Wired used to be a publication firmly on the side of Liberty and the potential good of technology and privacy. Now it is nothing more than a laughing stock publication peddling FUD and totalitarianism as desirable.
How the times have changed.
Gab is doing nothing other than fulfilling the prophecies of the Cypherpunks, standing for core American values and people's right to publish.
Wired on the other hand, stands for censorship, central government control, mass surveillance of the innocent, the ripping up of The Constitution and every other evil that they used to be against.
It's pitiful.
Gab is supported by all real Americans, and that's why it is growing, because as real Americans start to detect the threat to their liberty, they seek a place where they can exercise it, especially their freedom of speech, which is a guaranteed right...something Wired seems to have forgotten.
Very sad!
https://x.com/basedtorba/status/1803810333900861863?s=46&t=LNe8MN2dQUj_88yB-puY1Ahttps://m.primal.net/Irnd.jpg
Skeef is 100% correct. You will buy Bitcoin and you will be happy.
And don't wait for your favorite Bitcoin Influencer to tell you this is available around the corner from you, or that it has even happened. You will not hear it from them.
Very soon, Azteco will be available all over the USA, and we are doing this so that the normie can buy Bitcoin in a trivially easy manner, totally bypassing the 1st generation Bitcoiner thinking and methods.
This is the way we will transform Bitcoin distribution, with the aid of the best Bitcoin wallets and a new (to the consumer), better way of thinking about what Bitcoin actually is and how you should get it.
When this happens, Bitcoin will be essentially ubiquitous. It will be everywhere, like McDonalds.
And there are no “McDonald’s Conferences” or people wearing McDonald’s t-shirts worn by anyone but people who work at McDonald’s.
Bitcoin as Burgers and Fries. Bitcoin as Potato Chips.
Bitcoin as Steak Frits.
Bitcoin as a Pint of Bitter.
https://m.primal.net/IqsQ.jpg
"Get bitcoin off exchanges"
And THEN WHAT? Get your Bitcoin WHERE?
"And get your Bitcoin from Azteco"
There, I said if for you/me!
Don't compromise when you buy Bitcoin. There is absolutely no reason why you should use an exchange if you are not super rich or a business.
If you claim to be a "pleb" you don't get your Bitcoin from an exchange; that's what Patrician, aristocracy class like Jamie Dimon does, not a common pleb who wants to "Stay Humble and Stack Sats".
HONESTLY!
"PLEB IS AS PLEB DOES", AMIRITE?
LOL!
http://azte.co
Bitcoin is not "censorship resistant". It is a database. In order for others not to be able to stop you from using Bitcoin in the way that you desire, you have to use the correct tools.
Adam talks about "Clown Show" and "Self Custody" but he doesn't tell you how to do it, even to the extent of sending you to a single link.
"Remove yourself"? HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
Even the words he is using don't help you find out how to do it. hmmmm, it's 2024, let's ask ChatGPT!
* ** ***
"How do I remove myself from the political clown show?"
Removing yourself from the political scene can involve several strategies, depending on how deeply you want to disengage. Here are some steps you can take:
1. Limit Media Consumption: Reduce your intake of news and political commentary from TV, social media, and news websites. Unfollow or mute accounts and channels that focus on political content.
2. Social Media Detox: Take breaks from social media or limit your usage. Consider using apps that restrict your time on these platforms.
3. Engage in Other Interests: Focus on hobbies, activities, and interests that you enjoy and that do not involve politics. This can help shift your attention and energy.
4. Community Involvement: Get involved in non-political community groups, clubs, or volunteer organizations. This can provide a sense of purpose and connection without the political stress.
5. Mindfulness and Meditation: Practice mindfulness, meditation, or other stress-relief techniques to help manage any anxiety or frustration related to politics.
6. Avoid Political Discussions: Politely steer conversations away from politics with friends, family, and colleagues. It’s okay to set boundaries on what topics you’re comfortable discussing.
7. Curate Your Environment: Surround yourself with people and environments that support your desire to disengage from politics. This might involve spending more time with like-minded individuals or in settings that don’t emphasize political discourse.
By taking these steps, you can create a more peaceful and politically-neutral personal environment.
* ** ***
..."Meditation"
Well, that's not going to help much is it? If I could meditate to store Bitcoin, who would need hardware?
Oh dear! https://x.com/adamobrien_/st/adamobrien_/status/1802683201950777767
This is 100% not true, and is only believed by computer illiterate Bitcoin Cult members. Browsers, WhatsApp, Signal and other tools prove this, and if you don’t understand why, you don’t understand how things work. And that’s OK. It proves you don’t need to understand how things work to use Bitcoin!
Bitcoin is absolutely not "Resistance Money". The people who falsely characterise it in this stupid way overlap perfectly with people who have never encrypted their email and who don't understand what the lock in their browser means.
Bitcoin is perfectly ordinary, and a natural extension of what you already do every day without even realising it.
Bitcoin is no more "Resistance Money" than WhatsApp is "Resistance Phone Calls". The stupidity of this mischaracterization, even over ten years after Bitcoin was released is breathtaking.
And who do these people think they're helping by misleading people in this way? They already believe, incorrectly, that Bitcoin is a tool to "(((RESIST))) OPPRESSION" with and not a mundane tool for everyone every day in every context money is used.
By mischaracterising Bitcoin as some sort of challenge to authority, legitimate or illigitimate, they're fomenting resistance to it and not helping spread it. If they understood that spreading Bitcoin helps it help the needy, they would not talk like this....
But what do you expect from people who believe that Bitcoin needs "policy" (PROTIP: it doesn't).
Thankfully, despite these INGSOCS, Bitcoin will do exactly what it was designed to do. I can say this because I know something (and many things; that's now proven) that they don't.
And...I'M NOT TELLING.
https://m.primal.net/IkrW.jpg
BEAUTYON'S 21 RULES FOR BITCOIN AS A TOTAL REMEDY FOR SAYLOR'S 21 RULES FOR BITCOIN.
1/ You don’t need to understand Bitcoin to be able to use it.
2/ Nobody cares what you are for or against in maths.
3/ Nobody needs to grasp Bitcoin to do what Bitcoin was designed to do.
4/ Bitcoin is not powered by chaos. Bitcoin is extremely orderly. It is fiat and evil KYC Statists who are for chaos and murder.
5/ Bitcoin has nothing to do with gambling. Bad analogies are anti-Bitcoin.
6/ Bitcoin can’t protect you.
7/ No one owns Bitcoin. It is not an asset or a coin.
8/ The price of Bitcoin doesn’t matter.
9/ Bitcoin is not about winning and losing.
10/ The Matrix is a Science Fiction movie, not reality.
11/ Computer illiterates think knowledge is required to use Bitcoin.
12/ Bitcoin does not destroy models. It enforces them.
13/ Orange Pills are toxic. Don't eat them.
14/ Statists who pretend to be Bitcoiners think there is no problem with fiat. They are gravely mistaken. Don't follow them.
15/ Bitcoin is for everyone. On Bitcoin’s terms, not the Statist’s terms.
16/ Learn how to to think.
17/ Bitcoin can’t change people. It is not LSD.
18/ Laser eyes on avatars can’t make Bitcoin change the world.
19/ Bitcoin is not a person or a pronoun. It does not need and cannot understand “respect”.
20/ Sell your Bitcoin when you need to. Don’t be stupid always.
21/ Stretch out with your hate. Hate the state.
Would you rather have fun or be parachuting into Tehran Matt? Sorry to break the news to you, but at some point you have to grow up. This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun theres always X-Box for that, right?
An interesting micro trend is playing out thanks to GEPOTUS signalling support for Bitcoin mining happening in the USA. This character, who is a, "...teacher and Bitcoiner. Author of A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin.", is s member of the class of "Bitcoiner" for whom everything is academic and not real.
This character does not mine Bitcoin, does not sell access to it, does not develop software that runs with it, doesn't design, conceive or do anything that means taking risk.
He has written a book. About "Progressivism" (Socialism) and Bitcoin.
It's another case of someone trying to shoehorn their bad philosophies into something that everyone agrees is one of the most exciting events ever across several disciplines.
This book is not like Saifedean's crucial and essential book, which has a clear purpose and utility in that it tells the truth about economics and Bitcoin to the ignorant simultaneously and very successfully; this is a book designed to steer Bitcoin thinking into Progressivism, to mischaracterize Bitcoin and do all the other fallacious things Progressives do and slobber over.
There are other people like this; the "Bitcoin Socialists", the "Community" obsessives and the hyphenated Bitcoiners who plop their self assigned category name as prefix to the word word Bitcoin, thinking that that's any sort of requirement to use and benefit from it or associate with it.
Sad!
And there are many people who think like this. They on the surface can appear to be Bitcoiners, but in fact all they're doing is reciting from the Bitcoin Cult Liturgy. You've seen them do it most commonly as they try to describe Bitcoin. There are words you must use in the right order to be recognised as a member, and they all do it. I've overheard it whilst wading in a swimming pool on a blistering day in El Zonte. Incredible brainwashing.
The illusion breaks however when these same people talk about sound money and "Bitcoin only" and then start promoting Ordinals. They can't understand why Ordinals are toxic to Bitcoin because they never understood what Bitcoin was for, and are using at the most downstream part of it; it's just another excuse for having a rave up...
...and there's nothing wrong with having a party.
There is nothing wrong with having a wrong opinion either, especially in a world where Bitcoin is the only money, because in that world, opinions don't matter, Progressivism doesn't matter, Socialism doesn't matter; only Bitcoin Matters, and having Bitcoin, and being able to obtain it and then use it.
Jason can believe whatever he wants. He can vote Biden. He can vote Kennedy. None of that matters now that Bitcoin exists...barring WW3, which wipes all the chess pieces off the board. The only thing that matters is the rapid dissemination of Bitcoin to everyone on Earth. PERIOD.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is a Real thing. Simply mentioning "Orange Man" to these people drives them berserk with rage; they're victims of Mainstream Media Programming, and of course, they will never admit that they've been brainwashed. Why would they? How could they?
Being "Bitcoiners", they've been gulled into believing that they're a breed apart from everyone, and that's very probably not true, since their opinions are completely pedestrian and malleable like the lowest of the lowest common denominator peasant; blowing like a leaf in the wind at the fetid breath of Rachel Maddow and MSNBC whispered into their earwax smeared ear holes.
Once again, you will never be rid of these people, Bitcoiner. They are here for the duration of your life. Your job is to protect yourself and your family from them by accumulating Bitcoin, spreading Bitcoin as quickly as possible and using those actions to create a defensive wall to stop their votes from stealing your life from you and your children.
You may not like the sound of all of this, and believe that (because this is the way you are) everything you read like this is posturing and said merely for effect. Projection is the base and vulgar fundamental technique the lowbrow mind blind and ignorant use to protect themselves and their threadbare mentalities from upset; it is "ORANGE MAN: BAD" it is "THE PROTOCOL ALLOWS IT" and other things that collectively encapsulate the direct result of fiat and fiat education and brainwashing.
Down with it.
Down with them all.
UP Bitcoin!
https://m.primal.net/IjUC.jpg
It appears (naturally) that some Bitcoiners don't understand at least two things.
America is not a totalitarian state. If all Bitcoin mining moved to the USA, and Americans asserted their rights that Bitcoin it not money (which they refuse to concede, being fully paid up members of THE CULT), then there would be...
NOTHING TO STOP BITCOIN MINING IN THE USA. IT WOULD BE FULLY PROTECTED UNDER THE LAW; THE FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION, DULLARDS.
https://medium.com/swlh/why-america-cant-regulate-bitcoin-8c77cee8d794
And of course, just because all sane miner owning companies have move to the USA, this does not...
PREVENT ANYONE ANYWHERE ELSE ON EARTH FROM RUNNING MINING FARMS IN ANY COUNTRY ON EARTH, YOU COMPLETE, UTTER EEJITS.
What GEPOTUS unleashing Bitcoin would do is increase competition at the nation state level, incentivising countries to relent with their retarded Bitcoin regulation, just as what happened with France and its insane regulation of public key cryptography.
What's that? YOU "DIDN'T KNOW"?
Well read this, you cloth eared numbskull:
https://archive.is/1at7u
You people really need to brush up on your history!
AND...WHO IS "WE"?!
https://m.primal.net/IiLk.png
The self righteous and fantastically rich people in the west who have the power to solve these problems many times over are not at all concerned with the plight of other people, and are satisfied with pontificating and endlessly describing the same problem over and over. PATHETIC
Thankfully because Bitcoin is software and software can’t care about who writes it, the problems of fiat will be solved by people who can describe a problem, think, and who aren’t Virtue Signalling, playacting cowards. This work is happening without their permission or knowledge.
Buying Bitcoin to make payments is going to be the number one use case on Earth. It’s going to be done with Pine wallet, Blue Wallet and Azteco as the means of getting Bitcoin. I’m not speculating by the way. Mr. Jabesi is 100% correct. He can see this thanks to his perspective.
Without exposure to different perspectives and the ability to empathise, it is not possible to understand why Bitcoin was written. If you think Bitcoin’s use case is solely a “store of value”, you are parochial, ignorant, mind blind and closed off from reality. You don’t matter.
Bitcoin Matters. Bitcoin Exists. Bitcoin doesn’t follow your instructions or fit into your thinking; it is a tool that obeys the person who writes on it. If you understand what it is, you can use it to solve problems. That’s all there is to it. What you believe doesn’t matter.
