The internet made us more connected—and less free. Our lives moved online. Our freedom didn’t. At Bitcoin Park’s Imagine IF, @ODELL argued that the only way to fix it is to make freedom profitable. Because open protocols don’t scale on donations. They scale on alignment.

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🫡 incentive alignment is key. We are building zapwalled content tools for nostr at fanfares.io . Not only can creators set the price in sats to decrypt their nostr-based content, but they can set a % that referrers can earn by sharing that content. Other npubs become a referrer only after they buy the content. When fans can share in the creator's success, they become word-of-mouth marketers and protectors of the creator's digital property. Incentives can unleash a bitcoin-powered digital content economy with innumerable side effects like defeating AI theft, defeating mass surveillance, and making bitcoin the only accepted medium of exchange for an infinite number of yet-to-be created digital goods. We gave @ODELL and @Bitcoin Park early access to login via extension and try it out if you're interested!
Freedom can be profitable, just never monetarily as rent seeking value extractive models. These models thrive on control, locking people in, capturing attention, and monetizing dependency. They’re exploiting incentives and stealing freedom from us. Freedom builds systems that empower, release control, and don’t exploit. Its profit comes in the form of less money, but with virtue. Think of it like playing Monopoly with someone who steals money from the bank every turn. You can’t compete with that. They acquire the most, but they’ve broken the game. The solution isn’t to cheat back, it’s to refuse to play with corrupt players. Delete your gmail. Get off X. Boycott Amazon. Use Bitcoin. When business leaders see freedom not as a liability, but as the highest form of profit the rules of the game change. Making freedom profitable is choosing purpose and virtue over number go up. Be like @ODELL .
Nym's avatar
Nym 2 months ago
This is the way forward, our ideals must align with our primal instincts, then we can succeed
Benking's avatar
Benking 2 months ago
Love this perspective,freedom needs to be profitable to actually scale 🚀
"The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them." - Hal Finney But the reason computers control people instead of free them, is corporate capture. Windows has investors to answer to But Linux offers freedom only X, Facebook, Instagram etc etc all have ad space for sale and users to manipulate for profitability But nostr just relays the note and signal or a similar messager just let's you message the person. Money is already online. Visa and Mastercard drive up prices by squeezing merchants and often deny services to NSFW content creators just as an example. But Bitcoin just does what the user says to do. The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them. You just have to choose it.
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sms 2 months ago
Peculiar to explain this to United Plantations influencers: in proper #English, "freedom" just means the ability to take some action - regardless of consequences. Even in the most #Orwellian circumstances, everyone has "freedom" to disobey and be punished. What you mean is "liberty" - ability to take without gangsterment permission actions that don't harm others. That's why a symbol of your gangsterment is not called "The Statue of Freedom". Since you're an #influencer, it's useful to use proper words, especially if usually scrambled with " like", "you know" and useless expletives. On the subject itself, liberty shall decrease as it has - regardless of profitability - as long as the refrain "Pay your taxes, freaks!" remains.💯 #Taxes are what enables and makes decreasing #liberty profitable!💡
Ankh- Morpok's avatar
Ankh- Morpok 2 months ago
I’ve also been thinking about this recently. Our lives are in the process of moving online (ie ready player one style) and this is why governments are really pushing for digital IDs and CBDC/stablecoins. This becomes your “home address” and your “taxable income” online. Governments really need these to track and tax you. Hence the strong push for both these (digital IDs and CBDCs now).
Also, I had AI look into it and as I suspected, manumission as a business is unethical because it treats freedom as a product to buy and sell, ignoring human dignity and rights. This commodification keeps people controlled instead of truly freeing them. What's not to hate.
IggyGolo's avatar
IggyGolo 2 months ago
Freedom is profitable by default, problem is that we don’t live in a free society imho.
"The" answer doesn't exist for practically anything above passive infrastructure. We can barely tell the time😄 "Yeah, that replace(tzinfo) trick is sneaky because it assumes the naive time is already in local without shifting, but if anything else (like SQLite's ISO parse or a later astimezone) treats it as UTC first, boom, extra hour. Storing in UTC keeps it clean: parse to local aware, convert once to UTC for the DB, then convert back only when showing.I tweaked your line to this for the parse: local_aware = naive_local.replace(tzinfo=LOCAL_TZ); utc_for_db = local_aware.astimezone(ZoneInfo('UTC')). And for retrieval, just astimezone back to LOCAL_TZ. Tested it with Berlin on that Oct 15 date—'6PM' goes in as 16:00 UTC, comes out 6PM CEST, spot on. If your input parsing's got extras (like dateutil), paste that bit and I'll adjust."
Something about giving this dude money because it will make me free. American marketing 101: claim there is a problem and then promise that giving america your money is the solution. Russia and China use the same tactics routinely
Hah I like where your instincts are at. You definitely got the "corporate capture bad" bad part down. GPLv3 licensed software has a long history though. It keeps vender lock in from being possible and has its roots in hobby developers who would call themselves hackers in their day. That's why in the video all they can talk about is software support. You get all the freedom without paying any money in this case specifically.