Started working on a nostr client for the command line - for those of us like me who live in a terminal most of the time and would love to have a nostr embedded into a tmux session in their terminal. Mostly just doing it for a hobby outside of work, and to learn the nostr protocol, which is throughly awesome in its design and simplicity. Will open source the code if anything usable comes from it down the line.

The idea of a gold-backed cryptocurrency fundamentally misunderstands what a blockchain is and what very specific problem it solves for. Kinda tired hearing people talk about implementing a physical gold backed “crypto”, as if it would be a viable alternative to Bitcoin. Gold has to be warehoused somewhere. How do you verify the warehouse has the gold it says it does? How do you prevent gold seizures from malicious governments? How do you protect against theft if the gold? How do you audit the gold and make sure it’s not just gold plated tungsten? This is the essence of the oracle problem and it’s lost on people promoting “gold backed” crypto. You can go even further - who gets to add new blocks to the chain? Who can run a node in such a system and verify that the gold always existed at every point in the chains history? Can people redeem their tokens for physical gold, and how would redemption work. Having a digital token representing some physical gold isn’t a new idea, and it certainly doesn’t need a distributed blockchain ledger. An SQL database will do just fine, and people buying digital shares in gold will simply have to trust that the gold exists, and is safe. Or, you know, let’s just stick to using Bitcoin which is self contained and verifiable as it’s a self contained system with no need to have oracles or external trust…

Let’s address some chatter about Blackrock attempting to hard fork the BTC protocol into some “ESG Compliant” version. Bring it on I say - I’ll take the coins from the hard fork and immediately sell for real BTC. We will watch the purchasing power of these hard forked coins collapse like with bcash, and Blackrock will be throughly humiliated in the process, and learn an incredibly valuable lesson about the power of users running their own nodes… For the record I don’t believe Blackrock would attempt such a hard fork, especially if they are competing against a number of other large BTC ETF providers as it would be suicide to do so. Personally I’m more worried about paper bitcoin and rehypothecation especially if such practices become normalised across all of the soon-to-be-approved Bitcoin ETFs. Interesting times ahead!

Having a lazy Sunday…