Oklahoma crypto law: A bill protecting your ‘fundamental #Bitcoin rights’ has been SIGNED INTO LAW in the state of Oklahoma. Oklahoma will now defend your: ✅ Right to self-custody ✅ Right to spend #Bitcoin and digital assets ✅ Right to mine #Bitcoin ✅ Right to run a node It will also: ✅ Ban additional taxes when #Bitcoin and digital assets are used as a form of payment ✅ Protect the ability to mine #Bitcoin at home ✅ Eliminate the need for #Bitcoin mining and digital asset validators to obtain a money transmitter license

Successful political movements win by getting their demands included by ALL parties. There are 50M+ #Bitcoin users in the USA. They should have enough clout to get ALL political parties to court them and compete for their vote. So far Kennedy and Ramaswamy have been most vocal pro-Bitcoin. Trump has made some vague "pro-crypto" statements. Biden has been actively anti. To avoid empty promises the Bitcoin voting block should demand clear, in writing promises to: 1. Defend Bitcoin individual custody. 2. Defend free speech including for Bitcoin transactions. 3. Fight taxes on Bitcoin. 4. Defend freedom to transact in Bitcoin. 5. Defend privacy. Make a "Bitcoin pledge" including these 5 demands. Ask all candidates to publicly endorse it in writing. Shame the ones that don't. Make sure that every bitcoiner knows which candidates are defending their rights and who is not.

Banco Santander hacked. All client data leaked. This is why KYC sucks. All DBs will be hacked. All personal data will leak. Centralised databases are honeypots.

For anyone interested in the history of money, the Uluburun shipwreck provides fascinating data. It's dated to 14th century BC. First coins are from Lydia in 7th Century BC. So this trade ship predates coinage by 7 centuries! Its cargo provides an incredible wealth of information about bronze age mediterranean trade. It might even help answer questions about the origins of money... the eternal debate between mengerian "market origin" and chartalist "fiat origin".

🟢🟢🟢Lovely sunny mempool day. ☀️☀️☀️

Does Nostr work in China? Does Nostr work in Cuba? Does Nostr work in Venezuela? Does Nostr work in Afghanistan? I want to test that Nostr is as censorship resistant as we want it to be. I will zap ⚡ anyone replying from a high censorship country.

Gold, Guns and Ideas. You have an idea of how the world is wrong and how to make it better. You have an objective to reach or at least a direction that you want to move in. How do you go about making that change a reality? 1. IDEAS - information moves the world. If all media is controlled by status quo preserving forces, how can you fight against that? Simple: create your own media to first gather all like minded people and then educate others. 2. GOLD- money moves the world - you will need resources for all other steps. Political campaigning, legal action... everything needs funding. 3. GUNS - like it or not, you will need force for self defense. Even peaceful activists need to raise the cost of physical attack or intimidation. If your voice can be silenced through violence, you will get nowhere. Once you have secured these three basic resources you can move on to action. Measure your forces and examine the most productive strategy for incremental gains. 4. Political action - a lot can be achieved through political pressure in democratic countries by an organised minority. Just a few elected representatives can multiply your voice and negotiate advances. Even the threat of backing a different party (when made by a large enough number) can get existing parties to include your demands in their program. 5. Legal action - if there are laws on the books that you can use to defend and advance your ideas... use them! It's expensive but precedent is a strong influence. If the status quo has contradictory laws... make them fight! 6. Disobedience - raise the cost of enforcement for unjust measures. Make sure to plan and measure so that risk incurred is lower than cost created. 7. Economic action - boycott, lobbying and selective spending are very powerful. Most businesses don't have strong ideology and will happily bend to a minority's wishes as long as they have nothing to lose. Organised shareholder pressure is particularly effective. 8. Make noise - the squeaky axle gets the grease. You can be ignored if you don't focus on maximising visibility. If your actions are visible enough they will drive the news cycle and incite discussion of your ideas.

The Great Crypto Vs Gold Debate https://rumble.com/v4t3ho5-the-great-crypto-vs-gold-debate.html

FREE SPEECH is the exception. It is always under attack. This is why Nostr matters.

It's no coincidence that the censored but not surveiled space is empty. You need surveillance to be able to implement censorship.

Corrected. SimpleX is FOSS.

GitHub

SimpleX Chat

SimpleX - the first chat platform that is 100% private by design - it has no access to your connection graph! - SimpleX Chat

Please let me know if I left anything important out!

Many social media platforms were created promising free speech. Many were created in reaction to censorship. All failed. Nostr will succeed where so many others have failed. But let's look at some of the failures and why they failed. Many popular platforms never even tried. They directly enforce govt censorship or surveillance or both. Including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Wechat... Others were created explicitly to fight censorship and soon fell into it themselves for partisan reasons: Gab, Parler, Truth... Some started relatively free but came increasingly under pressure from advertisers, govts and others to "moderate" and censor: Twitter, Reddit... Their investors, advertisers and legal counsel told the company that there was no other choice. Even Twitter/X post-Elon censors massively outside the US in accordance with local laws. The founder of Telegram had to flee Russia and the US to keep a decent amount of free speech, but that will not last long as there is a clear central point of pressure. A few saw the problem and tried to build a network that was more decentralised: Mastodon, BlueSky, SSB... it's too soon to tell, but others have pointed out technical flaws. Nostr has the best chance of success and survival. It's FOSS. It's decentralised. It's a protocol, not a platform.

People yearn for the tribe. All our instincts pull us to a small, high trust, homogeneous groups where reputation matters. High civilisation requires more complex institutions that scale beyond these reputation and trust based relationships. Authoritarians think that we can scale identity and reputation via facial recognition, social credit score and other automated impersonal replacements for trust. Their way leads to horrifying dystopia. There is a better way. The Bitcoin way. A way to reduce the need for trust through openness, clear universal rules and equal access. Replace identity and reputation with institutions that make it difficult and costly to do evil. Instead of universal surveillance and authoritarian control to keep people in check, which are inevitably abused by those in control of the system, decentralisation and trust minimised relations allow for massive scale societal interaction with freedom and low risk of deceit or abuse.

JUST ONE ANT...

ACT! DO SOMETHING! No matter how small or insignificant your action, when many act together it can move mountains. EVERY TIME THEY ATTACK BITCOIN --> SPEND 10 MINUTES ON PRODUCTIVE ACTION TO: 1. Improve your privacy 2. Protect your property 3. Defy their censorship

@Phoenix Wallet May 3rd

Recap 24 hrs: 1. Samourai devs arrested on AML 2. FBI warning about self custody, non-KYC 3. SEC letter to Consensys re: Metamask