hope so - question if you had 15k - buy mstr or smash buy btc?

Yup, western governments are too large, and are too tempting for large groups to form in an attempt to wield its emence power. Small government, decentralized governance is the solution.

ETFs and third party custodians are Bitcoin scaling solutions in the same way that a bullet to your head is a solution to all your problems.

Sometimes tradfi people tell me that bitcoin is "captured" now that there are ETFs and such.

When that happens, I usually tell them to give me a lightning address and I'll send them some anon sats. None of them has ever taken me up on that offer. I gave this dude an opportunity for 1,234,567 sats or like $700 and he went dark.

I don't think they know how to use wallets. They are only think-bois.

Market's gotta dump so that Saylor's next $2B buy acquires as many coins as possible.

Japan and Korean stock markets hitting circuit breakers. Bitcoin tapping below $54k.

Basically it’s goblin-land in terms of western liquidity on a Sunday night as eastern stuff blows up.

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Bullshit.

The mere fact that they are calling it “the right-wing opposition” and name-dropping tenuous links to CIA tells you all you need to know.

Wikileaks reeks of Wikipedia-levels of corruption.

Everyone here is probably within two-degrees of separation from some CIA/NSA interest and could get dismissed like this easily.

nostr:note13002pgtl5f0qrytvada8ax667gfgursja8tzmmyk4s74rvajdc2smz8hrc

Bullshit.

The mere fact that they are calling it “the right-wing opposition” and name-dropping tenuous links to CIA tells you all you need to know.

Wikileaks reeks of Wikipedia-levels of corruption.

Everyone here is probably within two-degrees of separation from some CIA/NSA interest and could get dismissed like this easily.

nostr:note13002pgtl5f0qrytvada8ax667gfgursja8tzmmyk4s74rvajdc2smz8hrc

You tolerate other people ten times more if you know ahead of time that you have a shared principal with them. You'll disagree around the margins but realize you're basically on the same page.

Back in like the 1950s USA, people felt that sense with their neighbors, church, and even government. They might disagree on things, and there were some shitty downsides to that (anyone not in the majority) but they were like, flag-waiving Americans. So a question is how to recreate that, and more broadly than it once was.

And ironically, as shitty as the authoritarian economic and legal situation is in many ways, people in Egypt today feel that way today. There's a substantial sense of unity or shared ideals, aside from a small percent of extremist outliers. That's true for many developing places.

One of the major strengths of the "bitcoin community" is this set of shared identity. Bitcoiners will loudly argue with each other, but they know they have at least one foundational shared agreement. That's healthy.

There were times, at like conference side-parties, where I noticed I was standing in a friendly discussion circle with like an anarcho-capialist to the literal right of me, a progressive to the literal left of me, a human rights advocate from an authoritarian state in front of me, a billionaire capitalist with pragmatic politics also in front of me, and us standing in a circle happily talking and basically friends. It's because we have at least one shared major principle that brings us there. A unifying factor for which, as we enter discussions for which we might disagree, we know we can build common ground upon.

As certain countries get hollowed out, and as neighborhoods become more remote and distinct, I continue to believe that local in-person bitcoin communities are absolutely profound. Regular meetups help exchange local fiat with bitcoin P2P, help educate people on the latest tech, help bring people from different viewpoints together, etc. Absolutely essential.

it's easy to be cynical, hard to be optimistic

Half of Twitter right now is like:

This is why scaling in layers and pushing privacy up the stack is the correct strategy IMO. There are many improvements that can still be made at the protocol level e.g, wider Payjoin adoption, but most of the MoE privacy advancements should happen above layer 1. Being able to audit the supply trivially and with confidence is paramount to bitcoin’s long term success.

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Trump picked Vance as his VP running mate.

Notably from a financial analyst perspective, Vance disclosed owning bitcoin a few years ago, and has expressed the view that the dollar being the global reserve currency has hollowed out the US industrial base.

by now we're used to logging in to a nostr app and our social graph and data being there

now we'll become used to logging into an app and our money being there too

#nutsack