I make friends by viciously picking a fight with someone, and then apologise 😅

THE PROBLEM To flourish, humanity needs to go back to free market money (not issued by central banks or governments, but arising from the market) that can’t be manipulated by central banks and/or governments, nor eradicated. This money also needs to be digital, to facilitate international value transfer, yet scarce (digital tokens have always been “copyable”). Gold used to work well, but being physical, as trade expanded beyond the local town to international trade, peer-to-peer exchange of gold became impractical. The solution to that weakness was to centralize it (using bank ledgers instead, or bank “notes”), and digitize it (digitization of notes/contracts), allowing banks to become intermediaries of all non-P2P transfers of money. Gold’s physical nature led to the introduction of gold-backed paper/digital money, but then ultimately to fiat money — government-issued money not backed by anything at all, not even gold. Fiat money costs nothing to produce, is not scarce, and allows governments to avoid market forces. It allows the government to always expand, facilitating a relentless and gradual march to worldwide totalitarianism. Satoshi Nakamoto solved this problem with Bitcoin. THE SOLUTION Using a distributed ledger (ledger, meaning a record of all the transactions; distributed, meaning existing in many places at once, all in synchrony), and disappearing from the public, he spawned a money that has no central authority, no CEO — no one at all, who can be asked/forced to shut it down. Every single node needs to be eradicated to eliminate Bitcoin, and there are thousands scattered all over the planet. That lack of central authority in a digital token would leave a problem — double-spending. How can anyone be sure of the true state of the ledger? What if a token existing in wallet number one that has been spent, is spent again from wallet number one? Who decides which payment was first, and which was later (and is illegitimate)? This was solved partly by creating the timechain (“blockchain”). Transactions are put in blocks — data grouped together, like pages in a book — and each block includes the hash of the previous block. With the blockchain, the order of these blocks can’t simply be changed around without anyone noticing. If somebody changes transactions in block number one, then the hash of block one will change. The hash of block one is part of the data of block two. That means changing block one will cause the data (the hash) in block two to be wrong. That makes block two invalid. If block two is invalid, then every block after that would be invalid. You can’t have block 750,000 be valid if block two was not valid: The blockchain makes the ledger tamper-evident. The second part of the solution to double-spending was proof-of-work. Note that a re-ordering (or rewriting) of blocks is actually quite easy (and almost costless) to do — it just requires a computer to redo the hashes and link the blocks together. If a new version was presented to you, there isn’t a way for you to know which version is correct — without proof-of-work. What Satoshi Nakamoto did was use PoW (invented previously by Dr. Adam Back) to make these hashes costly to produce. This costliness was introduced by adding a rule to the Bitcoin protocol, placing restrictions on what hash results are valid, necessitating multiple brute-force attempts at hashing in order to meet the requirement. Random brute force attempts by a computer, that cost electricity, is how it’s done, but it is often explained in a way that’s wrong and hated by informed Bitcoiners. “Bitcoin miners are looking for solutions to difficult math problems.” They are not math problems. If attackers were to modify block one, they’d have to also find a valid hash (by entering and iterating some meaningless data until the hash is valid), then enter the new hash into block two and in doing so invalidate the hash of block two. They’d have to change block two in such a way to make it hash correctly, and then put that hash in block three, modifying block three. Then they’d have to repeat the work done to hash block three, and so on, all the way to the current block. The energy expended in mining Bitcoin blocks thus protects the network from attack by making it too expensive to repeat all the energy use. To rewrite Bitcoin from block one would require a repetition of the entire world’s cumulative energy expended on Bitcoin so far. Proof-of-work makes the blockchain tamper-proof. The other purpose of PoW is to solve the “Byzantine Generals’ Problem.” This arises in a distributed network of computers all needing to know the current state of affairs, and no message between computers can be trusted to report the current state (just like the predicament of the Byzantine Generals). The Byzantine Generals’ problem is solved by creating a rule that the chain of Bitcoin blocks with the most cumulative work is the valid chain (often approximated as “the longest chain”). This eliminates any requirement to trust an authority to state which version of the timechain is the valid one, should there be any discrepancy, and simply relies on everyone agreeing to that rule of “most work = the valid chain.” Another problem that Nakamoto considered when creating new money is the problem of fair issuance, and how to do it in such a way to maximize adoption. Nakamoto achieved this by staggering the release of new coins, allowing some of the later adopters access to newly issued coins. 50 bitcoins are released to miners every block, which occurs on average every 10 minutes, and that number of coins issued is halved every 210,000 blocks which is roughly every 4 years. Due to the programmed halving of issuance, there will come a day (estimated in the year 2140) where no further division is possible past the smallest unit (1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 bitcoin), and therefore the supply is mathematically capped and very close to 21 million coins. The difficulty adjustment was also crucial to prevent the supply cap of 21 million coins from being brought in ahead of schedule — it’s interesting to note, for the experienced Bitcoiner, that the difficulty adjustment does not affect the supply cap of bitcoin as such — it just prevents a change to the schedule of release. Even if there was no difficulty adjustment, the 21 million cap can not be breached. Finally, the creation of this money affected something outside the code – game theory. In the same way that the human genome is ultimately responsible for magnificent monuments and works of art, those things are not actually found in our genetic code. This is described by “The Extended Phenotype,” a book and term coined by Richard Dawkins. Bitcoin’s code results in humans acting in such a way to ensure its success. When you learn about Bitcoin in-depth, and the game theory surrounding it, you naturally come to this conclusion: The only thing that can stop Bitcoin is worldwide coordinated authoritarianism, and the only thing that can stop worldwide coordinated authoritarianism is Bitcoin.

