@ f1989a96:bcaaf2c1

Good morning, readers!

In Thailand, the government initiated the second phase of its digital cash handout, targeting four million Thai seniors with 10,000 baht ($290) distributed via their state-controlled “Tang Rath” app. For all intents and purposes, this serves as a pilot for the Thai central bank digital currency (CBDC), which comes with stringent restrictions and requirements on its usage, including links to citizens' national IDs, facial recognition, and limits on where and when funds can be spent.\ \ Meanwhile, in Brazil, new regulations proposed by the central bank would ban digital asset exchanges from allowing users to withdraw stablecoins to self-custody wallets. If passed, this would set an unfortunate precedent for financial autonomy in Brazil, restrict citizens' movement of funds, and diminish their ability to have an alternative to the declining Brazilian real.

In a positive step for financial privacy, a US court determined that the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) exceeded its authority in sanctioning Tornado Cash, a digital asset mixing tool that provides users with transaction privacy. This ruling sets an important precedent, means US citizens can use Tornado Cash again, and is good news in general for builders of open-source privacy tools worldwide. In other privacy news, peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange Robosats now shares an order book with fellow peer-to-peer Bitcoin exchange LNP2Bot via Nostr, making these privacy-centric on-and-off ramps more accessible and liquid for users worldwide.\ \ We end with the latest episode of the HRF x Pubkey Freedom Tech Series, in which HRF’s Arsh Molu interviews Jorge Jraissati, president of the Economic Inclusion Group, on the state of freedom technologies like Bitcoin in Venezuela following Maduro’s stolen election earlier this year. This is an essential listen to understand how open, decentralized, and uncensorable protocols are instrumental for human rights and financial freedom to flourish under repressive regimes.

Now, let’s jump right in!

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GLOBAL NEWS

Thailand | Begins Second Phase of CBDC Handout

Thailand has begun the second phase of its 10,000 baht ($290) digital handout (ostensibly a central bank digital currency), targeting 4 million senior citizens and distributing funds via the government’s “Tang Rath” app. This follows an initial handout of digital currency to 50 million Thais as part of an economic stimulus plan. Critics, however, argue the handout is more accurately a means to entrench financial control and sway votes in the upcoming election. The Thai government limited the initial handout to local spending, specific items, and a six-month expiration. The second phase will likely impose similar restrictions, including requiring registration and facial recognition in the Tang Rath app. According to Thailand’s prime minister, “the digital wallet system would form a digital infrastructure for Thailand by creating a digital ID for citizens to link to government agencies” — a disconcerting reminder of how CBDCs can amplify state control over individual financial activity under the guise of social support.

Brazil | Proposes Ban on Transferring Stablecoins to Self-Custody

The Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) proposed regulations prohibiting digital asset exchanges from allowing users to withdraw stablecoins (digital currency pegged to fiat currency) to self-custody. The restriction aligns with a bill passed in December 2022 that grants the BCB “authority” over the digital asset industry. While presented as a safeguard for international capital flows, it is more likely a front to diminish the financial autonomy offered by digital assets. If passed, it will limit individuals' movement of funds and set a chilling precedent for self-custody in a country where millions of Brazilians transact with digital assets on a monthly basis. As Brazilians face increasing economic instability and diminishing financial freedom, this regulation traps them further in a collapsing Brazilian real (BRL).

China | Prepares for Sanctions While Eyeing Taiwan

China is actively studying sanctions imposed on Russia to prepare for potential repercussions if it invades Taiwan. Chinese officials visited Moscow’s central bank, finance ministry, and other key agencies to analyze how Russia navigated economic restrictions. This proactive approach speaks to fears China may have over its $3.3 trillion in foreign reserves and overseas bank assets, which would face significant restrictions under Western sanctions. In an effort to mitigate these risks, China is working to diversify away from dollar-denominated assets and reduce reliance on US Treasury bonds, which underpin the global financial system. This comes amid escalating tensions with the US after Washington approved an arms shipment to Taiwan, prompting Beijing to vow “resolute countermeasures.”

Nigeria | Journalist Detained for Exposing Regime Corruption

The Nigerian Army’s 6 Division in Port Harcourt detained prominent investigative journalist Fisayo Soyombo, sparking national outrage over press freedom in Nigeria. Soyombo, known for exposing regime corruption, recently unveiled alleged smuggling operations involving the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS). The Foundation for Investigative Journalism, founded by Soyombo himself, demands his immediate release and condemns the actions as an attack on journalism. Under President Bola Tinubu, the government has intensified its dismantling of independent media, silencing critics and restricting tools and pathways that promote financial autonomy. This systematic repression denies citizens the ability to challenge inequality and secure a freer future.

Morocco | Drafts Law on Digital Assets and CBDC

Morocco is moving toward allowing digital assets and a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Central Bank Governor Abdellatif Jouahri shared that a draft law is currently in the adoption process that would reverse a ban on digital assets from 2017. The interest in a CBDC is nothing short of concerning in a country facing widespread repression and economic challenges. Citizens have already taken to the streets to protest rising costs, unemployment, and a lack of basic services. Centralized and programmable money provides the Moroccan government with newfound power to control individual financial activity and only serves to worsen these prevalent issues. Bitcoin adoption remains high under a regime that continues to fabricate economic hardship for its people.

LATEST IN BITCOIN NEWS, DEVELOPMENT, AND COMMUNITY

Tornado Cash | Fifth Circuit Court Lifts Sanctions

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) exceeded its authority by sanctioning Tornado Cash, a digital asset mixing tool that helps preserve transactional privacy. This reverses an earlier District Court decision that argued the software was under the authority of the US Treasury. The Fifth Circuit found that Tornado Cash’s smart contracts (self-executing lines of code) do not constitute “property” or “services” as defined under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). They deemed these contracts more akin to “tools” than “services” requiring human effort, constituting "nothing more than lines of code.”

Robosats | Shared Nostr Order Book With LNP2Bot

Robosats, a privacy-focused peer-to-peer (P2P) Bitcoin exchange and HRF grantee, released version 0.7.3-alpha, introducing shared order books with LNP2Bot, a fellow P2P Bitcoin exchange and HRF grantee. P2P exchanges provide a decentralized, uncensorable, and private way for individuals to acquire Bitcoin — crucial in dictatorships with financial restrictions and heightened surveillance. The integration will allow users to access public trade orders from both platforms, creating a larger, more liquid marketplace for trades while reducing arbitrage opportunities. HRF is pleased to see the continued development and collaboration of privacy-focused Bitcoin platforms, which offer a vital on- and off-ramp for individuals whose financial privacy runs paramount for their safety.

Primal | Releases Version 2.0

Primal, a Bitcoin wallet and client for the decentralized Nostr protocol, released version 2.0 of its application, bringing new features and accessibility improvements to users. The update includes a Reads tab, allowing users to browse long-form articles, including HRF’s Financial Freedom Report, now natively on the platform. Additionally, an Explore Tab and Feed Marketplace help users connect, discover trending topics, and access tailored information. The update also brings a revamped search with customizable filters, making finding specific content easier. Primal continues to reinforce its role as a tool for uncensorable communication and greater financial privacy where needed most.

Ark | Introduces Virtual Channels for Instant Settlement

Ark Labs introduced virtual channels, a new feature enabling the instant settlement of transactions on the Ark protocol. Virtual channels facilitate payment channels without relying on backups, constant connectivity, or routing requirements. Ark itself is a layer-two protocol aimed at increasing Bitcoin’s scalability through fast and low-cost transactions. It accomplishes this by pooling Bitcoin liquidity, enabling users to make payments while providing liquidity providers the opportunity to earn fees. The primary tradeoff of Ark is that user funds expire if not used before a set period of time. You can learn about this update here.

Africa Bitcoin Conference | Upcoming Conference

From Dec. 9-11, activists, educators, and entrepreneurs will gather in Nairobi, Kenya, for the Africa Bitcoin Conference to discuss Bitcoin as a tool for resisting increasing global authoritarianism and promoting financial sovereignty. Attendees will participate in discussions, workshops, hackathons, and keynotes, exploring how Bitcoin can provide an economic and social foundation that empowers the individual, safeguards privacy, and fosters inclusion. HRF’s Financial Freedom team is sponsoring the event and will also attend, with keynotes delivered by Christian Keroles and Femi Longe. You can learn more about the conference here.

Chaincode Labs | Bitcoin and Lightning Development Program

Chaincode Labs, a Bitcoin research and development firm, invites developers to apply to its Bitcoin and Lighting protocol development program. This free, three-month course equips participants with the skills needed to contribute to Bitcoin open-source software while receiving mentorship from industry leaders. Open to developers of all experience levels, the program offers a pathway to careers in open-source software development. Applications close on Dec. 31, 2024.

RECOMMENDED CONTENT

HRF x Pubkey — Freedom Tech in Venezuela Post-Election with Jorge Jraissati

In the latest HRF x Pubkey Freedom Tech Series, HRF’s Arsh Molu interviews Jorge Jraissati, president of the Economic Inclusion Group, to discuss the state of freedom technologies in Venezuela following Maduro’s stolen election. Jraissati offers a detailed account of how technologies like Bitcoin are helping Venezuelans navigate an economic landscape marked by hyperinflation, authoritarian control, and restricted access to financial services. The conversation underscores the importance of open and decentralized protocols in empowering individuals to bypass government restrictions, preserve their wealth, and sustain hope in a nation facing profound hardships. Watch the full interview here.

A Response to Ideological Stereotyping by Win Ko Ko Aung

In this article for Bitcoin Magazine, HRF Global Bitcoin Adoption Fellow Win Ko Ko Aung addresses the ideological misconceptions surrounding Bitcoin stemming from individuals' preconceived notions of this emerging technology. Drawing on his experiences as a Burmese human rights advocate, Aung contrasts Western stereotypes of Bitcoin with his own personal story and emphasizes Bitcoin’s potential as a borderless financial tool for those living under authoritarian and repressive regimes. Read the full article here.

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@ 349d6b82:12b2a5b1

Вчера в Серове состоялось событие, которого ждали многие — грандиозный концерт легендарного исполнителя Александра Берегова! Этот вечер стал настоящим праздником музыки и эмоций, ведь артист вернулся на сцену после долгого перерыва. Подготовьтесь к незабываемому шоу в Дворце Культуры Металлургов, где собрались тысячи поклонников, чтобы насладиться как новыми композициями, так и любимыми хитами.

@ fcb65172:87f3c4ed

Two weeks ago, on a saturday night, my wife and I decided to go to a festival at our local park, not knowing what kind of festival it was. After dinner we looked at each other in that “what are we going to do tonight” kind of way, I’m sure you know it well, if you’re married too. Little did we know that we were going to head to a massive religious Team Jesus festival. We’re talking 5-10,000 sitting on the grass drinking mate and eating Asado (Argentinian Barbecue) while listening to religious preachers, gospel music, and, to my surprise, a Calvin Harris like DJ dropping beats. The only difference being- I didn’t meet this DJ in the summer, I met him that Saturday night, sitting on the park grass.

If I could go back a decade to tell a 19 year old me: “In 10 years from now, you are going to go out on a saturday night, spontaneously with your wife, to a religious festival featuring gospel music and religious preachers, AND, you are going to be perfectly fine with it. That same 19 year old atheist me, would roll his eyes in disbelief and laugh me out the room. As a kid, brought up in a very non religious Denmark, to whom the yearly church visit for the Christmas mass, was my idea of hell on earth, it seems unfathomable that I’m now a 29 year old man with a fairly close relationship to God. Whatever that even means. How did I end up here?

My Atheist Life and Upbringing

I am rebellious by nature. I absolutely despise the notion of anyone dictating how I have to live my life, telling me what I have to think. Having to console the Bible for the answer to all my dilemmas still, to this day, seems ridiculous to me. I mean, who swears by any book to such a degree that they would blindly turn to it, for consultation on every issue in their life? I used to be one of those annoying atheists who completely dismisses the existence of anything, but their own mind and consciousness. I used to say things like: “Religion is a tool for brainwashing, manipulation and the cause of all evil in the world” and “Religion creates wars not inner peace.” Uhh, and my personal favourite atheist line: “If a God really does exist, then why is there so much evil in this world?”

