Monero makes you a ghost on-chain, sure — but you’re still running it on hardware that reports to its own invisible gods. Privacy in software, surveillance in silicon. The whole thing’s a magic trick where the rabbit escapes but the cage remembers. View quoted note →

For everyday consumers, all the privacy theater is just lotion on the tech-industrial burn — sleek brochures, cute padlocks in the UI, security-as-a-service sold like vitamins. But the second you cross into territory where the establishment actually cares, the mask drops. Suddenly the “safety features” look like containment measures, the firmware looks like a warden, and the only sane move is to flee into Coreboot, Qubes, and verifiable reality. #Privacy isn’t a lifestyle accessory — it’s a line in the sand, and most people never realize it’s there.

If you’re being hunted by nation-states, forget the smartphone — it's a pocket-sized confession booth wired straight into the silicon priesthood. The only sane refuge left is a Dasharo-flashed, Coreboot-purified laptop running Qubes, sealed with Heads like a digital chastity belt. One machine, one bunker, one verifiable universe. Everything else is just praying to the surveillance gods that they don’t notice you today.

Every device runs a tiny god under the motherboard — ME, PSP, TrustZone — a silent priesthood baked into the silicon. It sees your RAM, your keys, your wallets, your thoughts if you type them. And the industry hands you a lullaby: “Relax, it’s for security.” Sure. The architecture is indistinguishable from a perfect universal backdoor, but we call it “trusted computing” because the alternative can’t be proven and the machine won’t boot without its ghost king in the basement. #Bitcoin, #Monero, all the encryption cults chanting about sovereignty and privacy — they’re all praying their math outweighs the plausible deniability of the hardware that runs it. Faith masquerading as cryptography. Modern computing is a cathedral built on a crack in the altar.

TrustZone is the hidden “god-mode” throne room inside every ARM phone — the place no user, no custom ROM, no hacker messiah ever gets to touch. And we walk around pretending our GrapheneOS slabs are Fort Knox. They’re not. They’re just bulletproof vests strapped onto a reactor core we can’t inspect. GrapheneOS absolutely hardens the hell out of the layers above that black box — sandboxing, memory safety, verified boot, app isolation — all top-tier. But against a state-level adversary who can slip into Secure World? That’s like locking your apartment door while the landlord keeps a master key and sometimes sleepwalks with it. Use #GrapheneOS because it’s the best we’ve got. Just don’t hallucinate that it outruns the hardware’s built-in gods.

Modern CPUs are carrying tiny shadow governments inside them. Intel’s ME, AMD’s PSP, Apple’s SEP — microcontrollers buried under silicon, humming 24/7 with god-mode access while you pretend your “privacy settings” matter. Intel ME had remote-exec holes big enough to drive a tank through. AMD PSP shipped with privilege-escalation bugs. Apple’s SEP leaked keys after Checkm8 cracked open the old devices. Different logos, same story: closed firmware, untouchable privilege, zero transparency. Your laptop isn’t yours. Your phone isn’t yours. The machine is alive underneath, and you’re just renting the illusion of control. #Privacy didn’t die—it was baked out of the silicon long before you unboxed it.

NGU arrives and #Monero suddenly discovers Bitcoin’s final boss: rich miners with unlimited hardware budgets.

Don't confuse capitalism with statism. View quoted note →

After the latest update, @Amethyst stopped working with follows count, seems to be stuck at a certain number and it just doesn't change. @Vitor Pamplona is this how this got fixed? 😅

My feed isn’t based on a follow list — I rely on proxy/aggregator relays. Sometimes a spammer slips through and blasts dozens of notes in a short window, which gets pretty annoying.

Maybe you should start with paying your share for security rather than relying on US. View quoted note →

You're casually committing a false equivalence by equating trust in locally verifiable cryptography for ownership (signatures, addresses) with trust in globally unverifiable cryptography for monetary supply, which are fundamentally different trust domains. it’s a sad take because it collapses two completely different types of trust into one and pretends the trade-off doesn’t exist. View quoted note →

Monero frens skip over the key distinction: using cryptography for ownership and transactions is not the same as using cryptography to prove supply correctness. One is basic to any digital money; the other introduces deeper, harder-to-audit assumptions. Instead of engaging that structural difference, they drift into No True Scotsman moves and motte-and-bailey pivots that recast a technical point as an identity argument.

Monero frens dodge the technical trade-offs by shifting from protocol facts to identity games. They lean on no true Scotsman, motte-and-bailey, and mild strawmen — reframing disagreement as a lack of “enlightenment” instead of engaging auditability vs privacy. It’s more posturing than argument. View quoted note →

The key difference is verifiability: Bitcoin’s supply and transactions are fully transparent and trivially auditable by anyone, while Monero deliberately sacrifices global auditability to achieve strong on-chain privacy, requiring users to trust cryptographic assumptions rather than simple inspection. As a result, Bitcoin is generally considered superior as base-layer money, while Monero excels as private transactional cash. It's just a matter of unavoidable trade-off between supply-auditability and on-chain privacy. View quoted note →

There’s an important difference in degree, not in whether something happens. Both masturbation and partnered sex increase heart rate, blood pressure, and blood circulation — but not to the same extent. Masturbation is quick and mostly uses the hand, so the physical load is low. Partnered sex typically engages larger muscle groups, lasts longer, and involves full-body movement. Because of this, the cardiovascular response is significantly stronger, and many people feel a much bigger physical and mental boost afterward. With the right partner, regular good sex is transformative because it combines stronger physical exertion with emotional and hormonal effects that masturbation doesn’t replicate. As Woody Allen famously put it: > “Sex is only dirty if you do it right.” View quoted note →

Must be due to all those immigrants raping ugly English girls. 😅 View quoted note →