A panel on bitcoin treasury companies. Because investment law makes it hard for institutions to buy bitcoin in their funds. You can't own BTC in you tax free ISA. So some companies that do hold bitcoin, notably microstrategy, became proxy investments. If you can't hold BTC you could maybe own a company that owns BTC instead. Microstrategy started because it's ceo realized it's dollar treasury was being debased by dollar printing. So tried buying BTC instead, with fantastic success. Copycat companies proliferated. They boomed and then busted. One panelist calls that a grift. A way to memeticly pump share price. A line can be drawn between profitable companies just storing their profit in bitcoin Vs those raising debt to buy without having a profitable business. Imagine a world transiting from using seashells for money to using gold coins. A company gathers seashells from investors to buy gold coins, which will do better than sea shells. Trouble is the next step where the company pays back it's investors with... More seashells. If you own shares in the company, you do not own bitcoin. You'll just get more old fashioned bank money. Still. It's worked as marketing, more people being convinced BTC has value. If you do buy a treasury company, check it's bitcoin not "digital assets" including shitcoins. #bitfest #bitcoin #bitcoinTreasuryCompanies

Gaskell of Sundial is presenting on a layer two protocol designed to enable bitcoin to generate yield. Most bitcoin is still, in long term hodl. Not helping anyone. Sure, you could lend your bitcoin for interest but that would count as a tax event and also involve losing custody. What if a programmable sidechain to help with scaling, allow borrowing and lending and products retail and institutions like? His solution is called Sundial and doesn't need new protocol changes or forks. Hard to say what it actually does though? Presumably something like liquidity in sidechains? Didn't really seem to get what he actually is building. 🤷 #bitfest #bitcoin

The conference also has a cinema room, showing bitcoin based films. Not mine, but I'm here for "finding home" by avi burra. Who did q&a after. A short Travelog about a visit a cypherpunk in Prague for BTC Prague. Which was a much bigger bitcoin conference. Lots of shots of a beautiful European city, and brief interviews with the people there. Many at restaurants where meals are paid for with bitcoin. I guess they have a circular economy there of some sort. Conclusion seems to be that fixing the money is important but building community is even more importanter. #bitfest #film #bitcoin

Not sure what the difference between a panel and a"fireside chat" is. There is no fire. But here's a fireside chat on what nostr is. Nostr is freedom for Identity. Accounts without hosts. Publishing without publidhers. Censorship resistance without platforms deciding who gets to say what. It's not a silo in which you can be tapped as the service enshitifies, since it's a protocol with accounts you control, you can't switch clients or relays without loosing social graph or contacts. Nostr is notes and Other Stuff, what other stuff? the panel is working on an audiobook publishing system with perhaps a required payment and affiliate revenue share. E-commerce, video publishing, zap stream for live video with zap payments. Onboarding can be tricky with private key management needing to be understood and such a range of options of clients and what relays are. Can we make it easier? Perhaps by abstracting away the fact it's nostr at all. Devine users don't even know they are using nostr. But this robs users of the understanding they may need to move clients or use the same account for video and notes, say. Perhaps by making a private messagnger, the panel thinks people are used to using multiple messenger apps. Though I find they hate that, and that's why they refuse to install signal. They feel they don't need it since they already have WhatsApp with a bigger network. In the end it's education. We have to teach literacy so people can read and write, we have to teach public keys encryption so people can do so securely. #bitfest #nostr

Geyser is a crowdfunding system. Lots of history of patrons raising funds from the public for art works or public infrastructure. Kickstarter and the like on the internet made this much easier. But it's all bank money which is conservative and restrictive. Not global. High fees and middle men. So doing it freely with bitcoin makes some sense. Censorship resistance and global scope. Geyser has been running and funding projects for a while. Non custodial and money goes to creators only if target reached in time, otherwise returned. All open source in smart contracts on chain. #bitfest #bitcoin #crowdfunding

Daniel prince from Once Bitten podcast on usury and banking. Usury is lending money, charging interest. Aristotle thought money was for use not for interest. He thought usury unnatural. Many religious quotes saying not to extract interest. "Money is power" but this is not gold or paper money. It's credit. Infinite money with interest. Which breaks everything. Imagine a mortgage. Prices of homes inflated by available interest. You have to give a deposit but the bank creates ten times that in new money! Who gets rich here? Banks are printing money. That inflates prices and dilutes money purchase power. Not just mortgages. Business loans, repair loans, global scale of all of this. Not only did they create that money, the charge interest on the money they created! And if you don't pay, they take the house. One judge found this all illegal, but was soon overruled and found mysteriously dead. What can you do eh? Only opt out. Don't take loans. Use a money that stores value instead of losing it. #bitfest #bitcoin #banking

