Boomers took a high-trust, high capital society and spent it down to deep debt.
Bitcoiners will be building that trust back up through savings.


This leftist is doing what Bitcoiners have been doing for ages. Gotta love the Keynesian Brainwashing that makes him think this will hurt Trump.

https://m.primal.net/Mags.png


I am part of Gen X. This election felt like to me the first real victory over the Boomers.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #423

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-423


The big divide in the US is between merit and rent-seeking. For rent-seekers, toeing the ideological line is extremely important. For merit-seekers it's doing/being/creating the best. In a sense, I'm surprised this battle came so early because this battle is Bitcoin vs. Fiat in a nutshell.


DOGE should abolish the TSA. $12B in government expenditure, but more importantly, a huge tax to anyone traveling by plane in time.


Results are not linear, at least for most things. You put in 3 years into rock climbing and improve a lot. Then you put 3 more in and improve very little. Then you put in another year and you find yourself doing things you didn't dream of doing.

We like linearity. It's put in this much effort, get these predictable outcomes. Put in a little more effort, get a little better outcomes. What dirves us crazy is putting in a lot of effort and not seeing results. It's discouraging if not devastating.

But the world is non-linear and the curve of effort and time vs results is maddeningly unpredictable, so we make artificial linear outcomes. This is why jobs are so popular. They don't require specific outcomes, but pay based on time put in. And why entrepreneurialism is so scary, the results are non-linear.

This desire for predictability is at the heart of why people tolerate fiat money. Central banks promise some level of normalcy in return for continuous theft. Sadly, all that volatility just gets built up until it explodes some place as hyperinflation, war or worse.

So embrace non-linearity. If you're on here in a sense you already have. Bitcoin price is very non-linear and so is post engagement. But embrace it more. Because the wins are worth it and because it's more in alignment with reality.


What's your go-to Bitcoin online resource for noobs to study?


Our superpower is our inability to be shamed into submission by the authorities.


Great! You can pump and go away in a few months then.

https://m.primal.net/MCfN.png


The fiat system produces a lot of fragile people because they're so used to artificial stability.
Try holding Bitcoin and you'll learn to weather some storms.


at $1M we go Kobe


$87k at block 870,000. Someday, it'll be $1 for every block that's passed.


1 BTC > 1 kg Gold


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #422

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-422


Theory:

Kamala knew she was going to lose, so she spent the donor money on people that she owed favors to. Hence the billion dollars that got wasted.


Really enjoyed the Rogue Food Conference, especially because all the food that was served was local, seed oil free and delicious!


I didnt realize until a few years ago that Tiannamen Square protests were inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism is Europe.


The future belongs to those who show up, which by extension means to the people who have kids.


A bloodbath of rent seekers is coming.


The credibility of the legacy media is in the toilet. Disinformation and Sybil attacks of various kinds are still going.

The solution is to add prices, the best and most practical information you can get from the market.

Nostr and Bitcoin get us there.


Painful truth: The stock market is mostly derivatives of the dollar.


The normie liberal culture is in huge decline, as can be seen in the insanity of the two-tiered justice system, hookup culture, safe spaces and the like.

But there are pockets of different cultures out there like church which are a lot more healthy. Survival will soon mean getting into those cultures and not staying in the mainstream death culture.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #420

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-420


2016: A New Hope
2020: Empire Strikes Back
2024: Return of the ...

Almost feels like someone wrote a script.


I'm starting to hate the autocorrect on my phone. Seems to screw up every Nostr post.


The presidency that everyone in obsessed about us the centralized power point that everyone in competing for.

Decentralization in superior. In might wake some time, but the rest of society will come around to this idea.


I don't miss drinking or carbs.


The host difficult moral stands to wake are when everyone else disagrees, on worse when they think you are unkind in holding your stance. Bet such are the demands of morality that expediency of seeing someone be happy in not enough to swap your judgement.


If you're wanting to support the Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, here is your chance. These are descendants of some of the first followers of Christ that still live in Bethlehem and they make nativity sets and jewelry made from the olive wood that grows in the area. Unfortunately, they're not exactly tech savvy and you need to contact them personally, but message me if you'd like to purchase them. Also, thanks to my friend Fadi, I've convinced them to take Bitcoin.

Many of the people in this Christian community have been suffering a lot the past few years due to the collapse of tourism, especially around Christmas. They're also a minority in a largely Muslim area which make their faith that much more remarkable. Please support them if you can!
https://m.primal.net/LocI.jpg https://m.primal.net/LocJ.jpg https://m.primal.net/LocL.jpg


It's crazy how many restrictions we accept on real estate. Not only zoning laws, but property taxes, eminent domain, even condo associations. I'm not sure it's even possible to get truly unencumbered property.

This is why Bitcoin will beat real estate as a store of value.


The arguments against ossification are almost entirely around new stuff that devs want to build.

If that's the priority, why don't you build it on Liquid or Lightning or some other place that's not the base layer? Liquid in particular has a very similar system as L1 and on testnet, they have Simplicity enabled, which should get you pretty much any primitive you want that's not Turing complete. If your idea is so great, why don't you show the benefits of your idea by building elsewhere? Your argument for why you want a soft fork would be a lot better received if you showed evidence that the thing you want to build actually has a robust market.

If the reason why you won't build on another layer is that it's too cumbersome or difficult, then I have zero sympathy for your plight.


Understand that not everyone values freedom.

For a lot of people freedom can be stifling. This is because there's an inbuilt assumption that given freedom, you have to make optimal choices to make that freedom worthwhile and in that space of decisions making is a deep anxiety, one that blames you for any bad choices you make.


We were promised sidechains would destroy altcoins. Instead, it looks like altcoins are going to use the same tech to extract Bitcoin to their centralized ecosystems. Clearly aiming at multicoiners with promises of "trustlessness."

A lot of multicoiners are going to get rugged out of their Bitcoin this cycle.


In case you are not aware, every big company is a bank. They have to play financial games with whatever money they get and if there's any time gap between when they receive the money and when they have to deliver the good or service, they invest the money in the meantime to get some yield. If their customers can't pay right away, then they partner with banks who loan money which  prints more money.

Such is the way of fiat.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #421

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-421


I, for one, would love tariffs instead of income taxes. Consumption taxes are generally way more fair.


Logic only wins where rhetoric has cleared the path.


On Ossification
=============

*These were my prepared opening remarks on the Ossification Debate I had with @lopp at the Lugano Plan B Forum. It is published here for posterity.*

Thank you to Plan B, the city of Lugano and everyone here for this opportunity to speak about this very important topic. It's an honor to be here and I hope to do my side justice.

Since the beginning people have had two predominant and wrong views of Bitcoin. The first is economic, that Bitcoin is not money for one reason or another. This error is usually made by economists and their followers, some even of the Austrian school. They reject Bitcoin because it does not fit their conception of what money is supposed be. Bitcoin obviously is money, and the 15 years of history disproves their theories so we don't need to refute this error here.

The second is that of Bitcoin primarily being a technology. This error is usually made by technologists because the innovations that they've seen in their lifetime are generally technical in nature. They are the proverbial hammer wielder thinking everything is a nail. Like other technologies they've seen, say mobile phones or apps, they think that it's a race to build new features and to win is to beat the competition through changes.

But this is a serious error and indeed is the main argument given by altcoiners and their ignorant investors thinking that a better mousetrap is what will win. 13 years of altcoin history also dispels this myth. Faster block times, different proof-of-work algorithms, more expressive but more buggy smart contract languages, alternative consensus systems, and much more have been tried but none of these features have gained much long-term traction let alone threaten to dethrone Bitcoin. More features are not what make money better.

To illustrate, go through this thought experiment with me. Imagine that the Federal Reserve added technology features into the dollar, for example, faster settlement times, expressive smart contracts, and even privacy, would those features make it better than Bitcoin? Would you switch to it? Obviously not because they can and do change the monetary policy all the time. In other words, features are not what make Bitcoin better. Bitcoin is better money, not just better technology.

Bitcoin is money first and technology second and it neither needs centralized management nor new features for adoption. Indeed, it's better for money to *not* change. The reason why the classical gold standard worked so well was because gold didn't change. In fact the properties of gold are such that it's fairly hard to change it, either at a macro level, where its supply expands at around 2% per year, or at the micro level where it's non-reactive and extremely durable. Money that doesn't change is better because people who own it can plan more effectively for the future. Nobody likes a game where the rules keep changing, particularly if it's designed to pick winners and losers.

This principle that money is better when it doesn't change is the basis of my stance in this debate. We want money to be predictable, so that when the unpredictable happens, we can use the slack afforded by our savings to get us out of unpleasant situations. So my bias toward ossification is derived from this principle. Bitcoin's value proposition is that it is sound money and sound money works best when its properties are known and predictable.

That's not to say that I don't want anything to change or be built. Just do them on other layers. It's for this reason that I don't like the word ossification. Ossification is a weird word to be using because the mental picture you get is of a fossil, something old, worn and no longer living. I think a better picture is that of a house foundation. We are building a whole new monetary system, and for that it's important to have a trustworthy and stable foundation to build on. And indeed, that's how I view the layer 1 of the Bitcoin protocol. It's the monetary foundation. You can build other things on top like Lightning, eCash, Sidechains, Ark, Statechains and the rest. The foundation underneath all of these layers must be stable and predictable for those innovations to mature.

