No shit Sherlock View quoted note →

Just in case you didn't already know, @Russell's [Nmail](https://github.com/nogringo/nostr-mail-client) is a kickass email solution

@Amethyst I found a bug. In the notifications window, if you have two pending polls at the top of your feed, and you want to repost nothing them, only the second will be reposted. Whatever appears first AFTER the polls in your notifications tab will be reposted instead of the first poll.

# Why Bitcoin Matters: A Short History of Money One evening, I had a conversation with my daughters about Bitcoin. They had just turned twelve. One of them wanted to save her money in Bitcoin, and the other one was not so sure. Their older brother, Helmut, who is fifteen, said something like, “They don’t really understand it.” I asked him, “Do you mean they are only saving in Bitcoin because I tell them to?” He said yes. So I told Helmut, “Then why don’t you explain it to them? Why should they save in Bitcoin instead of dollars?” He tried, and he had some good points. But I could tell there were gaps in the explanation. Some of it sounded more like social pressure than understanding. So the next night, before the girls went to bed, I explained it differently. I started at the beginning. To understand Bitcoin, we first have to understand money. ## Trading Without Money Imagine two neighbors. Ursula grows watermelons. Wilhelmina grows corn. They are not sisters in this example. They are just people living near each other in a small community. Ursula gives Wilhelmina a watermelon. Wilhelmina says, “Thank you. I’ll pay you back.” At that moment, there is a debt. Wilhelmina now owes Ursula something. Maybe she owes her one watermelon, or something worth about the same as one watermelon. But Wilhelmina does not grow watermelons. She grows corn. Later, Ursula comes to Wilhelmina and says, “Can I have some corn?” Wilhelmina says, “How much?” Ursula says, “I need twenty ears of corn.” Wilhelmina says, “Well, that watermelon you gave me was worth about ten ears of corn. So here are twenty ears, but now you owe me ten ears.” In a very small community, people can remember this. Ursula remembers that Wilhelmina owed her. Wilhelmina remembers that Ursula now owes her. If everybody is honest and everybody knows each other, money is not absolutely necessary at first. People can keep track in their heads. This is a simple debt system. In the past, people sometimes used physical ways to remember debts. They might use beads, marks on a stick, or written notes. But the basic idea is the same: people need some way to remember who owes what to whom. Sometimes, if both people forget the debt, the debt is effectively forgiven. That can happen in a small community. But as a community grows, memory is not enough. People need a better system. ## The Problem of Matching Wants Now imagine a more complicated situation. Ursula has watermelons. Wilhelmina has corn. Gertrude has squash. Ursula owes Wilhelmina ten ears of corn, or something worth that much. Wilhelmina wants squash. Gertrude has squash, but Gertrude wants watermelons. So Ursula goes to Gertrude and says, “I’ll give you watermelons if you give squash to Wilhelmina.” If one watermelon is worth one squash, Ursula can give Gertrude two watermelons. Gertrude can then give one squash to Ursula and one squash to Wilhelmina. In this way, Ursula uses her watermelons to settle the debt she owes to Wilhelmina, even though Wilhelmina did not want watermelons directly. This shows an important problem in trade: the coincidence of wants. If Ursula wants corn, and Wilhelmina wants watermelon, trade is easy. But if Ursula wants corn and Wilhelmina does not want watermelon, trade becomes harder. They need a third person, or a more complicated chain of trades. Money solves this problem. ## Grain as Money Now imagine Helmut grows grain. He harvests it, winnows it, and puts it into bags. Grain is useful because almost everybody wants it. People can eat it. They can store it. They can measure it in small amounts. One scoop of grain is fairly similar to another scoop of grain. Helmut trades his grain for watermelons, corn, and squash. Soon, many people in the community have some extra grain. At first, they may want the grain because they can eat it. But then people realize something: grain can be used not only as food, but also as money. Instead of Ursula trading watermelons directly for corn, she can trade watermelons for grain, then use the grain to buy corn. Wilhelmina can sell corn for grain, then use the grain to buy squash. Gertrude can sell squash for grain, then use the grain to buy watermelons. The grain becomes a common tool for settling debts. That is one of the most important things money does. Money is not only something people trade. Money is a medium for settling debts. It lets people keep score in a way that everyone in the