Circlejerking over IQ has little to do with having IQ. Indeed, you're assuming those people aren't lying about their IQs.


IQ correlates well to success in life, measured in all kinds of ways. It's not the only factor. But it is an important one.

It's just wishful thinking to believe that it doesn't.


It's Taleb. I've got better things to do than debunk him given how he's obviously become a crank.

As for IQ in general, anyone with a bit of sense can see how obviously some people are just smarter than others, and how children tend to be similarly intelligent as their parents. Intelligence in general is _obviously_ a genetic trait: humans have it in ways animals _clearly_ do not, and different animals _clearly_ have it in different degrees.

As I said, you have to actively fool yourself to convince yourself otherwise; the burden of proof is not on my views here. The only reason there is an IQ denial movement is because IQ (especially the inherited component of it) is so utterly toxic to DEI beliefs.


Taleb is clearly someone who is willing to bend his intellectual arguments to fit his politics and preconceptions, rather than the data. Just look at how badly he failed on Bitcoin and COVID.

Not unfair to call him a crank...

https://medium.com/incerto/no-covid-19-is-not-an-old-person-problem-6968f720d153

Anyway, the ugly reality is IQ is certainly real, genetically heritable, and IQ distributions vary. The reason why so few engineers are black isn't primarily racism. It's because black populations around the world tend to have lower IQ.

Conversely, in spite of vicious racism in the past (and present...) Jews still managed to dominate the sciences is mainly because their average IQ is high. Same with Asians, though not as extreme.

Of course, distributions are distributions, and some people will beat the odds and you should evaluate individuals on their own merits. But as long as the genetics (and culture) of so much of the world is awful, those parts of the world will remain poor and backwards. And allowing the more talented people in those parts of the world to immigrate to western countries just increases that inequality through brain drain, while dragging down our countries if we're not careful. Canada's prior immigration policy was careful... and probably did the rest of the world a disservice by taking their best people.

The irony here is convincing yourself that IQ isn't real takes intelligence... 😂


You're an IQ denier? Lol, that's hilarious.

Lots of people desperately wish IQ wasn't a real thing. It is.


There's lots of stats along the lines of this floating around from various studies: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country

I'd take the exact numbers with a grain of salt. IQ is tricky to measure across cultures and there's more than one type of intelligence. There's also the issue that countries are often _not_ homogeneous (a hilarious example of this is how Dutch origin white Afrikaans in South Africa have actually been in South Africa _longer_ than the majority of the black population, as they descend from more recent invaders).

But the rough trends are certainly correct. And the fact that counties _do_ differ is important.

Also, the "more than one type of intelligence" doesn't change the fact that modern technology favors mathematical/logical intelligence: thinking logically is much more valuable than other types of thinking, because machines are so efficient at doing work.

It's interesting how making AI think artistically has turned out to be much easier than making AIs think logically...


How much money is in your bank account?

Is it more than $10? Why aren't you sending it to feed equally valuable humans starving to death in Africa?


Trump? Lolwut? Trump isn't anti-Semitic. He opened his speech at Nashville with a somber statement decrying at attack on Israel that had happened earlier that day.

Woke ideology hates Jews because Jews are spectacularly successful. Same reason woke ideology classifies Asians as white these days. Asians and Jews, among others, show that black underachievement is not due to racism.

Speaking of... In my previous job, at an extremely high end geophysics startup, with most employees being exceptional at what they did, out of my ~10 most direct coworkers ~5 of them were first generation immigrants born outside Canada. (White) South African, Russian, Chinese, Korean (IIRC), and Iranian. My boss – an exceptionally good engineer – was Greek (IIRC, 2nd generation). I'm probably forgetting a person or two born in the US too.

Canada has obviously done really well importing highly skilled people. But that's the thing: highly skilled. The only person I knew at that company who didn't get into Canada on pure merit was an Iranian refugee, and he was one of the least skilled people there. Hell, the South African was so good at what he did that he managed to get _two_ extra citizenships (Canadian and UK) through merit-based immigration before he retired.


In this I fully agree with  nostr:npub1ej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqm3ndrm

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


That's a member of parliment quoting UK official stats figures. They're similar to public figures from others European countries; many countries shamefully make it effectively illegal to even collect these stats.

Anyway, the fact you immediately go to "white supremacy" is ridiculous.

There is nothing wrong with wanting more of your country men rather than importing foreigners. Canada has done well with its previous policy of allowing high skilled immigrants in – Canada is a better country for it. Importing unskilled labor en-mass is nuts. Which is shown by the fact that these unskilled migrants are a clear drain on economies, and disrupt our way of life.

Violence is also a serious issue. We're importing violent criminals. That's just a fact. For example, Canada didn't have a significant problem with anti-Semitism until we started importing violent, unskilled, Muslims in large numbers.

Why on earth would I want highly skilled, peaceful, productive Jews to be driven out by unskilled, violent, unproductive Muslims?


Nah, I'm Craig Wright.


Those UK figures are for people who are allowed to work.

The west doesn't have massive shortages of unskilled labor. Quite the opposite: we're losing opportunities for our less well off people to work due to automation. It's a real tragedy for the mentally disabled: they used to be able to get relatively unskilled jobs like restocking and factory jobs, and now just end up aimless. I used to have a fair bit of contact with that group due to involvement in autism support stuff – even 20 years ago this was a big problem.

What's happening instead is unskilled immigrants are screwing over career progression for young people. Eg in Canada, it used to be easy for teens to get their first jobs working at places like fast food restaurants. Now those jobs are being taken by immigrants, giving young Canadians no way to get into the job market. That's an atrocious outcome. And it further depresses birthrates by making it even harder to raise kids.

The numbers don't lie: the world is full of poor countries with average IQs significantly less than the west. Allowing those people into our countries makes our countries worse.


Good. The world is chock full of unproductive, unintelligent, pretty much worthless, people who will flood our borders and take our stuff if given the chance. Immigration from most countries is a clear net negative.

It would be perfectly reasonable to intentionally sink these boats with gunfire; Poland uses live ammo to keep illegals from Russia (via Belarus) from getting close to the border fences.

https://x.com/AkkadSecretary/status/1856386068196573412


There is a very clear path to Ukrainian victory: provide Russia with the weapons it needs (and for that matter, promised) and use them against Russia.

Biden's administration has actually delivered just 10% of what congress approved – Biden has been intentionally holding Ukraine back to try to force some kind of ceasefire. Those billions of dollars of weapons promised hasn't actually been shipped to me Ukraine. It's endless delays and excuses, even though the US has large stockpiles of this stuff.

Yet even with 10% of what they were supposed to have, and never being allowed to use all kinds of long range weapons that would obviously make a huge improvement, Ukraine has not only successfully held Russia back. They've even taken Russian territory.

This isn't hard. Russia is a weak country with a terrible economic situation and failing military. They'd have lost already if politicians actually tried to win it.


Peace in this situation is equivalent to the defund the police insanity. Russia has stolen a bunch of stuff and murdered a lot of innocent people. To actually stop this behavior you need to change the incentives, and remove their ability to do so in the future. A quick "peace" through a ceasefire does not do that.

Territories have to be taken back, and Russians have to be captured and killed, for the incentives to change.

This is no different to how letting off shoplifters with warnings just results in more shoplifting in the future.


No! I said only if it's a cover band! 😂


Just listened to Paul Sztorx's talk on CUSF at the opnext.dev conference.

It is the worst technical concept I've ever seen presented at a Bitcoin conference. 😂

tl;dr: because no-one wants to merge his terrible soft fork proposals – and he's too lazy to rebase his code – Sztorc wants to ship a separate piece of software that uses the invalidateblock RPC call to detect and reporg out blocks that violate his soft forks. Obviously, if miners actually run this, it makes it a nightmare to actually run a real validating node as now this Rube Goldberg bit of complexity now becomes the Bitcoin protocol. And obviously, that makes it likely that a soft fork won't be enforced by economic nodes, resulting in massive losses when miners get bored and stop running it.

This would be a good reason to remove invalidateblock… except that it's likely that no miner will run this nonsense. Heck, at the talk itself, a miner brought up how crazy this is.


Just listened to Paul Sztorx's talk on CUSF at the opnext.dev conference.

It is the worst technical concept I've ever seen presented at a Bitcoin conference. 😂

tl;dr: because no-one wants to merge his terrible soft fork proposals – and he's too lazy to rebase his code – Sztorc wants to ship a separate piece of software that uses the invalidateblock RPC call to detect and reporg out blocks that violate his soft forks. Obviously, if miners actually run this, it makes it a nightmare to actually run a real validating node as now this Rube Goldberg bit of complexity now becomes the Bitcoin protocol. And obviously, that makes it likely that a soft fork won't be enforced by economic nodes, resulting in massive losses when miners get bored and stop running it.


TIL about BBC Pidgen: https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/articles/c78d7e75rppo


Good point. Though frankly it's cheap enough I never really thought about it. 😂


Last time I tried sovereign.engineering I got ripped off, FYI.

I'm prefer IVPN, which accepts lightning directly.


I've raised about 3 million sats, $2000, on geyser.fund

Twitter still has a lot more reach.


I'm not aware of any legal cases where _timestamps_ were publicly used, even though guardtime has been around since forever. My suspicion is that it's good enough evidence that no-one even tries to dispute timestamps.


The interesting thing about anti-fraud efforts like OpenTimestamps is often what they achieve is invisible, because they've discouraged fraud from happening at all.

I've experienced this myself: I was plaintiff in a lawsuit where timestamped evidence was damming to the defendant. Even though the evidence didn't have digital signatures, the defense didn't even try to contest the validity of it. I'm sure the timestamps helped them make that decision.

Previously in Guatemala, the timestamps on the tally sheets in the election did two main things:

1) They showed they the vast majority of tally sheets were filled out soon after the election officially ended, contesting claims of widespread fraud.

2) A significant subset of tally sheets had incorrect metadata times in the computer system that scanned them due to a timezone misconfiguration. OpenTimestamps provided evidence that this was just a timezone misconfiguration, not fraud, and the judiciary in the end accepted that evidence.


Also one of the most boring... But sometimes boring things that actually work are pretty useful. :)


I can now tell you all: OpenTimestamps did in fact have a small role in the US election! I don't know the full details. But apparently it was used to timestamp election data in Screven County, Georgia; possibly others too.

https://www.youtube.com/live/hR9dBzqZvvg?t=18344&feature=shared

The total cost for time-stamping at maximum speed for two days, on two calendars: 259,380sats.

If I get more donations, I'll continue to timestamp faster, giving everyone more accurate timestamps: https://geyser.fund/project/opentimestamps


I'm certainly soft and pudgy. But waiting the night to get more water rather than hiking further without being sure I had a water supply was definitely the smart move.


I like being in nature. But it's a lot more enjoyable because I can easily leave...


A few months ago I spent a night in a cave waiting for my water bottles to fill up from a drip in the ceiling while hiking in South Africa.

