Learning out loud here: I love Nostr and the community here. Relatively high signal, customizable (even to a fault 😂), extendable, etc. Because I wanted Nostr to grow and compete with the activity on platforms like X for a while I had a goal of having some kind of interaction on Nostr every day whether it was a post, comment, repost, or a handful of zaps. On reflection I’d prefer a relatively inactive but thoughtful and thought provoking feed. I don’t need the dopamine rush of a firehose feed. I don’t usually want to contribute to a firehose. There’s a great cohort of builders, artists, cryptographers, shit-posters that you can filter for and have a great experience and in that narrow view it’s already won the social media wars in my eyes. I may hop on Nostr 20 times a day or go a week without opening a client but it won’t be because of any vanity metrics. Touching grass is real. Distractions are real. Lifespans are real.

I asked others this, but curious on your take as well. Given how much electricity China is bringing online and how dominant they are in producing ASICs and how much control they have over block template creation via Antpool and their proxy pools do you think China will run parallel systems (gold and BTC) for settling international trade eventually? This chart that Marty shared seems to indicate a big move coming.

Freedom tech just hits different. You can build your own payment system in whatever way works for you and without asking. Imagine building something like this on the legacy fiat rails…

Is this whale potentially the ECB? Sounds crazy but they’ve been buying up Gold for years so they’re clearly stocking up on reserves and no reason to advertise buying bitcoin when they’re attacking it. They’re openly considering a euro stablecoin on Eth so it could make sense to push down BTC sentiment while they’re accumulating shitcoins for their layer 2+ shitcoin. If bitcoin runs up it hurts their messaging and shitcoin adoption narrative.

Life is short. Spend as much time in front of a screen while you can!

According to Richard Thomas, a wildlife biologist and notable Woodchuck (aka groundhog) aficionado, it can chuck about 700 lbs of wood! Source: https://gf.nd.gov/wildlife-notes/how-much-wood-can-woodchuck-chuck

That ending 🥶 lmao

Hollow words. Even if they pinky promise not to target developers they can always change their mind. They can also be replaced by the next administration who could reverse course. Notice how they used the word decentralized? That’s a sliding scale for one thing and in any case they don’t mention privacy which is the one thing most needed at this point in time.

Be prepared. The world is becoming overly hostile to bitcoin. “Then they fight you” is definitively here. ETH and the other shitcoins are not a threat to TradFi so they’ll embrace it in short order. It’s a captured network already. Vitalik et al will slip in some backdoors and some AML protections because they can. Few people on that network will mind and TradFi will love it because it appeases the regulators. Bitcoin? It will become prohibitively expensive (in terms of risk) to use in a sovereign way and all the normies will flock to the easily manipulated ETFs. Nations might still move forward in selling international trade with it but along the way they’ll squeeze every sat they can from the plebs. Saylor has done a great job pulling coins off the market in a sly way pretending to be in it for the “thermodynamically sound money” but in the end he’s going to hand over all of that stash to the government.

European countries and the EU have accelerated their crackdowns on the internet this last year.

Curious if you’ve seen this chart and what you think about China trying out a gold backed currency. Do you think they’ll replace CNH with such a currency? And given how dominant they are in producing ASICs and their enormous energy production push whether or not they’d have parallel systems (ie. gold and bitcoin) for settling international trade or if they’re more likely to go all in on gold.

Better than Claude?

How would this look for bitcoin script? All transactions have to be multisig with the treasury or a set of friendly banks being a party? Don’t see how it’s possible otherwise.