Jummah mubarak! My reflections on the recent London Muslim Bitcoin Summit. What are we actually building? And where do we go from here? View article →

Sounds corny I know, but, especially recently, I've been a lot more afraid of success than failure.

"What aIl bodies without organs have in common is intensity. Intensities can only form a continuum, unlike extensities, which can only form discrete points. If one's ontology begins with discrete objects, then one is very likely to end up with a discontinuous ontology and privilege stasis over change. If, on the other hand, one begins with intensities, the ontology flattens, becomes continuous. Here the new is possible. Here creation is possible. Here becoming is not subordinated to being."

Many will criticize HSBC as a failed attempt at IF. Few will criticize IF industry itself. Barely anyone will question the abstract machine of fiat money that organizes these institutions/capital that continually reproduces the very relations IF supposedly exists to escape

Man. What a summit! It was crazy seeing Simon in person. What a presentation he did! Also got to meet Harris Irfan in person finally! And I also go to meet Tarek El-Diwany in person, even though I only got to talk to him for like 3 minutes. It was funny, when I was talking to to him, I thanked him for writing his book, and I looked at him and said, you know Tarek, look around you, your book helped spark the Muslim bitcoin summit! You helped start this! He was quite surprised by that. Of course, I gave him a copy of my book. npub1473kymvazn0mpnptcxeqwsajjp375wul9fjuh8jxt8magnkacmpqzsg6c5 and npub1rn0dyrykzlyd3wslc5zkn6wytu9nja3jczrk3zr5dx69x2grnups4c7xpe both did really well. I like that they both brought a more level headed approach to looking at Bitcoin, especially in relation to sovereignty and nation states. It's always so overwhelming seeing all of the energy with these summits, especially this one. The folks that attended were so eager to talk to us and learn more. There were even non Muslims that were there that really enjoyed it and loved the energy. The workshops were great too. Only @MuaawiyahTucker could make elliptical curve mathematics sound interesting. I'm surprised he was able to keep the audience so engaged! I also go to show off npub175nul9cvufswwsnpy99lvyhg7ad9nkccxhkhusznxfkr7e0zxthql9g6w0 's noornote app. So many folks in the audience were really impressed by the app, and liked his approach of building outside of the architecture of LSM. Folks were also fascinated by how I can just request features on an app by publicly talking to the developer, and zapping them for their work. They could tell that something was there, a feedback loop that we need to be tapping into more. I was also pleasantly surprised by how many in the audience were already running Graphene OS. Running nostr just made sense to them. Anyway. I'm tired now. Need sleep. I'll have more thoughts to share InshaAllah.

At the @Muslim Bitcoin Summit , we need to be asking what might happen as @BitcoinMajlis stops thinking like an organization and becomes more of an assemblage for producing sovereign Muslims where sats, nodes, relays, FOSS, memes, summits, shared praxis recursively generate more capability, wealth, digital asabiyyah, new lines of flight. How do we make this thing proliferate sideways (rather than upwards), fork itself, go viral and deterritorialize from fiat institutions without eventually becoming another useless NGO shaped corpse chasing donors and legitimacy from old world? And if this actually works... if Muslim Bitcoiners become wealthy, technically capable and culturally infectious enough to start generating new businesses, waqf, infrastructure, institutions, etc., how do we survive that success without being reterritorialized back into the system we were trying to escape? Been on my mind a lot lately.

- get Esim before traveling to another country - lands in country - install esim - doesn't work Every single time man

STAKE YOUR SOUL View quoted note →

And now we wait 😁 Hopefully he responds inshaAllah, I want to force this conversation with the Muslim tech space View quoted note →

