Notes and Other Spam Transmitted by Relays.

How can I say I am bullish on ecash without saying I’m bullish? View quoted note →

Ecash. No smart contracts or zkrollups required. Cryptography you can understand. View quoted note →

Don’t confuse cooperation for control.

Attention Internet Shoppers - Ecash is Here.

Bitcoin Calendar

🗞️ New York Times Writes About E-Cash

On October 19, 1994, the New York Times published an article dedicated to David Chaum's E-Cash.

This gives me goosebumps

Bitcoin Calendar

🗞️ New York Times Writes About E-Cash

On October 19, 1994, the New York Times published an article dedicated to David Chaum's E-Cash.

The innovation that changed the world. View quoted note →

Another Promise Theory diagram that illustrates that zaps are the way to go. I promise you something (a nice song, for example), you zap me.

80% of reputation is just showing up on time.

Totally enjoying this book, Thinking In Promises, by Mark Burgess. The cartoon explains it all. IMHO, #nostr is a concrete application of promise theory.

Louvre Loot Descends Into a Murky Underworld BY KELLY CROW The Wall Street Journal Oct 22, 2025 After a group of thieves brazenly broke into Paris’s Louvre Museum and snatched eight pieces of jewelry that form part of France’s crown jewels, the chase is on to find them before they filter into the black market. The fear: that these historic artifacts could be dismantled and sold for parts. “Everybody in the business is talking about this right now,” said Robert Wittman, a former art-crime investigator with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who runs his own art-recovery practice. By everybody, he means both jewelry thieves and the private investigating firms who make a living hunting them down. The clandestine global network for stolen art, including jewels, trades billions of dollars’ worth of illicit pieces a year, according to the FBI, stretching from diamond-cutting shops in Dubai and Delhi to jewelers in New York, Antwerp and Tel Aviv. The U.S. alone logs more than $1.2 billion in jewelry thefts a year. If there is no reward or chance for a quick ransom, private investigators said the thieves will likely seek to smuggle the Louvre’s stolen gems to black-market jewelers willing to re-cut and reshape the bigger jewels into smaller, untraceable ones that can be resold anywhere. Unlike Picasso paintings or Rolex watches, stolen gems can be broken out of their jewelry settings and their gold settings can be melted down because such commodities retain value as precious metals and gems. They won’t fetch as much without the luster of their Napoleonic ties, but they’ll still be evaluated on their natural qualities as gemstones. Sunday’s theft follows a rash of gold-related thefts across Europe over the past couple of years, a spree jewelers link to the climbing price of gold on the commodities markets. Tobias Kormind, managing director of online jeweler 77 Diamonds, said the temptation for thieves to steal anything gold or glittery from museums has grown now that gold can be resold for over $4,000 an ounce, up 60% in the past year alone. Nearly 40% of jewelry thefts in the U.S. are smashand-grab jobs by organized crime outfits, according to the National Retail Federation. The most infamous jewelrytheft gang with Balkan ties is known as the Pink Panthers, an outfit cited across Europe and Asia for dozens of jewel thefts worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the past couple of decades. But the Pink Panthers rarely leave behind any evidence, Wittman said, whereas the Louvre incident saw several missteps. The team of four burglars at the Louvre left behind the furniture lift and the angle grinders they used to cut through the window and the display cases. They also left behind a yellow construction vest. Most significantly, they dropped the 1855 crown of Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s wife, with nearly 1,400 diamonds and 56 emeralds. It was found damaged on the street outside the museum, officials said. “Whoever did this is audacious, but amateurish,” Wittman said. Anthony Roman, a private investigator with art-crime experience, said he was surprised the crown was left behind. “If the thieves are going to drop a crown, they’re not pros,” he said. The fact that the gems that were stolen had been fashioned into jewelry in the 1800s might have played a role in their appeal to the thieves. Newer and lab-grown gems are often embedded or scored with microscopic serial numbers, but older jewels lack such markers, said Chris Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, a global art-recovery firm. But whatever their era, jewels appeal to thieves because they are easy to hide and move. “Who wants to get caught with a Picasso hiding under their bed when they can melt down the gold and break the jewels out of their settings and just sew them into a jacket and fly to a dodgy jeweler?” Marinello said. It is unclear how pure the gold is on the jewelry settings among the Louvre pieces— sometimes historic pieces are less pure than today’s jewelry. Laure Beccuau, the prosecutor in charge of investigating the heist, has valued the stolen jewelry at around $102 million. Ironically, the thieves are unlikely to profit much from their stolen haul. Roman said thieves rarely get more than 10% of a gem’s market value for their illicit goods, in part because they have to share their cut with others who know about the crime to protect their confidentiality. On the other hand, thieves could earn more hawking stolen jewels on the black market than they might with stolen paintings, given that looted or missing artworks tend to get logged into global databases like the Art Loss Register. Nothing equivalent exists for historic, stolen jewelry. Marinello thinks museums could require visitors to show photo identification. Of course, if the Louvre started asking tourists to show their IDs before they could get in the door, “they’d have lines around the block all day long,” Wittman said. But right after the heist, it didn’t make a difference if there were lines. The museum was closed. Shared via PressReader connecting people through news

Negentropy syncing is the way of the future. I experienced this firsthand a few months back when my servers were under a DOS attack and I had to shift my #nostr #safebox relay data to a new server infrastructure. I used negentropy with #strfry and switched everything without missing a beat. /cc @jb55 View quoted note →