Made the same tweet and nostr note. Note: 5 likes, 210 sats Tweet: 10 likes, 0 sats Plus I pay about 20k+ sats per month for Twitter, so I'm losing sats with that platform (though I've also supported plenty of paid relays, too)

Our code contains few comments, and recently that left room for ambiguity which was caught in code review. I added an assertion and error condition to catch the ambiguity, but I realized; if I had written a comment, would I have ever come to write the code to handle this error condition? Lesson: Don't comment your code, just write more code. There are lies, damn lies, and then there's documentation.

In a furry chat I started a while back, someone posted a hammer & sickle, or as I think of them, the "soviet swastika". I told them it was tasteless and the cause of much death and misery and I'd rather not have it in the chat. They pushed back, saying, hasn't the dollar done the same thing? Will you ban images of the dollar? And I thought about it for a moment, and I responded: "I'm fine with that. It's well-known that debasement of the petrodollar is used to fund the military industrial complex to fight forever wars." They weren't mad, in fact, they were impressed by my consistency. I think many a Bitcoiner would be hard-pressed to disagree with me there, either. After all, we understand better than anyone, the dollar is not synonymous with the practice of capitalism. In many ways, becoming a Bitcoiner lends a sense of perspective that transcends traditional politics. That said, if you want to add a new opcode to Core, things might get a little contentious.

I had a very @Lyn Alden thought just now... I just think it's interesting that W2 employment came about in order to fight wars and reduce inflation caused by deficit spending.

Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 - Wikipedia

And here we have the war, record deficit spending, more funding to the IRS, increased financial surveillance, FedNow, and CBDCs. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I was worried when Damus removed Zaps, Nostr usage was reduced. The news about #Twitter today is a good reminder that often the centralized systems do the selling for you... I see lots of people getting Nostr-pilled!

What if the year on Satoshi's planet is 3.992699064567648 Earth years? (210,000 blocks * ~10 minutes) / 60 minutes / 24 hours / 365.25 days

Will be giving a talk at Boulder Bitcoin on the 27th:

Meetup

Bitcoin is for Everyone, Tue, Jun 27, 2023, 5:30 PM | Meetup

Hunter Beast is a Bitcoin wallet developer and member of the LGBT community. He'll be offering his perspective on why Bitcoin matters in a presenta...

I'm really looking forward to this one!

So, a discussion came up in a popular community I'm a part of, comprised of individuals who are highly critical towards "crypto". I've typed up this explainer for them, and maybe others might find value in it, also, so I'm posting it here. -- While I'm hardly objective, I've thought about it a lot, from numerous perspectives throughout my life, and perhaps others might find value in mine. I know not everyone here wants to read this (TL;DR), and that's fine, nobody is entitled to anyone's time, this is not really the place for this discussion, and yeah, people will call me crazy or shout me down and that's fine, I'm used to it, but hopefully someone here might learn from this or find it valuable, and in the very least this can ease my conscience knowing I've tried my best to explain. So, the thing to know about "crypto" is, anything that calls itself cryptocurrency is a scam. We know who the founder is, they've allocated a significant amount of funds to themselves and insiders, the exchanges are in on it, and then they prey on unsuspecting retail investors. The other thing to know is that Bitcoin is different, in the whitepaper that presented it to the world, it didn't call itself "cryptocurrency", but a "peer to peer electronic cash system". There's a lot one has to learn in order to put money into it in a safe way, and if you don't know that, there's a very good likelihood you will lose your savings. This article is worth reading to better understand this:

Swan Bitcoin

Coinbase and the Insider Exchange Dump

Bitcoin is very different from all other cryptocurrencies. In fact, it shouldn’t even be considered the same asset class.

They'll also refer to themselves as "altcoins", or alternatives to Bitcoin, that offer more features than Bitcoin, and so you should give them your money instead, since it's better than Bitcoin and theirs will instead go to the moon. They'll also peddle things called "stablecoins", sold as something that can't possibly lose money, and might even "earn yield" (spoiler, you are the yield), and there's been a number of instances of these, none of them trustworthy, because they all require trust of some kind. All of these things are what Bitcoiners call an "affinity scam":

Affinity fraud - Wikipedia

Bitcoiners are essentially the doomsday preppers of the financial world, or monetary gun nuts ("right to keep and bear funds", "separate money from state"). I think it's also fair to call Bitcoiners religious zealots, there's a few good parallels; the message in the genesis block which implies Bitcoin's politically-motivated nature, as a response to the global financial crisis, there's also the prophet who "went nym for our sins", and an eschatology known as "hyperbitcoinization", a situation in which all other stores of value hyperinflate against Bitcoin (a furry came up with this term in 2014, btw). This is the original article on hyperbitcoinization by Cosmos Stag:

Hyperbitcoinization | Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

This article is about the possibility of Bitcoin-induced currency demonetization, or hyperbitcoinization, which is what would happen to any hapless...

