Those people still don’t understand the problems of money. Most still think money is *supposed* to lose value over time and that this is good for the economy. I’ve come to a point where I start by asking that question, and if they say “yes otherwise people will hoard it,” I know there’s no progress to be made discussing Bitcoin’s value
You don’t survive without “chemical emissions.” Life is a literal process of “chemical emissions.” Society can scale to about a couple million people who live in absolute destitute poverty without “chemical emissions.”
It’s something to consider that the very thing that gives us the lives that enable a degree of meaning, discovery, and advancement has been demonized. You realize the earth just dumps incomprehensible amounts of natural gas into the air, and an untold other number of chemicals, and smoke, and ash, etc.
It might be worth some self reflection that you can see something so incredible as launching a rocket into outer space and only see the absolute worst of humanity in it. That is a choice. Just saying.
I said thanks because I’m not logged into Twitter and don’t have the app, thus I cannot view a link to a tweet which tons of people do. I was literally thanking him for the screenshot.
Tether is not a CBDC.
It's literally a BDC
Tether is not a central bank, they don't issue notes of an independent monetary unit. They aren't associated with any govt. Tether is just a modern banknote with most of the same problems, risks, and trust issues. The difference being it is available to anyone with a smart phone without an account -- which is actually a significant improvement over the old garbage.
Tether is custodian issued digital banknotes. Literally in every use of those terms this is the accurate thing to call it. "Cash" has always just referred to banknotes issued that were redeemable in gold or at a bank that was a bearer asset. The difference with a stablecoin like Tether and physical cash is the oversight/surveillance that the institution has for the digital alternative. This is why ecash is actually the only thing that digitally shares basically all the characteristics of physical cash (txn privacy from issuer and bearer asset). Tether is far easier to freeze accounts and spy on what everyone is doing. Obviously why people want to label it "something bad."
My point is that the CBDC label is NOT accurate, and when we use words and labels arbitrarily, it desensitizes people to them. If people just become "whatever" about Tether (because if you don't use it, who cares), and everyone calls it a CBDC, then after a few years of this people are just going to think "CBDCs are fine, who cares?"
Calling everything we don't like a CBDC is a HUGE BENEFIT to actual CBDCs.
Bank digital currencies are not a problem. They will remain solvent as long as the "bank" does. They are a much better option than credit cards, and the option of being able to issue ecash is even better.
BDCs are certainly a far cry from the #Bitcoin sovereign world that we are building and have nothing to do with it, but they are ALSO a far cry from a genuine CBDC.
So please, stop using words that matter in a stupid and cheap way, because when we REALLY need them, you'll have sucked them of all of their power and meaning.
1000%, if we don't use our language carefully then we only ruin our own linguistic power to fight the things we don't want to see in the world. People do not respect how much we lose by being sloppy and cheap with our language.
Do you not realize that this isn't relevant at all and has nothing to do with the definition or core problem of a CBDC?
Treasuries back tons of major investment institutions, are they CBDCs? Treasuries back every modern currency across the world today, are they CBDCs? Treasuries back reserves at you local bank, does your debit card spend and receive CBDCs?
With respect, literally dude you kinda prove my point. "backed by treasuries" is the least important and not even slightly unique part of the concern for CBDCs. Literally ALL of the fiat bullshit, the ENTIRE global fiat enterprise, is backed by govt treasuries already. When someone issues and forces a CBDC on the population, not once will my protest be "I can't believe its backed by treasuries!"
If that's what bothers you about CBDCs, then I have really bad news for you... just sayin
I wouldn't say I love Tether, but I'm mostly indifferent about it. It's a huge step up from traditional banking and its a very interesting tool, but it also furthers the dollar network, bolsters the US treasury market, and is explicitly still just a dollar credit token.
I see its benefits and its drawbacks. I prefer Tether existing than it not, for sure, but I don't love it and it's not the solution to our biggest problems, its just an interesting new take on banking infrastructure, imo.
Nothing about what I said made any suggestion one way or another about "association with a govt." It's literally a USD stablecoin. Why would anyone claim that it's not US related?
That said from the company standpoint specifically, they are scared shitless about doing any business with any US company or being attached in any way to US markets. Like very paranoid about it. So if you are saying they are some US govt project then I'd argue that doesn't really add up. I think the US thinks Tether is undermining their power and control, even though from the standpoint of someone who understands, it actually is a significant support for the US dollar and treasuries. I simply think the political system is only just now waking up to that and trying to figure out how to take advantage of that.
