Kirk

The Coldcard bug highlights that AI is the technological opposite of encryption. Where cryptography is a tool that gives those defending their privacy and property an asymmetric advantage, ever-more-intelligent LLMs give attackers their own asymmetric weapon to steal and surveil.

To maintain sovereignty in the future will demand far greater personal responsibility and prudence.

I haven’t even listened yet, but it’s Max so I know it’s going to great

https://fountain.fm/episode/iKDtY1KBcNh1q8aVnK9S

Give me Kimi K3 on

and I may not need anything else

If you live down underer, please consider supporting Francisco's quest to Orange Pill New Zealand

https://geyser.fund/project/drivingbitcoin?hero=kirk1

Why is it that monetary debasement leads to a debasement in moral character of a huge swath of the individuals in a society?

Is it just that people are impoverished and desperate, and so all principles, integrity and ethical conduct get thrown by the wayside? But then why is it that you seem to see this kind of behaviour as prominently among the rich and societal elite as among the poor? Is it just that in a society like this only the cantillionaires and those with few scruples make it to the top?

https://fountain.fm/episode/9qJ5bwaUE3px4oMRd15K

https://fountain.fm/episode/9qJ5bwaUE3px4oMRd15K

We are ruled over by pedophiles, so it makes sense they tweet like a 12 year old playing Call of Duty

Merry Christmas to all you crazy, wonderful Nostriches! 🎄

Is there any archive of the original Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast episodes (from 2013ish)?

The RSS feed only goes back to 2019: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/sjaeb-91e5b/Speaking-of-Bitcoin-%28formerly-Let%27s-Talk-Bitcoin%21%29-Podcast

Those early shows with Andreas, Stephanie and Adam were absolute gems. Would suck if they've just been scrubbed from the internet forever.

We won't get another bull market until Blue Collar Bitcoin returns

Feels right to be dumping on the anniversary of BitConnect launching

Something I've recently realized is the extent to which Israel completely controls the US far beyond its middle-eastern foreign policy.

If Javier Millei had all the same positions he currently holds, only instead of being slavishly devoted to Israel he was critical, do you think the US govt would be creating a strategic peso reserve to bail out Argentina?

Of course not.

If María Corina Machado wasn't a pro-Israel fanatic who proclaims that "the struggle of Venezuela is the struggle of Israel", would she be such a darling of the US establishment?

Not a chance.

You can believe anything about any other issue, but if you aren't full-throated in your support of a genocidal ethnostate in the middle-east you will find yourself arrested, deported, fired, cancelled, regime changed and just generally demonized.

Almsot everything the US govt does is first-and-foremost to aid Israel: there's the direct financial aid, there's the endless weapons, there's the intelligence support, there's vetoing every UN resolution against Israel, there's running diplomatic cover for Israel, there's firing Ivy league professors and expelling US students critical of Israel, there's criminalizing US firms boycotting Israel, there's criminalizing speech against Israel in states like Florida, there's all the financial aid to surrounding Arab states so they don't intervene on behalf of the Palestinians but instead assist Israel whilst keeping their population in check (these are just bribes to look the other way), there's bombing Iran on behalf of Israel, the entire terror wars...

It's endless and it's utterly sickening.

Two things stand out watching this 1981 episode of Phil Donahue:

1. The arguments for unschooling/home schooling are pretty unassailable.
2. Donahue was a master, and his popularity speaks to how we had more intellectual, more curious America. Ironically, I think the government schools have played a large role in why a show like this would not be feasible today. https://youtu.be/fXLWPpln0rQ?si=fKFmZpRDDWVg3zT4

My citadel

I can't speak for 2013 and am not an OG, but the culture around Bitcoin was far more exciting during the 2018-2019 period.

Instead of simping for politicians, obsessing over zombie treasury companies, and arguing about things like op_return that don't matter, the discussion was serious and engaging. Lightning was just getting started, the earliest coinjoin implementations were launching, soft forks were actively being worked on and debated, the podcasters weren't all promoting penny stocks... It was a better time, imo.

This isn't hipster to recognize. We can be be glad that bitcoin is still alive, but there's more to bitcoin than NGU.

There's many ways in which things are better: Nostr exists now, there's a lot more sustainable funding for open source developers, bitcoin has been massively de-risked and normalized as an investment, and we've all gotten richer...but we've lost a lot too.

Max always has a great, principled perspective.

https://fountain.fm/episode/BGphNLL3sek1jYt3L84D

"Don't hate the player, hate the game" is one of those flippant things people say to absolve people of responsibility for the most blatantly unethical actions. It's a shitcoiner morality slogan.

It is possible at once to understand that we are living in a golden age of grift, and that systems have evolved to incentivize people to check their principles at the door for a buck. Still, everyone has agency and can choose not to sel their soul for a few bucks, a few clicks, a few likes.

It's important to find it within yourself to hate both the player AND the game.

A perhaps unpopular opinion that I firmly believe: MSTR has not even been net positive for bitcoin’s price. It’s been a negative on every front.

GM

God I hate the bellcurve meme

https://fountain.fm/episode/XRHxPWDK43EF80B3M3bM

This is very fiat, but are there any Nostrich Fantasy Football leagues going this year?

If not, I'm keen to make one. I'm thinking 250k sats buy-in.

What Walker means to say is "can Israel chill for like 5 minutes?"

Literally no-one else is trying to instigate WW3 here.

A friend just told me that, in the original story of Howl's Moving Castle, the reason he wanted his home to move around was to avoid property tax.

