a lot more art on nostr these days

Bitcoin will continue to surprise us, no doubt about it.

After spending 7 years as a political prisoner, I understood what freedom really is when I was under solitary confinement. Freedom is not one thing, freedom is the sum of being able to do many things, that’s why I believe that financial freedom is one of the many dimensions of freedom at large.

Last week, my sister nostr:npub10tct4d5td04frptyls4mk0nf7v28tzs6qza7ur4dfhlkw88y0v5sfzy70g and I participated in the HRF Financial Freedom retreat and met incredible people working to empower the most vulnerable. We come from Rwanda, a dictatorship where financial freedom is limited by the state. It monitors & controls transactions to prevent the funding of human rights activists, dissidents, opposition movements and journalists. There is a solution to this and we need to educate our people about the power of Bitcoin to circumvent the financial and economic challenges imposed by the dictatorship. AND bring everyone here on #Nostr nostr:npub1trr5r2nrpsk6xkjk5a7p6pfcryyt6yzsflwjmz6r7uj7lfkjxxtq78hdpu

GN

If Nostr is truly open and permissionless, people will build things that you don't agree with. And that's okay. 🫂🤙🏻💜

Will I use an Ethereum client? No. But I welcome Ethereum devs to try to build the best decentralized NFT experience upon Nostr that they've ever seen. 🤣

The free and open market will ultimately decide.

The two biggest questions you should be asking yourself if you care about your privacy while using Bitcoin:

Does my on-chain wallet let me validate my own transactions?

Does my Lightning wallet let me calculate my own payment routes?

what are you even talking about?

GM. It’s very likely that Broken Money by nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a is the last book about #bitcoin I’ll ever read. There not much more to say.

Exceptions for technical books if I decide to dive deeper into that.

People really don't realize how utterly dependent modern surveillance is on the idea that everybody is carrying a phone — which is always tracked. Their car has a cellular modem in it — which is always tracked. 99% of investigation is one guy and a search box. If you're not low-hanging fruit, you aren't gonna merit the Eye of Sauron of manual, well-resourced, focused team attention—and if you did, you probably planned ahead for it, right? Because it's not a mystery what would get you on Santa's Naughty List.

Anyway, the point is that even in a big city, the phoneless guy in a "covid" mask is going to be invisible to anything less than that exhaustive manual investigation — at least for a few more years. That may go away once they start networking all the cameras and having AI start trying to match up clothing sets moving from camera to camera, butthat capability is hard to hide, so it'll be in the news. And it won't work that well in places with less camera density and, perhaps, for people who wear the most-common outfits (the visual equivalent of a "shared fingerprint").

Remember: Phones are useful, but dangerous. And the people who will still wear covid masks to the beach are helping to normalize facial obscurity—regardless of their intention. Don't be mean to them. Encourage them to wear them everywhere. For passport photos. In police booking photos. At the customs desk. Family portraits! The sky is the limit—let them push the boundaries so that you don't have to.

nostr:note1dufu3sutqcu4er2pj9k7zmxdf7k23qxn3eskwdr8tp3ffvg7g9qqsv4lrc

GN

Good morning!

It would be unfortunate if some of the more ambitious Bitcoin script change proposals, particularly those attached to real or perceived culture wars within the Bitcoin ecosystem, end up slowing down the adoption of some of the more conservative or well-defined script change proposals that are broadly considered safe and that were steadily building momentum last year.

This church took 632 years to build.

Heinrich Heine explained: "Men in those days had convictions; we moderns have opinions. And it needs more than opinions to build a Gothic cathedral."

Bitcoin is our cathedral.