Nature kinda sucks.

nostr:nevent1qqsgz84njx6ust95gc075hrxc2kqp3vtlza3uzcwlsfd0924qcsrxccppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsgydql3q4ka27d9wnlrmus4tvkrnc8ftc4h8h5fgyln54gl0a7dgsrqsqqqqqph8j9dc


Polymarket at this point is probably more useful to hedge the risk of your less favorite candidate getting elected.

Who knows, maybe a ton of people who think they'll get screwed over by Trump are betting on him... 😂


To help anyone using @opentimestamps to timestamp data related to the US election, I've decreased the interval of timestamp txs to approximately one per block.

This will cost ~$300 at current fee rates. You can help out by donating with Lightning: https://geyser.fund/project/opentimestamps

Or on-chain, directly to the calendars I run:

https://alice.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org/
https://bob.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org/


Every one I took in this trip to Argentina for labitconf. :)


NEW EXCLUSIVE EVENT 📣

On Monday November 11, nostr:npub1ej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqm3ndrm joins #bitcoin historian Rizzo for a LIVE interview to discuss the claims made in the HBO documentary Money Electric, and what it meant to be a bitcoin contributor before most of the world was even aware of its existence.

This is a free, public event – RSVP ASAP! 🧡🙏🍻
https://www.meetup.com/pubkey-meetups/events/304380980


"We should increase the number of Satoshis."

"We should increase the number of satoshis."

Capitalization matters.


What's the easiest way to setup a self-sovereign LNURL these days?

Stacker News is ending it's wallet...


Yes, Libre Relay is mine. Latest version is at:

https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/libre-relay-v28.0


You should visit Kyiv. Same vibe surprisingly.


It's very easy for minor memory issues to result in disk corruption rather than overall system instability. You just need something like a single bad bit that only shows up sometimes, eg while hot as nostr:nprofile1qqsr6tj32zrfn7v0pu4aheaytdnnc6rluepq73ndc2tdjzus34gat9qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhswulwwv pointed out.


Not a lot of currency exchanges around either, at least that I've seen so far; in Ukraine you can find a currency exchange booth literally every few hundred meters.


You are probably experiencing memory corruption or something similar without noticing it.

The only times I've ever had a leveldb database get corrupted were due to bad memory. I spent a fair bit of ₿ upgrading my desktop to ECC memory a few years ago due to a run-in with bad memory that corrupted files.


I'm surprised more places don't accept USD with such a screwed up cash system.


Interesting price graph:

https://image.nostr.build/0c27406f6bd0c38cf8c1285d46ae5479b2e968f95f71e1a19451ca51e188414e.jpg

https://image.nostr.build/e98116a5bebfbc43a1294f4ca2a58d5c90302c1e4f952e9a2eff0bc86d76e7ba.jpg

https://image.nostr.build/3bfee8cdd0c8df2b28f61087d129c2616e9f7e3f00e7834f1c0eeca26f3dbbe7.jpg


I may or may not use anonymous zaps exclusively.


...and to think someone was still shilling Samourai on the privacy panel at the Plan B conference...

nostr:nevent1qqsqqqqaru54ylxfkms0x9e54m85zz5hqtdutrrplnlykhwltdvkkpqppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsfuv8fgq3cek0ta0rr9qtkm4x3pxqjz22y9u4xcwrj0lrxlfl2jzsrqsqqqqqpgrfz78


When you want your Instagram food blog to be top notch.

https://image.nostr.build/cd5824b8f848ff1674da0e13d3b05f71c16351bef1d7a0876ee34994182b8a09.jpg


“When all the fiat currencies die, what's going to happen to coin collecting?”

“Ordinals?” nostr:nprofile1qqspnc6chqq37h60cefu2ewx6np0x0ejvc05lyyc9j0wms5j4pm5ascpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qgswaehxw309ahx7um5wghx6mmd9u5a9y3e


First spend of a pay-to-anchor (bc1pfe
essrawgf) output, mined by MARA: https://mempool.space/tx/56ef7ea4110eb595bf020d4121a2c31fe35f54d9c4759d1e1c94b82fdac5a193

Interestingly, they didn't mine all the outstanding P2A UTXOs. Good chance MARA did this one manually.


Of course, the fact that Cullen can obviously make a good documentary is especially damning as to his integrity....


Name the park I'm at!


In reality I'm speaking at 7 public conferences in a row this month. 😂


I love how they're implying that I'm literally hiding in a cave. 😂

https://image.nostr.build/44b215691f896c35d2b7d50d98c668dd45a8d0170dec243b31b1bf08ef679f34.jpg

https://itc.ua/en/news/found-the-wrong-guy-peter-todd-is-hiding-because-of-an-hbo-documentary-that-called-him-the-creator-of-bitcoin/


Remember: anyone can do a citizens arrest.


cashuBpGFkclNlbnQgZnJvbSBNaW5pYml0c2FteBxodHRwczovL3N0YWJsZW51dC51bWludC5jYXNoYXSBomFpSAD2hOihuoaWYXCBo2FhAWFjWCED3rfjef9s1cIMblfdgorofScqzvQsOD_083BvR0XRTbphc3hAMDdmNDkwMjY0NGMxZjE2ZTljZTU4OTc1OTgxZjQwMDQyYzdjNzE4NmY0ZjdjYjM0NjFmMTdhY2I5N2UyZTU4MWF1Y3VzZA

Not your everyday cashu.


"Ordinals: we put the FUN in non-fungible!"


The most useful task I've found for LLMs so far was actually to walk through some physics problems to figure out what math symbols are standard for those problems.

It got the physics problems subtlely wrong in annoying ways... But it was a much easier way to figure out what the standards are; that kind of knowledge is impossible to Google.


Missed opportunity if that's all you achieve.


IIUC WWVB has about 1bit/s of bandwidth. That's not quite enough to broadcast block headers as fast as they are created, and realistically you'd want more to allow a fountain code to be sent to allow receivers to catch up after missing headers.

I dunno what they're licensed to transmit though. A new owner may be able to broadcast with more bandwidth.


Cave radio is a thing! But it doesn't work very well at all.

https://www.scavalon.be/avalonuk/technical/radio1.htm


With Starlink, caves are one of the only "outdoors" activities where you can truly get away from it all. 😂


I noticed!

It would be cool if there was a way to share animated QR codes via gif.


I specifically said "westerners" for a reason. We killed Germans efficiently. The Soviets were brutal and inefficient, including to their own people, and would have been utterly crushed without massive amounts of Western military aid. Allying with the Soviets was an example of joining forces with evil to fight evil.

Also mentioning China here is ridiculous. The massacre of Chinese civilians by the Japanese is one reason why we went to war with Japan in the first place.

It's like arguing that the 6 million Jews that were murdered show that we couldn't kill Germans efficiently and the war wasn't lopsided.


Video of the last thing Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar ever did in anger: he threw a stick at an Israeli drone, before they killed him with a tank shell. 😂

Just over one year after his Oct 7th massacre.

https://video.nostr.build/e6a2cdaf09c46d384ccfa535823fb6812111fc038afee9053ad5c785a29790e4.mp4


I also know both Russians and Ukrainians. The sane Russians with at least some wealth have mostly left Russia, for good. The ones I know who have stayed (or returned!) are nutjobs; I'm not concerned about the wealthier Russians who haven't left. And as for the poor ones, if they want to live the onus is on them to do something useful like sabotage to make their country lose faster. It's not that hard.

We should not sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians – and quite possibly ourselves in the future – for the sake of Russians.

The fact is, you do in fact win wars by killing the other side more efficiently. WW2 was won because far more Germans and Japanese died than westerners. We were damn good at killing them, to the point where they simply surrendered essentially unconditionally.


That's not an uncommon type of technical fault actually. Often things like low power modes have bugs that cause dropped connections; periodically transmitting avoids going into those bugged modes. I've run into this type of big myself a few times.

Coincidence is probably why it's working now. But it could definitely be the pings too.


The supermajority of Russians who are dying volunteered in exchange for (by Russian standards) large amounts of money; Russia has not resorted to large scale mobilization yet and it's illegal in Russia to send conscripts to Ukraine. The Russians fighting are psychopaths who thought it would be fun, and profitable, to kill off Ukrainians. That's probably a big part of why they fight in such wasteful ways: their commanders don't give a shit whether the men fighting live or die. They're just meat to them. And the Russians fighting don't give a shit about the people around them: they just want to avoid dying long enough to collect their financial reward.

Not all cultures or people are equal. That's leftist "defund the police" type nonsense.


The super majority of Russian soldiers that are dying are volunteers. Russia has not fully mobilized yet for political reasons. They're getting people to fight by paying them extremely well instead.

That's also why Russia is increasingly recruiting soldiers from outside Russia too: soldiers from countries that are more poor than Russia are cheaper.

These people don't deserve our pity. They volunteered to murder Ukrainians for money and died for it. The world is a better place without them.

"all lives are equal" is "defund the police" level nonsense.


It's a war. You need clear headed men to look at the situation objectively and win it. The more efficiently you kill off Russians, the fewer Ukrainians will die.

Between the two, one group is objectively evil and the other is not. The objectively evil group is the one trying to massacre Ukrainian civilians with drones.

https://x.com/CaolanRob/status/1843749934379515953


It's a war. Winning matters.

Russia is the one murdering Ukrainians, by, among other things, hunting for civilians with drones. Killing off Russians as efficiently as possible saves lives.

Not all lives are equal. It would be perfectly acceptable to kill a thousand Russian soldiers to avoid the deaths of one Ukrainian.

https://x.com/CaolanRob/status/1843749934379515953


It's a war. You could kill every single Russian soldier, and it wouldn't be a genocide. You would however be preventing a genocide.

https://x.com/CaolanRob/status/1843749934379515953


https://image.nostr.build/af98a70e2150ecfb84cfc0cf9a2c8362f753970bcf9e6f1a63f231c32fb8648c.jpg

I highly doubt this makes any financial sense.

The marginal cost to kill or seriously wound a Russian is probably something like $50k; the _entire war_ has only cost ~$250k per Russian casualty in direct military spending, and that includes lots of pricey defensive spending like anti-air defense. Ukraine has constantly been short on things like drones and ammo that could easily be purchased if only more funds were available.

I _highly_ doubt the French government is spending less than $50k per Russian. There's a ton of work that needs to be done to vet defecting Russian soldiers given the high chance they're infiltrators, and every failure is incredibly costly. That's on top of ordinary refugee expenses like welfare and other social support, which cost thousands per year.

Just spend the money on weapons and focus on killing Russians efficiently. The ones who are deserting were probably not effective soldiers anyway.


> Spoiler alert: the filmmaker is laughed at right in his face at the end of his film by the man he identifies as the bitcoin inventor in a Wie is de Mol-like scene. And I felt that urge too.

(Dutch newspaper, paywalled)

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/10/16/zoektocht-naar-uitvinder-van-bitcoin-eindigt-in-hoongelach-a4869535


Hi from Norways neighbor Sweden!