Kitchen Mishap takes us through some bitcoin visualisations. Max keiser promoted KM to buy, and he learned from antonopolis book. So he started trying to graph it since software for money is scary if there's bugs you can lose lots of other people's money. He spirals blocks around the years, rendering views of the whole chain. #bitfest #bitcoin #dataVis

Day two introduced again by Mad bitcoins . Then the history of art on bitcoin includes satoshi and his original logo, ASCII art in the Blockchain, Cassius coins with scratch off keys, these pictured images of fake satoshi and 200 logos. Exploded from there, trading cards, the rare Pepe's. What makes it bitcoin art? Symbology. The logo. Religious symbology. Is it a cult? Memes. Memes catch and go in a fashion which is unpredictable and fits the whole history to a timeline. Art builds culture and heros proliferate bitcoin culture for all. Art traditionally goes up in value but none of it seems to outpace bitcoin itself. Some is for sale in the gallery but it'll unlikely be a better but then 30 percent discount bitcoin today 😆 #bitfest #art #bitcoin

Bit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin. Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors. She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works. The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined. But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist. When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero. #bitfest #bitcoin

Bit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin. Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors. She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works. The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined. But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist. When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero. #bitfest #bitcoin

Short panel on merchant adoption. Hipster burgers here in Manchester takes bitcoin. The owner says people are generally more curious than dismissive. Gresham's law implies that people spend their worst money first. They want rid of it. When you give merchants your bank money you give them the worst money. Be kinder to merchants! Ben from lnbits, the first merchant point of sales lightning devices, says merchants are interested because they want to have a broad portfolio. Accepting bitcoin is the easiest way to get it, without "know your customers" banking rules. #bitfest #bitcoin

Prem ghinde thinks that Alan is killing bitcoin. Alan is paid in government money, and saves in bitcoin. He's an imaginary straw man. Alan doesn't plan to spend his bitcoin though. Just stack it until he sells it. And this doesn't build the bitcoin network. Without transitions, when the block rewards run out, there will be no money for miners. Miners will need fees, which means transactions. Since he's paying in bank money, he's funding bankers instead of miners. He's encouraging retail to accept bank money instead of miners and lightning liquidity providers. Unlike Alan, Prem lives on the bitcoin standard. All in. Spending sats because he has no bank money to spend. It can be done, he insists. Today. Mostly by using gift vouchers bought with bitcoin. He's sad that people here are buying drinks from the hotel with bank cards instead of lightning. Stop watching the price, he says, it's only a measure of government money's collapse. Change your yardstick. Account in bitcoin. Dollars aren't even money, they are currency. If you must measure, do it against gold. Since moving to el Salvador he had learned Spanish, until he even dreams in Spanish. Try to dream in bitcoin. Every transaction is a vote, so stop voting for bank money. I think the main trouble with this is that tax event in every purchase, and the fact my employer won't set a wage in bitcoin even if they would convert to bitcoin to pay me. #bitcoin #bitfest

Meanwhile in the other room, Derrick from Shakespeare is giving a demonstration of live vibe coding. Building a gift exchange website. His prompts build a website quickly and the monitoring agent spots bugs in it's own code, v asking to fix them. It's all running locally, with only the ai requests going to the llm APIs. With a powerful enough GPU you could run open models locally instead. It's handling source control management, committing to a guy repo, and deploying to the web. It's certainly made a website faster than I would do as a dev, at least if I did do from scratch rather than a template. Would have to examine the code to check if it's got any big flaws that the agent checking for bugs missed. Ai coding isn't strictly bitcoin related but there does seem to be a big cross over in people interested in both. #bitfest #vibeCoding

Meanwhile in the other room, Derrick from Shakespeare is giving a demonstration of live vibe coding. Building a gift exchange website. His prompts build a website quickly and the monitoring agent spots bugs in it's own code, v asking to fix them. It's all running locally, with only the ai requests going to the llm APIs. With a powerful enough GPU you could run open models locally instead. It's handling source control management, committing to a guy repo, and deploying to the web. It's certainly made a website faster than I would do as a dev, at least if I did do from scratch rather than a template. Would have to examine the code to check if it's got any big flaws that the agent checking for bugs missed. Ai coding isn't strictly bitcoin related but there does seem to be a big cross over in people interested in both. #bitfest #vibeCoding

