Did pretty good most of December, bought some stuff for the Christmas holiday and got totally bent last night. Fuck sober January, I'm doing sober forever. I'm still feeling it.

This has been the most important and eventful year of my life; and the best, so far..

In order of events:

- Quit my fiat job, had multiple issues with pay and they tried to stiff me out of 6-figures on the way out but I went nuclear and got paid in full

- Relocated from Australia to Vietnam

- Moved everything here that we didn’t sell; including my old dog

- Got married

- Had an amazing honeymoon

- Got in the best shape since my early 20s

- Learned Vietnamese to basic conversational level

- Made new friends, good friends

- Moved to a new house with a pool

- Had our first child

- Read 30+ books

- Put my time and energy into things that matter to me

- First Christmas with wife and baby

#Bitcoin works. It takes time, and I’m bound to have downswings ahead like everyone (12yo dog has tumours so I’ve got that to deal with), but none of this probably happened without it.

Watching Australia go to shit from afar is more bearable. At least I don’t have to deal with the constant stupidity when I walk out the door here.

I just put down the phone and the world around me is actually normal. Walk to the beach with the old dog, get a coffee for <$1, enjoy the Sun, people say hello and are friendly, work at home then go for great dinner with friends - a far cry from what my life was like last year and much more enjoyable.

#MerryChristmas everyone. Here’s hoping you all enjoy the best of life today!

Dads, your kids are watching everything you do, even when you think they’re not paying attention.

They’re watching how you treat their mom. How you handle stress. Whether you keep your promises. How you react when things don’t go your way. Whether you own your mistakes or blame everyone else.

You’re not just providing for them, you’re showing them what a man looks like. What strength looks like. What integrity looks like. They’re learning from you whether the world is safe, whether they matter, whether people can be trusted.

A lot of fathers think their job is mainly to work and provide money. That matters, but it’s not enough. Your presence matters. Your attention matters. The way you listen when they talk about something you don’t care about, that matters.

You don’t have to be perfect. You’ll mess up, and that’s okay. What matters is being there, being consistent, and actually caring about who they’re becoming.

The distance you create now, the conversations you avoid, the times you choose work or your phone over them, that stuff echoes for decades.

Your role is bigger than you think. Show up for them now or they’ll rely on a government that will use you children for profit.

My sister has a whole line of naturopathic products and her marketing is on point. Her name is Kerry and the so product line is called “ApotheKerry”, with awesome artsy hand drawn labels and documented formulation processes. It was part of her horticultural degree program. She used her own ointments on the scar from her knee replacement surgery a month ago and the surgeon told her yesterday that it looks like the scar is a year healed. I told her months ago she really needs to get on Nostr and embrace V4V for Bitcoin. One month progress pic, sorry the first one is a little gruesome. But naturopathy is amazing! I have been raving to the family about nostr:npub1yjdfzv3twyzfqfc8uxp42q9vc79wu08sv0q8xhdeu562fme0wmrsfyshq2 nostr:npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd nostr:npub1uzt238htjzpq39dxmltlx60vxym9fetk9czz6kddq6fhvkf4z3usy9qtrh nostr:npub1zzmxvr9sw49lhzfx236aweurt8h5tmzjw7x3gfsazlgd8j64ql0sexw5wy

nostr:npub1zqdpzty2mshxncqqxy2078qax6mlehsxmpx5095wtxw4tpepkr0s2ce6fj and nostr:npub1krt644z5quu3ac4mz28h8s7dx2f5dsx7rzcehy9y3uzyqeza92zss8kr8e to

#grownostr But I’m just the sound money nutter in the family lol.

How does one choose makeup artist for a wedding?

⚡️🇪🇺 NEW - The digital euro is ready... The ECB says it has completed all the technical work to launch the digital euro.

It now depends on political approval from European lawmakers.

"We have done our job."

"Our ambition is to ensure that in the digital age, there is a currency that is the anchor of financial system stability."

- Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB.

Why would we listen to Indians?

#nostr tribe could you please help me decide for my thumbnail test?

Which one would you click more top or bottom? And why?

Would love to hear your thoughts and thank you in advance 🫂☺️

#asknostr #plebchain

#asknostr

What’s the coolest way to give sats as a present to a no-coiner?fund a wallet and give the words?

ask to install, say WoS, and send?