We don't want to be changing the foundation because at this point millions of people are depending on it. The threshold for changing a house's foundation should be fairly high because it is a very difficult process and you may be damaging things built on top. Similarly, Bitcoin's foundation needs to be set so that other layers can have a chance to be built, to mature and to refine.

That said, I will concede that there are some really cool things from a technological perspective that you can build if you add a new OP code, for example. But that's not enough for me. It's not enough for a feature to be interesting, I need to see why a feature is *imminent* and *necessary*. If some critical cryptographic primitive is broken, that would necessitate change because the compromise of the system is imminent and presumably there are no other ways to fix the problem. To further my analogy, such an event would be like a destabilizing crack in the house's foundation, and though it's an invasive and difficult task, a destabilizing crack would justify repairs. But as I said, that's a massive cost to the entire ecosystem and should only be considered in a situation where there's grave danger to the entire system.

What is not enough is something that's necessary but not imminent. For example, we will need something to take care of the timestamp block header problem, but that's not until 2106. We don't have to solve that problem right now. What's also not enough is something imminent but not necessary. Some regulation that bans exchanges from sending to certain addresses may be imminent, but unnecessary. For me, imminent and necessary are the criteria.

In conclusion, what I view as important are Bitcoin's properties as money and the bar for change at this point, given how much value the network has, is pretty high. And I get the developer's perspective. They want new toys to play with, new primitives to work with. But the design space of Bitcoin hasn't been close to explored yet with features we already have. Between Segwit and Taproot, we have a crazy array of possibilities, as is being shown through BitVM, Ark and FROST. Changing things to satisfy the developers is the wrong motive, just as changing things to satisfy the Bitcoin businesses during the blocksize wars of 2017 was the wrong motive. Our priority should be Bitcoin as money. Not Bitcoin as art gallery, or decentralized exchange or digital archive.

I mentioned earlier that the error of many people that approach Bitcoin from an economics angle is to dismiss Bitcoin because of loyalty to an economic belief. Such an attitude comes from not just wrong economic beliefs, but also technical ignorance. I would implore you to not make the opposite error, which is to dismiss the economic and monetary reality of Bitcoin in favor of perceived technical benefits.

Bitcoin belongs to the community of people that own Bitcoin, not the economists and not the technologists. It is this community, you in this audience that Bitcoin belongs to and it is your needs are what Bitcoin need to serve. Setting a firm foundation is the path to doing exactly that.


Spend your time on high EV actions. Sadly almost all Twitter drama is low EV


With @willcole, we continue our series in building a product. This time we zoom in from strategy to a plan.

#Bitcoin Fixes This #129

https://rumble.com/v5jciod-bitcoin-fixes-this-129-building-a-product-part-2-with-will-cole.html


Wikipedia is very centralized and has been captured by people like David Gerard. Decentralized theater much like altcoins.


A large number of normies like sticking their heads in the sand. They don't think of their beliefs as that, of course, but the anxiety they have from the contradictions of conventional wisdom, show that they are, indeed, ignoring the obvious dangers.


Everyone who is really good at something is a giant nerd. Tarantino watches every film 7-8 times to get everything out of it. Penn and Teller have read and know the tricks of nearly every obscure magician. Every great boxer has studied old films of other boxers and their training methods. Greatness always builds on a foundation of knowledge and crucially stays humble enough to keep learning.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #419

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-419


Tariffs are economically non-sensical in a sound money economy. But in a fiat economy with the world's reserve currency, it's about the only way to spur genuine domestic manufacturing.


Capitalism or a free market economy is the natural state of things. It is the default, not an upheaval of a different order. It is every other system, Communism, Socialism, Corporatism, etc which are forced modifications to the natural order.


It's crazy to me that data breaches don't result in bigger payouts for the people whose data has been compromised.


There's a world of difference between believing something because you think it's true and believing something because you *want* it to be true. Unfortunately, the dominant post modern philosophy does not make this distinction.

I believe that Bitcoin and Nostr will win, not because I want them to, though I do, but because I see the incentives.


The etymology of the word educate has its roots in Latin with "ducit" which means to lead. The idea of education, then is to lead young people. But where are they being led?


Nostr is an experiment in a decentralized community. You'll know we've really made it when there are IRL meetups of communities outside Bitcoin.


Every community has a culture, and every culture has different rules around status.
The problem is when these cultures are centrally managed instead of emerging naturally.
You need decentralized systems for that.


Destruction of the old order is inevitable. We just have to outlast them.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #418

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-418


The. bankers run the world. It's Bitcoin that frees us from their control.


Fiat money forces you to worship it if you hope to keep any of it.

Our struggle for sound money is at core, a spiritual one.


Every politician promises to clean up the mess in Washington. The problem is they can't because the money created the mess and the money ain't getting fixed.


There are people that feel entitled to your stuff, and sadly they are egged on by politicians who want to gain power.

Nostr and Bitcoin are how we can put this mentality where it belongs: in the trash.


The fearful stay well within the Overton window.
The rebellious play at the edges.
The courageous go where their knowledge and understanding takes them, which these days is well outside.


The end of dictatorships is almost always economic. But sadly, fiat money lets them stay in power by bringing consumption forward.


Hilarious thing I just read.

There was a position during the Tudor Period called the "grooms of the stool" whose job was to wipe the king's backside after #2. Why would someone want such a disgusting position? To be close to power, of course.

Lots of fiat and altcoin rent-seekers who wipe metaphorical crap for a chance at influence.


Low key global economy risk is what happens when China enters stagflation.


Fiat money is deeply nihilistic. At core, it's the idea that you can create value from nothing, and by extension, meaning from nothing. In a subtle way it concedes the metaphysical ground, that nothing is the default state, hence trivializing anything and everything. Denial of reality is its inevitable end.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #417

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-417


Centralized restrictions are never used purely for good. It may start out that way, but the longer such institutions exist, the more corrupt they get, until they get reformed, and the cycle repeats.

Decentralized institutions generally improve over time as the markets punish the bad.

This is why Nostr and Bitcoin will win.


I talked to  nostr:npub1du6sgl90wse0cz44fg50a4kg9ea4sgctlxps90ccx58lw8ssgv9qhjyf3c and started started on a series where we'll try to make a product. We talked in part 1 about strategy, the different concerns you should have at this stage of idea development and what you want to have produced by the end of it. We did this with an idea I had for being a Bitcoin bank for my friends and family.

https://rumble.com/v5gluor-bitcoin-fixes-this-128-building-a-product-part-1-with-will-cole.html


The most enjoyable conversations are ones when you are giving shape to an idea to solve a problem. And if you have the right kind of conversation partners, you go to a place where none of you could have gotten alone.

That's my takeaway from Global Bitcoin Summit 2024


Sketch of a protocol I discussed with nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s for proving storage of a file.

before uploading, select 32 random bytes from the file, store their indices and the sha256 hash. do this 1000 more times (select 32 different random byes, calc sha256).

upload the file to the server. every day, ask for the hash of the 32 bytes at the indices stored from the server. if it matches transfer some sats. if not the server no longer has the file. you can check for 1000 days.


Hi. I'm a author of "The Girl with Seven Names" and escapee from North Korea. I'm here in Nashville to learn about Bitcoin for the first time in my life♡ https://image.nostr.build/14a71787e95f07d346130b6247d0209c65a6e3daec1cdac89a3594fc427c0206.jpg


jimmysong

Bitcoin Expert
Open-Source Coder
Follow me to learn #BTC

Author of 5 Bitcoin books

Fiat Ruins Everything: https://fiatruinseverything.com

PGP: C1D7 97BE 7D10 5291 228C D70C FAA6 17E3 2


Nostr is 3 years old  It's like Bitcoin in 2012.


Twitter: USD
Threads: ETH

Nostr: BTC


The big hurdle in Bitcoin education seems to be that it's intimidating and scary.


Freedom dies gradually then suddenly. If its not protected with vigilence, freedom dies.


Just heard from Marco (a Bitcoiner) in Lebanon via video about the situation there. What struck me was his optimism.

In the midst of hyperinflation and war, Bitcoin offers hope.


Help Daylight Computer


You can if you use FROST. You can be the dealer and send keys that need to sign to each server. 3-of-3 is possible, but you can also do arbitrary k-of-n.


I've been saying for a while that IBM is a zombie company. I had no idea how bad it was until I read this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IBM/comments/1fqt826/why_are_any_of_us_still_here_ibm_is_dying_and_we/


The main deception of authorities in general and regulators in particular is that gatekeeping is a net benefit. It sounds reasonable, for example for certain goods and services to have to go through some examination before being brought on the market, particularly if it has some potential for harm.