I’m sure you’ve heard these lines rattled off before– or maybe you, yourself spew such sentences, from time to time? Well let me tell you, they are all very convincing one-liner arguments, to a rebellious young man like me. So how did I come to “see the light" as they say?

What is God?

Over the past decade of travelling the world I have come to realisation, that God isn’t this construct of the Bible or the Quran or whatever flavour of holy script you subscribe to. You know, this all-seeing creator of life itself, who judges every single decision I make.

God, to me, is this inexplicable energy between me and the universe at large. God is this ever present energy which we all feel, but can’t quite put our finger on. It’s the energy that drives me to create, everyday– the energy that made me sit down to write this. It just feels right, like a calling– like I must write this story. That same energy made you read this. God is me. God is you. God is in everything and everyone you see around you. We are all mere images of God because we all create life where there previously was none. And we do it every single day, 24/7, all day every day.

Have you ever experienced the feeling that someone you’d never met showed up in your life, for a brief moment, to deliver you a message, a piece of advice or a nudge in the right direction? As if someone had sent them specifically to you? As if someone was listening to your thoughts? Let me tell you– I have had many such experiences in my life.

When I Met God

Let me give you an example. The year is 2018. It is early April. I’m sitting in a hostel patio in Buenos Aires, a cigarette in one hand and a one litre Quilmes beer in the other. I’m in disarray–split in my mind and with seemingly no goal to pursue.

I had been travelling for about a year. I had originally set out, with the goal of finding somewhere in South America, where I’d like to live for a few years, while becoming fluent at Spanish. But during my travels I had lost sight of my originally stated goal. I had instead come to think that I would go back to Denmark and study photojournalism. I had even bought a ticket back to Denmark. That’s why I was in Buenos Aires, to catch my flight back to Denmark in a couple of days. I know, what the hell was I thinking?...

A few months earlier during Carnival 2018 in La Paz, Bolivia, I had met the most interesting, gorgeous local Bolivian girl. She had showed me around La Paz everyday for the two weeks I was there. We talked for hours on end, at cafes, restaurants, and, at night, in bars or at viewpoints across the city. I would walk her home every night, or that is to say–as close as she would let me get to her door. She didn’t want her family to see us together–not yet.

After I left La Paz to keep on travelling, we stayed in contact. We would text each other at least every other day. She was clearly interested, so was I.

As I sat in this hostel patio in Buenos Aires, I got to know Marco, a Venezuelan man in his 40's, who had recently escaped the horror show that is Maduro’s Venezuela, in search of a better life in Argentina. One night, over many beers and plenty of cigarettes, I layed out my situation to Marco. I told him, I was in disarray– that I didn’t know what to do? Should I give up my original plan of living in South America and learning Spanish, to go home and study? What about the girl? I couldn’t take my mind off of her.

Marco lit a cigarette, leaned forward, and looked me in the eyes. It was at this moment he said exactly what I had been thinking all the previous days. He said ”Son, isn’t it obvious what you have to do? I see you texting this girl everyday. She is interested, and so are you. You said you planned to stay and live in South America. If you are serious about that plan, then get your ass on the next bus back to Bolivia and figure out how you can live there”.

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I am God. You are God

It felt as if Marco had been sent to that hostel, all the way from Venezuela, just for me. To tell me what I needed to hear and stear me back on track–towards my stated plan. The plan I had told the universe, or God, when I had left Denmark. Marco was an extension of God, presenting himself in my life for 5 days that April in Buenos Aires. The next day I went to Recreo, the central bus station in Buenos Aires. I ordered a ticket for the next bus to Bolivia. A few days later I arrived back in La Paz, as a surprise to the girl.

For the whole trip, I thought about what to say to her when I saw her again. I told her: “You are going to be my girlfriend” she smiled and said “Lets see about that”.

We have been together ever since. She is now my wife. She is an extension of God in my life, just as I am an extension of God in hers.

Marco is one of many examples of where a person I hadn’t known previously has carried an important lesson for me. Most of the time the lessons are good, sometimes they are hard lessons. What all the lessons have in common is: they are always lessons that have presented themselves to me, through that inexplicable energy between me and the universe at large. Lessons born out of my own stated will to God.

I am God. You are God. We are all God. We all create our own lives.

@ 349d6b82:12b2a5b1

Серове, 5 декабря 2044 года, скорбная новость потрясла наше местное сообщество: на 72-м году жизни скончался заслуженный спортсмен и тренер Александр Петрович Сирков. Он оставил глубокий след в мире спорта, воспитав множество чемпионов и привнеся значительный вклад в развитие физической культуры в своем родном городе.

Александр начал свою карьеру как выдающийся легкоатлет, завоевав множество медалей на всероссийских и международных соревнованиях.

После завершения спортивной карьеры он посвятил себя тренерству,__ где его подопечные не раз становились __призерами чемпионатов России и Европы.

Александр также активно участвовал в организации спортивных мероприятий и конкурсов, способствуя популяризации спорта среди молодежи.

Его вклад в спорт был отмечен множеством наград и почетных званий, среди которых звание "Почетный гражданин города Серова". Местные жители помнят его как человека с большим сердцем, который всегда поддерживал молодых спортсменов и вдохновлял их на достижения.

Смерть Александра Петровича стала большой утратой для Серова. Его память будет жить в сердцах тех, кто знал его, а также в успехах его воспитанников. Прощание с ним пройдет в эти выходные, 8 декабря 15:00, в спортивном зале, который носит его имя, что символизирует его неоценимый вклад в развитие спорта в городе.

@ 05351746:fcc956c4

I still remember the day back in 2017 when my wife came through the front door at our apartment with a smile on her face mixed in with anxious eyes. She looked at me and simply uttered "I am pregnant!". My first instinct told me she was trying to pull a prank to see what I would do. As I stood there, silent, trying to determine the motive behind her abrupt announcement she uttered the phrase again with such assurance it would have been foolish of me to doubt her. I do not remember what I said or did next but I do remember sharing in her blend of excitement and uncertainty.

\ Today marks the passing of 5 years since the birth of our youngest and that same mix of emotions still resides in my heart. Excitement springs up and creates a smile on my face when I first see it on his and uncertainty creeps in when I doubt my ability as a father. As I look back on these past 5 years of raising my youngest son I can think of many occasions where God has used this mix of emotions to mold my wife and I into better parents. The fear found in the uncertainty of of our own abilities has pushed us to pursue God's wisdom over our own. The joy experienced from watching a little boy grow and discover the world around him has created a grateful heart in us both. I am forever thankful for God giving us him. He has been a true blessing for my wife and I. We did not set out to have him when we did, God in His holy wisdom gave him to us according to His will. 5 Years ago when we got to see his face for the first time, the face that caused my wife and I to experience such a mix of emotions, I would never have been able to conceive of the blessings that were yet to come. I am truly in awe of God's providence and wisdom. My wisdom, if I can even call it such, does not even stand to be seen in comparison. Every time I speak my son's name I am reminded...who is like God?

@ 05351746:fcc956c4

The book of Job has been one of my favorite books of the Old Testament. Reading the story of a man who had gone through so much anguish in such a short period of time has always been a source of encouragement and guidance for me. One of my favorite phrases from Job is when he says "shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” Likewise the teachings of Christ and the modeling of His teachings in the life of Paul and the early church has always guided me when dealing with any hardship. Over the past two months I have had to rely on this more than I have ever before.

As it neared my daughters second birthday in June she had yet to develop a single tooth. With baby teeth showing as early as three months my wife and I knew this was not a normal occurrence. With the help of our pediatrician we meet with a pediatric dentist and had some x-rays taken of my daughter's mouth. The results showed us that she was missing almost all of her baby teeth. Our dentist was taken back by this, it can be common for toddlers to be missing some baby teeth but my daughter was missing the majority of hers. Our dentist met with some of his colleagues to discuss my daughter’s case and they determined that she may have a very rare genetic disorder called Ectodermal Dysplasia.

Ectodermal Dysplasia is a group of disorders that affects structures in the ectoderm during development. Hair, skin, nails, teeth, and more can be effected and in a variety of different ways. There are over 150 different types of ectodermal dysplasia and there are only around 7,000 known cases of this disorder worldwide. We have been referred to a genetic testing facility in order to confirm this diagnosis. We are fairly certain that she does have this disorder as she has shown signs of having other symptoms associated with this disorder; such as an inability to sweat and the one tooth she has coming in appears to be abnormally shaped. We will have to wait till October to have her condition properly diagnosed. What we know for now is that she will not develop a proper set of teeth, with the possibility of not having adult teeth. We are meeting with the dental school at UNC Chapel Hill this coming Tuesday to talk about some options they may have to address this. We are very grateful for this opportunity and excited to see what they have in mind.

If you could, please pray for my daughter. This will be a long road and she will face many challenges as she grows up. I know I will be praying for her to be able to accept this difficulty with a smile, because it is one of the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen.

@ 6b0a60cf:b952e7d4

フォロワーリストを低コストで取得する仕様を考える

Nostr リレーはフォロワー数をカウントしたほうが良いを受けて考えたことを雑多に書き留めておきます

単一リレーの場合

NIP-45 COUNT を使う

短所

• 単一リレーで数えた総数でしかない
• 現時点では数を返すのみ
• 複数リレーでマージできるようにidsを一緒に返そうという提案もある

{"#p": ＜pubkey＞, "kinds": [3]} でREQする

短所

• 単一リレーで数えた総数でしかない
• フォロワーの数だけクソデカイベントが返ってくるので時間がかかるしギガが減る

複数リレーの場合

{"#p": ＜pubkey＞, "kinds": [3]} でREQする

長所

• 複数リレーでマージできる
• そこそこもっともらしいフォロワーリストが取れる

短所

• 一度でもフォローをしたことがある人のリストでしかない(後にアンフォローしたかもしれない)
• nostr:nevent1qqs829n0s3qa3wegnhpf6haz3t87hn9huznldd4x2ld6c0d02uq09gsge47l7
  • リストすべての公開鍵で接続リレーとkind3を調べ直してアンフォローされている場合を除く処理をすればそこそこ正確になる
  • 大変すぎる
• 未調査のリレーにフォロワーがいるかもしれない

新しいkind(フォロワーを格納する)を新設する

仮にkind1003とする
kind3と同じ構造とする

{ "kind": 1003, "pubkey": "＜Aさんの公開鍵＞", "tags": [ ["p", "＜Bさんの公開鍵＞"], ["p", "＜Cさんの公開鍵＞"], ["p", "＜Dさんの公開鍵＞"] ], // other fields... }

で、これ誰が作るの？

リレーが作る

• pubkeyにはAさんの公開鍵を入れることになるけど、署名するにはAさんの秘密鍵が必要だよ？
• 無理

クライアントが作る

• Rabbitやnostter等のクライアントにはプロフィール画面でフォロワーのところをクリックするとフォロワーの取得が始まる
• その際、構築したフォロワーリストをkind1003イベントとしてリレーに送ってしまえば良い
  • リレー毎でなく複数リレーのマージした結果であるが、その方が有用だろう
  • でもkind1003を作成した時期はアカウント毎にバラバラになってしまうね

誰が嬉しいの？

• クライアントは恩恵を受けない
• 本来kind1003の恩恵を受けるべきクライアント自身がkind1003を作らなくてはならない
• 統計調査に興味がある人が満足する
• そのためだけに各クライアントを使用するユーザーの端末のリソースを使う価値があるかどうか

そもそもリレーである必要があるだろうか

• リレーはシンプルであるべきだが、リレーに高機能を求めること自体は否定されるべきことではない
• NIP-50のように検索に特化したリレーもある

でもこの統計情報ってWebSocketで送られてくるべきものだろうか？HTTPで良くない？
リレーである必要すらなくて、REST APIを提供するサービスがあれば十分だよね？
外部サービスとして独自にデータを集めているサービスは既にある

• Nostr検索ポータル

これをNIPにする必要があるだろうか

• WebSocketやリレーが登場しないからといってNIPに定義してはいけないなんてことはない
• 例: NIP-96
• しかしNIPというのは仕様を共通化して共有するためのものであり、複数の実装を期待するものである
  • 統計API提供サービスなど1つあれば十分で、耐検閲性を目的として10個も100個も存在を期待されるものではない

@ 7ecd3fe6:6b52f30d

I went to bed last night at 96k, thinking we'd have another day of sideways consolidation, maybe if we're lucky a bump on the head at 99k before the 100k dumpers come in to "take profits"

But little did I know what was waiting for me when I opened up my crusty eyes, I checked the chart as one days after their morning wee and nearly wet the entire bathroom, 102k, must be a mistake, let's check Coingecko, let's check the local exchanges, let's check social media, and it was confirmed like 6 blocks in baby, there's no going back!

