This is incredible. It’s the one bottleneck that prevent AI from delivering a turnkey solution. Instead of telling what to do, it can now do it and deliver a working product. WOW View quoted note →

Bitcoin and the tariff wars The New Testament Bible talks about building your house on a foundation of rock and warns of the dangers of building your house on the sand which is a poor foundation. Your home is the place where you have chosen to stake your claim in this life. It's the place where you are going to build a place of safety and raise a family. It's the place you come home to at the end of a busy day to rest, and it's the place where you and your spouse talk about your dreams for the future and make your plans. Similarly, a business needs solid foundation, but this stability is not created about the physical location you choose to operate your business from. It is the political, social, and economic environments you choose to place your business. Some regions are better than others, and some countries are better than others. However, it does not matter how great things are right now, circumstances can change quite quickly. The recent global shutdown caused by COVID are still fresh in everyone's mind. Political changes, through elections or revolution, are famous for making sweeping changes to the laws and regulations of the previous regime. Right now, the phrase “tariff war” is on everybody's minds. Stock markets have reacted strongly to the Trump proposed tariff and countries are responding with tariffs of their own. Nothing rattles international global trade quite like a tariff war, or at least threats of one. All of this creates uncertainty. Uncertainty makes planning extremely difficult. But businesses need to plan. They need to figure out supply chains, distribution channels, new product lines, branding and marketing to introduce these new product lines, and of course the regulatory environment into which these products fit. Even with stable political conditions, legislation can change. Suddenly with the swift stroke of a pen, your bestselling product could be in trouble. We haven't even added currency fluctuations into this discussion. Sometimes it's a country on the other side of the world that has a problem which reverberates all the way through to affect your business. One common thread about uncertainty is that is generally completely outside of your control. So where does Bitcoin fit into this? Bitcoin’s is a simple idea perfectly executed and runs entirely unsupervised and uncorrupted since its inception in 2009. Bitcoin has a simple supply issue schedule of a new block every ten minutes and this supply halves every four years. That’s it. And it has done this without interruption since 2009. It is so predictable the reliable that it is often described by the phrase “tik tok, next block”. I think it is worth emphasizing the fact that this is Bitcoin just following its code; no more, no less. It is not affected by a politician calling for a tariff war. It is not affected by the sudden devaluation of a currency or the hyperinflation of said currency. It is not affected by COVID lockdowns. It is not affected by a supply chain shock anywhere in the world. In fact, there is nothing that can be done to shut Bitcoin down or to alter it in any way without expending such significant resources as to make that likelihood nigh impossible. Even people heavily involved in the Bitcoin community that have, in the past, called for changes to the Bitcoin protocol, insisting that there is a dire emergency or cataclysmic event about to happen that required an urgent change, and have not succeeded. Bitcoin continues uninterrupted, unconcerned, and unchanged. This is the rock foundation for your business that is called bitcoin. If your business accepts Bitcoin for payments of goods and services, you have started building your solid foundation. This foundation will get stronger, and as your business accumulates more and more Bitcoin, you know that you are accumulating an asset that is not swayed by public opinion, political bias, newfangled fashionable ideas, currency debasement or the need humans have to change everything constantly, all the time to try and make it better. It is for this very reason that bitcoin exists. Tik tok, next block.

The Bitcoin network was pretty damn secure before the fees and block space went up in early 2023. No change since then - still damn secure. View quoted note →

What a winner. Well done guys. First time I’ve used nostr on my desktop. Super cool View quoted note →

This marks the beginning of the end for Central Banks. When nation states and other start adopting money that can't be inflated, then Central Banks no longer have a purpose.

This is a great summary of the current political position on Bitcoin in the US, neatly summarised and easy to understand. While not all of us live in the US, it is useful to understand how much has changed in such a short time.

What the Digital Asset Executive Order Means for Bitcoin

Welcome to this week’s edition of the BPI newsletter! It’s been a busy week for Bitcoin policy, and we’ve got a lot to cover. Since our last ...

So true. We have a body for a reason, and yet it’s probably the most neglected part of our reality. The state of most bodies is tragic. View quoted note →

I’ve seen Jeff Smith’s Bone in comic shops for as long as I can remember. I never read it but it was like that one album cover you always noticed every time at the record store - something just caught your eye. RASL is amazing. I only realised it was Jeff Smith from Bone after picking it up. Such a great story combining sleuth, private investigations, love and science (Nicholai Tesla fans, anyone?). Give it a go.

Bitcoin’s worst performance over any 4 yr period from 2011, is 23% annualized. This presents a very credible argument for inclusion in any portfolio; state, business or individual. It’s volatile to the upside, sorry to say. It’s not going to be very stable.

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Aleš Michl (@MICHLiq_) on X

Czech National Bank’s goal is price stability. When we took office in July 2022, inflation was 17.5%. We brought it down to target. We are also d...

We are still far from main stream adoption. I recently wanted to test / check my seed phrase for my #blockstream #jade wallet. Just to make sure I didn’t have a typo somewhere. Turns out you can’t do that. I had to move all the funds, wipe the device, setup from scratch and generate a new seed phrase. I wrote that down like four or five times to make sure. Then, when I tested the seed phrase on Sparrow wallet I could only see one account balance. I have three accounts on the device. There zero documentation that I could find explaining I needed to change the derivation path to access the funds from each account. Zero. I stumbled upon the solution quite by accident. I now have added the paths to the seed phrase for future use, that I hope I will never need. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Jade and it’s a great device. But, while I’m no dev, I do run a full BTC node, and LN node, #alby hub, using #btcpayserver to invoice clients in bitcoin, etc. But, if I had lost my #jade and needed to restore the wallet I would have needed help to access all the accounts. This is not how it should be.

