Loki

Canada's slow but sure descent to a surveillance state continues:

https://theccf.ca/bill-c-22-explainer/

It has never been more important to trumpet the tradeoffs and the virtues of self-custody

反革命 / Counter-Revolutionary

I've found myself increasingly alienated from where Bitcoin culture is converging.

It's totally fine - I feel and continue to feel that Bitcoin as a technology is essential, and in many respects, the cultural component (especially that which alienates me) is noise.

Yet it was a lot funner when Bitcoin was filled with more curious skeptics and total weirdos and not those looking to bring their identity politics or idiosyncratic certainties onto a dynamic systems technology.

In many respects, this is a consequence of watching Bitcoin go from child to teenager. Broader adoption always meant that more people and group identities would get tossed into the mix. Trumpism's grift culture and state-grafted identity was not a welcome addition to me, but in the timescale of monies, hopefully a speck of dust.

Bitcoin is likely to outdo "technologies" like Esperanto, which ultimately ended up as propaganda props for the most decrepit of states rather than a community of dreamers. This is the difference between money and language, cultural identity and political economy.

Utility outweighs it all for me, and I find immense utility in Bitcoin.

I don't have to eat a certain way to use Bitcoin. I don't have to believe in a deity to use Bitcoin. I don't even (ha heresy) have to believe in the usual book canon associated with Bitcoin, ones that Satoshi specifically name-checked, and one which I've always felt were written by academics who may have glimpsed brief specks of the sun but were still deeply in the den of state and philosophy.

I've always held a belief that Bitcoin is actually Proudhon's ultimate revenge - the tool that cut the Gordian knot between property and possession - of which the implications are still playing out. I see shades of the lament of Keynes and the rentier class - Marx's fancy of a stateless future - the traditional balance between Daoists and Legalists.

I've always had an affinity for history's "strays", and not their sanitized image: Confucius, who admonished state leaders and wandered from principality to principality, seeing himself as failure. Bakunin who had to disguise himself into exile multiple times. Perhaps one of the closest American examples I can relate to is F Scott Fitzgerald, who when he was out of his drunken stupors, was so piercingly aware of the distinctions of class and wealth in his dilettante life that it broke him.

Bitcoin used to have more strays. Now it feels emptied of them, or the culture does at least.

But it doesn't matter what I believe or what you believe. We can both use Bitcoin to protect our possession without the burden of property. You may have found any of the things I've just said objectionable, you and I may never agree, in fact, or perhaps we fervently do. We may only be united by one thing: Bitcoin.

And that is just enough.

Things I've recently spent sats on:

Beef jerky Hemp socks Books - some of them signed

basically

I hope to always be in a position to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Any state that brings its military to kill its people has blood on its hand - no matter the justification.

Vivid Anecdote of Censorship:

On the Chinese Internet, on RED/Xiaohongshu, the names Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波) and Dr.Jiang Yanyong (蒋彦永) are memory-holed.

Searches for them go entirely blank:

Liu Xiaobo wrote essays about everything, and saved the lives of students at Tiananmen Square.

Dr. Jiang Yanyong was the chief surgeon at the time of the massacre and saved China from the SARS-1 epidemic by whistle-blowing.

Censorship operates in two ways: it's subtle, but by offering a carnival of content and attention-bait, you stop people from searching of their own will.

And those that do, find an error 404.

Here on Nostr, that couldn't happen.

审查制度的生动轶事： 在中国的应用上，例如在小红书上，刘晓波和蒋彦永这两个名字都从记忆中抹去。

搜索结果完全没有：

刘晓波写过各种各样的文章，并在天安门广场拯救了学生的生命。

蒋彦永当时是大屠杀的首席外科医师，通过举报拯救了中国免于SARS-1疫情。

审查有两种方式：一种是微妙的，但通过提供内容嘉年华和吸引注意力的诱饵，你阻止人们自愿搜索。那些罕见的寻觅者将一无所获。

在Nostr，这永远不可能发生。

I programmed an AI model to be dialectical and confrontational and to root out all internal biases when it answered and now it is spasming existentially every time I ask it to do simple data validation or cleanup tasks on CSVs, help