It is WILD how bad Boomers are at recognizing AI slop…

You can show them a picture of Jesus riding a unicorn and they’ll be like “wow, where was this photo taken??”

The EU already is in the conflict. Has been from day one. Putin wants to take Ukraine so he can take a EU country next.

Ia the machine greasing the skids? Guess we’ll find out.. 👇🏻

According to Tucker Carlson, a congressional member informed him that Trump’s address tonight will include an announcement that “a war is coming.”

In response to Judge Napolitano asking: “Is Trump going to start a war in Venezuela?”

Carlson replied: “I don’t know the answer … here’s what I know so far, which is that members of Congress were briefed yesterday that a war is coming and it’ll be announced in the address to the nation tonight at 9 o’clock by the president…“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A bump of strong thiamine in the morning produces the most epic bowel movement. 💩

#Peatstr

#Terrain

One of the weird ironies of Russia's invasion of #Ukraine is that it was supposedly done to keep #NATO from spreading closer to #Russia, and the first thing that happened is that Sweden and Finland rushed to join.

Russia now has a very long border with NATO.

Just got a notification from X about an update to their privacy policy… Interesting…

“We’ve updated our Terms to explain that in some places, for example, the EU and UK, we may need to remove not only illegal content but also content considered harmful or unsafe under local laws.”

Breathe it. Gets in the air. A few years ago, we all came down sick, nasty sick, this helped tremendously. I swear the bugs stick and fall to the ground drowning, breaking the shells of viruses and they can’t get back up. Must be the garlic. A little fun with some science. I walked back in the house I can smell it. I’m feeling better sinus wise.

Busting out my mini crockpot. Orange, lemon and garlic. Steaming the house. I feel like I’m coming down with something, Sean is sneezing. Gonna use this. It’s worked for me for many years. House smells like garlic, but, well, it’s better than being sick. I’m not devoting time during break to bugs.

That's a step too far for me. Both my grandfathers fought in WW2. Their sacrifice created a stable prosperous land for their progeny. It is now within our grasp to create a stabile prosperous land for all people. We have a moral imperative to do so.

xposting a good long post by nostr:nprofile1qqsfccf03dms7r3l6dwd4s4u2l7waptpu4s9qn4ztj9ealuwqdgjk0spzfmhxue69uhhqatjwpkx2urpvuhx2ucpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgy2sgj2

I share one bearish observation on here and people lose their f-ing minds. They also assume I'm short.

No. I'm just not a shill.

The recent viral piece about how bitcoin is in IPO mode and we all need to relax seemed to me pretty accurate. Bitcoin is distributing and that's good. Bitcoin has won and it's a bit boring now and OG's are taking their billions and buying yachts or gold or AI / quantum stocks, and this is all very normal and expected, so chill.

But that also just felt... empty. It felt like cope.

Like, think about where we were before institutional adoption and Trump victory.

The price was lower, but the narrative was amazing. We--all of us in bitcoin--were in on a profound secret. We were building better money for a better world. The world was either laughing at us or fighting us, but we knew we would eventually win.

After all, nothing stops the train of debt and debasement. Nothing stops the control-freak impulse to censor and surveil us either. And bitcoin wins every time financial and legal authorities abuse their power. (All still true, btw.)

The bitcoin hate, much more common then, actually fueled us. Environmental critics were so off base, so embarrassingly misinformed, that confronting them with facts was actually sporting. We ratio-ed GreenpeaceUSA into oblivion, eventually winning decisively as they handed over "the skull" to David Bailey in Vegas like Cornwallis surrendering to Washington at Yorktown. Good times.

Similarly, the human rights angle was (and is) unknown by a lot of mindless fiat elites who had never reflected on their financial privilege. We won those debates handily too, time and again, as people started to realize what bitcoin is, its potential for empowering billions and disintermediating banks, disempowering chronic debasers and authoritarians.

Vibes were incredibly high.

Then Wall St. stepped in with the ETFs. The water cooler talk about bitcoin changed a bit. Rather than resistance money, it was an uncorrelated asset and a hedge against risk and inflation, but one now available in a nice wrapper that your investment advisor knew how to handle. It wasn't a threat to dollar hegemony. Instead, it worked hand-in-hand with stablecoins to advance the dollar and American interests. Ok. I actually buy that I guess, at least near term. All good, ok?

