Ben Eng

Define AI consciousness. Here is my attempt. https://www.jetpen.com/blog/2025/10/26/define-ai-consciousness/

It arrived.

Put in an order for a Trezor Bitcoin-only hardware wallet.

Grok, Rewrite the song "Wanted Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi according to the new theme "Debt or Alive" about ending the Federal Reserve ("The Fed") and fiat currency in favor of sound money Debt or Alive It's all the same, only the rates will change Every day, it seems our wealth's inflatin' away Another bank where the printers run so cold I'd fight all night just to bring back gold [Chorus] I'm a rebel, on a blockchain I ride I'm wanted debt or alive Wanted debt or alive Sometimes I trade, sometimes it's not for days The fiat I see always fades in separate ways Sometimes you tell the crash by the bubble that you burst And times when you're in debt, all you do is curse [Chorus] I'm a rebel, on a blockchain I ride I'm wanted debt or alive Wanted debt or alive I walk these streets, a loaded ledger on my back I hodl for keeps 'cause the Fed might strike back I've been everywhere, still, I'm standing tall I've audited a million books and I've crashed them all [Chorus] I'm a rebel, on a blockchain I ride I'm wanted debt or alive Wanted debt or alive I'm a sound money fighter, with silver bullets I fire I'm wanted debt or alive Wanted debt or alive

Guy poses a question: what would you take your $9B in Bitcoin exit to? The answer cannot be to fiat currency, of course. The answer must be in productive capital, such as investing into building a company that expect to grow and succeed in the long term. Maybe an AI startup opportunity?

What should my first Bitcoin hardware wallet be? I'm ready to purchase one to learn how to self-custody.

If pkdns is meant to replace DNS, why not implement gethostbyname() and replace that in the operating system directly?

As a long-time listener of @TomBilyeu and nostr:nprofile1qqstnem9g6aqv3tw6vqaneftcj06frns56lj9q470gdww228vysz8hqpzdmhxue69uhkzmr8duh82arcduhx7mn9qy2hwumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxg8mv947, I have a gentle criticism of how the fiat money and debt crisis is being explained. The explanation must be wrong, although the sentiment is directionally correct. As a side-topic, my realization has also allowed me to gain an appreciation for @EricRWeinstein's application of gauge theory to economics, which maybe would also align to how Jim Simons successfully applied math and science expertise to investing. Tom and Guy both have explained how the money supply necessarily must inflate to enable debts to be paid, because the interest cannot be covered without creating money. That is, if the total money supply is $100, and you lend it all to Alice at 10% interest, Alice cannot pay back the loan with interest without printing an additional $10. On the surface, this seems correct, but it cannot be. In Guy's episode "Chat_144" [open.spotify.com/episode/1HFORy…], the topic of using Bitcoin for collateralized loans is discussed. BTC is the perfect money, its supply being mathematically impossible to inflate. If the debt yields interest, the prior explanation making inflation necessary completely contradicts how interest-bearing loans of BTC could work. The contradiction is resolved by fixing the prior explanation. Money supply inflation is NOT necessary to pay back the loan with interest, because of velocity. The borrower spends the $100 on goods to build his business. That money flows out to others. The borrower's business earns money back through sales by his growing business. That $100 of total money supply has exchanged hands a great many hands in numerous transactions throughout the economy. Presumably Alice's business has earned revenue and profits, and it is from this inflow of money, which can grow on the ledger to many times larger than the money supply, that $110 can be paid back to the lender. However, the $100 money supply does limit the liquidity available to transactions being settled. The $110 repayment cannot happen in a single translation. There needs to be enough velocity to allow that money to circulate through the many hands, so that Alice can repay portions at a time until the full amount owed is repaid. We can see from these dynamics that the economy has mass (money supply), velocity (rate of transactions), momentum (amount of money * transaction rate, which economists mislabel as 'velocity' of money). We also have conservation laws, such as the obvious money spent must equal money received per transaction; the total money supply remains constant absent the creation of new money. This is exactly the physics of this model of the universe. From this insight, we can easily take the leap that this universe can be modeled as a gauge theory.