Your limited imagination isn’t the standard that Bitcoin or developers must adhere to. Your lack of imagination, exposure, experience and guts is entirely your problem. It is not the reality. Other people who are not like you and who live in reality are not constrained by you.
If you’ve constructed the correct model, written the software to give your ideas the power to act, and have market access, the world can change because you’re not a coward and understand risk, problem solving and entrepreneurialism. The weak and frightened can’t do this.
WhatsApp, Airbnb, Uber, Apple, Whisper Systems and others all exhibit the correct way of thinking. If you can’t muster the thinking for yourself, you can try to emulate…but nothing can cure your cowardice. You’ll never build something like Uber, invest in it or be associated.
Cowards just don’t have what it takes to change the world. A coward could never build Uber, and similarly the global Bitcoin Unicorn will not be built by or associated with cowards. These are matters of fact, not opinion. Facts don’t care about your feelings.
Nothing in the last 1000 years would have been built if men and women spent time describing problems as an end in itself. Definition is the first step only; it isn’t the goal. Solving problems and helping people is the goal. Bitcoin exists to solve a problem. Cowards ignore this.
Bitcoin was designed to replace fiat. It wasn’t designed to co exist with it. Many people simply can’t imagine that that goal can be achieved. That’s their problem; the problem of a lack of imagination. Bear in mind, none of these people thought fiat was a problem at all.
Do you really think that these imaginationless “recent converts” who want to constrain and pigeonhole Bitcoin can imagine the future? If you do, you’re a fool; these people can’t imagine anything, let alone what the near future will be like. On the other hand developers can.
Because entrepreneurs are aiming at a point in the future, they can see a future with their tool in it. The imaginationless can’t, because they don’t even know the tools are in development. Steve jobs knew that no phone in the future would have a keyboard. Normal people scoffed.
And YOU are not that stupid because you understand what Bitcoin is, are not a Virtue Signalling coward, and understand that the tools and services of “The Transformation” are being built right now. You don’t just talk about solving problems, you’re solving them by acting.
And let me be perfectly clear, and I’ve said this before. People whose role it is to act as educators are essential parts of the Transformation equation. In order for anything to happen people need to be persuaded that Bitcoin is a boon, and not a threat. medium.com/hackernoon/bit…
The Transformation needs gifted writers, thinkers and educators like @saifedean who is a perfect example of entrepreneurial spirit, and risk taking with his new education platform set to disrupt the global University system. Universities won’t like it like Banks hate Bitcoin.
Version original: https://medium.com/@beautyon_/pathetic-parochial-pusillanimous-2c1c2d6c9dc6
Many years ago, there was a Bitcoin exchange called MPEx, run by the late great Mircea Popescu.
The design of this exchange was brilliant and radical on a technical level, an expression of the genius of one of the greatest Bitcoiners; a man who is sorely missed by all true Bitcoiners.
This exchange had many users, one of which was infamous altcoiner Erik Voorhees.
Mircea Popescu was approached by the US government's SEC to reveal details of Erik's use of MPEx, and Mircea instantly lept to the defense of his client, refusing in the most scintillating and scathing terms to aid the SEC in any way, shape or form.
https://archive.is/Qcll3
You can read his responses for yourself
https://tinyurl.com/msduxfn2
eye opening, inspiring and highly instructive.
This, my dear readers, is exactly how all CEOs should approach any attack from the State, or its infiltrating Apratchicks who have snuck on to the staff.
If all CEOs behaved like Mircea Popescu, then many of the problems you as users of Bitcoin experience would vanish in a puff of smoke.
All the users complaining and posting screenshots showing Gemini asking weird questions that make absolutely no sense in reference to how they use "their" Bitcoin, that in this or any other universe are considered insane, and all the other "power over" abuses you've seen would not be happening.
And Bitcoin would have spread further into the world than it has today as a result.
The role of the CEO is not to Virtue Signal by patting the needy on their heads and other showy things that whilst good in a normal world are absolutely bizarre in the real world, where users are under attack and their rights are daily abused and the Bitcoin ecosystem itself is under constant pressure from enemies.
If we had more Mircea Popescu types, the Bitcoin ecosystem would be far better off than it is today; more resilient, more widespread and more useful at any scale, since it would not be mediated by cowards and weaklings.
Mircea Popescu cannot be a model for anyone I'm afraid, and there is no factory that can produce more of them.
Why is that?
The reason why, is that what I'm talking about in Mircea Popescu is a man of character. A man who understands what power is, and how to wield it justly.
Mircea bailed out OpenBSD
https://tinyurl.com/2xfn7j7h
and did many other things in secret that have changed the course of history for the better; that is what everyone should expect, not Virtue Signalling, pandering and being a willing cowering prisoner in a gaol of your own making as a way of life.
It should be obvious to everyone now that when the right man is in charge of something, amazing things can happen that can change the world rapidly.
Elon, for all his many faults, has radically shifted the overton window in the matter of free speech, and caused millions of users to breathe easier by having the threat of their speech cut off removed.
Imagine if this happened in Bitcoin services!
Imagine for a moment, that Bitcoin has no restrictions on how it can be used, and that you can use many services in whatever way you want without any fear that anything can go wrong.
Using Bitcoin like using an iPhone to browse the web at will.
This is unimaginable for anyone inured to the cancerous adversarial culture that has metastasized in "The Bitcoin Community", but for those not infected, the very idea of this makes goosebumps break out all over your skin.
In order for this to come to pass, well designed tools and services that can touch the public are an absolute prerequisite. This is what has been missing for many years for different reasons, but now there is no longer any excuse, and it is a matter of character and will.
You've seen how paradigm shifting services have been launched before from different companies run by fearless mavericks. The world is better off when CEOs are fearless mavericks like Mircea Popescu and Steve Jobs; they are the ones that make the great leaps, and they're sorely needed and will always be needed.
And in case you can't understand this, this is not about starting a very successful company after the groundwork has been done by mavericks; this is about being a groundbreaking maverick.
It's easy to pivot to a keyboardless phone design after Apple have broken the hypnotic Emperor's New Clothes spell of "ALL PHONES NEED KEYBOARDS".
Someone had to do it first.
Someone had to show some guts.
Someone had to reject bad advice.
Someone chose not to run away from imaginary problems.
Someone chose to take the commercial risk.
Bitcoin is going to win. It is a question of when and not if.
We know from the death of the AOL era, that all business models that don't conform to reality are destroyed in the end, and that it doesn't matter how big you are now; you will be destroyed by the market and by entrepreneurs with guts and character.
Bitcoin is no different. The people who are willfully and ignorantly choosing to serve people in ways that are sub optimal, because some pig ignorant Ambulance Chaser told them to, are going to lose in the end.
Losing in this scenario doesn't mean not making money; in 1999, AOL’s market capitalization soared to around $222 billion.
But look at them now. Not only is AOL no longer a standalone entity with its own market capitalization; it is now a mere element in a portfolio managed by Apollo Global Management.
It's dead.
This is the fate of all businesses that are not run by mavericks who embrace risk. Apple is what it is today precisely because Jobs was a risk taker.
If you think Apple is big, just wait till the "Final FinTech Unicorn" emerges that will be built on Bitcoin. Nothing like it has been possible in the past, because Bitcoin did not exist.
In the "Final FinTech Unicorn" future, Bitcoin regulation will be a thing of the past, just as regulation of the web today is a fantasy of EU witches with short haircuts. The web is an unstoppable force for good. Most people know it and nothing can stop it.
The same will be true for Bitcoin, only the changes it will unleash will be far greater than many people can begin to imagine.
"Do you want to be remembered as one of the people who helped make it happen, or not?"
That is the question everyone needs to ask themselves.
I asked ChatGPT to, "List ten of the most revered and beloved tech CEOs of the last 40 years".
It returned...
1. Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.)
2. Tim Cook (Apple Inc.)
3. Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X)
4. Reed Hastings (Netflix)
5. Jack Ma (Alibaba Group)
6. Shantanu Narayen (Adobe)
7. Marc Benioff (Salesforce)
8. Meg Whitman (HP, eBay)
9. Jensen Huang (NVIDIA)
10. Daniel Zhang (Alibaba Group)
Yikes. That's quite the list isn't it?
And you can't buy your way on to that list by Virtue Signalling. You've got to earn your place on it by doing real things that serve other people, without fear or favor.
Quite the task, isn't it?!
The scope of the “Crypto Larper Lifecycle” is now fully mapped.
It goes something like this…
Dream up “protocol”
Release concept
Collect community
Release app
Launch “Foundation”
Some steps are missing above, but you get the idea.
In this self contained, self limiting, onanistic pattern, is the total possible extent of the CLL cycle, and everyone involved in it is Platonically trapped.
In the CLL cycle, economics doesn’t matter, growth is irrelevant, utility is ignored. Nothing is fixed; Bitcoin doesn’t actually matter.
CLL is entirely about Virtue Signalling to a vanishingly small number of inert onan-elements, who, if they never existed, history could not measure the loss of in the final calculation.
If you are a Bitcoiner, you’re not swayed by antics, stunts, the vapid opinion of the crowd, trappings, brainwashing, the bleating of sheep or other such things.
You are interested in the problem Bitcoin was released to fix, and nothing else. You’re willing to go to any ethical length to see the Bitcoin future come to pass, and you won’t be stopped by normies, Ambulance Chasers, the timid, the frightened, the stupid or their braying brainless followers.
You command and control your resources, use the truth as your razor sharp weapon and cannot be swayed by the crowd.
Bitcoiners understand that facts are central to its existence, and are not optional. The 21,000,000 limit is essential, and not optional. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, wants, asserts or believes. It’s 21,000,000. That’s it.
This attitude should enter the Bitcoiners thinking and touch everything where rigour is required. Bitcoiners should not accept the opinion of, for example, Ambulance Chasers when it comes to defining what Bitcoin and all software processes are and do.
As soon as you accept the opinion of an Ambulance Chaser, you’ve lost.
It means you can concede anything, including the idea of breaking the 21,000,000 limit, “because legal says so”, or “the community has decided”, or some other extraneous, absurd and ridiculous pretext.
Bitcoiners are interested in winning, not performing.
Bitcoiners want to replace fiat, not integrate it.
Bitcoiners have truth on their side, and don’t back down.
This is why Samourai Wallet, and the attitude of Rodriguez and Burroughs is pure Bitcoin. It’s why Mircea Popescu was a real Bitcoiner, and not a Virtue Signalling waste of space.
And what do these people have in common?
They’re hated by LARPING, Virtue Signalling carpet bagging fakes who don’t agree with the aims of Bitcoin, and who are quite happy to not only allow, but to encourage and facilitate the fiat slave system to spread and defraud the weakest, most powerless people on earth.
These carpet baggers take their marching orders from literal illiterates, who have zero understanding of how anything works. At best they’re incomer colonists who bring socialism and, “every voice must be heard” insanity to the table, where, “we want dollars” is given a serious hearing…
BY BITCOINERS.
It’s like taking your instructions on how to organise your life from Slime Mold. That’s how insufferably dumb designing world changing tools by the thinking of idiots is.
Imagine Satoshi making the coin limit flexible because a man in a mud hut told him, “I WANT DOLLAR, MOAR COIN IS BETTER!” That’s what’s happening before your very eyes.
These cretinous LARPers applaud the destruction of tools built by people they dislike, by the very state Bitcoin was designed to destroy. Ironic, isn’t it?
These LARPers, these cretins, these fiat heads, are the most despicable filth imaginable.
And “I can imagine quite a bit.”…
IRONIC
People gathering at a conference to promote democracy and Bitcoin and Bitcoin Privacy, not understanding that the greatest threat to Bitcoin and privacy is democracy is breathtakingly blind.
The number one force against Bitcoin is democracy. If the democratic governments were vanishingly small, who would be able or motivated to simultaneously threaten millions of Bitcoin users and violate their privacy (or bank users for that matter?)
No one.
No one in the market is incentivized to violate the privacy of millions of people other than the State. If you refuse to accept this, then you're living in a fantasy world, where solving problems is not your goal.
https://mises.org/mises-daily/do-you-hate-state
The DCG is not Bitcoin. You are Bitcoin
25 min read
Read Flexible: https://medium.com/@beautyon_/the-dcg-is-not-bitcoin-you-are-bitcoin-c57e2d2ce846
There is widespread panic and seemingly insurmountable confusion on many sides about “Segregated Witness”; the complete solution to the Bitcoin scaling problem. This confusion, and the irrational opposition to it is yet another symptom of the problem of widespread Computer Illiteracy.
The “Digital Currency Group” or “DCG” is run by a group of people who are not software developers, trying to crowbar a place for themselves in The Transformation; the global shift away from fiat currency to a market generated and programmable sound money in the shape of Bitcoin. The DCG serves no useful purpose in Bitcoin. They don’t produce any software, and when they discuss Bitcoin with legislators, their Computer Illiteracy causes profound misunderstandings that have the potential to trigger a raft of damaging legislation like the notorious and corrosive BitLicense of New York.
The recent publication by the DCG (https://medium.com/@DCGco/scaling-bitcoin-reflections-from-the-dcg-portfolio-35b9a065b2a4#.t0hesglom) Scaling Bitcoin: Reflections from the DCG Portfolio Scaling Bitcoin: Reflections from the DCG Portfolio exemplifies this problem very well, which is why I will use it today as a framework to address this dangerous, reckless group.
The article starts with the following TL;DR top level assessment:
***
It’s difficult to know what to support and how to contribute to Bitcoin scaling. We want to break out of this current template.