We desperately need such a law. This is one of the instances I'm definitely not agreeing with the hardcore libertarians. Cash is the only thing that can protect financial privacy and partial financial sovereignty in the short-to-medium term, and it's quickly being done away with in this country. I recently read that about half of the stores here don't accept cash!

However, it needs to be more thought through. Many businesses stop accepting cash because they have trouble getting rid of it. A law was passed a few years ago saying that the banks must have some way of depositing cash, but unfortunately they only have machines that accept bills, not coins. (Most bank offices don't handle cash at all.) And there's only one value-transport company, Loomis.


Stockholm, Sweden, was the worst place I've ever visited for cash acceptance. AFAICT it was literally impossible to get from the airport to the city center without a credit card. Ridiculous.


That account is a third party mirror of their mastodon server, right?

I can't find any evidence it's official.


What about numbers that identify as men?


Your trick does not work for retail, where you do not owe the store anything at the time you are trying to pay.


The currency haa nothing to do with tarrifs; there is absolutely nothing stopping a country from imposing tarrifs regardless of the currency.


Really good news: in Norway, the right to pay cash has been enshrined in law, as of Oct 1st. Retail will no longer be able to refuse cash for payments up to $2000.

Meanwhile, in some EU countries you're _prohibited_ from accepting that much cash!

https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-right-to-pay-cash/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/norway-one-worlds-most-cashless-economies-just-made-it-lot-easier-pay-cash


I probably should have worded it "some EU countries" come to think of it.


I wasn't saying the entirety of Europe had that limit.


It's a copy of a tweet; 280 characters....


Really good news: in Norway, the right to pay cash has been enshrined in law, as of Oct 1st. Retail will no longer be able to refuse cash for payments up to $2000.

Meanwhile, in other EU countries you're _prohibited_ from accepting that much cash!

https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-right-to-pay-cash/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/norway-one-worlds-most-cashless-economies-just-made-it-lot-easier-pay-cash


That was a v4 format QR code.


Though this also shows the limitations of ecash. If that were a 127sat token, it'd be damn near impossible to scan. https://image.nostr.build/e33e0bbba9f8bea5af15e57d2b7e781759a34bc31a21dc8f952eabc109e52cb6.jpg


Someone generously donated another $700 on top of my target to release Libre Relay.

What do you guys want me to work on?

I have a v28.0 release: https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/libre-relay-v28.0

https://geyser.fund/project/librerelay


Gaza wasn't an open air prison.

If it was, over 1000 Israeli's wouldn't have been murdered by Hamas and other Gazans on Oct 7th.

If anything, it's a really good argument to seal up Gaza for good and actually make it into an open air prison. Because allowing goods to flow freely into Gaza, and Gazans to travel in and out of Gaza, is stupidly dangerous.

The unfortunate reality is most Gazans (and many other Muslims) want Jews dead for b.s. religious reasons. That's not going to change no matter how nice Israel is to them. They're evil people with evil beliefs, and on average they're quite a bit less smart and successful than Israeli Jews. It's a recipe for violence that can't easily be changed.

This also shows how as much as you can rightfully say what the settler movement is doing is unethical, the settlers forcing Palestinians out of the West Bank has also saved the lives of a lot of Jews. Oct 7th helped legitimize the settler movement.


Just watched the whole thing. It's great until it goes off the rails in the last fifteen minutes. I think it's Roger Ver and Amir Taaki that sent the documentary maker chasing a ghost. They made RBF seem important, even suspecting it to be a government sabotage effort. This glorifies nostr:npub1ej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqm3ndrm's image in his head, which Peter then openly exploited - while being very honest about doing so.

The bigger meta mistake the documentary maker made was to seek out people who enjoy being on TV. If he'd contacted experts in a more systematic way they would have ruined the plot. But this is more fun for everyone. nostr:note1w0679347vjl0sjny793aahr3k7cxzxjklrzqdd82dfatfe64m2rq97nkww


we're all Satoshi, even nostr:npub1ej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqm3ndrm  🙂


particularly thrilling to have funded "satoshis" latest contribution

nostr:note1et2cmu8j4zwgmtwhrfa0fdxtvykl4wawt7smuzcrmstcy0j6wgqs07mjf6


https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/oct-04-2024-united-states-announces-humanitarian-assistance-support-populations-impacted-conflict-lebanon

Lebanon isn't a cohesive country with a single government. Southern Lebanon is controlled by Hezbollah, and (mostly) populated by Shiite Muslims. Northern Lebanon is mostly populated by Christians (about 40% of the total population), with a mostly separate government. The Christians have been trying to prevent Hezbollah and their supporters from fleeing north.

The US isn't necessarily "funding both sides" by sending a small amount of humanitarian aid to one group, and a much larger amount (10x) of weapons to another (though even then, most of the funding is going to anti-air defense).

If you want to make that argument, you need to drill down to exactly where that money to Lebanon is actually going. This isn't Gaza; with Gaza it's much easier to make the claim that the US was funding both sides as Gaza has (had?) a cohesive singular government: Hamas.


https://image.nostr.build/f7480764f148fad34ad0f8d174d2bd7fba21a4163be8241a42f61151d265dcd9.jpg

https://x.com/Thebitcoinway_/status/1843935840399241409

😂😂😂😂


To be clear, Cullen didn't present it as a "who's Satoshi documentary", and gave us no indication he was looking for Satoshi until the very end. I interviewed with him something like 4-5 times. Only the very last time did he bring that up.


Think about what I'm quoting...


"Craig Wright is Greg, Right?"


Nostr DMs suck...

nostr:nevent1qqswfjqxtdhwpxps7d807eeme5s6q3y93dtv2rmnd8cqur0v68ucq6qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygx4gadjfpq72nj3ppaqnvr8e93eh6su3ffsy44g74qjtzwgpx8pcspsgqqqqqqs9muerp


Nope.


It's not better than Wasabi "by far". They're both good with advantages and disadvantages.


It's accurate to within about an order of magnitude. Good enough for marketing.

Obviously they wanted a nice clean 0.1kcal number. In reality for a typical adult most figures I've seen are more like 0.15 to 0.3kcals.


Good eyes. I took that photo at an Intersport in Kyiv.


0.1 calories/step
 https://image.nostr.build/db2a807ba78fb9810beab7641a382d8bdb47e6fd65d658244cbd8cbee2b811df.jpg


Did you check what happens if you edit the NIPs to change the specification? Is the code still correct?

It's likely the LLMs can do this because working demos are in their training sets.


"without stirring up any drama"

You just need to read this to know that's not true: nostr:nevent1qqsrygggyvutgv99fy0seg04q4vlhqywsv0p4dm8c6fvhwpwdp0xvnqpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qgs9qp2dql3vmuetzq6hw77eeaeej2j2ughers22wch0m2jm7c05w4grqsqqqqqpqg99cr


"really impressive"

Those are all things Bitcoin wallets do. Heck, Bitcoin pioneered block filters.

What's actually really impressive is implementing Lightning.


Pretty lame network. Just a spanning tree. No redundancy. 😂


I got an email from nostr:nprofile1qqs9v9et20mnqagtgrnrc5qmzcrgmkt2y3087p23vawqlmyczlhfdcqpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejszxmhwden5te0vejk2ern9ehx7um5wghxyctwvshhq6trwvq3vamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarj9e3xzmnyrwt363 saying that some  of my data was being deleted automatically.

Although that data is still exposed elsewhere, I really appreciate that Coinkite is at least trying to limit the attack surface for my data automatically.

Good move. Keep up the good work.


Those claims are simply bullshit.


Yeah, facts and logic allow people to be very certain.

You're just looking for excuses to be contrarian. The world is often pretty simple snd straightforward, and people and nations often do things for obvious reasons (including evil reasons).

Russian culture is just evil. Russia got to the size it is today through relentless invasions and subjugation. Which is not too uncommon in prior history... Except Russia continues to do this to this day, long after we decides it's unacceptable to invade sovereign countries to take their stuff.


Re: Eastern Ukraine, Russia's claims of self defense are obviously bullshit. If they were remotely true, they wouldn't be taking troops away from NATO borders to fight in Ukraine

You can no more arbitrarily claim you're concerned about an invasion than I can shoot you for arbitrarily claiming you are a threat to me.


Huh? Russia tried very hard to seize the areas on that map with oil and natural gas. They got pushed back to the border fortunately. But the plan was certainly to seize it all (Kyiv too).

It's obvious why Russia would fight for the coast: access to the sea. Also not on those particular maps is the vast areas of prime farmland. Again, lots of it in areas they tried to occupy.

Re: access to the sea, that was one obvious reason to take Crimea. But that unexpectedly backfired on Russia as Ukraine has developed their anti-shipping capabilities to the point where the Russian Navy has mostly been pushed out of the Black Sea entirely. Of course, that outcome doesn't change the fact that they obviously wanted to seize all those areas.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git

A good example of a git repo used for journalism is: https://github.com/Enegnei/JacobAppelbaumLeavesTor


Funny you say that... Russia has literally sold a billion or two worth of stolen grain already, much of it straight out of storage silos in occupied Ukraine. They also were selling off metal stocks seized in Mariupol and other places. Similarly, we know they took over many mines and are now operating them. Also in Mariupol and other parts or occupied Ukraine lots of Russians have moved into stolen apartments and houses – the original owners often being dead. They have formal processes to take over property without compensation.

You don't have to speculate on this. Russian TV talks about how Ukrainian resources and land are going to strengthen the Russian economy. They know they're stealing it all.


Case in point:

https://image.nostr.build/022f8524315cb556e2ee8c01fb656efb5c626a5053bedb7a765639be067b8081.jpg

These are maps of Ukrainian mineral resources. Now notice the parts of Ukraine that Russia has occupied.

It's just theft. All the bits about "protecting Russians", "NATO expansion", etc. are Craig Wright level gaslighting. Russia is waging war because they think they can get away with stealing a few trillion dollars worth of land and resources. The only way we'll achieve a long term peace is by defeating Russia militarily and economically, and killing off all the psychopathic Russians who subscribe to the belief that they can just steal other peoples' stuff.

It's as stupid to negotiate with this as any other thief. Just kill them off until they're no longer a problem.


This.

Killing people is a part of self-defense; at national scales defensive wars are just self defense.

There's a lot of psychopaths in the world who want to kill you and take your stuff. If you don't have a solid system of defense, war becomes profitable for the aggressor. Not to mention situations like Israel where the aggressors have  religious beliefs that demand they exterminate you.

This is exactly why saner libertarians accept that one legitimate purpose for government – and taxation – is military defense. If you don't have a military to defend yourself, eventually someone else will form a government to fund a military to take your stuff.


An exploit that was discovered and fixed extremely quickly, precisely because the chain is transparent.


The difference between inflation exploits on privacy coins like Monero and Zcash, and inflation exploits on Bitcoin, is on Bitcoin because amounts are transparent it's practically guaranteed that the inflation will be discovered very quickly.