And at first, that may even work, and certain dangerous goods and services not brought to market as a result of the gatekeeping. But as regulion ages, not only does gatekeeping keep out dangerous goods and services, but also new and innovative goods and services. This is due in part to the capture by the incumbents that have influence over the gatekeeping, but also due to the burden that increases as the bureaucracy around the gatekeeping grows. Indeed, the incumbents often collude with regulators to make it so that nothing can get through the gatekeeping except the incumbents, often getting carve outs for "legacy" institutions that got past the gatekeepers when the requirements were much more lax.

Gatekeeping ultimately then makes everything static and becomes a giant rent-seeking operation, where payment to the rent-seekers become licensees who refuse to issue new licenses. Competition slowly disappears, through mergers, bankruptcies and so on until there's only a few players, who, being critical to the economy as the only providers, get bailouts when they are in trouble.

Such has been the fate of many different industries where a few giant companies dominate. Industries as diverse as Banking, Airlines, Health Care, and Food Production all operate in something like a pseudo fascist manner. Note that I use fascist here in the original definition, where companies are essentially directed by the government.

Gatekeeping, in other words, is the first step toward tyranny and it should be opposed on philosophical grounds.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #416

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-416


Hardware is the next frontier for open source.


Forgiveness is hard, but do it for the sake of your soul.


Are there any Nostr clients that don't have such a present bias? I'd like to see older posts that have been popular and continue to get engagement as that's probably the most evergreen content.

Wisdom > hot takes.


The software that civilization runs on has a lot of bugs and incompatibilities.


Every central bank is a vampire, sucking the life out of the economy and turning many other institutions that get bailed out into vampires as well.


The best posts have a lot of affordances. That is different directions where the conversation can go.


Technologies show your politics. There is no neutral anymore


Decentralized Capitalism > anarchocapitalism


We are inundates with propaganda in normal everyday life.
Anything with a gatekeeper will be mostly propaganda.
This is why we Nostr.


Santa Claus
Tooth Fairy
Modern Monetary Theory


Plausible deniability is the worst form of defoecting blame. The fact that so many people use it as a license to screw others seems to be a fiat consequence.


Diversity is needed in fiction. It's hard to tell a story when every character has the same PoV. But it need not be the gender/race/sexual orientation diversity that's constantly pushed. At least for me, the far more interesting diversity is one of morals, belief and goals. The best stories at least in my opinion, have some moral dilemma at the crux and you can't get that without some conflict.

Anyway, I'd love to read stories you publish, Lyn.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #415

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-415


Inflation is resisted by every actor as much as possible. That is, sticky prices are a real thing and preserving the status quo a big part of contracts and planning. So prices are held down as much as possible, through scale, debasement, shortages and the like. But even after all that when the prices go up, politicians typically demand even more concessions, accusing goods and service providers of greed.

It's such rank hypocrisy given that it's the politicians greed which creates the inflation in the first place.


Genius is what progresses society. We haven't been producing them because of the desire for "equality"


inflation is a hidden tax. this is why so many people feel so blindsided by it, but tis ultimately the result of deficit spending through loans.


It really doesn't take much to make me happy.

https://m.primal.net/KvxD.bin


50 basis points is honestly not very much. But you can bet that there are going to be a lot more cuts behind it.

Current central banker dilemma is between recession and inflation, but they pivoted from fighting inflation a little too late to stave off recession.


I'm still seriously offended by the lockdowns, the ban on all sorts of innocuous activities and the complete destruction of civil liberties.

And no, I won't let this go.


I talked to Ella and Lisa Hough about raising Bitcoiners.

Find out how Lisa raised Ella to be the high agency, independent and responsible young woman she's become!

https://rumble.com/v5f5ov9-bitcoin-fixes-this-127-raising-bitcoiners-with-lisa-and-ella-hough.html


Are there any Nostr clients that are relationship-centered instead of content centered?


Any day that starts with a deadlift is a win, guaranteed.


Nostr, like Bitcoin, only needs to survive as the other centralized competitors blow themselves up over time.


All positivist law, which grant positive rights such as the right to health care or housing, or food, inevitably lead to some form of slavery. This is because such goods and services must be provided by someone.

No positive rights exist, they are a political fiction to get support from compliant people.


It's not where you start, but where you finish.


Content that you dont pay for is advertising.

Pay for valu.


So the golf round was a last-minute decision yet the shooter somehow knew and brought his guns and a camera to record himself.

The shooter was recruiting people to be a mercenary in Ukraine.

So a black ops guy, most likely that got a tip to go shoot Trump.

Someone in the deep state wants civil war, really, really bad.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #414

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-414


Here's the article that it's from https://substack.com/home/post/p-148148075


Read this paragraph and then read it again substituting the word Bitcoin for virtue.

https://m.primal.net/KrBu.png


Fiat people are scared to be called Nazis, racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, or any number of labels.

Once you overcome this fear, then you'll be truly free to think for yourself.


prayer is the next obvious step then.


The state is an agent of death and destruction. Thus, the bigger it grows, the more death and destruction it leaves in its wake. Conversely, the more restrained it is, the more life and creation can happen.

The thief steals kills and destroys.


Glad to hear that. The next action isn't about adopting organized religion, it's about prayer.


China will inflate first and that will make inflation a bit more manageable for the US.

Also true of every US trading partner. They dont call it an exorbitant privilege for nothing.


How do you even find out about these things? I suspect people I've orange pilled in the past have gone full retard altcoin, but I can never tell, because it's not like they come back around to me and tell me that they've lost all their money, or worse, that they're pumping something else.


We've gone from an academic culture that explored and dove deep to find the truth to a culture that tells you where you're not allowed to go.

Gatekeeping is almost always a function of preserving the status quo.


I talked to  nostr:npub1dtgg8yk3h23ldlm6jsy79tz723p4sun9mz62tqwxqe7c363szkzqm8up6m about Virtue, Vice and his upcoming book. There was a lot of conversation about Nietzche, Christianity, Bushido and much more.

https://rumble.com/v5e2f64-bitcoin-fixes-this-126-virtue-and-vice-with-aleks-svetski.html


Laws and courts are supposed to give people justice. Instead, now it's a place for government show trials against their political enemies.


AI vs Bitcoin

The AI hype has been non-stop for the last 2 years ever since ChatGPT came out with its 3.0 chat. Since then, there's been an insane amount of investment into AI tech from every direction. There are hundreds of startups, every tech giant has been making investments and companies in between have been putting a lot of money toward it as well. It's not a small amount, either, as the AI hardware costs make Bitcoin mining look like discount bargains.

Yet after two years, what have we to show for it? Maybe some faster image editing on newer phones? Slightly faster answers to questions you would normally ask Google? Some productivity increase among junior programmers? The investment was enormous, as can clearly be seen in NVIDIA's growth, but the results are pretty underwhelming. As with any hyped technology, the possibilities have run past the actual use.

One of the supposed benefits of fiat money is that capital accumulation is unnecessary to create real value. You can build roads, for example, without having to save up for it. What this misses are many obvious drawbacks, but one of them is that there has to be someone that evaluates whether something will create value and create the money out of thin air to fund the project. This is not just inherently centralizing, but also deeply political.

For whatever reason, AI passed this political test and got the blessing of the money printers, which, to a company that sells, shovels like NVIDIA has been great news. But the drawback is that there's bound to be at least *some* that don't pan out. Maybe some segment of the economy can't use AI profitably, for example. Yet the powers that be, mostly Cantillionaires, have decided that this is worthwhile and have poured insane amounts of money into this bet.

But much like hyped tech of the past, it's looking more and more likely that there's little profit to be made here. Yes, there's some useful things that can be made, but the costs are simply too high right now to justify spending that much. It's a luxury item that mostp people simply don't need, and hence don't want to pay for. AI has become an expensive solution looking for costly problems to solve.

This was always my analysis with another hyped tech: blockchain. It never really made any sense as the cost was too high for what was really just a distributed, very redundant but hard to upgrade database. It, too, couldn't find costly problems to solve, with the exception of one. That, of course being Bitcoin.

What differentiates Bitcoin from AI is that people *need* Bitcoin. It's its own killer app. AI is not so popular that people will pay for what it costs right now. And that means that most of the investment will be wasted. Like most hyped things in a fiat economy, it's doomed to have significant malinvestment.

A lot of people complain about Bitcoin businesses and how hard it is to make them profitable. In a sense, I get it. You want more people to have steady jobs and so on. But in another sense, I think this is the market speaking. You're not going to get paid from Bitcoiners easily and there's no flood of printed money looking for a place to go. At least there won't be once fiat money has run its course. Building a profitable company is hard and so few meet that mark, especially in a new segment as AI has shown.

So in that way, I'm encouraged, because the companies that survive in Bitcoin will have something truly worthwhile. By contrast, the companies that survive in AI will probably be the ones that get subsidized the longest.


Sometimes the hardest times are the times you cherish the most later. Because that's when you find out the most about yourself, good and bad.


There's little incentive for centralized platforms to ban bots.

There are lots of incentive for relays to ban bots.


It is so hard to gain weight as a carnivore. I have to seriously overeat to even gain a couple pounds. And one day of slip up, I lose the weight gain. It's like the inverse of the standard american diet.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #413

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-413


Every video, book, article, even platform is a window through which you perceive reality. Some are less manipulative than others, but the cost is paid at the front end by how the window is framed.


