I use 'tishcoin", because it confuses the algorithms.

I found the original Twitter functionality when I joined Nostr. And honestly the liberal normie community and I parted ways years ago so I have nobody on BlueSky that would listen to anything I say.

I'll stick with Nostr until all of the other networks just become relays in our network. I really think that's coming.

The next step for governments is to start setting up bitcoin mining rigs and then putting the Bitcoin generated into the General Fund to pay for expenses instead of taxes. Any chance of that happening in the next 100 years?

All we can do is Stay Calm and Stack Sats.

What I really want to see from the Bitcoin Financial Industry is an Insurance company that saves the payments from policyholders directly into Bitcoin so we can watch the accounts and KNOW that they are there when we need them.

There is a reason to have custodial accounts for things like Insurance. For property or Life insurance, the holdings can get massive, especially when we're talking about commercial. But if the carriers are not holding the capital in Bitcoin, they are losing money.

nostr:npub1cn4t4cd78nm900qc2hhqte5aa8c9njm6qkfzw95tszufwcwtcnsq7g3vle, any chance of Strike entering the field?

I'll believe it's his account when he shares his npub on X.

There is always ROOM AT THE TOP!

First Price for me was $2,713.16.

Have it pop up with the giant robot from Robocop. "YOU HAVE 90 SECONDS TO COMPLY"

or something.

If a client wants to implement edits, how about "review this post before it goes to the relays. You have 20 seconds to comply."

If the government had more money than it knew what to do with, we wouldn't be running Trillion dollar deficits. Our current monetary foundation is based on debt, because we can always go more into debt tomorrow to pay the debts of today. Until we can't. Bitcoin changes that entire foundation and flips it over. The more debt you have, the weaker you are.

Thomas Paine didn't have as good of an understanding of economics as Alexander Hamilton did, but he did understand politics. The people institute governments in order to manage infrastructure that is beyond the ability of individuals or companies. Governments may have been corrupted over the last 250 years, but that doesn't negate the need for governance systems that function well.

Tariffs don't dictate whether a good or service is available, the intention is to increase the costs of imported goods and services to give domestic labor a chance to compete fairly. They've always been part of a healthy multi-national economic landscape, they've just dropped off the radar of policy makers for so long thanks to the insanity of the WTO that nobody knows how to even talk about them with intelligence, let alone implement something that would actually accomplish what needs to be done.

Tariffs are so far away from the ideals of central planning it's almost funny to see them used in the same paragraph. If we have concerns about a New World Order at the level of the WTO and UN, IMF, and ABC XYZ, then tariffs are the way out of that pit of vipers, not a reason to jump into one.

And this is from someone who considers himself to be a hard left progressive. Take it with a grain of salt.

Which will NOT upload to Nostr no matter what I do, so here's an Imgur link:

https://imgur.com/a/qQzI0um

So every once in a while, the web version freezes. I decided to turn on Chrome logs to see what the holdup was, and was able to capture this.

We need to get away from the advertising model and start using the appreciation model.

In today's language, if just about anyone is speaking of the "far right" they are referring to people positioned to the "right" of wherever they consider themselves to be, whether that is a hard left progressive socialist talking about ... just about anyone else, or a right leaning libertarian freedom loving human who just wants the stupid federal budget to be balanced. Whatever is to the right of the speaker, that's "far right" to them.

Well, if you go back to the source of the "left-right" spectrum in France, 1789, the far right were the legislators who supported keeping the monarchy in place rather than form a true democracy in the aftermath of the Revolution.

In answer to a friend on Facebook who did not understand.

Money/Capital has three main properties. Store of Value, Medium of Exchange and Unit of Account.

Store of Value is easy to understand, being that if we save a certain amount of money, it should maintain purchasing power over 1 year, 10 years or 100 years. Since 2000, the US Dollar has lost nearly half of its purchasing power.

Medium of Exchange is also easy to understand, it's basically whatever form of currency is allowed within a legal jurisdiction. In the US, that is the US Dollar, so all exchanges of any kind, even in-kind trades of one thing or another, need to be priced and valued in US Dollars for reporting and tax purposes.

Unit of Account is a bit more involved, but it's basically how much a type of money or currency is used to price goods and services in the market.

There is a difference between money and currency. The Canadian Dollar is a currency, but it's not money in the United States because most retailers won't accept it directly. The CAD vs USD is too volatile, even though it doesn't move more than a few pennies in either direction over days, weeks or even months.

The US Dollar is actually issued by the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank of the United States, per the law passed in 1913. The Treasury's job is to manage the revenue and pay the expenses of the US Federal Government. But they have outsourced all of the monetary policy aspects to the Fed.

FDIC Insurance protects our accounts in the event of bank failures per bank.

The Federal Reserve has three major mandates from Congress;

1. Maximize employment while maintaining a stable inflation rate.

2. Stable prices for goods and services.

3. Moderate long-term interest rates, basically the intra-bank rates that underpin currency liquidity.

The target inflation rate according to the Fed is around 2%. But if you ask them, they can't tell you where that number comes from, it's just the way it has always been. Some finance minister in New Zealand made a comment a few decades ago, and it just stuck. The truth is that 2% is the average expansion in the circulating quantity of gold from mining operations over the past few hundred years, including the gold rushes.

