Forgot to say where it's from: Steven Mitchel, Tao Te Ching, verse 17

When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised. If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.

I understand where you are coming from. Censorship-resistance is paramount. In Bitcoin, it is expressed by the fact that no one can stop a node from broadcasting a consensus-valid block. Absolutely no one. Purpose of Bitcoin is very simple, to create and destroy UTXOs which represent financial transactions. That simplicity is part of the breakthrough. Now, apart from the consensus rules for transactions, policy rules exist. Ponder the name for a moment. Policy is a weaker brother of consensus which functions as a malleable way for nodes to effect the rules, without (or before getting to ) changing the consensus. That's why nodes always mattered. For example, previously it has been possible to create transactions paying to public key. (P2PK). Because that opens a risk of factoring the private key in the future, this scheme has been rejected in favor of paying to public key _hash_ (P2PKH). Not that it is censorship, it's because there is technical reason for applying cryptography in a sounder way. Similarly for bare multisig. Bitcoin is not losing its censorship-resistant properties just because people defend their mempools with the tool they've been given and that's been in Bitcoin since earliest of days. Now, Bitcoin doesn't care about transactions because it's not alive. It is a network of nodes policing each other, and we are the people running the nodes and bitcoin is the expression of the purpose of why it was created and the culture of bitcoiners. Failing to see that is bound to get a person to think 'everything goes' in Bitcoin, and if you're not for it, then you are 'censoring', but that's just not true. When Vitalik wanted to do EVM and his funny smart contracts, he was met with disapproval and left to found Ethereum. Similar to colored coins and counterparty. Was this "Bitcoin not caring"? No, in fact it was bitcoiners caring. Now, since Feb 2023, bitcoiners had gotten relaxed and distracted as new avenues for spamming had been discovered, bugs not fixed timely and inscriptions exploded, blowing up the chainstate to 12GB, most of which are currently toxic dust UTXOs which, if you run a node, are have done IBD multiple times, you should know affects IBD performance. Don't dismiss it. It's very important. Why? Key health metric of Bitcoin is decentralization. Key decentralization metric is number of individuals running nodes for themselves. Key metric for running nodes is how easy it is in the decades to come. Each day, each Terabyte of disk, each GB of RAM, each CPU core that is incrementally added year by year by non-monetary uses acts to dishearten potential node runners, and opt for custodial solutions which lead to centralization. And with centralization of nodes, every other centralization metric follows. I absolutely love that you are for fuck-you money, fuck censors, fuck busybodies, for freedom, for sovereignty. But Bitcoin is not a Swiss army knife and it shouldn't be because the more we give way to optimize any non-primary objective (eg. BitVM, Citrea L2 DeFi, etc), the worse the primary function (Uncorruptible Sound Money) becomes. We've seen that when SPAM waves displaced monetary transactions. A blatant "advice" was given: "fees are the SPAM filter, outbid the graffiti or you're too poor to use bitcoin". We need this sound money to establish itself in the hands of many people, probably for a few decades more, and not fiat and klepto bros sucking hope out of gullible souls around us. That's not the humanity angle I came to Bitcoin for. That's horrible. Spammers were using an op code envelope which enabled to stuff data as code. Bitcoin was tricked into treating obfuscated data as transaction code. That is a subversion of the original intent, yet Bitcoin Core has been adamant not to entertain the idea that we could address it. Many narratives emerged which only fed helplessness: - defeatism (you can't fix it) - strategic fatalism (if it fails, it never was good) - descriptivism (oh, it's broken? let's fix the documentation to match the error; it is what it is, bitcoin don't care, transaction is transaction) - censorship-resistant skewed to mean "eat my JPEG or you're a tyrant" - incentive-compatible skewed to mean "we do everything to secure miner revenue" And on the basis of those we got this faux hype word salad that Bitcoin is to be fun, and become the underpinning of a new digital era and that's why it must become a google drive to host all the vaporware use-cases. Having said all that let's resume fucking up the central banks, shall we? With money, not JPEGs. With plentiful bitcoiners, not DeFi peddlers pushing loans. With purpose, not use-cases.

It is now updated to v29, thanks for your attention :-)

I need to get that updated now that 29.1 is released

Cool tshirt

If you use #gmail, search your emails for "account created", "new account", and similar in your language. Then review the accounts you had created in the past, and consider loging in to those systems, anonymizing the user data records and then deleting the accounts. Thank me later GM

LFGooo!11

guy on a call next to me: > I just fat-fingered myself 😬

Over 20 years of having a gmail account I have created lots of accounts in lots of places: blogs, platforms, applications. They may hold my name, email, and depending on the the website profile and how trusting I was. Many of the websites have your data, and do not contact you, or have been sold to other companies. This exercise is to: a) realize the digital footprint you have b) obfuscate and prune it for privacy, including preventing leaks of weaker passwords you might have set a long time ago c) prune it for less emails coming to your inbox d) prune it just for digital minimalism e) start doing something about the gmail umbillical cord Perhaps there are other reasons you would have for such a cleanse?

LOL! GM! Zapping naow!

Wow, nicely done, what a charmer! Is this an imaginary dog or did you have a model?