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One thing about the "reserve" kerfuffle. What they've announced so far, is no "reserve". It's a "stockpile". A reserve in the sense we are all discussing, and Trump willingly (and probably misleadingly) implied all along, is 1. held by the monetary authority, 2. specifically used to back up currency value by balancing external payments A stockpile is a quantity of whatever stuff kept in stock, to be deployed in case of a shortage or "market disruption". That is, a market price manipulation mechanism. I think that fits very precisely the whole "American crypto" discourse, and does not preclude the addition of BTC to the actual reserve. It's just probably that he can't do it by executive order. I've posted many times about the "Prudential treatment of cryptoasset exposures" by the Bank for International Settlements". That will be the mechanism, but it's up to the Fed, by definition. https://www.bis.org/bcbs/publ/d545.htm

So nostr:nprofile1qqsf80gvdu7vhtj88z9srtrvuzevqyc3fh9yczxkufcj6nlhzsz68scpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgqg0waehxw309aek7mr0vdhjumnvmxmjyh now supports Silent Payment addresses. I'm reading this in the v2.4.0 What's new notes, so I get the concept. But could somebody technical ELI5 this for me? Does this mean not having to rotate addresses anymore?

XRP is how the US does a CBDC, while saying there is no CBDC. I honestly don't fully understand what is so surprising about it, because it's been clear from the very beginning that was the product Ripple was selling. Yes, the Democrats went after it because they lean Statist, while MAGA and the Republicans lean Corporatist. As if that made any difference. It's all part of the same spectrum, just different ratios of the two ingredients. That's the trick with which they fool you all the time.

I swear... nostr:nevent1qqsgtn7dnnc3uzpug87zj6eqsf0v04d9tqq85w6wysx35jnew5258fc7qt4sn

You know when you pay for something on the base layer, and you're setting your fee while checking on mempool dot spast, I mean space, and you go like whatchumean 10 sat/vB mofucker? OK I'm just gonna have to suck it up, set it to 6 and low-pri it... Click send on the wallet, go back to mempool dot and I swear sometimes I wanna kill Satoshi.

I think the "donate to Ross" era is now over. Didn't he recover at least several thousand BTC? nostr:nevent1qqszkp93v8gf6tskg6evne5nmyspd7lc6tdty6gxqthq43a2wwtgygggcaq8d

It's not the first time that I take a shot at the conservatives, and as I've said many many times, I am old enough to remember the 80's and 90's and the real threat that the unhinged religious right was for the US and for the world. As a libertarian I opposed them back then, and when they lost institutional power to their left-wing socialist mirror image (often they're their literal biological successors, which explains a lot about the woke cult and their temperament), I opposed and continue to oppose the hordes of blue haired demifaggot Pol Pots. There seems to be a new swing, now back rightwards -- yes, I have publicly said that I think Trump and MAGA have done a great service to the US and the world by dismantling the GOP leg of the neocon movement. But I will never support the jingoistic theocratic rightwing socialists either, and I will criticize them every step along the way. Especially if MAGA remains in power long enough to purge the institutions of the woke parasites, and the remaining Democrat leg of the neocon movement, and relegates them both to irrelevance. The enemy of libertarians is always whoever holds the power of the State -- including the Corporate pillar of it. I have gladly supported MAGA because it was (hopefully will continue to be) useful and a net positive -- for now. We must stay vigilant though. nostr:nevent1qqsrvhp058e77cvmc9weqskkswel4ns62ru9gs92h9mmnrjxv7rvhzcl5ftkz

