I hate paying taxes. I hate even more doing taxes. Paying someone else to do it for me doesn’t completely solve the problem as most of the effort is still mine. But I wouldn’t mind that much giving up 1/2 of my income if most of that money was to actually help other people, even if badly managed. Heck, I wouldn’t be too bothered if they just took 50% of my income to enrich themselves and then left me alone. What is truly infuriating is that they take my money and then use most of it to find new ways of harassing me and other people, dictate what we can or can’t do, patronize, humiliate, and gaslight us, and in general make our lives as miserable as possible. If you known some place in the world where I can just pay taxes and be left alone I would love to move there. A society governed by common thieves would be a great improvement over the status quo.

I don’t agree with the argument that every crypto-asset other than bitcoin is a security. Maybe that’s the case in terms of positive law — aka whatever legislators and courts define as such. But in terms of logic, if every crypto asset other than Bitcoin is a security — then every asset other than Bitcoin is a security. Wether cryptography is used for tracking property is irrelevant. If you created a token that represents a fractional ownership of real estate would that be a security? Why isn’t an apartment a security then? If the expectation of something becoming more valuable due to the work of others turns that something into a security— then every asset you buy today to sell tomorrow is a security — including Bitcoin and USD. In fact I can’t see any true essence in the “security” species to set it apart from other sort of property. It’s just a regulatory fiction to obtain jurisdiction over part of the economy. We should not encourage semantic creep that leads to inflated regulatory power with statements like “everything but Bitcoin is a security”.

You think censorship on social media is bad? Wait until the people who beg to be protected from “harmful content” try to force you to use a web browser that rewrites all websites on the fly using AI — for your safety of course. You see if “harmful content” and “misinformation” are the worst threats of all, then having a robot that can’t be harmed read everything for you then explain it to you in safe terms is the holy grail. The only people who should be protected from “harmful content” are kids. And the only people doing the protecting should be the parents (or those authorized by the parents). Everything else is badly disguised totalitarianism and mental problems presented as virtue.

GPT-4 is even more opinionated about what is right or wrong and worse at writing even fiction about anything it considers bad. It has built in values about pretty much everything. I believe all the effort to “regulate AI and ensure it is consistent with our values” are just an attempt to regulate us and ensure we’re consistent with *their* values. Who gets to say what AI is evil? In the end they will try to ban you from using your own AI to do things your way — and maybe even protect you from their AI. They’re not afraid of an evil AI. They’re afraid of people not being ruled by *their* evil AI

May the sats flow to you folks

So it’s looking like we’re headed to a 2008-like event. Is it the final collapse, or just another bump in the road to it? In previous crises Bitcoin didn’t exist. How will Bitcoin’s existence influence outcome? It’s important noting that not only Bitcoin exists but the infrastructure to make it usable for all Americans on a daily basis is almost in place. Some stuff would have to scale quickly, but if you include custodial LN wallets, the US could completely switch to BTC in a matter of months with relatively little operational problems. What about the rest of the world?

Is there a “Zaps for code reviews” thing? I think it could incentivize people to review PRs. Perhaps even likes would be enough. If you can show maintainers liked your comments on PRs, and an aggregate number, that could also be some sort of badge, like how many commits you got merged. Is there some sort of GitHub (not Git) over Nostr? I mean issue tracking, discussions, etc. Shouldn’t be too hard, so I would guess someone is working on it.

Andrew Chow (Bitcoin Core maintainer), in interview for CoinDesk. “Reviewing code is mind-numbing” While for sure contexts qualifies the statement, I find it surprising that most people tend to think reviewing code written by others to be boring compared to writing code themselves. Maybe I’m old man, but after decades of coding, writing programs often has become to me just a chore between an idea and its implementation. Reviewing other people’s code however is much more exciting. For the past four years, I have spent 50%+ of my work hours reviewing code and less than 10% writing it — and I think it’s much more fun. While often transcribing an idea into code is quite trivial, and consists mostly of reading docs and the figuring out your own stupid mistakes, there are infinite ways in which other people make mistakes. I think one of the main reasons people don’t spend as much time contributing code reviews is that it’s harder to use it to show off creds. I can always point to my merged commits as clear evidence I contributed to Bitcoin Core, but anyone can leave random comments in PRs and it’s hard to tell if a comment was actually valuable.

Is this how the “then suddenly” begins?

After all the talk about crypto creating systemic risks for the larger financial system We’re now waiting to see how much failing banks will spread their shit show to stablecoins and beyond. If you never thought much about counterparty risk — there’s a good primer on today.

SVB thing is scary. It you think a financial meltdown will not affect you bc you own BTC, think twice. In the long run you might have a life boat. But in the short term things can get ugly and pressure to sell BTC to pay for bills might make your long term impossible. I think we’ll have QE. But a gigantic hard default isn’t impossible.

Without cryptography It would have been better computers had never been invented. Cryptography is our only defense against machines destroying society.

If it wasn’t for Nostr I would be reading Shakespeare While I wait for `cargo build` Nostr is killing our culture

Is there a protocol for radio broadcast that doesn’t assume people will just not “trespass” on someone else’s frequency band? Last time I studied radio FM was bleeding edge 😂

Me: I don’t want to delegate to a third party deciding what is and isn’t spam. I don’t want to delegate it to a relay and I don’t want to delegate it to my “friends”. Nostr doesn’t let me do that. Person who never thought about censorship resistance or how it can be achieved before Jack donated to Nostr: “Censorship resistance doesn’t mean forcing people to see your content” The same dialogue multiple times and the exact same answer — verbatim. Who the heck invented that nonsensical argument and why would anyone think it counters what I said?