The Problem With Money and the Solution Explained – Bitcoin Guides

Termites. Fuck. Gonna cost me sats.

I just spent 4 hrs carefully migrating my home server which was set up years ago as Ubuntu (before I knew any better) to a Debian ParmaDrive, and loved every damn minute of it. Bitcoin, LND and channels, btcpay server (making use of Parmanode database backup & restore feature) with domain and reverse proxy, electrs, fulcrum, RTL, Tor services/onions/configs, home directory files, SSH keys, and new drive encryption with VPS unlock (ParmaGaurd). I feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh shit, I lost my private keys. 4 hours and is not bad actually. Once upon a time this would have taken me about a few days maybe a week. I didn't jump right in though, I did spend a few days thinking about it in the back of my mind, just to make sure I don't fuck it up.

I dream of a day when there's nobody wrong on the internet.

I'm enjoying being a maths teacher for my daughter in self-custody homeschooling. Today I introduced polynomials and manipulating curves on 2D axes. Tomorrow I think I'm going to whip out, "It's just math" 😂

The whole purpose of bitcoin is to study charts, and learn to buy at the exact bottoms, and sell some at the exact tops consistently, in order to outperform the first ever adoption cycle of worldwide unstoppable digital money with an unchangeable fixed supply and no central coordinator that was designed to defeat central banking and stiffle attempts at tyranny via the manipulation of money.

God help anyone else who's elderly parents come home from overseas both with two new phones needing help transferring old to new, and converting android to Apple, AND with "what's my Facebook password" looks on their faces.

An analogy to help you explain to newbies how Bitcoin transaction fees are measured by data not value... It's like you're sending a cheque and the banker weighs the cheque to decide how much fee you pay. The thicker or bigger the paper the more you pay for the transaction. Nothing to do with what's written on the cheque. It's closer to how are the postal service charges for packages. Or, for 90 year olds, it's like charging for a telegram, fee per character

Don't leave your kids in custodial homeschool if you have a way to avoid it.

Love it when there are more Knots flavoured ParmanodLs in the world! Here is one transitioning...

There are people running Core on Umbrel. Here's what you do... Place the machine carefully in the trash can. Set alight, optional. Then, buy a plug and play ParmanodL with Knots.

Parman Home

Updating Parmanode dot com to make it fucking hot. Sneak peak...

