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SovereignLife
e8541da6f0332957cb2a09bf01da12ae3e71cdb2b8c0fb9d766e3314972db059
Into Bitcoin since July 2011. Into Nostr since February 2023. Influenced by the works of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Andrew Galambos - and thought-provoking books including: The Sovereign Individual, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, The Path of Least Resistance, PT - The Perpetual Traveler. Professional drummer in my earlier life, digital nomad in my later life, and jazz lover most my life. We won't achieve meaningful freedom until four key "separations from the state" are done and dusted: Separation of church and state (mostly done), separation of money and state (in progress), separation of communication networks and state (early encouraging signs), separation of education and state (a long way to go).

I've since been informed that such options are client-specific only, that while a post may be deleted on Iris, it still exists in the rest of the Nostrverse.

But do you offer a guarantee that I will lose my bitcoin?

But what's the point? If zaps are a way of rewarding content we like, then zapping back such zaps undermines the incentives.

Wallet of Satoshi will transfer funds to any valid invoice or Lightning address - regardless of who the recipient is.

Government control over the means of communication is the cause of much trouble in the world and the primary lever of their ability to "manage" individuals and society. But "communication" is not just social media and the like, it's also how knowledge is shared as in education - and of course "financial communication" as in the monetary system itself.

I am grateful to be alive to see the emergence of Bitcoin as the world's first non-government money for the internet age, fully decentralised and without rulers. And now we have Nostr, paving the way to a world where communication between individuals is not subject to censorship.

The next "government control lever" to be challenged and overcome is their grip on education. What's needed more than ever is a complete re-thinking of education at all levels.

We already have the tools - the internet being the primary one. There is no reason on earth why governments should be able to control what we learn and how we learn. I see the rise in alternative online education at all levels as the next breakthrough required. We can see the potential in Michael Saylor's "The Saylor Academy" - https://www.saylor.org - which shows how it can be done.

We should not rest until - just like the previous separation of church and state - money, communication networks and education are completely separated from the state. This is the path to human flourishing and freedom.

I'm primarily a laptop user and find Iris to be the best experience. I also keep an eye on Damus (MacOS version) and Snort - for comparison reasons. I'm not fast -fingered enough on my phone, but a touch typist on the keyboard.

That will change over time, as more people with different interests discover Nostr. Like Twitter, what you see is largely a matter of who you follow, so in the future it will be possible to follow others on Nostr with differing passions and interests. We are still so early.

Since yesterday I have noticed numbers appearing next to the Lightning icon in posts. Is this the zap integration you were talking about? I'm assuming the number represents the number of zaps, not sats.

Final reminder to followers of mine who haven't claimed their 1000 sats yet. This is the last of my daily sats giveaways this past month. From now on I'll be rewarding good content with individual zaps. 😎

For my final giveaway I'm sending 1000 sats to each of my followers who taps/clicks to "like" this post. If you've already liked and claimed your sats, please ignore. Sats will be sent, once "following" status has been confirmed.

Sats away!

Today is the last of my daily sats giveaways during February - my way of celebrating the emergence of Nostr, and what it means for communication freedom. From now on I will confine myself to rewarding good content with individual zaps. 😎

For my final giveaway I'm sending 1000 sats to each of my followers who tap/click to "like" this post. Sats will be sent once following status has been confirmed.

Sats away!

Congrats to Damus users, now able to ZAP 'til their hearts content. 😁 But beware of RSD - "rapid sats depletion" - a serious condition caused by zapping euphoria.

So, if you're running out of sats, here's a lifeline - if you're quick!

1000 sats each to the first 10 people who "like" this post.

When you click on someone's zap icon on their post a screen pops up allowing you to choose a predetermined zap amount or enter a custom amount.

Replying to Avatar MuaawiyahTucker

If I can prove to you that the Quraan we have today is 100% provable to be the same as revealed 1444 years ago, what does that mean to you? Has it changed anything for you? Well it should. So let’s take that journey.

Ok, so first, the religious basis. Allaah said Himself in the Quraan that He has given us this ‘Reminder’ & that He will preserve it. So that’s a promise from the start. But in practice, what actually happened? Well, here’s the case for its preservation.

Let me try to explain in a way a Bitcoiner can relate to. One of the reasons why it’s so difficult to destroy the ₿itcoin network is bcoz it’s distributed. Even if nuclear war breaks out in the world & 90% of all computers are all wiped out, it’s still highly likely the #BTC  will survive.

Copies of the blockchain is scattered throughout the world in such a way they we can know 100% it has been preserved. They are all the same, byte for byte. By design.

So when it comes to the Quraan, we have a similar situation. Not exactly the same but similar. Let me demonstrate

Let me first explain how the Quraan and blockchain is different.

Blockchain: Each block is ‘solidified’ with a nonce, that verifies that it’s valid & it is proof that the work was done to mine that block. There is no ‘nonce’ of the Quraan.

Blockchain: You could have countless different chains for btc & they would all be mathematically valid as all you need is data & the Nonce. But we only accept and build on top of the ‘longest chain’. That obviously doesn’t exist with the Quraan.