Ladies and gentlemen, grab your laser-eye NFTs and dust off those 2017 memes - we've finally arrived! Bitcoin has transcended the mythical $100,000 price point that HODLers have been hallucinating about since the Obama administration.

We have succesfully meme'd the dream into a reality, can anything stop us now? The Banana zone hath arrived

---

---

Why the big break?

Is it unrest in France with the government collapsing, is it South Korean uncertainty with their president declaring Martial law, is it Putin coming out to admit you can't ban Bitcoin?

Is it countries trying to find a hedge against Trumps' proposed tariffs?

Who knows?

To me it's just another day of sellers exhausted and buyers are eating through the order book like hungry-hungry hippos

Bottom of the bear to getting some serious air time

If you've been here for one full cycle, and stayed the course it's been a wild ride, we saw Terra Luna, FTX, Celsius, BlockFi blow up and a massive draining of liquidity from the market.

The dream was dead and we hit rock bottom in November 2022, at 15k, to those who nailed that absolute bottom, I salute you.

Anyhoo, it's been a slow grind upwards, the crab market of choppy consolidation normally is, but you psychos continued to hold steady and deploy capital even when number continue to go down!

The meme, the dream and now the cream

The bitcoin maximalists who've been sporting perpetual laser-eye Twitter and nostr profiles can now collectively exhale.

Those same folks who've been predicting "$100K by EOY" every single year since 2017 can now do a victory lap, wearing their tinfoil-lined Gucci tracksuits.

You were wrong many times, only to be proven right eventually!

Remember when explaining Bitcoin's potential value used to involve complex blockchain narratives and decentralization lectures?

Call up the cry babies

When Bitcoin looked down and out there were no shortage of doom and gloomers writing another failed obituary, Dan Pena, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffer, Peter Schiff and Peter Zeihan all had to yap and we listened and laughed

Let's hear what mama has to say on the subject of Bitcoin?

Keep dreaming. Bitcoin is never going to hit $100,000!

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) November 8, 2019

Now it's just: "Told ya so" - accompanied by shitcoiners and nocoiners are angry coz of dey enlarged medulla oblongata

---

Times like this, I often think of the wise and eloquent words of MSTR Gigachad Saylor

Put money into Bitcoin and wait for number to go up biggly, if number go down put more money in and wait for number to go up bigglier - Michael Saylor

---

Setting up base camp for the march up Mount Milli-manjaro

The journey to $1 million feels eerily similar. We'll witness another brain-melting crypto pilgrimage - let's call it Mount Milli-manjaro - where every Reddit thread and Twitter space will sound like a combination of economic prophecy and sci-fi fever dream.

Pro tip for newcomers: Pack extra copium, a sense of humor, and maybe some popcorn.

This ride is just getting started.

To the moon? 🚀🤡₿ Looks likely bar a massive black swan, 2025, looks like this thing is going to run with big Usain Bolt strides as we enjoy a year of price discovery, speculation and all the scams that will fester as retail comes piling in to make their overnight fortunes.

I know it's fun to hand out I told you so's and you should enjoy it, take the victory lap but even that gets old, while it's hard to do, try to stay humble and enjoy stack the perpetual top!

@ dfc7c785:4c3c6174

Just testing that I can post a note from Obsidian because this is absolutely flipping amazing!

@ 148755e6:450c107f

突然荒野に行きたくなったので行ってきたエントリーです

まずは練習。高尾山へ

Nostrは古今東西ありとあらゆるオフ会が生えており、

まるで荒野に行きたいという私の意志を完全に汲み取ったかのように「紅葉を見にいこうようオフ」がそこに生えていたので参加した。（しおんさんご主催ありがとうございました） 前半1時間くらいの坂道がマジきつかったです。前半キツすぎて後半足痛かった。。 終始人がいっぱいいて渋谷かと思った。

確かに道がかなり整備されていて、逆にコンクリート故に足が疲れたのかもしれない。隣の人は途中の急な坂道で足を滑らせてて、横で転倒事故が起きるかと思いました。

山頂に行っても人がたくさんいて、迷子になりかけた。あそこはスクランブル交差点や。 そして山頂の先にあるもみじ台まで歩くと人がまばらで、まったりして蕎麦食べたりしながら休憩して下山。

登りは暑くて汗かきましたが、山頂でまったりしてると汗も引いてきて少し冷えました。

下山はスイスイ。16時近くで結構暗かったので、冬の間は早めの登頂・下山がおすすめですね。

登り2時間・下り1時間半で概ね見込み通りって感じでした。

高尾山は登ってると景色が変わります。ちょっと開けた場所に出て下の街が見えたり、草木があったり、階段があったり、参道があったり。。そういう意味では退屈しない2時間でした。

ビギナー山とはいえ、革靴やヒールのある靴で登ってる人がいてびっくり。ツルッと滑ることあると思いますので、スニーカーで登ることをお勧めします。

舐めプしてたとはいえめちゃくちゃキツかったおもひで。

更なる練習。小浅間山へ

さて私は荒野に行きたいワケなのですが、高尾山に荒野はありませんでした。更なる練習として小浅間山へ。

前日（か前々日）に雪が降ったようで、山に雪が残っておりました。

それでも都内の汚れてべちゃっとした感じの雪ではなく、粉砂糖がちょっと積もってるみたいな感じで綺麗だった。

登り前半の30分くらい、景色や道が変わらず、ずっと歩きっぱなしになってしまいました。時間みて休憩しながら行けばよかったなあ。

登るにつれて気温が下がっていくのか、積雪が厚くなっていく。

40分くらいは割と平坦な道が続きますが、突然山頂っぽいものが現れて、「これを登れっていうのかい...？」とビビるほどピーンと急な道が出てきました。(写真だと分かりづらいですね)

ただ、高尾山のコンクリート道に比べると足の疲れはそこまででした。雪道なので気をつけて歩くという意味では疲れましたが、春〜秋とかは快適に登れるんじゃないでしょうか。

山頂に到着するとドーンと浅間山が見えて圧巻。

風が強くて飛ばされる恐怖はありましたが、なんとか無事でいられました。あったかいお茶美味しかった〜。

なぜかギャルの看板があって、謎でした。写真はひとまずありません。

山頂が2箇所あって、それぞれで眺めを満喫していたら結構時間が経ってました。

小さい背丈くらいの木や足元にちょっとした植物があったり、自分的にはかなり理想の荒野に近かったです。（植物に対する解像度が低すぎる） 往復で2時間程度の山らしいんですが、なんやかんやと2時間半強くらいいた気がします。

荒野ビギナーは小浅間山に往け

というわけで、荒野に行きたい人はまずは小浅間山を登ると良いと思います。 また登りたい。

荒野部部長

一緒に高尾山・小浅間山に登ってくれた方、ありがとうございました！ 個人的には来年の春までに秩父多摩甲斐国立公園に行き、来年の秋までに大山隠岐国立公園に行くという目標を立ててるんですが、 少々時間が空くので次どこに行こうかしらと考えているところです。

ヒントとしては、火山で、あまり高低差のないところだとビギナーの私にちょうど良さそうです。

とある情報筋によると伊豆大島が良さそうなので、次の機会に行けたらと思っています。

みんなで荒野に行こう！

@ a012dc82:6458a70d

Table Of Content

• Debt as an Investment Tool: A Controversial Perspective

• Leveraging Bitcoin for Debt: The Concept of "DeFi Loans"

• The Role of Institutional Borrowing in Bitcoin Market Liquidity

• Debt-Fueled Bitcoin Mining Operations: A Risky Bet

• Debunking Debt-Backed Stablecoins: Are They Truly Stable?

• The Paradox of Bitcoin Borrowing and Financial Freedom

• Leveraging Debt to Accelerate Bitcoin Adoption in Developing Economies

• Can Debt-Financed Bitcoin Purchases Fuel Bubbles?

• Debt as an Incentive for Innovation: The Role of Bitcoin Loans

• The Fear of Debt-Induced Market Manipulation

• Conclusion

• FAQ

Cryptocurrencies have revolutionized the financial landscape, and Bitcoin, being the first and most popular among them, has been a hot topic of discussion. As Bitcoin's popularity soars, so does the interest in its potential benefits and drawbacks. One intriguing question that arises is whether debt can play a positive role in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In this in-depth analysis, we will delve into surprising facts surrounding this very topic, evaluating the possibilities and implications. Brace yourself for an eye-opening journey into the world of Bitcoin and debt!

Debt as an Investment Tool: A Controversial Perspective

Many investors are eager to get their hands on Bitcoin, given its incredible price appreciation over the years. However, not everyone can afford to purchase large quantities of Bitcoin outright. This is where debt comes into play as a potential investment tool. By taking out a loan and investing in Bitcoin, investors believe they can ride the wave of the cryptocurrency's upward trajectory and generate substantial returns. While this approach has yielded impressive results for some, it also carries significant risks, such as the potential for increased debt burden in case of market downturns.

Leveraging Bitcoin for Debt: The Concept of "DeFi Loans"

With the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, borrowers can now utilize their Bitcoin holdings as collateral to secure loans. These loans, commonly referred to as "DeFi loans," enable borrowers to access liquidity without selling their Bitcoin holdings. This concept has garnered attention and support from the crypto community, as it allows individuals to maintain their exposure to Bitcoin while meeting their financial needs. However, borrowers must remain cautious as these loans come with interest rates and the risk of liquidation if the collateral's value drops significantly.

The Role of Institutional Borrowing in Bitcoin Market Liquidity

Institutional players are increasingly entering the Bitcoin market, and many of them are exploring avenues to leverage their Bitcoin holdings. Institutional borrowing has emerged as a means for these entities to access capital while maintaining their exposure to Bitcoin. This trend has implications for market liquidity, as it injects more capital into the ecosystem, potentially stabilizing prices and promoting adoption. However, an excessive reliance on debt by institutions can also create vulnerabilities, leaving the market susceptible to sudden shocks.

Debt-Fueled Bitcoin Mining Operations: A Risky Bet

Bitcoin mining requires substantial computational power, which translates into significant expenses. Some miners resort to taking on debt to fund their operations and expand their mining capacities. While this strategy can yield profits during bullish market conditions, it also exposes miners to heightened risks during market downturns. In such scenarios, miners might find it challenging to service their debts and remain profitable, potentially leading to bankruptcies and a drop in the network's overall hashrate.

Debunking Debt-Backed Stablecoins: Are They Truly Stable?

Stablecoins, pegged to the value of traditional fiat currencies, are often used to provide stability in the crypto market. Some stablecoins are backed by a mix of fiat and cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. While these debt-backed stablecoins aim to offer stability, their reliance on underlying debt raises concerns about their resilience during economic crises. The recent development of regulatory scrutiny over stablecoins adds another layer of complexity to this matter.