I mean that they haven’t issued a govt currency and aren’t a govt program or institution. I didn’t mean that they don’t buy a particular govt’s treasuries, as that’s obviously false.
So @kineticfinance do you have any good bug based recipes I could try out? I’ve been thinking a lot more about how to help the planet since your recent videos and I want to do my part. 🫡
Welcome. Tomorrow’s episode of Bitcoin Audible will be reading and commentary on @LynAlden ‘s recent piece all about #Nostr
If you are into podcasts and/or want to read the article, it’s a great breakdown of why it’s important and how big of a deal it could be as it grows.
Also get a Lightning wallet so people can zap you. You add the Lightning address into your profile details.
For quick & easy custodial wallets to get started I recommend Alby, Fountain (has one built in), Blue Wallet, or Wallet of Satoshi (depending on where you are).
Because they need to like him and if they admitted that he was literally EAGERLY behind the horrifically corrupt pharma/covid/authoritarian shit show that was 2020 AND 2021, they would probably have an aneurism.
So instead they just kinda pretend that none of that happened and focus on the fact that the establishment hates him, therefore he must be our friend.
Almost every decision that was made was directly contradictory to all decent evidence, strategy, and policies we had developed.
First, quarantining THE HEALTHY is fucking insane and makes no sense.
Second, you never vaccinate during a supposed pandemic, it’s exactly the way one makes a vaccine useless
Third, removing restrictions, dropping stupid and stagnant standards, and letting everyone explore all possible treatment options and then bringing as many doctors expertise and experiences together to cover what was and wasn’t working would’ve had a successful and effective treatment in weeks
Fourth, ATTACKING treatments and stripping them from market shelves across the country that show promise is fucking stupid, arrogant, and authoritarian, on top of the fact that it likely alone causes thousands of deaths by not making simple treatment options impossible to get.
This list could go on for a long time. And on top of it all he trusted, supported, and gave way more power and authority to Fauci who should be in prison for mass man slaughter like 10 times over. The guy is evil incarnate and has been pushing horrific and pointless treatments onto people that he profits from with outright and *known* lies. Even a cursory look at his history shows that guys does not have a conscience of any form.
Everything that was done was backwards and fucking stupid. Trump has never apologized and STILL brags about it to this day. And he literally towed the line with every big govt, authoritarian lockdown, moronic health policy, and parasitic pharmaceutical plan and power grab during the entire period.
How people let him off the hook with that shit and have lost their most basic common sense on the issue is beyond me. It was a failure of incredible magnitude and it was not even a little difficult to come up with a VASTLY better course of action.
That’s what they did specifically because they tried to have one stupid global plan for everyone.
Are you suggesting that huge, centralized decision making and risk consolidation is BETTER than decentralized experimentation and risk assessment?
If you actually believe something so contrary to common sense and everything we know about markets and networks then I would ask why on earth you are in #Bitcoin?
Yeah how on earth people think there were no other options and that “we would have all done that” is fucking bonkers to me. Not at ANY point did I think what they were doing was rational or intelligent because it was all fucking insane from the outset.
To the contrary, you CAN centrally plan a response to a disease, in the same way you can centrally plan market prices. And the results are about the same
1000% this.
I've worked really hard to try and create this for myself through various apps and ways to "regulate" my own use of stuff. But to have a "push only" client for #Nostr would be a game changer for productivity of content creators.
nostr:note1zemssj56r7hqtyzg6tvtw2gzw2ua562qd6hqdk2wvvj5mnk87ggq5zxshz
There’s needs to be a clearer distinction for degrees of open source I think… unless of course they already exist and I just don’t know them.
I guess “source viewable” is one I hear often. But there also needs to be a “closed development, but open code” version I think. Like just “open code” or something maybe. I don’t know but I feel like the demands of open source projects are growing, and users expect it to be exactly a certain way, and the ecosystem is varied enough that it might be useful to have distinctions for these things.
I don’t fault them for being closed development though. But I get why people wouldn’t like it being called “open source” but then finding out they don’t allow contributions or heavily control input from outside.
Yo @jb55 is there a particular trigger or tag for blurring an image that @damus will read? I’m curious because I have an idea for a filter that I could run on my personal relay to test something out. Could be really cool to pair with a different project I’m working on.
