It may be routine for you and obvious. Still, if I am honest, it blows my mind that it is possible today (as compared to 2000), to get a decent barebone with incredibly cheap and colossal RAM and storage and network interfaces and fail-overs, install bitcoind, electrs, cln, lnbits, nutshell, RTL, nextcloud, onlyoffice, jitsi, photo prism, listmonk, WordPress, transmission, ... all for FUCKING free, if (big if) you know how this shit works. I remember paying dozens of thousands of dollars annually for WebEx in the early 0 years. But you know what: back then, people would join just because of the video conferencing tech and tell their loved ones about it at dinner or breakfast (depending on time zones); my product was the add-one ;-) I bought their shares before Cisco acquired them, waaaay before Eric Yuan started Zoom. Here we are 25 years later, and FOSS is king. Love it.

I am sympathetic to DOGE's efforts, not because I like disruption and drama but because I like transparency, rational thinking, and good decision-making. Some DOGE critiques ( even seem to reinforce its necessity. But I also support EFF and its efforts, and now EFF clashes with DOGE (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/eff-sues-doge-and-office-personnel-management-halt-ransacking-federal-data). Of course, one should never have collected these giant data pools in the first place. What do you think about this?

Much work has gone into planning and evaluating an upgrade to my computing infrastructure, and purchasing these is also quite costly. Mind you, I only have a few people using any of my services (lnbits instance, cashu mint). This initiative, which is fueled mainly by idealism, aims to contribute to the world I want to see, which includes decentralized, permissionless, and private payments. The work is much fun, and I get a sense of giving back to the community, the people who built all the cool tools I am deploying, and Satoshi.

GM 🌥️ This week, a friend asked me why we are confident there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoins. In response, I wrote this (in German):

Warum gibt es nur 21 Millionen Bitcoin? – Bitcoin Weesen

It was a profoundly insightful conversation (yes, four hours) between Marc Andreessen and Lex Fridman. I just picked out one thought: In the context of "having just four sinks of high school immigration (US, Canada, UK, Australia), Marc asks what is going to happen to all other countries that get brain-drained. As talent is rare and limited, what will a country do if all the smart and young kids have left? And why does society at large classify colocalization and material resource extraction (of the past) as evil while ignoring or applauding the extraction of human capital? For me, the four hours of listening were well spent.

I have been early at least twice in my life: first, when I created the software Imaris in 1990 and co-founded Bitplane in 1992, and second, when I (finally) embraced Bitcoin in 2014. In hindsight, being early is a lot of fun. You are in the company of adventurers who are in it to build, and there are zero administrative or regulatory hurdles. The risks and volatility that came with it did not bother me much (most of the time); on the contrary, it felt alive every time. If you think you are the type, give being early a chance.

Both AO and EO takes a lot of news coverage lately.

In our circles here on Nostr, saying that you will be rich by staying humble and stacking sats is not exactly breaking news. You know it works (and you'll be wealthy in 10 years) or at least you believe it works because you know people who you trust believe in it. If I go out of Nostr to the people who surround me, I see a behaviour that seems to say "it's not for me". People find comfort in having missed the boat. Because bonding it comes with the responsibilities for learning about and buying Bitcoin. My message to these people: be honest with yourself. Admit that you don't want to be weathly, after all (not judging). Or else get going; most of Nostr is here to help.

So much good stuff is happening for Bitcoin and the people who believe in it, the people who built it, and the people who are building it. It's incredible. This is very inspiring and a fantastic start to the year.

Downloaded the latest @blockstream green wallet (2.0.17) to a MacBook Pro (Ventura 13.7.2) from blockstream.green. The software crashed immediately upon startup (I tried it on two different laptops). Then, I resorted to the previous version (2.0.16), which worked as expected. I hope that no newcoiners will experience the same.

My goal for Q1 is to ramp up my computing setup: put redundant components in place for instant fail-over switching, and create more capacity for Bitcoin, lightning, cashu, and nostr. Everything without asking for permission and the certainty that Bitcoin will not fail should I screw up any of the config or wiring. The power of de-centralization goes goes far for all of us.

"Why This Hope Matters: This open-minded perspective is not just comforting—it fuels curiosity and a desire to explore the unknown. The future of life and intelligence in the universe might be far more extraordinary than we can currently imagine." - ChatGPT

intelligent people are sometimes hard to understand because for them, everything that is easy to understand seems obvious and thus not worth mentioning - leaving humorous or higher-order observations; as can been seen here on nostr 🐬

"What this actually means is that no one is really in charge of bazaar-style FOSS projects. A project’s leader cannot steer the project in an unpopular direction without losing the developers he so crucially needs. Under the bazaar model, software is in a very real way controlled by its body of contributors, each with their own personal reason to be involved" [The Genesis Book by @Aaron van Wirdum] - superior decision making baked into Bitcoin

I find it encouraging how profoundly Bitcoin and the findings of the Austrian school of economics have penetrated our society. Statements that, a couple of years ago, were to be found only in Bitcoin circles are now printed in established newspapers and propagated by politicians. I just asked ChatGPT whether it is exaggerated to compare modern states and central banks to drug addicts; it will mainly accept the comparison as sound (with the caveat that some debt-financed state interventions are productive while the effects of drugs never are). This is what winning looks like: it is slow, subtle, but unstoppable.