sachin

It's very easy to believe in God if one dismisses all the rituals and superstitions, disassociates from all religions, avoids all places of worship and distances himself from the preachers, proselytizers and zealots.

These things just get in the way.

Any form of state involvement in the realm of education is an atrocious idea if the goal is to develop productive individuals who are aware of the world, can survive effectively and be of service to people around them.

I have so much to say about this but I am way too biased because of my own experiences with education. I can't be value-free about it yet. So much emotion still.

Man fuck these bitch-ass governments.

One of my favourite things about Rothbard is that he made Law a fun subject to explore for mw. He keeps his arguments simple and really gets at the foundational principles.

His reasoning is very sophisticated, but the way he presents it is very simple. That's a great skill he had.

Descending ordered list of wallets that can do LN payments based how trustless the setup is:

1. LN via self-hosted node and self-managed channels
2. LN via mobile embedded node with LSP choice
3. LN via mobile embedded node but no LSP choice
4. LN via hosted node with VLS
5. Ark with unilateral exits
6. Spark with unilateral exits
7. Liquid wallet with atomic swaps
8. Fedimint ecash with multiple mint operators
9. Cashu ecash or Fedimint ecash with a single mint operator
10. Fully custodial LN

I think there'll be valid disagreement with (2 <> 3 <> 4) and (5 <> 6). No strong opinions from me about their order.

And I'm sure there's a good case to be made for kicking 7 out of this list altogether because of the way the Liquid hack has been handled.

'It is ideas that make history, and not history that makes ideas.'

• Mises in Human Action

Neither a fiat money nor a sound money policy program is inevitable. The one that gets widely-accepted by public opinion will eventually be reflected in the laws that are adopted. A major factor is the ability of intellectuals and advocates to convince people of the set of ideas they favour.

First got into Bitcoin and got excited about number go up. Then I was like oh yeah fix the world and started getting easily triggered.

A bunch of value-free austro-libertarian insights about the causes and consequences of the state's very existence, I'm back to having fun and sticking to number go up.

Biggest misnomer in democratic politics is the use of the words 'public' or 'commons' while describing ownership of something when it is, in practice, clearly and obviously state-owned.

On paper it is called as 'public' money and 'public' property to give people an illusion that everyone owns it and has a say in how it is used.

In practice, it is the state's money and the state's property.

Temporary caretakers (ministers and bureaucrats) own it and have ultimate decision-making power over the property in question.

The hole in the above argument might come up when, in a democratic state, ministers think a decision about government property might affect their votes.

But for that, people's attention has to be on the issue. But everyone, in practice, can't pay attention to and get outraged about everything all the time. It's tiresome, unhealthy and unrealistic. Time and energy are scarce.

So decisions about stuff that people don't care about, which are most of the things, are the taken by ministers and bureaucrats, not the public.

There's another interesting consequence of such a state of affairs in a democracy.

Politically active folks tend to push outrage and doom porn on everyone's faces in an exaggerated and emotionally manipulative manner, so that non-political folks prioritise talking and thinking about the issue they want them to care about.

The goal being to make ministers think that the decisions they take about something will sway votes in their favour. Democracy necessitate outrage and doom porn. Nobody living within the system can escape it. They are trapped.

Pretty sure you can recall many relationships being damaged by political conversations. It's a flywheel effect.

It's not just algorithms that's making people miserable and angry all the time.

It's democracy as well 😊

I don't see Bitcoin going the way of Gold or Silver as something to be freaking out about, whether it happens or not.

Nearly every single fiat currency in existence including dollars, yen, yuan, rupees, pounds, etc. used to represent units of gold or silver.

Their issuance, movement and uasge was 'captured' by states and their central banks, and turned into fiat. Gold and silver remained as they were. Their properties never changed.

Both metals are still very much relevant, widely-used, frequently traded, highly liquid and held by many. They're just not widely used as money anymore. When priced against fiat, they've gone up by quite a lot in the last few decades. Those who have held them wouldn't be disappointed I'm guessing.