Today, I have learnt something View quoted note →

The least they could do is give you the car for free. View quoted note →

I would like to add to the old saying, ‘If women ruled the world there would be no more wars’, by adding ‘If women ruled the world the wars would never end.’ Men will punch each other in the mouth and then go have a beer together afterwards. Women can hold grudges a long time.

What is a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve and how to get started. What is a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve? I'm so glad you asked. This is just a fancy way of saying you have some savings in Bitcoin. In the case of an individual person this would be the same as a savings account, except in bitcoin. In the case of a company this sort of savings would be called a treasury. Company treasuries don't come up in conversation too often simply because most companies can’t leave cash just lying around in case of an emergency. Inflation eats away dormant cash like a melting ice cube. Reference previous article for more details. The profit predicament. As more and more businesses start to look at a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve (BSR) it’s worth discussing some ideas around this. There are a few ways for this to be done: Firstly, the SBR is a reserve. It’s not working capital, and it’s not short term investing. It’s capital that can be stored for at least 5 years without disrupting company liquidity. Now how do you actually go about creating one? Let’s look at two options. 1. Buy Bitcoin with retained earnings and store it, or 2. Get paid in Bitcoin and store that as your strategic reserve. Option One: This option involves the company opening an account with a registered Bitcoin exchange. Be prepared for some serious admin jumping through all the KYC hoops – exchanges are financial service providers after all. Deposits funds to the exchange account, and then buy Bitcoin. The exchange typically charges between 1% and 2% per transaction, but make sure to check the ‘fees’ page on your chosen exchange. Fees are different for each type of transaction. An eft payment from your company bank account to your exchange account is the cheapest but you do have to wait the usual 2-3 days for the fund to clear. You can use quicker payment options but fees tend to be higher for the convenience. Option Two: A much more interesting option is getting your clients to pay you in bitcoin. This way you can get bitcoin without having to open an exchange account and go through the troublesome KYC process with multiple verifications and emails forwards and backwards. You also avoid the exchange transaction fees but, more importantly, you also avoid the merchant fees for credit card transactions. Merchant accounts for businesses charge between 2.2% and 3.5% per transaction this means for every R100 your client pays by credit card you pay R2.20 – R3.50 to the bank for the favour. Of course, there is also an initiation fee the bank charges for the hardware and setting this up and there can be a monthly admin fee that you are required to pay to continue the service. There is an increasing number of third-party companies providing the similar solutions but the fees are pretty much similar to traditional banks. https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/card-online-payments-south-africa-2021-6 Something else to think about with credit card payments is that you don't actually receive the money immediately. Yes, the transaction shows as approved when the credit card is swiped and your customer takes his product or service, but the funds only arrive in your account days later. This means that not only do you pay a transaction fee but you're also going to spend up to a week waiting for your money. For the sake of simple math let's use 5% as the cost of taking money you have earned from your business to purchase Bitcoin (3% merchant fees and 2% exchange fees). Now imagine if your client paid you in Bitcoin. This means you now get the Bitcoin at a 5% discount and the Bitcoin is stored directly to your account. Business owners sometimes say that they cannot afford to lose out on rands and that they need every penny to meet their expenses. The reality is you are not going to be converting all your sales from rands to bitcoin overnight. You will only have a very low percentage of people using Bitcoin to buy your products and services, at least for the moment. Pick ‘n Pay stores have been early bitcoin payment adopters and even with their national footprint of groceries (cheap daily necessities) they only received 0.34% of their annual turnover in bitcoin.

Pick n Pay sees uptick in Bitcoin payments in stores | ITWeb

https://www.picknpayinvestor.co.za/pdf/investor-centre/results-and-presentations/2024/interim-results-2024/pnp-h1-fy25-interim-results-booklet-singles.pdf The fees that you are paying on credit card transactions are going to amount to far more than what you would miss by being paid in bitcoin with a near zero transaction fee. This is also a convenient savings tool as the bitcoin that comes in gets stored and left there. It's a small percentage you probably won't even really notice it and yet it's just going to add up week by week, month by month until you have a really significant portion. Think of this as a forced savings account. You can even afford to incentivise clients to pay in bitcoin by offering a discount. Another benefit is that by offering or by accepting bitcoin payments can sell to customers outside of South Africa, that would normally have difficulties sending you cross border payments via traditional means. Speak to us for more information.

Bitcoin For Business

What is a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve? - Bitcoin For Business

What is a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve? I'm so glad you asked. This is just a fancy way of saying you have some savings in Bitcoin. In the case o...

What is this purple icon on the top right of the screen on Damus? You can tap it on and off (purple or grey)

Devices like these may be the ultimate solution to mining centralization. Someone on a podcast last year said they imagined a future where every single electronic appliance/ device would have a mining chip embedded. That’s a future I was to see. View quoted note →

When people working in bitcoin aren’t Bitcoiners, this s what you get. View quoted note →

Pretty incredible to have a major national retailer accept bitcoin. View quoted note →

Spread the word View quoted note →

100% baby 🤘 View quoted note →