***
It is only difficult to know what to support if you don’t understand Bitcoin and what improvements Segregated Witness (SegWit) offers. Anyone who has an interest in Bitcoin has looked at Segregated Witness and the alternative of changing a single parameter to increase Bitcoin’s transaction rate capacity.
Bitcoin, in order to remain Bitcoin, cannot have its shape changed so that only a few gatekeeper businesses own nodes that can initiate transactions. Everyone should be able to send transactions without permission. Read this article about what Bitcoin is and potential barriers to entry caused by a reckless block size increase.
https://medium.com/bitcoin-think/the-bitcoin-gauntlet-e9e721297aca#.z49wbe5i4
The DCG want to “break out of this template” but what does this actually mean? No one is forcing the companies in this group to use Bitcoin; they can all join together with their billions in capital and launch their own version of Bitcoin that works exactly the way they want it to, and then watch Bitcoin die. The problem is that none of the people at the DCG can write software, and none of the developers (sorry boys) at any of its member companies is as gifted as the developers contributing to Bitcoin Core.
You can never “break out” from Bitcoin, because you can’t develop software. Even if you do as I recommend, and fork Bitcoin, you will forever be stuck on a branch where there is no groundbreaking development. R3 tried it and failed, and you would fail also, while Bitcoin improves in exponential leaps and bounds, leaving you in the dust. More on that later.
***
Following a few days of chatter, we all agreed it would be beneficial to take these discussions, piece them into a more structured narrative, and share with the broader community in the hopes of fostering a more open, pragmatic dialogue about how to break out of this current pattern of stalemate, which seems to be affecting everyone in different, but overall negative, ways.
***
This is the problem. “Chatter” doesn't create executable software. Narratives are for novelists, not software. There is no “Bitcoin Community”. Dialogue doesn't matter; software matters. Bitcoin is not in a stalemate. Eventually SegWit will activate, and when it does, everything will change. There is time for this to happen, and even if SegWit were to activate now, a significant amount of retrofitting, business model adjustment and software development needs to be done to accommodate it.
There are no libraries in high level languages that developers can use to make integrating SegWit processes easier, and there are conceptual mountains to climb in integrating it. I have a suspicion that it is this software retrofitting that many companies simply do not want to do, as it is time consuming, expensive and risky. They understand the proposition of Bitcoin, and now they are being asked to un-know what they know and rethink everything. It’s painful to think about. Software is a tough racket.
***
We (as most if not all of you) are affected by network congestion and it’s difficult to know how to push bitcoin forward from a scaling perspective. Last year we got on the Bitcoin Classic bandwagon out of desperation. Our stance was: Segwit sounds complex and Classic seems easy and buys us time. Today, a year after, it’s difficult to know what to support and how to contribute to Bitcoin scaling.
***
All of the businesses have built their work on a broken model, based on a flawed idea of what Bitcoin is. There are many people like this, and the more brave ones have created forks of Bitcoin that reflect their curious notions of what money is, Freicoin being my favourite example; a coin that decrements your balance if you don’t spend your money, inspired by the fanciful idea of demurrage.
They say SegWit sounds complex. This is an astonishing statement for people in the software industry. Every software tool used by everyone on earth is as complex as SegWit at the protocol level. Take reading this page for example. Loading this page in a browser might sound “simple” to the DCG, but it is in fact, a hideously complex process.
Whenever you visit a site that has SSL enabled (the little green lock in the upper left hand corner of the window, to the left of the URL [the address of this page] for this Medium post) a fantastically complex series of steps is undertaken, but all you as the user see, is a little green lock, that means the content of your session cannot be observed by eavesdroppers
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*KVlFWibjzECvQrJPd8qjkA.jpeg
And I am leaving out the other very complex networking steps that HTTP servers use to deliver content, and all the other layers to do with displaying images, styling text and so much more.
Web developers, the equivalent to the members of the DCG, never interact with any of this complexity, which has been abstracted away into high level tools that are simple to use. For example, with Lets Encrypt (https://letsencrypt.org/), setting up SSL is much simpler than it used to be, requiring a single command line instruction, whereas before, it was a real headache.
SegWit is exactly the same as SSL on the web, and SMTP, POP3 with email. All of these low level protocols are hideously complex, but you don’t have to worry about them, once they are abstracted away from you. Very few people will ever interact with these protocols directly, but billions will use them without knowing anything about it, every second of every day.
The DCG says classic “seems easy”. This statement is not serious. It is the same sort of lightweight thinking that created “Blockchain not Bitcoin”:
Software is not about what looks or sounds nice, and certainly no decision about anything should be made on the strength of “it seems easy”. Once again, anyone with sensible objections does not speak like this. Increasing the block size has profound and detrimental implications for Bitcoin, and anyone who brushes them off with a scoff is a propagandist, not a serious contributor to discussion.
***
We took risks and built _on bitcoin_ with our current project — not generic “blockchain” but real public-blockchain BTC… simply demoing to prospective customers has been an exercise in frustration due to simple user experience issues with the network confirming transactions. e.g. we pay an above-average fee and sometimes still takes multiple blocks to confirm.
***
You took risks. Risk does not mean you are guaranteed success, or give you special privileges above any other user. Risk means there is a real possibility that you will fail. This attitude is the result Millennials being trained from a young age that “everyone gets a prize” and trying hard is enough.
It’s interesting that these people, who are promoters of “Blockchain not Bitcoin” now say they represent Bitcoin. Which is it? Once again, your frustration is a result of your broken business models, not any problem with Bitcoin, which never made and could never make any promises to anyone. The people who built correct business models, like LocalBitcoins are thriving. You should look to them for inspiration, and cease trying to shove Bitcoin into your Procrustean Bed.
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Its been particularly bad last few days, some users sending to [our exchange] were sending over 100 satoshis/byte and still waiting for over 12 hours for a confirm.
***
This is whining. Bitcoin is far cheaper and quicker than Western Union, and it doesn't violate your privacy. This is nothing more than temper tantrum antics, and really, should not be listed at all as a complaint. If Bitcoin could handle billions of transactions per second, all of them taking exactly 12 hours to confirm, it would still change everything. This is not a valid objection, and it’s why serious men don’t invite you to secret meetings.
It’s really bad right now. Bitcoin is starting to make SWIFT look attractive. If this isn’t fixed, I expect we’ll see the non-speculative use cases migrate to other chains.
This is worthless emotionalism. Saying SWIFT is better than Bitcoin shows that whoever made this statement doesn’t understand what Bitcoin is for, or why it was developed in the first place. They should stop using Bitcoin now, as their fundamental premises are wrong. And by all means, migrate to other “chains”. Thats what they are there for (https://www.corda.net/). They’re waiting for you.
***
The current situation is that a Bitcoin node code revision has been put forward (by Core), and it has not secured sufficient ‘votes’ from miners to be ‘adopted’ by the network. Why is this?
***
The language in this is telling. Nodes running Bitcoin Core version v0.13.1 are not “voting”. Bitcoin is not a democracy (https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-is-not-democratic-81f87158250a#.9m7zi9q1l). It is taking time for everyone to upgrade to SegWit for several reasons. One of which I outlined above. You cannot take advantage of SegWit without writing software, and this is difficult, expensive and dangerous. Also, there has been a concerted propaganda effort from celebrity Bitcoin investors who are not developers who have been spreading FUD. This is “why”…and why do you ask? Even if SegWit were activated immediately, none of these people are ready to take advantage of it because there are no libraries to accommodate easy, abstracted access.
The sensible thing to do in this case, in their own narrative of being “Good members of the Bitcoin Community”, would be to (https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/) write and freely release SegWit libraries so that developers can take advantage of it as soon as it activates. Of course, this means putting weapons in the hands of their agile and unencumbered commercial adversaries. Difficult choices for the people desperate to pull up the ladder (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=&q=pull+the+ladder+up+metophor&btnG=Google+Search&meta=lr%3D&aq=f&oq=#safe=active&hl=en&q=Pulling+Up+the+Ladder+Behind+You+metaphor)!
As you can see in the SegWit adoption list, there are 106 (one hundred and six) companies that are actively preparing for SegWit, with confidence it will activate. They’re doing the hard, low level work that needs to be done, quietly, and everyone will eventually benefit from it. Compare and contrast this with people who don’t even run a full node, or who haven't run any tests, let alone build services against the new software.
***
So how do we cross this impasse before it’s too late? There have been quite a number of attempts to secure agreement on the best path, and yet here we are, no further forward. Why is this?
***
“Too Late”? Too late for who? 106 companies are not sitting around waiting to see what will happen, they are well along the SegWit path, gaining knowledge and building tools. “Wait and see” is not how entrepreneurs behave, they forge ahead and take risk. And note how throughout this, the DCG talks about miners as an abstract other or third person. If they are not DCG members, why not, and if they are, why do they not cite, “the miners who are our members”?
When they say “too late” I suspect they mean that these businesses are not profitable, and they are burning through VC cash with no prospect of ever becoming profitable with Bitcoin as it is. They made a bad bet on Bitcoin and are desperately, frantically trying to tweak their way out of it. This is probably why Coinbase is making insane bets like adopting Etherium.
***
SegWit, is at its core, a technical issue. For entrepreneurs who are busy running their company and trying to keep their products and platforms running for the paying customers, it can be challenging to also try to focus on making serious changes to the core bitcoin protocol.
***
Another telling paragraph. The entrepreneurs in Bitcoin are in a technical field, they are not in a field that is separate from the nature of Bitcoin. This thinking is a leftover from the days when bosses used to dictate to typists on typewriters, and years later secretaries on desktop computers clacking out emails. Your business IS the “tech”. You cannot be separated from it, ignore it or do anything other than be totally immersed in it if you want to succeed. The days of developers being “back room boys” are over, and this is part of The Transformation.
The geeks run the world now (http://444.hu/assets/amir-taaki.jpg). They design the software that runs your cars, washing machines, phones and the locks on your doors. Nothing happens today without software mediating it, except growing carrots. If you think you can suceed in Bitcoin by dictating to geeks you will fail. Your business models must start with the geeks otherwise, you will not be able to compete.
Bitcoin works exactly as expected. It is you that has to change. What we are seeing here is a group of people bereft of imagination and creativity. There are (https://medium.com/@beautyon_/how-soon-is-now-df391d6675f2#.bwyiv5vqe) ways that services can scale to billions right now; all it takes is some imagination and skill. Entrepreneurialism can never be free of risk. Risk is your business (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toG6aSQFF7Y); that’s why you're in Bitcoin.
***
Our summary of SegWit is not “bad” but “complex” — in all senses of the word. SegWit is a good “lego block” foundation advancing the ecosystem. It is also very complex, technically, governance-wise, from a technical readiness standpoint, and more. This is why we’re working on a “SegWit for CTOs” style document.
***
See my points about complexity above. This is a patently absurd complaint. It’s apt that Lego is used as an analogy. The point about SegWit being complex governance wise is telling. These are the people who are desperate to inject the poison of the State into Bitcoin. There are no “governance” problems in Bitcoin, SegWit or any software. Bitcoin is self governing and doesn't need any help from non entrepreneurs or developers in keeping the system running.
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We’ve been asked by a number of people now to endorse it (whatever that means), and while we like it conceptually, I don’t think it would be responsible to endorse it unless we’ve performed rigorous analysis and testing ourselves (which we’ve not)
***
Similarly, the DCG “endorsing” SegWit is completely meaningless, unless they run a cluster of full nodes full time. What these people think has no effect on running software, and it’s amazing that they don’t employ developers to contribute meaningfully and usefully, or even do the most simple act of running a cluster of full nodes. All they do is arrange for people to be bullied by the legislature. Thanks to Trump, they will be milked of their venom and de-fanged.
They say they like SegWit “conceptually”. This is not possible, obviously, since they are not capable of understanding it. They admit they haven’t done any analysis or testing of it, and they are not capable of doing so either. There is nothing wrong with not having a skill, expertise or understanding; the problem is not having them, and then running to the legislature to control the men who do.
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Testnet has been SegWit-active for a while now, but little testing has been done by major bitcoin network players. Several larger players are waiting for lib updates to go to production before beginning their own testing.
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Little testing has been done. How do you know this? If you know this, why have you not paid for testing to be done so you can accept or reject SegWit based on evidence instead of feelings? As for lib updates….I told you!
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Our understanding is its only been tested by core devs on testnet… the main worry would be that this testing may not match what enterprises actually need on a production level
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Bitcoin does not belong to “enterprises” who happen to be your members, and what they require is irrelevant to Bitcoin, which does not belong to your members or any particular person. Once again, you can solve this problem by starting your own DCG alt-Coin, where all your members and their collective genius and billions can have absolute control over what you are using, and exclude anyone who doesn't agree with you.
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Some of us feel that SegWit and Lightning are both in the “exciting, but still in the lab” category — and that nuance is often lost in the SegWit / Lightning excitement.
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SegWit is in the wild. Your feelings don’t count. Nuance?! (https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=nuance+beautyon&src=typd)….https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:640/format:webp/1*UOActaurhGMF7DegJm7hmQ.png
THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
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We don’t want to be anti-SegWit or pro-SegWit, just pro-pragmatism. There seems to be a disconnect between what the devs are developing, and what business actually need and want, which is a bigger problem about how resources are directed.
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You can’t be anti-SegWit and also pro-Bitcoin. SegWit is Bitcoin. It is also absolutely pragmatic, with exponential benefits for everyone, causing Bitcoin’s capacity to exceed (https://youtu.be/-0kRLvpDBSY?t=8m55s) VISA and MasterCards transaction per second rates. What business wants is not what matters. Bitcoin is not a “business network” or a tool made for business. It is made for users of every class; businesses are nothing more than peers on the network, with no special position, precedence or privilege or right to demand anything whatsoever.