Wanting bitcoin to be used as a widely-accepted monetary good is a wonderful ideal to be working towards realizing. I want it too. I want to take self-custody and pay in bitcoin. If it happens, great!

But if it doesn't happen, I'm not going to be disappointed. I can simply convert to whatever money people accept. No biggie. That's what markets are for.

States are pitiable institutions that are always going to want to steal, coerce, manipulate and surveil. It's in their nature and purpose to do that. They can't help it. They can't know better.

In a world of states imposing legal tender laws; taxes on trades; exchanges and capital gains; foreign exchange controls; trade enbargoes; manipulation of money, interest rates and foreign exchange markets; we're not probably not to going see sound money adopted and used widely.

Maybe if the things listed above don't exist anymore and are scrapped outright, things will be easier. But public opinion in Bitcoin, leave alone the wider world, isn't actively in favour of or advocating for such a state of affairs.

Black markets are bound to emerge if bitcoin does become widely used in such a world, and we'll simply have to learn how to navigate them. It is what it is.

Ch 2 pt11 of Human Action is epic.

LvM explores the limitations of using praxeological concepts in perceiving or understanding God. He's spot on.

Neither rational nor empirical intellectual tools are of much or maybe any use in the pursuit of spiritual knowledge.

A tricky spot liberatarians can land in is when the opponent uses the 'appeals to evidence technique' of justifying state action.

'Well look at x industry, it's all privately owned and services are shit so socializing everything or partially socializing is a better way to go', the statist says.

And then the burden is on the libertarian to make causal links on why costs and prices are going up while service quality is going down, capital is being destroyed rather than preserved, pull the correct threads to find the regulations and laws which are preventing competitive pressure from existing.

The statist who claims to look at things scientifically and objectively based on evidence is looking at things neither 'scientifically' nor 'objectively' but with a theoretical framework that is arbitrary and biased against entrepreneurs, when he says regulations or socialization can improve quality, bring down prices and costs.

Entrepreneurs, as in the Misesian sense, spot opportunities others have not yet spotted and capitalize on them. And regulations exist to handicap them. Competition exists or can potentially emerge to punish them for making the wrong choices and making inefficient decisions about the use of resources. He must always be alert to losing his market share should he keep prices too high and cut costs too much in a way to bring the quality of his offerings down.

The kind of person who sits in an ivory tower and writes regulations based 'on evidence', ie, the bureaucrat, will not want to recognise these opportunities or can't do it because it's not profitable from him. He can't or won't think of ways to solve problems because that's really not his job. His job is to increase the number of regulations and budgetary allocations to his department.

And the fiat component of incentivizing over-production and malinvestment cannot be dismissed.

Looking at evidence is well and good, but because statists have a theoretical framework that looks at and arranges the interpretation of evidence as justification of state action by default, it's difficult to tackle the things they say.

The Economist published an article about the Indian government selling state assets:

https://archive.ph/4LovK

Privatisation of government entities seemed like one of the easiest 'wins' towards a more libertarian situation of affairs.

But it's a bit complex and very challenging to pull off, even if the party in power has a somewhat libertarian leaning.

Right from the get go, there'll be extreme opposition from labour/employee unions. The narrative of being pro-crony will be attached to the ruling disposition. This means loss of votes. No politician would want that if he wants to remain in power.

Thing is, if privatisation is also not accompanied by deregulation and thus getting out of the way of potential competing firms from emerging, it would be tantamount to a transfer of monopoly privileges from bureaucrats to cronies.

So union folks would then think they were justified in opposing privatisation outright.

There is also the challenge of convincing potential private buyers that the assets being sold are worth buying in the first place after years of being mismanaged. Finding buyers would be very difficult.

Otoh, if the entity is performing well on paper through mergers, subsidies and infusions from the state exchequer, there'll be arguments that they need not be privatised and that the industry need not be liberalised at all.