I’m looking for a specific way to basically TELL Damus to blur an image, even if it’s from someone I follow. And then if I connect to a particular relay, it could give me those images blurred specifically because my personal relay gave the “signal” to do so, while I’m browsing in @damus
Essentially a way to tag or assign blurring to any specific note.
Yo @M you gonna have to stop posting that turismo shit or I’m gonna have to mute. I get maybe you’re trying to call attention to it, but I can’t be havin that in my feed while I’m sitting with my kid and wife and have no way to blur or hide it. Don’t want to block for WoT reasons but might have to anyway.
Imagine... the most wasteful institution in the history of the world is "cracking down on companies that waste people's time and money."
This is one of those I-have-to-laugh-to-avoid-crying sort of moments.
https://m.primal.net/JxkG.png
PSA 🚨
Without a direct innovation in the monetization structure of #Nostr I think we should expect a highly successful #Nostr to evolve like other protocols before it. I think there are 2 most likely comparisons:
1. #Nostr ends up looking more like email. It is still open and decentralized, but dominated by a small group of companies with enormous insight into everything that is happening and acting as huge semi-centralized custodians of everyone's data and messages.
2. #Nostr ends up looking more like RSS & podcasts. It is open and decentralized, but most users and all serious content creators pay for hosting platforms (relays) that sell it with a bunch of other features, analytics, and secondary services attached to it - or built in advertising and monetization splits.
Understand I'm not predicting that it will go either direction or that only these two options exist. I'm saying that --- without a significant innovation in the monetization method --- it will very likely take one of these two paths. Also understand that neither of these are bad outcomes, per se. Both present a VASTLY better internet sovereignty and user/server power dynamic than the current Web 2, but this is far from realizing #Nostr's true potential.
I only say this to get people thinking about the fact that we still have a very serious problem funding relays at scale, and it hasn't been solved, it's mostly been covered up with some very generous grants and *extremely* generous volunteer developers and relay runners. But it WILL have to be addressed or nostr's success will come hand in hand with some hard truths about how we use it and what we think it is.
It won't be unlike the people who thought all #Bitcoin transactions were going to be free forever, settle instantly, and that the whole world could be sovereign with their own UTXOs. That's simply not how it worked, and we had to have a 4 year, vicious, all out civil war within the community when we were finally forced to come to terms with that reality.
> “Stop copying the business that run on ad revenue.”
I agree, I’m not suggesting that people use the same business model. To the contrary, I was explicitly suggesting that this is the area people need to be thinking about. Right now the old business models remain the only ones invented that have been proven sustainable. This is where we need to big breakthrough and we have the tools we need to experiment.
IMO, the biggest mistake of all #Bitcoin/#Lightning wallet and app developers right now is not integrating the most naive version of a #Nostr based contact list.
Literally we have everything we need to easily select and send bitcoin to people, projects, clients, etc and establish very simple web of trust security. AND to have a #Nostr identity created within a wallet by default for those that don't have one, even in the absence of caring about social posts or notes or whatever.
As I learned very recently, npubs are literally taproot addresses, so legit every bitcoin wallet could generate a nostr ID for those that don't have one and if you punched in your nsec into the app, anyone could receive coins straight to their npub by the app merely auto-removing "npub..." and replacing it with "bc..."
This is SUPER low hanging fruit that completely shifts the user experience of bitcoin and I think extremely few people have realized just how big of an improvement this would be.
My advice: Stop thinking about #Nostr purely as a twitter replacement, think about it as a #Bitcoin account, username, & reputation system, it actually works and scales BETTER for that use than for general purpose social media.
I agree. I'm not saying you would do that. I'm saying you could:
1. Generate an nsec from your bitcoin private keys
2. SEND to any nsec if you wanted to. (the receiver would be highly encouraged to send to a real bitcoin wallet after receiving if someone sent them something)
#2 is basically moot if #Nostr contacts are integrated into wallets, because you can have the clients communicate to get payment details if desired.
I'm not suggesting to advise people to generate a #nostr ID and then use that as their bitcoin wallet keys. I'm just explaining that the standards are exactly the same and the UX could be vastly simpler than we currently have it across the ecosystem by thinking about it this way.