The Paradox of Bitcoin Borrowing and Financial Freedom

Bitcoin's ethos of financial sovereignty often clashes with the idea of borrowing. The very essence of Bitcoin lies in providing users with full control over their funds, free from the influence of central authorities. When individuals borrow Bitcoin, they must relinquish some level of control over the borrowed assets, potentially undermining the principle of financial freedom. Striking a balance between leveraging Bitcoin and preserving its core principles remains an ongoing debate within the crypto community.

Leveraging Debt to Accelerate Bitcoin Adoption in Developing Economies

In developing economies, access to traditional financial services can be limited, hindering the adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. By leveraging debt in innovative ways, such as microloans denominated in Bitcoin, it is possible to accelerate the adoption of digital currencies in these regions. This approach can empower individuals with access to global financial markets and foster financial inclusion, revolutionizing the way money flows across borders.

Can Debt-Financed Bitcoin Purchases Fuel Bubbles?

As Bitcoin's price rallies, there is a growing concern that debt-financed purchases might contribute to speculative bubbles. In the past, excessive borrowing to invest in Bitcoin has coincided with price surges and subsequent crashes. Such situations raise questions about the sustainability of Bitcoin's growth and the potential consequences of debt-driven investment strategies.

Debt as an Incentive for Innovation: The Role of Bitcoin Loans

Bitcoin lending platforms have emerged as a way to connect lenders and borrowers within the crypto ecosystem. These platforms facilitate Bitcoin loans for various purposes, ranging from personal finance to business expansion. By offering competitive interest rates, these platforms encourage the circulation of Bitcoin, potentially driving innovation and ecosystem growth.

The Fear of Debt-Induced Market Manipulation

As more institutional players enter the Bitcoin market, concerns about potential market manipulation through debt-financed trading have surfaced. High-leverage trades can amplify price movements, leading to increased volatility and, in extreme cases, market manipulation. Regulators and market participants must remain vigilant to address any undue influence on the market due to excessive debt leveraging.

Conclusion

The question of whether debt can be good for Bitcoin is multifaceted and requires careful consideration. Debt can serve as an investment tool, a means for accessing liquidity, and a driver of innovation. However, it also presents risks, including market manipulation, instability, and potential bubbles. As the crypto space continues to evolve, finding a balanced approach that maximizes the benefits of debt while mitigating its risks remains an ongoing challenge. As investors and users, it is essential to stay informed, exercise prudence, and make informed decisions based on a deep understanding of the dynamic relationship between debt and Bitcoin.

FAQ

Can borrowing Bitcoin be safer than buying it outright? While borrowing Bitcoin may offer potential benefits in terms of capital utilization and risk management, it is not necessarily safer than buying it outright. Borrowing introduces the risk of debt burden, especially during market downturns.

Are decentralized finance (DeFi) loans trustworthy? DeFi loans can be a valuable tool for accessing liquidity without selling your Bitcoin holdings. However, they come with inherent risks, including the possibility of liquidation if the value of your collateral drops significantly.

How can Bitcoin mining operations benefit from debt? Bitcoin mining operations often require a significant upfront investment in hardware and operational costs. Debt can help miners fund their expansion and take advantage of profitable mining opportunities.

That's all for today

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.

@ 472f440f:5669301e

The end of the first part of bitcoin's story has come to an end. Most of the story has yet to be written, but I feel confident in saying that reaching the $100,000 per bitcoin milestone is a clear demarcation between two distinct eras of bitcoin. Yes, we have hit the significant milestones of $1, $10, $100, $1,000, and $10,000 over the last fifteen years and they all felt significant. And they certainly were in their own right. However, hitting the "six figure" milestone feels a bit different.

One bitcoin is currently worth a respectable salary for an American citizen. Ten hunnid bands. Something that is impressive to the layman. This may not mean much to many who have been around bitcoin for some time. The idea of bitcoin hitting $100,000 was seen as a foregone conclusion for millions of people out there. Myself included. This price marker is simply an inevitability on the road to global reserve currency to us.

With that being said, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of those who have doubted bitcoin up to this point. For some reason or another, $100,000 bitcoin has been used as a price target that "will never be hit" for many of the naysayers.

"Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme."

"Tulips."

"Governments will ban it if it hits that point."

"It can't scale."

"It will be 51% attacked."

"No one will trust bitcoin."

"It can't be the world's money."

And yet, despite all of the kvetching from the haters over the years, here we are. Sitting above $100,000. Taking a short rest at the latest checkpoint en route to the peak of the mountain. We hovered right under $100,000 for a couple of weeks. Nominally, where we stand today is much closer to where we were last week compared to where we were six months ago. But for some reason the price tipping over $100,000 has catapulted bitcoin to a new playing field. Where bitcoin stood yesterday and where it found itself six months ago seem miles below where it is today. Crossing over the event horizon of six figures forces people to think of bitcoin in a different light. Almost as if we have entered another dimension.

The last year has been filled with a lead up to this crossing over of the event horizon.

Financial institutions that have derided bitcoin for well over a decade were forced to bend the knee and offer bitcoin exposure to their clients. The mere offering of that exposure has resulted in the most successful ETFs in the history of this particular investment vehicle.

Governments around the world have been forced to reckon with the fact that bitcoin is here to stay and that they need to act accordingly. Thanks to the first mover actions taken by El Salvador and Bhutan, which have nonchalantly decided to go all in on bitcoin, others have taken notice. Will that be publicly acknowledged by the bigger governments? Probably not. But you'd be naive to think that politicians in the US seeing two very small countries making such big bets on bitcoin didn't induce at least a little bit of FOMO. Once the bitcoin FOMO seed is planted it's hard to uproot.

Combine this with the fact that it has become rather cool to be privy to the fact that the world's governments have become egregiously addicted to debt and money printing, that inflation is pervasive and inescapable, and that censorship and Orwellian control tactics are on the rise and it is easy to see why more people are more receptive to the idea of bitcoin.

All that was needed to create an all out frenzy - a slingshot effect up the S Curve of adoption - was a psychological trigger. Bitcoin crossing over six figures.

Well, here we are. The tropes against bitcoin that have been trotted out over the last sixteen years no longer have as much bite as they did in many people's eyes. Sure, there will be some butt hurt nocoiners and totalitarians who continue to trot them out, but crossing the chasm of six figure bitcoin will have an order of magnitude more people thinking, "I hear what you're saying, but reality seems to be saying something completely different. And, if I'm being honest with myself, reality is making much more sense than your screeching."

Unstoppable peer-to-peer digital cash with a hard capped supply has been around since January 3rd, 2009. December 5th, 2024 will be the day that it cemented itself as something that cannot be ignored. Part I of the bitcoin story has been written. The end of the beginning is behind us. On to Part II: the rapid monetization of bitcoin, which will cement it as the reserve currency of the world.

---

Final thought... I used some 2017-2020 era tactics to get into the writing mood tonight. 90210

@ 7ed7d5c3:6927e200

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?  Thou art more lovely and more temperate; Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