Even if the privatisation goes through, prices might not come down, since they have to be brought back to what is economical by the new owners whereas previously it was kept below market rates by the government to satisfy voters or whatever political goals they had.

Not to mention the upward pressure on prices due to fiat money, making it harder to convince civilians that privatisation is the way to go.

Essentially, if the goal is to bring prices down, make the industry more efficient overall, improve the quality of services and reduce capital consumption, privatisation would need to be accompanied by deregulation and a rewrite of the laws governing the industry. And a shift to a sound money system as well.

New product trend:

Interest paid in sats on fiat deposits

River's been doing it for a while:

https://river.com/bitcoin-interest

Cash app started a week ago:

https://x.com/CashApp/status/2103207687127466307

21bitcoin in Europe started the day before yesterday:

https://x.com/21bitcoinApp/status/2105665124535074886

Strike announcing soon it seems like:

https://x.com/Strike/status/2106103556013252970

Alby's 'Buzz' series gets most or maybe all of their stuff from Bitcoin Breakdown and credit us also. If you'd like to sift through the updates we curate in a Twitter article format, this one's a good follow:

https://x.com/getAlby/status/2105642974830903650

Part one of 'Human Action' is to economics what numerals, addition, subtraction, etc. are to mathematics

One can for sure consider ancap as a fantasy, because it is. It's a value-laden position about what ought to be. Intentionally so.

But one can still apply basic economic principles like the calculation problem, effects of price controls, monopoly vs competition, etc. on all possibile services provided by a government monopoly and understand what is, and why it is the way it is.

Another banger quote from Mises in Human Action on why those in power usually hate real economics and economists:

'It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power. An economist can never be a favorite of autocrats and demagogues. With them he is always the mischief-maker, and the more they are inwardly convinced that his objections are well founded, the more they hate him.'

Heads up

I'm probably going to be posting a lot of notes, quotes, excerpts from Mises' Human Action for a while.

There's a lot from the book that's worth sharing. It's awesome.

'Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.'

• Mises in Human Action

'There are, in the field of economics, no constant relations, and consequently no measurement is possible.'

• Mises in Human Action.

Point being that truths in social sciences and human action are purely qualitative, not quantitative.

I don't get the chatter about the first part of Mises' human action.

It's difficult to grasp but magnificent intellectual work.

Anyone interested in any branch of social sciences would find a lot of benefit in reading it patiently.

What's happening in English Football with Manchester City and their 114 charges is huge.

Most discourse is centered around punishments, but even though I support Arsenal, current title rivals of the charged club, the more interesting question for me is if these financial rules should continue to exist in the first place, because of the consequences they result in.

Like any set of regulations that deal with more than basic property tights violations like fraud and aggression, they end up making it difficult for smaller entities, football clubs in this context, to compete.

Besides, because of financial regulations, more money is prevented from entering the system, which means wages, salaries, facilities and investments don't grow as much.

They create a cartelizing effect where the bigger ones keep getting bigger in terms of finances.

All this reflects on the pitch as well.

I've also thought about a bigger and even more interesting question of a given league's monopoly within a sport.

The entire industry of sports is dominated by a monopolistic mindset.

New enterpreneurs across industries often succeed, usurp the old guard and take the industry to new heights by changing the way the game is played. Currently, there's no room for something like that in any popular sport. There are no competing leagues with different rules, so the sport tends to become drab, boring and overly obsessed with rules and regulations.

Clubs or players in existent leagues decide against exiting because most sports are monopolized in each country due to the obsession of fans and spectators to maintain existing monopolies.

Sports fans are generally hell-bent on demanding a level playing field and the means to achieve this end is considered to be even more rules and stricter oversight and punishment. They have a tendency to get angry at big money owners because according to them, they ruin the essence of the game they love so much.

Sports would be more exciting if it's about pushing the limits rather than imposing them.

Below is my attempt at making a value-free, praxeological case to a privacy advocate that a stance in support of taxation is contradictory to their goals of enabling privacy for everyone.

