Interesting. I'm using nostr:npub12vkcxr0luzwp8e673v29eqjhrr7p9vqq8asav85swaepclllj09sylpugg on web, and also using Proton VPN, and when I have the VPN enabled, all of my nodes fail to connect. I have Proton on my mobile device and it doesn't stop things from connecting, but on the web app they're all red until I turn the VPN off, then I can see them connecting one at a time.

Many of my current following are crowing about their Bluesky profiles. I'll just build a new network among people who I can get along with better. When Bluesky collapses in a heap of government censorship, I'll still be here waiting for them.

Insurance is a government sponsored protection racket. Homeowners Insurance, Car Insurance, Health Insurance, all of it.

You are required, by law, to give money to a corporation that puts the capital into low yield accounts and then does everything in their power to prevent having to give it back to you.

Why? Because large expenses for major disasters, wrecks, illness or injury take too much capital for the vast majority of people to pay, so our corporate owned government passed the legislation written of, by and for those corporations and shoved us all into orbit around a black hole for our "protection".

It will NOT be easy to dig our way out of this hole. This is going to be rough on individuals, families, communities and governments. But dig out of it we must.

First step, stop saving capital in a form of money that steals value from you every hour of every day of every month of every year. Get out of Fiat.

Second step, put that capital into a form of money that grows in purchasing power over time. Don't be afraid of deflation, it's just the global economy coming back from insanity, coming back from the edge of a cliff, coming back from the event horizon of a black hole. Buy what you need, pay your expenses for the life you want to live, enjoy life without worrying about whether you have enough. You will.

I'm going to assume that nostr:npub1ex7mdykw786qxvmtuls208uyxmn0hse95rfwsarvfde5yg6wy7jq6qvyt9 is also reaching out to business that are getting some of these payments to help them set up to receive Bitcoin directly instead of going through the USD at all.

For anyone who is wondering where the top is to the current Bitcoin run, I have three words for you.

HA, HA, HA.

I just thought of something. If Americans bought and held Bitcoin, the US Government wouldn't have to.

Nah, it will never work...

Grok is interesting.

Was this on a test node, or was this done from a different account? I'm not seeing this note on your feed.

I love the demo, just wondering if it is live or if it's memorex.

How might we apply Nostr's Alexandria to the US Patent and Trademark Office records? Or the European Patent Office, Japanese Patent Office, Korean Intellectual Property office, National Intellectual Property Administration, etc?

Thanks for the invitation to your mining system, but I'm not interested and I honestly consider it to be spam. Please don't reach out at random to people on Nostr with spam schemes like that. All it takes is one person posting a comment on one of your posts that can never be deleted, and everyone will be able to see what you are doing.

Good luck!

Bitcoin is the ultimate manifestation of Capital.

Nostr is the ultimate manifestation of Trust.

There are two other fundamental resources of civilization that we need to build tools for. Information and Innovation.

Information could be done with a system like IPFS, where files are stored as hashes that cannot be changed, only built upon.

Innovation could be done with a system like Git built upon a secure information storage and communication system like Nostr.

Capital, Trust, Information and Innovation. These four resources work together to link and grow a civilization beyond what physical laws and energy can do, and they only exist when neural networks grow to a level of complexity that we have seen develop over the last 10,000 years. It's time to actually build a civilization worthy of passing on to our children so that they can expand to and explore the stars.

One of the biggest things that I've realized over the last few months is that the inflation rate that is presented to us is an incomplete picture. CPI is only a list of very specific products and services that the government finds easy to watch so they can tell us how fast prices are going up. But it's a very small list, and it gives no REASON why the prices go up, only that they are. So when I found Bitcoin, and really started studying it, I realized what I had been missing.

The US Federal Deficit in 2023 was 1.7 Trillion.

The US GDP in 2023 was 27.3 Trillion.

The Deficit to GDP Ratio in 2023 was 6.22. This means that the deficit was 6.22% of GDP. Our government created that amount of money through the sale of bonds issued to pension funds, mutual funds, retail portfolios, institutional portfolios, exchange traded funds, Japan, China, the UK, Luxembourg, Canada, etc. It increased the supply of US Dollars in the world, thus reducing the purchasing power of each and every dollar denominated Bond, Bill, and Note by that 1.7 Trillion. And this happens each and every year, some years worse than others.

The US National Debt in December 2023 was 33.1 Trillion. So the deficit to debt ratio is 5.13%. If the US National Debt is considered the total sum of all "money" in the market, then the real inflation rate in 2023 was 5.13%. Each and Every Year.

We can't talk about what we want to do with money until we get a handle on our money. Because everything that we do that costs more than we bring in is devaluating the money that all of us use each and every day. Any raise in wages less than 5.13% in 2023 did not keep up with the loss of purchasing power. Prices are increasing faster than our wages have been growing since 1971, and THIS IS WHY.

