I'm starting to think that orange pilling big name Muslims and institutions is probably not the way forward. I used to always get excited at the opportunity to orange pill a sheikh or community leader, but after many attempts at this, it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Like, they appear to "get" the general idea of what we're trying to say about Bitcoin, but it doesn't interest them enough to take any action, or even read a single book or listen to a podcast about it. I'm always left disheartened, like I've just wasted my time. And I've noticed that a lot of other Muslim Bitcoiners still haven't arrived at this realization, and they keep trying to have audiences with these big name Muslims, and it becomes increasingly hard for me to get excited about these opportunities anymore. I'd much rather build a network of "no name" Muslim Bitcoiners here on Nostr, as a base to work from. The interactions I have here are a lot more meaningful, and way more fun, than trying to do a 5 minute sales pitch to Sami Hamdi or Yasir Qadhi.

Lately I’ve been getting an annoying number of messages about some new altcoin that apparently matters because it's private or whatever. Start with the only question that matters. What makes this coin special compared to Bitcoin? I do not care about some sales pitch. Let us grant the best possible case and let us assume it has stronger privacy features than Bitcoin. Okay. So now what? Congratulations, we’ve just discovered the 1,374th altcoin that claims superior privacy. Now tell me why would anyone hold it for longer than the thirty seconds necessary to complete their supposedly super secret transaction? If all it does is move value privately, then it’s not money, it’s a disposable utility token! It’s a tool you use and immediately discard. And if there’s no rational reason to hold it, then there’s no path to monetization, no monetary premium, no long-term demand curve, and therefore no price floor. Which means the thing collapses into irrelevance the moment the hype cycle ends just like every other altcoin. We have not even mentioned the tradeoffs yet. You want more privacy? Great. What did it sacrifice to get there? Liquidity? Decentralization? Immutability? Audit ability? Network effects? Settlement assurance? Show me the altcoin that can move a billion dollars with the same finality, security, and global liquidity as Bitcoin. There isn’t one. And before you say “I’ll never move a billion dollars”, congrats on outing yourself as someone who has no concept of what sound money is or why it matters. You out yourself as someone who literally cannot construct an if-else statement and can't think what it would be like if you didn't have breakfast this morning. Bitcoin does not price itself around your personal consumer lifestyle (but my groceries!), it prices itself around global scale and institutional grade settlement, absolute assurance + irreversible finality. Bitcoin is competing with central banks and global settlement networks (hundreds of trillions of $) and not your stupid privacy gimmick (which is not even private in practice) Until you understand that, you’ll keep falling for shiny distractions that treat money like a toy rather than the base layer of civilization. Bitcoin or nothing.

There are many out there... Probably 😏 View quoted note →

"No more heroes Muslim Bitcoiner, your time has come"

Easily the best essay you can send a normie that wants to learn about Bitcoin. Such a great and gentle introduction. View quoted note →

@allen and Harris Irfan have published their essay: Bitcoin, Fiat, and Islamic Finance: An Economic, Ethical, and Historical Analysis of Sound Money in the Context of Islamic Teachings Read the essay here:

Axiom

Bitcoin, Fiat, and Islamic Finance — Axiom

Haven't read it all yet but this is shaping up to be canonical text of the overlap of Bitcoin and Islamic Finance.

We could definitely expect to see more Muslim governments want to implement their own version of the great firewall:

Proton VPN

China exports Great Firewall surveillance systems | Proton VPN

China is selling mass surveillance systems based on Great Firewall tech to authoritarian regimes to further its geopolitical goals.

As I've said, being cypherpunk is wajib. We have no other choice.

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Allah said: Whoever shows hostility to a friend of Mine, I have declared war upon him. My servant does not grow closer to Me with anything more beloved to Me than the duties I have imposed upon him. My servant continues to grow closer to Me with extra good works until I love him. When I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes, and his foot with which he walks. Were he to ask something from Me, I would surely give it to him. Were he to ask Me for refuge, I would surely grant it to him. I do not hesitate to do anything as I hesitate to take the soul of the believer, for he hates death, and I hate to displease him.” Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6502 View quoted note →

Jummah Mubarak 🕌

Bitcoin payment infrastructure is likely to see its most widespread use in Africa because that's where the demand is highest. There's an actual need for it. View quoted note →

Blackrock can tokenize deez nuts

It gets tiring hearing people go on about the end of labor because of AI or the end of prosperity because falling prices. It's quite curious that extremely intelligent people make these claims. They've essentially made no effort, or for whatever reason, abandoned any semblance of first principles thinking when it comes to economics. They like talk as if society were this machine with levers labeled “AI" or “rates” or “spending” or whatever. But understand that at the base of these phenomena is acting humans coordinating scarce means across time. What this means is that, no, intelligence on tap does not magically abolish scarcity or labor. It reshapes margins and reprices tasks. And no, cheaper goods don’t implode economies. They tell entrepreneurs where capital actually belongs after years of fake signals. Understand that, interest (defined here as the ratio in the mutual valuation of present goods against future goods) is rooted in time preference. This cannot be circumvented through central bank controls. Money is a tool for calculation. It does not measure value or price, and it is not a thermostat to play with to change “aggregate demand”. Once you stop reifying aggregates and return to the axioms rooted in concepts like action, like scarcity, like time, you see that the supposed paradoxes evaporate. Aggregates do not act, people do. That’s where your thinking must start.

Got another brother from X. Zap him!! View quoted note →

Good night

Great thread on Hallaq. Muslim Bitcoiners would even take this a step further and assert that its about money, as technics is downstream of incentives and incentives are downstream of money. For sure, Bitcoin won't magically "Islamize" the state, but we have reason to believe that it could, in theory, shrink the state and even re price violence and bureaucracy, which would reopen the design space for an actual Islamicate order, especially in cyber.

"Today is truly the day that we must take action, no matter how small, not just to fix and reverse the results of these fiat, usury, predatory banking and centralised system, but to sow the truth of sound money and self-sovereignty to our children and their children." View article →

Insane to think that this post was made on reddit on r/Islam 11 years ago: "if our goal is just to avoid all the usury associated with fiat money when it is created, there might be a solution. I have recently been looking into bitcoin - a global digital decentralized p2p currency... it does have the advantage of not being associated with usury/riba when bitcoins are created. Bitcoin is a currency that is not based on riba like fiat currencies."

😂 We got Bitcoin Magazine sharing this news like it has anything to do with Bitcoin View quoted note →

Pretty soon there's gonna be more nostr clients than there are shitcoins

Notice the change in language They're pivoting from "digital assets" to "virtual assets", but it's all the same high-modernist surveillance garbage. It's never about empowering the Muslim individual with anti-Riba money.