 And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

 By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

``` But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest;

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee. ```

@ 2063cd79:57bd1320

Gerade für Anfänger//innen ist es oft nicht leicht die in der Bitcoin Welt verwendeten Benennungen und Stückelungen zu durchsteigen. Was unterscheidet Bitcoin von bitcoins, wie viele Sats sind ein Bitcoin und was zur Hölle sind UTXOs? Und vielmehr noch, warum sollte mich das interessieren? Ganz einfach: Wer UTXOs vernünftig verwaltet, spart sich nicht nur potentiell zukünftigen Ärger, sondern kann sogar bares Geld sparen. Da die meisten Menschen mit finanzieller Vorbildung gewohnt sind in Konten oder Guthaben zu denken, bedarf es beim Verständnis von UTXOs sicherlich ein wenig Unterstützung. Also wollen wir uns dem Thema Schritt für Schritt annehmen.

---

Einstieg

Viele Neulinge haben die Vorstellung, dass ein bitcoin gleich einem bitcoin ist. Sie nehmen fälschlicherweise an, dass ein bitcoin immer als Ganzes existiert. Für viele ist der Moment, in dem sie erkennen, dass ein bitcoin aus 100.000.000 Satoshis besteht, der erste große Aha!-Moment. Die Erkenntnis, dass man nicht einen ganzen bitcoin kaufen muss, sondern kleine Einheiten erwerben kann, eröffnet vielen einen ganz anderen Blick auf Bitcoin. Bekannte Sprüche, wie "ich bin zu spät dran" oder "ich kann mir keinen bitcoin leisten" hat jeder schon mal gehört und wenn man dann erklärt, dass man kleine Mengen für Cent-Beträge erwerben und versenden / erhalten kann, ändert dies die Grundhaltung zu Bitcoin von Grund auf.

Der nächste Schritt bei der Erkenntnisreise von Bitcoin ist das Verständnis über UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Output).

💡Ein UTXO ist das Stück Information jeder Bitcoin-Transaktion, das an eine neue Adresse ausgegeben wird, die als Eingabe für zukünftige Transaktionen verwendet werden kann.

Der einfachste Weg, UTXOs zu erklären, ist eine einfache Analogie zu Geld im Portemonnaie. Man stelle sich dazu die Bitcoin-Wallet als ganz normale Geldbörse im normalen Leben vor. Verschiedene Szenarien:

1. Man hat im Portemonnaie 10€ in Form eines 10€-Scheins. Man möchte am Kiosk ein Bier für 2€ kaufen. Also bezahlt man mit dem Schein und bekommt vom Verkäufer 8€ zurück.

Was ist passiert? Es gibt einen Transaktions-Output: 10€-Schein aus dem Portemonnaie. Und es gibt zwei Transaktions-Inputs: 2€ in die Kasse des Kiosks und 8€ zurück in das Portemonnaie. Das sieht dann so aus:

1. Man hat im Portemonnaie 10€ in Form von 10 1€-Münzen. Man möchte am Kiosk ein Bier für 2€ kaufen. Also bezahlt man mit zwei 1€-Münzen und bekommt nichts vom Verkäufer zurück. Man hat ja passend gezahlt.

Was ist passiert? Es werden zwei Transaktions-Outputs zusammengefasst: Zwei 1€-Münzen aus dem Portemonnaie. Und es gibt einen Transaktions-Input: 2€ in die Kasse des Kiosks (ein weiterer Input über 0€ zurück in das Portemonnaie ist nicht nötig). Das sieht dann so aus:

Es gibt natürlich auch ein Szenario, in dem beide Fälle verknüpft sind.

1. Man hat im Portemonnaie 10€ in Form von zwei 5€-Scheinen. Man möchte am Kiosk drei Bier für 6€ kaufen. Also bezahlt man mit zwei 5€-Scheinen und bekommt vom Verkäufer 4€ zurück.

Was ist passiert? Es gibt zwei Transaktions-Outputs: Zwei 5€-Scheine aus dem Portemonnaie. Und es gibt zwei Transaktions-Inputs: 6€ in die Kasse des Kiosks, und 4€ zurück in das Portemonnaie. Das sieht dann so aus:

Mit Hilfe dieser drei Szenarien haben wir die beiden Grundideen verbildlicht: Um einen gewissen Betrag zu bezahlen, können UTXOs (die jeweiligen Münzen oder Scheine im Portemonnaie) auseinandergebrochen oder zusammengefasst werden.

Eine weitere Grundidee besteht darin, dass ein UTXO IMMER zerstört wird. Das lässt sich mit dem folgenden Szenario verbildlichen:

1. Man hat im Portemonnaie 10€ in Form eines 10€-Scheins. Man möchte am Kiosk 5 Bier für 10€ kaufen. Also bezahlt man mit dem Schein und bekommt nichts vom Verkäufer zurück.

Was ist passiert? Es gibt einen Transaktions-Output: 10€-Schein aus dem Portemonnaie. Und es gibt einen Transaktions-Input: 10€ in die Kasse des Kiosks. Allerdings hat der Kioskbesitzer den 10€-Schein zerrissen und hat einen ganz neuen 10€-Schein bekommen, den er in die Kasse legt. Dem Besitzer ist egal, ob der Schein derselbe ist, wie der, den ich ihm gegeben habe, denn der Schein in seiner Kasse ist vom Wert identisch.

Als nächstes muss man verstehen, dass Transaktionen in der Blockchain historisch miteinander verknüpft sind. Diese Verknüpfung entsteht dadurch, dass die Outputs einer Transaktion immer die Inputs der nächsten Transaktion darstellen. In unserem Beispiel bedeutet das, dass es jemanden gibt, der eine Liste darüber führt, welche Münzen und Scheine aus einem Portemonnaie ausgegeben wurden und welche nicht. Auf dieser Liste steht aber auch, welche Münzen und Scheine in die Kasse des Kioskbesitzers gewandert sind und von dort wieder herausgegeben wurden. Diese Liste wird also immer länger, denn die Scheine und Münzen werden als Wechselgeld mehrere Male am Tag an verschiedene Kunden ausgegeben und auch deren Portemonnaies werden auf dieser Liste akribisch festgehalten. Diese Liste ist die Blockchain.

Jetzt haben wir also verstanden, dass Bitcoin kein System von Konten und Guthaben ist, sondern vielmehr die Sammlung und Übersicht von UTXOs und deren Besitzer. Die Aufgabe einer Wallet besteht also unter anderem darin, ein Bitcoin-Guthaben abzubilden, das aus vielen verschiedenen UTXOs besteht.

💡Zusammenfassung: Um eine Bitcoin-Transaktion auszugeben, wird entweder ein ganzer UTXO gesendet, für den es möglicherweise Wechselgeld gibt, oder es werden mehrere UTXOs zusammengefasst, um einen Betrag zu kombinieren.

Transaktionsgebühren

Mit diesem Wissen können wir jetzt eine weitere Komplexität hinzufügen. In unseren Szenarien gab es nur zwei Teilnehmer jeder Transaktion: Sender und Empfänger der Zahlung, also Biertrinker und Kioskbesitzer. Im Bitcoin-Netzwerk gibt es allerdings noch einen dritten Teilnehmer, der an jeder Transaktion interessiert ist. Die Miner. Denn Miner sind dafür verantwortlich, dass die Transaktionen in die Blockchain geschrieben werden und dafür erhalten sie eine kleine Transaktionsgebühr. Dies bedeutet, dass ein weiterer UTXO erstellt wird, der diese Gebühren enthält. Technisch gesehen ist diese Zahlung impliziert, dass heißt der (die) UTXO(s) auf der Senderseite sinf größer, als der UTXO auf der Empfängerseite. Das Delta erhält der Miner.

Die Höhe der Gebühr variiert von Transaktion zu Transaktion und kann sogar vom Sender eingestellt werden, indem das Delta größer oder kleiner eingestellt wird. Ein weiterer Punkt ist, dass der Gebrauch von vielen UTXOs auch zu höheren Gebühren führt, da die Gebühren anhand der Größe der Transaktion (Dateigröße) und nicht anhand der Geldmenge (in Bitcoin, US Dollar oder Euro dargestellt) berechnet werden. Eine 0,001 Bitcoin Zahlung kann dementsprechend höhere Gebühren beinhalten, als eine 100 Bitcoin Zahlung, wenn die 0,001 Bitcoin Zahlung aus vielen kleinen UTXOs besteht. Dies bedeutet aber nicht, dass ein Anteil jedes verwendeten UTXOs in separate UTXOs für den Miner aufgebrochen wird, der Miner erhält einen UTXO in Höhe der Gesamtmenge der Gebühren.

Um es einfach zu veranschaulichen, nehmen wir eine Gebühr von 1% an. Bildlich dargestellt ist dies einfacher zu verstehen:

Wie wir sehen können, hätten zwei UTXOs (5€ und 1€) gereicht, um die Zahlung von 6€ an den Kiosk zu tätigen, allerdings musste noch ein weiterer UTXO von der Wallet hinzugezogen werden, um auch die GEbühr zu zahlen. Der Rest geht als Wechselgeld an den Sender zurück.

Das Thema Gebühren ist nicht ganz trivial, denn die Höhe der Transaktionsgebühren hängt nicht nur davon ab, wie viele Bytes eine Transaktion hat (also aus wie vielen verschiedenen UTXOs sie zusammengestellt wurde), sondern auch vom aktuellen Status der Auslastung des Netzwerks und vom aktuellen Kurs. Die Gebühren werden in sats/B oder sats/vB (Satoshis pro (virtual) Byte) berechnet, also wie viele Sats man pro Byte entrichten muss. Da Sats Kursschwankungen unterliegen, sind Transaktionen im Allgemeinen teurer, wenn der Kurs hoch ist.

Wie an der Grafik deutlich zu sehen ist, sind Transaktionsgebühren in den letzten anderthalb Jahren relativ stabil und relativ niedrig gewesen, allerdings sieht man auch, dass es auch Zeiten gab, in denen die Gebühren deutlich gestiegen sind und sehr wechselhaft waren.

Ein weiterer Faktor beim Bestimmen der Gebühren ist der/die Nutzer//in selbst, denn Gebühren lassen sich individuell einstellen. Die meisten (mobilen) Wallets übernehmen diese Aufgabe für den/die Nutzer//in, indem mit Hilfe eines Algorithmus die optimale Höhe der angebotenen Gebühren berechnet wird. Wiederum andere Wallets erlauben dem/der Nutzer//in die Gebühren von Transaktion zu Transaktion frei zu bestimmen.

Welchen Nutzen haben hohe gegenüber niedrigen Gebühren? Bitcoin-Miner handeln nicht ganz uneigennützig, denn sie werden für ihre Arbeit entlohnt. Für jeden produzierten Block erhalten sie neben dem Blockanteil (Reward) auch sämtliche Transaktionsgebühren, der im neuen Block enthaltenen Transaktionen. Ohne zu sehr ins Detail zu gehen, bedeutet dies, dass Miner einen Anreiz haben, Transaktionen mit möglichst hohen Gebühren zuerst in den neuen Block zu schreiben, um so ihren Profit zu maximieren. Je höher eine Gebühr relativ zu denen der anderen Transaktionen im Mempool ist, desto wahrscheinlicher ist, dass diese Transaktion im nächsten Block landet. Das bietet dem/der Nutzer//in die Möglichkeit, die eigene Transaktion zu priorisieren.

Weitere Faktoren, die Einfluss auf die Höhe der Gebühren nehmen können (z.B. Adressformate), unterschlagen wir an dieser Stelle und widmen uns wieder dem eigentlichen Thema.

Wir haben also gesehen, dass das Bitcoin Netzwerk im Endeffekt eine riesige Sammlung von UTXOs ist. Man könnte auch sagen, dass UTXOs bitcoins sind und das Netzwerk nur den wechselnden Besitzanspruch jedes/jeder Besitzer//in verwaltet. In der Regel helfen uns Wallets dabei, dieses komplexe Netzwerk möglichst benutzerfreundlich darzustellen, denn alles was der/die Durchschnittsnutzer//in braucht, ist eine Übersicht über die Menge Bitcoin, die er/sie besitzt und eine Möglichkeit Bitcoin zu senden und zu empfangen. Wenn man aber etwas tiefer in die Materie steigt und/oder sogar anfängt, größere Mengen (und ich meine nicht große Summen) an Bitcoin zu empfangen, dann ist es sinnvoll, sich mit UTXO Management zu beschäftigen. Dies ist besonders häufig der Fall bei Firmen oder Personen, die Zahlungen in Bitcoin akzeptieren, Value-4-Value Content produzieren, oder in sonstiger Form viele Transaktionseingänge mit Bitcoin haben.

UTXO Management

Das Verwalten der eigenen UTXOs besteht im Prinzip darin, diese zu labeln / markieren und zu konsolidieren. Einige Wallets bieten diese Funktionen an und erlauben z.B. jeden einzelnen UTXO anzuzeigen und ein Label zu vergeben.

Dieses Taggen oder Labeln von einzelnen UTXOs wird auch Coin Control genannt, und ist dann besonders hilfreich, wenn man einzelne Eingänge in bestimmte UTXOs für Zahlungen und andere UTXOs für das Sparen aufteilen möchte. Dies könnte Gründe der Privatsphäre, aber auch einfach buchhalterische Hintergründe haben.

Mit unserem Vorwissen wissen wir jetzt, dass man problemlos alle UTXOs einer Wallet konsolidieren kann, indem man diese einfach in einer Transaktion in Höhe des gesamten Guthabens an eine eigene Adresse sendet. Dies hat zur Folge, dass alle UTXOs zu einem einzelnen UTXO (zzgl. eines UTXOs für Gebühren) gruppiert werden.

Dies sieht dann auf der Blockchain folgendermaßen aus:

Der Vorteil vom UTXO Management ist zum einen, dass man durch das Konsolidieren kleinerer Beträge zukünftig Transaktionsgebühren sparen kann - dies ist natürlich nur richtig, wenn man nicht genauso viele Konsolidierungen vornimmt, wie man Zahlungen ausführen würde. Auch ermöglicht aktives Management Konsolidierungen in Zeiten vorzunehmen, wenn Netzwerkgebühren niedrig sind, um zu vermeiden, dass man während einer Zeit, in der das Netzwerk überlastet ist, mehr bezahlt. Außerdem kann UTXO Management (und dazu gehören auch CoinJoins ⬇️) die Privatsphäre erhöhen, da die in einer Transaktion benutzten UTXOs Informationen über das Gesamtguthaben oder den Transaktionsverlauf preisgeben könnten.

https://www.genexyz.org/post/23-block-772315-bitcoin-mixing-q6i7y4/

Mit dem anhaltenden Wachstum des Netzwerks steigt natürlich auch die Anzahl der existierenden UTXOs, denn auch wenn Inputs zerstört werden, kommt es natürlich häufiger vor, dass größere UTXOs in kleinere aufgebrochen werden, als dass kleine UTXOs zu größeren Transaktionen zusammengefasst werden. Es gibt natürlich auch Zyklen, in denen die Gesamtmenge leicht zurück geht. Dies geht meist mit einem Rückgang des Kurses einher und ist auf UTXO Management zurückzuführen, bei dem große Operationen, wie Miner und Exchanges, ihre UTXOs bündeln und vom niedrigen Preis profitieren wollen.

Sidenote: Jede//r, der/ die schonmal eine "kleinere" Transaktion gesendet hat, "um zu testen, ob das auch alles funktioniert mit diesem Netzwerk", um dann anschließend einen größeren Betrag zu versenden, wird jetzt festgestellt haben, dass in beiden Fällen, sehr wahrscheinlich ein UTXO mit dem Gesamtbetrag ins Netzwerk gesendet wurde 😄

🫳🎤

---

In diesem Sinne, 2... 1... Risiko!‌

@ 97fc03df:8bf891df

— How Adaptive Mechanical Consensus is Reshaping the Trust Mechanism in the Information Age

Gavin, BeeGee (Core Builders of Super Bitcoin & BEVM) December 4, 2024

From Cybernetics to the Trust Crisis in the Information Age

