anybody wanna fill me in on if this whole “panic in DC”/Tucker/Jan6 debacle is as hilarious as it seems?
as repeatedly mentioned, I’m trying to stay off twitter but I’m basically wondering if I can work it all out just by imagining the stupidest possible explanation 😂
over longer and longer periods, the most scandalous shrinkflation will be in bitcoin.
you'll always be able to buy some for a set amount of $. you'll just get less and less 😉
hot take: I get that custodial lightning is not remotely decentralized, sovereign, trustless, etc. - all that good shit …
… but is nobody else outrageously excited by how much of an improvement over fiat it is? not just in its own right but even explicitly in terms of decentralisation, sovereignty, and trustlessness?
it strikes me as a key vector of bitcoin driving jurisdictional arbitrage, for one. say some authoritarian regime cracks down on bitcoin (whatever that ends up meaning in practice, doesn’t really matter) and makes it politically risky to run a node, or manage liquidity, or be seen as “transmitting money”, or whatever. if there is a trustworthy custodial lightning provider *literally anywhere in the world* you can anonymously spin up the ability to receive payments in seconds. “anonymously” and “in seconds” are both groundbreaking advances if you have any familiarity whatsoever with fiat banking and payment rails.
if you think about it, you actually can’t get this with “real” lightning either. it’s not instant (to set up) and you need to know people who presumably trust you to some small extent to get to the point of workable liquidity and stay there (perhaps under-discussed, but if channel partners “don’t trust you”, they will close or never open, and you can’t use lightning at all. WhO’s TrUsTlEsS nOw HuH?!?)
so yes, this requires trust, but like, fuck me, so does everything in real life 😂 - being overly negative on this strikes me as a kind of core fallacy of appreciating open and decentralized systems: that it’s a spectrum, not a binary. how open and decentralized the foundation is represents the maximum openness and decentralisation of anything built on top, *not the minimum*!
moving away from completely closed and centralised does not necessitate the opposite, it opens up an entire range of new possibilities, all of which come with tradeoffs. but tradeoffs are relative to circumstances in real life, and in real life, selective trust is very much a thing because We LiVe In A sOcIeTy 🤪 - talking about tradeoffs in absolute terms as if the decision to accept them can be made entirely devoid of context is highly regarded. and this isn’t even to get into the rather obvious line of argument that if you want people to ever get to the extreme, having a spectrum to gradually move along is far more appealing than requiring them to jump in at the deep end. i.e. it’s also amazing for adoption.
in conclusion, don’t be highly regarded. support adoption. agree with my hot take. gm, pv 🤙
Alex Gutentag is a treasure and the good people of nostr need to know about her!
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/collapse-covid-truth-regimewhat do people on nostr (and hence who presumably enjoy it and are getting value from it) make of the whole DID/web standards/key rolling critique?
it seems to have become oddly partisan wherever you look so I’m keen to crowdsource some thoughts that may well be passionate but are at least also sober and disinterested …
In case anybody outside the UK is unaware of this (which you almost certainly are, which is kind of the point) a journalist named Isabel Oakeshott signed an NDA with with Matt Hunt, who was the UK Health Security during early covid hysteria, to help him write a book, then breached the NDA and leaked ~100k WhatsApp messages to the press. The messages show - entirely unsurprisingly - that the UK government didn’t have a fucking clue what it was doing, then amidst all the lying and smearing to justify lockdowns, started lying and smearing to cover it all up as well.
Not that this in itself should be news to anybody, but two things stand out: i) there’s now undeniable proof in the public record of everything that has been a “conspiracy theory” for 3 years, and ii) the mainstream media is flat out embarrassing itself in a hilariously tone deaf way by giving precisely zero shits about the actual story and pretending that the “news” here is the breach of the NDA.
Absolutely nobody is buying it. It’s all very cathartic. Nature is healing ☺️
But seriously, for a less naive take consider that this all feeds into the increasingly undeniable realisation that state control of information dissemination was key to the catastrophe. The Muskificiation of twitter may be a very slight reprieve - and one that makes the regime shit itself much more than it really ought to because it has no idea how anything actually works - but if they understood nostr even a little the level of self-shitting would be off the charts 🙏
guys I’m honestly so sad I didn’t set up a shitcoin short hedge fund.
I couldda done it you know. I’d literally be a bajillionaire right now 😢
“paper gold is technological progress. paper bitcoin is technological regress.”
this meme has been rattling around in my head for a while now but I don’t know who to credit for it - does anybody know?
gm 🤙
what books about pre-industrial revolution finance and political economy are you reading today to try to understand what a hyperbitcoinized world will look like?
me: [explains zaps]
mrs allen: “oh wow, how much money you got? can I get mango ice cream?”