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In general, the bigger problem is the pursuit of niche projects over business & user needs that could actually change the the user experience in much needed ways.
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Bitcoin itself was a niche project when it was released. None of the people who want the block size increase today even cared about the form of the money in their pockets in 2009, or encrypted their email or had any dream of a stateless, irrevocable anarchist currency. I do not invoke the ridiculous, bogus, worthless and frankly stupid claim that because you were an early participant in something, your opinion counts more than others, but it is a plain fact that Bitcoin was designed for a specific political and philosophic purpose, and that purpose was not to serve a small number of businesses who want a life without having to innovate.
Calling SegWit a “niche project” is not sane. Given that SegWit will cause Bitcoin to outperform the biggest credit card companies on earth, combined, while maintaining its distributed network shape is a staggering achievement of breathtaking creativity and genius, and it is an unimaginably powerful and profound addition to Bitcoin. Taking into consideration what SegWit will deliver, it’s worth dismantling all the software the DCG members have written and re-writing it to accommodate SegWit. If they don’t accommodate SegWit, someone else will.
***
It would be helpful to have a constructive dialogue with realistic views on technology timelines vs. user experience benefits delivered by technology to prioritize how and when upgrades are deployed to benefit the greatest number of stakeholders.
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Helpful to who? A dialogue with whom? Who is to say what is realistic and what isn't? The capacity of Bitcoin SegWit, if you had offered those numbers two years ago would have been thought completely unrealistic, and now, they are real. This section is nothing more than a pre Trump Washington Wonkesque call for the takeover of Bitcoin Core, with its oily talk of “stakeholders”. No one is buying any of this. If SegWit does not activate, you will not gain control of Bitcoin. If it does, you will not gain control of Bitcoin.
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Overall, there are better ways we could deal with new technology as a community. For example, NASA deals with new-new technology all the time, and came up with a ladder to assess how close to production a technology is, called a Technology Readiness Level: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/engineering/technology/txt_accordion1.html
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NASA? Really? This is absurd, but what else would you expect from people who think you need the State to regulate Bitcoin? In case you have’nt been watching the YouTube, you don’t need the State to get into Space, (or regulate Bitcoin) and NASA’s way of doing things is completely shown up by Space-X who are performing acts that are mind blowing in their innovation, from the live video links of every section of the fight to the shriek inducing landings of the first stage boosters on robot platforms.
It’s 2017, and you're asking the government for guidance? Give me a break.
And there is no Bitcoin community. What you are talking about is the needs of your monoculture members, not anyone else, pure Argumentam Ad Populum (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-popularity.html).
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We’ve never understood why it has to be one or the other — why can’t there be both? Why can’t we introduce 2nd layer technologies (as they are ready) AND have a block size increase as well?
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You don’t understand because you don’t understand Bitcoin. You can’t have both because increasing the block size will lead to centralization, which is anti-Bitcoin.
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If you remove all the us vs them rhetoric being thrown around — we could gain benefits from both approaches (block size increase and SegWit)
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Here we go with the “sotto voce violation of the Verbal Morality Statute” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rVQGT01Kzg) mantra that robust arguing is counter productive and inappropriate. This really is a matter of “us vs them”. On one side, you have a group of men who have a limited horizon view of Bitcoin with strong incentive to repay Venture Capital firms so they can exit and rid themselves of this seething morass of anarchists and geeks. On the other, you have the seething morass of anarchists and geeks, and a few ethical entrepreneurs thrown in for good measure. This is a fight over the biggest software breakthrough since public key cryptography, or the various tools that make up the basic internet protocols. Bitcoin has the potential to change everything; expecting people not to argue over it is irrational.
There are no gains to be made from centralizing Bitcoin, if you are interested in Bitcoin. What the DCG call “gains” people interested in Bitcoin call death. These people are wrong because they can escape at any time and form their own network. In years, if they have made the right bet, they will be the biggest financial network on earth. The problem is they have already bet incorrectly once, and are nervous about making another wrong bet, while Bitcoin goes on to explode without them. They also know that they have a serious technical deficit in the form of strong developers; if this were not the case, they would not be complaining about SegWit, and would be busy writing the libraries I described and that the DCG concedes must be written.
All of this is a logical conclusion based on the facts, and you are not entitled to your own facts. You cannot refuse to take a side, because there are no sides in this matter. SegWit is the logical choice and it should be activated immediately. The only reason why you would be against this is that you are frightened that a startup is waiting in the wings to eat your lunch with its zero conf high speed service that wipes you out. If things stay the same and SegWit never activates, then you get to avoid having to spend a fortune on new, dangerous software, and can pull the ladder up and prevent a startup from obliterating you. The choice is clear for them; SegWit must be stopped. They can participate in any future centralized Bitoin Clearing specialist as privileged actors and the VC spigot will never be turned off. They might even end up being the ones running it. These are the secret thoughts behind the anti SegWit animus.
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It’s difficult to identify how we move the discussion forward productively — anyone who takes any sort of position in public, even one of compromise, is instantly labeled to be a seg-wit supporter or a seg-wit blocker and the discussion just ends/degrades into name calling
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This is more soap opera. There are developers who are above this sort of nonsense, being more concerned with the quality of their important work. What anyone “labels” you is irrelevant. People who were undecided have openly said they now support SegWit activation, often after having it explained to them. It’s not easy to understand. There is no discussion to move forward in any case; software is not about discussion; it is about the delivery of code.
We know that increasing the block size alone will irreparably damage Bitcoin, so this is not an option. We know that SegWit will increase the capacity of Bitcoin beyond VISA and MasterCard. Thats it. It’s a no-Brainer. Furthermore, the block size limit will be increased to 2meg giving companies with anxiety time to get their SegWit solutions in place.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*Lom8KqSN0ZLPCBvHxaP9zQ.jpeg
Everybody wins with SegWit
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As a community, we should avoid all-positive documents on SegWit (prudent to include some cautions), just as we should avoid all-negative SegWit commentary. This is a hugely complex upgrade, as the devs themselves have noted many times.
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Another call to group think, and DCG wants to be the cult leader. It’s a fascinating position to take, but quite understandable when you consider that they are absolutely bereft of power and influence. There is nothing at all bad about making a categorical statement that something is completely wrong if it is in fact, wrong; this is another way of claiming that this matter is nuanced. which should trigger anyone who is interested in Bitcoin’s success. It is a way to say that no matter what your position is, it is always flawed in some way or subject to interpretation, which is obviously wrong.
There are absolutes, there is right and wrong, there is good and evil.
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What we’ve observed is that communication has done downhill — people are calling one another liars, claiming the “other side” is destroying bitcoin, calling anything that doesn’t match their proposal a “coup,” and it’s incredibly unprofessional. It makes everyone in bitcoin look bad. We want to see communication return to a professional, scientific level.
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In order to melt iron you need heat. You cannot produce steel without a hot furnace. When men debate, they get angry, they fight, they use curse words and lose their tempers. This is completely normal, expected and useful.
The people who want to centralize Bitcoin really are on the other side of an argument. They really are a threat, not only to the idea of Bitcoin, but to what people can do with their money; transmit it without permission. If you threaten to steal someone’s money, they are going to get angry. This is completely normal, rational and legitimate. As government issued fiat is withdrawn, permission-less Bitcoin is now more important than ever. This not just an academic debate any more, this is a matter of human liberty and dignity.
Trying to wrest control of the Bitcoin source repository and control of the protocol by lying, threatening, attacking the network with thousands of artificial transactions has all the markings of a coup:
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*sXx4uOUhjs38CZZAmXzUWA.png
Spreading FUD, attacking the network with spam, whispering in the ears of company owners to get employees who are pro SegWit fired (https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/roger-ver-from-bitcoin-jesus-to-bitcoin-antichrist-69fc7a17c622#.42a8fzd1s), (yes this actually happened https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=samson+mow+fired&src=typd) are all attempts to take over the root operation of Bitcoin but worst of all, is the launch of a buggy rival reference client “Bitcoin Unlimited” (https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=bitcoin+unlimited+bug&src=typd), which is tantamount to the firing of a weapon against the Bitcoin network. This is in no uncertain terms an attack, and an attempt to steal control of or spoil Bitcoin, and it is entirely justifiable and reasonable to call these attempts a coup and to vociferously argue against them.
It is not unprofessional to protect your work, and in software, the only thing that matters is whether or not your code works correctly. This is why in offices all over the world, the geeks are allowed to wear their hair in any way they like, are allowed to smell, to keep their work spaces like pig styes, work in their pyjamas and all other sorts of unimaginable, filthy indulgences that only a few years ago would be unthinkable behaviour for any office. In fact, if you do not provide beds, slides ,9https://www.google.com/search?q=office+slide&safe=active&hl=en&biw=1533&bih=784&tbm=isch&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjyo7_N7YjSAhVBnRQKHc7mA9gQsAQIGQ) free food, massages and an absence of rules (on top of a fortune in money, equity and benefits) you can forget hiring the best developers. I could Google many shocking pictures (https://www.google.com/search?q=office+slide&safe=active&hl=en&biw=1533&bih=784&tbm=isch&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjyo7_N7YjSAhVBnRQKHc7mA9gQsAQIGQ#safe=active&hl=en&tbm=isch&q=insane+office+interiors) to prove this, but ill spare you having to buy a new keyboard. Heh (http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/).
Nobody who writes software cares about looking bad in front of normies. All they care about is their work, and that it compiles, and is appreciated by their peers. This is why Open Source software has eaten the world; people working for the good of other people and respect of their peers; those motivations were enough to change everything, and now that energy is being applied to the problem of replacing fiat money.
Making a claim that people are not being professional because they won’t tolerate you destroying their money is absurd. Men really are trying to destroy Bitcoin; this is not exaggeration; it is a statement of fact. That is why people are so angry (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf7dteQEILo) and they are right to be angry (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7WglEQb35A) at the reckless selfish acts of vandalism that are being launched at Bitcoin, and the useful idiots who know nothing about Bitcoin, can’t write “hello world” in C but who think they are “Stakeholders” trying to force their ideas on something they know nothing about and that they're fundamentally ideologically opposed to.
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But It’s Clear the Current Approach Isn’t Working
We’ve thought long and hard about this — if anything, what we would really like to see is compromise (e.g. both sides working together on a solution that works for as many as possible) — but its like trying to get someone from the extreme political right and left to agree on something they fundamentally disagree on — any push towards compromise/confronting the issue seems to just entrench the two sides that much further
***
Yes, it is working. SegWit has been developed and is now in the reference client. SegWit is the solution, if you want to work with Bitcoin. No one should compromise with any idea that means Bitcoin becomes centralized, in other words, stops being Bitcoin. This is the problem the DCG does not understand; they are looking at Bitcoin through the lens of their iPhones and not at what makes it work, or valuable. It’s just a number on a flat screen (https://medium.com/@beautyon_/the-flat-screen-dilemma-e84384cfd19f#.lf6hprf8s) "The Flat Screen Dilemma", indistinguishable from any other.
There is a lot of talk about using “Blockchains” to improve data integrity, but what all these solutions fail to…
medium.com
And as for the comparison between left and right in politics, this is a perfect example of how the DCG does not understand Bitcoin. The left in politics believes that the Federal Reserve and central banks should control the supply of money, by right. Bitcoin was written because its author understood that this is not correct, and that money is a product and service that should be produced by the market, not the State. If anything, the DCG is a Socialist organization, because it is for the State and its “regulations” and the de facto centralization of Bitcoin.
The men who produced SegWit are not entrenched. They've produced working software that will change everything, and that you may opt not to use. Every single member of the DCG can carry on exactly as they are and not adopt SegWit. No one is being forced to do anything, and this change is very accommodating and respectful of everyone, not breaking anyone’s software or disrupting anything.
Compare and contrast this with Bitcoin Unlimited, which will eventually push small operators off of the market by making it impossible for them to run a full node. They are the bad guys. It is they who have launched a poison fork, it is they who are spamming the network, running propaganda and asking for employees with different opinions to theirs to be ruined. No one from the SegWit side is going those unethical things.
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It seems that so far, the approach of “get [devs] to all sit down and figure out how to work together” is a lost cause and that trying to push it has done more harm than good. Events like the Hong Kong Meeting, the various Roundtables, have all isolated rather than included opinion.
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There is nothing to discuss any further. There have been many hours of discussions, and flying all over the world to solve this “problem” and everyone has had literally years to write software to make their vision real. Only Bitcoin Core has come up with something, at great personal expense, and it’s more than just something, it’s a work of genius that changes everything.
Anyone that has anything to offer needs to offer it in the form of working software. Talk is meaningless and so are the endless “white papers” that cannot do anything. If you really have something to offer, you can write some C, or develop a service (https://medium.com/@beautyon_/azteco-bitcoin-for-the-masses-fc17f8ca1df0); either way, you have to write some software to have influence. That is the only thing that matters.