With Monero and Zcash, if an inflation exploit is being used, your only sign might be the price falling. And that's certainly not a reliable indicator.

nostr:nevent1qqszqwelxeyn8ckunqjr36tgjvnky50hrpvvh66smx7mrmcppvzynjspzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygp5v5df8yknf0uaqe8rnu7pp0h0wj679rn3psrnyschk6ruf27haqpsgqqqqqqs095zdj


Nostr has no guarantees about message archiving. It's entirely up to relays to decide how long to keep a message. Also Nostr doesn't store media on relays; media is referenced by URL to third party, centralized, media storage sites with no guarantees.

I would suggest putting this stuff in a git repo instead. That at least is easy to mirror.


speaking of Dandelion, has anyone yet made a stand-alone bitcoin P2P transaction broadcast tool using arti (https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/core/arti/ )?

like https://github.com/laanwj/bitcoin-submittx but it wouldn't use a SOCKS proxy to an existing Tor daemon but handles the Tor network handling internally

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzpp59a0hkv5ecm45nrckvmu7pnk0sukssvly33u3wwzquy4v037hcqqs0pga3kvduve5rzvg2zhrqa5c5qdw2ad0rvdasnvgyu25lj5c83qsv9w79g


The sudden fall is probably due to Kraken delisting it.


Monero is also much simpler in many ways. Supporting L2's properly requires a surprising amount of work on mempool behavior, and of course, a script system that Monero just doesn't have. Of course, I think Bitcoin Core has overcomplicated certain aspects of mempool behavior. But even ignoring that disagreement it would _still_ be much more complex than Monero.

I have a Monero node on my laptop – running in Qubes of course. On top of it being slow, the database implementation fragments the hell out of the disk image file due to how it does so many writes to arbitrary locations. One of these days I might just give up on that node... 😂


More journalist in this case. Vlad isn't good enough to make a living as a journalist without stirring up drama.


Notably, Monero has much simpler transactions and mempool policies than Bitcoin. So implementing Dandelion correctly is quite a bit easier.


“Bitcoin’s lack of privacy is not an accident & it’s not the result of negligence.

It’s a deliberate choice, as cowardly devs & sellout community members deliberately ignore a decade of research & experimentation.”

Nothing says “world's reserve currency ” like research and experimentation....

Given that Zcash and Monero have all had multiple inflation exploits that could have killed them completely, I'm happy to be called a coward for ensuring that our best chance at a digital currency doesn't get killed by a simple exploit.

And yes, this choice is not due to negligence! Quite the opposite in fact.

nostr:nevent1qqsrygggyvutgv99fy0seg04q4vlhqywsv0p4dm8c6fvhwpwdp0xvnqpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsygzsq4xs0ckd7v43qdth00vu7uue9f9wytu3c998vtha4fdlv86825psgqqqqqqs0hstxr


Ah! So those are containers you brought.

Glass should be easier to sterilize too. Though clean vs sterile probably doesn't make a big difference.


I'm surprised you can't get it in micro plastics free glass jars.


Did you move to Kyiv because of the war?


The newer ones are better, as the lid is designed to rest at 180° rather than 90°


"Encryption alone is not enough to ensure freedom. We must organize politically against autocrats.

End to end encryption allows us to safely do just that."

- Phil Zimmermann


How does European gear compare to North American gear?


“Event is loading or can't be found in your relay list.”

Focus on getting nostr to actually work reliably and not depend on a handful of relays first... self-censorship is embarrassing.

https://image.nostr.build/7d19625f12524064762e966f98540f56433ffd6c1e56e92e3b9339df394adebd.jpg

nostr:nevent1qqsg4r3hdh2u2tjxj6ucv4drp2dtn38r37mvueavh5vzwmrxlyurncsppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsqgc0uhmxycvm5gwvn944c7yfxnnxm0nyh8tt62zhrvtd3xkj8fhgrqsqqqqqp8fet56


Dunno if you're noticed, but Nasrallah is just one of a few thousand Hezbollah members who have been killed or seriously injured recently, along with lots of weapons caches.

Killing one person is obviously not (usually) going to make a big difference. Killing all of them does. As the article correctly argues.

Anyway, the goal here for Israel is to get to the point where people can return to their homes in northern Israel. To achieve that if there's still Hezbollah members around, they just need to invade southern Lebanon and turn it into a demilitarized zone, putting northern Israel out of reach.

Similar to what Ukraine has done by invading Kursk, Russia.


Good article on Nasrallah's (likely) death: https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-forum-observer/nasrallahs-death-should-be-a-lesson-to-the-united-states

Western and UN diplomacy is a joke that legitimizes evil. It's far more effective to just kill evil people.


In Ukraine there's open wifi without registration practically everywhere. Including Starlink on the trains.

It's remarkably civilized.


Where are you located?


Dutch parliament passes fascist law to ban cash payments above €3,000.
https://tweakers.net/nieuws/226916/tweede-kamer-gaat-akkoord-met-verbod-op-contante-betalingen-boven-3000-euro.html


My experience with air raids in Ukraine was, I guess you could say, a "gradual" introduction. First two visits during the war I heard them multiple times but was never close enough to actually experience anything, beyond _maybe_ hearing some explosions very, very, far away in Odesa. Heck, I slept through the sirens multiple times. And a lot of those times I was around Ukrainians who totally ignored the air raids. 😂

First time I was actually close enough to experience anything was seeing what I think was a cruise missile getting shot down, probably 2-3kms away, as well as another time hearing a loud explosion (probably from a ballistic missile hit) while having dinner at an outdoor restaurant. Again, everyone around me just ignored it.

I've been within 1-2kms from explosions a few more times since. I find that the sirens are a bit more likely to wake me up than at first. But possibly because I got introduced gradually to this, it didn't affect my sleep noticably. And I'm here voluntarily, which probably makes a difference too.

Of course, I've done a lot of pretty dangerous stuff in my life before, eg cave exploration. So I may be just more calm around danger in general.


Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, etc. are relatively safe. There's no chance of those cities getting actually invaded anytime soon, if ever. As for air strikes, just walking around it shows that the actual chance of getting hit is relatively low: the vast majority of buildings don't have any damage from the war. Some do of course. But it's well under 1% in almost three years of full scale invasion, and even if you did happen to be in one of those buildings, more likely than not you'd be fine if you're sensible during air raids. Main thing is get under cover if you actually hear things getting shot down. Though in my experience Ukrainians in those cities almost completely ignore air raids. Eg I was having dinner once in an outdoor restaurant, and something loudly exploded relatively closely to us (~2-3kms?) a few minutes after an air raid started. Literally no-one did anything other than flinching from the loud bang.

Other cities closer to the front line are much more dangerous. Eg in the Kharkiv area, Russian forces are close enough that they're able to hunt down civilians with drones and drop grenades on them. They're straight up bragging about it publicly, and publishing the videos, apparently calling it the "human safari". And from what I hear, a lot more buildings in Kharkiv have been hit; being closer, you get a lot less notice to take cover.

I wouldn't hesitate to visit Kyiv. I'd want an actual reason to visit Kharkiv.


Indeed... I was in South Africa last February for a few weeks. Everywhere I went in South Africa there were daily power outages. And outside of the wealthier white areas, it's a dirty, violent, shithole. I repeatedly had locals warn me that I shouldn't go to certain places because I might get murdered.

Ukraine meanwhile, in the middle of a massive war with daily missile and drone attacks, has been able to keep the power on much more often than that, in a much colder, less sunny climate. And even in poorer parts of Ukraine you feel safe walking around and the streets are pretty clean.

South Africa's GDP/capita is $7000 USD; Ukraine's GDP/capita is $4500 USD.

Sure, Ukraine is getting outside support, including funds and materials to keep the electricity grid going. But still. WTF South Africa.


Yup. The Ukrainian government is clearly trying to prop up the value of the hryvnia. Certainly not very libertarian of them. But that's understandable during a war that's an existential threat to the country. Currency controls are just another (indirect) form of taxation, and they have damn good reasons to be collecting taxes right now.


Thank you. Ukrainians are fighting against war criminals to protect their lives and homes, and to reclaim their stolen children. Their efforts not only keep the murderous dictator at bay but also safeguard their European neighbors. Supporting this fight is in the best interest of the West.

nostr:note1fzm4ym97tjykvxzkr9jk6yc2wdlwj2p5sfrqjf696xal3xkp9puscwvghq


They dehumanized themselves through looting, rape, and murder in an immoral war of conquest. Killing them is a good thing.


Yup. Floor cooling can't remove humidity, so if you are in a relatively wet climate like Europe if you need to reduce the temperature more than a few degrees you'd end up with wet floors.


I wouldn't say that. Those generators are quite expensive to run. Businesses turn them off whenever grid power is available, which at the moment is 100% of the time (in late August and early Sept Russia spent ~$1 billion on missiles and drones attacking energy infrastructure, but Ukraine has managed to mitigate that attack since then; Kyiv hasn't had a power outage for about 2 weeks).

It's also notable that Ukrainians aren't responding to this by installing solar on a large scale. In this climate it's just too expensive for not that much power. There is a bit of solar. But it's pretty minimal. Wind isn't being installed either.


Every unit in the apartment building my Airbnb is in has an air conditioner outside. And no-one is stopping you from fixing it by crawling on top of it 10 floors above the ground!

https://image.nostr.build/860c405b10d3562c12b5c4fe1967aaa2920c795fae9595bc942090407053b7e5.jpg


Due to airstrikes on the electricity grid, power outages are relatively common. This has lead to literally every business buying generators.

In other countries, putting a generator on a sidewalk outside your business would have taken months of red tape. Not here.

https://image.nostr.build/cc2f40f6b487729658f542e647db041c73b39068c83f087e85163885f8b9f2ef.jpg


Unsurprisingly, Ukraine still let's businesses use plastic straws and plastic bags, and no-one cares if you're recycling or not. And the plastic caps on bottles are still removable!


One of the really awesome things about Ukraine is there's a strong libertarian feel to it. If you're not harming anyone else, people tend to let you do what you want with little red tape.

Case in point: two different businesses were able to do rope jumping from this pedestrian bridge in the middle of Kyiv. They're doing it out in the open, no permits, right in front of soldiers in a defensive post guarding the bridge.

Another example is the Urbex tours a few companies run. I'm not sure how much is going on during the full scale war. But just prior I was able to go on one, paid, tour through cold war era bunkers and tunnels all around Kyiv. The guy running it didn't have any formal permits or anything. Though I suspect that one isn't possible anymore, because those bunkers are probably getting used by the military again...

