I dont think the ministry of silly zaps are aware of the problem they are creating for nostr. No serious developer that knows anything about bitcoin is going to implement this proposal. Instead of focusing on making zaps easier for everyone, normies will be even more confused as to why zap this way and not another way. This makes getting into zapping even harder: just like when SW and WW were constantly battling over who is better, people just stayed away from coinjoins all together bc they didnt know who was right. Lose lose lose situation. View quoted note →

Someone added the Strait of Hormuz to 21's bitcoin meetups and i can't lmao

Early bitcoin feels 🧡🫂 View quoted note →

The off the bench monero keyboard warriors in my replies are always funny to me - The Rage has been taking monero donations since the beginning and the XMR community are by far the best donators we‘ve had feel free to send us some here GM

The Rage

Donations

BTC via Lightning on Geyser Geyser Fund - Crowdfunding with BitcoinGeyser is a bitcoin crowdfunding platform that enables campaign creators to lau...

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Somewhere at Chainalysis HQ, probably View quoted note →

The extent to which these people dont understand what the problem is is genuinely terrifying. View quoted note →

Publicly tying your social media profile to one address forever is genuinely the biggest gift you could make to AML companies, ever. To get that money out without hurting the privacy of people you interact with you‘d need to jump through so many hoops that it defies the entire purpose of this legendary „ux upgrade“ in the first place. Onchain zaps, not even once. View quoted note →

There‘s a coordinated campaign to flood Nostr with regime change freedom astroturf propaganda, and I am tired of it. View quoted note →

Leopoldo Lopez calls for real elections. He says Venezuela needs real democracy. Not a new connected elite. These are admirable things. Lets see what he means by this. In 2014, Leopoldo Lopez was arrested for leading violent protests in Venezuela. This fact is disputed, especially by those who advocated for his innocence. What is undisputable is that a 2013 memo crafted under USAID supervision called exactly for what Lopez had been charged with: telling opposition members to „create crisis situations in the streets that facilitate U.S. and NATO intervention.“ „Whenever possible, the violence should result in deaths or injuries,“ the memo says. And dozens of people did die in the protests Lopez led, with hundreds more being injured. This, too, is undisputed. A few years later, in 2019, Juan Guaido led an uprising and declared himself President of Venezuela with support of the first Trump administration. No election, no democracy. Guaido freed Lopez from house arrest, who is widely cited as his mentor. During the time of Guaido‘s acknowledgment as the legitimate - though unelected - President of Venezuela by the international community, he robbed the country of an estimated 30B Dollars. This included reserves at the New York Fed, which had been frozen due to sanctions - under guaido, the 400M Dollars belonging to the country dwindled to 30M. Over 350M dollars, gone. It also included handing US vulture funds control of Venezuelan infrastructure - including funds led by American investor Paul Singer - and ballooned Venezuelas debt with international creditors from ~1B Dollars to more than 20B Dollars. Due to his actions, Guaido quickly lost support even from his own party, and was eventually ousted. As one opposition member stated: „Maduro, Guaido, Chavista […] They‘re all just thieves.“ So when Leopoldo Lopez speaks of „real elections,“ „democracy,“ and „a free venezuela for everyone,“ ask him if he means like the last times he attempted to take over the country with the help of the US. Very long but worthwhile investigation into the financial coup Lopez‘ mentee staged here:

The American Prospect

The $30 Billion Identity Theft of Venezuela - The American Prospect

How Juan Guaidó sucked a weary nation dry, and primed it for the current U.S.-led assault

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GM

Someone has to say it: You cannot support Oslo Freedom Forum while supporting human rights. Today I checked my spam folder and saw that the HRF has announced that Venezuelan opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado will be speaking at this year's OFF. In December, Julian Assange filed a criminal complaint against the Nobel Foundation for awarding last years peace prize to Machado, arguing – with substantial legal basis – that the payout of the 1M$ prize money would amount to complicity in war crimes. Machado has repeatedly called for US bombing of her own country, has endorsed the US' extrajudicial killings of fishermen at sea – classified as war crimes by countless legal scholars around the world –, and has told Netanyahu that she "greatly appreciates his decisions and resolute actions in the course of war, as well as Israel's achievements," according to the Israeli government. In case you are wondering, that is the same Netanyahu who currently has an outstanding arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and whose government has been found to plausibly be infringing on the UN Genocide Convention by the International Court of Justice. Go to OFF for all I care and tell yourself that you are doing something good for bitcoin. But know that if you do, you are, quite literally, taking a stand against humanity.

Do you use a VPN? You may be send to prison for a crime someone else committed with that same IP address. A lot of people ask why Roman Sterlingov’s prosecution may be as important as the prosecutions of Roman Storm and the Samourai devs, when one allegedly operated a custodial mixer and the others built a non-custodial software protocol. The answer lies in how Sterlingov was identified as Bitcoin Fog’s operator – and it could happen to anyone. At yesterday’s hearing, judges pushed back against the idea that Sterlingov “likely” operated BF. Why? Because the main piece of evidence tying Sterlingov to BF is an IP address that was used to log into a Liberty Reserve account tied to BF. A few minutes before, Sterlingov had used that same IP address to log into a Liberty Reserve account under his own name. The prosecution argued that it is therefore “likely” that Sterlingov operated BF. But how “likely” is it really? “Likely” is a comparative term, the judges argued yesterday. Could the prosecution present any framework for what constitutes “likely” in this case? It could not: An IP address can be used by tens or thousands of people at the same time when using a public WiFi or a VPN. By how many on average? The prosecution didn't know. Without the IP address tying Sterlingov to the Liberty Reserve account tied to BF, the entire case falls apart: Because the cryptocurrency tracing is also tied to that same IP address – all it shows otherwise is funds from Sterlingov’s KYCed MtGox account flowing to a wallet outside of MtGox, exemplified by the Government with a literal black piggy bank with a question mark. No one knows who that wallet belongs to. From there, the funds flowed back into MtGox, and *numerous* hops later, through several other exchanges, wallets and addresses, test payments had been made to BF. Again: the only evidence tying Sterlingov to BF is that someone with the same IP address logged into an account tied to BF in that chain of payments. That could have been anyone on the same VPN or public WiFi – and it could have been you. According to the Government, ofc there were other "indications" making it "likely" that it was him - such as an email showing that Sterlingov used Liberty Reserve and AurumXchange. If you've been around long enough, you'll know that everyone used AurumXchange. And that everyone used Liberty Reserve. Bc bitcoin was early, and not many services existed. The moral of this story is that if you happen to use the same VPN as a criminal, and you also use the most popular services a criminal uses, the government may send you to prison for over a decade for a crime it finds “likely” you committed with no framework of what “likely” even means. This is the bar for factual evidence this case sets that can be used to send people to prison.

Circuit judges appear to be arguing that mixers are legal in theory, but not in practice: any money sent to them is part of a criminal conspiracy to launder money. Pay fucking attention. View quoted note →

Extremely tired of the constant infantilization of women in this space. Having a vagina does not make you retarded. Maybe a good thing to remember. Happy mothers day.