There is absolutely a point to made about the risk of using a Nostr key for real money, but then when the alternative is to use a custodian, I think the argument is basically moot. It's obviously better to have self-custody of a small amount of funds and an alternative way to communicate and pay each other where you hold your own keys than not, regardless of the trade offs or risk. Everything has risk.
This is for the user to decide. You cannot demand that everyone make the same decision about the trade off of privacy vs self-custody simply because you have a preference. There are very real trade offs with the options you present, the worst thing for UX is to presuppose what trade offs the user wants and centralizing risk into one design for everyone despite the very different needs.
It's about teaching the difference between these risks and letting people choose, not choosing for them, imo.
hmm, if its a taproot address i don't see why not. Although you'd have to get the individual private key (rather than the master seed) for it to get your nsec. 🧐
Hmm your right it isn't a valid address when i replace it, but it was being discussed that it was based on the same standard and that there was a valid taproot address in some way with some minor modification.
I may just have the specifics wrong. I'll try to find the post about it. It was really recent because I was surprised. I hadn't known this piece of info.
Ok finally found it and it doesn't seem as simple as was explained. They are the same standard, but it isn't hashed to the same size, which just looking at it should've triggered to me that it was longer than a normal address just by character count. However it does seem to be the case that you can generate taproot addresses from the nsec and/or use your bitcoin wallet to also generate a Nostr ID with relative ease. But the degree of connection i posted above doesn't seem to check out in practice.
Post that was suggesting the beginning could just be swapped, when it seems like it needs to be hashed differently, but the rest of the description of it seems to be correct:
nostr:note1jefn0r50q3rzkqgpd8jxph2lpc5c23mthyv2njdn57lg9j4qlkksz7hmqz
A post discussing the differences and how to generate addresses or npubs from each other:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5473719.0
The bigger the #Bitcoin team gets, the harder it is to fight.
The earlier you join the #Bitcoin team, the more you will be rewarded for cooperating instead of fighting.
The game theory is surprisingly simple. Sound money will eat the world, and finally cure the cancer of fiat.
I'm sorry you are likely getting your narrative of #Bitcoin from a whole lot of people who aren't actually anywhere near it. You have completely misunderstood how network technology evolves and have possibly stuck your head in the sand if you think #Bitcoin isn't winning harder than literally anything else right now.
“Slow TPS”
I suspected as such. You’ve failed to understand the most fundamental of issues. If you actually care to learn and aren’t here just to win social points and beat your chest, here’s a place to start:
https://fountain.fm/episode/cLNMTcWrFO3hlQXk8e1K
Should’ve bought a modest house with the most subsidized loan imaginable and with as little as possible on the down payment. Then as the price of the house goes up, refinance to pull money out and buy more #Bitcoin.
He’d have the house and pretty much all of his (maybe even more) bitcoin.
Actually “Em-Tee Gox” is the original pronunciation and I was just trying to be true to history for the audiobook. It shifted to “Mount” over the years simply because it looked that way.
But MtGox originally stood for “Magic the Gathering Online Exchange.” It started as a tradable card game service that eventually added bitcoin. Then at some point they updated branding and people had already been calling it “Mount” at that point and it stuck.
I don’t think there was a specific time when it shifted but in thinking about it I went with the original that we would say way back in the day before mount became the norm. The play on “empty” feels appropriate as well. 😆
Also I have never done the “have Ai read for me” thing yet. But I was considering turning it into a game for Ai Unchained where the person to guess got some sats or something. 🤔😆
There is almost always a market spread and it’s pretty universal that it won’t line up with spot basically anywhere you buy. But also keep in mind how nominally large a small percentage of the price is now. You mention $256 as the price difference, but that’s only 0.4%.
No, is imagine the market solution would basically be the same as the old debtors’ prisons. Where the criminal literally owed the victim certain restitution, and the “prison” they worked in basically earns the fee for keeping them imprisoned and earning for the victim or their family.
Could also be interesting in the case of murder and similar crimes, the victim gets to decide what fee they are willing to pay for what conditions the prisoner gets. 🤔
Some ideas to muse on, but we’ve had market based prisons and common law before. There is no shortage of ideas to try and there’s a surprising history of stuff that has worked in the absence of direct political control. Some really interesting systems popped up in the Wild West (book recommendation: The Not so Wild, Wild West). Taxation is essentially both the laziest and most immoral way to sustain anything.
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