It's fun to think about all the time, energy, and money they spent fighting the inevitable all these years.

TikTok - Make Your Day

What separates Nostr from other social media platforms isn’t that it’s decentralized or censorship-resistant, it’s that everyone is really nice on here.

Heading to the mempool.

Bitcoin is the first currency made by consensus instead of commandment.

We’re trying not to cross-post content between Nostr and Twitter, but since the Nostr community is 3,000,000% more likely to understand what’s going on in our quarterly updates, we’re giving ourselves a cheat day:

Quarterly Update Q4 2023 · Spiral

This quarterly update is all about breaking records. Not only is it the latest update we’ve ever published, it also contains the most words and m...

These bitcoin mining and security myth-dispelling children's books never took off when we originally posted them on Twitter. We think they’ll do better here since, even at its peak, Twitter never had Nostr’s fortitude and commitment to the cause.

Bitcoin Mining · The Spiral Book of Bitcoin Mythology

The Spiral Book of Bitcoin Mythology

We have a document that’s as old as our grant program. It has rough and final announcement copy for every bitcoin grant we’ve given since the first. As of today, it is 101 pages long. Our grant program is a novella long.

You don’t hear enough about how profoundly hopeful the bitcoin community is. It is tech’s most hopeful sector and the only one that can use the “we want to make the world a better place” cliche without even a trace of cynicism.

A little known secret of bitcoiners is that although they want bitcoin to conquer fiat, what they really want is to spend four days wandering around a major city with a giant, anthropomorphic bitcoin:

Cross-posting here so no one misses the only thing in a while worth missing about Twitter.

Grant renewal. @bitcoin_design community pillar @mogashninaidoo is a UX researcher, believer in open source/working in public, and blogger at

Mogashni’s Substack | Substack

Spiral grantee and UX Research evangelist working in public. Click to read Mogashni’s Substack, a Substack publication. Launched 3 years ago.

Her plan for grant #2 is to “go into the ecosystem” and test the UX Research Toolkit she built with grant #1.

The problem with publishing a popular quarterly blog post is that people will expect you to keep publishing it. So here it is, back and longer than ever, with more links than ever, detailing every good and bad thing that we’re involved with:

Quarterly Update Q3 2023 · Spiral

This quarter’s newsletter was delayed by a number of factors, one of which was last seen wandering the streets of New York between July 14–17. ...

It’s hard to explain why stacking even pennies worth of sats is so satisfying, yet if I lose an equivalent amount of change in the couch, it’s gone forever. I’m never going after it.

To date, we’ve issued 70+ grants worth $7M+ to 40 grantees and 10 projects across 20+ countries. A dozen now work full-time bitcoin jobs. Rather than fire off statistics, we gave current and former grantees a chance to talk FOSS bitcoin in their own words: In case you don’t have 4 minutes (come on, you’re on Twitter), the takeaway is this: Every org that benefits from the work of FOSS devs and designers should be supporting them. This way, devs, and designers get paid to do what they love, bitcoin gets better, and everyone wins. OKCoin, HRF, OpenSats, Bitfinex, Strike, Coinbase, Kraken, Chaincode Labs, mitDCI, Brink, the btrustteam, and others are with us. Don’t have the resources to run a grant program? Donate to orgs like Brink or let employees take sabbaticals to work on FOSS. We are always accepting grant applications. If you have an ambitious idea for how to improve bitcoin, email us at grants@spiral.xyz. It worked for this testimonial video’s stars: thunderbiscuit, Daniela Brozzoni, John Cantrell, Justin Moon, Steve Myers, Stephen DeLorme.

We're building an R&D team of bitcoin wizards to improve security, decentralization, privacy, and scaling across all layers of bitcoin. Wizards will identify and drive projects forward in collaboration with the Spiral team and the greater bitcoin development community. Hypothetical projects that wizards might take on include those pertaining to novel cryptography, developing existing protocol proposals, creating new protocol proposals, etc. Learn more here:

Spiral is Hiring Bitcoin Wizards · Spiral

Spiral is hiring bitcoin “wizards,” though we will settle for bitcoin mages, sorcerers and sorceresses, witches, warlocks, and druids.

Steve’s gotten really good at podcasts, especially if you compare his appearances to what they were like two years ago. We’re all really proud of him. ☺️ Here he is on the brand new Bitcoin Builders podcast with Nathaniel Whittemore:

The good news is that we’re finally on Nostr. The bad news is that half our engineering team has been trampled by heavy, high-speed, flightless birds.