To my fellow American nostriches, may we remember what animates us as individuals and unites us as a nation. It neither originates nor emanates from DC. It's where you are.

Happy Independence Day.

Move along folks, nothing to see here………

Valhalla Awaits

It’s a beautiful day to be alive.

I use credit to short the dollar.

To me, it doesn't make sense to hold dollars aside from a little paper money for convinience.

I don't like spending money on cars aside from maintanance and repairs. I don't even like to drive.

According to Einstein, one sat currently "weighs" about a nanogram.

Bitcoin mining energy = 400 TWh per year

Bitcoin mined = 164,250 btc per year

Energy per bitcoin mined = 2.435 GWh per btc

(Conversion: 3.60E+12 Joules per GWh)

Energy per bitcoin mined = 8.77E+12 Joules per btc

Speed of light: 3.00E+08 m/s

(Mass/energy equivalence: E=mc^2)

Mass of one bitcoin: 9.74E-05 kg per btc

(Conversion: 1.00E+08 sats per btc)

Mass of one sat: 9.74E-13 kg per sat

(Conversion: 1.00E+12 nanograms per kg)

Mass of one sat: 9.74E-01 nanograms per sat

I just paid of my wife's van. We bought a used Sienna in 2020 and only had a couple million sata left to pay.

I remember the van was worth a whole coin back then. That's nuts.

Checkmate bible people

I'm reading a history of asymmetric cryptography right now ("Crypto" by Steven Levy), and my mind is being repeatedly blown by the origins, odds, and success of the movement. Everything we're doing with nostr started in the 1970's! And yet we somehow still don't have widely-used, decentralized electronic mail that checks both boxes of the original RSA paper:

> we must ensure that two important properties of the current “paper mail” system are preserved: (a) messages are private, and (b) messages can be signed.

The question that keeps coming to mind is this: what happened between 1996 and 2009? Once individual rights to cryptography was established, did the movement die out? Why did no one build out access to cryptography for the average internet user? Yes, SSL is ubiquitous, but it's still controlled by a cabal of root certificate issuers.

I know there was ongoing work that led to bitcoin, and XMPP is an obvious exception, but even so I am stunned that 50 years after the invention of public key cryptography we still don't have widespread, meaningful adoption. Keys are limited to technical users, and encryption is mediated and undermined by centralized platforms.

For those with some perspective on this history: are we in the midst of a cryptography renaissance? Did bitcoin kick off a resurgence of interest in digital privacy? Or is that just my own bias at play?

You would get inscriptions? 😂