Running Nude

Proforma I made for arrogant normies... If I'm correct, your entire world view is wrong and your decision to not do what I'm doing will be utterly devastating for you. Instead of putting in the many hours required to know what I know, you're the one living in hope, hope that I'm an a fool or unwise. It's a common behaviour of all the normies out there, all doomed to be the last in to Bitcoin, missing out tremendously. I can't imagine how painful it will be. To have some idea, look at Peter Schiff, he talks about how bad Bitcoin is more than he talks about gold! That's raw PAIN. Bitcoin Derangement Syndrome is a life of anguish. I hope I can snap you out of your belief system, it's uncomfortable to do, but the future distress coming is worse. AIl you have to do is study it for several hours with an open mind, instead of hoping for its death.

Going to bed early. Not to anyone in particular, I just wanted to say, "Get fucked".

New technical analysis pearls I learnt from a paid course... Every all-time high is higher than the last one. All you have to do is buy at the all-time high and sell it the next one, rinse and reapet.

Democracy is a 51% attack on freedom

New insights for teaching kids Trigonometry, might help some homeschooling champion parents... Sin, Cos, and Tan is unnecessarily taught all together, causing confusion, and difficulty memorising. It's made worse by teaching fractions of triangle sides, "Sine is opposite over hypotenuse", and then mnemonics are taught..SOH CAH TOA. Ridiculous. I had to undo a lot of this crap today teaching my daughter, and the new system was easier and she got it straight away... To begin with, forget Tan. And forget side ratios initially. 1. For any right angle triangle, the two other angles, theta and alpha, add up to 90 deg. 2. Any two right-angle (RA) triangles with the same two other angles are similar triangles. If the hypotenuse is also the same SIZE, then they are identical triangles. (Explain this by discussing zooming in and out, triangle gets bigger and smaller, but it looks like the same triangle. And so these numbers define the "shape of shapes", but not always how big or zoomed in they are). 3. Always work with triangles where the hypotenuse is 1, to begin with. To eliminate complexity of absolute sizes, start with the "shape of the shapes". 4. Sine is the main one to know, and learn to "feel" that it's the most important - it helps memory. It refers to the size of the triangle-side furtherest from an angle (don't call it a ratio yet). Animate the angle changing, and the side's size changing with it (and triangle shape). And of course it always remains a RA triangle. On one extreme where the angle is approaching zero the triangle becomes acute, then almost just a straight line. The hypotenuse is to be considered like a clock hand, fixed in size of 1. As the angle is approaching zero, the sine-side (opposite) is approaching 0 in length, and the other side, the cos side (adjacent), is approaching the same length as the hypotenuse, 1. Show how both sides HAVE to change size, because you're not changing the size of the hypotenuse. On the other extreme, when the angle is opening up towards 90°, the sine side is approaching 1 in length, and the cos (adjacent) side is approaching 0. Another straight line. When the angle is 45 deg, the animation is exactly half way between the two extremes and both angles (theta and alpha) must equal 45 degrees (otherwise it's not a right angle triangle). And the 2 changing sides are equal in length. Demonstrating this, I think, is much more important than memorising opposite over hypotenuse, adjacent over hypotenuse, and opposite over adjacent. Then when you have a something like, sin(37 degrees), one can appreciate this DEFINES a triangle's shape. Then, once they get that, you can explain the vale of sine(T) is actually a COMPARISON to the hypotenuse, which has always been 1 so far, and also is always the longest side of the RA triangle (so the value of a side has always been under one). Comparison means a ratio. 0.5 means half the size compared to the hypotenuse. THEN, show... sine (45) = A/H = 0.7 ... as an example, and demonstrates how with bigger triangles (hypotenuse greater than 1), if the shape of the triangle is the same, defined by angle, then sin(T) stays the same, and always under 1, no matter the larger hypotenuse. Once comfortable, draw sine waves and cos waves (careful not to become the whiteboard meme guy here). Then when comfortable with that, show a clock and the triangles formed in the 4 quadrants. Introduce radians. Only THEN talk about Tan, opposite over hypotenuse, or sineT/cosT. Just my 2 π

I'm not saying you're annoying, I'm just saying I get annoyed by you. And that you're annoying.