Whether one is for or against either, governments and privacy cannot co-exist in peace.

Stories of characters with 'unrealistic' personalities and traits, with insane redemption arcs, are fun to watch or read. The ones that try to be edgy are tiresome, depressing and dreary.

A protagonist who is an annoying prick, gets angry at everything like a bitch, treats people like shit, lets himself consumed by vengeance and gives in meekly to his emotions is boring and dull. Anyone can be like that with very little effort or no effort at all.

On the other hand, one who aims at higher ideals like mercy, grace, self-realization, redemption and actually achieves even one of them is rare. It's not easy in any day and age, and give something to aspire to. How this person gets there is far more interesting, difficult and impactful.

Many of us have been brainwashed into hating banks so much that we rarely stop to think that a portion of our bank deposits are forcefully taken by the government in the form of bonds.

There's a lot of risk in using Bitcoin yes. But fiat also has tons of risks normal folks like us can't comprehend.

I'm in the camp of Austrian boomers who believe that things related human action cannot be 'scientifically' predicted using historical patterns, stats or equations.

One can and has to make 'entrepreneurial' predictions and adjust their positions regarding how other people will act in order meet their various ends, but it cannot be considered scientific. For a proposition to be 'scientific', it has to aim at universal truth and certainty irrespective of time and place.

Monetary returns can be accompanied by psychic returns from seeing fiat money crumble and collapse into irrelevance

I understand the incentives for covering clarity, ai, govt debt, 'macro', oil, us politics, data centers, geopolitics, left-right tribalism, etc. by Bitcoin publications. No judgement there. Gotta get engagement, clicks and all by whatever means lead to sponsors.

But I'm wondering if the audience of such publications actually prefers majority coverage dedicated to the above, like say 70% of articles/posts/media, while Bitcoin-native news get 30% of coverage.

Ibis wallet (which I haven't tried out yet) has added support for Ark via Second's Bark, unilateral exits on its existing Spark integration and full support silent payments in v5.0.

Already has support for proper on-chain features, watch-only, hardware signing, Liquid, remote connection to LN nodes as well.

This mobile wallet, on paper, seems promising. Has anyone tried it? Thoughts?

https://github.com/aeonBTC/IbisWallet

Do you believe that the 4-year cycle in price is still intact?

If no, what makes you think it's been invalidated?

If yes, what needs to happen for you to change your mind?

The latest Strikes newsletter is very good for keeping up with Lightning

https://lateststrikes.com/s/2026-36-37

By Fanis Michalakis:

https://x.com/FanisMichalakis

Suits, traders, degens, DCA stackers, bankers, normies, p2p exchangers are all a crucial part of the adoption story because liquidity is foundational.

It is foundational because more liquidity enables easier buying and selling through any means, in any context, for any type of economic actor. Bitcoin becomes easier to get in and out of, hence easier to accept or adopt. Its saleability improves, which means its quality as money improves.

Adam Back has been tracking the journey of Bitcoin price’s 200 week Simple Moving Average since October 2024 when it crossed $40,000. It recently crossed $65,000. He thinks it is Bitcoin’s ‘floor price’.

200 week SMA is calculated by taking an average of Bitcoin’s price recorded at the close of each of the last 200 weeks. For Bitcoin markets, each week opens at 12:00 AM GMT on each Sunday.

Link:

https://x.com/adam3us/status/2099119687124615314

I hope the idea that users don't care about unilateral exits is revisited and scrutinized heavily now.

When things go bad and users are unable to access their funds, they'll leave once issues are fixed and never come back.

If they don't care much about unilateral exits as a concept, they will care even less about the nuances of why they were not able to access or move their funds.

There can never be 'nuance', 'balance' or 'realistic thinking' when it comes to the subject of taxation. No ground can be yielded.

Laffer curve fiscal conservative balance my ass.

Fuck their solutions. Fuck their tradeoffs.

