Just received a copy of the new edition of the greatest treatise on Islamic Economics ever written. There's now an extra section on crypto.

Just recently listened to this podcast: I couldn’t help but notice how much of the vision still feels biomass coded. You have big ummatic slogans, collectivist optimism, and vague faith in “unity” rather than hard analysis of what actually creates durable power. I mean it sounds attractive on the surface but it risks repeating the same patterns of fiat thinking that got us here in the first place. Like the “subscription model” idea (100 million Muslims paying $1 a month) is essentially fiat logic. It presumes centralized fees, fiat rails, trust in bureaucratic management. It's not really a meaningful parallel system. If anything, it reinforces dependency on fiat jurisdictions, regulators, banking systems, etc that can, and will, shut us down the moment they feel threatened. And there’s also the predictable dismissal of “crypto” as if Bitcoin were just another speculative casino coin. No need to comment on this as we've already done that hundreds of times. But even more concerning is the call for Muslims to avoid wealth accumulation, as if piety means rejecting material leverage. But history shows that every functioning civilization had elites who accumulated and deployed capital strategically. Without Muslim elites building deep reserves of hard money, and creating independent financial infrastructure, any talk of digital nation-states is just hand-waving. Power requires concentrated capital! Not just collective sentiment. What we actually need is not another ummah themed subscription NGO, but a hard pivot toward unapologetic/toxic Bitcoin adoption, elite wealth formation, and (actual) parallel institutions. Sacrifice has its place yes, but sacrifice without strategy just leaves us weaker. If Gaza taught us anything, it’s that fiat boycotts are fragile victories (if we can even call them that). If we are serious about sovereignty, then the real “digital caliphate” begins with doing the hard work of lowering time preference and sacrificing consumption today in order to accumulate the capital needed for a future of genuine empowerment.

😳 Woh. Triple H and Saifedean meet up. I can't believe this conversation isn't being recorded!!

Some big Bitcoin buys today: - Saylor’s Strategy: $96 million - Metaplanet: $632 million - Strive: $675 million - Capital B: $62.2 million TOTAL: $1.47 BILLION Bitcoin bought this morning. And the price went down a few percent, despite all of these huge million $ buys. I want to repeat: I NEVER want to hear how the price of Bitcoin is being manipulated. If you make this claim, you will be mocked, and after that I'm going to make you read Rothbard's The Mystery of Banking, chapter 2, titled "What Determines Prices: Supply and Demand"

I gotta step up. Gotta get number 1 View quoted note →

Billions must read. Get your copy here: https://bitcoinmajlis.org/anti-riba-money/

Both Nostr and Remilia are trying to escape the algorithmic sludge of web2, but to me it seems like they're taking different approaches. Nostr is focused on open protocols and censorship resistance, while Remilia doubles down on gamified identity funnels and cultural manipulation as the filter. I think Remilia is an interesting space to watch.

Remilia Corporation

RemiliaNET Alpha v0.1 - Design Notes

RemiliaNET forms the profile/identity service layer of Remilia Chat, acting as a single sign-on with rewards tracking for the existing Remilia ecos...

We're gonna need FOSS for our fridges

In a very dark place rn 😭

Yay! We cut rates! ACCELERATE

There comes a point in a Bitcoiner's journey where you eventually come to this daunting realization 👇

"states are the outgrowth of natural elites: the natural outcome of voluntary transactions between private property owners is non-egalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist. In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent." https://mises.org/mises-daily/natural-elites-intellectuals-and-state

You know what to do. Zap him! View quoted note →

"With agentic AI and AGI what inevitably emerges is algorithmic selection optimization following the logic of techno-capital and freedom from conscious political will. Human consent to join this process is irrelevant as the virtue of inhabiting networked civilization has already been done and human political decision-making is already being outcompeted by algorithmic governance." Already happening View article →

Apparently there's an option (literally a drop down menu) for the lightning node on umbrel to use knots... Could have saved me a lot of trouble if I had known that at the beginning 😔 anyway, lightning node restored alhamdulilah. Where the jummah Mubarak posts so I can test some zaps? View quoted note →

The cybercult will make the nation state obsolete Start building your cults on nostr

Wise words from Eco

The right now have their saint George Floyd

I’m starting to think geopolitics isn’t even a real science or discipline. Whenever I read or listen to it, the “analysis” usually boils down to the practitioner explaining how their favorite country or region is secretly playing 4D chess. It rarely feels objective. The frameworks are loose and the predictions are vague and the explanations almost always read like elaborate storytelling. It seems more like narrative-building than science where they try to make unpredictable human/state behavior fit into a neat (and often flawed) theory after the fact. I mean how often has geopolitical analysis actually predicted major shifts? Almost never it seems. And yet after the fact the same analysts will retroactively claim “Oh, but the signs were there!”

I've been using this greentext a lot lately in response to people's analysis of the attack on Qatar. It captures the situation quite well I think