Don't focus on finding "a place" for yourself. If you care too much about fitting in, you'll inevitably get compromised into the values of the gatekeepers.


Every 20th century leader that advocated and pushed for war has been, in my estimation, caused immense human suffering for not much gain, despite what the propagandists will tell you.

They were bloodthirsty warmongers and should be looked at with contempt.


Politics:

Tyranny by your guy is unacceptable.

Tyranny by my guy is ok.


I canceled my credit card of 29 years yesterday.

As rates go up, fiat mechanisms like credit cards make less and less sense. One of the realities of hyperinflation is that ironically, there's no consumer credit to be had anywhere.

I've always thought that Bitcoin as method of payment would come about when merchants demand it. Now I'm thinking that there might be some pressure on the consumer side as well, as the cost of credit cards goes up.


You don't understand propaganda if you think you're immune to it.

The dumb people continue their exposure thinking their rational facilities will make them immune. "I read the New York Times because I want to know what my opponents are thinking!"
The smart people decrease their exposure and don't engage in the framing.


Thinking from first principles is hard. Not the logic, but the conclusions. If they're against the main narrative, you are going to be called a conspiracy theorist or weirdo or wack job. The social isolation and peer disapproval is the hardest part.

This is where you need to let go of that desire to fit in and be well thought of by the normies. It's hard work, but worth it for the intellectual freedom.


All these bureaucrats think that banning speech on these centralized platforms will get everyone to see only the info they want you to see. I kinda hope they succeed so Nostr can show just how wrong they are.


With phones in everyone's pockets, we've eliminated boredom.

But also eliminated contemplation along with it.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #412

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-412


Anything rising in price is absorbing the money being put into the market.

Human progress is deflationary.


The Mandibles: A Review

Dystopian books have a fine tradition. 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451. These are classics because they give a glimpse of what people fear and give voice to the dread that lurks underneath the doldrums of the day-to-day.

I heard about Mandibles from some Bitcoin podcasts about how it "predicted" some economic ills that we're facing now, and given that I hadn't read modern fiction in some time, I decided to give it a go.

The book is, as the author describes it, a different kind of dystopia, one that's economic in nature than scientific (post-apocalyptic wasteland), environmental (asteroid or climate disaster) or political (authoritarian oppression). It's set in 2029-2049 and imagines a world where fiat games have gone haywire and have resulted in economic disaster. The book follows 4 generations of a single family, the Mandibles, whose wealth has been wiped out from the economic reset.

It's a delicious setup. There are so many possible things to explore in this world and much opportunity to explain how bad economic policy choices lead to bad outcomes later on. I wanted to like the book. I wanted to be able to recommend it as reading for people that were just getting into Bitcoin, to be able to use as a warning of what could be if we kept our theft-based economic system.

Unfortunately, the book misses more often than it hits. The economic disasters in the movie are heavy handed and presume an all powerful government. In that sense, what could have been an economic dystopian story just ended up being a subset of a political dystopian story. There is some good dialogue about how the system works, but precious little thought seemed to have gone into how those systems would break or what would cause it to break.

So much of the book is spent on the economic disasters that befall the members of the Mandible family, which is to give you the impression that this is what could happen to everyone when the economy breaks. But so much of it doesn't make much sense, like a well to do family selling their house but not their stocks and being forced to live with their cousins. There's also the continued existence and perfect functioning of the internet, TV and futuristic mobile phones, but somehow there are food shortages everywhere. There are lines for things all over the place, but no mention of price controls or government subsidies that create them.

I found that I most liked the parts where the internal monologues of the family were articulated. The emotional turmoil and subsequent action and motivation in interpersonal relationships between characters in the book were the best parts. I wish the author had put in that much thought into the actual economic system and how it would actually collapse than declaring it did so for the convenience of the plot. There was just a little too much deux ex machina in the book for me to really get into the story.


Environmentalism is a religion.

God is earth/nature.
The apocalypse is climate change.
Sins are your carbon footprint.
Redemption is for garbage (recycling), not for your soul.

It's sad that such a hopeless religion has become so popular. No wonder adherents are so depressed.


According to Zuckerberg, the FBI was pressuring them constantly to censor in 2020-2021. They couldn't speak up about it for a host of reasons, mostly around the fact that they are a centralized entity that has to do what the governing authorities tell them.

Extrapolating out, we can assume that such shenanigans have been and continue to be at play for every centralized company to keep the regime's narrative going. This is why Nostr is so important.


I thank God every day that I can work in Bitcoin.

It's rare for people to find an intersection of what they're good at, what they can get paid for, what they enjoy and what makes a difference.

To all of you who are here. Thank you.


What is your relationship with the truth? This is not an ivory tower theoretical angels on the head of a pin question. Your relationship with truth determines your relationship with everything else.

Most people at least publicly say that they want the truth and seek after it. If you don't profess that, it's hard for anyone to trust you. And without trust, it's really hard to have any sort of relationship.

Yet for most people, power is the priority. When prioritized, it's a nihilistic Neitzchean value, and it can be effective. But it's also highly destructive and sociopathic. Admitting to such is not going to win you friends. So the modern values system tends to be lip service to truth while pursuing power. We can see it all around us with politicians, CEOs, journalists and academia. Pretty much any centralized organization where power is in the hands of a few have at the top one or more people that pursued power to get there.

Power is seductive. And it's easy to see why people pursue it. But to do so at the expense of truth, where truth becomes secondary destroys, not just these people's souls but the organization that they create. Ill-gotten power doesn't last.


Children are the ultimate flex.


Centralized platforms are rulers, whose rules change on whim and enforced arbitrarily.
Decentralized protocols are rules, which are consistently applied.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #411

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-411


The x-rays of Kennedy's head were doctored. They did that to hide the clear exit wound at the back of his head, which the entire medical staff testified to seeing when Kennedy got to the hospital. Why? Because an exit wound at the back of the head means that he was shot from the front and that means there was a second shooter.

Just one of the many details of the Kennedy assassination that were clearly coverups.


The DNC had a mobile abortion and visectomy clinic for free. So they don't want children, but want to indoctrinate yours.


If you want to improve in an area, lower your time preference in that area.

For example, if you want to lose weight, you need to have low time preference eating habits. That means eating will be kinda boring at first. That's generally a good sign. If something is exciting all the time, it's likely very high time preference.


We're now a commodity.

There's a saying that's become a bit of a cliche at this point: If you're getting something for free, you're the product. Indeed, that's the case for a lot of free services online like Google, Facebook and Instagram. These are companies that sell your attention to advertisers, your data to analytics firms and your tendencies to propagandists. More to the point, there are lots more free things like TV and radio that have been selling the same for a long time. You are the product.

What's concerning is that we're not being sold for advertising, but now for gambling. Sports these days is more about fantasy football and prop bets than it is cheering for your team. And nearly every crypto ad is about joining their casino. Even pay-to-play games are exploiting this dynamic, where getting us addicted is a lot more profitable than merely getting our attention.

It's a whole new evil out there. Stop being someone else's commodity.


It saddens me to know that there are people so crippled with anxiety that they live their lives online. One of the things COVID took from us is a sense of communal living, where people did stuff together and that was fun. It used to be a deep human need. Now a generation gets anxiety thinking about engaging in it.


Musk is doing what he can with X. He's fighting government mandated censorship wherever it may be. Unfortunately, it only takes one loss to render the platform compromised.

Given that many of these orders are secret and do not allow Musk to reveal them, it's possible that it's already compromised.

In other words, it's only a matter of time before things get worse there. The future must be decentralized.


I'm guessing you'll appreciate the talk I'm preparing for Lugano's Plan B forum.


The appeal of price controls

Yes, we all know it's stupid policy and ultimately will create massive shortages, more government power and general poverty. But Kamala Harris is proposing it and there are political realities that we really need to think about.

Price controls come about politically because they are popular. People like getting stuff for less. In the short term, it makes people happy. They get something that they've been buying without the inflation. Sure, there will be less producers and deep government intervention and eventually scarcity of the product as they go into black markets if at all. But in the short term, when the producers haven't adjusted yet, the stuff looks like it's free and it helps the politician that imposed it.

The last guy to do price controls on food was Richard Nixon, and he had to do it because he suspended dollar convertibility. He had an election to win in 1972, so he implemented price controls. And guess what? He won in a landslide, because he mitigated the effects of the abandonment of the gold standard through price controls.

Long term, the price controls were a complete disaster. Theere were long lines at the gas stations, inflation went into hyperdrive and the productivity of the 70's was completely lost to stagflation. But it got him the election.

So while Kamala's political positions look stupid from the Bitcoiner point of view, don't underestimate its appeal to normies that don't understand economics. It's not as terrible a move as it seems.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #410

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-410


Intelligence by itself doesn't get you very far. You need perseverance, courage, drive and many other things to succeed.

And if you don't want to end up like Bill Gates, you also need virtue.


The deficits they ran 5-10 years is the inflation you're paying today.

nostr:note1sw4665sjgupy9yy9hga59w8ulsghu23fz03hemjg3kc39pum9hqqlhfyh8


It's painful to me to start something and not get to finish it. Anyone else have this problem?


