All of my interests aligned perfectly in Bitcoin and yet despite a friend pushing it on me in 2011 and being open minded I ignored it for years because it was effectively pitched as complicated money. I’ve been a “saver” since I was at least 10 years old. I got interested in the stock market as a teenager and read books like the intelligent investor and other classics. In college I formally studied mathematics but I also took many classes in physics and economics out of interest. I read physics books in my spare time (textbooks and pop sci books alike). Eventually I became a software engineer. Bitcoin touches each of those fields in a fundamental way. It should’ve clicked on day one but it didn’t and that’s ok. The reason I’m sharing this is to highlight how you have to meet people where they are and be patient if you want to get a message across. Your friend you’ve been trying to orange pill may eventually get there but it’s going to happen on their schedule and on their terms.

Coinbase apparently has a “wrapped Bitcoin” offering now. Not a fan of coinbase but it’s honestly genius and keeps sats from being lost. You want to send “Bitcoin” to some #shitcoin network but you actually send an IOU to that network and #coinbase keeps the BTC. If that network fails or a smart contract goes wrong (or corrupted) they can claw back the coins and keep them for themselves. All the shitcoiners get to play roulette and assume the risk while CB ultimately holds the keys.

Some people say that Bitcoin is a great absorber of liquidity, which is true, but another way to think of it is that it’s the most efficient network to distribute central bank “stimulus.” With all other assets there are far more middlemen to scalp fees or dilute along the way.

This is a must listen for anyone who owns Bitcoin or values #freedom. Self custody is under attack behind the scenes. We all knew it was coming but it’s here now. It starts with certain wallet software and hardware being approved and then comes the backdoors. Being open source isn’t a silver bullet either. Remember the xz backdoor [1]? Thank you @OpnState 1.

XZ Utils backdoor - Wikipedia

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Does splicing a lightning channel reuse the address? I’m seeing someone who keeps topping up an address to about 50m sats and drawing down to about 14m over and over.

Hear ye! Hear ye! FPPS is deprecated. Move to Datum or Stratum V2 protocols if you want more corn for your hashes. View quoted note →

TL;DR - Meta is in a position to set up the ultimate Bitcoin surveillance state. Seeing people talk about #Meta holding bitcoin on their balance sheet. I don’t like or trust #Zuck at all and here’s my prediction: Meta will eventually acquire bitcoin for their treasury. With the new US administration being “pro-crypto” Meta would apply for money transmitter licenses and embed a custodial wallet in their apps. Since they’re holding bitcoin at that point, opening up “bitcoin” payments on their platform of billions of people greatly increases demand and therefore their valuation. They’ll then have unparalleled surveillance capabilities and governments will be more than happy to partner with them on that. This is the future that totalitarians could only dream of. Yes, NGU but then freedom-go-down. Pull as many sats as you can off the exchanges. Don’t sell your corn.

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Nostr makes censorship at the network level harder but then it puts pressure to kick censorship into the hardware layer. We need open source low tech hardware signers and more scalable #meshtastic devices.

Two years ago I tipped a waiter with bitcoin (and cash) since he was open to it. A few times since then he’s messaged me about how much that tip has grown in value. For him there was no risk since I paid him cash and the bitcoin was just extra. Now he wants to learn more about bitcoin so he can stack more. In the spirit of that I’m considering teaching a short course around my area in the hopes more people come around to the idea of sound money. If I go through with it the plan will be to charge an optional fee in sats: only pay if you feel you got value and can make an on chain transaction. This first course would potentially focus on: - what is money - history of failed fiat - brief prehistory of bitcoin (a quick summary of “The Genesis Book” - how Bitcoin works (ELI5 version) - the fundamentals of Bitcoin transactions and security (seed phrase management, etc) Anyone here done something similar? Any tips or suggestions? Not giving them financial advice for the record 😅

I tried it so you don’t have to. Frozen #beer is a shitcoin. Interesting idea though! The beer itself isn’t frozen but the head is.

Global M2 has been declining since October. If all these nations are serious about acquiring Bitcoin is it possible they’re draining liquidity to starve their competition (the general population)?

Move those sats folks. If you’re a merchant or small business owner then accept sats like you’d accept cash. If you go out with friends and someone pays the bill then pay them back with your corn. Someone’s birthday or a big holiday? Send them bitcoin. Normalize the flow of sats. View quoted note →

Not your node, not your rules.

Happy Genesis day everyone! Don’t forget to rug the exchanges if you’ve got any IOUs left on there.

And so it begins:

US Treasury says it was hacked by China in 'major incident'

A Chinese state-sponsored hacker broke into the US Treasury Department's systems and accessed some unclassified documents.

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What does it mean for #bitcoin to “succeed”? What metrics can we use to know how successful it is? Most diverse ecosystem? Reserve asset for the most people? Facilitates the most trade? Survives the longest? First currency used on the moon?

Everett’s interpretation of quantum mechanics [1] is a more compelling and in my opinion a framework more faithful to the principles of physics than Copenhagen. The Copenhagen interpretation introduces a wave function collapse which, aside from placing an unnatural emphasis on the observer, also introduces an arrow of time where the Schrödinger equation is symmetric in time. It’s a weird and unintuitive crutch bolted on. Oddly enough, Everett’s interpretation implies the past is as uncertain as the future. At a “fixed moment” there’s a branching where the system continues forward in time as concurrent “worlds” but also the same is true in reverse. Going backwards there were many branches that merged at that point and then branched again. What does that imply for us? On the macroscopic scale we don’t know, but one possibility is the idea of confluence. Basically at the smallest scales of the universe we have these parallel quantum systems but for every branching there’s a corresponding merging eventually and at the larger scales all we are capable of observing are the states that are consistent between each of the parallel systems. 1.

Many-worlds interpretation - Wikipedia

The average block reward and the energy cost to produce that block sets a floor for the price of bitcoin. Bitcoin gives the most accurate insight into the true cost of compute. The biggest input cost for AI is just the cost of compute. Over time we’ll see metrics like hashprice [1] become a good proxy for the cost of training and running a frontier model. 1.

Hashprice

All the Bitcoin network data you need: Bitcoin mining hashprice, Bitcoin price, Bitcoin hashrate, Bitcoin transaction fee volume, and more.

Researchers find a way to boost (microwave) signals by up to 1,000x at room temperature [1]. One day we’ll get that tech into pleb devices like #meshtastic for more robust decentralized telecommunications networks. 1.

UNSW Sites

This purple diamond could one day amplify signals from deep space

UNSW engineers have developed and built a special ‘maser’ system that boosts microwave signals – such as those from deep space – but does n...