No, but I've been buying more drinks in Lightning lately

oh hang on, I have another one in 5 words:

savings, real estate, only better.

better real estate

Bitcoin is used by criminals who are bored with the safety of physical cash and prefer taking the risk of leaving permanent tracks on a public blockchain, giving plenty of hints to help investigators find them sooner or later.

MorningBrew showing more details of the system used by Bathhouse spa in New York to heat up their water pools.

https://twitter.com/MorningBrew/status/1736862534265688369

Lyn Alden: "fees aren't expensive because there are frogs on the timechain; fees are still cheap because relatively few people are using bitcoin to send and store money compared to the total addressable market that could be doing so."

hang on, who said that and who is this guy on the picture?

that's a good quote

Another feel-good classic to watch over Christmas 🍿

Another good synthetic quote that summarises the current situation:

"If I were to describe in one paragraph why money has been broken around the world for so long while almost everything else has improved substantially (energy abundance, technology abundance, and so forth), it’s due to this gap between transaction and settlement speeds that the telecommunication era created.

For a century and a half, the world has been stuck in a local maximum that has required and incentivized ever more complex forms of centralized abstraction to bridge that gap.

The international gold standard worked for several decades during peacetime but was inherently flawed from the start due to how many claims it enabled to exist on such a small monetary base of actual gold, and it failed its first test as soon as war broke out between major powers in Europe.

The Bretton Woods system was even more flawed due to even greater levels of abstraction and managed to fail in less than a decade and a half after full implementation.

The modern system of 160 different ever-devaluing fiat currencies loosely tied to one world reserve fiat currency is highly flawed due to having no inherent grounding in scarcity."

Lyn Alden, Broken Money

Anxiety and ambiguity are not even that bad

Collecting some quotes from Broken Money (Lyn Alden), which I keep reading at night.

"A user typically wants to hold money that appreciates in value, that is easy to hold and pay with, that is private, and that is difficult or impossible to freeze or confiscate.

A modern currency issuer, in contrast, generally wants to issue money that smooths out near-term volatility, that pulls demand from the future into the present, that is easy to surveil, that can be frozen or confiscated by authorities easily, and that gives the issuer a lot of flexibility to spend money even at times when nobody wants to finance them"

Gridless in Malawi

https://twitter.com/GridlessCompute/status/1731960374449115547

The first form of savings accessible to anyone on the planet without any barrier of entry. And much safer in terms of secured storage.

From 1 EUR a month to any amount you can afford.

No KYC needed. No pre-requisite. No need to show a salary payslip, utility bill or a passport.

https://x.com/AmmousMD/status/1725585788895728125?s=20

Latest update on mining in Virunga by Sebastien Gouspillou at Adopting Bitcoin 2023

https://www.youtube.com/live/i7VERpwwTPY?si=JikPBhyDlbTyJavy&t=17345

Timestamp 4:49'00''

Latest update on mining in Virunga by Sebastien Gouspillou at Adopting Bitcoin 2023

https://www.youtube.com/live/i7VERpwwTPY?si=JikPBhyDlbTyJavy&t=17345

Timestamp 4:49'00''

“Bitcoin mining is the only economic incentive on the planet to reduce your energy waste and reduce your emissions that is not funded by government subsidies."

Benjamin Gagnon (Bitfarms)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=927&v=3KhsezFehlM&feature=youtu.be

A good synthesis of the current macro-economic situation by Mark Moss

https://youtu.be/s8i6HIeAUGA?si=zY7laEQmBzIrNGmt

the idea that the fiat era is a short blip in human history (<100y) in-between two phases of sound money:

- one based roughly on gold (about 5000y)

- one based on bitcoin (5000 more years?)

https://www.youtube.com/live/SFV0hP28SLs?si=vxNLyGj3GtXvPoBy&t=9544

Gives perspective:

1. expresses realisation that the monetary system in which we live is not normal, it’s just very weird and experimental

2. does not assume that humanity is about to self-destroy, which is for some reason what we all have in the back of our mind. it’s rare we project ourselves in the future in terms of thousands of years. refreshingly optimistic.

For the youtube link, jump to timestamp 3:48:51

https://www.youtube.com/live/SFV0hP28SLs?si=AmWVyUtqI5t83pFM&t=13731