All virtue is integral. You cannot take just one piece of it without the others, otherwise you end up with vice.

Prudence, or low time preference behavior, must be integrated with fortitude and justice, otherwise you just become a miser.
Fortitude, or courage, without prudence or temperance turns you into a degenerate gambler.
Justice without fortitude or temperance turns you into a keyboard warrior who never acts.

Seek virtue as a whole, not just the part that happens to be useful to you right now.


The unfunded liabilities totaling over $300T is essentially guaranteed future monetary expansion. In other words, there's a lot more inflation to come.


In a fiat world, it pays not to stand out. This is what I hated most about having a "job"


Low interest rates in a free market indicate that the people in that civilization have a low time preference. Central banks lowering interest rates is trying to bring forth the fruits of low time preference without any of the work.


I don't want money to be "fun," I want it to work.


Fiat lets people stay in the realm of rhetoric and never progress past to truth.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #409

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-409


A lot of people self sabotage when they're about to win. don't be one of those people.


Every organization that matters there days is enormous. We are not built for enormous. we need communities of 150 or less .


I missed having my own grill and smoker.

https://m.primal.net/JtwF.jpg


The fact that so few altcoins are the on here should tell you all you need to know about how much they value decentralization or self-sovereignty.


Would you rather have a nocoiner president or an altcoiner president?


So much of the world is the way it is because of small frictions.


I know politics makes for strange bedfellows, but I refuse to get in bed with scammy altcoiners. This is why CoinCenter is so ineffective. Instead of focusing on Bitcoin, the altcoiners have made punishing Gensler the priority. This is going to lengthen the life of altcoins.


Opportunity doesn't knock often, but when it does, it's usually during a fear-filled time.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #408

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-408


You  can get a lot of free stuff, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
This is not true of welfare, and it's why I find it unnatural and stupid.


Bitcoin is such a good test of character.


Slow and steady user growth over flavor of the month any day.


Apparently, it's now "right wing" to talk about having children.


Bitcoiners don't have the same consumer patterns as Fiat people. Until you understand that it's going o be hard to get sats from them.


You have better things to do than spending time with people that suck.


the larger the conference the more cringe the content and attendees.


I have a ruthless system for reading articles. first I never read them when I first seen them. second I save ones that are interesting for later using insta paper. third I only read them on my daylight computer.

many of them come from twitter, others come from newsletter subscriptions and still others from random articles people send me. about 80% of them are not worth sharing. I save the best ones for the newsletter.


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #407

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-407


Trump: under my administration, Bitcoin increased by 3600%

First reaction: Did he seriously take credit for Bitcoin's price rise?

Second reaction: This isn't the flex that he thinks it is.

Third reaction: The money printing will probably be similar to what he did before. Maybe it's not a bad reason to vote for him.


Mostly we were discussing how Austrian economics is compatible with Natural Law. I don't think other economic systems derived from other schools of economics are compatible, meaning they violate natural law through monetary manipulation.

His view was that a lot of the attractiveness of Austrian economics is precisely because of its consistency with natural.law.


Still high from discussing Natural Law with Ron Paul while waiting for Trump.


rumors at the conference that there was an active attacker that caused the delay.


Vegas? Do they want to go full degen?


RFK Jr.  is winning me over.

20 years of dollar cost averaging
no taxes
strategic reserve


Truly one of my heroes.

https://m.primal.net/JfED.bin


how many banking panels can a conference have?? that was painful being in the green room listening to banksters


Kind of crazy to say, but the assassination attempt seems played out already?


If your take on everything is utterly predictable, you might be an NPC.


Remember all those VC tokens that were going to decentralize the web?

Turns out you don't need tokens.

#Nostr


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #406

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-406


A Whitehouse intern being in a conspiracy with Kamala Harris and the Clintons would be the most interesting time line to bring about the current situation.


Iceland has way fewer traffic lights and way more rotaries. Interesting driving experience as you don't stop as often.


Learning something from first principles and really internalizing that knowledge is one of life's great joys.


it's easy to be cynical, hard to be optimistic


Nostr is not down


most things can be counterfeit, up to and including life experiences.

Bitcoin and digital signatures cannot. I don't think we fully realize the implications of that.


I'll be at TGFB and Bitcoin 2024. much easier to meet me at the former.


a lot of people don't know but a lot of startup guys the past 4 years have been libertarian Christians.

The VCs are moving that way by supporting Trump because they need to.


We're all in this together is the biggest lie. self sovereignty means you're not roped into stuff you don't agree with.


everything is about status. it's the primary motivation of most people after surviving, and sometimes it Trump's even that.

but I disagree with Naval here. money obsession is neither low or high status. there are lots of high status people obsessed with money like Warren Buffett, Kevin O'Leary, Jamie Dimon, etc. there are also lots of low status people obsessed with money.

what makes an obsession with money high status is how hard it is to get into that position. being a hedge fund manager is high status. flipping burgers is not, but both can be equally obsessed with money.

if I'm right, some ranking board of most zapped accounts or notes would make Nostr just as much a status game


The most interesting cultural result of this past weekend is that shy Trump voters are no longer shy. Theyve taken their lead from Trump and are now being bold about their beliefs.

I don't like what Trump did with covid and the vax and not draining the swamp his first term. but his courage is infectious and it's wonderful to see in a population that was acting from fear for the past 4 years.


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https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-405


if this pic doesn't move you, you have no soul

https://m.primal.net/JQJK.jpg


Savings is a useful tool, but it's a terrible master. Greed is still a vice and an addiction.

Not as bad under Bitcoin, but still a danger.


"decentralized" projects

https://m.primal.net/JMRg.png


Seeing a lot of posts on X about crypto people getting robbed on the street here in Brussels. The irony is completely lost on them.


Funny how little we hear about ordinals anymore, now that they're all down 90%+


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #404

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-404


first time in this country

https://m.primal.net/JKqn.jpg


Zero-sum games are for suckers.


Finding out that my next destination is hosting a large "crypto" conference while I'm there... 🤮


no run ups on penalties
offsides only past half way between goal and halfway line
allow people to run full speed on set plays before the ball is kicked
6-team groups with only winner going to semifinal


questions altcoiners ask: what's the next coin that'll pump?

questions Bitcoiners ask: how do I secure this against threats?


Fiat opinions coalesce around power.

The longer you're in Bitcoin the further your opinions will diverge from the.mainstream. that's a good thing.


Lots of posts about founding fathers being young and comparing them to 20-35 year olds today.

Understand most of these guys had private tutors most of their lives, and didn't go to government propaganda school.

What they learned was far more difficult and required far more diligence and accuracy. It was only a few that became the founding fathers. They really don't train kids like this anymore.


Unpopular opinion: BOLT12 will chip away at lnd's dominance or lnd will start supporting BOLT12. Maybe both.


The burgers in Germany are consistently very high quality. Anyone know why?


The best hack for saving money is realizing you don't need to impress anyone.


Seems obvious now, but until yesterday, I didn't know that the Tiannamen Square protests were inspired by all the communist countries falling in Eastern Europe.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #403

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-403


This is why I'm on Nostr, to hear random interesting stories like this.


Ethereum is the coin of perpetual adolescence.
Ordinals are a midlife crisis.


some day people will be amazed that we earned thousands of sats for a single post on Nostr


If you've studied Girard, you can already see what's coming. Kamala Harris will end up the scapegoat, Biden will step aside for health reasons and there will be a new slate for the Dems.

The sacrifice of Harris will be brutal.


Full podcast here, thanks again for having us on nostr:npub10vlhsqm4qar0g42p8g3plqyktmktd8hnprew45w638xzezgja95qapsp42 !

https://youtu.be/4ejrKutuAn4?si=zeG0HPci20eoHfMF


Sound money, strong families.


I'm going to guess that whoever gave the 8 BTC donation to Assange is on Nostr.


hotel room keys that keep demagnetizing have to be some of the most unnecessarily painful UX


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #402

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-402


All companies die eventually. protocols, on the other hand, generally survive.


You don't need to try harder, you need to repent.


so few people are interested in seeing reality as it is.


As destructive, pointless and unnecessary rent seeking tends to be, it is nothing compared to total war.


Who's more cringe, billionaire simps or rlmainstream respectability simps?


Pilgrimage complete. A little disappointing to find that the statue is so close to the Microsoft building.

https://ibb.co/vvzKrV6
https://ibb.co/RyTMw1c


I've never seen someone getting into altcoins, start getting fit, becoming more disciplined, having lots of children. They mostly seem to have and up drinking a lot and getting fat.

altcoins are fiat 2.0


The South wasn't a bunch of innocents, for sure, but the question we need to raise is, did he need to wage war? if you think that he did, then I would argue you haven't studied history enough. Why did chattel slavery end everywhere else before and after the Civil War without a war?

I believe revoking the Fugitive Slave Act and letting the South secede would have ended slavery in the same way it did in Brazil, through economic means and without millions of deaths.


There are still people that think the lockdowns were justified, much like how there were still people in 2007 that thought invading Iraq was justified.


Anyone starting an argument with "we need to compete with X" where X is some shitcoin can be safely ignored.