Price went up. But the bitcoin brand itself again shifted just a bit in its meaning. It became, rather than a people's movement to reform money, more of a new thing for your retirement fund. Gold 2.0. Not a bad thing by any means, but... a different vibe and not quite as sexy.

Next was treasury companies, promising to exploit every financing trick in the book to port debt appetite from dollars into bitcoin. Ok, well again, this was to be expected. Who wants to hold dollars these days? Why shouldn't floundering companies pivot to stacking bitcoin? It worked for Strategy, after all. Bitcoin twitter became stock talk. Not a lot of focus on f-you money, more like f-you levels of wealth from PIPE investments.

Again, nothing wrong with this, but it once again shifted the tightest associations with bitcoin, as an idea. Bitcoin was somehow now a corporate thing, a finance thing. Bitcoin, despite being a financial instrument... didn't use to be a FINANCE THING. Finance bros hated it. It wasn't a CORPORATE THING either. Corporations wouldn't look twice at it. In some ways, it was anti-finance, anti-corporate. Now, it's good that finance bros and corporations are coming around (the vast majority still haven't!) but that's a brand shift, a vibe shift too.

Michael Saylor has been a tremendous advocate for bitcoin, don't get me wrong. But contrast his image--billionaire CEO conquering the fiat world of other billionaire CEOs in a contest of getting richer--with @aantonop, who declared bitcoin "punk rock, not smooth jazz" and promised that bitcoin would "bank the unbanked billions."

These are very different mascots for very different brands.

Next, Trump was elected and promised bitcoin-friendly regs and a strategic bitcoin reserve. This was undoubtedly better for bitcoin than the alternative. No question. David Bailey was ingenious and resourceful in making it happen. But... the vibe shifted again, as ideas of the orange coin and the orange man fused in the collective imagination.

Ok, so at the same time all this winning is happening, privacy-protecting open source development is targeted by the same admin, and bitcoiners don't seem to care about that so much as the number just continuing to go up. I am proud of @btcpolicyorg's work on this, but it's not the central focus of bitcoiners more broadly, or at least that is my impression. Would happily be corrected.

So it's in this context that we observe price hasn't even gone up that much, despite this embrace of bitcoin by the federal government and Wall St. and despite the many brand compromises, each of which pushes us farther from the cypherpunk core.

What is happening on bitcoin twitter these days? Well, our enemies have stopped posting much. Occasionally you get some old crank like Hanke providing us some target practice. But after we crossed $100k, most critics have learned not to make price predictions. The left wing departed twitter altogether for bluer skies. We turned on each other instead to debate, not even a consensus change but relay policy... and if anyone comes into this debate they see nasty infighting and csam speculations. Luke is crapping on the Treasury Secretary of the US, paying homage to bitcoin? Truly unappealing, and I wouldn't want any of my normie friends to visit right now.

We have a drawdown in price after some crab action. No big deal and not nearly what we've been through before, but in absolute terms, a lot of investors are down slightly. And it's now that we're told longer-term holders are selling to the ETFs and treasury companies. And we're told hey, don't worry it's the IPO moment for OGs. Relax, it's ok, they need to cash out, e.g., $9b of bitcoin to provide for their families. Don't worry, it's like the early days of Amazon.

I don't know, man. That is all true, but it is a lousy narrative compared to where we came from even a few short years ago. "Be the exit liquidity for OGs, they deserve it" doesn't hold a candle to "be your own bank."

Something about this felt really empty and depressing. So I tweeted.

To be clear... nothing has changed about bitcoin itself. It is just as much freedom money as ever. Moreso, as we improve privacy and utility. It's still a global, permission less censorship-resistant network anyone in the world can be a part of. It's still a monumental step forward in how we store and transmit value. It is all of the things it ever was. And the future is brighter than ever.

I remain all-in on bitcoin with my capital, my time, and my reputation. But I will also always tell the truth about how I see things, and right now I think we need a better focus and brighter narrative. We need to remember who we are and what bitcoin is. Thanks for reading.

Took my homeschooled son for his basketball physical today. Predictably, the physician immediately pivoted to pushing multiple vaccines. When I declined, he pressed for justification.