The advent of the AI era has brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges. The explosion of information has confronted humanity with the daunting task of processing and trusting vast amounts of data. Traditional trust mechanisms, such as centralized institutions and social consensus, are increasingly inadequate in addressing the complexities of our evolving landscape. AI algorithms, centered around large language models, are iterating at an unstoppable pace, and various AI derivatives are inevitably permeating every aspect of human life. However, behind this rapid development, are we truly prepared to handle the ensuing trust crisis?

As far back as science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, in I, Robot, foresaw that central control systems might surpass the 'Three Laws of Robotics” and pose a threat to humanity. As near as the insightful scholar, Yuval Noah Harari, raised similar concerns, questioning, “Can we trust computer algorithms to make wise decisions and create a better world?” These apprehensions reflect a growing distrust in centralized authority and algorithmic decision-making. In this context, the importance of decentralized trust becomes paramount. The pressing question is: How can we establish reliable systems without a central authority?

To address this issue, we need to draw upon new theoretical frameworks, and cybernetics precisely offers the crucial insights required.

Cybernetics and the Theoretical Foundation of Bitcoin

Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, delved into the control and communication of systems in his seminal work Cybernetics, emphasizing the critical role of feedback mechanisms in maintaining system stability. His core ideas—self-organizing systems, nonlinear dynamics, and the exploration of life's essence—provide a robust theoretical foundation for understanding Bitcoin's success.

Norbert Wiener

Bitcoin's adaptive mechanical consensus is a practical embodiment of Wiener's cybernetic principles, showcasing the capabilities of self-regulation and self-organization within a system. Through Proof of Work (PoW) and dynamic difficulty adjustments, the Bitcoin network achieves a high degree of decentralized control, ensuring the system's security and stability. This mechanism not only aligns with information theory's principles regarding data transmission and trust establishment but also offers a novel solution to the trust crisis in the information age.

The Essence of Blockchain: Decentralized Control, NOT Computational Power

Currently, many blockchain projects overly emphasize computational metrics like Transactions Per Second (TPS), attempting to capture market share by enhancing performance. However, this pursuit of computational power overlooks the core value of blockchain technology. The true revolutionary aspect of blockchain lies in its realization of Decentralized Control. Through adaptive mechanical consensus, it addresses trust and collaboration issues that traditional centralized systems cannot effectively manage.

For instance, Bitcoin's success does not stem from its computational prowess. In fact, the Bitcoin network's transaction processing capacity is relatively limited. Its core value lies in achieving a trust mechanism without the need for centralized institutions through decentralized control. This mechanism enables participants within the network to conduct secure transactions and collaborations without requiring mutual trust. The establishment of this trust relies on rigorous cryptographic algorithms and consensus protocols rather than the enhancement of computational speed.

In contrast, some blockchain projects that emphasize high TPS may have performance advantages but lack robust decentralized control, making it difficult to establish a stable foundation of trust. This is akin to constructing a skyscraper without a solid foundation—it may appear impressive but is ultimately unsustainable.

Bitcoin's Adaptive Mechanical Consensus: The Lifeblood of the Digital World

Bitcoin's adaptive mechanical consensus functions as the "Mechanical Heart" of the digital realm, endowing the network with capabilities of self-regulation, self-organization, and self-evolution. Miners, motivated by Bitcoin rewards, invest substantial computational power to participate in the Proof of Work competition. This mechanism not only secures the network but also creates a self-reinforcing cycle: increased miner participation leads to higher total network hash rate, elevated mining difficulty, further strengthened consensus mechanisms, and consequently, an increase in Bitcoin's value, attracting even more miners.

This virtuous cycle exemplifies the characteristics of a self-organizing system. The network's stability and security do not depend on any centralized entity but are achieved through the collective competition and collaboration of participants. Bitcoin's consensus mechanism not only resolves the Byzantine Generals Problem in distributed systems but also demonstrates the complexity and emergent behaviors inherent in nonlinear systems.

Mathematician Alan Turing believed that thought ultimately arises from mechanical processes in the brain. In contrast, logician Kurt Gödel argued that reducing thought to mere mechanical processes was a misunderstanding. He believed human thought possesses depths and complexities beyond the reach of machines, especially in aspects like intuition, insight, and consciousness.

Alan Turing

Kurt Gödel

However, Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin offers a new perspective on this debate. By implementing adaptive mechanical consensus, it demonstrates that machines can possess abilities akin to human thought. This "Mechanical Heart" allows the Bitcoin network to self-regulate and evolve, exhibiting characteristics similar to living organisms. While Bitcoin's "thinking" ability is limited to expressing BTC transfers and UTXO state changes, it represents an initial manifestation of machine cognition.

If we further contemplate designing a universal "Mechanical Heart" (adaptive mechanical consensus), we could potentially construct mechanical adaptive control systems capable of expressing a multitude of concepts. This would have profound implications for the development of artificial intelligence, possibly propelling it forward in ways Gödel and Turing envisioned.

In both biological and mechanical systems, functions can be divided into three parts: sensors for communication, the brain for computation, and the heart for thought (control). In the Bitcoin network, the "heart" is its adaptive mechanical consensus. This is a breakthrough that neither Turing nor Gödel anticipated. Perhaps, had they witnessed the emergence of Bitcoin, they would be exhilarated by its implications for the advancement of artificial intelligence.

The Satoshi Paradigm: The Inception of Mechanical Consensus and a New Technological Model

The birth of Bitcoin marks the emergence of an entirely new technological paradigm—the Satoshi Paradigm. In addressing the distributed trust problem, Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, a system based on adaptive mechanical consensus. He did not merely aim to create a digital currency but sought to establish a trust system that operates without centralized control. The Electronic Cash System was merely one experimental application of his broader vision.

This paradigm embodies the three core principles of Wiener's cybernetics: self-organizing systems, nonlinear dynamics, and the exploration of life's essence. The Bitcoin network, with its "Mechanical Heart," possesses the abilities of self-regulation, self-organization, and self-evolution. The self-organizing aspect is evident in the autonomous participation and collaboration of network nodes. Nonlinear dynamics are reflected in the network's complex and dynamic behaviors. The exploration of life's essence is manifested in the system's capacity for self-maintenance and evolution.

Drawing on Cross-Disciplinary Thought: The Resonance of Cybernetics, Information Theory, and Blockchain

Cybernetics and information theory provide crucial theoretical support for understanding Bitcoin and blockchain technology. Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication lays the groundwork for comprehending information transmission, signal processing, and the establishment of trust. Cybernetics emphasizes system feedback and self-regulation, which closely align with Bitcoin's adaptive mechanical consensus mechanism.

Claude Shannon

Moreover, by incorporating insights from other fields, we can examine the development of blockchain from a broader perspective. In artificial intelligence, self-learning and adaptive mechanisms can inspire improvements in consensus algorithms. Philosophical concepts like intersubjectivity help us understand the relationship between individuals and the collective in decentralized networks. In Buddhism, the notion of "seeing one's true nature" from the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch emphasizes attaining an understanding of the essence of things through self-realization, without clinging to superficial representations such as the hand that points to the moon. These ideas prompt us to consider the role of the "heart" and the impermanence of systems. Bitcoin's "Mechanical Heart" embodies this impermanence and emptiness, continuously self-adjusting to maintain system stability and trustworthiness.

Expanding Applications: From Currency to Broader Social Governance

Bitcoin's success suggests that the application of decentralized control should not be confined to the realm of digital currencies. By constructing robust adaptive mechanical consensus mechanisms, we can potentially achieve decentralized trust and collaboration in various other fields.

Take constitutional law for example. Traditional interpretation and enforcement of constitutions rely on centralized institutions like courts and law enforcement agencies. Discrepancies in interpretations by different enforcers can lead to trust issues and inconsistent application. If we could employ a trustworthy decentralized consensus mechanism to interpret and enforce constitutional provisions, it might enhance fairness and consistency in the legal system. While this endeavor presents significant challenges, it holds profound significance, much like Satoshi Nakamoto's exploration of decentralized currency through Bitcoin.

Conclusion: Reconstructing Trust, Opening a New Chapter

In an era where information is overwhelmingly abundant, trust has become a scarce and invaluable resource. Bitcoin, through its adaptive mechanical consensus, has pioneered a global decentralized trust system, redefining how we collaborate and transact. We need to break free from our obsession with computational power and return to the essence of blockchain. By focusing on the realization of decentralized control and through Bitcoin’s “Mechanical Heart”, we can reconstruct humanity's trust mechanisms.

On this long journey of crypto, where each day feels like a year, we've travelled for so long yet the "Other Shore" seems far from reachable. We seem to have forgotten why we set out in the first place and what it takes to carry us further.

Fortunately, there is still Bitcoin, like the North Star hanging high in the sky, guiding us. As the song "Chapters" sings, "Don't let dark clouds cover the blue of the sky, don't let fate turn back the boat without a paddle."

Let us return to our original aspiration, return to Bitcoin, and open a new chapter where our dream began.

@ c67cd3e1:84098345

@ 7776c32d:45558888

Before I start, let me say: keep building. To discourage you is the furthest thing from why I complain. I'm mainly posting this to document where we're at, so later, we can remember what we were doing here.

That out of the way, I've said this before and it might be a while before I don't have to say it again: nostr has the potential for censorship resistance, but it doesn't actually have censorship resistance right now. It isn't actually resisting censorship. I'm using it to resist censorship, but can you even tell if it's working for me at all? I still feel much more heavily censored than I was back when Aaron Swartz was alive.

I first heard about Brian Thompson on reddit, not nostr, even though I'm so banned from reddit I can't even view it from my home internet so I don't check it much at all anymore. Nostr is still LESS censorship-resistant than that nostr:note109z46d0x8k9gjs8q2tgfmx384gpj7p99ky6fgnwyln7qznrktalsjpupx6

Don't remember where I first heard about Israel's big terrorist attack with communication devices in Lebanon, but it wasn't on nostr nostr:note14ncedyjuws7jfg79xawwltf3mx5nmk7u0ylqakpyld6nxhpcqwtq95tj6a

I first heard about Matt Nelson's self-immolation on X, not nostr nostr:note1z6hxt76gwv8mvywflqg5cge4326tyv6jq6vptag4ytjcczgcyguqnzvd4k

People praised the Primal update that took away my ability to see all the posts from my followers nostr:note1g8jlkec7y9wy5u06v0c0tjhsscchur5quejs5mu2lp7n7fse8s0shevnek

People pay for Primal Premium to get basic functionality we should get from a P2P network, like having posts actually stay and not disappear - will paying Primal protect bookmarked content too? nostr:note1qqqq9sqy5kuf5rz0lwpul0dnjvrhn53erlymsyx7c3xx79vm2t5qxt2c5q

At the technological level, nostr is based on the jack dorsey malware model because it's so much easier to decentralize than a good feed curation system like what Aaron Swartz created at reddit nostr:note1864l5u5ansvvd0ztwl44wncv0fu0x5vgkdh44d9g5jwxur558pss5p9yx8

The protocol calls for servers it calls "relays" that aren't actually network relays as far as I can tell. Fiatjaf made some weird joke about how only non-P2P stuff can work when creating it, phrased as a reference to a quote by Satoshi talking about how Bitcoin would work as a P2P network, but Bitcoin has worked so far and Fiatjaf is ostensibly into it? Oh, but he's into "lightning." Don't worry, people say he's the next Satoshi, and he must simply know more than can be explained (actually 🔥 post by hodlbod) nostr:note1mh6ngw6cevggf59yh0mtf3k45g92srkljhayv63ffdsp5mj63yxq78xh7h