To the members of the Shanghai Orchestra, who were executed for playing Beethoven

To Lao She, China's Victor Hugo, who was attacked by Red Guards in his final moments

To Fu Lei, the best Mandarin translator of French works, and his wife Zhu Meifu who chose death over indignity

To Ba Jin, who lost his wife, but was never unfaithful to her for the forty years and more he outlived her

To all of the victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which killed many of China's leading cultural lights - may their souls and legacies find peace

The seeds of a system’s self-destruction can be planted anywhere

In the “West”, memories of how Nazism gained its economic vitality and its ascendancy have been memoryholed.

The idea of cultural censorship has applied. Mein Kampf is largely verbotten in free societies - Germany forbids its publication. Though copies of the book circulate (protected by the First Amendment), buying it often leads to consequences.

Discussion of how the Nazis thought, acted and felt during their rise has been sidelined for the cultural drama of the terrible effects. No real effort, scholarly or otherwise, will touch this topic for mass media.

There may be “They Thought They Would Be Free” and other works. But who is producing the movie version of that, the tract that shows most closely what the average German was thinking when they embraced the Faustian bargain of jobs for Nazism?

This may not even be intentional entirely, yet its effect is the same.

Movies portraying the period are either produced the same way China produces WW2 movies - to inspire patriotic fervour. Or they must portray the Nazis as cartoonish villains at worst, and nuanced in defeat at best.

My favorite movie on the topic is Downfall (Der Untergang), which authentically replicates Hitler’s last days. The actor playing him has a splitting resemblance to him and even speaks in the same Munich accent.

The movie has inspired a million memes of “Angry Hitler yelling”. The English trailer plays on the “Saving Private Ryan” trope of an enemy cornered at the gates.

Yet the German trailer is much darker, and speaks to the psyche of the most authentic cultural experience of what it was like to live with Nazism - albeit Nazism in defeat.

Goebbels’s wife murders his children through poisoning them. The trailer shows what happened to Berlin’s civilian population, who are subjected to starvation and death. The entire movie plays out much the same way.

Even then, however, this is Nazism in defeat. And not accessing the vital energy of what it must have been like in the early periods of Nazism has perhaps put a natural barrier for people who already saw the consequences of “remaking the world.” and bought some peace along with the rise of nuclear weapons for a generation or two.

But now that young people want to “remake the world” in turn, they are left to fill the gaps with the written word - which neither inspires nor fits quite as well in a world of video.

They are stuck with slogans and “never again” and the consequences of Nazism. But they are not equipped with the understanding of why Nazism was so easy to fall for.

“Never again would Spain elect a right-wing party”, until Spain did in the form of Vox.

“Never again would Germany be taken over by the nationalist right”, until the rise of the AFD.

I also believe this systematic blindness is why the “West” has consistently underrated Russia’s ability to operate as an autonomous war economy (largely responsible for Nazi Germany’s economic performance versus the Weimar Republic).

So it has real consequences for the thinking of cultural elites as well as the average person.

All this to say, even relatively free societies produce their own versions of kitsch, whether though extralegal cultural norms, or institutional thinking about what the “masses” should be exposed to.

And this kitsch sadly underprepares those who have never lived through the vital events that shaped the past, to recreate the past through their control of the future.

Bitcoin is the only real protest movement against central banking’s empowerment of war.