***
Private, closed-door meetings do little to address the main issues found in support tickets that we’re seeing every day. We need to talk about alternatives and options to get these issues addressed. It seems like a better use of energy to identify a new mechanism that gets devs, business operators, and miners together — not in secret, invite-only roundtables
***
This is a veiled threat to push for the State to directly intervene in Bitcoin’s governance as Primavea De Philippi brazenly called for in Wired (https://www.wired.com/2016/03/must-understand-bitcoin-regulate/?source=post_page-----c57e2d2ce846--------------------------------)
"We Must Regulate Bitcoin. Problem Is, We Don't Understand It
Bitcoin has failed. Bitcoin is the future. Bitcoin cannot be regulated. Bitcoin needs to be regulated."
this is what it means when the DCG says, “a new mechanism”. And there is a reason why men have to meet in secret to discuss these matters. All of them are on the same side of this problem. They want Bitcoin to scale. They want to continue to profit. They do not want Bitcoin to break. They all know what they are talking about, at a source code and network protocol level. Having the DCG and other people, even entrepreneurs who run services on top of Bitcoin but who don’t have expertise in cryptography or C at a meeting would be completely pointless. The people who can’t contribute feel left out, become emotional, and feel like they are being talked down to…which is true and often completely justifiable.
Bitcoin is not about community, meetings, the DCG, endless conferences and lawyers; it is about software. It is not about your opinion. There is no “we” that needs “other methods”. You do not “have a say”.
Whether SegWit activates (it should) or not, what we are dealing with is a profound cultural mismatch between at least three different camps. Two of these camps are powerless, and they can’t stand it. They don’t have the ability to start their own network, or write their own software, and they can’t influence the Bitcoin network, one of the most successful and reliable software projects ever launched. They are trapped. It is the success of Bitcoin which everyone now understands and that is attracting undesirables who want to change the rules of something they never saw the need for and couldn't possibly have imagined.
As I've said many times, if Bitcoin cannot successfully repel these low level attackers, it will have no chance against the State. This is the big picture of the Bitcoin Unlimited vs SegWit competition, which is about the future of Bitcoin, and how in that future everyone interacts with it.
https://m.primal.net/IXGg.jpg
Anyone calling themselves a “Bitcoiner” is not impressed by this Virtue Signalling.
The only thing any Bitcoiner wants to hear from Ted Cruz is that he swears again to obey the constitution and will fight with every fibre of his being against any legislation tabled that mentions the word “Bitcoin”.
Anything less than this is unacceptable and is window dressing and Virtue Signaling.
No one cares that you’re running some mining rigs Ted. This is like publishing that you’re drinking rain water. Anyone can drink rain water and running a Bitcoin miner or using Bitcoin for any purpose should be unregulated, and vigorously defended by anyone claiming that they are obeying and are true to the oath of office they swore.
PERIOD.
https://m.primal.net/IVEb.jpg
Why You Can’t Understand Bitcoin
Here are some of the reasons why people can’t understand Bitcoin. It’s taken years to dispel the many myths, misunderstandings and lies that have swirled around Bitcoin. Here is what ails the stragglers.
Computer Illiteracy
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are Computer Illiterate. This means you have little to no understanding of how your devices or accounts work, and very probably have no interest either. You use Microsoft Windows, “Because its the Standard” . You don’t care how things work as long as they appear to work. You defend your ignorance like the Beavers shore up their dams.
This class of user is a massive problem, not only because they are computer illiterate; most people can get along without knowing the intricate details of the tools they use. They are a massive problem because they are computer illiterate, and they insist on “having their say” about Bitcoin, how it should be treated by market actors, by developers and how Bitcoin itself works.
Crypto Illiteracy
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are Crypto Illiterate. You don’t encrypt your email, despite knowing that the State and other attackers can and do read all your emails and look at your photos. You prefer wilful, blissful ignorance to easily obtained absolute security, and when pushed to explain why you behave in this irrational way, have only platitudes, fallacies and learned by rote garbage as a response.
This user presents a cultural challenge to anyone who wants privacy to be the default. Many great efforts, aside from the writing of privacy enabling software like GPG, have been undertaken for years, and its only now that that work is bearing fruit in the form of mass adoption on Instant Messaging platforms. There is a long way to go before we achieve total blackout, but now the light at the end of the tunnel is approaching.
Monetary Illiteracy
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are a Monetary Illiterate. Monetary illiterates come in serveral forms, but there are a small number that are the worst of the worst, and they are responsible for the majority of what’s wrong in this category; Keynesians and Statists. Keynesians believe that the money supply must increase forever. This is a lie. It’s like arguing that the number of numbers must increase over time because the number of things you need to measure is always increasing.
This user of government money is a problem to anyone who wants a stable economy and an end to the warfare state. The inflationary fiat currencies in use today are toxic to liberty, prosperity and peace, and this was one of the reasons Bitcoin was developed; to create a money that was separate from the State, economically sound, global and irrevocable. Monetary illiteracy is what stops people clamouring for sound money. They have no idea they are being robbed on a daily basis. If they understood what was being done to them, it would be pitchforks and bonfires in every world capital.
Statism
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are a Statist. A Statist is a man or woman who believes that only the State should be the final arbiter of every activity man can engage in. In Bitcoin, Statists are a constant irritant and lethal toxin. Their belief that people should be forbidden from sending messages to each other over a public network is un-American and completely irrational. You don’t need to identify yourself to use WhatsApp, and its messages are fundamentally no different to Bitcoin; its encrypted with the same “tech” Bitcoin uses, yet these Statists can’t explain why the latter should require a passport to use and the former does not.
This user is delusional, violent and extremely destructive to human progress. She believes everyone must be dragged down to her level of base stupidity, and is very often a monstrous admixture of all the bad qualities listed above and below, increasing her toxicity. Once again, these people are not content to wallow in their own mud; they insist on dirtying and contaminating everything they touch with their error, making it increasingly difficult to get work done, make progress, integrate seamlessly with the market and help humanity. Eventually these people are always swept away by the flow of history, but when they are at their peak, they are a constant chafing, sore making irritant.
Clinical Paranoia
You can’t understand Bitcoin because you are Clinically Paranoid. People with paranoid personality disorder are very suspicious of other people. They often feel that they are in danger, and constantly look for evidence to support their irrational suspicions. They have trouble seeing that their distrustfulness is out of proportion to their environment. There are many people like this, who will (for example) immediately select only the perceived flaws in a new device or service, rather than the obvious benefits. In Bitcoin, an example of this would be immediately pointing out that it can be used by criminals to pay debts. Once again, this demographic overlaps with some of the other categories listed here.
This user is highly distracting and negative, and they exist in every generation. The same class of individual made bogus, unsubstantiated claims the State had broken PGP (it never did) and today, they claim that Bitcoin is broken (it isn't) or that some vendor with a radical new design is vulnerable to an abstract Straw Man Flaw (nonsense). It appears that we will be stuck with these types forever as there are always insane people in every generation, and the only way they can be shut up is if mass adoption of the trigger for their paranoia makes it socially unacceptable to spread FUD. There are only two good things about these types: 1) They sometimes provide healthy analysis. 2) They are powerless, since they don’t overlap with the State when talking only about the hardware and software.
Eventually, as the killer Bitcoin business model emerges, everyone will settle on the correct definition of Bitcoin, and no one will suffer from any of the traits above. Bitcoin will become as normal as bottled water. It will invoke no curiosity, questions or false assumptions. It will just be. It will be everywhere, in every pocket, on every computer, just like email, just like cameras and telephony.
Computer Illiteracy will not matter, because the workings will disappear.
Crypto Illiteracy will not matter, just as it doesn't to WhatsApp users.
Monetary Illiteracy will disappear with the death of Keynesianism.
Statism will disappear…because there will be no State!
Clinical Paranoia will remain. For the lulz.
https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-moneyhttps://m.primal.net/IVBa.jpg
Thought experiment.
What would happen if the 368 million monthly users of Twitter downloaded Primal and started poasting with it on Nostr as they do there?
Hmmmmmmmm!
The Fall of Anti-Bitcoin
As I’ve said many times before. Everyone and every nation will eventually capitulate to Bitcoin. The latest nation to capitulate is Great Britain, whose army of anti-Bitcoin propagandists has just received orders from The Motherland that Bitcoin is to be fully embraced.
For years, Frances Coppola has been one of the most strident, steadfast and consistent anti-Bitcoiners. You could rely on her to provide every irrational pretext for rejecting Bitcoin; every trope, misreading, propaganda line and pretext. She Podcasted against Bitcoin, wrote articles against it, and did everything you saw and would expect a hard core anti-Bitcoiner to say and do.
And now look at her.
In this BBC piece on Bitcoin, the entire narrative has turned 180° from “skepticism” to “Bitcoin is the future and we are now embracing it”.
Because America is embracing it.
Understand that this is just the first part of the total capitulation of Great Britain to Bitcoin. Frances says Bitcoin is good, “As a store of value” after having spent years saying that it is the opposite of a good store of value, “Because it is volatile”.
Bitcoin hasn’t changed. Frances has changed.
The capitulation narrative begins by conceding ground bit by bit. First they concede that Bitcoin is a store of value, next they will concede that it acts just like money and can be used for small, everyday transactions. They have no choice but to concede this.
For years I have been gently trying to persuade The British Government in public and private to take a rational stance on Bitcoin, precisely to avoid the 100% predictable outcome you are seeing today. Which is another country will be the leader in Bitcoin.
Right now, that leader is El Salvador, that has fully embraced the “Consumer Bitcoin” ecosystem by making it Legal Tender. The USA is a close second because the SEC was forced to capitulate by a court order to allow “Free People” to do math and make promises (Bitcoin ETFs).
El Salvador is missing the financialization part, and the USA is missing the Consumer Bitcoin part. Either one of these great countries could do both and take the lead; it all comes down to legislation and leadership.
What we can say for sure is that Great Britain will not be able to catch up now. They were warned 10 years ago by me:
Our submission to the British Government’s “Digital currencies: Call for Information”
We made the following submission to the British Government’s “Digital currencies: Call for Information”. There is at…
medium.com
Had they listened, neither El Salvador or America would have a chance to lead the world on The Golden Path to Bitcoin.
All the entrepreneurs, businesses, know how, software and systems expertise, methods of exchanging and conversion would have been born in Britain, and they would have been able to sell this expertise and invite people from all around the world to participate…and be taxed…in Britain.
They even had two of the world’s greatest experts on Bitcoin living in London, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, who are now official advisors to the government of El Salvador. Imagine what would have happened had Britain embraced them as advisors? First of all, their expertise would have been denied to other nations, and Britain would have been the leader by default.
But no. Britain chose the way of the Luddite, and even chased businesses out of Britain. Look at the headlines for yourself…
London-based digital wallet provider Mode is shutting down
Nexo ‘closing two UK subsidiaries
UK Shuts Down Temporary Crypto Company Licensing
PayPal to halt UK crypto sales until 2024
UK Regulators Order Shutdown of Cryptocurrency ATMs
London based Bitcoin App Bottle Pay Shuts Down
There are many Bitcoin infrastructure and consumer facing companies that started in Britain and left (Azteco is one of them) and that were shut down by the imposition of the most insane rules you could not imagine in your worst nightmare.
Wallets run by incorporations in the UK were told that they must not only KYC their users, but that they must also KYC the users who send Bitcoin to their users who are not their users!
I’m not making this up. The FCA has done a thorough job of killing any nascent Bitcoin startup running in the UK, dissuading companies not in the UK to do business from there and generally being a constant irritant. The receipts are available, obviously.
Watch now, as orders coming from on high cause the FCA to 180° on Bitcoin in a desperate, pathetic attemtpt to stanch the flow of brains from Britain.
It’s too late.
Not only did the FCA make it impossible to run a Bitcoin company in Britain, they deliberately made it impossible for any financial rails company to do business with a Bitcoin company.
I can tell you from first hand observation that all financial rails companies, even very big ones, are all terrified of the FCA, and will scarcely take a piss in their own offices without checking if the FCA allows it.
It therefore was impossible to run a Bitcoin business from inside Britain. That was the entire idea.
Now that that policy is abolished, you can expect a huge Public Relations campaign to be launched to try and induce Bitcoin Businesses to relocate in Britain.
They are going to have a hard time convincing anyone.
Why should anyone running a Bitcoin business incorporate in Britain when you can incorporate in El Salvador and be guaranteed that you not only have a stable, safe, First World level country, but that you will not, as a Bitcoin company, be taxed?
You’d have to be BARMY to risk putting down stakes in Britain when incorporating in El Salvador is a matter of a phone call.
And while we’re at it, as a suggestion, El Salvador must partially deregulate its banking sector, or it will lose this race forever.
What can you expect next from Frances Coppola in terms of narrative capitulation?
You can expect her and her class to concede that Bitcoin for consumers is a good thing, and that it can be used not only just as easily, but more safely for both consumers and business globally.
She will concede that Lightning is a real thing, and that on it, the entire world can use Bitcoin. She will concede that the Unbanked will all be put on Bitcoin. She will capitulate in everything she has said against Bitcoin, and abandon the prosaic, poetic pretexts for its failure, like, “The value of Bitcoin is exogenous” and other similar guff.
You were all told this was coming, and you refused to listen, either because your culture is anti entrepreneur, or because you were told to lie about Bitcoin in a vain attempt to prevent it from spreading.
Either way, you all failed.
Now the inevitable is inevitable. Bitcoin is going to do EXACTLY WHAT BITCOINERS SAID IT WAS GOING TO DO and there IS and was NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
Bitcoiners won.
You LOST.
There is no inducement now that can be offered to any Bitcoiner to incorporate in Britain. That ship has sailed, like the ships taking the first colonists to New England.
No one is coming back, not even if you pay them. You can’t pay them because you have no money (BITCOIN) to pay them with! LOLOLOL!
And just so it’s perfectly clear, the other predictions about Bitcoin that we’ve been making (see the link in my profile) are also going to come true, and those are also now unstoppable, inevitable and very soon to come to pass.