I'm watching some rather interesting reactions from "MAGA" and conservative people online about the specific examples that the Spanish Dear Leader gave in his apology of totalitarianism... Not unexpected, but interesting all the same. See, Sánchez said that if you "don't allow people to walk on the street masked [in Spain that's indeed illegal -- except apparently if you're a muslim woman -- probably in the US it's not in any case?], or drive a car without a number plate, or send a parcel without showing your id [again, illegal here. Is it in the US too?], or buy a hunting gun without giving your name", then it follows that you can't "allow people to roam on social media" anonymously spreading "hate speech and misinformation" and the Black Plague. What's interesting about these reactions I'm seeing by American conservatives is the strong cognitive dissonance when they say that "somehow" all those examples are OK, but tweeting is different. The more advanced ones are trying to come up with "the First Amendment" as proof that speech is different, but didn't we all agree that the US Constitution is not a compilation of rights, which a natural and inalienable ("God-given" for those who are into that type of rhetoric), but limitations on the government? And in any case, isn't the right to freely trade and to freely associate, and to freely travel (within the national territory) equivalent to and as important as freedom of speech? So why is it justified to mandate a number plate on your car and to show your ID to send parcel, but not to tweet? This is of course a very tall pile of steaming shit of an attempt to justify a purely partisan position. There is nothing to it, and is internally contradictory. It falls apart. But because they are *conservative*, they actually try to hold it together with rationalizations, because in fact they agree with it. Just when it's not "the bad guys" doing it, and it's them. Libertarians, as usual, don't have to bend over backwards to palliate any cognitive dissonance, because we don't agree with *any* type of mandated government identification or infringement on our natural rights. I don't want number plates on cars, and I don't want to show an ID when I'm sending a parcel. And I surely don't want the government to be able to link my ID to my notes or tweets, regardless of whether they're "good" or "bad". nostr:nevent1qqswng9xrdwradjh4huu3403vlhe94ea77uxwfj5j6tmr5jj48xnqpgre5qlu

To elaborate just a bit on this, the article quoted in the video I was referring to... says that we're in a nation-state race for AI, as evidenced by Trump's "Stargate project". I say OK, that may be their intention, but it just sounds silly to me. Because you can have your superintelligent AI with its "billions of scientists" (hopefully contained in a nuclear silo ten miles underground with no access to the world) producing all these massive theoretical breakthroughs in secret... OK. You will still need to somehow go out to the physical world and put some WORK to it. And the other nation-states will absolutely and definitely be WATCHING and their spies will eventually figure out what you're trying to do. Or at least that you're all of a sudden mining for whatever ore in buttfuck nowhere, and will immediately do the same somewhere else. It just sounds very silly to me, this hope/fear that whoever unleashes it will overnight become the Absolute Overlord of the world and will be able to maintain total secrecy and information asymmetry for a sufficiently long time. nostr:nevent1qqsrz8hv0ak2usqmn6m85f40e7vs02klaplk76ed6v9pl9da9se68ss4nvx3l

I'm watching a video in which the narrator is going through an article that argues that Western states "must" be the ones to develop general AI, as opposed to China, for example. The author says that broad AI will supply whatever nation that develops it with "billions of scientists", so scientific and technological development, specifically military technology, would burn through decades of human work in years or less. The culmination of this would be AGI giving birth to hyperintelligence . I remain skeptical. It's not only the infrastructure that such levels of output require -- Stargate project or not. It's the infrastructure that *materializing* those hypothetical scientific breakthroughs require. The AGI may very well come up with the whole tech tree required to produce a warp drive (as I said earlier, I'm stuck watching Star Trek these days). But then we have to make all those things required to produce it. New materials, new mining rigs to extract them, new plants to process them and assemble them, and so on and so forth. And what about the testing? Will we just get rid of testing? Will we accept AI models and simulations ("projections", they'll call them) instead? I just don't see it.

"Pure" in the sense of "maximum". "A life lived to the max" would be a long but accurate translation. I remember when this first became a meme here and people kept making up all these silly New Wave interpretations of the adjective as saintly and puritanical. So fucking annoying. In the correct cultural context I would even say it's rather the opposite, an appellation to a very physical and sensual joy. nostr:nevent1qqsytv57406aqc0zq4sg9r23t8s3k0d3efs36wg6ynutzcj2szgt0xcduxcqd

Just think about this case. I have zero idea of the details about this person. Let's assume he is "rich". Let's say, he's got assets worth 50 million euros. Let's say the kidnappers demanded 10,000 BTC from him. 10 million. How much does the State demand from him *every day and every year*? What happens to him if he refuses to pay? What happens to his assets? As I said, do not fall for the propaganda. The GIGN did not "rescue" him. They retrieved property, like the cattle slave masters in the cotton farms would retrieve a slave taken by another slave master, by force if necessary. nostr:nevent1qqsfl8lfvs0d7wu6rz6e8ht9z0atpuz4gmthh3ktatzjqul072ytkgs6djsdl