there are other shirts?


gm sir


Praise bee 🙏


calvin

Kubernetes and magic internet money @ Lightning Labs ⚡🍊


As a US user, this theme has me contemplating navigating the hurdles and making the switch to Phoenix.


One day, it would be nice to see a well-capitalized challenge to the Bank Secrecy Act on 4th amendment grounds.

The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they saw that people need a license to transmit money, or that the government thinks it has the right to surveil and censor everyone’s money and transactions.

The default is privacy. To infringe on someone’s privacy should require probable cause and come with checks and balances. Ubiquitous surveillance shouldn’t be the default, since it enables tyranny. https://image.nostr.build/59d050b8cf8f75a3d469e83812a0be6681bcad506e63bc0bf4417cfece14d0b8.jpg


The entire developed world tax apparatus that was built in the 20th century and extends into the 21st century depends on ubiquitous financial surveillance.

They are not going to give that up without a fight. I have been saying at a number of conferences and podcasts that privacy is the main battleground for the next decade.

Back in the 19th century and before, money was mostly private. There were plenty of dictators but there was no major method of surveilling all transactions. Therefore things like broad income taxes were untenable to enforce.

But in the 20th century as money increasingly moved around at the speed of light, people needed bank accounts to keep up. It wasn’t all forced on them; they chose it. And those bank accounts were centralized, surveillable, and ruggable.

This allowed authorities to switch to income taxes, which require ubiquitous financial surveillance to work. And ultimately it allowed them to switch to fiat currency altogether.

Now in the 21st century, Bitcoin and its various layers allow people to hold and move around money globally without permissioned banks. They can do so peer to peer, or they can do so with custodians and open layers, etc. Unlike the base layer of fiat, the base layer of bitcoin is permissionless.

But this represents a threat to the entire current system of taxation and financial control. If bitcoin and particularly various private methods on top of it were to be adopted at massive scale, the entire tax structure and other things would need to reshape themselves around that reality. And so they won’t make it easy; they will try to criminalize financial privacy as much as possible while the network is still pretty small.

The only solutions are to 1) make privacy tech so ubiquitous that it can’t be isolated and can spread organically in a distributed way and 2) to apply legal pressure when possible so that governments sort of have to operate within the bounds of their own law, like the 1st and 4th amendments.


Money used to be private by default.

Once it became widely surveilled in the 20th century, attempts to make money more private again were generally criminalized. nostr:note14csdgnum2xkte2d46n2ru6e30eshfvncldqf6vvnp88kj0xf5x3qfwsh7a


Reminder that “money laundering” is a fake, fiat-era crime.

It presupposes the state has the right to know nearly every financial transaction made by its citizens, despite the 4th Amendment.

It has only been a crime since the 1986 Money Laundering Control Act. And the term itself only goes back to the 1970s, a typical case of wtfhappenedin1971.com. https://image.nostr.build/44dbb9966b80c5b242636e991e2ff9d182304ee757c035a0a1df90b3a6bc4aed.jpg


As I have said for a long time, money is superordinate to laws. In other words, when money is broken, laws are changed to protect the winners of the  manipulation of money, rather than citizens.

The recent news is only one more step in the inevitable fight to centralize everything…..”in the name of protecting you”

A dystopian control structure preying on you by pretending to be the free market.

PS - Been expecting this and a lot more.
I stand ready.

Game on!


🚨 Minneapolis Bitcoiners Meetup TOMORROW  🚨

WHEN: Tuesday, April 16th @ 6PM

WHAT: Halving-themed bitcoin-only meetup. No speaker. Spread the word. Bring a friend.

WHERE: O'Shaughnessy Distillery in Minneapolhttps://m.primal.net/Hvfg.mp4 is (upstairs)

DM me for an invite to the telegram group.


More details tonight at the Minneapolis meetup. The invite code to the Fedimint will be posted. Might be kicking the tires with the local crew there to start. https://x.com/bquittem/status/1749922489038225423?s=46&t=MFT2ghQUgULd-IfrDfXBgg


Joining an existing mint is pretty easy. Setting one up is a bit more difficult, but came across some helpful docs here: https://github.com/fedimint/fedimint/blob/master/docs/setup-docs.md.


Still ironing out some details before opening up broader access. If you’re free this Tuesday night, nostr:npub1zswjq57t99f444z6485xtn0vfyjjfu8vqpnyj6uckuyem2446evqnxgc6x is speaking on Fedimint and Scaling Bitcoin. The invite code to the Fedimint will be posted there. https://x.com/bquittem/status/1749922489038225423?s=46&t=MFT2ghQUgULd-IfrDfXBgg https://image.nostr.build/237ae4ef34fd5693f5b55352c5e6e7c24f7e20d5ccef3d48017645dc595d9122.jpg


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

Mutiny + Fedimint is slick


Unlike our hometown boy Kashkari, we have a finite amount of e-cash at the Minneapolis Fed https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4vmZSPkFQ


First successful e-cash receipt on mainnet for newly inaugurated Minneapolis Fed(imint)! https://image.nostr.build/15e09ad8ba23d34f2a8694a42e381137df8b9867fdb08cbac13e60041d198553.jpg


Running fedimint


The Minneapolis Fed is born 🙌🔥