YOU LOVE TO SEE IT!
https://twitter.com/search?q=beautyon+%22Frances+Coppola%22&src=typed_query&f=tophttps://medium.com/@beautyon_/our-submission-to-the-british-governments-digital-currencies-call-for-information-160fbf103bbc?source=post_page-----626eb10561d6--------------------------------https://medium.com/@beautyon_/over-9000-7f6547aeff86https://m.primal.net/IUUq.jpg
Why America Can’t Regulate Bitcoin
Hearings on Bitcoin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CCqCsmCDdw) and its derivatives are being held in the USA on a regular basis, and invariably the expert witnesses fail to properly describe the actual processes going on. If they used the correct language and excluded all analogies, the only possible conclusion would be that America cannot regulate Bitcoin under its current legal system. The Constitution guarantees the inalienable rights of American citizens, and therefore Bitcoin is a protected by virtue of it being a form of publishing text. The only way Bitcoin can be made regulable is if the Constitution is changed; and that does not mean adding a new Amendment, it means removing the First Amendment entirely.
Inevitably the anti-Bitcoin protagonists will face a robust and ultimately successful legal challenge that will remove the possibility of any sort of “BitLicense” or interference from the CTFC, FinCEN or any other agency. It will also remove any possibility of interference at the State level. The consequence of adhering to the basic law of the United States will cause America to become the centre of all Bitcoin business for the entire world, and will cause trillions of dollars worth of eCommerce to flow through the USA.
Let me explain why this is the case.
Some say that Bitcoin is money. Others say that it is not money. It doesn’t matter. What does matter are three things; that Bitcoin is, that the Bitcoin network does what it is meant to do completely reliably, and what the true nature of the Bitcoin network and the messages in it are.
Bitcoin is a database, maintained by a network of peers that monitors and regulates which entries are allocated to what Bitcoin addresses. This is done entirely by transmitting messages that are text, between the computers in the network (known as “nodes”), where cryptographic procedures are executed on these messages in text to verify their authenticity and the identity of the sender and recipient of the message and their position in the public ledger. The messages sent between nodes in the Bitcoin network are human readable, and printable. There is no point in any Bitcoin transaction that Bitcoin ceases to be text. It is all text, all the time.
Bitcoin can be printed out onto sheets of paper. This output can take different forms, like machine readable QR Codes, or it can be printed out in the letters A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9. This means they can be read by a human being, just like “Huckleberry Finn”.
At the time of the creation of the United States of America, the Founding Fathers of that new country in their deep wisdom and distaste for tyranny, haunted by the memory of the absence of a free press in the countries from which they escaped, wrote into the basic law of that then young federation of free states, an explicit and unambiguous freedom, the “Freedom of the Press”. This amendment was first because of its central importance to a free society. The First Amendment guarantees that all Americans have the power to exercise their right to publish and distribute anything they like, without restriction or prior restraint.
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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
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This single line, forever precludes any law that restricts Bitcoin in any way.
In 1995, the US Government had on the statute books, laws that restrict the export of encryption software products from America without a license. These goods are classified as “munitions”. The first versions of the breakthrough Public Key Encryption software “Pretty Good Privacy” or “PGP”, written by Philip Zimmerman had already escaped the USA via Bulletin Board Systems from the moment it was first distributed, but all copies of PGP outside of the United States were “illegal”. In order to fix the problem of all copies of PGP outside of America being encumbered by this perception, an ingenious plan was put into motion, using the first Amendment as the means of making it happen legally.
The source code for PGP was printed out. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigation)https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*YarDOJB7sRnR0uuXvqxmQw.jpeg
The original print out of the PGP source code.
It’s as simple as that. Once the source code for PGP was printed in book form, it instantly and more importantly, unambiguously, fell under the protection of the First Amendment. As a binary, the US government ridiculously tries to assert that immaterial software is a device, and not text (software or “binaries” is text that can be run on devices). Clearly the idea that software is a device is patently absurd, but rather than waste money arguing this point in court, printing out PGP removed all doubt that a First Amendment act was taking place.
The printed source code was shipped to another country, perfectly legally and beyond challenge, and then transferred to a machine by OCR (Optical Character Recognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition), a software tool that can turn a printed page into a text file, removing the need for a person to manually type out a printed page), resulting in a PGP executable that was legally exported from the United States.
The direct analogy to Bitcoin should be vividly clear to you now. PGP and Bitcoin are both:
1. Pieces of software that can be rendered as printed text on paper
2. Software that generates unique blocks of human readable text
3. Designed to generate text that is 100% covered by the First Amendment
The purpose of PGP is to absolutely verify the identity of the sender of a message and ensure that the message was not read or changed in transit. The purpose of Bitcoin is to absolutely verify the ability of the owner of a cryptographic key (which is a block of text) that can unlock a ledger entry in the global Bitcoin network. Both of these pieces of software are messaging systems and services that absolutely fall under the First Amendment in every aspect, from the source code used to generate the software clients that do the message signing to the text the compiled clients generate, send, receive and process.
Bitcoin is text. Bitcoin is speech. It cannot be regulated in a free country like the USA with guaranteed inalienable rights and a First Amendment that explicitly excludes the act of publishing from government oversight.
Bitcoin and PGP generate messages that are initiated by their users. Each of the messages that are generated by these two pieces of software are unique. The only bodies of law that could possibly be invoked regarding their output and source code are Copyright and Patent law respectively. The Bitcoin source is not copyrighted and the core idea of it is not Patented, and in any case, none of this has anything to do with the nature of Bitcoin messages, or your right to publish. Typewriters can include Patented methods in their construction, and those Patents have no bearing on your First Amendment right to publish what you create with a Patented tool.
Copyright gives the generator of these texts privileges under the law imposing fines on someone copying your message without your permission, but Copyright law has nothing to do with exporting, regulating or imposing a tax on the messages themselves, and of course, forbidding the copying of your Bitcoin payment message rather negates the purpose of using Bitcoin.
Taking all of this into account, if any legislator, regulator, three or six letter US agency or other bureaucrat dares to try and regulate Bitcoin, they will be on a hiding to nothing. A legal challenge will be mounted (https://t.co/HfGxuOmyt6), and will have to be mounted, because if the State can legislate against a single piece of software that generates messages, a legal precedent will be created allowing the US government to regulate all software no matter what it does.
Bitcoin’s operation is fundamentally no different to what all email, text messaging and internet connected software does; relay messages. The only difference is in the software that tracks how the messages of the sender and recipient relate to each other. Email is no different to Bitcoin, save for the fact that a record of the sender and recipient and content of your email is not stored in a public ledger one against the other. We know it’s stored in a private database, but that’s another story. Wink wink.
Here is another example (https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice ) of case law proving that this reasoning is correct.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*JxSFa9PktMtgZSb9KeEHeg.png
In Bernstein v. US Department of Justice it was established that code is speech and is protected by the First Amendment. This absolutely and unambiguously applies to Bitcoin, with eerie parallels to KYC/AML in Bitcoin. The unconstitutional ITAR requirements are exactly the same as asking Bitcoin traders to register as “Money Transmitters” and seek licenses before they can be paid to transmit text to the Bitcoin network for publication on the public ledger. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Bernstein’s favour, and ruled that software was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional. It is clear to see that Bitcoin falls squarely into the category of protected speech, there is no way around any of this, and the US courts must come to the same conclusion for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is protected speech, and the case law says so explicitly.
The position that Bitcoin is money is fundamentally wrong, and systems like it have existed for many years without gaining the attention of any three letter agencies. Take for example FarmVille, the massively popular farm simulation game on Facebook.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*Y0b6FOSODj3Y1yId9BsCug.png
This hugely popular game is no different to Bitcoin in nature. FarmBucks exist in a closed system, just as Bitcoin does. The only difference is the size of the space where the messages are being sent, and in the case of FarmBucks, the number of users and transactions (messages sent) was large. FarmVille had 83,760,000 monthly active users and not a single one was subjected to KYC/AML to exchange fiat for FarmBucks or FarmCash. Why not? What happened to that money? Why weren’t FinCEN or SEC all over that game as they are on ICOs? No one can explain this adequately. This example is very useful as a tool to pull back the curtain on the people who assert that Bitcoin is a money and is fundamentally different to a money kept in a game. All the rationales they use (mostly in the form of run on sentences) to explain the difference are inaccurate, and never address the fundamental processes; if they did, they would have no choice but to conclude that Bitcoin is no more subject to regulation than FarmBucks or PGP are.
Clearly, allowing legislation to touch Bitcoin means that any software of any kind will suddenly be liable to arbitrary and unconstitutional restriction. It will set a precedent that will be devastating to all software development in the USA, and software is the means by which everything is run, communicated, exchanged and ordered in modern society. In fact, it is impossible to run a modern society without software.
Twitter for example, could find itself being regulated; it transmits messages that are no different in nature to the messages that Bitcoin transmits; the only difference being the publicly maintained ledger and application of the messages. In fact, twitter could turn itself into a Bitcoin company quite easily by adding a few fields to its message JSON schema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#Example) to include a Bitcoin address for each of its users, adding a page to its client and running its own Bitcoin server pool. Would that extra text suddenly transform Twitter into a bank? Would that suddenly change the nature of each Tweet that is sent on their network, and cause them to be “Money Transmitters”? How is having a Bitcoin address integrated into your Twitter account different to making a promise by hand on Twitter to your followers or in a direct message?
Essentially, Bitcoin allows you to make written contracts with people without knowing them or signing paper; the network and software takes care of identifying and fulfilling the promise, all with cryptographically signed pieces of text. What the people calling for “BitLicenses” are asserting is that because Bitcoin right now has a particular use, it should be exempted from the basic law of the United States of America. That is completely insane, and will have unintended consequences that would be absolutely disastrous for the American economy since almost everything today is mediated by or touches software.
On the other hand, if Bitcoin is left to flourish and the market allowed to define the services, means of setting the value and resolving disputes, Bitcoin as an ecosystem will be extremely robust and widespread, just like the Internet is today, after having grown for twenty years without any regulation or oversight from the State.
Furthermore, as I have said previously, the country that does not enact Bitcoin legislation will become the starting and endpoints of all Bitcoin transactions globally by first mover advantage (https://hackernoon.com/our-submission-to-the-british-governments-digital-currencies-call-for-information-160fbf103bbc). All other jurisdictions will see Bitcoin passing through them untaxed, and there will be nothing they can do about it, as Bitcoin is an unassailable peer to peer network.
We have seen a similar phenomenon with the legal position of encryption in France. SSL was regulated in France until Dominique Strauss-Khan, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, removed the restrictions (http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/01/15/france_to_end_severe_encryption/). They knew that “French e-commerce” would take place inside “le pays Roosbeef” if it were not possible to secure French websites with SSL on demand without friction. American Bitcoin businesses (since the endpoints will be in their jurisdiction) will be taxed on their profits, and this will be a percentage of the trillions of global transactions made on the network for every conceivable and inconceivable purpose.
The same is true for any other country. The United States looks set to cripple itself by enacting “BitLicenses” and declaring by fiat that Bitcoin is a currency, or a commodity or legal tender. As I describe above, Bitcoin is none of those things by nature, and the myriad number of applications it can be put to is only just being discovered. Our project Azteco is but one of them, with the potential to reach the billions of unbanked people in the world, and provide them with an easy way to access internet e-commerce, world-wide, with a system that makes payment fraud impossible. The potential benefit to the unbanked and the websites that sell goods on-line and the jurisdictions where those websites operate is without precedent. Only a fool would do something that could harm the advent of this transformation, or shun this new technology and the business building on it.
No legislature will be able to keep up with the advances in software that are taking place; there are too many developers and efficient tools in the wild all over the world, all with equal access to the market. The best the State can possibly hope for is to tax new businesses that use the new tools as they emerge, and encourage entrepreneurs to incorporate in their jurisdictions. If America wants to drive away Bitcoin developers, exchanges and new businesses, by all means, do so and take the consequences. There are many other places in the world where fast internet pipes have been laid and where the government is not so backward. Skype was founded in Estonia, not Silicon Valley, and this is for a reason. All the big Bitcoin exchanges are outside of the USA. There is a reason for that. No one wanting to start a Bitcoin business is planning to move to New York from anywhere, because they know that their business models will immediately come under attack.
For those of you who are frightened of a free market in Bitcoin, rest assured, all the laws that currently exist to do with fraud, theft, misrepresentation and everything else, continue to apply to all people and corporations who use Bitcoin. Bitcoin does not make laws or your personal or corporate obligations moot. When you deal with a company, you retain access to the law and recourse to it. When someone makes a promise to sell you goods with Bitcoin, that promise is not nullified because you are paying with Bitcoin. Good Bitcoin businesses will build dispute resolution systems the way that eBay and Amazon have, so that you never have to go to court to obtain justice if there is a problem. Online, reputation is everything, and bad reputations can destroy your credibility and customer base over night. This is a far more powerful incentive to behave correctly and fulfil promises, which most people do by default in any case, rather than some arbitrary and absurd “BitLicense”.
All the “BitLicenses” in the world could not stop MTGox from having a software problem, and no law can bring back the money lost either directly or through the disruption the event caused by the software error. Once again, entrepreneurs powered by the Internet make life easier and better, not laws and regulations. Regulation does not make software correct; developers do.
I have one recommendation for anyone advocating that there should be a “BitLicense”. Don’t waste everyone’s time, money and resources proposing this anti-American idea. The EFF has better things to do with their time than teach the PGP “Munitions Case” lesson all over again. If it goes to court, your side will lose, and as a consequence, America will lose its head start as all Bitcoin entrepreneurs flee the USA for environments that will allow them to innovate, grow and prosper.