community accepts. If you have grain, that grain represents your ability to settle debts and buy things from other people. ## Inflation But there is a problem. Once grain becomes money, everybody has a reason to grow more grain. If more and more people grow grain, the community may end up with much more grain than before. Now there is more money chasing the same amount of goods. At first, maybe one cup of grain buys one watermelon. But after a huge harvest, everybody has lots of grain. Now Ursula might say, “I’m not selling my watermelon for one cup of grain anymore. I want ten cups.” The watermelon did not necessarily become more valuable. The grain became less valuable. That is inflation. Inflation happens when the amount of money increases faster than the amount of real goods and services. If there is much more money but not much more food, tools, clothing, land, houses, or useful work, then each unit of money tends to buy less. So grain can work as money for a while, but it has a weakness: people can produce too much of it. A good money needs to be useful, but it also needs to be hard to create. ## Shells, Beads, and Precious Things Because of this, people have used other things as money: shells, beads, cocoa beans, salt, precious stones, and many other things. These things worked as money when they had certain qualities: They were desirable. They were hard to find or hard to make. They were recognizable. They were portable. They could be traded. They were scarce. But there was always a danger. What if a group of people uses a special kind of shell as money, and then someone discovers a beach full of those shells? Suddenly that person can bring a huge supply of shells into the community and buy other people’s goods without actually producing anything useful. That person becomes extractive. He gets real goods from the community merely because he found a way to increase the money supply. The same thing can happen if a certain kind of bead is used as money, and then someone finds a cheaper way to make lots of those beads. So people kept looking for better money. ## Gold and Silver Over time, gold and silver became widely used as money. Gold and silver have qualities that make them very good forms of money. They are scarce. They are hard to mine. They are durable. They do not rot like grain. They are divisible. They can be melted and measured. They are recognizable. People across many cultures have considered them beautiful and valuable. The word “precious” means something is both rare and desirable. Gold and silver are precious metals. They solved many problems that grain, shells, and beads had. No ordinary person could easily create huge amounts of gold or silver. That made them much harder to inflate. But gold and silver had another problem. They are physical objects. If you keep all your gold and silver in a box at home, someone might steal it. Maybe you bury it somewhere on your property, but someone watches you and finds it later. As communities become larger, and as people deal more often with strangers, it becomes harder to rely only on trust and memory. So people developed another institution: the bank. ## The Bank and the Vault Imagine a community where everybody has some gold and silver. They do not want to keep it all hidden in their houses. So they agree to store it in one secure place. Maybe someone has a strong building. He agrees to guard everybody’s gold and silver. Eventually, he builds a vault. He hires guards. He keeps careful records of how much gold and silver belongs to each person. Now he is operating a bank. At first, the bank is just a storage business. People deposit their gold and silver. The bank keeps it safe. When someone wants his gold back, he can withdraw it. But carrying gold and silver around is still inconvenient. So people begin using written notes. For example, if someone wants to buy an ox, he may write a note to the bank saying, “Transfer ten ounces of silver from my account to the seller’s account.” The seller brings the note to the bank. The bank updates its ledger. The buyer now has ten ounces less silver. The seller now has ten ounces more. This is very convenient. Later, instead of writing new notes every time, the bank may issue paper notes or tokens. These notes represent claims on the gold or silver in the vault. People can trade the notes instead of carrying the metal. As long as everyone trusts the bank, the notes are almost as good as gold. ## Fractional Reserve Banking Then the banker notices something. Most of the gold and silver in the vault is not being touched. People are trading paper notes and checks, but only a small percentage of people withdraw physical metal at any given time. So the banker thinks, “If most of this gold is just sitting here, maybe I can lend some of it out.” People come to the bank for loans. The bank lends money and