Just closed my Venmo account. It's messed up they can just change the rules on people retroactively. I wonder if this will open any eyes. What's worse is that Venmo lets the buyer select whether this is a business tx. So, you have to trust anyone paying you to not mark the income as reportable. Anyway, if anyone here doesn't yet know how to be free of financial surveillance, you know who to talk to.

New tax rule on apps like Venmo, PayPal could spell confusion for small businesses

Starting next year, a new IRS rule will require anyone who earned over $600 on payment apps in 2023 to file a 1099-K form.

I've noticed that people see some things they think are really messed up, and so they won't take the time to learn about them, because they think nothing they can do can change that. Only once I realized I *could* do something, did I really start learning.

It's because of patent law that healthcare is so expensive. Drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers use the state as a cudgel to strengthen their monopoly, exploit the vulnerable, and extract wealth. Then people are convinced to make excuses for billion dollar corporations, oh no, they won't innovate, there won't be new drugs, how will they recoup costs? And I'm here like, we can't just separate R&D from manufacture? Trade associations are a thing. The industry could pool resources to maximize value. It's not like demand for new drugs is going away. Anyway. That's the kind of thing that runs though my head when I see drug advertisements. It's silly, this whole system is super silly. I feel like I'm taking supersillium.

Bitcoin is an issue that transcends politics, because when bankers steal our wealth by inflating the currency, everyone who buys food at the grocery store feels that. Bitcoin automates the bankers' jobs so they can never manipulate the system in their favor again.

Whether January 6th was a peaceful protest or an attack on democracy is irrelevant, because objectively, it doesn't matter. None of it matters. It's just a bunch of nonsense They want us to be mad about. But there's no sense in being mad about it, or spending time on it, it's all a distraction from the mission: Hardening the protocol. Building what's needed. Gaining adoption. Communicating the message. And maybe the message of Bitcoin is that we can opt out. No longer do we have to be amateur Wall St speculators, part-time economists, political philosophers or pundits. We can just get on zero, tune it all out, and be friends with each other. The only thing that's in my control is to focus on what matters to me: Fixing the money, so that maybe we have a shot at fixing all the other things wrong in the world. And ultimately, where one spends their time is an investment. And like I wouldn't put my money in stocks or shitcoins, I won't invest my time in getting caught up in politics.

It really does seem that there are powerful people who benefit from giving us reasons to fight each other.

So, this video by @skdh affirms a bit of a theory that I've been thinking about... I'm pretty sure the galactic community Satoshi hails from doesn't use radio waves to communicate, it's just too archaic, slow, and unreliable at interstellar distances. It's very possible the "no-communication theorem" isn't a fundamental limitation of physics, like the speed of light, but just a limitation of our understanding of quantum physics. It could be very possible that faster-than-light communication could just be a protocol problem of some sort, and we're not very good at quantum protocols, because we don't have decent quantum computers. But what if Satoshi gave us the concept of Bitcoin, not only for us to become a postscarcity civilization by incentivizing Humanity to harness more energy than we need, it also provides a profit incentive to invest heavily in quantum computing. There'll be a land grab to repatriate bitcoins held in P2PK addresses. In this case, we're going to need a soft fork to add "P2QR" addresses, Pay-to-Quantum-Resistant address keys. I'm thinking something based on FALCON makes sense. FALCON signatures are definitely larger, maybe by about 10x, but the additional security would be worth the additional bytes, imo. If there ever was a galactic community of peaceful extraterrestrials who, out of kindness, gave us a nudge in the right direction at a time we could not only make use of it, but also truly need it, I think it'd be mighty clever to give us Bitcoin. If bitcoinization does usher in an era of economic and technological prosperity and expansion, a Bitcoin Renaissance, as it were, maybe with the incentives built into Bitcoin, we'll be well-prepared for the big moment where we can meet Satoshi's kind and thank him for what he did for us. Remember: Everything is good for Bitcoin. Even hacking addresses via quantum computers, and meeting aliens, it all hardens the protocol. - The Exophiles, Datalinks

Re: A potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan... Whatever happens, you know those upgrades you wanted? That 5 year old laptop you've been thinking about replacing? Maybe buy your electronics now. Let's call it "ePrepping". If something really bad happens, the price of everything will double and it won't go back down.

Inflation is so weird. I constantly catch myself thinking... was it always that expensive? How long ago was it cheaper? Such a mindfuck.

Although some have disagreed, I'd describe a Bitcoin layer as an open protocol that uses either the Bitcoin blockchain or Lightning payments network for settlement or consensus. For example, RGB uses an L1 UTXO for consensus of ownership over an asset, and it also makes use of LN to form a system of token channels. An open protocol could be defined as software capable of being self-hosted that has an interface that other applications can make use of. This could be accessible by either RPC, REST, or embedded APIs. One might be tempted to split layers into separate payments layers and application layers. But if one sees Nostr as Cash App, Venmo, or Strike (social payment platforms) but just in a protocol that other applications can build upon, in what traditionally would been used an API, then in every case where a layer has a financial application, it too can be a payments layer, so such a distinction doesn't make sense for the prior definition of layers. Further, anything worth doing can have a financial application of some sort, especially if built into a protocol. Many protocols don't use money, or worse, they use their own fee token, and this inhibits their capability to scale and mitigate against bad actors. So, I think it makes sense to call things like Nostr, Fedimint, Cashu, LNBits, Carbonado, etc., L3s. Another interesting case is the future Lightspeed Network (LSN), which builds on RGB... I would still classify it as an L3 payments network, since it helps scale Lightning with even more performance and smaller denominations of a sat. Perhaps in the bitcoinized future, LSN will be a better analog for point-of-sale Visa payments than LN, which would probably be a better analog for something like interbank FedACH. Indexes like Electrum usually fit between L3s, so they could be considered L2s. The Ordinals index currently has no off-chain payments capability itself, so it could be classified as an L2. Non-fungible assets in most cases can only really be settled on the base layer since there's not enough liquidity for routing between multiple payment channels.

Ironically, Elon's fear of competition makes me want to opt out even more

Bitcoin companies don't really have to compete, even if they're doing similar things. TAM is 8 billion+, and using the UTXO set of ~85 million as a rough heuristic for how many "Bitcoin users" there are, we're only about 1% in. Not everyone needs to care as much as Bitcoiners do to use Bitcoin, but I see newcomers make "The Journey Through The Rabbitholes" all the time. We're a growing community, and the future looks very bright. We need all sorts of individuals working hard at finding different approaches to crack certain markets. It doesn't have to be coordinated or centralized. Direct cooperation is nice, but even serving to inspire others is sometimes good enough.

Nothing better than a good BitDevs

If you think "Chinese" is a race, not a nationality, maybe you're the racist

There's no such thing as a normie bitcoiner. We've all had to go through a lot to be this weird. But that doesn't mean we're alone. It's good to be on this journey together, ya weirdos.

Just found the PoW option on Gossip. I hacked my version to output leading zeroes updates and compiled with as many optimizations as I could think of. Let's see how this goes! 40 bits of SHA-2 on a 32 thread Ryzen 9 5950, LFG!

Really great work on Gossip so far, @@Mike Dilger ☑️. I just synced my fork of the Gossip client and installed the latest on master locally. Works fantastic! Great work, Mike, seriously. Also, to address the concern of my having too many relays might be a DDoS of the network, at the slightest hint that I can't connect to a relay, I make sure to remove it. Culling dead relays dramatically improves client performance, I've found.