And what can the business people who want a “BitLicense” forced on the software industry say? That they don’t trust themselves? That’s patently absurd. That they do not trust their competitors? If it’s the case that their competitors are not good actors, then the good actors have a market advantage, and remember; a license cannot protect the public from fraud or provide any guarantee of any kind, it can only distort the market.
What these “BitLicense” advocates actually want is a guaranteed market advantage. They are Crony Capitalists. They want to prevent the emergence of a “Golden BB” entrepreneur that might destroy their business, they want to slow down and stifle innovation, so that they can become the entrenched and unassailable gatekeepers. They want to bar new entrants to the market. It simply will not work. And it’s un-American.
The American legislature must let the American dream flourish and extend its power to Bitcoin, or it will be compelled to obey the law, and this has started to happen. Two judges in the USA have now found that Bitcoin is not money, and have thrown out “Money Laundering” charges against two men:
“
U.S. Magistrate Judge Hugh B. Scott ruled in a money laundering case in Buffalo, N.Y. that bitcoin is more like a commodity and is not a form of currency, according to a local news report.
He recommended the money laundering charge be dropped against the defendant since bitcoin isn’t money.
In another money laundering case last year, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Teresa Mary Pooler stated it is very clear, even to someone with limited knowledge in the area, that bitcoin has a long way to go before it is the equivalent of money.
Archive: https://archive.is/pKQJ2
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Bitcoin is not money. KYC/AML should not apply to it at all. The Hugh B. Scott ruling is highly significant, because it directly contradicts the idea of BitLicence. And lest there be any doubt, all of this, including legal remedies for breach of promise, applies to “ICOs”, which are also nothing more than text stored in a database. The fact that they are called, “Initial Coin Offerings” is irrelevant to the underlying processes, and it is not illegal to parrot the language and terms of finance, which are not trademarked or copyrighted. The Hollywood Stock Exchange wasn't deceptive because it called itself a “Stock Exchange”. Opponents of Bitcoin and ICOs have no good arguments, and the threadbare pretexts for regulation they’re able to synthesize are as flimsy as fiat.
Listen to this piece read out by a real person (https://anchor.fm/thecryptoconomy/episodes/CryptoQuikRead_260---Why-America-Cant-Regulate-Bitcoin-e4b4s8/a-ah3bvg) on The Cryptoconomy Podcast.
Read this article in Spanish (https://sovrnbitcoiner.com/por-que-estados-unidos-no-puede-regular-bitcoin/). Translated by Wave @insatwetrust.
Many years ago, a despicable little pipsqueak trumpeted that they'd "Won" by getting Bitcoin "recognised" by a legislator, after years of lobbying for new rules.
No one anointed this runt to do this job. They took it upon themselves to poison the legislature.
Now, as a direct result of this imbecile's action, doing business is harder than it would have been had he kept his stupid mouth shut.
Now the same people are trying to pivot to being the champions of freedom, having forged the chains that now bind them and other actually innocent people, and contaminate the business landscape.
We remember what you did.
We do not forgive. We do not forget.
You're still a tie wearing normie underneath.
WE SEE YOU.
https://x.com/Beautyon_/status/1795811453762416789
Slowly but surely, Lummis & Co. are starting to get it, but they’re not anywhere near close enough to fulfilling their oaths.
First of all, there is no such thing as a “Crypto Asset” this is a portmanteau a made up phrase borne of backward analogies computer illiterates have constructed to give their arguments form.
As soon as anyone says the phrase "Crypto Assets", you know you’re dealing with an ignoramus, in the strict Latin sense of that word: “Know Nothing”.
Users who have control over private keys do not have “custody” of Bitcoin. The word “custody” is another analogy used to encapsulate the idea that these users don’t have to ask another person to sign a message on their behalf.
No one “custodies” Bitcoin at all; there are no “Bitcoins”.
You can blame the idea that Bitcoins are like actual coins from the retarded use of the gold coin images that have polluted the minds of politicians and many others. This money imagery is the cause of the widespread confusion over what Bitcoin actually is, which is not money, but a messaging and database system.
It is simply not true that “transactions are processed on the user’s local device”. Bitcoin signatures do not require a device at all, and can be made with a pencil an piece of graph paper.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo&ab_channel=KenShirriff
Lummis & Co. do not know this, because they are computer illiterates. Most people are, and that's OK. What is NOT OK is telling American citizens what they can do with their writing of math. That's unacceptable at any time and anti-American by default.
If they knew this fact about what Bitcoin actually is, that it is a form of writing (math), they would understand that the devices people use are mere conveniences and not prerequisites to signing messages before being sent to the Bitcoin network for addition to the chain of blocks, which does require a computer.
The fact that a computer is required to send messages is also protected speech under the Constitution, lest anyone believe that the use of a computer changes the nature of the basic act.
For Lummis & Co. because Bitcoin wallets look just like their Bank of America apps, they cannot conceive of what is actually going on under the hood of a Bitcoin “wallet” app, and how radically different these apps are from banking apps.
They see the conventions used by Bitcoin “wallets” including a chronological list of “transactions” and a “balance”, without any understanding of of what is happening in the background. They think the analogies are the reality. That is not so.
For all her many faults, Lummis is trying her best to get to grips with Bitcoin. She has not doubled down on some of her more outrageous and insulting ideas (https://medium.com/@beautyon_/unpacking-the-lummis-gillibrand-responsible-financial-innovation-act-6128e6db6a68), has abandoned them in a timely manner of her own accord (apparently), and so she should be applauded and helped correct her thinking, since this appears to be possible, so that she can transform herself into an ally of American citizens from being a leader in the ranks of the bitter enemies of, "We the People".
https://m.primal.net/IRNs.jpg
It is not true that Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is over.
The exact opposite is true.
Bitcoin was written after the mid-seventies Home Computer revolution took place and “ended”, putting the power of software development in everyone’s hands at a cost of essentially zero. Before that, to develop and run software, you had to book time on a large UNIX machine at a University, and that was only possible if you were enrolled as a student at an institution with a computer. Computer illiterates don’t know any of this important context and history.
Bitcoin was written on widely available, ubiquitous commodity computer equipment available from Walmart to Radio Shack. It was written in programming languages that were free and on operating systems that came for free with the machines they ran on. None of this was true previously; the cost of a commercial software license for AT&T UNIX was $30,000, out of reach for all but companies and educational institutions. Even the single user license of $150, whilst not an impediment for the die hard, was eliminated when Bitcoin was written by GNU. Universal availability of computing made the software development revolution possible. It meant that anyone anywhere could write software without permission, admission to University or supervision of any kind, and then they could distribute to anyone anywhere it without permission at a cost of near zero.
In the early days, software was distributed by mail order on floppy discs. Then it was distributed by BBS systems over telephone calls modem to modem. Now it is distributed over the Internet, for free. The commodification of computers and elimination of the cost of tooling to write software, remote connecting and expanded access to every form of intellectual pursuit in software from game development to book writing and research.
Can you see what’s coming next?
Universal access to programmable synthetic money in the form of Bitcoin will mean that anyone anywhere will be using Bitcoin. Nation States, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds’ are irrelevant to this, and will continue to be downstream of the innovators from the public, just as they were and are with the Internet, email and Bitcoin. Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds did not develop Bitcoin (or email or the web), and could not have developed it. They could not have imagined any of them, nor had they the skill to implement it. (See Paul Krugman’s predictions about the Internet being no more important than the Fax machine, or his most recent predictions about Bitcoin. What a joke!) The members of their impotent class will be, at best, peers on the network, like everyone else is. They are no longer special, privileged or required. At all.
That’s the whole point of Bitcoin, in case you didn’t know.
Jeremy Alaire famously said many years ago of the Bitcoin ecosystem, “It’s time for the grown ups now”. He was 100% wrong, and ended up peddling altcoins and unethical stablecoins because the immovable and immutable object “Bitcoin”, resists partially informed incomers with their clever plans to improve it. This feature of Bitcoin (and it is a feature, not a flaw) is what is currently being missed by FinTech bros, WallStreet Wonks, tenacious tangentials and other people who have just come to the ideas that spawned Bitcoin; reality no longer operates by proclamation of the self anointed.
It is a good thing that a small number of Americans are finally capitulating to Bitcoin, however in addition to capitulation, their parochial “Policeman of the World”, “my way or the highway”, “our institutions and governance models are the only possible way forward” mindset is best abandoned by them; no one on Earth wants to hear it, everyone is fed up with them, Bitcoin can’t hear it, and all real Bitcoiners ignore it.
The subconscious urge to control everything is strong in many characters; this is why rebellion is cast in a negative light by Statists. Change is not rebellion. Change is the essential process of all existence. Change is coming to what money is and how it is mediated, and in this change, the old players are removed from management, oversight, design or input of any kind. They are excluded. They are exsanguinated.
Yesterday’s men can’t conceive of any power outside of the familiar structures from their past; “the big boys” will always be the great powers. They don’t seem to realize (why should they?) that Bitcoin is sitting on top of something that has already completely eroded the power of many venerated “staple of modern life” institutions to great effect and universal benefit
Journalism: Junked
Music Distribution: Marginalized, Decimated
Publishing: Pulverized
Dictionaries: Destroyed
Telephone Companies: Trashed, Castrated
Censorship: Cauterized and Circumvented
Government Postal Services: Gutted, Piked, Slaughtered
Only the most naïve of people thinks the entry of Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds as peers on the network abolishes Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, cypherpunk era. On the contrary; the spread of Bitcoin makes Cypherpunk and the culture of rebellion the norm. It is Cypherpunks that are the innovators, and they’re continuing to prove it. Look at how one software company, Blockstream, run by a Cypherpunk, is providing financialization services to a nation state that were unimaginable before Bitcoin. All of this is obvious to anyone who can think.
The Cypherpunks and their direct descendants are building the new companies, software and services that cannot be revoked or “supervised” by outsiders, cowards, Statists, carpetbaggers, thieves, Socialists, and other human moths attracted to the bright flame of Bitcoin.
Look at Nostr for another example. While everyone downstream of Twitter as consumers complained bitterly about it, one man decided to offer a possible solution to it. No one saw it coming, or even thought it possible. Now, like it or not, an ecosystem has the very real potential (because it is real) of emerging on it, where the people using it cannot be told what to do or say.
This is exactly analogous with what happened with Bitcoin. Wall Street Wonks complaining bitterly about “the corrupt system” could not imagine Bitcoin, and then Bitcoin…existed, and now it cannot be stopped, like it or not, and its nature will not be changed because Bitcoin’s rebellious, DIY, mid-seventies-like, Cypherpunk era is not only not over but will never end. This is a safe prediction to make; look at how features of the web are developed, through the IETF process. The people at the coal face are doing the hard work of fundamental design, and corporations have nothing to do with it beyond paying the salaries of the designers; the “big players” don’t have a say in how things actually work.
Apple learned this the hard way by trying to introduce a new protocol called “AppleTalk.” Launched in the mid-1980s, AppleTalk was designed to facilitate networking in Apple environments, allowing Macintosh computers to connect and share resources seamlessly. Despite its initial success within Apple’s ecosystem, AppleTalk struggled to gain broader acceptance due to the dominance of other networking protocols like Ethernet and TCP/IP. Over time, as the industry standard shifted towards TCP/IP, Apple gradually phased out AppleTalk, officially discontinuing support for it in 2009. “2009”...a special year, wasn't it? This is exactly like Wall Street trying to “take over” Bitcoin and change it. It cannot happen, and there will be no “The Grownups are Here Now” moment in Bitcoin. History indicates this strongly, but you have to know your history in order to understand this.
These are just a few of many examples showing the nature of the change and who is being excluded as a consequence. Everyone who has the power to create software and services is fed up to the back teeth with being told what they are, what they can do, what they can say, how they must implement software tools, and being on the bottom rung of the perverted “Society” where Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds have control over what money is and how it is allowed to move.
That’s over chaps.
The masses using Bitcoin at every level are together far more powerful than any Nation state, hedge fund or sovereign wealth fund. The masses using Bitcoin as money is an absolutely inevitable outcome, and it will happen on the terms of the Cypherpunks, not Nation states, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds.
It seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that there only needs to be one Bitcoin Conference ever, for all time, and then that conference put on YouTube for everyone to watch forever, will be the only one required, without ever doing another one.
Doest this make sense?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
1. Reject lying and infantlilism like "absolutism". There are absolutes, there is "truth" and reality is not a matter of "Perspective" or "Nuance". There is no such thing as "individual truths".
2. Truth is not a matter of balance. There are absolute rights and wrongs, and these are discoverable in ways that make refuting them impossible. This is why Bitcoin was written. Critical thinking is in aid of discovering absolute truth. Science is not truth; it is a method only, and is never "settled". Truth can be settled, like Maths, Biology, Physics and Chemistry, which are not part of Science.
3. Taking action to solve problems together is a good thing, but cœrcing people to solve problems by violent collectivism and "Democracy" is not. Conscripting people into you morally repugnant and offensive "Society" is slavery, and slavery is evil.
READ ALL ABOUT IT.
https://mises.org/library/book/new-liberty-libertarian-manifestohttps://twitter.com/StartsWithUs/status/1790492681736532390
INGSOCs fatal conceit is the belief that legislation solves problems. It doesn't all this nonsense means is that manufacturers will leave INGSOC and CALISOC so they can produce their goods in free countries.
It doesn't matter if it is bad practice that bad passwords are shipped with goods; what matters is the principle of the State telling people how they should run their companies, down to the technical details of password strength.