But ANY inflation, even "modest" amounts like 2% result in a loss of purchasing power over time that for generations has dragged our civilization closer to the edge of a monetary cliff, and that's what we're dealing with today. It's not just in the US, it's every nation in the world because all of them run their monetary systems on a "fiat" standard, basically saying that the currency has value because they SAY it has value, not because it actually does. Remember I said that the purchasing power of the US Dollar has dropped by nearly half just over the last 25 years. The inflation rate described by the Consumer Price Index is only part of the real inflation of the supply of currency in our economy, there are many other domestic and international influences and drivers for that value.

Think about that first property of money, Store of Value. If I put $100 into a bank today, I want it to be able to buy $100 worth of goods and services in 1 year, 10 years, 100 years. That has never been true. And it never will be on a fiat based system where there is nothing backing the strength of the currency or the circulating supply of currency. For any currency, that strength is based ON that circulating supply. And the supply of US Dollars in circulation grows tremendously each and every year that we run Trillion dollar deficits. Our deficit during 2023 was 6.3% of GDP that year. The deficit requires that the money be generated by some mechanism, and that mechanism is the sale of Treasury Bonds, Bills and Notes. Billions of dollars come into the Treasury every day through the sale of these debt instruments, and every one of them requires the Treasury to repay them after a designated period of time, plus interest. The interest that the Federal Reserve is supposed to be keeping down at a reasonable level.

You're right, the money supply is supposed to be the one most easily controlled, and just how well has it been controlled when Congress refuses to even consider any option for balancing the budget and stopping the inevitable avalanche of bills coming due that we can't pay without printing an ENDLESS quantity of new debt for our children to pay off or ignore at their peril.

Getting to Bitcoin.

Who issues it? Nobody. Bitcoin is not "issued", it exists. It is computer code, locked by agreement within the software never to exceed 21 million units, each of which can be sub-divided into 100,000,000 sub-units called Satoshis (sats). The mechanism for releasing "new" Bitcoin into the network is called Proof of Work, which requires that effort or energy be expended in order to keep the entire system honest. Nothing is free, and putting computers to work at a cost is a big reason why the security of the network is absolute. Nobody is going to get into bitcoin mining unless they are willing to put in the work and pay for the energy, because the calculations done by the computers to solve the puzzle of the blockchain take a lot of energy.

Is its value guaranteed? Define value. Bitcoin when used as money only has value in exchange for goods and services, other currencies being some of those services. That's a subjective measure. But whether you are sending/spending 1,000 Bitcoin or 1,000 sats, the network doesn't care, it's all part of the math. What provides value to the network is how much energy is being expended for the miners to do their work, and the utility value of having a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account that cannot be corrupted or influenced by any politician who wants to make or break promises just to get votes.

Bitcoin is highly regulated. It is regulated by the SEC because they think it is a security. They're wrong, but whatever. It is regulated by the CFTC because they think it is a commodity. They're wrong, but whatever. It is regulated by banking laws because in order to buy it you have to spend fiat currency, so every penny is accounted for. It is regulated by the Department of Energy and state/local parallel regulators because the banks of computers absorb raw power and every watt is accounted for.

There are a growing number of communities and countries around the world that are using Bitcoin as Store of Value and Medium of Exchange, because it is not subject to inflation rates of 2%, 20% or 200% like fiat currencies are. One of the fears of monetary policies is "deflation" when prices go down over time instead of up. In theory, this would mean that people would want to hold onto their capital instead of spending it in the market, thus reducing the power of our consumer based economy. I have never understood why that is considered something to be feared. It's not like I will stop eating because I don't want to spend the money. Or buying clothes to wear, or homes to live in or nice things for a high quality of life.

The only reason why Bitcoin is volatile is because it is a pure market priced asset. There is nobody who has the authority to say that a certain amount of Bitcoin or Sats can buy a certain amount of rice, oil or land. It's all up to the market. Is it speculative? I thought so, at first. It looked like a get rich quick scheme, money for nothing and tricks for free. I was wrong. I kept reading and learning, not just about Bitcoin but about the person(s) who created it, and what their reasoning was. Like the message they left in the very first transaction block: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

Do I want to see public resources used to facilitate the strongest representation of Capital that humanity has invented so far? Do I want our government to stop running deficits and end the plague of inflation that has been destroying lives and holding us back for over 100 years? Do I want the Treasury Department to start building on a monetary foundation based on wealth instead of debt?

Yes. Yes I do.

Bitcoin made me question everything I thought I knew about money, our monetary system, our fiscal system, our currency, our past, our present and our future. I did not just toss it away because I became uncomfortable with what I learned, I doubled down and learned even more. And my discomfort didn't come from what was new, but from the discrepancy between what I knew as the potential path we have in the future vs. the future we are likely to have if we DON'T allow everything to change. It won't be a recession, a depression or even a dark age. If we don't get our monetary foundation under control, it will lead to extinction. I'd rather not see that happen in my lifetime, nor any number of lifetimes. We have a galaxy to explore, and it's time we started moving in that direction instead of worrying where our next meal is going to come from.

An edit mechanism that creates a new note that supersedes the original, while leaving that original intact, would be ideal. We all speak thumb.

Cross posting to X seems to be working, but it's hard to judge how many characters we have that will actually transfer over. Could a feature be added that highlights characters beyond the 280 character limit so we know when to stop typing? This would be a rare feature that could be added as an option for those of us who still have X, so it's a low priority.

If you're looking for a social media experience similar to the early days of Twitter, follow the founder of Twitter to Nostr. All social media roads lead to an open source protocol level system that cannot be blocked and cannot be hijacked.

cc: X