We own a building in the mountains of southern New Mexico that has been used as a general store for many years. We are thinking about selling it, but I'm wondering if there is anything Bitcoin related I can do with it.

Scheduled to talk to an accountant tomorrow to discuss getting a ruling from the IRD on this…

As a family, we have traveled quite a bit in the last year (for us) and with trips to El Salvador and New Zealand under our belts I've learned that US coffee is shit.

I think the appeal lies mainly in the convenience but it is a better alternative than storing your credentials on a companies server.

this is full kyc though?

Another day, another exchange I am suspended from.

All of my funds are conjoined or swapped between LN/XMR for privacy before sending to exchanges, triggering all sorts of nonsense AML flags.

The exchange I am with now is requesting proof of funds, meaning it wants to see fiat coming into my bank account from an entity I have a business relationship with, asking me to "kindly assist them" in surveilling me.

Except that all of my business relationships are handled in bitcoin – meaning that it is impossible for me to show proof of fiat funds.

Alternatively, the exchange says, I could send them “the address” to which I received payment in the last year, matching the amount of money I have exchanged on their platform.

Obviously no such address exists as I create a new address for each transaction (and so should you). Additionally, much of my money comes in through donations, for which I simply do not have an invoice.

I could now send them every single zap I ever received on nostr in the past year – for context, that would be over 250 zaps in the past week alone, s/o to all the zappers – or I could move my business to Switzerland, where I can exchange up to 1000 CHF per day KYC-free (for now), which is what I’m going to do.

However, since I’ll be more heavily relying on peer-to-peer exchanges from now on, I’ll likely have my bank account flagged for receiving weekly payments from randos on the internet, making it fairly foreseeable that I’ll be losing my bank account in the coming months as well.

Fundamental rights violations aside, the amount of complete nonsense work – and with that costs – this system creates both for the Government and private institutions is absolutely astonishing. If there ever was a true bullshit job, compliance officer would no doubt be it.

It’s time we end the global discrimination complex inherent to the financial system in which we are all guilty until proven innocent, only to upkeep an inefficient system that is useless in preventing crime but formidable for imposing mass surveillance on the people.

So no, I will not "kindly assist you" in surveilling me, and if I die on this hill.

Until then, shill me your favorite tools to pay my bills in bitcoin 👇

I learned a little more about why people have such a hard time with bitcoin's "intangibility" while talking to my mom last night.

I asked her what it was like when credit cards were invented, and she explained that before electric cards there was something called a "charga-plate":

This was a metal rectangle you would present at shops, which would be pressed into paper to create an authenticated artifact of the transaction.

The precursor to charga-plates was just regular paper checks. In either case though, the mental model is the same, and credit cards simply extended the same mental model of having some physical cash in the bank (whether or not that is strictly true), and authorizing someone else to talk to your bank and pull some out.

Bitcoin completely breaks this mental model. The problem isn't that it's intangible, because we've been using intangible money since the 16th century. The thing that breaks people's minds is that it is intangible, and has no custodian.

When you sign a transaction, who are you authorizing, and to request money from whom? It really doesn't make any sense from the legacy money perspective to authenticate ownership of a UTXO with cryptography, broadcast it to an etherial network, *pay* one of several miners to include your transaction in a "block" (?) so that the math money can be split and some handed to your counterparty.

Anyway, I think this difficulty might exist for nostr as well. Credentials authenticate you with the account holder, but keys authenticate your content with the reader. To make this worse, users have to custody their keys, making them the account holder and custodian — and when they log in to an application, they have to ask themselves permission to create self-authenticating messages! Weird.