Get rid of every single tax on income, sales, imports, exports, goods and services, property, capital gains, all of them. Abolish them all.

Advocating for the abolition of legal tender laws, foreign exchange controls, capital gains taxes or any other taxes on the exchange or use of bitcoin is a top legislative priority if the goal is to get bitcoin adopted as a widely accepted monetary good

'Saleability' also means liquidity.

More liquidity for bitcoin against every single currency and asset that exists would be great for improving its saleability.

This means P2P exchanges, centralized exchanges, decentralised exchanges, OTC desks, shitcoin chains, banking apps, stock exchanges, derivative exchanges, forex exchanges and every conceivable exchange or trading platform supporting and enabling trades between bitcoin and anything that can be traded.

Nostr is the only place I post stuff but I do keep an eye on other platforms and how they are used because I like keeping track of these for some reason.

What the average daily user and the average usage pattern for each social platform looks like to me at the moment:

Instagram - watching and sharing reels, posting stories and relentlessly checking who has seen them, celebrity updates, thirst traps, brand marketing and following, fashion trends, social trends, discovery of local places to hang out/eat at or go for retreats/vacations to

Facebook - Older folks watching and sharing reels and even posting stuff still, buying and selling stuff on the marketplace, groups for local communities, brand marketing for older folks, political marketing for older folks.

Snapchat - Maintaining 'streaks' with people where snaps are sent to each other every day, even if they're just blank pictures or pictures of whatever is in front of them. Demographic is young and folks who use it are quite social. Like mostly younger than late 20's.

Twitter - keeping up with political and 'macro' trends and drama, fandoms of various kinds with very vocal people, lot of folks whose personas here are different from their IRL personas.

LinkedIn - career-related/professional stuff, trying to make onself or one's company attractive to employers/investors/clients. People from all ages. Mostly people from industries where there are big companies with suits.

Reddit - Extremely niche communities, finding people with similarly weird interests, NSFW content, folks here also like to keep their online activity unknown to their IRL connections.

Pinterest - lesser-known but widely used among women or visual artists afaik. Inspiration for designers, artists, home decorators, home makers, etc. Super sticky because it delivers new content so fast and in an easy manner.

YouTube - Nothing comes close to this when it comes to video content still. Vertical videos not as great as Instagram. Social activity is mostly Reddit-type and happens in the comments section. User base and user activity way too diverse to generalize.

TikTok - No clue since it's not available in India. From what I hear, this is where trends among younger than 20's people emerge. Like Instagram, folks from all ages spend a lot of time on this. Like a lot of time.

Not a debasement trade or a flight to sound money if shitcoins are also going up along with bitcoin

If it correlates to both equities and gold during different periods, maybe Bitcoin is its own thing because of its multi-faceted nature. Payments, energy, grids, money, finance, etc.

I've seen people say that BTC/XAU, i.e. Bitcoin priced in Gold, is the chart that really matters. That unless Bitcoin is going up there, we can't say that it's bullish.

I agree.

Going up in fiat terms is easy. Almost every asset does that.

2026 has been massive for the decline of communism in India.

For the first time in half a century, not a single Indian state has a commie party in power. They usually win elections in 2 or 3 states.

The ideology's armed branch, comprised of Maoists and Naxals, have been dismantled structurally. Lot of folks from these groups have laid down their arms.

There's still always the threat of the ideology becoming popular again in public opinion due to the consequences of fiat money and state laws and regulations.

The finishing stages of the 'long run' that those pesky Austrian economists keep warning about are approaching.

None of us are dead, Keynes

What now?

Regulations have a tendency to kill competition and entrepreneurship.

One does not need evidence to understand this.

If evidence is needed, look at what's happening to Peach Bitcoin, being forced by regulations to discard important features that give it a competitive edge over centralized exchanges.

