1940s Los Angeles became the cultural capital of German and Austrian exiles - taking the cafes of Munich, Berlin, and Vienna and placing them between physical paradise and writing purgatory. In LA, airy aristocrats like Thomas Mann were put together with Marxist firebrands like Bertolt Brecht - what ensued was boredom, tedium, but also resilience and hope - and some of the most defining post-war literature to reflect on what led Germany to madness. I often wonder about what city or perhaps online community this might mean for the exiles of Ukraine, Russia, Iran, China and more. Perhaps Nostr?

The New Yorker

The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile

Wartime émigrés in L.A. felt an excruciating dissonance between their circumstances and the horrors unfolding in Europe.

until the next time Bitcoin price dips, friends

Remember your heroes: From top to bottom: Anna Politkovskaya, Liu Xiaobo, Francisco Ortiz Franco, Aaron Swartz.

Part of the reason why I think Nostr will win, eventually, is that nations understand how to control and co-opt corporations very well, but don't understand how to do it with protocols. There is no clear "face" or "villain" to paint. This is important because now Elon is seen as controlling X, which makes it an easy target and reduces the attack surface. Maduro, the hamfisted and bloody tyrant calls Elon out - Starmer, the incompetent looking to implement force to cover up his failings has also side eyed Elon. This has come up with "left-wing governments" like Lula's Brazil as well. The sentiment makes for sport and is the kind of emotional BS that politicians ply to control their peoples every day. But this sort of attack is confusing at best when it comes to Nostr and Bitcoin - because who exactly do you attack? "Shadow coders" isn't as easy to define as "Elon Musk".

if you find yourself caring about Bitcoin's short-term price trajectory, remind yourself not to care about Bitcoin's short-term price trajectory

Proton Wallet got suspended by that cursed X/blue bird app. @Proton Wallet is still on Nostr, not suspended, as things should be.

It was great to see a lot of in-person Nostr engagement and meetings in Nashville. Normalize sharing npubs

One of the most common questions I get is - will China unban Bitcoin? To save you a click, no. But it's well-worth diving into the whys and hows. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/07/24/will-china-unban-bitcoin-creating-a-huge-bitcoin-price-bump/

Looks like we're starting to get fake accounts like Jack@primal.net on Nostr, but that's defrayed by the trust gained by Jack's main account. A sophisticated attacker might spawn accounts that aren't on the platform already, making things difficult to track. Right now, Nostr's verification process is longest-standing npub with most followers, but perhaps, in time, there should be tracking on people who zap back and forth as "verification". This has the incidental benefit of getting people to use Bitcoin/LN even if they're not Bitcoiners.

With the news that Proton is releasing a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet, fun easter egg, I've been interviewing their CEO and co-founder Andy about Bitcoin for a couple of years. In that entire time, I've asked each time about them accepting Lightning Network (lol) - but it's very fun to see them go from accepting Bitcoin and getting more actively involved in it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/10/06/protons-ceo-on-why-they-continue-to-take-bitcoin-and-the-future-of-encryption/

I wrote about how Bangladesh spies on journalists, arrests people for freedom of expression and bans Bitcoin as part of a broader techno-surveillance state focused on control - now that nearly 200 are dead after protests and the Internet is being taken down by centralized authorities to hide videos and photos of the atrocities - we can see the real costs of these authoritarian, power-grabbing technical choices - along with real challenges to freedom money and freedom speech if we assume states are willing to take down the Internet in their borders. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/07/23/bangladesh-nearly-200-dead-under-the-cover-of-internet-censorship/

In Bangladesh, the Internet has been shut down - protestors are being killed and the military has been deployed. It's likely atrocities will continue to escalate. https://apnews.com/article/bangladesh-student-protests-violence-internet-shutdown-622c6c464c47860afee293e80550c051

A thought that occurs to me - should journalists encourage the use of one-time nsec/npub pairs to be sources through Nostr? Generally speaking, any way to contact a journalist usually involves email/phone numbers and is an announced channel (meaning intelligence agencies will also be able to find those channels). In China, Signal has had a fake app placed (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/08/30/malicious-signal-app-planted-on-google-play-by-china-linked-cyber-spies/) to trick people and in the past, I remember that some sources went dark because they had to download Signal to communicate with journalists, and the Great Firewall does pick up if you're trying to download Signal, which can be a crime in of itself. I want to hear as many downsides to this as possible, especially on the encryption/privacy front.

I wrote a guide on Nostr, trying to refresh people's knowledge of what you can do with Nostr access with the new apps and new people/content to follow. I also linked a tutorial for getting a zapping wallet set up, and NIP-05 as I've seen the most problems with that. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/07/17/your-guide-to-nostr-the-decentralized-network-for-everything/

I wrote about the companies getting onto the Bitcoin standard - accepting Bitcoin, and more and more, paying their employees in Bitcoin, and putting their reserves in Bitcoin while spending fiat as an operating flow. Nostr helped me put together more members of this list! https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/07/16/companies-are-getting-onto-a-bitcoin-standard/ CC: @Start9, @Zaprite, @Leo, @N, @npub1wu4a...3vw0, @npub17u5d...t4tp @Will Cole and the many Nostr peeps that help put this together.