Makes me love it all the more.

The further I get into my bitcoin journey, the more I look back on the 2018-19 bear as the high-point of bitcoiner culture.

Bitcoin felt punk back then. We’d just emerged victorious from the block size wars, price had crashed to sub-$4k, lightning was just getting going, regulators were trying crush us...good times.

And, while on one hand, bitcoin has been substantially de-rerisked, open source funding has improved dramatically, the political environment has become more favourable…the culture feels like it has rotted (except for here on Nostr).

When I look at the empty mempools and lack of retail interest/search volume for bitcoin (despite basically being at ATHs), I can’t help but think it is because bitcoin has lost its counter-culture appeal in the eyes of most people. Between hyping MSTR and its myriad of clones, simping for politicians and cronyism, ‘strategic’ reserve bs, we’ve gone from suits not wanting to associate us because bitcoin is just used for drugs and terrorism dontcha know, to regular people not wanting to associate with us because of all the suits.

Feels like a kinda shitty timeline tbh.

Last 15mins was A+

https://fountain.fm/episode/oTbUzIEm58wf78ZOA6HN

Listening to this 1979 talk by the late psychologist, Nathaniel Branden. Though the topic is how libertarians can unwittingly work to undermine their own movement, it all equally applies to bitcoiners.

What starts as earnest and principled can so easily become performative if we don't engage in constant self-reflection.

I'm really not a fan of MSTR getting these kinds of passive flows.

Within bitcoin we rightly view yield with a mixture of suspicion and contempt, often saying things like "you are the yield".

MSTR stock has a perpetual gravity that pushes the stock price back to the value of their bitcoin treasury. The way Saylor generates his "BTC yield" is from indiscriminate buyers who pile in at multiples to MSTR's underlying bitcoin holdings. They are the ones being harvested.

Having retail investors passively and indiscriminately buying this thing every month makes them easy to harvest. Being charitable, MSTR is a strategic trading vehicle and shouldn't be treated as something you just allocate to the same way you DCA bitcoin.

Bitcoiners make fun of goldbugs a lot (and often for good reason).

However, gold is still the only other asset that it really makes sense to own. The kind of asset you would feel comfortable holding if you knew you were about to go into a coma for a decade.

Gold is the perfect compliment to bitcoin in a portfolio. The tail risks that could make bitcoin go to zero are twofold: political and technological. The tail risk that could make gold fall is that bitcoin's tail risks don't materialize.

We have to remember, he’s saying this to a man who referred to Abu Dhabi as Aboo Daboo four times after having spent a week there.

So much for the first amendment

I like how, when a zap fails to send on Primal, it gives you a notification with the option "No"

Civil asset forfeiture is just a fancy term for theft

A nation of genocidal Jussie Smollett's

https://m.primal.net/Oznb.png 😂

Full tank of gas!

GM

I normally agree with Lola, but she’s mistaken here on virtually every point of this:


1. USDT on lightning is in no way “expanding US hegemony over the global south”. Most people in third world countries are desperate for dollars (Jack Mallers talks about this a lot, and this bottom-up demand is why Strike started supporting USDT on Tron). Compared to their local govt shitcoin, the USD is a pretty decent store-of-value.



While it used to be that only fairly wealthy people in these countries who were able to save in dollars (as they either had to have offshore bank accounts or purchase physical cash on the grey market), USDT vastly expands who has access to dollars. As much as I hate the dollar and the entire fiat system, in this context it is the opposite of subjugation. It is liberation for potentially billions of people. 



It is also entirely opt-in. Compare some individual buying USDT on an app in their phone to vs the IMF or World Bank giving massive loans to their country’s dictator and then forcing all the citizens to pay off the debt once that dictator inevitably embezzles the funds. One is liberatory and voluntary, the other repressive and forced.


2. As for Lola’s second paragraph: “The collab circumvents US dependency on selling debt to other nations while furthering Tether's position as one of the largest buyers of US Treasuries, custodied by a private entity formerly owned and operated by the US Secretary of Commerce.” I’m not sure what is particularly negative about any of this.



We should want Tether’s position as one of the largest buyers of US Treasuries to be further cemented. Demand for USDT has historically been directly proportional to demand for bitcoin. If the US govt is dependent on Tether to buy its treasuries so it can fund itself, it can’t then go cracking down on bitcoin because that will affect demand for USDT and thus demand for treasuries. 



This is unambiguously a good thing. 


3. As for USDT being a CBDC… I’m not sure how Lola could be defining CBDC for this to make sense. 



Despite being issued by the company, Tether, this company has virtually zero insight into who actually holds USDT. Tether only has direct knowledge of the KYC-verified accounts that deposit/redeem USDT directly with them. 



This makes accurately discerning and freezing certain USDT wallets incredibly difficult. Especially since USDT is on a bunch of chains and swapped on all kinds of DEXes. 



Chainalysis is already a bunch of probabilistic nonsensical voodoo akin to blood spatter analysis or the polygraph. 

Imagine how much harder things are going to be for the surveillers with USDT on lightning, where you already have pretty good privacy. Especially since you will be able to atomically swap USDT on lightning to USDT on Liquid (with confidential transactions). 



This seems like the opposite of a CBDC. It’s far closer to the creation of dark, digital USDs.

I knew things were going to change with Gensler gone, but this is pretty wild

I'm seeing a lot of posts mourning the death of David Lynch. It's made me want to learn what it is about his work that folks here clearly love so much.

As someone who has never seen anything by David Lynch, where should I start?