Notwithstanding critical vulnerabilities being found and reported, I can only imagine how annoyed devs are at the amount of nothingburger/time-wasting reports, overblown narrative-pushing, clout-farming and headline-generating

Folks who dislike posting on socials or public forums probably have things to say about all this

Hans-Hermann Hoppe, one of the greatest political and economic philosophers of all time, comments on how Bitcoin and monetary metals can help improve economic literacy among the public and help them get insights into the dangers of government-controlled money

'Soild economic education is the enemy of government.'

-Triple-H, in a new and rare podcast appearance, where he mentions Bitcoin at around 54:30ish

Can certainly stop using the term 'maximalism' and throw it in lingo garbage, who cares?

Don't need labels like this to point out what's going on with shitcoin networks and what they actually do in practice, without making any value judgements whatsoever. Three popular examples:

1. Public company shitcoin L2s

Two US public co's launched their own L2s on a shitcoin smart contract network, or as they say in shitcoin lingo, 'rollups'. The corpos run the sole 'sequencer' of their respective rollups.

Which means, as far as I can tell, transactions can be censored, funds can be frozen and the 'network', or I should say 'system' to be accurate, can be taken down. They openly and unabashedly want to be 'compliant'. This is how they work in practice. Or they have to maybe.

2. 'Tokenised assets' or 'Real World Assets'

Stablecoins come under these.

They are still issued using smart contracts which can be programmed with 'compliance tools' aka censorship, freezing and seizure capabilities.

'Tokenized' stocks, bonds, digital representations of assets are mostly issued this way.

Stables' issuance side is already being gone after by regulations. Transfers post-issuance can be and are being frozen and censored already. Surveillance of them is a matter of when, not if.

Security issuance and exchange is regulated by the state monopoly, hence centralized infrastructure has not faced enough competition to evolve and provide faster clearing and settlement times, which shitcoin networks have been able to do. They offer regulatory arbitrage as well, albeit in a limited fashion. Issuers will still constrain themselves based on the laws of the jurisdiction they operate in.

3. Prediction markets

Of the two major players, one doesn't even use a shitcoin network on its backend. Just a normal database/clearinghouse. Both attract similar volumes.

The other supposedly decentralized one does engage in geoblocking. And it relies on centralized backends for important operations.

Shitcoiners can do what they want. Nothing wrong with what they do really. Regulatory arbitrage will always exist no matter what when regulations are garbage.

Preferences for monetary goods will vary. Not everyone needs to or will use a single monetary good. Shitcoins will continue to exist and there's nothing wrong with that either.

I can still interact with them economically while sticking to using Bitcoin as money. Enabling that is what markets are for.

But avoiding shitcoins is not an 'ideological', 'moral', 'religious' or 'puritanical' position for everyone who does it. It can as well be practical, value-free, economic and realistic.

When a Bitcoiner takes a position that:

•Bitcoin will outperform everything else. •Many people will accept or use bitcoin as money in the future. •Bitcoin will become the most salable monetary good. •It is prudent to accumulate as many sats as possible by buying or earning.

He is making an entrepreneurial choice and prediction based on his own economic reasoning. Such choices will not be objectively 'correct'.

Besides, not everyone who calls himself a Bitcoiner will provide the same answers when asked why they take the positions listed above.

If one gets that impression, they have not had real conversations with enough Bitcoiners where they pay attention to what they are saying.

Using lightning self-custodially makes me pull my hair out so much I might go fully bald soon.

Then, to avoid getting mad at computer code like a crazy person and to get some perspective, I ask some questions to clankers about the state of scaling on popular shitcoin networks.

•What would happen to *insert popular shitcoin network' if it faces volumes of millions, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of transactions per day like UPI, Visa, Mastercard, etc.? •What would happen to their blockchain sizes? •How are fees calculated and how do they respond to insane demand? •How would the network handle spam? •What would become of node hardware requirements when volumes are so high? •What happens to bandwidth requirements with their respective block time intervals? •If scaling solutions exist, how do they enable users to exit unilaterally to the base layer without trusting a third party?

etc etc etc

Curious that when Blackrock and other ETF issuers lower their swap thresholds for in-kind creations and redemptions, it is interpreted by Bloomberg and CoinDesk below that this would make it easier for people to move from self-custody to ETF shares.