Of course, buying and selling Bitcoin is easy to do here without any AML/KYC. Currency exchange in general is easy to do everywhere, without any AML/KYC or forms to fill.

https://image.nostr.build/cdbfd9812d9388299277818be606c9930503561ee245a5d65ce03d9b6dd28a19.jpg

https://video.nostr.build/79b849c79cffbbdbdbb7540bb30a3052f2c384a9470be17499ce7b1dce889e31.mp4


Among other things, I'm speaking at the local bitdevs meetup, and meeting up with some locals I know. Plus I needed to be outside the EU for visa reasons, and Kyiv (and Odesa) are nice cities, and relatively cheap. Hell, if not for Russian airstrikes Ukraine would be a safer place to be than a lot of EU capitals right now: no uncontrolled illegal immigration.

https://image.nostr.build/73e56b2ba3083b65e6b75d11e02007301fe7f6bdaaf1c9828f9ccf44069b62e2.jpg

https://image.nostr.build/277698f8b8271302f41a074f947cc61be11ea9691ed2166e83229b4628ef35bc.jpg


I never got the COVID vaccine. I even left Canada for almost a year to avoid getting it (and because fuck Canada).


That's an incredibly dishonest screenshot.

Look at the actual tweet. It's obvious sarcasm:

https://x.com/peterktodd/status/1512611115917791232


Ah yes, so Ukrainians should just abandon their homes and businesses.

And where does this stop? Do all 40 million Ukrainians just flee to the EU? What happens when Russian troops are at the Polish border and decide to take the first town?

Should they all run too?

Do you just flee indefinitely whenever someone points a gun at you?


“Increase restrictions on cluster munitions ”

How the fuck do you expect to get Russia to abide by that?

You're really just listing a bunch of ways to get Ukraine to lose.


I'm happy to sign Zelensky's bombs.  I want Russia held at bay.
I'm also happy to sign Israel's bombs.  I want Hezbollah held at bay.

And nobody _can_ speak for bitcoiners -- and that's by design.  Bitcoint/Nostr is a free speech movement bro.

From: mleku<-semisol at 09/24 11:37

> peter, if you are condoning killing people, you have completely lost your credibility with bitcoiners bro
>
> i watched uncle bob try to side with israel recently and now israel is about to bomb the shit out of lebanon
>
> you cheer for murderers you are not any more part of our peaceful movement, you dumbass
>
> nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzpn92tr3hexwgt0z7w4qz3fcch4ryshja8jeng453aj4c83646jxvqqsy3d6jdjl9eztxrptpjetdzv98xlhf9q6gy3sfyazarwlcntqjs7g7nfk28

CC: #[4]


The Minsk peace accords were signed in 2014 and 2015. As Zelensky himself said, there would be no further Minis peace accords because they're obviously a trap: Russia has been happy to break them before and agreeing to "neutrality" and limits on arms would make Ukraine defenseless.


Ukrainians don't want to get invaded. If anything, feelings towards Russia are at an all time low right now. Especially in areas in Ukraine that are closest to Russia, for the simple reason that those areas got massacred.

Holding elections right now is of course both illegal – the Ukrainian constitution forbids them during war – and obviously unfair and impractical– large chunks of Ukraine would have no way to vote.


You're in Russia?


LoL, no, they certainly were not.


"condoning killing people"

Simply by being in Kyiv, Russians are trying to kill me. In the past few weeks visiting Kyiv and Odesa I've been within 1-2kms of an explosion from Russian air raids three or four times. That's a genuine threat to my life and everyone around me.

Do I "lose my credibility" by condoning the killing of the evil people trying to kill myself and other Ukrainians to steal land and resources?

What do you think Ukrainians should be doing to prevent themselves getting killed?


If Bitcoin isn't about politics, why is nostr:nprofile1qqsrf5h4ya83jk8u6t9jgc76h6kalz3plp9vusjpm2ygqgalqhxgp9gpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qzrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqz8thwden5te0dehhxarj94c82c3wwajkcmr0wfjx2u3wdejhgjaa6xr making political statements about the right of people to defend themselves?


Russia's demands for "peace" were that Ukraine would nearly eliminate its military, and they wanted veto power on anyone else helping defend Ukraine. Even from Russia themselves.

Obviously, Russia was just trying to make Ukraine defenseless for yet another invasion.

Ukraine already tried negotiating peace with Russia multiple times; Russia has broken those agreements each time. Peace agreements with Russia are worthless.


I've donated a decent bit of money to Zeus development. I will no longer be supporting Zeus.

It's morally bankrupt to respond with derision to a Zelenskyy and others signing bombs that are keeping Ukrainians alive by killing Russian invaders. I'm in Kyiv right now – those bombs are part of the reason why I can even be here relatively safely. They're why people I know got their houses back after the occupation was pushed back; sadly they couldn't get their friends and neighbors back, because there's no fixing being murdered.

Disgusting.


Governments aren't all equally criminal. This is like comparing speeding to murder.


Those people sacrificing their lives as a testimony to peace tended to be idiots who would have done a lot more good getting a rifle and sacrificing their lives killing the enemy.


Ukraine is using those artillery shells to kill invading Russians.


WTF are you on about?

Those bombs are going to Ukraine to defend themselves from an invasion force trying to steal their land and take their stuff.

People get to defend themselves from aggression. It's something to be celebrated.


• Israel’s is promoting an initiative to abolish the 200 shekel bank notes as a first step to narrow use of & abolishing cash. Same as in India in 2016.

• Physical gold & silver may be forbidden to hold. 🪙💰

• Gaza’s population suffering from financial oppression via lower cash deliveries & bank notes physical erosion.

All explained in this video, please share! 🙏🏻

https://v.nostr.build/J3BiwP5FUjIpBKNj.mp4


Last time my country did something seriously wrong – but _much_ less wrong than the Russian invasion of Ukraine – I did in fact leave.


"justifies violence" 😂

No sane person thinks violence is never justified. Russia is trying to invade a sovereign nation to steal their land and resources, and they're raping and murdering the population in the process. It's just common thuggery at a large scale.

If you don't think that justifies violence to stop the thugs, you've got something seriously wrong with you. Particularly in this case: Ukraine blew up ammo depot's full of weapons that were going to be used by those thugs to kill Ukrainians.


You're one of those people who is smart enough to work themselves into hopelessly stupid viewpoints.


You don't fight a war on that scale without the whole population being substantially involved. It's estimated something like 10-20% of Russia's entire GDP is going to the invasion.

Russia isn't a despotic state. Huge numbers of Russia's have left, because they disagreed with the war. The people remaining tend to either be poor, or immoral.


Depends on the circumstances.

All that ammo was going to be used to kill Ukrainians and try to steal their land and resources. Obviously, blowing it up and killing the people involved is a good thing.


Yup.


Third large ammo depot blown up in Russia this week by Ukrainian drones.

It's not hard. Kill evil people and blow up their stuff.

https://video.nostr.build/3f0af42af79c3b78643be4ce67507edd216b18dceaa64b51f079c97cb4817640.mp4


I created the production version of OpenTimestamps in Sept 2016... right after Isis Lovecruft accused Jacob Appelbaum of rape, and after I noticed she had lied about certain details that I had first hand knowledge of.

One of the first things I used OpenTimestamps for was to timestamp all my communications with Lovecruft. I strongly suspect this is one reason why even though it was damning to her false accusations against myself, she never tried to deny them in court.

Ironically, in one of those damning messages Lovecruft had asked me to timestamp something for her with Bitcoin: https://archive.org/download/todd-vs-lovecruft/pond-msgs/2016-05-01.txt

https://archive.org/details/todd-vs-lovecruft


Relevant: https://github.com/opentimestamps/nist-inject

tl;dr: I have a long standing project that timestamps the NIST random beacon, and a bunch of other blockchains, with OTS/Bitcoin. This means that Bitcoin blocks can be proven to have been created _after_ those random beacons, giving even more evidence as to the accuracy of Bitcoin block header times.

Also, I'm time-stamping Bitcoin block headers with a bunch of Roughtime servers: https://github.com/opentimestamps/restamp Again, this provides evidence proving Bitcoin blocks were create prior to those trusted Roughtime servers.


Excellent opening line in this mainstream news article:
> Anyone who sends a nude photo via Snapchat often hopes that the image will be seen by a maximum of one pair of eyes. But the EU is considering changing that. nostr:note1kuugdyzhmc288y9rt36kc7p48q89kya8cwhsdpt92lxpp852666snx0usx


https://www.samsung.com/us/business/solutions/industries/government/tactical-edition/

Interesting.


🚨 New release 2.2.0.0 is out 🚨

🥕 Taproot receive addresses
🚀 Faster transaction broadcasting
🔍 Help to setup and find a coordinator.
⏫ More accurate CPFP fee estimation
📉 Safer protocol
🪲 Backend optimizations

Release notes & Download: https://github.com/WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v2.2.0.0

🥕 Taproot receive addresses

Users can now choose taproot when generating a new receiving address. Spending a taproot input is 16% cheaper compared to spending a native segwit input. Users aren’t the only ones that benefit - Bitcoin nodes can verify taproot’s signatures faster than legacy ones, so the entire network gets a little speed boost.

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

🚀 Faster transaction broadcasting

A more sophisticated transaction broadcasting mechanism was introduced to make the process faster. Transactions are now broadcast to multiple nodes in parallel (through the Tor network) and fail more quickly if the transaction is rejected by the network. Users who upgrade will notice it now takes half as long to send their coins.

🔍 Help to setup and find a coordinator

A new message is now shown when no coordinator is configured, along with some help to understand how to find and setup one.

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

⏫ More accurate CPFP fee estimation

The CPFP feature now takes into account the fee paid by the parent transaction. In previous releases, the child transaction assumed the parent paid 0 sats in fees, and thus always overpaid for the speed up.. This improvement will be especially significant in high-fee environments, where the CPFP feature is most useful!

📉 Safer protocol

In order to avoid introducing unknown incentives and to limit risk to users, the coordination fee concept has been removed. Only coinjoin coordinators that don't charge any coordination fee continue to be supported. Read more: https://blog.wasabiwallet.io/killing-coordination-fee/

🪲 Backend optimizations

Users who run a Wasabi backend can now do so with a pruned node and significant CPU/RAM savings. This makes hosting a backend much cheaper and helps to decentralize this component which Wasabi clients still depend on.


Throwback to Day 1 of #BH2024

An exciting back-and-forth between  nostr:npub1ej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqm3ndrm  and  nostr:npub1au23c73cpaq2whtazjf6cdrmvam6nkd4lg928nwmgl78374kn29sq9t53j about OP_CAT really kept the crowd buzzing! 🐝

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


😂😂😂

Just in the occupied areas, there's about $12 trillion worth of resources, including coal, iron ore, etc. https://www.dw.com/en/russia-ukraine-war-natural-resources-grain/a-66639269

And Ukraine has more top quality topsoil than any other country in the world. There's a reason why they're (still) one of the world's top food exporterers.

As for the US, they haven't taken resources for free.


"as many Ukrainians among these Russians" 😂

This isn't some complex moral quandary. Russia is trying to invade Ukraine to take their land and steal their resources.

Russians are fighting this war for money: the Russian military is promising huge (for Russia) salaries to soldiers. If it was successful, it would have been a very profitable war because Ukraine has trillions or dollars worth of resources to steal; Russia has already stolen something like a trillion dollars worth of land and resources already.