Britain is broken, in various ways. Could adopting bitcoin help it bounce back? Renegade Investor thinks so. Central banks printing money causes government debt and artificially low interest rates. Their monetary policy is political and done for bankers not for people. Bitcoin monitory policy is fixed. Lockdown during pandemic was funded by money printing, and caused a big inflation pump and government debt increase. It caused the current cost of living crisis. Lockdown could have been impossible under a bitcoin standard. In pounds the cost of living has gone up lots over the last decade. But in bitcoin it's gone down massively. He thinks wealth redistribution is taking money from productive people and giving it to those who aren't increasing the country wealth. Here I disagree entirely. Wealth is reality being taken from the workers and given to the capital owners. We are redistributing wealth towards the rich currently. Taking the wealth created by workers to give to idle owners. I also wonder, would limited government power be good? Did the lockdown save lives? Would it do do under a worse pandemic? Limited government power may be double edged. Not sure why he thinks immigration is funded by government, rather than immigrants increasing the country wealth. Seems to think bitcoin could reduce immigration, which I find unbelievable and undesirable. This talk I disagree with quite a lot. #bitcoin #bitfest #britain

A panel of people from a few different countries. The UK, where the event is, and the US currently have money which perhaps is good enough that the people there don't see much need to replace the money. Running global reserve currency helps exploit other poorer countries. The problems are fairly invisible. But in other countries, poorer countries with even worse money, countries more exploited by debasement of the global reserve currencies, the problems with government money are more evident. They see the need for an alternative more strongly. Adoption is important though. Money is only money if it's widely accepted. So given the choice of more users or higher price, the panel would all pick more users. #bitfest #bitcoin

Despite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy. I'm at bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money. It could hardly be worse. The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren't all in are trying to buy more at the discount. After an introduction by Mad Bitcoins, Joe Bryan explains the problem with government money. He imagines an island on which two types of money are tried, with a dividing wall between them. When economic problems hit, government can just print more money on the fiat side. Everyone now using money which is worth less. Distorting prices, inflating asset prices, making the rich (who hold assets) richer and the poor (who have to pay inflated prices) poorer. Driving wealth inequality. On the hard money side, government must tax properly. Take in more from the rich rather than inflating to take it from the poor. Reducing wealth inequality. On the government money side, the wealthy monitize houses, stocks, resources. Saving in money is impossible, its inflated away. So they save in assets and hording resources. Capital is misallocated. The youth can't afford houses. Poverty traps are caused. The only way out is printing more for benefits. Making it all worse. More economic crises, more printing. More government debt. Eventually, the wall is broken. Government money people can save in the hard money instead. It reduces the value of government money further. More printing. More inflation. Eventually, war. Funded by printed money. The dollar is the best of a bad bunch all other government money is falling in value even faster. I wonder, is bitcoin really this better money though? It's limited, hard, and can't be printed without energy investment. I'm still unsure that fixing money fixes the world. -- Note: "crypto" is mostly more like government money than bitcoin. It can be printed indefinitely by it's makers, does not cost it's makers to print. Crypto is usually just a scam people to get more bitcoin. Bitcoin is not crypto. #bitfest #bitcoin

Eugene points out that in the current centralised social media, your identify is held by the provider. On nostr, the user holds the keys to their own identity. One identity works with many apps. It can't be revoked deleted or taken over by the service provider. This gives you a credible exit, you own the account so you can move it elsewhere if the web host is toxic or abusive. #nostr #nostrshire

Panel talking about dark markets on nostr. Nostr can be quite anonymous and encrypted and connected to payment via bitcoin. Can it therefore do Silk Road? Allow anonymous markets? Nobody wants to publicly advocate for selling illegal drugs, but yeah, sure, people could do that. There's even protocol types for market places. Relay owners might get into legal issues if they are forwarding illegal market listings. But this is true in general, there are also illegal images and even illegal text. Nostr relays and Devs might find themselves in legal trouble anyway, due to the general legal crackdowns on internet requiring age proof and id on websites obstensively to protect kids. These are freedoms we all need to fight for. Perhaps brains will drain to more free jurisdictions? Devs move to where open development is legal? Not the panel at least. They want to say at home. #nostr #nostrshire #darkMarkets

Angor is a crowdfunding protocol for nostr and bitcoin. Dan here is building it. Kickstarter without middle men. Accountability is key. What stops the fund raiser just fleeing with the coin? Funds are programmed to be released in stages, time locked in a multisig. So if they aren't meeting milestones, investors can withdraw. If the founders are buying lambos instead of building, just cash out at that point. Permissionless and decentralised, no servers except nostr relays and bitcoin nodes. No third party's claiming 30 percent fees. The system is a nostr client scanning relays for investment object types. Allowing investment into the funding contracts and subscription to updates. #nostr #nostrshire #angor