It is obvious that this would make it easier for ETF holders to swap out from ETF shares to self-custody as well, but that is not mentioned in these articles at all.

https://archive.ph/MKNYo

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/08/26/E

Governments are actively engaging in monetary and economic censorship.

And we have thinkbois courageously declaring that privacy, self-custody and p2p exchange is not for everyone and that they are ideological fantasies.

Awww man it's sooooooo hard for an adult to watch one-hour BTC Sessions tutorials where he explains screen-by-screen, button-by-button, as he would to a toddler, how to use freedom tech tools.

Come on man 🤣

It eased my mind to understand that states are not exempt from basic economic casuality, consequences and constraints that apply to corporations, however omnipotent they or their lackeys present themselves to be.

States can try to tax, spend, surveil, manipulate, regulate, beg, borrow and steal to escape economic realities. But they will reap what was sown and eventually perish. All of them. Not because of moral consequences, but economic ones. It's not a coincidence that none of them have lasted more than a few centuries, which itself is a best-case timeframe for their vain existence.

If one wants a state to perish, he doesn't need to become an active libertarian, organize conferences, perform moral canvassing and live in perpetual annoyance at his friends and family to enable it. He can probably accelerate it at best, but at great personal cost which is not worth the trouble.

He doesn't have to be gaslit as a believer of a utopian fantasy which doesn't exist when in truth, it is the statists who are doing that.

States, more than machines or anything else, represent man's vain attempts at playing God rather than surrendering to his infinite love and grace. They will prove to be man's ultimate bane.

It's easy to believe in the claim that 'nothing is happening' in the development of software, tooling and projects built on Bitcoin, but it doesn't reflect reality.

The tools and projects section we cover on Tuesdays and Thursdays will give readers an idea. All the old daily issues are free to read.

https://www.btcbreakdown.com/t/tools-projects

ICYMI: Issue that tracks BOLT12 implementation progress on LND. Expected to land in November (based on milestone dates set for LND v0.22.0).

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/issues/10736

Been a few months since I started reducing or outright avoiding political conversations or stating value-laden opinions on anything in general.

Everything feels more chilled out. Social interactions are more laid-back. Overall mood is more pleasant. World doesn't feel annoying or broken.

Wertfrei frees one's mind and soul.

Technologists are wildly underestimating what the human mind is capable of.

Fair, because I don't think the fooe we eat, our lifestyles, mental states, education (*indoctrination) and environmental conditions are conducive to using our minds to full capacity, however varied it may be for different people.

There are also things about it we don't yet understand widely due to the limitations of both rational and empirical methods in science and what knowledge these methods consider as valid.

A potential disadvantage I see with using LLMs for writing long form content is the existence of readers' ability to smell out slop. It's real. Over a long enough timeframe, anyone can develop it.

I don't subscribe to the 'masses are dumb' worldview as it is not effective while trying to provide value to people.

Once they do develop this ability, it's likely that they'll start trusting the text you publish less and less, because they might start doubting that you've proofread it, verified it or put care and effort into refining it.

There is no such thing as an objectively 'good' body of text to read. But people will still judge it according to personal tastes and preferences.

If what they're expecting from a writer is just news reporting, slop might be fine to an extent. But if they want more, like valuable insights, analyses or opinions, slop could be off-putting.

Even for news, telling LLMs to answer basic questions required in journalism: 'why, when, where, who, how, what, which, etc.', i.e. research, which LLMs can be better at than human effort, is highly effective.

But choosing which answers are the most relevant for a given news story, how to interpret and present them, the appropriate theoretical tools to use, i.e. curation, empathy, reasoning (in the accurate definition*), judgement and entrepreneurship, are things humans are better at than LLMs. This requires time and care too.

