Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme, the dollar is. Bitcoin requires no new debt or suckers to persist. It just keeps on working enforcing the rules of the protocol for anyone who chooses to use it. The dollar on the other hand must borrow from future generations to try to keep the scheme going. Without constant injections of new debt, the dollar system collapses. If you couldn't tell, I've had enough of systematized theft. I am not going to stop talking about how Bitcoin fixes this. Not because it's a good "investment opportunity" but because it literally ends a system of financial slavery.

Money is a system of information. Bitcoin is a language that cannot lie. Dollars are printed to twist the truth. The world groans, caught in this web of misinformation, confused why we can't break free. Truth will set us free.

Friends and family: What good is Bitcoin when large-scale disaster strikes the Internet and power grids? Me: The world is a big place, and disasters like that are localized. I suspect Bitcoin is the safest place to store long-term wealth because if disaster strikes leaving your community, state, or country in shambles, you can effortlessly relocate with all of your wealth intact.

I understand the tendency for people to expect fiat to persist alongside Bitcoin for decades because it feels presumptuous and reckless to say the big ship of fiat will quickly sink. But I don't see any first principles that keep fiat afloat. It's headed into rapid debt default. How can the USD survive for more than ~10 more years?

The natural behavior for prices is for everything to get cheaper and cheaper. As technology advances, production becomes easier and thus cheaper. But since 1913 the Fed has printed money with the specific goal of reversing this natural trend so that instead everything gets more and more expensive. For those using dollars over the next 20 years, it will look like everything is continuing to get more and more expensive. For those using Bitcoin, it will look like everything is getting cheaper, just as it should be and should have been.

There's no need for complex conspiracy theories to explain societal decay when fiat monetary slavery is perfectly sufficient.

Inflation (money printing) is UBI for asset owners.

Slowly reading and contemplating the Tao Te Ching and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle together as complimentary works is amazing.

You know that part of The Big Short where the corruption of the banks and the credit rating agencies not fairly pricing the CDSs becomes blatantly apparent? That's how this part of Bitcoin's price history feels.

Jean-Paul Sartre looked at Descartes's statement "I think, therefore I am" very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks. What did he mean by that? When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. And it is that awareness that says I am. If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. You would be as identified with every thought as the dreamer is with every image in the dream. - Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

A master class of corporate accounting clearly explaining why big businesses dominate and consume small businesses, and why corporate debt runs hot. The economic problems were suffering through are systemic, logical, and fixable by moving to a Bitcoin standard.

If you want to create a money that nobody can counterfeit, then you have to peg it to the only thing in the universe that nobody can counterfeit, namely energy itself. - @Robert Breedlove

So, Mexico just revealed 2 alien bodies during an official Congressional meeting, and literally nobody cares. Makes me feel better about the lack of interest during my Bitcoin conversations, actually. 🤣

What year will it be when companies collectively allocate $1 billion of advertisement budget to zaps? I guess 2028. Coca Cola spent $4.7 billion in 2022 on advertisements. Disney spent $7.2 billion. It took Bitcoin less than 5 years to hit $1 billion market cap. If Nostr and zaps are in fact becoming an open standard for data and value transfer, it seems reasonable that zaps could attract $1 billion worth of advertisement budgets from companies around the world by the year 2028. Feels like the stage is being set for advertisements to go from evil to awesome. If you think about it, the concept of advertisements is pretty amazing - "here, let me pay money to show you how well I can serve your wants and needs."

"The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am." - Eckhart Tolle

So pumped for the algorithm innovations that will result from Nostr and AI coming together to offer a growing collection of curation algorithms.

"We aren't living in dark times. It's the ipposite. We are entering an epoch of spring where the light is slowly dawning on the previous epoch of winter. Sometimes it may feel like we are entering into darker times, but that is only because with the light comes understanding and clarity to see the horrible mess we have been in for so long but could not yet see." - Matias de Stefano

How scarce is Bitcoin? There are ~36 b acres of land on Earth. An estimated ~5 m bitcoin have been lost forever. Leaving ~16 m bitcoin in circulation. Owning 1 whole bitcoin is equivalent to owning ~2,250 acres of land. Owning 1 sat is equivalent to owning ~1 square foot of land. (There are 100,000,000 sats in 1 bitcoin.) At today's exchange rate of $26,000 for 1 bitcoin, that means ~3,800 sats for $1. In other words, the equivalent of 3,800 square feet of land for $1. The Homestead Act of 1862 in the United States let any adult claim up to 160 acres of land. This offer ran for years while the US was emerging as a powerful country. The sat equivalent of 160 acres of land is 6,970,000 sats. In other words, at today's exchange rate, for the cost of ~$1,800 any person can claim the equivalent of 160 acres worth of territory on the world's most powerful emerging monetary network. The primary questions facing a potential homesteader in 1862 were: 1. Would the land be useful to them? Did they have the skills to farm, build, ranch? Or were they more suited to stay living in the city? 2. Would the land become more desirable to inhabit as time passed? In other words, would social infrastructure surrounding their land make their land a more desirable place to live with time? Or less? These are the same basic questions facing potential bitcoin moneysteaders now: 1. Is the bitcoin useful to you today? For most people in developed, safe countries, the current answer is 'not really.' Unless someone finds themselves in a situation of being financially repressed, they don't have an immediate use for bitcoin's amazing censorship resistant properties. 2. Will bitcoin become more desirable as time passes? Or less? Will an open source protocol that invites anybody to build on top of it become more appealing for people to use with time or less?

Life is a network. Money and language are technologies to propagate energy and information through the network. When the money gets corrupted, the life in the network gets choked. Bitcoin is incorruptible money. Fixing the money means fixing the network. Fixing the network means nurturing life. Lots of compelling ideas covered in this interview with @Robert Breedlove

With a tip from @noKYC ⚡︎, I got #amethyst connected to my @Alby account via Nostr Wallet Connect, and it's awesome!