sachin
npub1xnc6...3qnl
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.
Bitcoin Breakdown
Tools & Projects | Bitcoin Breakdown
Bitcoin-only daily newsletter with the highest signal-to-noise ratio in the industry
ICYMI: Issue that tracks BOLT12 implementation progress on LND. Expected to land in November (based on milestone dates set for LND v0.22.0).
GitHub
[epic]: BOLT 12 Implementation Roadmap · Issue #10736 · lightningnetwork/lnd
BOLT 12 is an alternative to BOLT 11 invoices with reusable offers, a two-step negotiation protocol where a payer decodes an offer, requests an inv...
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.
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.
'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
Bitcoin Breakdown
Boltz Group Takes Over ⚡, Goldman Buys NEOS 🏦, OCC Eyes Bitcoin Banks 🏛️
Boltz may stay online, but Bitcoin’s swap infrastructure still relies too heavily on one service.
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:
bitcoin++
bitcoin++ · Developing the frontier of bitcoin
bitcoin++ hosts technical conferences, workshops, and hackathons for bitcoin developers and builders around the world.
bitcoin++'s Insider Edition | ~nifty~ | Substack
bitcoin++ is an international bitcoin dev conference series. "Insider Edition" is our newsroom covering what's happening in and across the bitcoin+...
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.