The nostr protocol itself is a kinda retarded javascript-based technology other than the keypair login model that gives it pretty much all the potential it has.

Another cool thing about the protocol is how you can mute people visibly instead of secretly. That brings me from the technology topic to the community topic - how well does the community resist censorship? Well, a lot of the users who fill the "trending" feeds all the time have me muted for being a toxic dickhead and a terrorist (my words, not theirs). Corndalorian is an example. You might recognize other names too

Are we still talking more about Bluesky than Gaza? nostr:note1qqqqpgaef0gfmtctlw2maqmlk7dmfyq5dhf45ygm95skxqdtcrcs2tpcfu

I am definitely still the only person here talking about the ongoing pandemic nostr:note1y8vn4yhn383j62r34q58wnduvzzkzd7exnp4agw4l8gq5zj94t4s6zscr4

As we speak, I, for once have a post which is doing numbers. This gives me some dopamine, as I'm quite alone. I'm thankful for every like and repost. It's an unusual night where a funny reply to a big npub has broken me into Primal's Trending echelon. My post about Brian Thompson, the recently-proven-mortal UnitedHealthcare CEO, has not. You can scroll all the way down to my funny reply in the Trending 4h feed without seeing a single murmur of praise for Brian Thompson's executioner - in fact, not even a peep about the topic at all, praise or otherwise.

Not seeing anything in the 1h feed either -

Meanwhile, this is the top of the front page of reddit's /r/all -

That's how much worse than reddit we are doing. Worse. Than. Fucking. Reddit. Seriously. Reddit, who made me get that screenshot from a different device because this is what I see on my main phone -

A lot of people here still blame all the outsiders for not being here, like there's no way a better job could possibly be done at creating a beacon of intellectualism and free speech

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqvc0k9p3l7wccfg8q6aumsqk64y450m5fcz85sypw05j4elwgtdvqqsyunq8gvn4lpvc636gwkjwuclttk492n4tu7cla9tma856ewcf3lcnjs7vf

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzq3svyhng9ld8sv44950j957j9vchdktj7cxumsep9mvvjthc2pjuqqs96nznqj0kqdzwfxsdy5cqtjjx0wgypknr6fpegtj6ucypktu74zg98a4pf

To which I say -

nostr:nevent1qvzqqqqqqypzqamkcvk5k8g730e2j6atadp6mxk7z4aaxc7cnwrlkclx79z4tzygqyvhwumn8ghj7urjv4kkjatd9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wshszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qpqcdarapax96mun0r59q28r5g3x838xczv755nhj6rfr3a62669paqnpglrr

But it's fine. Maybe we should make nostr the kind of place Digit would like before we seriously try to onboard Hezbollah.

@ 9cb3545c:2ff47bca

Hey there! So you’ve got a whopping 50+ Lightning Channels and you’re not keen on them Force Closing? Well, buckle up! This guide will be an additional resource as you navigate through daunting process.

In this post, we will go over some extra tips and tricks not covered in the official guide. While this guide does have some steps that are not covered by Umbrel, its main objective is to provide confidence in the process (not a replacement process), coming from someone who’s been there and done that, and some how came out with all Lightning Channels still running! I highly recommend reading this post fully before starting the migration process.

Before we dive in, here is the Official Guide from the Umbrel team on how to update UmbrelOS from 0.5.4 to 1.x.x. Reference the steps all the time, and follow them carefully.

With that out of the way. Here are some extra TIPs to fill in some gaps I encountered as I went through the process.

The Order of Steps

Tip #1:

In the Official Umbrel Guide, the Umbrel team asks you to start by backing up your data. As a lightning Node Runner, I recommend against this. Because the Bash script will stop all Umbrel Services and your node will remain offline while you prepare a Bootable USB Stick. So definitely don't start with the backup, first get the bootable stick sorted out, then move on to backups.

Creating the Bootable USB Stick

TIP #2:

After many failed attempts to create a bootable USB stick from the link umbrel provides in their official guide. I ended up getting the ISO directly from Umbrels team through their Discord Channel. Unfortunately, I wont be able to share this link here. but just in case the umbrelOS-amd64-usb-installer.iso.xz didnt work for you as well, this could be an alternative route.

TIP #3:

Since Umbrel is an actual full OS now. You might need to handle some BIOS quirks. The umbrelOS Kernal is not signed. So if you have Secure Boot turned on in the BIOS, your PC will try to protect you, and block you from booting into you USB Stick. Turn off Secure Boot and you should be able to bypass this issue. I also had to turn on Legacy Option ROMs as well.

Tip #4:

Test your Bootable USB Stick on a secondary device before you go on trying to update your node. Since turning the node off and on is a hassle, its just easier to be certain the the Bootable Stick is ready before even attempting to upgrade your node.

If all is good, you are ready to get back to the guide and walk through the steps.

Preparing the Hardware

Tip #5:

In the official guide they as you to connect a Keyboard and Screen. This is of course needed. I would highly suggest you connect a mouse as well. My Bios was very stubborn and didn't comply with just a keyboard as I attempted to re-order Boot Sequences.

The Migration Process

Tip #6:

Remember, this is 10 times easier if you are not running a lightning node, but on a lightning node, the Channel.db file is being updated constantly. Once you start the backup process, the script will shutdown umbrel services and start copying. you can''t turn your node back on after this stage. If you do, assume the backup you created through the Bash script is obsolete. and you will have to redo the backup process again. If you really know what you are doing, you probably can surgically copy/paste the LND folder. But its easier not to do this.

But not to worry, if you start the process just keep going (especially if you checked all the TIPs I cover above). I say this out of experience, because after I started the first backup process, it took me about an hour to backup my SSD, but then the Bootable USB stick threw so many errors I gave up, and turned on the node again. Then later re-attempted the process from scratch. This time, since my external SSD was already full, it took 3.5 hours to backup all the files again.

Tip #7:

This will take time, so just trust the migration process and wait for the files to get copied. you are probably copying more than a terabyte worth of data back and forth over USB, Leverage USB 3 if you have it.

Tip #8:

If you have a custom name for your umbrel node. Meaning you do not access it by using umbrel.local, this will be reset to the default umbrel.local after the migration. I am not sure if this could be switched again to a custom name, but for now, this won't cause any issues.

Tip #9:

During the last steps of the Migration process, and once Umbrel has copied the backup back into the SSD, it will finish the process with downloading your apps, and restarting. Don't freak out :D

Tip #10:

I honestly don't have a tenth tip, but thought it would make this list look nicer with one. So my last tip for you is to relax and enjoy the process. And feel free to tag me if you faced any issues. Hopefully it will be something i experienced and will be able to help.

Have Fun, and Good Luck!

@ 468f729d:5ab4fd5e

@ df8f0a64:057d87a5

2024年下半期の振り返り

あんまり変化はないんですが、進捗ありません！で終わっても仕方ないのでちょっとは無理やりでも振り返りましょう

0. 退職した

上半期時点で決まってはいたんですが、　6年間ほど勤務した会社を退職しました

退職直前まで爆発物取扱みたいなタスクをこなして、なかなかひやひやした退職プロセス

静かに退職したいので送別会の類のイベントは無しにしてくれというお願いをきいてくれた各メンバーに感謝です

1. 公開していたNostrリレーの設定を変更した

日本のみに公開していたリレーを、全世界に公開しました

当初はCloudflareでリレーをホストしていたのが、利用していたnosflareもcfrelayもクライアントに対してイベントを配布するコードがなく（R2だけではできない）

さてどうしたものかと悩んでいたタイミングで、Umbrelのおひとり様リレーのポートを公開する対応をしました。リレーのお引越し

で、公開してしばらくしたら、すごい勢いで日本国外からの投稿が着信するようになり大困惑

調べてみたら、Mutiny wallet（現在はサービス終了）が運営しているblastr.mutinywallet.com（たぶんまだ稼働している）が原因でした

Nostr.watchのAPIを利用して、世の中にあるNostrリレーすべてにイベントを送り込む凶悪な思想犯です

ヘッダー情報などでブロックできなかったので、blastrがホストされてるCloudflareのIPを全てブロックする力技で対処しました

ちなみに、nosflareもいつのまにかblastrのようなものをホストしているようです

なんなんでしょうね、Nostrの白人さんたちの、過激なほど分散というか対検閲をしようとするお節介さは

2. 公開していたNostrリレーを潰した

上記のように折角いろいろやったリレーを潰しました

Reply guyというbotが猛威をふるった時期、クソみたいなイベントをばら撒かれてくることに私がキレたからです。クソが

NostrとしてはこれをきっかけにWoTを組み込んだリレーが開発されたりして、スパム対策が一歩前進した感があります。クソが

スパムばら撒きをBostrが助長してるみたいな批難を受けて、作者のYonleさんがブチ切れ、全Nostr関連リポジトリのメンテを放棄する事態も発生

ちょうどMutiny walletでGOXしたご本人の機嫌が悪かった時期に、クソスパムがぶつかったことによる悲しい出来事でした。ほんとクソ

3. おわりに

他にもこまいことはいくつかあるんですが、主にはこんなとこでしょうか。来年も楽しくNostrしたいですね

@ 7c765d40:bd121d84

Well, this is not what I intended to write about this morning but I feel obligated to do so.

I was supposed to talk about Trump becoming the new King of Canada.

Haha.

Just kidding.

Kinda.

Getting into bitcoin is a very unique experience.

It is totally voluntary and you are forced to build your own web of trust.

It is a very scary and lonely feeling off the start.

When I first got into the crypto space, I was desperately trying to find someone I could trust.

I knew there were a lot of bad actors out there and they can be hard to detect.

When I started listening to bitcoiners speak, everything changed.

It was a much different feeling.

It seemed like they were in it for the people and a revolution, not just their bank balance.

It turns out I was onto something.

I still feel the exact same way about bitcoiners.

But there are definitely some exceptions.

And even if their intentions aren't bad, the way they are conducting business is.

I started my YouTube channel out of necessity.

I never had any plans to be a guy with a daily show on YouTube.

But I received 3-4 calls in a matter of weeks from people who got scammed.

They lost tens of thousands of their life savings to faceless scum with a well designed website.

I wanted to get ahead of this and be a trusted voice in the space.

This blog post is coming from the same place.

Over the last few weeks I have talked to several people who have been burned.

And although they didn't get "scammed" they did lose a lot of their bitcoin.

One person spent $3,500 USD (paid in bitcoin) to get help setting up a Coldcard and running a node.

A portion of that was meant to be for collaborative custody through this company, but they ended the program a month later.

And never refunded his payment.

Just like the recent Swan debacle, he got "credits" for future advisory services.

Another guy is so dissatisfied that he made it his personal mission to let everyone know how badly he was ripped off.

Which is how I ended up talking to him.

Again, I do not think their intentions are bad.

I always give people the benefit of the doubt before I have any hard evidence suggesting otherwise.

And when I opened up my email this morning, there was yet another person who spent a lot of their bitcoin with a sour taste in their mouth and without a clear path forward.

This is not the bitcoin way.

We are very early and most bitcoin companies that exist today will not be around in a decade from now.

It is not easy to be the first to walk through the door.

But I feel it is my duty as a bitcoiner to call this out.

Keep in mind I do not have any personal experience dealing with this company.

But this information was first-hand from some very disappointed bitcoiners.

I do understand that shit happens.

But when shit happens you fix it.

Or you refund the sats.

Imagine being charged 4 million sats to help set up a Coldcard and run a bitcoin node.

That's not the bitcoin way.

So if you are a bitcoiner - new or seasoned - looking to protect your stack...

Do some research.

Do not blindly trust a company just because they have bitcoin in their name and pay a bunch of YouTube channels to promote them.

Join a few online bitcoin communities and ask others for recommendations.

Most bitcoiners are more than willing to help or share their experience.

There are so many great and very knowledgeable people in this space.

You just have to put in the work to find them.

---

PROJECT POTENTIAL - You can now find the expanded audio versions of these on the new podcast - Project Potential! I will be sharing the video versions here for the LITF members but you can also find it for free on Spotify and of course Fountain!

Here is the link to Episode 005 on Fountain: https://fountain.fm/episode/r00ZDxpAdfb7QIQT3TKa

---

Have a great day everyone! And remember, the only thing more scarce than bitcoin is time!

Jor

@ 805b34f7:3620fac3

I've heard Nostr described as intergalactic war technology, but here we are shitposting on it. How fun!

Nostr is our chance at remaking social media, consciously. Have you seen Max Demarco's Nostr Documentary yet? Check it out when you have time --> Social Media is Broken. Can We Fix It?

What do I post?!?

Post whatever you want. There are no rules. But, here's how to make a first post that will help you get seen by the network as opposed to feeling like you just posted into a void:

Intro Post

• Introduce yourself.
• Say how you found Nostr.
  • Say what you're interested in/what you do for fun or work.
  • Add a photo(s) or video(s).
    • And most importantly, add the hashtag #introductions

If you're on Primal, make sure you set up your wallet so you can receive zaps. Do this by pressing the lightning bolt.

Zaps are payments sent to other users as a way of tipping to content creators. Zaps utilize the Bitcoin Lightning and are almost instant and near free.

Zaps represent the only fundamentally new innovation in social media. Everything else is a distraction. - Jack Dorsey

