On Antminers part? Hard to believe given historic evidence to the contrary.

GM. Never a dull moment in bitcoin. Antminer playing fuck fuck games again.

Fedimint is the only federated custody project I've ever come across in this space that has moral integrity.

No shitcoining, no pretend L2 bullshit, no "two way peg your Bitcoin" bullshit, and the only free and open one I know that you can actually run yourself instead of trusting THE one and only federation.

Fucking awesome to have them.

@proofofsk8 refuted his argument on Twitter, and it deserves to be seen by more people.

👇

1) nyms gain reputation the same as anyone else, by earning it

2) this argument is so tiring. users custody the ecash tokens. the mint custodies the bitcoin. it's not that complicated

3) writing down 12 words is not hard

4) honest custodians have massive incentive to run ecash

5) ecash does not prevent self-custody, it encourages it

6) FOSS devs *can*, *should*, and *must* work on a variety of projects for this bitcoin thing to work. you don't get to pick what they work on, they pick. improving custodians is massively important. maybe the #1 priority. nostr:note1kh6t0phx2shpnkd2qljrw0lvwunyg478ugtaz5av97lqqpjgjeqspfjhgs

If you have a person with an impairment at your job, please do not spray random things around - their sense of smell might be sensitive.

Mine is, and one of my collegues just sprayed half a bottle of desinfectant around.

Least to say, im dying over here X.X urk...

When you realise that today is yet another bank holiday.... #CorpusChristi who?

I use a different wallet address every single time

I recently learned that legislation has been drafted on Capitol Hill to classify *not re-using Bitcoin addresses* as "mixing"

There are also efforts to force "unhosted wallet providers" to collect user info for taxes

As well as to give power to Treasury to sanction any address (even Americans)

And a whole lot more bad stuff

IMO Coin Center does vital work to fight this and to protect privacy tech

They are a compact team and do a lot with the resources they have

They sue the OFAC and Treasury

They consider the Bank Secrecy Act unconstitutional and act accordingly

I just spent some time with their leadership team, asking questions, and came away impressed, I would strongly suggest a donation today

coincenter.org

To the ppl who say “open source everything”

Have you ever opened sourced something?

Currently debugging code older than me that has 2 other solutions for the same problem 🤡

In the Foundation trilogy, one of the all time great sci fi series, this scrappy start up civilization at the edge of the galaxy, the Foundation, survives the collapse of the galactic empire and the subsequent descent of the galaxy into chaos.

Every chapter covers a different time period in which the Foundation faces an existential threat and is saved at the last minute by a surprise turn of events. It's all been preordained by a new field of science that can predict, with very high accuracy, the flow of human history over vast scales of time and space. But nobody alive knows how it will turn out. So the resolution to each threat comes as a surprise to the characters in the story.

In one chapter the imperial remnants, still dominant over the center of the galaxy, discover this upstart state all the way in the hinterlands and decide to subjugate them. They send an armada with the goal of conquering the Foundation. This fleet has enough military might to utterly destroy the Foundation, so the protagonists are rightfully scared.

They try all kinds of political machinations and fail at every turn. At the end of the chapter the fleet is recalled for political reasons. If the general did manage to conquer the Foundation it would empower him as a direct rival to the emperor. The emporer can't allow this, so he ultimately has the general tried and executed. The Foundation is once again saved from certain destruction, this time by the dysfunctional politics and deadlock of their most powerful antagonist.

I think about this story often. It has a lot of parallels to real life. Pay attention to the divisions and internal disfunction of those supremely powerful entities who would try to crush a promising young upstart. Their failures might just be your greatest successes.

hashwars are coming

nostr:note1kgr73hn28glxzmsk760dak82hk5p2qmvxqmyrwrqyurjp0c95grqksfnsl

Coinbase also sponsored some core devs and other projects like Summer of Bitcoin tbh

But true, Microsoft has at least some usable products like Github

To be fair, conbase lets you buy and withdraw 🌽.

MS made an offer to Chaum in the 90s to have e-cash included on every copy of windows. Imagine if every copy of MS came with something btc related.

Bringing back nuclear? 👀

What is worse, Microsoft or Coinbase?

Ever wonder what it was like working for a Bitcoin company in the early days? Did you know users back then were part crazy, part generous?

I started working at BitInstant late 2012, which allowed people to buy Bitcoin with cash. In the fall of 2013, I joined Blockchain(dot)info (BCI). The early days at BCI is what I want to focus on here.

BCI was the biggest non-custodial web wallet & the most used block explorer. I wore many hats as the first employee, but my main job was handling the support tickets.

My first day at BCI was chaos. I logged into Zendesk and saw THOUSANDS of tickets as old as January 2013. There was one guy, Ben Reeves, doing everything since inception. Support wasn't the highest priority.

After initially feeling overwhelmed, I decided to clean things up. I closed all tickets older than a few weeks, and included a message apologizing for the lack of response. I assured people this would no longer be the norm, and to open a new ticket if their issue was ongoing.

I had free reign over my job, and became obsessed with making sure users received help in a reasonable amount of time. It started as a goal to respond within 24 hours of a new ticket, which turned into 12 hours. Within a few months, the average response time was down to 2-4 hours, only because I had to sleep at some point! 😂

I didn't realize how little I knew about Bitcoin until I had to answer tickets about the Bitcoin network itself. After all, we weren't just a web wallet, but a block explorer! I spent many late nights digging around on BitcoinTalk, trying to learn more, so I could help users with their questions. Learning about Bitcoin back then wasn't impossible, but it wasn't easy.

Many early users were shocked to receive a response to their questions. To hear back so quickly was unheard of. There were many Bitcoin projects back then, but most didn't have dedicated support staff. If you received a response, it would be from the founder or some other developer. These guys didn't have the resources to tackle support, especially in a timely manner.

I quickly learned about the generosity of bitcoiners. Many users requested a btc address from me so they could send a tip for the help provided. Even when I told them it was unnecessary, as I was a paid employee, they insisted on tipping.

Many of these users were nuts. 😂 Here's an example that didn't happen frequently, but it happened:

A user opens a ticket during the time I'm actively watching the queue. I see it come in, respond within minutes with a solution, and he insists on tipping. I'm like, "Bro it's cool, don't sweat it," but this madlad won't leave me alone until he tips me.

I look at my tip jar - 0.5 BTC, which is worth a few hundred USD at the time. WTF, ARE YOU INSANE?! 🤯

Part of this generous attitude was about saying thank you, but I believe a bigger part was about the early proliferation of Bitcoin.

We preach the HODL mentality today, but Bitcoin wouldn't be what it is without the generosity of early adopters. So many bitcoins were given out freely so people could learn about it firsthand.

I believe many of the tips I received were from people who, at one point, also received free btc. It felt wrong to HODL these tips, so I paid it forward. I purchased work related items so I could do my job better. I tipped people on Reddit. I donated towards bitcoin-backed fundraisers, including when Andreas fundraised for Dorian Nakamoto. I did everything I could to keep that spirit of giving alive.

The landscape today has changed, but that spirit of generosity lives on. The best example is zapping on Nostr, where people are tipping each other via LN for posts and comments. It's beautiful to see!

Thank you, early adopters, for your generosity. You're a big part of why Bitcoin is what it is today. 🧡

Be kind, be generous, and be a little crazy. 😄