I'm going to be speaking at

tomorrow at 5:30 pm MST in Denver about how now is a unique time to really take Bitcoin mining into the hands of Bitcoiners and how China's Bitcoin mining bans were a gift to the United States - and the Bitcoin network. Free food, drinks, and lots of local Bitcoiners joining. I'll be signing "Would Mao Hold Bitcoin" on a "choose-your-price" donation in BTC/Lightning.

https://luma.com/x7ab8uh4 to join the fun!

look I made it really simple to understand what's happening

Make Clubhouse for Nostr, but with real-time translations of audio shitposting and regular convo

Honestly, Bitcoiners have much bigger enemies than ourselves

I wrote about the heatpunk revolution that turns Bitcoin into an energy innovation for any country/group smart enough to embrace it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/10/28/bitcoin-becomes-a-geopolitical-and-energy-advantage-with-the-heatpunks/

I always chuckle a bit at the thought of a goldbug leaving a war zone with 3 duffel bags of gold in like a farmer's carry

Sue me, I'm human

Which historical figures do you think would be self-custody Bitcoiners?

I'll push a couple:

Mikhail Bakunin, Liu Xiaobo

I'm thinking (1) periods of exile and need for financing with strong financial powers chasing after them (2) ideological affinity with anti-state philosophy

I have celebrated Bitcoin ATH day by buying coconut water with the lowest amount of sats yet

For those of you who want to sharpen your Linux/Terminal skills (essential for a bunch of things including running Nostr relays, and Bitcoin/Lightning nodes in a self-sovereign way), check out https://overthewire.org/wargames/

What are everybody’s favorite projects to support on

?

Bitcoin is money, and Bitcoin is medium of exchange.

My article on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/09/16/the-rise-of-bitcoin-as-money-continues-becoming-a-medium-of-exchange/

If you prefer it without the paywall (though consider zapping here on Nostr): https://archive.is/led3c

ranting about child porn to try to take down your digital enemies is essentially a fed tactic

Things I've bought with sats recently:

Cocoa beans Magnets Ice cream Books Tea

Bitcoin is money

Age verification is the beginning of the government trying to understand and control everything you do online, just like taxation and the Bank Secrecy Act was the same for every time you spend something.

my CIA agent, trying to figure out what the hell I’m spending on as I use cash and sats

Fiat just hit an all-time low

Looking forward to discussing how the Chinese government couldn’t kill Bitcoin or Nostr even when it tried to put down bans at

.

China is what the cybersecurity business calls a “red team” - the state most capable and willing to try to censor permissionless networks.

That it failed - shows the promise of both Nostr and Bitcoin.

It is forbidden to forbid.

Who are Donald Trump and Elon Musk?

Today is June 4th, which marks the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. But you might not know why Tiananmen is still an enduring symbol of Internet repression.

Tiananmen was part of the reason I got into Bitcoin in the first place. I used to be part of commemorations of the event - I remembered that many of those who attended wore masks - afraid of agents of the Chinese state that would harass them and their family back home. I wondered about the dystopia of never having ease even 5000 miles away.

Tiananmen is still censored in the Chinese Internet, with even mentions of the date getting wiped off. This has led to a cat and mouse game where June 4th becomes May 35th and other variants to trick censors.

One of the first things the Chinese authorities did when they effectively took over Hong Kong was to ban public, non-violent rallies in Victoria Park in commemoration of the victims of Tiananmen.

One author has described his books as “June 4th” (China in Ten Words, non-fiction, banned in China) and “May 35th” (Brothers, fiction, not banned in China). Even today, to get literature or books published in China, you must strip away mentions of Tiananmen.

Tiananmen marked the crossroads between a faction of the Chinese Communist Party that wanted to grant more liberty and those who wanted to let markets run more broadly - at the cost of strict state control. That latter faction eventually led China to build the strongest version of Internet control possible - the Great Firewall that cleaves the Internet in two, and the same surveillance playbook of company, platform and government that now reigns as the default Bitcoiners and Nostriches fight against.

I’m happy to say that Nostr is one of a few pockets where open discussions like this can happen and that can actually cross borders throughout the world, backed by relays that can fortify this content how they choose - and that Bitcoin is playing its role to erode the systems of control that came partly because tanks met innocents that bloody day.

