Today I feel thankful for nostr. It’s not perfect, but it’s a small life raft in a sea of people who want to control what you say and think. Not sure where I would be without this place, probably depressed on twitter watching the latest doom&gloom video that got injected into the top of my feed. Thanks for sticking it out here for this long! It’s everyone here that makes it worth coming back to every day.

The latest Bitcoin block's fees surpassed the subsidy amount. Wild.

If California pays $1.2M in reparations payments per person, I wonder if they’ll make those payments tax exempt for state tax purposes. The Feds definitely won’t.

Almost $500K/person going to federal taxes. That would be an interesting use of state tax money.

Note: I don’t expect it to actually happen, but it’s interesting to think through the tax implications if it did. Would the state withhold federal taxes or leave it up to the taxpayers to handle paying their federal taxes properly? Those new IRS could end up being pretty busy. 🤣

Back at it again with #SkepticismSundays 🤔

The goal of this thread (which I'll post weekly on Sunday's) is for discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about Bitcoin.

NOT the positive aspects of it.

Discussing things with a critical thinking approach and level-headed discussion helps us learn where Bitcoin and it's community can improve and go from there. We had a *fantastic* amount of good conversations last week so I can't wait to see this week's!

What's gotten you thinking, has you concerned, or always irked you about Bitcoin, its ecosystem, etc. this week?

The way of the dodo?

Seignorage

Taxes

Copyright

IP

Paywalls

₿anning

Borders

Why I support #Bitcoin:

1. I want to see a global native currency of the internet in my life time.

2. Under a #Bitcoin standard we will have zero inflation. Meaning prices of goods and services will be reducing year by year.

2. It’s the only viable scientific way of ending corruption in government… by taking power from governments and giving it to the people.

3. It teaches people to be long term thinkers, fiat teaches the opposite.

4. If it succeeds it will shrink the size of government by orders of magnitude.

5. It is apolitical and permission-less. Doesn’t care about your race or creed.

6. It is the cheapest asset that anyone can own in the world.

7. If it succeeds, it make the price of real estate very cheap. Because right now people use land & house as a store of value.

The only "political" reason for this attack that I can think of would be to divide the community and agitate for some quick fix that favors the interested party. Like Roger and Jihan keeping the fees high during the blocksize war, while campaigning for a hard fork.

never criticize without also presenting an alternative solution

Can you believe some people are calling this legitimate activity? It's like the word 'exploit' doesn't exist in their vacabulary.

everyone seems to fawn over RFK but he has spent quite a bit of his life trying to close the indian point nuclear power plant

RFK is not your friend but at least he seems to be anti-war

#[4]

Thank you for giving my thoughts your time.

I did kinda lead with that on purpose. 😆

I agree. It is hard to remain vulnerable in the face of many attacks and trolling. The payoff is worth it though. I keep my story behind anonymity, and there is definitely one there, but I have received so much more than it has cost.

"You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices."

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

If person A doesn’t pay a high fee person B can front run their inscription by copying the jpeg and paying a higher fee so that their copy is “minted” first, and then person A is the one who looks like they copy pasta’d the jpeg.

I ask stupid questions sometimes.

I’m old (in computer years) but Ive been breaking stuff professionally for 25 years.

If I ask a stupid question, I appreciate not being written off for asking it.

It may be I dont know because it’s not in my domain (very little we do here is), or because after 25 years I’ve gotten very good at asking the type of stupid questions that reveal foot-guns hidden behind good ideas.

*It is much easier to respect and admire the skills and talents of those who are not patronizing*

Getting older has also taught me to greatly value having friends in many domains who are willing to give feedback on my ideas before I waste days trying them. Even non-devs are experts in multiple domains and worth listening to. In fact, theyre 99% of any userbase, so you could argue they’re one of the most important experts to listen to. Nobody can tell you better how they’re going to use a piece of software better than a user.

I’m also old enough to know I don’t have shit to prove to anyone to get them to listen to me. I think my character has spoken for itself. One of the things that was awesome about the early Internet was you never knew if major architectural flaws were being addressed and fixed by a Sr. Software Engineer who was typically (at the time) some older white guy with a degree, or a 12 year old girl from a country most rich white folks couldn’t pronounce. Ideas were currency and intelligent questions were respected with an answer, and everyone was excited when someompne new wanted to play in the sandbox with us.

We need to recultivate that attitude. There are many who still act this way, but its no longer a majority. Development communities have become toxic landscapes filled with arrogance and asinine arguments over favorite tools, elitism over how much an individual understands, and a serious disregard for what has come before. We stand on the shoulders of great people who came from everywhere, often worked in garages with scrap parts, and many of whom lacked or dropped out of formal education. We essentially *still use the technology created by these people*.

It’s not all doom and gloom. There are pockets of supreme positivity and groups of people being encouraged to play in the giant sandbox who never have been. The sandbox is truly global in scope now. And Ive met some of the kindest, most helpful, and genuinely coolest ass people on here who are also developers.

But we need to be cautious. Success can breed arrogance. The new creation we enjoy here does not mean we will be successful in reinventing everything. Nor does it exempt us from laws of development that are older than the majority of us. Nor does it mean that the lessons learned from previous failures (and successes) should be forgotten. It certainly doesnt make us better than other developers or users.

Listening is a skill we should all cultivate. So is helping, teaching, and allowing ideas better than your own to flourish. We are *not* naturally good at these things. They take years of honing and constant vigilance.

The first step is remembering that the Nostr of today, will be the MySpace of tomorrow - and we will not be judged by what we built (which will be replaced) but by how we behaved.

“Stay hungry,

Stay foolish.”

— Steve Jobs

Worth noting that Satoshi’s last public post was about the risk of DDoS on #Bitcoin

Not saying this is necessarily what’s happening now, but it’s worth considering the risks

nostr:note1kczgfmyhymnle5m25v36e7yj7mac6th8nsah7xjqax0kktt04gushesw9p

Some serious shitcoiner energy here.

hi

Shitcoins

Shitcoins are never going to go away, I gave up hope years ago.

The human being loves gambling, proof of this is the multimillionaire business of casinos around the world in cities like Las Vegas, or Macau, the multimillionaire business of betting or online games like poker.

Shitcoins are just that, a casino and people love to gamble and lose their money.

The problem is that now shitcoins are screwing up the Bitcoin mempool and we don't seem to care. Bitcoin is not ready to scale and neither are layer 2 technologies.

Bitcoin needs serious development like the Linux Kernel has, development that combines the goodness of FOSS but also enterprise power as for example with Red Hat or Intel on Linux.

I was hoping that Blockstream would play that role but I get the impression that investment is lacking.

I'm just thinking out loud.