Within Ukraine the supermajority of fundraising is to buy more drones to kill Russians. Drones are one of the most effective tools Ukraine has, and unlike other weapons, the parts for them can be easily bought commercially.

Of course the fundraising is going to purchase weapons. Killing Russians is how Ukrainians stop Russians from killing them.

Solve the root cause of the problem. Not the symptoms.

https://image.nostr.build/b2c09e44c2c82aa07d472fbfa77c242acf0cb12af39b13796ac24f0781d64555.jpg


I reached my funding goal to release my port of Libre Relay to Bitcoin Core v28.0rc1

A donation from nostr:nprofile1qqsxzk2dw992jnl928mqgy340rz2vkfpgh6z9zkcvqfzfvdcnnjqrvqpr9mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctv9uq3zamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wwa5kuef0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7l9df8l put it over the finish line. Thanks to everyone who donated!

As promised, the code: https://github.com/petertodd/bitcoin/tree/libre-relay-v28.0rc1

https://image.nostr.build/1ebe99d78c66817f85d96bc2daf7358f8bd012108aea5bca87e1bb86c34a4202.jpg


"notes coming from certain IP addresses"

Congratulations: in your ineffective efforts to stop spam, you'll end up getting rid of privacy. Because inevitably spammers will use the same tools – like Tor – that people use to achieve privacy.

nostr:nevent1qqs2ksr776ht5chtawxcsx7a8sfdasekk7ty7raendhs57rucu5tq4gpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygpjuxp8vd29p6ancknaztql3eajk52y8xkppfn7au7elkw9c68zg5psgqqqqqqsct5ksn


Found a version with subtitles:

https://video.nostr.build/52a823aebfb8287a98ac977aebbb961dda3174219b7fa60f21e7c73f3178f3ed.mp4


You might be having a bad day. But you're probably not having as bad a day as the governor of Tver, Russia, who had to say that all Ukrainian drones attacking the Toropets ammo depot were shot down while explosions were still going off in the background. 😂

https://video.nostr.build/2c9cd04a721ddae7110d73b1e047b5ac1a37747407f2596450fd34bb6ce50627.mp4

https://video.nostr.build/3ddba349888994ac0af6b4f060298cf81e819b828cbb9d0ce1bfe370fdd2468b.mp4


“Residents of the Tver region are asked not to publish photos and videos from the site of the UAV crash in Toropets.”

😂😂😂😂

That UAV must have been filled with nukes.


Won't be long before we can subtitle client side with AI...


You might be having a bad day. But you're probably not having as bad a day as the governor of Tver, Russia, who had to say they all Ukrainian drones attacking the Toropets ammo depot were shot down while explosions were still going off in the background. 😂

https://video.nostr.build/2c9cd04a721ddae7110d73b1e047b5ac1a37747407f2596450fd34bb6ce50627.mp4

https://video.nostr.build/3ddba349888994ac0af6b4f060298cf81e819b828cbb9d0ce1bfe370fdd2468b.mp4


Nah. It's a potential flame thrower maybe. But not a bomb. Lithium batteries just don't have the chemistry necessary to make a proper explosion. They can pressurize a battery case. But batteries are intentionally designed to blow out in a controlled way.

It would be good if Israel came out and explicitly said this was an attack done with explosives.


I'm halfway to my goal on geyser.fund for the next Libre Relay release.

https://geyser.fund/project/librerelay

https://image.nostr.build/82bcab275d9c7c14ad964cf481b1f88ae6e9d1a70e5505f07e858b3ac0c33796.jpg


https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/sep/12/labor-hate-crimes-bill-lgbtq-jewish-groups

Australia has chosen to protect freedom of speech rather than embark on the course of  prohibiting harsh words.


Correct!


BTW, I'm fundraising for the next release of Libre Relay: https://geyser.fund/project/librerelay


In theory it's a competitor to Slipstream. In practice though Libre Relay simply can't relay all consensus valid transactions because there are real technical rationales for almost all the filters in Core.

For example, Slipstream has been used for extremely large transactions. The current Core codebase simply do good transaction selection if the maximum transaction size is close to the block size limit.


I run two out of four calendars. The other two are run by Bull Bitcoin and Riccardo Casatta.


The nature of time-stamping is that it doesn't make sense to duplicate efforts beyond what is necessary for failure tolerance.

Indeed, I should add a pay-with-lightning scheme to trigger an immediate time-stamp transaction for anyone willing to pay for it.

The calendar server software is of course open source, so it's trivial for others to run their own calenders. But there isn't a good reason to do so.


Note that the OTS infrastructure works better if there are fewer calendars, not more (to a point at least). The issue is that OTS clients create incomplete proofs by default, to avoid waiting for a confirmation. So to verify a proof, the calendar data needs to be available. More calenders means more data for the whole community to backup, and more chances something gets lost.

If someone, eg, wanted timestamps once a block it would be much better if they just paid me to do timestamps once a block than setting up their own calendar. Which incidentally is exactly what was done for the Guatemalan election project: the company doing it paid me a few hundred dollars to pay for fees of doing almost constant timestamps.


I've gotten 1,100,000sats of donations in the past week to my OTS calendars. At current fee rates, that's enough to run them for another 6 months.

Currently they make a timestamp about every 5 hours. I could reduce that further, which would have the advantage of higher precision timestamps. But that's more money, so I'll be back here asking for more sooner.

It seems that the community might be willing to fund fees for faster timestamps. What do you think?

nostr:nevent1qqs08404xsehqykve92jd50fh0r2mha6j924x3w6w8fe8vya9dklcpsppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsve2jcud7fnjzmchn4gq52wx9agey9uhfukv69dy0v4wpuw4w53nqrqsqqqqqpjdu847


Heh, never watched that movie.


Hell, I've seen women over 18 wear _their_ former school uniform for Halloween.


It's a popular fantasy item. I've known adult woman who wore it, eg for Halloween, costume parties, etc.


I'm saying it's not surprising that adults would continue to have fantasies based on what they fantasized about (and actually did) as teens. Indeed, "schoolgirl uniforms" are pretty popular with adult women too.


Whatever teen girls wear is inevitably going to be sexualized by teen boys, because teen girls is exactly what teen boys are going after.

Those teen boys grow up...


nostr:nprofile1qqsw3znfr6vdnxrujezjrhlkqqjlvpcqx79ys7gcph9mkjjsy7zsgygpr9mhxue69uhhqatjv9mxjerp9ehx7um5wghxcctwvsq3samnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarjd93kztnrdaksz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ekk7um5wgh8qatz7tvu4p donated 500,000sats! That's enough to keep the two calendars I run going for another 4 months at current fee rates (I have a sponsor for server expenses).

nostr:nevent1qqs08404xsehqykve92jd50fh0r2mha6j924x3w6w8fe8vya9dklcpspzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7q3qej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqxpqqqqqqzc6d5m5


I've started a new Geyser fund for Libre Relay: https://geyser.fund/project/librerelay

I've ported Libre Relay to Bitcoin Core's new v28.0rc1 release, and I'm trying out Geyser to see if I can get my time paid for. I'll release the code if I do.


There's a list of the four calendars on https://opentimestamps.org/; each calendar has a website showing you stats.

The most frequent transactions at the moment are done by https://alice.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org/, on average once every 5 hours at a cost of 20,000sats/week.


If you to want to help cover the tx fees for Opentimestamp, consider donating to the nostr:npub1kmwdmhuxvafg05dyap3qmy42jpwztrv9p0uvey3a8803ahlwtmnsnhxqk9 Fund: https://geyser.fund/project/opentimestamps

nostr:note1qkklcq5df00vs3x6na77mrc7zzqvu59ceenwytp738kp99n6gl3q7dty9t


Pro-tip: this is only good advice for things sufficiently safe that you can probably do them twice.

nostr:nevent1qqsqtrxvf9q7cdlfq3gr0wnazalp7erw43030elapfshqkl5vhnsw8spz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygqml8ernh9pvds5n0p08lpngpm6a9v749s8et8eghhclzajylw9uypsgqqqqqqsqwf0lf


I don't have a copy. It's a web form, and OpenSats doesn't give you a copy of what you submitted.


In theory... In practice the calendars themselves aren't horizontally scalable, so with enough load they'll fail. We're not at that point yet. But a DoS attack would do it.

This can be fixed with improved code. But I haven't been able to find any funding to spend the time to actually fix this.

I gotta pay rent after all...


To be pedantic, I'm not personally paying for OpenTimestamps transaction fees. There's a community fundraiser for that: https://geyser.fund/project/opentimestamps and the calendars themselves accept funds directly to their wallets.

Last time I pushed for donations was in January, and I got enough donations to last until now (most donations, by value, were not sent through geyser).

I'll probably run out of donated funds again in another 2-4 months. FWIW I share the funds donated to my calendars (and through geyser) with the other calendars.


I have just started running nostr:nprofile1qqsp2k6lqqqw5uyaeaaeayjd22yu9rymg9ntqsu66kplcc9uu75khtgpzamhxue69uhkxetvd3shytnwdaehgu3wwa5kuegpzfmhxue69uhk7enxvd5xz6tw9ec82cspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzvuawauwv and timestamping all events published to pyramid.fiatjaf.com with NIP-03 (OpenTimestamps). The timestamp events, kind 1040, are published to nostr:npub18kzz4lkdtc5n729kvfunxuz287uvu9f64ywhjz43ra482t2y5sks0mx5sz's cellar.nostr.wine which is not going to delete them -- and to some other relays.

Somehow this will protect the humanity against the AI takeover in the future, so I recommend other people to do the same with other events. The source code is at https://git.fiatjaf.com/ots_nbot and you can customize the relays, kinds and authors it tries to timestamp, among other things, via environment variables.

If you don't understand how such a simple gesture has such immense powers, listen to Antihashed Podcast episode where this is explained, or ask nostr:npub1t6jxfqz9hv0lygn9thwndekuahwyxkgvycyscjrtauuw73gd5k7sqvksrw.


I built a few treehouses.


Hell, I barely even "voiced my frustrations" beyond mentioning that you just don't get any feedback on how to improve.


OpenSats is in part funded by the general public – donations are solicited from everyone, and accepted via BTC and fiat. That's one reason why grants are made public: it'd be absurd for OpenSats to be spending money without disclosing who is getting it.

But it's also absurd if the _rejected_ applications are entirely private too. Which is the status quo. Funders should have some idea of what they could have spent money on, and didn't.

All I did was reveal two rejected applications. If that is enough to constitue serious drama, you should rethink what you're doing...

nostr:nevent1qqswx60ffrdslpq2hnm3am2sraapnz9s0emkh482jdk205rf09yqhzspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsyg8g3f53axxenp7fv3fpmlmqqf0kquqr0zjg0yvqmjamffgz0pgyzypsgqqqqqqs3dny47


Swiss dude gets a 98.500 Frank fine for tailgating. Similarly someone in Finland got a €121.000 fine for speeding.