Unless and until we balance the budget, stop issuing new debt, pay OFF the national debt and start building a collection of assets at the US Federal government level that generate the wealth necessary to pay our government expenses without taxes, this will continue to get worse and worse and worse.

We could start to fix this today. Congress won't even have this conversation. The Banks will destroy any high level political leader who moves in this direction. Why? Because shifting from debt to wealth DESTROYS THE BANKS. It makes them unnecessary, something for the history books. The entire financial sector disappears, because all of those credit card fees, bank fees, financial investment fees, they ALL GO AWAY.

The money system we have now is based on a Fiat Standard, where "money" is a story that we tell each other and the monetary foundation is the debt that we owe to each other. That standard for our monetary foundation came fully into effect in 1971, although it had been growing in strength for the entire history of the US.

The US Treasury does not create the US Dollar. They outsourced that power to the Federal Reserve in 1913. The only times that the US Treasury issued currency directly that I'm aware of were in 1861 when Lincoln issued Greenbacks without any backing to help finance the Civil War and take the creation of currency away from International Bankers (which was needed because the US did not have a Central Bank between 1836 and 1913), and in 1963 when Executive Order 11110 was issued by JFK, directing the Secretary of the Treasury to issue silver certificates backed by the silver reserves. Both of these men were killed, likely because of these attempts to wrest control of our currency away from the banks.

If our currency is exclusively based on debts, then "paying off" the debt would erase all currency from circulation. But that is not the way it works. How it is taught is from the perspective that all money is a creation of the state, and therefore all holders of money are 'beholden' to the state. That is the source of all of our understanding of money in the modern economy, and it is that understanding that is leading us off a cliff into an extinction event.

There is no savings account maintained by the US Government. Since we stopped using gold to back our currency in 1971, the gold we have is an asset that the treasury keeps on hand and on the books, but it doesn't do anything. We're not buying more, and we're not selling it. We're not doing anything with it, it's just an asset that does nothing for us. And every dollar that goes through the federal government is held in checking accounts, simple accounting books because that's all fiat is, an number on an accounting book. It's not real capital, it's just a story. And throughout most of the history of fiat going back to Ancient Rome, that story has been a lie.

If the US Federal Government had paid our debts from the Revolutionary War in gold, we would have run out of gold. That's why Alexander Hamilton came up with the idea of securitizing the debt and turning it into an asset that could be held by the foreign countries that we owed, so we wouldn't actually have to pay them all immediately, we could pay them off over time, plus a little interest. The interest paid on the bonds was the main selling point.

But it was just a story. It was a way of cheating debt, by not paying it off and by having no intention EVER to pay it off. Andrew Jackson saw this for what it was, and ended it in 1836. He paid off the debt entirely and required all US Federal Agencies to only accept Gold or Silver for land being bought in the West, which brought in a decent income for the government in addition to the import tariffs. And when the California and Alaska Gold Rushes happened, it boosted our vaults with a lot of new gold. But the cost for doing this was very high. Banks in different parts of the country started issuing their own forms of currency, backed by whatever gold they had in their vaults. There were some banks that kept the ratio of gold to currency at 1:1, but others that used fractional reserve banking to boost the currency they issued beyond their vault balance. This resulted in some forms of that currency to be worth more than others, and because we had no central bank to maintain standards and oversight, it caused crash after crash, bank run after bank run.

As long as we see money in terms of this story, that is a promise of money and future money that may or may not come from taxes, currency equals debt and we are beholden to it and the holders of it.

We don't want to just turn the wheel, we must break the wheel.

There is a different way of seeing money, where instead of being based on debt it is based on wealth. In the ancient days, if you did not have the gold or silver to pay for something, you had to go without until you earned it. Debts existed, but for a very limited amount of time and the interest rates were high enough that the goal was to pay them off as quickly as possible. We didn't want to hold debt because when the debt collectors came, they would take everything we had or do us harm if they could not find what we owed.

If we changed how we look at capital, away from debt and looking at wealth, we now have the means to really change things. It would require balancing the budget, each and every year. It would actually require pulling in a small surplus in order to accumulate additional reserve assets that generate revenue streams without taxes. It would require changing how we think about currency, store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account.

Bitcoin can do all of this. Today. Stablecoins built on top of Bitcon Layer 2 systems can do this. Today. We could balance the budget, stop issuing new bonds, pay off the existing bonds, and build a collection of assets that generate the revenue stream that our federal, state and municipal governments need for operations without taxes. We could do that today. It would just take people learning about what it would mean and for government institutions to make the transition.

On a Sol-Earth L5 Orbital Station.

Sir, this is a Wendys...

This is what Bitcoin and Nostr are doing.

Could you tap into the IPFS network for distributed cloud storage?

Similar to what IPFS can do. I've always wished that we could tap into that.

Start with farmers markets!