Anyone who calls themselvs a "Bitcoiner" cannot be for this. If they are, they are painfully naïeve, believing that these same computer illiterate geriatrics are not coming to Bitcoin to demand that the 21,000,000 limit be increased, "For the good of Society".
There are not enough hours in the day, days in the year, or years to keep teaching these fundamental principles over and over to stupid, naïeve, ignorant dullards. This is why Bitcoin needed to be written, so that the law is laid down once and forevermore in a way that cannot be undone.
Once the money supply is constrained, the State will not be able to force you to set passwords.
YES, that is the true purpose of Bitcoin, Droogie!
--------------------------------------------------
↓ FROM BRUCE SCHNEIER, BITCOIN DENIER ↓
----------------------------------------------------
The UK Bans Default Passwords
The UK is the first country to ban default passwords on IoT devices.
On Monday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices.
https://therecord.media/united-kingdom-bans-defalt-passwords-iot-devices
Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted.
The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 (PSTI)
https://archive.is/wip/vIYbQ
introduces new minimum-security standards for manufacturers, and demands that these companies are open with consumers about how long their products will receive security updates for.
The UK may be the first country, but as far as I know, California is the first jurisdiction. It banned default passwords in 2018, the law taking effect in 2020.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/05/california-passes-law-that-bans-default-passwords-in-connected-devices/?guccounter=1
This sort of thing benefits all of us everywhere. IoT manufacturers aren’t making two devices, one for California and one for the rest of the US. And they’re not going to make one for the UK and another for the rest of Europe, either. They’ll remove the default passwords and sell those devices everywhere.
Another news article.
EDITED TO ADD (5/14): To clarify, the regulations say that passwords must be either chosen by the user, or else unique to the device. If unique preset passwords are used, they can’t be produced by an algorithm that makes them easily guessable. Here is the actual language of the regulation.
https://archive.is/UtSRe
This means that all Dutch developers are in danger, not developers in free countries.
And foreign developers don't need to ever go to the land of the Dutch for any reason in perpetuity, because the world is a big place. Did you know that?
All this does is reinforce the attractiveness of El Salvador and other free countries as not only havens of peace, but very soon, havens of innovation where people are free to write software and release it.
El Salvador could be the centre of all important software development if they maintain reason and an environment of Liberty, and from there, absorb all the developers and businesses and reap the benefits.
Will it be perfect? No.
Will people release disruptive tools? Yes.
Is that a reason to regulate software development? NO.
And if you don't think regulation of software development is not coming, you are mentally retarded.
https://twitter.com/freedomtech/status/1790500980100104591
As I've been telling you; if Bitcoin is money then software is money and writing software will be regulated. The Tornado Cash conviction is the most recent excrescence of this abominable nonsense.
https://twitter.com/Beautyon_/status/1180188226423808001
This is an example of the great danger of computer illiterate judges simply making things up when delivering a judgement.
By this, all BitTorrent developers, and the Linux distros that distribute clients, are culpable for the uses Linux and BitTorrent are put to. It's insane to anyone who can think...
And that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it?
https://twitter.com/freedomtech/status/1790500934126293311
It would be a good idea to for “Bitcoiners” to buy a map, and study what “Jurisdiction” means.
Whenever you hear an American say, “things are bad in Bitcoin”, several things are inevitably true.
They think America and its “SEC” are the only powers on Earth.
They refuse to name the enemy that causes their fear; “The State”.
People like this can never solve problems because they’re psychologically incapable of imagining a world where their beloved State is smaller.
These people were never truly aligned with Bitcoin’s aims; they think the purpose of Bitcoin is “decentralisation”.
It is not.
The purpose of Bitcoin is replacing fiat, not to act as a perfect expression of a database software problem.
And Bitcoin has no aims; it is not a person.
People have aims, and if your aim is X it’s up to you to make it so. If you refuse to face reality, other people who do, will, and you’ll be drowned out.
And even if Bitcoin was perfect to their standards, it would still be corrosive to the power of the State, and distribution and dissemination of it into the economy would remain a problem (app stores)…or do these delusional people believe the State will throw its hands up and walk away, “because distributed”? You’ll still be an enemy of the State, and a target, even with a perfect Bitcoin, silly little boy.
The level of delusion, infantilism, brainwashing and just plain silliness on constant display is shocking and perplexing. If it were not for the bright future coming it would be depressing.
You the observers can choose to listen to the negative Bitcoin Cult members, and wallow in the pool of misery they sit and stew in that they want to drag you all down into.
Or you can go boldly into the future with real Bitcoiners and step into the bright future with them.
Easy choice Droogies!
Elon can post the vidya below, and yet, he thinks Bitcoin is a bad thing “because of the environment” and Doge is a serious alternative.
AI electricity consumption is set to become greater than that of Bitcoin, (and aluminium production already is) but these are unquestioned…why?
Not only does Bitcoin come under unwarranted scrutiny and hysterical innumerate criticism, but the truth about its consumption is thrown out (Bitcoin doesn’t waste electricity https://medium.com/@beautyon_/bitcoin-doesnt-waste-electricity-649694ea3605 and neither does AI or any other use) irrationally…why?
I’ll tell you why. The fundamental problem expressed in this clip is that people are weak, incapable of grasping scale, afraid of themselves and desperate to push responsibility for all events in their lives onto (((them))).
This is the reason why the irrational and illogical “Freedom of Speech Not Reach” is the policy on X. This is why Bitcoin is shunned by Elon, rather than being fully incorporated into X.
This is why it was proposed that blocking and “likes” be removed. Irrational people don’t like facts, shun reality, don’t like being challenged by hard to accept truths, and will do anything to silence people telling the truth. This is not a new characteristic of man, obviously.
The worst part is that they drape the cloak of “Science” around their shoulders to appear logical, fair, modern and reasonable. They are none of those things. They are unreasonable, unreasoning, illogical, unscientific, emotional and utterly wrong.
They don’t follow Science; they’re cultists in Scientism.
They don’t believe in free speech, or the truth.
They’re not for mankind; they’re the enemies of man.
This is exactly why Bitcoin is so desperately needed. The world would be much better off with a monetary system permanently free of the control of this class, where irrationality is excluded and immutable discipline is imposed.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1789678328875745575
Did I say “would”? I meant WILL.
Countdown to Primal dumping Nostr and going full throttle Bitcoin Wallet.
They can’t possibly win if they Ambulance Chase Geo Locate.
INGSOCs need Bitcoin too, and other countries don’t ask where or who you are.
GASCINATING BEHAVIOUR
(YES “GASCINATING”)
https://m.primal.net/IFVI.jpg
Walk out to where? Honestly, why is it that people can’t contribute a single action to take? BAFFLING.
“Leave your money on the table? How are you going to buy your burgers if you do that? Capitulation in the face of tyranny gets everyone murdered.
“You can just commit suicide; THAT WILL SHOW THEM!”
Back to X, where I block, and THRIVE in PEACE! nostr:note1r7v07rnuaptf4xat69pp2meeypr5jyp3j36gatvyr7vs3jklg7qsvtx5l4
Tolerance is the direct route to fiat and WW3. I loathe tolerance and the blithe acceptance of evil, and believe it or not, you CAN block the whole world, and living with idiots is a choice. Every once in a while, I dip my toe back into the cesspool of the idiots to remind myself of what I’ve escaped on a daily basis.
It’s refreshing! https://image.nostr.build/f851af92aff5e4a9998e74298e2aa86203bb8f26e380574be1554cf6ff6c0a80.jpg
TERRIBLE flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and our friends from Rolante (the biggest Bitcoin adopting community in the world rn) need your help.👇
If you can give any aid in any way, including Bitcoin, I'm sure they would find it a great blessing.
With Bitcoin, it is now possible to send very small amounts, arbitrary amounts, to help in emergency situations, and Bitcoin was MADE FOR THIS.
If you are in Brazil you can send PIX, obviously, but being Bitcoiners you have a special power at your fingertips to help people in need.
If everyone in Bitcoin who is on Lightning sent a few dollars, this would be not only a very great act of charity, but would also send a signal about how useful Bitcoin is.
6 hbitcoinrolante
Confira abaixo como ajudar 👇
PIX 👉 51.299.707/0001-81
BITCOIN via Lightning 👉 enchenterolante@coinos.io
BITCOIN via onchain 👉 bc1q4w3mc5uztsznk6v64hwj097umr3p4cepayt6d3
instagram.com/reel/C6gtbUKLk…
COPA coming to Samourai’s defence is what I expect to see announced next. This is a historic case that will determine the future of Bitcoin.
The high stakes Samourai case is no different to Bernstein v. United States, and requires a final, definitive answer to the fundamental (already answered) question, “What is the true nature of all cryptographic operations taking place in computers?”.
And Bitcoin is simply math being performed in computers, and it is literally nothing more than that. The same arguments for Bernstein, and Phil Zimmerman’s case (http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/philzima.html) apply to Samourai, and the same defences should work if The Constitution hasn’t changed. And it hasn’t.
If COPA do not rise to this challenge and defend the underdog, then the floodgates will be opened for the missapplication of money laws to all Bitcoin operations no matter what they are.
At the fundamental level, Bitcoin is speech. This is not “Semantics”; this is a plain statement of fact, established in law.
Everything you do in Bitcoin is protected speech. If you believe that this event applies only to “mixing”, you are mistaken.
The simple act of “moving” Bitcoin from one address you are known to control and are registered with, to another address that is an “unregistered Bitcoin address” could be construed as a criminal act in the future if COPA don’t kill this.
And I hope they kill it. With fire.
@opencryptoorg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
As predicted, eventually someone with laser focus (not laser eyes) will enter the Bitcoin market, and make the process of controlling and using Bitcoin as easy as WhatsApp, without compromise or the need for any education.
Bitkey is the first global scale company to achieve the hardest part of this. The focus - very sharp, the user experience - extreme simplicity.
By removing all "thought barriers" from its operation, people using this device and service can just get on with using Bitcoin. That's more important than anything. It is a beautiful mix of safe storage and everyday use.
The vast majority of users on Earth will never read about Bitcoin just as they have never read about SSL or POP3, but everyone is using the web and email.
This has to happen in Bitcoin for it to reach and touch everyone, and it has to reach and touch everyone for it to do the work it was designed to do.
This development, like Bitcoin itself, starts off quietly, then all of a sudden, it's everywhere, with the side effect of forcing everyone to rise to its high standards.
As it was with the iPhone, before it, all phones had mechanical push button keyboards. Then, seemingly all of a sudden they were all relegated to the dustbin, and the expectation was "keyboardless".
You're seeing the beginning of something like that here with Bitkey. This single event could be the beginning of the very much needed sea change in the thinking behind delivering Bitcoin services to the public.
Well done that Bitkey team!
https://bitkey.build/bitkey-starts-shipping-today/https://nostrcheck.me/media/134743ca8ad0203b3657c20a6869e64f160ce48ae6388dc1f5ca67f346019ee7/nostrcheck.me_4951410842165091871710407501.webp
Human nature is fixed.
Give them internets, they use it for porn
Give them Bitcoin, they create altcoins
Give them Nostr they do “gm frenz”
Man always brings his garbage with him wherever he goes; wherever man is, you will find his filth. The dream of Nostr, that it will be some sort of Sesame Street el dorado of free speech is a childish fantasy. It’s wanting man without his nature, which is simply not possible.
The only people realistic about this are the transhumanists, who are just like Nostr people, only more serious, result driven, scientific and realistic. They want to change man through breeding and gene altering so that man is no longer man, but “Man 2.0”. Schwab and his evil acolytes (some of them Bitcoin infiltraitors) are explicitly for this.
Naïve people are very boring and dangerous. While they pick their navel lint with their little toes, literal monsters are trying to reingineer both man and the Earth (Gates and his clot shots, Polio causing vaccines in India, GMO mosquito releases, synthetic meat etc, WEF eat ze bugs and so on).
But everything is OK because…YOU’RE ON NOSTR!
The real problems must be described and faced squarely if you want to solve them, If you don’t want to face them and solve them, well, fine enjoy it.
nostr:note1puc0t8j5na62fpvp5eqdxxtkf20kk6e5wzw70z86m5ks4358s56qy74fk7
Human nature is fixed.
Give them internets, they use it for porn
Give them Bitcoin, they create altcoins
Give them Nostr they do “gm frenz”
Man always brings his garbage with him wherever he goes; wherever man is, you will find his filth. The dream of Nostr, that it will be some sort of Sesame Street el dorado of free speech is a childish fantasy. It’s wanting man without his nature, which is simply not possible.
The only people realistic about this are the transhumanists, who are just like Nostr people, only more serious, result driven, scientific and realistic. They want to change man through breeding and gene altering so that man is no longer man, but “Man 2.0”. Schwab and his evil acolytes (some of them Bitcoin infiltraitors) are explicitly for this.
Naïve people are very boring and dangerous. While they pick their navel lint with their little toes, literal monsters are trying to reingineer both man and the Earth (Gates and his clot shots, Polio causing vaccines in India, GMO mosquito releases, synthetic meat etc, WEF eat ze bugs and so on).
But everything is OK because…YOU’RE ON NOSTR!
The real problems must be described and faced squarely if you want to solve them, If you don’t want to face them and solve them, well, fine enjoy it.
nostr:note1puc0t8j5na62fpvp5eqdxxtkf20kk6e5wzw70z86m5ks4358s56qy74fk7
People who vote based on sad family stories recounted in tear jerk biographies rather than policy, The Constitution and ethics should not have the vote at all.
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