People love self serving delusions


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Bitcoin Tech Talk 401

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-401


Who's with me?

https://m.primal.net/IoAq.png


1200 gram wagyu

https://m.primal.net/ImcF.jpg


Don't talk about your diet or exercise routine, show me your body.


AI is really just a good search engine. It does not create because it has no telos.


Wish more men in BTC would wear suits and not hoodies/jeans/sneakers.


I've seen this a lot.


Lots of times


The graffiti in Prague bothers me. I strongly suspect it's a remnant of it's communist past where people didn't learn responsibility.


On X you're the product.
On Nostr you're the producer.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #400

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-400


Every centralized app ultimately leverages it's position to make money off bilateral transactions. in other words. rent seeking is a constant temptation for centralized players.


If you don't care about virtue, you will be ruled by vice. Shotcoiners, for example, don't care.


Austrian economists that don't understand programming, technology and cryptography will dismiss Bitcoin or attempt to change Bitcoin because of what they don't understand.

Programmers, cryptographers and technologists will do the same because of the economics that they don't understand.

Stay humble.


This was such a good podcast. The kind that stays with you years in the future.

THANK YOU SO MUCH for this.


As Bitcoin price increases, so does envy about our situation.

I talked to @JohnathanBi about how to deal with it looking at envy through the lens of philosophy.

https://youtu.be/-5Aqo-inaMc


if hurt people hurt people, then journalists must be seriously hurt


I'd like to see Bitcoiners buy profitable businesses and provide value to the communities they're in.


my conviction is stronger than your ability to comply


There's a tremendous amount of capital that Bitcoiners have. We will literally be building the future.


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#BITCOIN Tech Talk #399

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-399


Freedom is paid forward


aisan cultures do orders of 10 in groups of four instead of three.

so western is thousand, million, billion and so on, which are 10^3

east Asian is by 10^4, so the word for 10,000 is mahn in Korean, and 100,000 is 10 mahn and so on.

maybe the reason we have 100,000,000 sartoshis per BTC is because Satoshi was east Asian. 10^8 is much more natural in those cultures.


What do you think happens if Trump is assassinated?


All altcoins ultimately trade on association with Bitcoin's success.


Savings vehicle or jpegs and memecoins? your choice


way more people would travel if border controls weren't so onerous.


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Bitcoin Tech Talk #398

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-398


Nothing like 20 hrs of travel to catch up on some Bitcoin reading.

Also nostr:npub1a2cww4kn9wqte4ry70vyfwqyqvpswksna27rtxd8vty6c74era8sdcw83a's book is a great work of scholarship while being very accessible. I regret not starting earlier.


funny, I do this when I go to church.


I would like to see clients surface older notes based on content. This is something YouTube does very well that Nostr could benefit from.


That's an excellent description of the rent seeking managerial class.

there are others in that class though like:

* unmarried, childless female careerist Karen

* short balding unmarried childless gamma male spending money on only fans

* DEI hire


A picture is worth a thousand words.

This was sent to me by my tour guide from the West Bank of a child waiting at a checkpoint to get to school.

https://m.primal.net/ILWM.jpg


Mindful consumption is way better than haphazard, propaganda driven consumption.

Hard to live that, though.


I find it strange that the reasons I don't like Trump are the things most of his haters give him credit for. Like the lockdowns and the vax.


In this excerpt from my book, I argue that people draw the wrong lessons from Pizza Day. Instead of day dreaming about being a lucky gambler, you should be providing value instead.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/bitcoin-magazine-books/the-wrong-lessons-of-pizza-day


How would jewelry that hides a private key work?


There will be a lot of Bitcoiners that will regretnot having more kids in 20 years


The attacks against Bitcoiners show just how important decentralization is to our collective security.


Most people that we want to orange-pill or even Nostr-pill need to be security-pilled first.


One of the biggest reasons people don't succeed is because they don't know what they want. Yes, everyone wants a lot of money, an attractive partner and so on, but what's your priority? What do you really want? Those other desires, the *results* are generally very vague and therein lies the problem. Your goals are not specific enough and your vision not clear.

That's why you lack passion. Because it hasn't come from you, it's come from envy of others.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #397

https://open.substack.com/pub/jimmysong/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-397


Using a Daylight computer is changing how I spend my time.


The monetary system sets you up to be fragile.


From what I understand of the protocol, no. That's one of the main features is that the fact of its privacy preservation is hidden in what look like completely normal transactions.


My Nostr key is mine in the same way my Bitcoin private keys are mine.

We own these things in ways that are qualitatively different than anything else. We have property rights that exceed that of physical possessions.

This still blows my mind.


As a techie, it's easy to overestimate peoples' ability to use technology. My wife spent an hour helping my mother in law figure out how to check her text messages to log into a two-factor auth account.


I talked to @AnjanKatta about our relationship to Technology. He's the founder and CEO of @daylightco and is building devices that will reset this dysfunction.

#Bitcoin Fixes This #124

https://rumble.com/v4um1o5-bitcoin-fixes-this-124-relating-to-technology-with-anjan-katta.html


Sad to say, but IQ has a big part to do with it.


Less built around engagement, more built around ideas. Formatted for quick consumption, not continuous consumption. Less built around links and lots of good exit points so I can do other stuff. Make it easy for me to save long-form stuff for me to read later.

Basically, more contemplation, less reaction.


I wonder how many bad design patterns have been built into most Nostr clients. I'd pay for one that's built to serve me rather than the other way around.


Our enemy has always been, and always will be, those that abuse their authority, to steal, jail and murder.


Has anyone made some sort of Nostr dating app? Every single guy I talk to seems very frustrated with the centralized dating apps that currently exist. Wouldn't one that isn't so exploitive do better?

But then again, the big problem to solve is, how do you get the single women on here?


As an engineer, doing something under duress is likely to have a lot more problems later on. This is called technical debt and you pile it on when you're doing things reactively and urgently.

Like most fiat things, technical debt doesn't really get paid off in most places because every non-engineer hates spending resources paying it.

But Bitcoin is different because it's not built reactively or urgently. It's not fiat and we do pay off technical debt. That's why it's got the record that it has, especially compared to altcoins. Something like Ethereum 2.0 is building something from scratch because there's too much technical debt.

Bitcoin is not going to imitate fiat practices. We will make things in due course, with sufficient review and consideration.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #396

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-396


15 years of payments vs. savings.
Savings has won every.single.time.


Back when I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with computers. This was back in the 80's when they weren't that common, but my parents saw that I really liked them, so they got me one for my 9th birthday. It was a Commodore 16, not the 64 which had lots great games, but the 16, which had like 3 games, total.

Having nothing else to do with it, I learned how to program simple programs in line-basic. Stuff like this:

10 print "hello"
20 print "world"
30 goto 10

Honestly, I didn't know many commands, so goto loops were about the most I could do.

My mom somehow found a teacher for me to take computer lessons. She was doing something with networking computers and I guess had graduated with a degree in Computer Science. She was also pregnant.

I took lessons for about 5 months (until my teacher gave birth) where I learned stuff like variables, prompts and so on to make a really basic text interface. It was the first time I felt like I could make something useful with this device.

Anyway, I tell this story because that's what a good mom does. My mom was a recent immigrant who had no idea what computers were, but she found the right teacher for me so I could develop my talents. For all you moms out there, this is one of the best gifts you can give your kids.

Thanks mom.


Malthisiam idiocy about population led to Marx's theories.

The neo-Malthusians like the WEF and Bill Gates are bringing about a neo-Marxist state.


I can't decide whether the people complaining about lightning are perfectionist engineers or disgruntled latent altcoiners.


OK, question for  nostr:npub1getal6ykt05fsz5nqu4uld09nfj3y3qxmv8crys4aeut53unfvlqr80nfm now that I've hooked up primal to Alby, I can't see who's zapped me and it makes all my posts seem like there aren't any zaps on it, even when I'm receiving them. How do I fix this?


Inside of you are two wolves.

The one that wants to be lazy and rent-seek.
And the one that wants to beat up that other wolf.


I talked to @Matthewlysiak about Fiat food, the control that ig companies have over food narratives, health and more!

Bitcoin Fixes This #123

https://rumble.com/v4ttnf2-bitcoin-fixes-this-123-fiat-food-with-matthew-lysiak.html


The only thing we have to fear are authorities that tell us there's nothing to fear.


https://m.primal.net/IEcg.jpg
# On Memecoins

The VC token industry is not what it was in 2017 or even 2021. Back then the newbies to the "crypto" space trusted them to give recommendations on what to buy and what to not buy. Fortunes were made by crypto VCs as almost anything they promoted would be bought by the gullible public and subsequently pump. They made money on all kinds of tokens, from EOS, to IOTA, WAX and STEEM. Those were the golden days when they had influence in the market.

The crypto VC influence has significantly waned the last few years and the days of making 30x on an ICO are long over. Their reputation since has been sinking faster than Bill Cosby's, as the market that they built their funds on got away from them. In a sense, though, they deserved it, as pretty much everything they pumped did horribly, and the promises of these tokens about as likely to be fulfilled as a Kardashian wedding vow. The run they had was unbelievable, fueled by a ZIRP environment and insane FOMO, but when the altcoin market started going south, their prospects crashed along with them.

