You can think of money as economic potential energy. It’s where excess economic productivity is stored until there’s a demand for it. It’s like a battery. A battery that can hold a charge for as long as you need it is preferable to one that can’t. Even better is one that can hold it indefinitely so that it can be reused by others eventually. Picture your money now and think at current prices how big of a “battery” do you need? If you have enough money now at current prices to last you 10 years will your money “hold its charge” that long? If the medium you’re storing your money in is leaky then you have to expend more effort and resources just to have a stable balance. What happens when that leak is fixed? Imagine at current levels of productivity how much more economic potential energy could be saved up just by patching that leak. What do we unlock now that we have such a money?

You thought centralized fiat money was bad, but consider the idea of centralized fiat AI. With power over a money printer you can manipulate economies. With control over the strongest AI you ARE the economy. We need to work on making the frontier models completely open from the data to the hardware and everything in between.

TL;DW: as long as your stack is growing you’re winning. Don’t focus on the units and the fact that you’re getting less income in sats over time. Everybody is going through that. Focus on building a sustainable business model by providing actual value today. A “growth at all costs” mindset on average leads to fewer sats in your wallet. View quoted note →

It’s hard for our generation to understand what money was like during our grandparents generation. It’s hard for our grandparents to understand technology. It’s hard for adversarial governments to relinquish control especially during periods of escalating tensions. This is why hardly anybody truly understands what bitcoin is doing to the world.

Big win for privacy in the US! View quoted note →

What Andreas says here about bitcoin applies equally well to decentralized social networks like Nostr. It’s clear what Bitcoin has done to the financial world and governments in just 15 years now imagine what an open, permissionless, censorship resistant social network can do for the world in another 15 years. View quoted note →

“We have to understand that there will be closed, centralized systems. Those systems will appear faster and cheaper. We don’t beat PayPal or Visa, we don’t beat the banking system, by doing what they do, becoming them but only ‘weirder’.” - Andreas Antonopoulos “The Internet of money volume three”

Over time Bitcoiners become more economically relevant and as a result you’ll see more vendors and local governments forced to accept that reality.

No need for new OpCodes to enable covenants. Write a script that encrypts a method for generating a private/public key pair using the entropy from the last N blocks and can’t be tampered with. As long as the runtime script is blinded from the machine running it and you can prove that nobody can witness the private key then you can also have the script perform arbitrary computation and verifiably be rewarded with a UTXO. Ask your friendly neighborhood cryptographer for a prescription for homomorphic encryption today. #bitcoin #covenants

The country that can spread bitcoin as wide as possible has the biggest advantage since they’ll be spreading network defense as wide as possible. When a country centralizes it in the hands of a government and limits access they run the risk of deferring network decisions to far more people that aren’t necessarily aligned with you. The more you can diffuse it across all the economic actors in your borders (ie. individuals, clubs, companies, local governments, national governments, militaries, etc) the better preserved your society is and in fact it aligns everyone and encourages economic rationalism. TL;DR - you don’t have enough #bitcoin, anon!

Underrated artist: The Spy From Cairo

Keynesian economists: “if things become more adorable over time then people quit buying things. You’ll hate it!” Uhh ok.

@DETERMINISTIC OPTIMISM 🌞 any plans to make a Coldcard Q-like device but for running a full node? Use case: I want to run my full node on trust minimized hardware. I imagine it would be useful for applications built on top of the chain too that need tighter security.