What we're preparing for is the possibility the central bankers might one day be really bad at their jobs. They seem to be doing a decent job so far, and I hope that continues well into the future, because I don't see Bitcoin as a "get rich quick" scheme. Some of us have turned to religion as a way to keep ourselves from losing our minds, for any number of reasons that hopefully seem quite obvious from those outside the community with a sense of empathy for people doing something they truly believe in. For more on the perspective that Bitcoin is a religion, I very much recommend this highly critical piece on the community of Bitcoiners:

X (formerly Twitter)

nic carter (@nic_carter) on X

If you're somewhat new to the space and you're wondering why self-professed Bitcoiners today cheered on SEC attacks against the two most important ...

Regardless, if the central bankers screw up, especially the ones managing the supply of the global reserve currency, there's the possibility of what's called "financial repression". This is most common in currencies in developing countries, and it's basically a way to pay off debts denominated in their own currency:

Financial repression - Wikipedia

I'm not an economist, and this viewpoint runs counter to prominent, mainstream economics, but a theory has been put forth that money as a store of value can be compromised through monetary expansion, and debt issuance is a form of monetary expansion (as money that didn't exist before that's good to spend now). Think, mortgages, credit cards, student loans, car loans, corporate debt, treasuries, etc. In a system that's based largely on debt, with something like 97% of our money supply issued by private banks, and given guarantees on that debt by central banks, there's a possibility that things can go haywire and the Federal Reserve will have no choice but to financially repress the global reserve currency, which has never happened before (at least in recent times) and might result in chaos, or things might turn out perfectly fine. What it would cause is a massive wealth concentration into big banks, which is already happening now that big banks are earning very high interest rates on US government debt, treasuries. Another thing to know is that federal deficit spending is a form of monetary expansion, and the Federal Reserve is currently insolvent, using money they don't have to discourage big banks from lending (and further increasing the money supply, leading to monetary debasement and commodities price inflation). That said, I'm not predicting the system will collapse anytime soon, since nobody can know whether it will or it won't, or when. This is a good article for more information on this:

Lyn Alden

How the Fed "Went Broke"

For the first time in modern history, the Fed is operating at a loss. This article explores what that means for savers and investors.

The best I can do is, try to build the technology needed to scale this system that automates away the role of central banks in a way that can safely serve the needs of everyone who might need it. For anyone with questions on how to put money in Bitcoin safely, I recommend reading the Swan blog post which was the first link above:

Swan Bitcoin

Coinbase and the Insider Exchange Dump

Bitcoin is very different from all other cryptocurrencies. In fact, it shouldn’t even be considered the same asset class.

Again, apologies for the long post, but thank you for reading, and I hope this was helpful to you in some way. #bitcoin #orangepill #toximaxi

If you want a simple explanation of #RGB to share with your friends, I've put one together. Feedback appreciated. -- RGB is a generalized smart contract system built on #Bitcoin and #Lightning. It's scalable and private because it keeps contracts off the blockchain, and the parts of a contract that can change are anchored to a little piece of a bitcoin called an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO). When this piece of a coin is spent, it can never be spent in the same way again, so we know, that part of the contract has changed. This is similar to a tamper-evident single use seal, like a bag with a zipper that can only be zipped once. Even better, only the person who owns the bag with a single use seal can zip it. And like a bag, it can contain multiple items. Multiple tokens can be anchored to a single UTXO, and when they're spent, the ones you're not spending are sent back to yourself, to another UTXO you own. Because contract data is kept off-chain, decentralized storage protocols like Storm and Carbonado are used to keep and communicate contracts reliably. This is then used by wallets to do things like mint, transfer, accept, and verify on token contracts. There's not really a need for an RGB node, even in web browsers, since the code needed to validate contracts can be built to run in browsers. This is what is meant when we say client-side validation (CSV); only the wallet needs to know about the contracts, and only peers that interact with each other need to know the contract data. This allows for privacy and scale in a number of ways: - Contracts are not put on-chain - Contracts are not executed on nodes - Multiple contracts can anchor to a single UTXO - The UTXOs are very small and look like ordinary Taproot payments If you request a payment from someone, nobody can see what other tokens you have, even if they have the contract. This is because a really big number is added to the UTXO to make a blinded payment. Nobody can know which UTXOs have tokens by scanning the chain on an explorer, and there's no way to send someone tokens if they don't request and accept them. -- I hope this is a good start towards understanding RGB! A great way to understand it even better is to actually try it out on any of these wallets:

MyCitadel - Ultimate digital sovereignity for bitcoiners

MyCitadel - Ultimate digital sovereignity for bitcoiners

MyCitadel is a suite of software, hardware and Internet services focused on digital individual sovereignty and privacy. Primarily, is a wallet for ...

Iris Wallet

(not to be confused with iris.to, or IRS wallet)

BitMask Wallet

The Browser Extension for Decentralized Applications on Bitcoin. Access Bitcoin Finance, NFTs (UDAs) and more using RGB protocol, with full financi...