantly clear that you invest 100% into your passion projects. Respect. 🤜 🤛

i am a paying customer, take my phone calls damn it!

not a fan of this trend where companies don't put their phone number on their own website so you have to look on google maps instead

doesn't hurt to have a plan b tho 😉

If you can't feel your guts vibrating the bass is too low. I don't make the rules. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So we should just hold back all development because the government might decide to perceive lightning in a slightly more favorable light, maybe, if they're not having a bad day that day?

This is the opposite of cypherpunk. Lightning is obviously transmitting money. It is foolish to pretend otherwise.

The state attacks will continue until the leviathan is exhausted. They don't have a consistent legal framework. The framework itself is the attack vector. They will contort it in any way that suits their agenda. We can't win this fight playing by their rules.

TapAss moves every stablecoin user one step closer to a bitcoin standard. We will coopt the dollar and put it on bitcoin rails. Embrace, extend, extinguish. This is the path to victory.

Sometimes I get questions about various cryptocurrencies. I specialize in bitcoin so I can't give detailed answers but this is my mental framework:

Hard agree on the privacy point. I don't see a path for a heavily regulated onramp to really push on privacy. If we tried to push the envelope we would get shut down faster than you can say wasabi. Nobody wins in this scenario except the state. We need cypherpunks to advance the cause of privacy. Mad props to the mad lads making this a reality. Respect. ✊

As for self-custody, Swan puts a lot of emphasis on pushing people to take custody of their corn. I first became a customer because they were the only game in town with automated withdrawals.

Swan also caters to entire customer segments that are not able to self custody thanks to the regulatory state. Important not to lose sight of the reality on the ground. Many institutional customers are required to use regulated custodians. IRAs exist in a legal gray area; Swan chose the conservative path of custodial IRAs to avoid this legal risk. Other companies chose a different path. Again, I am happy that bitcoiners are pursuing all strategies. It makes the whole movement more resilient and more likely to succeed.

Bit of a reach there. Fortress is a different company from Prime with the same founder. Both companies partnered with Swan. It's not a deep market. There are not many choices for custodian integrations. The biggest issue is finding a custodian that can scale the seperate trust account for each customer model that swan uses. This model provides legal protection for customer funds in the event of custodian bankruptcy. Nobody else does this AFAIK.

BTW swan now supports multiple custodians. We are working to build a nice integration layer to bring on even more. Also, I can't say much about it but Swan is working on a very smart long play here. We're hard at work setting up a bitcoin only custodian.

I think your distaste for swan is way overblown. It's trendy to hate on swan but we are pursuing a unique strategy. Time will tell what strategy is most appropriate or who executes better but I, for one, am very glad to have multiple teams of bitcoiners trying all different approaches to solve the same problem.

It's easy to criticize builders. Much harder to build something from nothing. Ask yourself this: are you a net contributor or a net detractor to the cause of freedom technology?

Bankrupted and reborn? You got a citation for that?

Swan mining is not cloud mining. It is not on offer for retail. These are business deals between corporations with oversight and accountability.

You should be more careful to separate the concept of cloud mining from the scummy companies that have ruined this term in the minds of the public. I think we will need to build a robust market for hashrate in order to solve miner decentralization. Guess what that's called? Not cloud mining lol that phrase has been burned. The idea is sound. Execution has so far been extremely poor.

Same. I think it has to do with VC funding. As always, follow the money.

Replying to Avatar NDN

Biking

Ah, too bad, sounds like it would have been an epic disc golf injury. I've been there. Stay on those orthopedic exercises to make sure you recover as much as possible. 💪