## The Demise of VC Tokens

Despite their struggles, Venture Capital benefit from the fact that it's a lagging industry. They typically raise the next fund while the iron is hot, and can raise crazy amounts during these bull cycles. They can survive a long time on their 2% yearly management fee, even as their 20% of profit looks increasingly unlikely. Crypto funds have all done terrible the last few years and most of them are deeply underwater.

The few coin pumps that they've tried have more or less died before they had any chance to pump, BitClout and WorldCoin being two notable examples. VCs poured a lot of money into these things, hoping to bring back the good old days, only to find that the market no longer trusted them. And who could blame the market? The coins they pumped previously were down significantly in USD terms, and in BTC terms, they looked like the Venezuelan Bolivar.

## The Rise of Memecoins

But that doesn't mean altcoins went away. Memecoins obsoleted the VCs and ultimately brought some more honesty to the Neitzchean will-to-power games that were always being played. The original memecoin, of course, was Dogecoin, and Elon Musk pumped that thing like a hot air balloon, and surprisingly, the market followed. What Dogecoin did was to lay bare what was actually going on in the altcoin markets. The narrative didn't matter and it was all a power game, a Keynesian Beauty Contest, and mob rule. These "blockchain" use-cases were about as realistic as a Milli Vanilli comeback, so in a sense, the altcoin market reduced to its essence.

Dogecoin was also notable because it cut out VCs. It was a retail phenomenon and VCs for the most part, didn't get into it. How could they? These are people that supposedly figure out what the future is going to look like and invest accordingly. There's no expertise, no due diligence and no market research needed in a memecoin pump. VCs don't have any special access or insight in the memecoin market and they didn't provide anything of value to the pumpers. They got cut out as middlemen.

Doge was followed by Shibu Inu and its success rapidly rendered VCs completely unnecessary. The game that was being played didn't require large injections of capital, just the appropriate buzz and enough marketing to achieve escape velocity. Shibu pumped purely as a meme, copying Dogecoin and it similarly required no VC pumping to succeed. And with that, VCs became the cable news of the altcoin industrial complex, where the only attention they garnered was from their deluded peers.

## A New Cycle

We're now in an environment where memecoins have become the altcoin pump and dump of choice. Indeed, just about the only coins this cycle that are pumping are either memecoins or platforms for memecoins.

For what it's worth, memecoins seem to have a similar dynamic as other altcoins, in that a few mainstays seem to hold significant mind share while everything else dies a quick death. What's different is that because these memecoins don't have large marketing budgets, they get to their dump phase much quicker.

All this is good. The altcoiners are in a sense a lot more honest this time around. There's no grand promises of crazy applications using blockchain, or disrupting some industry. The people that are getting into memecoins know that it's a gambling vehicle and that they're playing a greater fool game. There's little deception in PepeCoin or DogWifHat because they're not claiming any utility or even a future.

And don't feel sorry for the VCs. They are reaping the rotten fruit of hype and fraud that they've sowed. Many have destroyed their reputations pumping useless stuff and the fact that no one is listening to them is the market functioning properly.

There's also a lot less waste of developer time. Instead of altcoin platforms wasting developer time on barely working, insecure projects, they're eschewing utility altogether for "fun." The entire altcoin industry has been about gambling and now, everyone knows.

In the end, memecoins make Bitcoin look better and better.


What's the use of FU money if you don't say FU?

Do something with your Bitcoin that you want to do that the establishment does not.

This is much harder than it sounds.


Watching the Tom Brady roast, it made me think that there's a deep cultural ritual that was being performed.


Free issue for first Monday of the month!

US/China Convergence, Taxonomy of Evil, Too much Gamification, Testnet Griefing, BitEscrow, BOLT12 Support, More Companies pulling out of the US and more!

#Bitcoin Tech Talk #395

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-395


Fiat has trained its subjects' brains to think that wishing leads to results. Even Hollywood reinforces it. Have you noticed the trope? That only when a superhero loses control and acts with full _emotional_ intensity, do the magic colored lights start to spark from their hands. You can see political activists trying to emulate this power, to poor effect.

Fiat is a modernist simulation of a god. It surreptitiously steals energy from one sector of the economy, and gives to the true followers who make the most convincing supplications.


Bitcoin doesn't care what features you want, but anyone is free to build tools.

Complaining about something that doesn't exist as if it's just a matter of politics is a very fiat way of thinking.


Some day, we'll be able to leave a QR code and go.

nostr:note1r7v07rnuaptf4xat69pp2meeypr5jyp3j36gatvyr7vs3jklg7qsvtx5l4


Churchill was the worst PM of all time.


Worst three presidents of all time:

Lincoln, Wilson, FDR


Oxymoron: fat OG bitcoiner


Easy to do if you have a third party involved (they just record your config)

What I want is for this setup without a trusted third party and connecting to my own server.


This man is Jared Bernstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

He does not understand the monetary system that he's advising on.

https://m.primal.net/ICpT.mp4


Bitcoiners without Nostr accounts are a bit sus to me now.


We already have decentralized IDs. They're called npubs.


This, too, shall pass.


Decentralized tech is not for the marginal user.


Nostr generally has poor discovery. I don't have many moments on here where I find new people to follow that I don't already know from other platforms.

Thankfully, being decentralized, the client that comes up with more effective algos will have an advantage and will get copied. I just wish there were more interesting data-driven attempts at discovery being tried.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #394

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-394


Man it must suck to be a company having to navigate the SDNY DoJ right now.


Your real life begins when you realize you don't need "their" approval.


There's a big difference between Bitcoin "owners" and Bitcoin Maximalists.

The vast majority of people that own Bitcoin don't care much about the KYC requirements the US government is attempting to add.

The vast majority of Bitcoin Maximalists do.


There's almost nothing that makes me feel as good as doing a hard workout.


Image is nothing to the didactic learner.
Image is everything to the status seeker.


I heard that John Stewart is on the Daily Show again.

I'd bet the only people that watch him are the people that watched him 20 years ago. That is, in their attempt to make leftism "cool" again with the young, they've inadvertently shown how outdated they actually are.


Bitcoin is the perfect tool for charging money to people that want the service but don't want to give up any personal information. To my knowledge VPNs are about the only service that's really embraced this.


We'd like to think that when we're neutral it's the result of wisdom and humility. But if we're honest, much of the time, neutrality is really the result of cowardice and laziness.


Instead of moving away from gmail (another service, making your own mail server, etc), is there a way to move out of email altogether?


Fiat stupidity goes away when reality chokes it out like a submission specialist in an MMA fight.


For free subscribers: Financialization, Blue Church, Organ Donation Bureaucracy, Halving Fees, Destroying Rent Seeking and more!

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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #393

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-393


COVID lockdowns, Ukraine funding, Israel funding

It's rare to meet people that are against all three outside of Bitcoin. Shows how prone to propaganda normies are.


Turns out the halving event was a scambrian explosion.

2000 altcoins minted or being minted in just 14 hours using Runes.


## Update:

Apparently, there's a minting process that was added to the Runes protocol, so you have to first commit to the symbol using a hash and then reveal some number of blocks later. I was going off of the initial blog post, but a few people have pointed me to the update of the protocol because they saw this same problem. Thus, the one dollar auction dynamic does not happen, though there's plenty of altcoins being launched. There's already over [1000 new altcoins](https://unisat.io/runes/list) either minted or in the process of being minted on it.


https://m.primal.net/HxhK.png

# Halving Fee Chaos

The Bitcoin halving is an anticipated event, one of those Bitcoin holidays that happen every once in a while. Along with Soft Fork Activation and various financial instrument introduction days, it's one of those not-quite-predictable days that occur every few years which give Bitcoiners reason to pay attention and mainstream media to speculate.

This year's halving was much anticipated, as halvings usually are, but we had a bit of an incident that requires some further explanation. The block subsidy decreased from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC on block 840,000 as expected, but what wasn't expected was the 37.626 BTC in fees that came along with it. To give some context, that's easily the highest ratio of fees to block subsidy that Bitcoin has *ever* had. [One transaction](https://mempool.space/tx/152b928e97bb9e874da1bd4abdf766ae0cdc7a2f260dad5542967cb414c58489) paid nearly 8 BTC in fees by itself.

## More Fees

It wasn't just block 840,000 that had high fees, over the next 5 blocks, we had fees of 4.486, 6.99, 16.068, 24.008 and 29.821 BTC respectively. The fees are the highest it's ever been. This situation in Bitcoin is unprecedented.

Up to this point in Bitcoin's history a block whose fees were higher than block subsidy were pretty rare. There were a few in the 50 and 25 BTC eras, but these were mistakes by the user (usually forgetting to put in a change address) and almost all of the fee came from a single error transaction. In the 12.5 BTC subsidy era, there were a few transactions toward the end of 2017 when the cumulative fees exceeded the 12.5 subsidy. In the just-ended 6.25 BTC subsidy era, there were many blocks during the ordinals craze which exceeded the 6.25 BTC subsidy.