charges interest. The interest pays the bank for taking the risk that some people may not repay. But eventually, the bank may lend out more claims than it actually has gold and silver in the vault. For example, the bank may have 100 ounces of gold, but it may issue claims for 200 ounces of gold. This is called fractional reserve banking. The bank does not have enough gold to pay everyone back at once. But it can continue operating as long as everyone does not demand their gold at the same time. This creates a fragile system. ## A Run on the Bank A bank run happens when many people lose confidence in the bank and try to withdraw their money at the same time. If the bank has promised more gold than it actually has, it cannot satisfy all the claims. Some people get their money. Others do not. This is why fractional reserve banking is dangerous. It depends on trust, confidence, and timing. It becomes even more dangerous when governments become involved. ## Government Debt and Banking A government has something ordinary people do not have: the power to tax. Because a government can force people to pay taxes, banks may see governments as very safe borrowers. A government can borrow large amounts of money and promise to pay interest over time. But governments often do not actually pay off their debts. They may only service the debt, which means they keep paying interest while rolling the debt forward indefinitely. This creates a strong temptation. Banks can lend to governments on favorable terms because the government has enormous taxing power. But this also encourages banks and governments to create more claims on wealth than there is real wealth behind them. In other words, more fiduciary media enters the economy. Fiduciary media means money substitutes: paper notes, bank balances, or credit claims that people treat like money, even though they are not fully backed by actual hard money. This creates inflation. Just like too much grain made grain less valuable, too many paper claims, bank credits, or dollars make each unit less valuable. ## Central Banking Central banking was created partly as a way to solve the problem of bank runs and unstable banks. A central bank can support ordinary banks when they get into trouble. It can create money or credit to keep the system functioning. But this does not eliminate the deeper problem. It moves the problem higher up. Instead of one small bank issuing too many claims, the whole banking system can now expand credit together. And because the government can borrow through this system, it can spend more than it collects in taxes. It can borrow now and push the cost into the future. This is one reason modern money loses value over time. When the money supply grows faster than real production, prices rise. People feel like things are getting more expensive, but another way to say it is that the money is buying less. ## Why We Use Dollars Anyway At this point, someone might ask: if gold and silver are better money, why do we use dollars? One major reason is electronic transfer. You cannot easily send silver across the internet. You cannot email a gold coin. If you want to send value electronically, you usually need a trusted system. Banks, payment processors, credit card companies, and governments all become part of that trust system. But once money depends on trusted institutions, it becomes vulnerable to the same old problems: The money supply can be increased. Accounts can be frozen. Transfers can be blocked. Rules can be changed. The system can be controlled by people with power. So we need something that has the scarcity of gold, but can move electronically. That is where Bitcoin comes in. ## What Bitcoin Solves Bitcoin is a global digital money with a fixed maximum supply. There will never be more than 21 million bitcoin. Bitcoin is divisible into very small units, so people can use tiny fractions of a bitcoin. It can be sent electronically across the world without needing a bank to approve the transfer. It is not backed by a government. It is not created by someone promising to repay a loan. It is not issued by a central bank. Bitcoin is valuable because people agree to use it as money, but unlike grain, shells, paper notes, or bank credit, no one can simply create a large supply of it for himself. The rules are enforced by the Bitcoin network. The value of Bitcoin comes partly from this agreement: that the quantity is limited and cannot be inflated by political pressure, government spending, or banking games. That is why Bitcoin is sometimes called hard money. It is hard to make more of it. Gold was hard money in the physical world. Bitcoin is hard money in the digital world. ## Why Counterfeiting Is Different from Borrowing During the conversation, one of the girls asked, “What stops the government from printing money? Why can’t I just make money?” If you print