*For now, I can only say bluntly that LLMs aren't really 'reasoning', based on my understanding of rationalist ideas.

RoninDojo v3.0.0 update announcement:

https://ronindojo.io/blog/announcing-ronindojo-v3

Idk if they're coming back, based on response from their support

The reason why Austrian economists are annoyingly nitpicky about definitions is that it impacts how one builds their reasoning, and over the long run, how they look at the world.

A small error with a tinge of conviction and brainwashing can lead to bizarre and erroneous conclusions that do not describe reality.

One can end up overestimating what bitcoin can fix or how easy it is for a new form of money to become widely accepted if they don't define money correctly.

One can underestimate how much the state can and has ruined if they don't understand what a monopoly really means.

Or one might conclude that noone should or can ever accumulate a lot of wealth honestly and that all forms of ownership is evil if they define exploitation in a different way.

One would end up justifying mass murder and widespread theft without remorse if they define justice in a botched manner.

Human minds are far more powerful than we think. We do not realise how gifted we are. If something as powerful as our mind loses its grounding in reality, it can wreak havoc and destroy everything around us and within us.

Btcd might look low on node counts, but if you take into account the users of tools/projects that are built on btcd, it's quite prominent in the ecosystem

'Realities of an alternative Bitcoin implementation'

By Calvin Kim, maintainer of btcd, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin written in Go.

'We have these brilliant engineers that write code in brilliant ways that only their brilliant minds understand' - Calvin on Bitcoin Core's code 😂

There are a few under-the-radar, not-so-talked about projects/tools/developments that are worth keeping an eye on:

•Floresta

•Compact block filters

•Splicing beyond channel management, splicejoins, etc.

•Validating Lightning Signer

•Payjoin

•Miniscript

•Yields from Lightning liquidity provision in general, potential of doing these trustlessly

•Mainstreamification of coinjoins

•Wallets potentially defaulting to coinjoins

•Yields from coinjoin coordination becoming a thing

•Frost, musig, collaborative custody, etc.

•LSP competition for channel provision

•Competition in Atomic swap provision, Boltz alternatives, yields from liquidity provision for swaps

•Use of Nostr in Lightning, CLINK

•Fiat <-> Lightning <-> Fiat payment apps like Tando

•Buying bitcoin by paying random fiat QR codes from strangers for bills

•Bolt12, push payments on Lightning

•Small non-public, non-popular, private, companies generating 'sats flows', and the term becoming a thing

Four proposed set of upgrades/changes to Bitcoin that are worth tracking:

•CISA

•Covenants

•Consensus cleanup

•Script restoration

No need to be for or against any of these at the moment.

Issue #623 of Bitcoin Breakdown is out

Covered a lot today

https://www.btcbreakdown.com/p/issue-623

Issue #622 of Bitcoin Breakdown is out

https://www.btcbreakdown.com/p/issue-622

If Bitcoin discourse feels like a drama-filled political reality show to you and you're sick of influencer slop, check out Bitcoin++ and all the content they are putting out on their socials, including their 'Insider Edition' stuff.

Lot of signal there.

Links:

https://btcpp.dev/

https://insider.btcpp.dev/

Issue #621 of Bitcoin Breakdown is out

https://www.btcbreakdown.com/p/issue-621

In Defense of Extreme Rationalism by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

https://mises.org/online-book/great-fiction-second-expanded-edition/18-defense-extreme-rationalism

In Defense of “Extreme Apriorism” by Murray Rothbard

https://mises.org/mises-daily/defense-extreme-apriorism

The nature of Bitcoin means that nobody can make moral or legal judgements on any of the transactions that are added to consensus valid blocks, even if they are purely monetary.

I can probably choose not to relay transactions related to Coldcard thefts and BTCPay Server exploits via my node, because I think they are legally invalid.

But if they are added to a block, my node accepts it. If it doesn't, it's not a part of the network anymore. This is uncomfortable to think about, but it is what it is.