I'm reading a Culture novel again now, for the first time since getting properly into Bitcoin and AI There is a lot of AI in those stories, so it's interesting to read it now that it seems more realistic And they're always pointing out that the Culture isn't so "organized"; no hierarchies and laws and so on. I guess it's what some anarchists would hope is possible (They still have extraordinarily powerful armed forces though)

"Just transitory" @Bugle.News #40HPW🎧 , monitoring the STRC de-peg

I enjoyed this much more than I expected I would. I love Steve Keen's work, he's excellent on economics and it's history, especially on how fiat works. I was a bit worried that Peter McCormack would be too ideological, but he was willing to learn and you can see that they both enjoyed this discussion. Keen isn't a bitcoiner (yet); they didn't really discuss bitcoin here. We need a way to combine his expertise with the facts about the world today (e.g. the existence of bitcoin)

This debate is interesting, about economics during and after hyperbitcoinization. Some good points, but I also wish I was there to intervene and point out some historical facts that they might not be aware of Around 36:30, Gammon is pointing out that, after hyperbitcoinization, people will want to borrow Bitcoin and generally that there will be some demand for credit creation and fractional reserve banking. While that's true, it's misses the point that credit creation is difficult when inflation is low. Today, I wouldn't want to borrow a bitcoin. Even if I didn't have to pay interest on it, I know it would be very difficult to repay the bitcoin in a year from now (unless, of course, I just sat on it). When an asset (like Bitcoin) is going up in value - and also when it finally settles to its final value - then it's difficult to borrow it because it's difficult for the two parties (the lender and the borrower) to agree on a positive number as the interest rate. In the opening minutes, Gammon points out that the US money supply increased as much in the late 1800's - when the US was on a gold standard - as it did between 2003 and 2023. While the discussion on that was interesting, they didn't point out that the late 1800's was a period when gold mining was increasing the supply of gold at a very fast rate, thanks to improvements in mining technology. So basically, the economy did well during that period because of the inflation that was introduced by the gold standard. Economies can sometimes do very well when the money supply ('raw' money, and/or credit) is increasing quickly (late 1800's), and also when there is good regulation of the financial system (US from around 1940 to 1970). Bitcoin's instant private cash settlement of the hardest possible asset will have dramatic impacts on the financial system, many of them bad. On *average*, I have some optimistism that the pros will outweigh the cons, but it will still have some of the harmful effects due to its deflationary effects

Fun prediction: Strategy has been hammering STRC this week, causing the price to de-peg to $93, and using the proceeds to buy a lot of BTC

Mostly focussing on stress testing of MONAD, especially of the networking, in recent days. Turns out that my little laptop can't take 250,000 TCP connections attempting to connect to the same ip_addr:port at the same time 😀. So I'll bind lots of listeners across 127.x.y.z View quoted note →

I've worked out how to add Tor-style hidden services (.onion) to MONAD, and have coded some of the logic already A more useful evening than following Nostr drama 😂 View quoted note →

Getting hooked on coding freedom tech again is cool and all. But now it's well after midnight and I'm too excited to sleep

I'm enjoying using state machines. Old state goes in with an Event (e.g. payment received), and a new State and a list of Effects (e.g. update balance) comes out. I really feel that AI is improving the quality, not just the quantity, of my work. When I realize The Right Way™ to do something, my agent can just do the refactor easily. All the quality things that some devs ignore (testing, documentation, specs, ...) are also really good at educating the agent about how to write good code View quoted note →

A random update on what I've been doing. This project isn't quite ready, but I'm very happy with my progress since I got back into this about ten days ago. I hope to ask for testers soon: MONAD is a system with some similarities to Tor, and also to the everyday usage of the word "VPN", a system to allow you to access websites and systems while obfuscating your location, e.g. access Netflix from another country. I started it as a demo for @Sovereign Engineering and now I'm going to try to get a usable system out It's funded by Cashu, specifically by the Spilman channels, so that you can easily pay tiny amounts (one sat, or even one millisat) as needed to keep the stream alive. This helps privacy because it makes it easier to use a different payment for each session, so that the relay operator can't easily link your sessions together Like Tor, you can select multiple relays in a chain for extra privacy, and you pay each one separately. It's onion routing, with sessions nested inside each other Lots of encryption of course, using secp256k1. And blinded paths already implemented as an option, in order that the client doesn't know the IP address (or FIPS address) of every relay @FIPS A few days out of date, I'll update it fully when it's ready for some testing:

GitHub

GitHub - SatsAndSports/MONAD: Monetized Onion Network Access Daemon - onion-routing, where you pay each node via Cashu spilman channels for their service

Monetized Onion Network Access Daemon - onion-routing, where you pay each node via Cashu spilman channels for their service - SatsAndSports/MONAD

@Cashu