I’m just making it clear how they are different so it’s not misunderstood that somehow ‘Quraan and blockchain are the same’. That’s not my point. But what I am saying is that ‘distribution’ is a powerful mechanism for ‘preservation’

But the ‘preservation’ part of the history is the important part.

Muhammad, unlike Jesus, was a prophet & messenger for 23 years. And during that time the people he was sent to (including himself) were mostly illiterate, as most people were in the past. Reading was a privilege.

So as the Quraan was ‘revealed’ in stages over that period of time it was memorised by Muhammad & his followers. Again, unlike Jesus who was a single individual, Muhammad was a leader of a nation. So 1000’s memorised it word for word

This is the ‘distribution’ part. The entire area of what is now Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman and Yemen came under Islamic rule within his 23 year mission, and 1000’s of people memorised the entire book from cover to cover and 1000’s more memorised smaller parts. And that was just the beginning.

His main 4 followers who lead the Muslim nation to expand the Islamic boarders all the way further from Egypt to India & China, reaching as far north as Iraq and Syria happened in the next 30-40 years. That’s a total of 63+ years where Islam spread an area larger than Europe.

During that time, schools were set up across that land mass from those original 1000’s of people who memorised it to teach 1000’s more. This is how we have preserved the Quraan.

One of the main motivators to memorise the Quraan is bcoz we pray 5 times a day, reciting it in every prayer from memory

Islam today spread as wide as from Indonesia (the country that has the most Muslims in it of any Muslim nation) to morocco, from Russia (that has more Muslims that the GCC countries combined) to Somalia and Nigeria. In all of that, we still memorise the whole book cover to cover

And since 1444years ago until today, across that massive land mass, you don’t find any difference between any copy of the Quraan in even a single letter. So from an information distribution perspective through time & space, it’s actually impossible by normal means for them all to have agreed upon a lie or mistake.

But it doesn’t even stop there. At this point it’s pretty confirmed, but there is another final piece to the puzzle. We have something called “isnad” which is called “chain of narrators”. And this is where the similarities to ₿itcoin comes again.

If a person memorises the whole Quraan, they could take it to the next level & read the entire Quraan from start to finish to his teacher. His teacher will listen to it entirely & if it is exactly as he heard it from his teacher he will give him ‘the chain’.

This ‘chain’ is exactly like the blockchain in that it is a list of teachers who did exactly the same thing all the way up to the prophet Muhammad. And there are millions of these chains scattered across the world as people themselves scattered and moved to different lands.

We know exactly who every single person is in that change. Their names, their fathers names, their grandfathers names, where they were born and died, all the way up to the top, to the source. A continuous chain of people who memorised the Quraan & verified it with their teachers

And if you were to gather all these chains from across the world & compare them, you will see it spread out like the roots of a tree, some of them coming together and so on.

So when you put all of the above together, it becomes practically impossible to claim it was not preserved

1) No two copies that are different

2) So many people who memorised it at every level that it’s impossible to have agreed upon a lie

3) We know exactly who each memorise was, so nothing is anonymous like the Bible

4) Historical manuscripts all confirm the above.

5) Every Muslim on planet Earth, from the moment they can start to recognise letters start memorising the Quraan, some complete it and some memorise some, but you now have today more than 1 billion humans who actively memorise and read the Quraan at least 5 times a day.

Sorry, this turned out to be a bit longer than a few note, but I think one can agree, that if all what I’ve said above is true (you can easily verify that) then it is indeed preserved. Just remember, what is Quraan is ONLY what has reached the above criteria.

That was very interesting, thank you.

Easiest way is to use Muun wallet. It allows you to transact with both main chain bitcoin and lightning - so you can send bitcoin for example, and pay out in lightning (to refill you LN wallet).

We have a lot of work to do to convince normies that government is essentially the mafia which hides the fact by posing as an entity that "cares".

Exactly! But those other interests are likely very diverse, and as such provide an opportunity for more specific interest groups to evolve on Nostr.

I made my first post on Nostr on 1st February. A lot has happened since then. I've had time to evaluate what is happening here, in particular as it compares to my own activity in Twit land.

First of all, it's obvious that the first wave of Nostr adopters are bitcoiners. So right now, for me, Nostr is the ideal place to meet all sorts of people who love bitcoin and to hang out together. This is especially useful to me, living in a small country on the other side of the world, where not much happens by way of open bitcoin activity.

However, as I Twit user I realise I can't totally leave that platform yet, as I have other interests and follow other people outside of bitcoin space. For example I'm interested in the wider areas of freedom philosophy, economics and geopolitics.

Ideally, over time, people with interests other than bitcoin will migrate to Nostr. However, the primary appeal and value of this platform is that it's free from government, corporate and algorithmic control - and the sad fact is many people don't value that as much as we do.

Hopefully, as time proceeds and the nature and dead hand of state control becomes more widely understood, more people will appreciate and adopt what Nostr is offering.

Bitcoin is separation of money and state. Nostr shows the way to separate communication networks and state. The future is to separate as much as possible from the state.