Good Morning! I have to share an epiphany that I had prompted by a discussion I was following on Twitter about the emergence of money being tied to energy versus money being decreed by an authority. The "money is decreed" side made the interesting point that gold wasn't really money until a governing body put a stamp of authenticity on it, and as cringe-worthy as that is, it does seem to have some validity. I started to imagine what I would do with a sizable nugget of gold that I found in my backyard if I was in a society that used cold coins as money. The fact is, I would probably trade it for gold stamped coins, and take a haircut. I could potentially trade it for a cow, or some land, but if I wanted to buy a hat, I don't think I would be able to to chip off a chunk of gold and take it into the hat store- even if I had a scale with me. The hat store owner needs to enter the sale into their books, give you a receipt, etc. and that process is more efficient if they accept standardized tokens that communicate well with a community ledger. They would most likely tell you to head down the street to the gold dealer, and return with stamped coins. Fiat takes this to the extreme, taking pieces of paper and just printing elaborate designs on them that are hard to fake to protect this stamp of authenticity. The epiphany came when I realized that the most important distinction between Bitcoin and all other forms of money throughout time, is that money until now has always depended on a stamp of authenticity from a governing body in order to conform to a standardized ledger, and Bitcoin does not. Bitcoin is the ledger! Or thinking about it a different way, Bitcoin is the central authority, maintaining its sound monetary properties without incentive, or the ability to influence or be influenced.

Bitcoiners are long human flourishing. We say "Bitcoin doesn't need you, you need Bitcoin," but I disagree. Bitcoin doesn't just need us, Bitcoin is us. Every Sat you own represents a hope that the human race will choose a better path.

Hello everyone, I live in Washington State. I was using Phoenix, then Mutiny... Any suggestions for a good lightning wallet to move to?

People who want power will always try to control those who truly possess it.

Time to say goodbye to the philosophy that states "nothing means anything," and say hello to the philosophy that states "everything means something. "

Bitcoin solves the game of "telephone" that you played in kindergarten where everyone whispers something in to their neighbor's ear, and by the time it makes it's way around the circle, the message is different. With bitcoin, at the end of the day, or the year, or the century, messages are the same.

Hi everyone! This is my first Nostr post. Somehow just the existence of this place provokes deep thought. My daughter recently explained to me that "First- all of this was in the future, right?" This logic has proven to be too difficult for me to dismiss, and I now believe that it is probable that the universal sequence of events moves towards the past, not the future. Time is not sequential, it is relative. We don't really use it to determine an accurate sequence of events, but rather just to help us keep a semblance of order that we exist within and thrive. With all of this in mind I would suggest the possibility that life was born as an effort to escape the inevitability of an impending and universal past. Bitcoin is the first verifiable movement against this sequence. It doesn't just swim against the stream, it is its own stream.