fake dollars yourself, that is called counterfeiting. It is illegal because you are creating money that other people did not agree to accept from you. You are pretending to have value that you did not earn. But there is another way new money enters the system: loans. When a person buys a house, he may go to a bank and promise to repay a loan. The house becomes collateral. That means if he stops paying, the bank can take the house and sell it to recover the money. When the bank issues the loan, new money effectively enters the buyer’s bank account. He uses that money to buy the house. The seller receives the money and spends it into the economy. Then the borrower works, earns dollars, and uses those dollars to repay the loan. When he repays the principal, that part of the debt disappears. The money that was created by the loan is destroyed as the loan is paid down. The interest is different. The interest goes to the bank as income, and the bank spends it back into the economy through wages, expenses, profits, and other payments. So ordinary loans can create money temporarily, but if they are repaid, they also destroy that money over time. The more dangerous problem is debt that is never truly repaid. When governments borrow endlessly and only service the debt, the money supply can keep expanding without the same discipline of repayment. That causes long-term inflation. ## Why Save in Bitcoin? So now we can answer the original question. Why would someone save in Bitcoin instead of dollars? Because dollars are part of a system where the supply can be expanded. New dollars can be created through banking, government debt, and central banking. Over time, this makes each dollar worth less. Bitcoin is different. Its supply is fixed. Nobody can vote to create more bitcoin. No bank can lend extra bitcoin into existence beyond what actually exists on the network. No government can print more bitcoin to pay its bills. That does not mean Bitcoin’s price is stable day to day. It can go up and down. Sometimes it goes down a lot. Someone saving in Bitcoin must understand that. But over the long term, Bitcoin is designed to protect savings from inflation because its supply cannot be increased. Dollars are useful for spending because stores accept them and bills are priced in dollars. But dollars are not very good for long-term saving if their purchasing power keeps falling. Bitcoin is useful as long-term savings because it is scarce, digital, portable, divisible, and outside the control of any one bank or government. ## The Main Lesson Money is not just paper. It is not just coins. It is not just numbers in a bank account. Money is a tool people use to settle debts, store value, and trade with each other. A good money should be: Scarce. Durable. Divisible. Portable. Recognizable. Difficult to counterfeit. Accepted by others. Hard for powerful people to manipulate. Throughout history, people have moved from memory-based debt, to barter, to grain, to shells and beads, to gold and silver, to paper notes, to bank accounts, to central bank money. Bitcoin is the next step because it gives us a form of money that can move electronically without depending on a trusted institution and without being inflated by human authority. That is why Bitcoin matters. It is not just something that goes up in price. It is not just an investment. It is not just a thing adults argue about online. Bitcoin is a way to save value in a form that cannot be printed away. And if you understand that, then saving in Bitcoin is not just doing what someone told you. It is choosing money that is harder, fairer, and less corruptible than the money most people use every day. View quoted note →

I like hearing people unapologetically profess belief in Jesus Christ in a public setting without also being professionally compelled to do so like a pastor or priest. I went most of my life never hearing people do that because it was considered "personal".

Shitcoining is a financialist mindset. It is to to gain value through risk at the cost of other people's fear. Its a zero-sum fear/greed transaction. It extracts wealth from those who do actual work, and we call it "being smart" when in it is closer to a mere socially acceptable theft. We used to call it usury, now we euphemistically call it "financial investment."

If you are once a bitcoiner, you are always a bitcoiner. If you stop being a bitcoiner, you never were a bitcoiner.

We have a prodigal nostrich View quoted note →

I just sat down tonight for 15 minutes with my 12 year old girls and had "the talk". Now they understand fully how debt, money, fiduciary media, fractional reserve, debt notes, central banking, national debt, inflation, the internet,, the Byzantine General's problem, and Bitcoin all work.

Make 0.1 BTC affordable again

I fear Bitcoin may recover in price before I can sell all of my chairs