Yesterday after Jumu’ah prayer, an old gentleman stood up to talk to us. He was nearly 80, a white revert, and he said a few words about his conversion story, about Islam being a religion of peace, and about his organization, Muslim Voices for Peace or something like that, can’t remember the exact name. He talked about how they were spreading dawah in over 100 countries, how he lives in Saudi Arabia now, in Jeddah, and how fortunate he felt to have spent his life doing this work. He and some of the people traveling with him had set up a table outside with hats, t shirts, pamphlets, all kinds of merchandise that looked like it had been sitting in boxes for decades. Lots of “Know Islam, Know Peace” type stuff. You get the picture. Felt like the table had been teleported straight out of an Islamic convention from 2002. He was a charming old man, though. You could tell age was catching up with him and that he was probably nearing the end of this chapter of his life and ready to retire any day now. I couldn’t help but approach him afterward, shook his hand, gave him a big hug. The whole scene left me with this strange bittersweet feeling that I couldn’t quite shake. For a moment I felt like I was nine years old again, like I was listening to someone like Yusuf Estes explain that Islam means peace, that the Trinity doesn’t make sense, you know all that old school dawah material I heard constantly growing up. There was something deeply nostalgic about it. Felt like I was hearing echoes from some distant era in my childhood, surrounded for a few minutes by a kind of atmosphere I hadn’t realized had long disappeared. And what made it even stranger was that my own 9 year old son was sitting next to me listening to him 😂 It was just surreal. I felt like Frieren suddenly encountering some ordinary event in the present that opened a door onto a life from centuries ago. Felt mundane but also dreamlike. I’m sitting there as a father now, watching my son at the same age I was when this particular style of American Muslim dawah was everywhere, and listening to this elderly brother who somehow carried that entire period with him into the room. There’s a sobering side to it too, the brother really does seem frozen in the 90s and early 2000s. He’s still giving dawah as though Muslims just came out of 9/11 and our great civilizational task was convincing Americans that Islam is peaceful and explaining why the Trinity is wrong. The world he learned to operate in has pretty much vanished. The entire Muslim scene has changed. Everyone has moved on. It reminded me of that Japanese soldier stranded on a remote island who kept fighting World War II decades after it was over. There’s something objectively funny about it, but also genuinely sad. He kept faithfully, and almost robotically, carrying out the mission he was given, even though the world around that mission disappeared. Maybe that’s why I felt compelled to hug him, idk. For a few minutes he brought an entire vanished world back into the masjid with him. And sitting there beside my own son, I realized that I was remembering being nine myself. I'll stop talking now. Just a weird reflection I had after Jumu’ah.

The irony here is that the Kasurian editor's critique of Islamic finance doesn’t actually produce anything new. IF basically accepts the prohibition on Riba but then modifies the contractual forms until they can be reterritorialized onto existing fiat/credit system. But he simply performs the inverse operation where he accepts the existing financial system, then reinterprets riba until the prohibition no longer interferes with it. We can see that the first solution changes the financial signifiers while preserving the machine, and the other solution changes the religious signifier while preserving the machine. So either way, the same debt regime, banks, monetary architecture, incentive structures remain. The supposed line of flight just gets captured and routed straight back into the same assemblage.

Jummah Mubarak I wrote a response to "The Muslim Technologist" essay from the perspective of the Digital Muhajir. Read it here: View article →

Launchgood constantly getting debanked, and now they're getting shadowbanned, and they're still nowhere close to even considering a coherent thought about how Bitcoin and Nostr fixes this. Oh well, at least it's kind of funny, in a sad kind of way.

I just wish Andy would block me for this

"Don't trust, verify" Na I trust and my homies verify 😇

It should be painfully obvious now that trying to onboard governments to Bitcoin has been a disaster The next phase of Bitcoin adoption needs to be built on parallel monetary infrastructure that is "extra-state" and institutionally autonomous.

Reminder to please donate any spare sats you have to npub1mdggrkkjvr4k33ylk230c6qwnz9ewahsxsa55ygvdc54w2jkrrmq48k309 Just 1500 sats ($1.30) can feed a child for a day! The brother that runs this does incredibly good work and is very thorough in documenting how donations are spent. Donate to: orphansofuganda@8333.mobi View quoted note →

Graphene OS team getting attacked by crazy Mastodon users. We must remain toxic enough on Nostr to not allow this faggotry to grow here.