Highly recommend this book if you want something to supplement your video course. It gives a solid overview and has plenty of exercises in there: “Understanding cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners” https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-69007-9

That didn’t work for me. They denied me 3 times likely because I used a proton email. Never approved. Their support wasn’t helpful either.

I’ll be traveling the next few weeks and not bringing my nsec with me. I’ve had “interesting” experiences with internet connected devices in these countries so just gonna play it safe. See you in a few weeks, anon!

What’s the light source on the left? Is it a skylight or did they install some kind of fancy candle?

What’s your go-to hot sauce? I used to be a Sriracha maxi (the original one not all the knock offs) but these days I’ve been on a Cholula kick.

Join the evolution of mining

Congrats, Derek!

It’s true Saylor brought the discussion mainstream, but he also coopted the narrative and is clearly pushing for it to be used a database rather than money. He tells people not to spend it and to borrow against it. He advocates to stop making changes (because then bitcoin could serve more people as a currency). He preaches “trust; don’t verify” by laughing at self custody and mocking proof of reserves while touting an audit by other mega corps instead. He tells everyone the work is already done and there’s nothing else to do but buy bitcoin in their brokerage or bank account and leave it there: literally the exact opposite of the lesson the whitepaper taught us. Bitcoin has no value unless it’s being used by as many as possible. As decentralized as possible. A world where 10 governments, 20 banks, and a few hundred companies own the vast majority of bitcoin is a complete failure of the mission and yet if you follow his lead that’s the world you end up in. I’ve had friends tell me they’re not spending their bitcoin. HODL they say. And yet they’re spending their fiat nonetheless. They’re still spending money but can’t bring themselves to use bitcoin for purchases because this influencer “super maxi” says not to.

The XOR operation is essential in cryptography (e.g. used in one time pad). You can also do other neat things with it: https://florian.github.io/xor-trick/

It was mostly tongue in cheek. I’m very active and eat a relatively healthy diet and have good blood pressure and resting heart rate. I’m really just commenting on the fact that doctors are quick to prescribe medication.

I’m long overdue for my once-every-other-decade physical. Just going to assume I’ve got all the chronic illnesses and need all the pills.

Mining is fun for the whole family!

The government playbook: approve and encourage bitcoin ETFs, tell people they’ll have their fingers chopped off and they’ll lose their keys, praise “bitcoin treasury companies”, let banks custody and lend/borrow against it for fiat, and make the taxes complicated for direct usage. You’ll unsurprisingly reduce adoption. Throw in plenty of collaborative custody solutions so you can keep tabs on the ones who stay outside the system and suddenly bitcoin doesn’t seem so scary!

They meant “lol period”. Classic typo. Every day we get to lol at clown world and what they have to put up with.

Personally I’d rather subscribe to a project of theirs. Even if the project is given away for free I’d be willing to regularly pay some amount. The more I use the app or service the more I’d pay. I think that’s a more sustainable model for everyone too. The “funder” gets to signal specifically what they like and have something they can point to and know they played some small role in keeping it around; the developer still pays the bills and at any point they can pass the project on to someone else to maintain and there’s a more natural continuity in maintenance.

Cloudflare is trying to make a spam firewall with AI and tradfi. Tell me you want bitcoin without saying you want bitcoin. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/pay-up-or-stop-scraping-cloudflare-program-charges-bots-for-each-crawl/

Good call. For posterity, I’m talking about hypothetically helping the towing company employees who forgot their keys 😅

“This is no doubt going to have, as an effect, the banning of open source AI that people can run freely on their own laptops.” 🎯 The big players will be much easier to control and share data with the regulators. And the mega corps don’t want the competition from self hosted models that don’t serve ads.

A very simple explanation you can use when talking to regular people and without using the B-word that can often shut the conversation down. did the work so you don’t have to!

Saw someone with a boot earlier. Wish I had seen this a few hours ago to practice it.

Ah it’s a problem with the error message. My wallet didn’t have enough to cover the lightning fees so it failed and told me to HFSP. When I changed the invoice to 45 sats the payment worked.

Thank you for the mcp-money server (https://github.com/pablof7z/mcp-money)! It works well for most things but when I tried paying a 50 sat lightning invoice it failed with this message “Payment failed - insufficient balance. You have 50 sats but need 50000+ sats for this 50000 sat invoice.” The invoice is only for 50 sats 😂 . Just want to let you know!