What do people want to be built on Nostr that doesn't exist yet?

Canada bans cash payments over $10,000. This seems like Bitcoin's time to shine.

If everything becomes unlocked by a block chain secured by cryptographic keys, people and everything we use must evolve to embrace cryptographic keys as digital identity. Every time the topic of digital identity is raised, there is backlash. The reaction is ill founded. Resistance should be to digital identities that are issued, controlled, and revokable by centralized authorities (government, corporations); with authorization for services being programmable by authoritarians (i.e., social credit). We need to embrace decentralized digital identity, which is what Bitcoin uses, where the end user arbitrarily issues their own keys, and then maintains custody and control over their keys, never relinquishing secrecy to anyone else. That is Self-Sovereign Identity.

Today's lesson in Applied Cosmology: dimensions and degrees of freedom In physics, Minkowski spacetime has 4 dimensions (3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension), expressed as X⁴. In curved spacetime, the number of degrees of freedom for X⁴ is the number of parameters to specify this model: fourteen (14). 🌐4 coordinates for identifying a point in spacetime (x, y, z, t) 📏3 rulers in the space dimensions to measure distance ⏱️1 clock in the time dimension to measure duration 📐3 protractors (x-y, y-z, z-x) to measure the angle of each space dimension with respect to the other space dimensions 📐3 protractors (x-t, y-t, z-t) to measure the angle of each space dimension with respect to the time dimension In the same way, we wish to identify configuration dimensions with respect to separation of concerns. The number of separate concerns is the number of dimensions. Within each dimension, each concern has many parameters. The number of dimensions is modest (fewer than a dozen?), while the total number of degrees of freedom (parameters) is large (hundreds?). For example, the horizontal scaling dimension is parameterized for the platform and infrastructure by the number of worker nodes in a cluster. Within an application component (e.g., deployment or statefulset), horizontal scaling is parameterized by the replicaset scale. The vertical scaling dimension is parameterized for the platform and infrastructure by the compute shape (cpu architecture, cpu, memory, boot volume) of each worker node. Within an application component, vertical scaling is parameterized by the cpu, memory, and storage requests and limits of each container within the pod template. Other dimensions of interest are: 👉high availability 👉disaster recovery 👉workload complexity 👉workload scale 👉workload isolation 👉security isolation (and many more)

When BTC becomes the unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value as the global reserve currency, its valuation should be equivalent to the total global wealth being convertible all at once to BTC. USD$454.4T / 21M BTC = USD$21,638,095.24 per BTC Is it coincidental that the square root of the total global wealth roughly equals the number of Bitcoin?

The increase in emissions and atmospheric particulates coming out of Iran recently is concerning.

Twitter is literally on fire.

https://breez.technology/sdk/ @breez Clicking on Build gives this error:

Thanks for nothing, Bitkit.

When we say "the economy", it sounds disconnected from our lives. I always refocus its meaning to "standard of living", which in this context means the productive activities that sustain our lives. Freezing the activities that sustain our lives focuses on the essential concern.

We must recognize that history serves a purpose. Its purpose is not to log a series of events. It is to provide an explanation that teaches us lessons toward strategically guiding our future with ideological and moral clarity. Clarity comes from romanticizing good and evil, separating heroes from villains. Without essentializing in this way, history is noise with no signal. Signal is discerned from recognizing essential characteristics and filtering out the noise. Thus, history must be mythologized to be useful toward its purpose. The history of America's founding was drowned by noise (slavery, colonialism), and its essential lessons (secession, rights, liberty, protection against government tyranny) were muddied. So too has the Renaissance. The noise now overwhelms the signal, as the mythology is lost to the noise-makers.

On Android, Primal has one major advantage over Amethyst. Primal presents a thread in a proper tree, while Amethyst does not.