The problem with these income adjusted fines is privacy. Finland has a central database with everyone's income that cops can apparently just access. It's effectively a kidnap shortlist. Though to be fair, these guys were already flaunting wealth so for them the additional risk is marginal. But everyone is in that database.
https://www.ad.nl/auto/rijke-advocaat-krijgt-boete-van-105-000-euro-voor-bumperkleven-in-zwitserland~afefaaf9/


nostr:nevent1qqsfp6cjwn7k73jn3merxhd6qz2g7zysga3krkne0yfnkv8jyh4xw4cpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygxv4fvwxlyeepdute65q298rz75vjz7t57txdzkj8k2hq782h2gespsgqqqqqqsnymmj7

I need funding for that and haven't been able to get it.


Ironically this reply guys are a really nice example of a problem with Nostr's decentralization claims...

nostr:nevent1qqswwej6zrtr7au8h5qk3ptuzfeshzvvm6nmqfyg77qpq6utpu7p6rgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygq3rq8vzf6xwk7xcfmev9trx44yl7jejzvcyty24xqq0rxthyj82upsgqqqqqqszrcew8


To be exact, IIRC I estimated it at 153 billable hours at $150/hr. Billed like lawyers do, with only time spent directly on the task. So for a "days" work that means 4 hours billed like that.

I also offered doing it as a fixed price contract.


This is precisely why we need competent people to analyze Nostr's centralization story properly.

More relays is irrelevant with the current protocol.

nostr:nevent1qqs2wfg49w2ej4ay53nhxhj0kagx438jg6puxh04kefpup9pykpjnmgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsyfhqu9kuu877hhm5j2lkwk5478nuvgza00d3lgmjkkk9px8r57zcrqsqqqqqpnmyfz3


Re: the OpenTimestamps grant request, the problem is right now while the protocol scales in theory, the backend does not. It would be quite easy for a bad actor to DoS attack OpenTimestamps out of existence because I simply can't throw servers at the problem: the backend code just doesn't scale.

I need funding to put in a bunch of hours to fix this. So far, no luck in finding that; OpenSats is one of a few sources I've tried.

Frankly, I suspect that there isn't actually much interest in time-stamping.


Heh, I applied for a $20k grant to do a proper analysis of Nostr's decentralization on Saturday. Same idea (and similar cost) as my recent L2 Covenants article. Only took them one business day to reject it (took them 6 weeks to reject my grant request to keep OpenTimestamps running).

I'm not surprised. I strongly suspect there isn't much good to say about Nostr's decentralization and I hear OpenSats is funding a bunch of Nostr. Nostr needs a serious redesign.

https://image.nostr.build/53cab3aa2f8099ca6659b9f97648813b6de2eccbd53e4d9ccb9db956d51cbe99.jpg


One thing I'm noticing over time from reading about different ZKP (or just succinct proof) systems is how often two patterns/tricks come up:

one is: represent a composite claim about numbers by random-combination: say you want to prove A is zero and B is zero, you construct A + alpha * B, where alpha has to be unpredictably random - but that's what hash functions + fiat shamir transform can do for you easily. This is seen in basically every construction ever; if nothing else, it's used to make verification faster by batching proofs together.

the second one is something many of us learnt in school with a concrete example: to add up a long list of consecutive numbers, the trick is to take the first and last, then the second and penultimate, then the third and third-from-last etc. as pair, because all of those pairs have the same total. So the general form of this is "pair off items in a list to make a list that's half as long *and* has some special property", and then repeat that until a huge list becomes just a single value.
I've just seen this in FRI as well as it being in bulletproofs and Halo etc. (sometimes called 'recursive' proof technique but that's misleading because that's really something else; that's proofs that prove other proofs are correct :)). The FRI one is interesting because they choose even/odd as the "splitting" function that reduces to half size.


Who care? Coinbase payouts are a way to avoid custody risks. They don't make a pool decentralized. If anything they increase the cost for a pool's hashers to be decentralized as during high fees they're wasteful.

Lightning payouts are much more important than to hashing decentralization, as they make it possible for large numbers of small miners to get paid on time.


This is not a great decentralization success story.

What we actually have is a pool mainly used by a small number of relatively large hashers. A real decentralization success story would be if the number of individual hashers was so large, coinbase payouts were completely impractical, and almost everyone was getting paid by Lightning.

nostr:nevent1qqs9amjvvqxac7m8c6vpjaaal9mgyn3mcptlm0gluajw83tez0dddnsppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgsq9k04vahllseell55m74n3047y88pzlr0z5yany32st29fapqmgsrqsqqqqqpq5gugp


I guess first we need to see reality: majority of the EU officials wants to introduce this regulation. European Parliament is against of it. We still can do change and express our position.

Leaving EU is not a solution.
Danish Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard said encrypted services and social media - naming Telegram and TikTok - were widely used to facilitate crime and that if it was up to him alone, some communication platforms would be geoblocked and shut down.  https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-denmark-pressure-tech-platforms-over-gang-crime-ads-2024-08-21/

And it is just one example. Sweden, France, Hungary, Spain and other the same. Because citizens of these countries think that someone should defend their rights without any efforts. It doesn’t work like that.

Your rights will be easily taken, but not given. So help to involve as much people as possible to resist and stop this abusive regulation.


Fact check: drinking exclusively kool-aid that you make for yourself is the best way to ensure a charasmatic cult leader hasn't poisoned it.


By good people, yes.


I was thinking about the "space and time" analogy a few weeks ago, then  nostr:npub1ej493cmun8y9h3082spg5uvt63jgtewneve526g7e2urca2afrxqm3ndrm comes out with this beautiful article: https://petertodd.org/2024/covenant-dependent-layer-2-review
🤯
I like the suggestion: "do a consensus cleanup soft-fork, followed by CTV."
I would add SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT.


Someone made an audio book of my L2 article! Crazy.

https://youtu.be/DHWdGiaR0F0


Sure. But that's an upper bound. Hell, it's not even the real upper bound, due to non-btc protocols.

We just don't know without an economic analysis, which I was not trying to do. And economics isn't exactly all that scientific.


Nope.

Think of it this way: the ASP is loaning you money. But when they get the money back is not at the end of the next V-UTXO expiry: it's when the current V-UTXO expires.


Fees aren't proportional to UTXO value. So it's really hard to know at what price point will people be priced out.

All we can know with this kind of analysis is what is technically possible.


If the V-UTXO is about to expire, the ASP will get their liquidity back soon; if they're borrowing liquidity they don't need to borrow it for very long.


https://petertodd.org/2024/covenant-dependent-layer-2-review

“Soft-Fork/Covenant Dependent Layer 2 Review”

I've finally published my big article sponsored by Fulgur Ventures, analyzing all the main covenant proposals, and the L2 proposals that would use them.

tl;dr: Ark is pretty cool, and CTV is a good way to get it.


On the first part: the goal is likely to scare big brazilian accounts of influencers, politicians, etc to stop using X. Bc their identitt is known and they could easily be fined. They then expect brazilian users to follow them to another platform.

On the second part: he did ban VPNs briefly, ordering they be removed from the play store and the app store, but then went back on it, but maintained that if people use them to access X, then they could be fined. So it is indeed, very possible that VPNs will be banned at some point. We are at the mercy of this judge's whims...


Cap lock odell understands.
nostr:nevent1qqsqzshhwzlctfll09lz4l4872rz48k78xp02zfa4mmf765a0898faqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygqyey2a4mlw8qchlfe5g39vacus4qnflevppv3yre0xm56rm7lveypsgqqqqqqs8janmx


TECHNICALLY SPEAKING THE BRAZIL X BAN IS TRIVIAL TO CIRCUMVENT.

THAT IS MOSTLY IRRELEVANT.

WILL LIKELY STILL BE EFFECTIVE AT SILENCING BRAZILIANS WITH LARGE AUDIENCES. LARGE KNOWN X ACCOUNTS. THEY WILL RISK PUNISHMENT IF THEY POST.

NOSTR DOES NOT FIX THAT.


They just need to identify that you might have a Twitter account, and then show that you've been using a VPN. Which given their judicial standards, probably won't be hard...

Also, good chance they move on to banning VPNs outright anyway.


Dogecoin Lightning


Detecting VPN usage is really easy. Most VPN protocols and services are trivial to detect based on packet analysis.

Banning VPNs is an extremely serious threat to a free society.


😂

Hardly anyone uses that term in that sense.

Legal immigration with high standards is fine, at least for the country allowing immigrants in. Arguably it's a bad thing for the world as it tends to lead to brain drains, depriving poorer countries of their talented people.

Obviously letting in millions of poor people with few skills, low intelligence, and violent cultures is a terrible idea.


Alternatively, Canadians. 😂


In a place like Canada they get called immigrants. At least they used too, when legal immigration had high standards.


Productive foreigners don't get called "migrants" or "illegals"


If you're unemployed it's hard to be legally in the UK as a non-citizen unless you qualify for some sort of refugee status (and thus aren't a migrant).

Anyway, my point is equally valid regardless of the exact legal situation. It's completely insane to spend enormous sums of money on foreigners who are on average, less productive and more violent than the people already in your country.


Nope. Russians make a big deal out of BRICS, as well as how "diverse" their fighting force is. Lots of far-left people buy that nonsense.

Also, lots of far left people like Russia because they think they'll somehow get a return to communism by supporting Russia. Even in battle Russian forces have often used hammer-and-sickle insignia.


I mention it because I know damn well that far left politics likes to hate on Ukraine because they're white. Equally, one reason why they support mass illegal immigration is because the illegals are almost all non-white. There absolutely is a racial component to this.

I went to art school. I got to see this insanity first hand.


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13794959/Record-numbers-migrants-living-Britain-jobless.html

The UK is spending £8billion/year on illegals, while in three years they've provided just £7.6 billion on military assistance to Ukraine.

Basically they'd rather waste billions on unproductive and violent non-whites (mostly) then help white people fighting to keep all of Europe safe.

We could compromise and give them all jobs demining Ukraine... It's not very difficult work. Just incredibly man power intensive to do safely, and dangerous if you get complacent.


It's not a "show". They were loading a ship with cargo containers. Ukraine manufactures and exports a lot of goods.


https://image.nostr.build/ebf8eecc2843409bde2e797703ae1234047a1e951e1da64b135554e1abe6ba26.jpg

What exactly is that relay supposed to be doing? I'm certainly not able to connect to it.


Speaking of, footage from awhile back of a Ukrainian drone boat blowing up a Russian ship.

Looks like one of the drone boats enters the ship from the hole made by a previous drone boat. Likely that Russians died in that attack. Good.

https://video.nostr.build/0a5ccac83ab0fca45ed7cee81aba6862eb1f7bb8535a0710287c73db0a869771.mp4


Status: Having drinks at a fancy rooftop bar overlooking Odesa harbor, watching cranes loading a container ship.

Don't underestimate how remarkable this is. Officially Russia has closed the Black Sea to Ukrainian shipping, and they've tried to attack that port over and over again.

