The biggest use of Lightning (by transaction count) existed a year ago, but had no real integration with Lightning yet. (It's Nostr) It's hard to see these things coming.

A major GBTC shareholder $4 Billion dollar hedge firm (Fir Tree) who is suing Greyscale for wrongdoing put a large short position on Tether last year that they said would pay off in a year, which is... this month. Right as Gary started going after stablecoins AND WSJ published an article about Tether using pseudonyms to get around regulations. Probably something going on there.

It doesn't look like it's up yet, but I heard there is an ongoing collaboration between... WalletScrutiny and The Bitcoin Design Community in which they are integrating Nostr, I think users will be able to log in using their Npubs and comment or something. Pretty cool!

Does it feel like Bitcoin has it's own social/communication protocol? It does to me. And I feel much more at ease because of it.

So this is pretty cool, this #[0] account seems to use the RSS feed to post to Nostr all new threads on stacker.news. Would love to see more of these/someone make a "turn a RSS feed into a Nostr Account Generator" tool. Speaking of Stacker News, I just got a Cowboy Hat, don't know how! It's on my guy too!

Zapatistas!!!!!⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️

Zapatistas have come to storm WoS

I listened to an episode of 'Bankless' today. There is an interesting development, a court of England and Wales had ordered Oasis, a UK company, that acts as a front end for the more decentralized MakerDAO to change a smart contract to attempt to steal back 120,000 ETH that was stolen from Jump Crypto in the Wormhole Bridge hack of February 2022. It successfully reclaimed the funds, but set an interesting precedent. The hosts of Bankless asked an obvious question, how could a decentralized smart contract just confiscate funds due to being court ordered? Well, the smart contract was upgradable. (Non-immutable.) According to Chris Blec, someone who isn't the Crypto industry's favorite person, (for reasons of talking about how centralized the industry actually is) this is quite the norm. What surprised me is the Bankless guests said something to the effect of "If you are really decentralized, you can't be regulated anyway. If you are really centralized, you can't avoid being regulated anyway." Wow! I actually agree with that! However, the next story they were complaining about Gary Gensler coming after them even though they are decentralized. And then I realized, they actually think MOST of defi is decentralized. And they think MOST of crypto is decentralized. Painful. (Also when the Crypto industry collapsed and all their sponsors went under, losing all their customers money, they cried ON AIR with A NEXO AD AT THE BOTTOM ADVERTISING YIELD.) Crypto is a cesspool.

Since Braiins quietly removed the Github repo for BraiinsOS(not+), Bitcoin has been without a fully open source mining firmware. I haven't heard any comments on this and some things on the site still refer to it existing and link to a dead link. Luckily, Jack and Block are stepping up with MDK, (Mining Development Kit)

Bitcoin Magazine

Jack Dorsey’s Block Announces Mining Development Kit For Novel Bitcoin Mining Use Cases

The development kit is envisioned as having multiple components that would enable increase the accessibility and openness of bitcoin mining hardware.

#[0] Verifying My Public Key: "Timechain_"

A few episodes of 'What Bitcoin Did' ago, Sam Wouters from River was on. If, in 20 years from now, Bitcoin was used the same amount as now, it would need to be about 900k for the security budget to be the same. Now, It's TOTALLY possible for it to be there, at about 1 million. It will probably take a bit to get there, so we will need to have more usage than we have now. The DCA meme DEFINITELY assumes an environment where governments are Bitcoin-friendly. Totally possible for them to shut down the on/offramps. Maybe the Hodl meme should not be the prevailing meme, maybe circular economy should be. Wait a second. Is zapping the beginning of this?

I've learned over time that Bitcoin (unfortunately) doesn't exist in a bubble. A few external things affect it (that I wish didn't). -politics -macro -crypto Politics affect the network most where it interacts with meatspace. This includes the mining infrastructure, exchanges that still accept useless fiat for bitcoin, and bitcoinERS, themselves. Macroeconomics impacts mostly the strength of NGU technology. Certain macro landscapes cause people to liquidate their liquid volatile assets. This causes institutions and retail 'non-believers' to sell. Fucking Crypto. The paper (by that, I mean non-existent) Bitcoin sold during this cycle, in my opinion, caused us not to hit 100k. The collapse of much of the Shitcoin industry caused us to dip below our previous high of 20k. This limits NGU technology. NGU technology drives adoption, keeps the network secure, and even is frequently re-invested back into the industry. Although there are a few well needed Bitcoin-only VC funds, much of that comes with the aid of NGU technology. There are ways to insulate ourselves against and limit the impact of these factors on Bitcoin. But to do that, we can both simultaneously be aware of their power AND choose to disregard it. How? Last month, Montana and Mississippi passed "Right to Mine" Bill's. We can BOTH fight for similar bills AND ignore the law if they outlaw it. peace & pv.

To everyone who was blackpilled until they found Bitcoin... ...remember that? That was the worst! I definitely didn't want to produce any children. And I think that's a reasonable reaction to seeing a future without hope. So when you see some nihilistic 'party' (well, escapist) drones, they aren't 'bad' people, they are just missing a VERY important part of the puzzle.

If DM spam becomes a problem, How about a client feature where someone can charge a fee to get a DM I think it can be done at the client level in a way that doesn't matter what client the other person is using. -Person sends a message to me -My client autoreplies with an invoice at an amount I set -that person pays it -my client then allows me to see message. Since on his end the payment is entirely through DM, it should work no matter what client he uses. I have no skills to do this, but what do you guys think?

It would be great for newsletters to come either to my feed and @ me, so I don't miss it. Orrrrrr, just nostr DM me. At the moment nostr DMs aren't dead and useless yet. Like emails are. But, I guess that will happen.... right? Is there anything we can do? Can we do things with putting a Bitcoin "hashcash" fee on sending messages to Nostr DMs? Will there be blacklisted relays the way there are blacklisted... whatever 'zones' in IP addresses are called. Let's make it so we don't recreate the same system. (that story about that guy that ran his own email server for 40 years and had to stop because he was ALWAYS filtered out as spam.)