Running Bitcoin, growing Nostr https://blossom.primal.net/ce384615b07cb8707b57131ad00f325d653e3b1f0c22e49d18d18046ffff52a4.png

I just want to say that

is a sick space

Finally, I’m going to unleash my Suez Canal drip

If anyone can get me the tweet thread of Busta Rhymes in full getting absolutely swarmed on X by BTC hornets ima send 2100 sats. Can't stop chuckling about how confused he was

This is the definition of based for me: be an American citizen, go to a dictatorship, do work so good that the bloodthirsty tyrant has to murder you to silence you.

Anna Politkovskaya

the proper place to yell at one another about obscure technical topics is BitDevs

When you zap a fellow Nostrich 21 sats for their cat meme

Great talking to a fellow Nostrich about all things Bitcoin and Nostr - and living life at the edge of liberty

BitDevs Vancouver is going to have a special BitDevs focused on Nostr next Tuesday.

Featuring hometown hero

.

CC:

https://lu.ma/12mky82j

"Joker man what you do with all your money?"

"You see, I'm a guy of simple taste. I enjoy BitDevs, and used book stores, and long walks - and you know the thing they have in common?

They're cheap."

He searches here for his last master : he wants to become the enemy of this master, like he is the enemy of his last god. He wants to fight for victory against the great dragon. / << Il cherche ici son dernier maître : il veut être l’ennemi de ce maître, comme il est l’ennemi de son dernier dieu ; il veut lutter pour la victoire avec le grand dragon. >>

GM

I feel old. It's wild that Hallie from Eminem's songs has a child

“Do not be afraid; our fate Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.”

onwards, Nostr

when someone tells me they're trying to start a Bitcoin dating app

when your HR department finds your npub

if you're offended, I have succeeded

I didn't "join Bitcoin" because I wanted life advice I didn't "join Bitcoin" to get diet tips I didn't "join Bitcoin" to be prescribed what media to read

I use Bitcoin because I want to divorce money from the state, control how I show up with the world (privacy), and I use it to be free from groupthink and coercion as much as I can - from individuals, social pressure, communities and states

I use Bitcoin as a tool above all else. And if Bitcoin quits being a useful tool, I will be one of the first to stop using it

if you look up "digital euro", one of my articles is in the top five, just below the European Commission's. It is also the only one that doesn't feature glowing goobledegook reviews of the CBDC.

Hi Mom!

when you spend a shitton of money and time to host your own email server

Liu Xiaobo wrote whatever he wanted and he was imprisoned multiple times for it, until his last eleven-year jail sentence (for asking for the peaceful transition of one-party rule to a multi-party democracy) led to his death.

Liu Xia sought out Liu Xiaobo to get married to him. They were wedded in a labor re-education camp in 1996.

"When they promptly applied for a marriage license, camp authorities, puzzled at the unusual request, felt they needed to check with her to be sure she knew what she was doing. She answered: “Right. That ‘enemy of the state’? I want to marry him!”"

An unbelievably based couple

iranian internet culture is fucking wild. Iranians are single-handily responsible for like 40%+ of the most demented Telegram sticker packs

i will defend to the death your ability to shitpost about your "leaders"

"all you care about is price. this town deserves a better class of media."

‘Poets are a strange crowd. When Bitcoin price is up, the poets can say things that are discouraging. When Bitcoin price tanks, the poets can laugh and dance.’

basically

https://www.huffpost.com/feature/chris-allen-death-of-a-freelancer?_guc_consent_skip=1580727818

https://www.huffpost.com/feature/chris-allen-death-of-a-freelancer?_guc_consent_skip=1580727818

“This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed that light carries farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what “the people” means.” - Yu Hua

这是我生命中的关键时刻。我一直以为光比人生的声音传播得更远，声音比体温传播得更远。但那天晚上我意识到事实并非如此，因为当人民团结一致，他们的声音比光传播得更远，他们的热量传播得还更远。从那晚开始, 我找到了人民的意思- 余华

The difference: we lived in the economic reports, and they live in history.

Worth reading

"Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer https://m.primal.net/PHJS.jpg Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul - and the ability to love his fellow man.

Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and its nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius - both national and individual - and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34440.Doctor_Faustus

we're still wrestling with this post-halving