*Custodial Lightning effectively reintroduces the logic of financial intermediation under a new technological guise, offering comfort and simplicity while reducing individual agency. Non-custodial Lightning embodies the radical intent of the network: to eliminate intermediaries entirely by substituting verifiable computation for trust* View quoted note →

In non-custodial systems, *The trade-off lies in operational responsibility: users must maintain node uptime, monitor watchtowers to guard against fraudulent channel states, and ensure sufficient liquidity for effective routing.* View quoted note →

*If an LSP declines to open or rebalance channels, the user’s node becomes effectively isolated. Control over liquidity translates into control over usability. The model thus shifts from key custody to liquidity custody—a subtler, but equally consequential, vector of dependency.* View quoted note →

*If a small number of high-capacity custodial nodes can observe or restrict routing, they become functional analogues of settlement banks* View quoted note →

*It would be nice to own some gold when it goes through boom times like 2025 but you have to get used to not always owning the most popular asset each year* Why I Don't Own Any Gold - A Wealth of Common Sense

A Wealth of Common Sense

Why I Don't Own Any Gold - A Wealth of Common Sense

Gold is on fire. The yellow metal is up more than 60% this year. It’s risen nearly 30% in the last 3 months alone. It’s hard to get a n...

Apparently, debt is good.... Government debt is private wealth, so why do people want to get rid of it?

Funding the Future

Government debt is private wealth, so why do people want to get rid of it?

Every pound of so-called “government debt” is a private financial asset. When the government spends, it creates money that becomes your wealth....

*The system keeps telling ordinary people to save harder within a broken framework instead of rethinking money itself*

Stacker News

Max Out Your Pension Savings, Plebs! (FT, Moira O'Neill) \ stacker news ~econ

Alright, here's a pretty standard run-of-the-mill take that's completeeeely insane, borderline immoral. It's a violation of fiduciary duties to you...

*Stop measuring in dollars and start measuring value against other scarce assets* View quoted note →

*One of the greatest tricks the government has ever pulled was keeping the apparent form factor of the currency media the same (coins, bills, etc.) but removing the money from it.* View quoted note →

*The real test of a revolutionary technology isn’t whether it excludes power structures. It’s whether it forces them to play by new rules they didn’t write and can’t rewrite* View quoted note →

A great achievement, Jordan. *We also have to set that example for little ones. They learn courage by watching courage, not by being told to be courageous* View quoted note →

*They have meetings. We have blocks. They have promises. We have proof. One architecture will survive the next century. The other will not.* View quoted note →

*the rules of the game are written by the guys who own the banks and have vested interest in the currency* View quoted note →

*The Psychotic Topology of Home Value This is not a market correction. It is a mass psychotic break with reality, where the metaprograms of human cognition have become the delusional architecture of the market itself. · The Global ↔ Specific Psychosis: The Global mind clings to the axiom (remember, an axiom does not have to be proven, yes): "A home's value never falls."*

Stacker News

Why UK Homeowners Are Delusional About Property Values (FT, Hugo Cox) \ stacker news ~econ

Here's a nice little report on UK property owners. Like in most Western countries — Australia or Canada probably the worst — the majority of th...

*the reason you will eventually grow out of forums is that they are search queries written by other people. LessWrong was summoned into existence by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson writing a sequence of exceptionally powerful search queries (on Overcoming bias), blog posts so strong that the networks they created survived the exodus of the original nodes. This is what online writing is at its limit—the summoning of a new culture. If we squint a little, we could even say that this is how the internet itself came into existence. In 1963, J. C. R. Licklider wrote a memo about an “intergalactic computer network”, and that search query was so powerful it summoned the aliens. We’re all living inside his search query now.*

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.

*you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the responses you garner, you steer your development. You become more agentic.*

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.

*The way the machine seemed to work was: The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others. The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. For my writing to find its way in this netherworld, I needed to have a rough sense of how information flowed down there. The pattern was this: words flowed from the periphery to the centers. This was a surprisingly rapid stream. Then the words cascaded from the center down in a broader but slower stream to the periphery again.*

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.

*who's going to invest the substantial sums required to manufacturing opensource chips at economical scale? National security states won't make it easy even if there were groups with enough resources to do it... a lot of people will fall out of windows or at least find themselves indicted over a parking ticket if they try undermining the ability to track everyone everywhere all the time*

Stacker News

DISCUSS: Why is it so hard to design an open-source smartphone? \ stacker news ~Design

Following SNL #194 conversation around open source phones OS , it seems that every project regarding open source smartphones OS are centered around...

*I didn’t get into bitcoin to store money on other peoples computers* View quoted note →

*Gold's run is a symptom of a dying system. Bitcoin is the cure* View quoted note →