Still, these were relatively rare, and most blocks even in the most recently completed era mostly didn't exceeded 1.5 BTC. Yet in this new era of 3.125 BTC subsidy, every single block as of this writing (block 840018) has had fees exceed the subsidy, some by many multiples. So what happened? Why was the halving block getting so much in fees?

## Runes

The reason has to do with a new protocol called Runes. It's yet another colored coins protocol on top of Bitcoin that Casey Rodarmor designed back in [September of 2023](https://rodarmor.com/blog/runes/). The main idea is to allow coin issuance on Bitcoin that uses the UTXO set natively.

Now to back up a bit, colored coins have been around for a long time. The main idea is that you can "color" certain Bitcoin transaction outputs as meaning something in addition to the Bitcoin amount in the output. It could be another "asset" and issued as a token. The first implementation of such a protocol happened 11 *years* ago in 2013 and there have been many attempts since, including MasterCoin (renamed Omni), CounterParty, and more recently, RGB, Taro Assets and BRC-20.

As Rodarmor states in his blog, his motivation for making another protocol is to bring some of the asset issuing from other chains to Bitcoin. To make the launch of this protocol more interesting, Rodarmor decided to start the issuance on block 840,000, leading to the chaos we saw.

## Simplification vs Game Theory

Casey Rodarmor is also the creator of ordinals, and he took one of the concepts, which was to name assets using the capital latin alphabet on Runes. This is a normal fine choice, but what happens when there's a conflict? If two assets have the same name, how do we distinguish between them?

To simplify things, the protocol just looks up what assets exist already and if the name conflicts with something that exists, then the new asset isn't issued. This indeed simplifies the client and gives a global unique name to each asset. Unfortunately, it also makes for some terrible incentives.

## Sniping Asset Issuance

The first incentive problem is that if the transaction issuing the asset is sent out to the Bitcoin mempool, then as that transaction is gossiped to nodes around the network, other observers can snipe the name by getting the transaction in earlier.

Now "earlier" in Bitcoin is a strict concept. Blocks are ordered and transactions within a block are ordered. Whichever comes first gets the symbol and the asset issuance. But if you want to squat on a good symbol name, you can just look for mempool transactions that are attempting to create a new asset and create your own with a bigger fee. That's the essence of sniping.

What's really terrible about a situation like this is that *both* transactions will likely go into the block, but only the first will successfully issue the asset. The second will not issue the asset but *still pay the fee*.

Miners generally order transactions by fee rate, so a higher fee likely means that they'll get to issue the asset. I say likely, because there's a second incentive problem here I'll discuss later. But game-theoretically, both participants are incentivized to increase fees continually to one-up each other. The dynamic is similar to the [One Dollar Auction](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction), where participants end up making rational choices, but end up with an irrational result (like paying $1.50 for $1). Every loser pays lots in fees for nothing.

## Second order Game Theory

Now given this first-order incentive playing out, it's not a surprise that a lot of issuers purposefully put in a very high fee initially to discourage anyone from trying to snipe the symbol. After all, if your sniping attempt fails, then you lose out on the fees you tried to snipe with. There's also a significant uptick in the usage of RBF for this reason, so that you have the option to one-up the sniper and the sniper to do the same to the issuer.

Note that RBF isn't useful here to *get out* of paying the fee, as a replacement transaction has to pay more than the previous transaction in fees. Either way, the miner ends up with the fees.

Now back to the miner's role. The miner can, if it so desires, give preference to the *lower* fee transaction by including it earlier in the block. Indeed, the incentive is to give miners off-band fees if possible to order transactions in such a way as to win by not revealing how much you've paid. Miners in this protocol have a lot of leverage.

## Conclusion

Runes have resulted in some really high fees, though it's hard to know if the design was intentional or unintentional. What we do know is that Runes have been hyped up for the last few months and have been anticipated for a while, and certainly being one of the first assets issued under the protocol has some marketing value for the eventual goal of getting them listed on an exchange.

Sadly, in addition to the normal scamming of altcoins being completely centralized, there is a deeper cost in terms of block space congestion, where fees of 1000 sats/vbyte are currently not enough to get into certain blocks. The Runes asset issuance has overridden almost every other use case at the moment.

That said, the current rate of Runes issuance is completely unsustainable. Just in the first 18 blocks, there's been over $20M in fees spent, most of that in Runes issuance. At this rate, Runes issuers would be spending $150M a day or $1B a week. I honestly can't see them doing this for much longer than a month or two. In the meantime, it must be great to be a miner finding these blocks.


Amazing how no one has done a cover of this song with Bitcoin-related lyrics.


Five-hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes. (is a year)
Four years is two million one hundred thousand three thousand eight hundred forty minutes. (add one thousand four hundred forty minutes for the leap day)

That's two hundred ten thousand three hundred eighty four blocks if they average ten minutes.

Not quite four years, but close.


You can get my newest book Fiat Ruins Everything on audio and pay with Bitcoin!

https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/collections/books/products/fiat-ruins-everything-audiobook


Why does it feel like every elite person is for both wars?


The most freeing moment of your life is when you recognize that you'll never fit in with the elite, that they don't want you and that you'll never be good enough for them.


Bitcoin helps me to appreciate and accept reality instead of trying to change it toward my preferences.

Fiat money deludes you into thinking you can change reality through politics.


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#Bitcoin Tech Talk #392

https://jimmysong.substack.com/p/bitcoin-tech-talk-392


Here's the beautiful thing. The market will try all sorts of features. Some will succeed, some will not. But what Nostr doesn't have is some corporate chain of command that innovators have to go through to get their feature approved.

So it should result in weirder and more interesting features and something will stick. Time is on our side.

nostr:note19aldr26lyw2lqatcgqscyt3kpq76hcpwtwmglypvqqgx3m27fsaswa8rr6


The difference between "digital" collectibles and physical collectibles is that with the latter, the creators can't change your item, revoke your item, or censor your item after the fact.


There's deep danger to denominating in dollars.


Why do I need to provide so much info?


Where's my primal lightning wallet?!?!?


# Privacy is a Social Good

When we think about privacy, it's usually in the context of an individual being able to hide something, usually from the government, but also from lots of other entities. It's a security issue in the greater discourse because there are bad people that can and will use information about you to reveal embarrassing information, blackmail, or even steal from you.

This is not just true of criminals, but also of companies and even governments. They can and do use information about you to propagandize you or demand taxes from you. These are, of course, understandable concerns and good reasons to want privacy.

## Status Games

But there's another aspect of privacy which is just as important, perhaps more important than these and it's the social dynamic at play.

Privacy, you see, is a necessary buffer between people to keep order. This is because people are, in the end social creatures and in every social group, there is a constant jockeying about for position, what I would call status games being played.

The problem with status games is that they are by nature zero-sum. Whoever is at the top is usually both admired and envied, while whoever is at the bottom is generally pitied. This is especially true when the participants can change their position, whether through achievement, violence or politics.

## Envy and Resentment

Too much clarity on the status of individuals in the group causes strife in the form of envy. This is not just for people at the bottom, whose envy of everyone above them is understandable, but also for those near the top, who likewise will envy people above them. A big enough group of disaffected people in a status game will cause some form of revolution. In other words, strictly ordered status games are not stable.

Thus, too much information sharing is bound to cause bitterness and resentment which in turn causes unstable organizations because humans are very status-aware. Marxism tries to solve this by making everyone equal, but of course, this doesn't work because the entity which controls this equality ends up being higher status than everyone else. You cannot have full transparency and social order. There will be too many dissatisfied people.

This is where privacy is important because it gives groups ambiguity about where each individuals stand. For example, most social groups in the US have as a default, social standing that corresponds with their level of wealth. The richer you are, the higher on the status ladder you are and the poorer, the lower. A very strict pecking order where everyone knew exactly how many assets everyone had would breed a significant amount of envy and resentment. Any group where this level of transparency was required would be unpleasant to be in strictly for that reason. We need a level of ambiguity to socially interact in a reasonable way.

## Decentralized Status Games

That's not to say that everything is completely obscured. Most people that have money signal in various ways, with their clothing, car, topics of conversation and so on. They signal with various levels of loudness and reveal status information to the people that they're targeted at. One of the features of "old money" people is that they're very good at identifying other "old money" people while simultaneously hiding their wealth from people that are not as rich as they are. In a sense, this is a survival mechanism because envy, bitterness and resentment are not pleasant to deal with and oftentimes dangerous.

Privacy is the ability to disclose information at our discretion, not someone else's and that's exactly what happens in groups to keep the peace. Privacy has deep social value because it gives individuals the discretion to reveal where they are relatively in status. That protects not just them from attack, but also protects the group from upheaval. The less envy, bitterness and resentment there is, the more cohesive the group can be.

## Conclusion

Privacy is a necessary part of civilization because cooperation is hard and nothing destroys cooperation like bitterness and envy. And those two in turn are caused by too much clarity on status. Privacy is what adds ambiguity and empowers individuals to calibrate group dynamics.

Privacy: it's not just for cypherpunks anymore.


ETFs are rent-seekers.


At some point in the future, I'd love to be a patron for good code.