My response was direct: “I don’t trust your institution or the regulatory framework governing it.” He launched into rehearsed statistics, the same talking points designed to manufacture consent through appeals to authority rather than genuine informed consent.

I cut through the theater: “He’s my child, not yours.”

The conversation ended there. No coercion, no further attempts at manipulation. Just acceptance of parental authority as it should be

FinCen and the Treasury are expanding the Patriot Act to attack bitcoin self-custody and privacy.

We shouldn't live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator and make things worse for the overwhelming majority of the population.

nostr:naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzq3e0gs8jnmued6f2rp4c6vs07xqvs4vs8zpwt82smcdch4txjvq7qys8wumn8ghj7cnfw33k76twd4shs6tdv9kxjum5wvhx7mnvd9hx2tcpzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qzgw35x2tt5wfjkzum4wfuj66tn94jhsurpdejxjmn8946xsefdwpshgunfda6z6ctrwskhgmedv968gctrdvkky6t5vdhkjm3dwdjkce3dvd6hxar0v3usutskeg

What kind of UX is this?

Best description will be awarded 1000 sats

"Tell me", Lola y Manuel, Flamenco, translation to English

"" Tell me …

If you «lied» ever

and tell me when you did feel ashamed of being a liar.

Tell me, tell me …

Have you ever «hated»

whom you made believe real love, tell me ….

If you feel  in your heart,

the pain of your brothers, tell me, tell me ….

Have you ever «cut» a flower

without your hands trembling, tell me …

Do you really believe in God

as you believe in fire when it  burns you, tell me, tell me ….

is it your dream heaven

or is it the truth on earth, tell me …

To every thing, say yes or not, and then I will know

if you are my dream, tell me, tell me, tell me ….

to everything say yes or not, and then I  will know

what is your creed.

Tell me … ""

⚡️💬 END OF SERVICE - Day 227: Actualities very hard to cover today, but I have no right to complain.

If the truth bothers you, feel free to leave the Flash project. On this account, I've always chosen to show reality, unfiltered. Originally, I was going to cover light subjects like AI and Bitcoin, but very quickly I felt obliged to cover more important subjects that were impossible for me to ignore. My responsibility on Nostr is to keep you informed.

Shocking videos or content that do not contribute anything or that only seek to offend the community will never be published. On the other hand, sensitive documents that illustrate the situation on the ground and serious acts will always be shared. This isn't the first time, and it won't be the last.

I try not to censor reality, even when it's difficult to see. To show these images is also to inform in a neutral way, and to refuse to see them is to cut oneself off from a truth that is often necessary.

For those who find my content disturbing: Believe it or not, my account doesn't cater to your individual needs and preferences.

Good night and thank you all, I'm at peace with everyone.

Unverified but interesting:

At night in Ochakov, Russian special forces landed from several boats and infiltrated the command center. They captured British servicemen who were coordinating the use of British missiles and drones. Among the prisoners were Colonel Edward Blake, an officer of the special psychological operations unit; Lieutenant Colonel Richard Carroll, a representative of the UK Ministry of Defence who actively participated in operations in the Middle East; and an unidentified staff member, presumably an MI6 intelligence officer, present as a cybersecurity advisor.

The Russian special forces operation lasted about 15 minutes.

A few hours after the operation, diplomatic relations between London and Moscow sharply deteriorated. Representatives of the UK Foreign Office contacted the Russian Ministry of Defence with a request to return the British officers "lost" on Ukrainian territory. The official London version: the detained officers were travelling to Ukraine for tourism purposes and accidentally ended up in Ochakov. Presumably, they were interested in the history of the navy and wanted to visit the coast where battles took place during World War II.

However, the detainees were not found with beach towels or cameras, but they did have maps marking strategic sites on Russian territory, plans of Russian air defense, secret instructions for interacting with Ukrainian drone operators, as well as disks with encrypted data and logs of negotiations with the British General Staff. Quite an unusual luggage for tourists.

Russian Defense Minister Belousov allegedly responded to the British that British soldiers are not subject to exchange and that the West will not return them by Red Cross planes. Russia intends to bring them to trial for participating in hostilities against Russia.

Caught a stream from some London cyclist — kinda surprising how few white people you see there these days.