Ukraine said fuck you and blew up enough Russian ships that Russia has withdrawn from the Black Sea, and Odesa port is shipping more cargo than before the full scale invasion.

Killing evil people works.

https://image.nostr.build/cfd8986aed587a56007a1d3394068e8e59f2b0cf2e9af264f3fa86c2178bab87.jpg


Of course, keep in mind that at the front lines, Russia is rather literally turning entire towns into dust with relentless artillery bombardment... And where they have been able to capture areas with people still in them, they rape and murder Ukrainians by the thousands. In Mariupol it's quite possible that as much as 100,000 Ukrainians were killed. Russia is refusing to allow third parties access, and the number of people missing is enormous.


Not bad. I just had some excellent sushi on a rooftop restaurant with a great view. During a scheduled power outage because Russia has been trying to destroy the Ukrainian power grid and all generating plants – they launched one of the biggest missile/drone attacks in human history against Ukraine just the other day.

This building, and pretty much every other business, has installed generators to compensate. The elevators were even working fine.

It's more like being in WW2 Britain than the "war torn" countries you usually think of. Lots of stuff is running, and life is reasonable. But it's only possible because brave men are risking their lives on front lines to continually push Russia back.


It does AML/KYC nonsense that probably makes a lot of big companies lawyers happy.

Also, IIRC AirBaltic has been allowing Bitcoin payments for quite awhile. So back in the day it may have been the most reasonable option.


I didn't even do this on purpose. I noticed I could pay with Bitcoin after I selected my tickets both times. (and unexpectedly found out that another bitcoiner was taking the exact same route with me)


I was able to travel from Riga to Odesa entirely with Bitcoin, paying for the tickets with Bitcoin directly.

Riga → Moldova: AirBaltic accepts Bitcoin with BitPay (ugh).

Moldova → Odesa: LikeBus accepts onchain Bitcoin (and other coins) via some Ukrainian payment provider.


We already have the decentralized alternative to Liquid. We don't have the decentralized alternative to social media. We should be creating it.


Unless you are verifying to your own domain verifying is pretty much useless. It's not actually verifying anything beyond a domain name.

Presenting this as a Twitter-like checkmark is bad UI.


Sparkling water is awesome.

It reminds us that humanities domination over nature is so absolute we can force CO2 into trillions of litres of water simply to amuse ourselves.


Apple has probably already filed the paperwork for all encryption techniques implemented in common standard libraries.


“Imagine a parallel universe full of O'Reilly books, where every cover isn't an animal. It's a furry.”


I've never actually tried exercising while listening to music or anything else. Closest I've ever done would be the music my old climbing gym occasionally played, and that was when I was a teenager.


Telegram is almost entirely unencrypted. So no, the product doesn't prevent him from doing anything. Telegram has banned a bunch of content at the request of the Russian government. They've also done a good job at banning porn or anything remotely like it, probably because they know child porn claims were coming.


Poor quality privacy is dangerous.


Telegram is a service, not just software.

Nostr's problem here is that it too is pretty close to a service, a fairly centralized one...


We arrest people on the basis of having a poor quality product all the time. It's called commercial fraud. This may be an example of it, depending on the statements that Telegram has actually made about the security of their product.


Telegram had such terrible privacy it might have been reasonable to arrest him in the basis of fraud...

This is a case of bad people getting arrested for bad reasons. The outcome might end up being good for the wider world, if users of Telegram move to something more secure.

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It's demonstrably wrong. Lots of users care.


“Do a better job ensuring that users are charged for the on-chain fees that are actually paid. Perhaps that means refunding back overages when the withdrawal is processed in a large batch that enables the fee to be shared among many users.”

I really like this idea.


He was defending Twitter's lack of privacy, which is 100% an influencer type of social network.


He was talking about the possibility of, eg, blue checks being purchasable via non-AML/KYC methods. In that context failing to provide options for an important minority is stupid.

It's as stupid as saying "Only a small minority of Twitter users have a lot of followers; there's no reason to make their experience good."

Obviously, the small minority who really need this stuff are often your most interesting users, who drive user interactions from the majority.

Snowden being a great example! Who Jack went on to point out had left Nostr due to bad privacy!


"People don't care." @jack on privacy and AML/KYC re: Twitter at #nostriga

What a fucking stupid argument. The market created Nostr for starters, used by people who do care. Equally _lots_ of people are failing to get blue checks for privacy reasons.


I need to write a full blog post on this...


Publishing on the system is the consent.


Since nostr doesn't have any type of blockchain tech, mirroring isn't reliable. You have no good way pf knowing if you're being censored.


Caching on nostr doesn't work well because nostr left off any kind of blockchain tech to make it simpler. Nostr should have had something like the architecture of Scuttlebutt, with something like a per-user chain or graph. But that's more complex than doing something dumb that doesn't actually work well...


“Users should own their own data”

That is fundamentally impossible in a digital system, especially if you want it to be decentralized and/or open access.

Data can be copied. That's just life.

If you're trying to prevent mirroring, at minimum, put it on a website. Though even then copying isn't that hard.


Just sat through the "Scaling Nostr: The Future of Decentralized Relays" panel at #nostriga

I'm very disappointed. Despite this supposedly being a talk about decentralized relays, _nothing_ mentioned in the panel was actually decentralized. Not a single damn thing.


Because you lived in a community where enough other people wore shoes, and has functioning sewage systems, that hookworm had been eradicated.

Like vaccination, you only need a certain % taking counter measures for the remainder to be protected.


Properly treating sewage is the second way that hookworm was eradicated: the lifecycle of the parasite includes spread via feces. But shoes were the first effective measure.

A big part of why people culturally wore shoes was probably hookworm infestations. Over a lifetime you're more likely to survive if you and the people around you consistently wear shoes.


We eradicated hookworm by getting everyone shoes.

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The root problem here is that nowhere near enough young people vote.

If they did, they'd still be able to sway the vote enough to cut spending on the elderly. But because they mostly don't vote, they're going to get screwed.

Frankly, they collectively deserve to get screwed. Inaction has consequences.

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Damnit, you keep on promoting it and I might have to go even without a talk. 😂


Dude, by that standard there was plenty of racism against Germans too...

The populations of both Japan and Germany at that time were deserving of scorn and hate. They both supported mass murder and had their own ideologies of superiority. Japan in particular was practically a death cult.

Almost everyone alive then is now dead, with the extremists of the time suffering a particularly high death rate.

It's also psychologically healthy to dehumanize your enemy in war. You have to kill or capture them, and more often then not it's the first option. No reason to spend valuable sanity worrying about their humanity when they're trying to kill you. That's especially true with large scale wars like WW2 where the whole population is meaningfully working together to kilk you.


Sound isn't an electro-magnetic wave. Sound propagates through pressure waves, a very different mechanism than electro-magnetic waves.


Like is said, there were far more Germans, making a indiscriminate approach impractical; on Hawaii where there were far more Japanese, the indiscriminate approach was also impractical, and not followed.

There's no racial difference here. Just circumstance.


The US did intern German Americans too, in both WW1 and WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans

About 36% of all people interned in WW2 were Germans. There were far more Germans in the US (millions) so interning them all was totally impractical, unlike the much smaller number of Japanese (~125,000).

In Hawaii about 1/3rd of the population were Japanese. And again, due to the enormous numbers involved, only a small % were interned.

The policies weren't about racism. They were about practicality.


I plead the 5th on whether or not I self zapped.


Iran attempted to kill large numbers of Israelis with hundreds of deadly weapons. It was a stroke of luck that Israel was able to deal with the threat effectively, mostly with the help of unexpected allies.

This is why attempted murder is still a serious crime. You don't go free just because you failed due to the difficult and heroic actions of others.

Iran is also getting close to obtaining nuclear weapons, which they certainly will use against Israel. And Iran is funding many other groups attacking Israel, including Hamas. Iran is also providing weapons to Russia to use against Ukraine, and that'll likely spread to other parts of Europe if Russia isn't defecated.

It is perfectly reasonable for Israel to put an end to this, now, before more Israeli's and orhers are murdered. Iranians should do the job first if they want to live.


FTC bans self-zapping.

https://image.nostr.build/e4839045e6fb8aa611ac94727ffd40597cde764d155d361c5ab5843d308868d7.jpg


Context: Iran just launched the largest missile attack in human history against Israel.

Obviously, Israel is allowed to fight back. And Iran is actively trying to get nukes themselves, while actively promoting the genocide of Jews. Israel probably doesn't have much longer to defeat Iran before a few million Israeli's could be killed.

If Iranians want to live, they should be overthrowing their government. Like Russia, they're ultimately responsible and they have the power to stop this.


Japan was fighting total war. Just like Russia, nuking their cities was a perfectly valid way to destroy their economy. And as it happens, it convinced them to surrender.

You know, the firebombings actually killed more people... Funny you don't mention that...

As for Iraq, it was Iraqi extremists who killed the most Iraqis, by far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War


Gee, I wonder why might Jews have been pissed off at the British back then...


Like I said, I left Canada for something a lot less evil than what Russia is doing. I'm willing to take action to avoid being on the side of evil. Everyone has a responsibility to do so.

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“What we're funding in Gaza” 😂

Gaza is the aggressor there. And the high rate of civilian deaths is an intentional strategy by Hamas.

Literally hundreds of IDF soldiers have lost their lives in the past few months for the sake of Gazans. A lot less would be dead if Israel focused purely on winning.


As for the Russian forces civilean death count... Just today I visited someone at the children's hospital that Russia intentionally bombed.

You're delusional if you think Russia is fighting a "clean" war.


Meh. Facts are different.

If the US was doing what Russia was doing, US taxpayers would be guilty too. Fortunately for US citizens they aren't.

And yes, your government certainly does represent you to a point. Even in a dictatorship you still have a vote in many ways.


There's been reportedly dozens of attempts on his life by Russia. Fortunately they've all failed so far.


Nothing the US has done in my lifetime comes close to what Russia is doing right now. It's just not comparable.

Be lucky you live in a sufficiently ethical county that you don't have to make such hard choices.

That said, when Canada's government went crazy with covid vaccines, I refused to comply and left Canada for months until they reversed course. Staying and complying wouldn't have been ethical, as I was in a position where I could refuse.

No comment on whether or not I paid all my taxes...


You get used to it really quickly. I've been outdoors at a cafe with families with young children, and watched at no-one did anything at all.

Certainly there are cases where the danger is higher and people would take more action. But fortunately I've never experienced it myself.


So I'm a warmonger because I might get killed by a Russian cruise missile?


I'm making a moral argument, not a legal argument.


I gave two Bitcoin talks today in Kyiv, and both talks got interrupted by air raid alarms. Not a big deal – we were in the basement of a co-working place next to the designated shelter room. But it goes to show how often they go off.

Honestly people usually ignore them. Kyiv is about 3 million people. 3 million minutes is 5.7 years. So once you've spent 13 minutes in shelters, collectively you've spent an entire human lifetime.

The lost sleep isn't worth it when an attack probably "only" kills one or two people on average.