New guidance on crypto asset promotions from the FCA will categorise Bitcoin as a restricted mass market investment. In preparing our latest policy document, we consulted across the industry. The prevailing view? That not only is this classification incorrect ab initio, but it is also likely to increase the risk of customer harm by driving UK customers to unregulated offshore exchanges, which are less likely to be compliant with UK rules. Bitcoin may be described in many ways, but a ‘restricted mass market investment’ is not one of them. It is a digital bearer asset with no counterparty risk; it is a free and open-source payment protocol that has, via its Layer 2 protocols, a transaction throughput far in excess of Visa and Mastercard combined; it is a permissionless money that no government can censor, debase or dilute, and with whose monetary policy no central bank can interfere. These new regulations, including a categorisation that the industry has consistently advised against, may inadvertently increase those very risks that the rules are intended to mitigate. https://www.bitcoinpolicy.uk/post/bpuk-response-to-fca-guidance-consultation-gc23-1

Would Bitcoin have helped Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning? Minor SPOILERS below.... . . . In the film, Hunt and team are fighting a rogue AI that's capable of changing our digital history at will. Things get so bad that the team realize they can't rely on the truth of any digital information, anywhere, and try to go completely analogue to fight it. If you're a Bitcoiner, by this point you're probably already thinking of one digital source of truth that cannot be changed other than by making new valid transactions. An absolutely true ledger, whose historic information literally could not be tampered with, or deleted, without redoing all the vast proof of work that has accumulated in the ledger. An AI, faced with this impossible task in a realm that straddles the physical and the digital, would be defeated and our source of truth in the timechain would remain uncorrupted. We could include any messages we needed to preserve in transactions broadcast to the network, and the laws of physics would protect them, forever. Bitcoin is digital, but tied to the real world through proof of work. Energy cannot be forged; and we cannot create more time. The ledger is protected by the laws of the universe, which even an all-powerful AI cannot change. It was sad, in a way, to see the Mi7 team printing out records rather than using proof of work to defend them. Perhaps that wouldn't have been a good use of blockspace? Maybe there's a use case for ordinals after all 😜 Gigi is of course magnificent extra reading on this. I particularly love this piece: "Every 10 minutes, Bitcoin re-asserts itself. Every 10 minutes, it cements a message in its timechain: "you shall not steal." dergigi.com Bitcoin Is the Rediscovery of Money | dergigi.com

Can't quite believe this is happening, and need to thrash out what I'm going to talk about, but it appears that I've been invited to speak at Bitcoin Amsterdam. Delighted to be asked and very much looking forward to it!

JRR Tolkien on CBDCs: "We now live in a world where Gandalf is genuinely considering using the Ring 'just for a little bit' and 'only for good reasons'."

Some (legal) thoughts in response to a question on whether governments could ban Nostr: It’s important to consider two things – whether governments can pass laws to make something illegal, and whether those bans can be effective (i.e., can they be enforced). In England and Wales, Parliament is sovereign. If Parliament so wished, it could pass a law making gravity illegal. Much as in the case of Bitcoin or Nostr, this would of course have no effect on gravity. People would carry on falling downstairs, and Bitcoin and Nostr would at a protocol level be completely unaffected by a ban. So, we should consider whether enforcement is possible, and if possible, what is the cost of that enforcement to the government. Distributed systems greatly increase the cost of enforcement and reduce the likelihood of enforcement at the same time (in an extreme example, where thousands of people are running their own relays at home behind TOR, a government might need to spend time and resources on house-to-house searches to shut down the relays). This would of course be prohibitively expensive and wouldn’t stop anyone accessing relays outside that government’s jurisdiction. Enforcement might then become retributive – for example, imposing heavy fines and penalties on anyone using Nostr. However, this once again upsets the balance of power, as they’d have to find you first, and there are very many ways of carefully preserving one’s privacy online (all of which we should be practicing and learning right now in case we ever need them). A government might temporarily shut down access to the internet, which is why I think that investigating continuity solutions such as GoTenna, mesh networks and satellite phones might also be prudent in the longer term. In short, the government could make Nostr and using Nostr illegal, yes, but such a law would be very hard (if not impossible) to enforce, and enterprising citizens would find ways of ensuring continuity of access to the protocol even if both a ban and enforcement action were ongoing.

Of course they must. Bitcoiners have been saying this for years

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Freddie New (@freddienew) on X

I agree! Given past reluctance even to mention the money supply in the context of #inflation, it's encouraging to see more and more attention bein...

A ping of 21 back to @OPD. Just because we can 😉. Fuck KYC in all its forms.

Thank you to the anon pleb who just zapped me 420! A legend, whoever you are.

So, incredibly, British economists and the Bank of England have (once again) totally miscalled the UK inflation situation:

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Freddie New (@freddienew) on X

So the only safe #inflation prediction is that neither economists nor the Bank of England know what they are talking about. A systemic failure to ...