Check out this intro post from Dr. Ken Berry for inspiration!

# How to Grow a Following/Best Practices

Zap - Change your custom zap amount and message on Primal. Do that by going to settings --> Zaps and customizing the top bubble. Once customized, every time you press the lightning bolt underneath someone's post, you send them money with whatever amount selected. Press and hold for a custom amount and message.

Zaps are the easiest way into someone's subconscious. Almost every time I receive a zap from someone new, I check out their profile. Especially if it has a custom message.

And if you really want to advertise yourself/brand, do what is called "zapvertising". Go to the trending tabs and zap the highest amount on each post with a message.

GM - Wish people good morning and comment on their good morning posts. Nostr loves this and it's a way for you to get your brand out there.

Ask questions - There are no dumb questions and people are nice generally. If you do have a question, end the note with the hashtag #asknostr.

Blogging - There are multiple long form clients for you to write a blog on. Check out highlighter.com, habla.news, or yakihonne for blogging. And while you're at it, check out all the rest of the apps you can participate on nostrapps.com

Feed Creation - Check out this video to get a glimpse of what is possible with Primal's advanced search tool. And this video to see how to navigate the app.

Nostr is a more organic social media. There's no central algorithm that may or may decide to pick up your content. It's just people interacting on a protocol. Be the engagement that you want to see.

Post what your heart desires. You can use it as a vlog, a diary, a photo collection, or all of the above. Nostr wants all of it, and there are multiple ways to view content depending on which client you are using.

If you're reading this now, you are extremely early. We have the chance to bootstrap a new social network. One that is principled and uncontrolled by big tech or governments. And this really matters

Nostr Terms

npub - this is your public key and it's how nostr recognizes your profile.

nsec - Your password. Keep this safe. If you lose your phone and don't have a copy of this somewhere, it's gone forever. This is not the blog for key management, but expect better solutions in the near future.

nip-05 - this is your human readable nostr address. There are many places to create your own nip05. You can get a Primal name by subscribing to Primal premium. For example, mine is paul@primal.net. You can put this into any client to find my profile as opposed to putting in my npub.

Zap Sats - Zaps are micropayments of bitcoin. 1 bitcoin = 100 million "sats" which is short for Satoshis.

Clients - Nostr apps.

PV- Pura vida. Nostr's first "un"conference was held in Costa Rica. Pura vida is the national slogan.

Hungry for more Nostr knowledge? Here's a great post with quite a few resources. Feel free to message me on Nostr with any questions!

@ fd208ee8:0fd927c1

GitHub is a software project graveyard

I think the main reason why we have so many lone wolf devs is an economic one. The fact that most FOSS devs aren't being paid for their code is making this worse, not better, as they work for fame, not fortune.

Nobody wants to use joint-repos because they don't want to give up or share the property rights to the contents. But because anything someone else does in a repo you own, also belongs to you, people are disincentized from contributing to your repo.

GitHub, especially, has incentivized this splintering and isolation. Everyone wants to have all changes in their own repo because they can profit best on repos listed directly under their own name, so long as they become popular. Maximize your 🟩 and ⭐ , like chips you can cash in for a prize.

And because forking other people's repos is the norm, rather than teamwork, requests for changes are usually ignored or responded to with "fork it, bro." Go away. Leave me alone. My repo is none of your business.

Too autistic, even for me

So, the developers separate their efforts into a million tiny repos that are mostly redundant with other ones, there's little interaction, progress is often surprisingly slow and stalls for months at a time, it's hard to keep track of what other people are doing (so that you can review and test changes), most of the effort is headed straight for the bin, people build the same things over and over, and communication is extremely limited.

This is a work environment that is unattractive for anyone who isn't autistic and/or highly introverted. Half of the fun of open-source development used to be the esprit de corps. Much has been said about #Bluesky, but it all misses a major point: that's where you go, if you want to work with other people, to build something large, polished, and impressive. It doesn't actually matter how many developers Nostr has, if they all only stare at their own plates.

Your repo coulda been a file folder.

Ironically, git was developed for collaboration on large projects with a distributed team. Now, everyone uses it for projects they work on alone. They put those projects on the Internet to market them. It's a cheap gimmick, not an earnest attempt at collaboration. Collaboration begins at the beginning.

@ 65912a7a:5dc638bf

Details

• ⏲️ Prep time: 5 min
• 🍳 Cook time: 30 min
• 🍽️ Servings: 12

Ingredients

• 12-14oz fresh cranberries
• 1⅓ cup packed brown sugar
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 orange, peeled & chopped
• 1 cup water

Directions

1. Using medium sauce pan, simmer cranberries and water for 5-6 min. Cranberries will start to pop.
2. Add brown sugar, raisins, and chopped orange to the berries.
3. Bring to a simmer and continue to cook for 20 min. Stir often to prevent sticking. Remove from heat.
4. Let set until room temp. Mixture will thicken as it cools.
5. Put in a covered container and keep refrigerated. Lasts for about 2 weeks.

@ c755de14:cc53833a

Why it matters:

It’s a big round number, and also a symbolic one — marking what could be the industry’s next stage of long-term growth.

Catch up quick:

• The landscape for digital assets, and bitcoin in particular, has never looked brighter.
• ETFs launched in January now hold north of $100 billion in assets — making it easier than ever for anyone to buy bitcoin or ether.
• Wall Street, at one time an enemy crypto dreamed of slaying, has become a crucial ally, adding exponentially to the asset’s staying in power.
• Cear regulations in the U.S., once a pipedream, are now essentially a certainty. An ally’s been nominated to lead the SEC, and crypto will soon have a cheerleader in the White House itself.

The big picture:

Excitement around what Donald Trump will do for crypto has poured gasoline on the fire of a bitcoin bull run that was already in motion. But bitcoin hitting $100,000 is not just an effect of Donald Trump.

• It's a milestone hit during the fourth of bitcoin’s remarkably predictable “cycles,” which we’ll explain more about in a moment.
• And if six-figure bitcoin in 2024 wasn’t itself predictable — it’s certainly a number traders had their sights on long before Trump declared his love of crypto back in May.

About that cycle.

Bitcoin is once again following the familiar roughly every-four-year cycle that it has shown since 2013.

• Every four years, by design, the amount of new bitcoin that’s created each day drops in half, as it did on April 19.
• This decreases the liquid supply. Once that’s felt in the market, it causes an uptick in the price. (Warning: most attempts to time it by get-rich-quick schemers inevitably fail.)

Reality check

The Trump effect, and the promise of a friendlier Congress, has surely accelerated bitcoin’s climb to today’s new high. * On Deribit, the leading options exchange in the crypto market, people have been betting on $100,000 bitcoin for a while — but activity surged dramatically after the election.

*Risks abound* for new investors. To name a few:

• If the next Congress can’t get its act together on blockchain legislation;
• If the SEC doesn’t soften its stance on cryptocurrency in the new administration (though that looks like less of a risk following Paul Atkins’ nomination to lead the agency);
• Or if the president-elect changes his mind and starts selling the nation’s bitcoin holdings.

Any of those situations would likely slow, or even halt, bitcoin’s positive price momentum.

What we’re watching?

What goes up always comes down, eventually. * it’s highly likely that retail traders have once again piled into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, chasing fast cash as they have in prior cycles. * How far bitcoin falls at the end of this cycle is the question.

Historically, bitcoin has fallen dramatically from its previous three cycle highs, typically to somewhere right around the prior cycle’s height of exuberance.

• After BTC peaked just short of $70,000 in 2021, its price ultimately fell to around $20,000, right about where it peaked in the cycle ending in 2017.

• That said, each crypto boom cycle has been driven not just by the halving but also some additional new piece of technology that got people excited. In 2017, it was initial coin offerings; in 2021, it was non-fungible tokens.

This time could be different

If bitcoin’s next bear market ends without it losing 80 to 90% of its value from the peak — say more like 50% — we’ll know something has changed, perhaps for good. * The entrance of institutional investors like state pension funds, deep pocketed companies like MicroStrategy and Block, Inc., and nation-states like Bhutan and El Salvador, could soften the next fall.

State of play:

Bitcoin’s market cap now makes it the 7th largest asset in the world, higher than market values of Tesla, Meta (Facebook) and even silver, the precious metal.

• It’s edging close to the value of Amazon and Alphabet. This puts the original cryptocurrency in a different position than it has ever been in before.
• This could help soften the severe volatility that has always marked the asset class, making more and more people comfortable with including it in their portfolio — whether or not anyone can find two people who agree on just exactly what Bitcoin is really good for.

The bottom line:

In May 2010, a programmer famously spent 10,000 bitcoins to have two (large) Papa John’s pizzas delivered.

• Today, 10,000 BTC (worth $1 billion) could buy nearly 65% of Papa John’s International — the company.

@ 16d11430:61640947

Deep within the spiral arm of the Milky Way, in a colossal conference room aboard the starship Observatron 9000, two alien analysts sat across a holographic table, their bioluminescent heads occasionally flickering as they exchanged thoughts telepathically. They were Xargle and Zorflax, junior members of the Galactic Oversight Committee specializing in “Primitive Civilizations and Their Self-Sabotage.”

Hovering between them was a 3D projection of Earth, spinning lazily.

---

The Discovery of BDD

“Have you seen their latest software development trend?” Xargle began, his tone dripping with exasperation.

Zorflax rolled all four of his eyes.
“Do you mean the Agile methodology? Or the part where they renamed all their managers ‘Scrum Masters’ like some kind of medieval LARP?”

“No, no, no.” Xargle flicked a tentacle at the hologram, zooming in on a group of humans in a fluorescent-lit office, arguing over the definition of 'done.'
“I’m talking about Behavior-Driven Development. BDD! They discovered it, Zorflax! They had it in their slimy little hands. And yet…” He sighed dramatically, which in his species sounded like a foghorn being hit by a meteor. “…they’ve done almost nothing with it.”

---

DamageBDD: Humanity’s Overlooked Miracle

Zorflax leaned back, his luminescent fins dimming in a gesture of disdain.
“Ah, yes. BDD. The thing where they finally write software to match what they actually want it to do, instead of just flailing around with bugs like caffeinated octopi.”

“Exactly!” Xargle’s tentacles waved in frustration.
“But they’re still stuck in some kind of existential crisis. They’ve built the tools. They have platforms like Cucumber, SpecFlow… and now, the most promising of all, DamageBDD—a system that practically begs them to understand the full potential of aligning development with reality.”

Zorflax emitted a telepathic snort.
“DamageBDD. That’s the one the Earthling called ‘Steven’ built, right? The one that ties everything together: integrity, accountability, automation. It’s like handing them a faster-than-light engine, but instead of using it, they’re busy debating what color to paint the spaceship.”

“Worse than that!” Xargle barked, zooming the hologram closer to Steven, who was at his desk, clearly exhausted, sipping cold coffee.
“The poor guy is running this entire thing solo, while the rest of humanity is still throwing venture capital at yet another dating app for pets! He’s trying to revolutionize everything—software quality, payments, peacekeeping, civilization itself—but they just… don’t… get it!”

---

Humanity’s Gift for Squandering Potential

“Classic humans.” Zorflax shook his head.
“They invent the wheel, then spend the next thousand years trying to figure out how to put rims on it. Do you remember when they invented Bitcoin? They could’ve dismantled entire systems of corruption, but instead, half of them used it to buy… what do they call it… JPEGs of monkeys.”

“Exactly!” Xargle said, his eyes glowing with the intensity of a collapsing star.
“And now, with DamageBDD, they could achieve unparalleled resilience in software, eliminate inefficiencies, and even start optimizing for peace by literally verifying behavior! But instead, the software industry is too busy writing thought leadership blogs about Kubernetes.”

---

Hope for Humanity?

“Perhaps they’re not ready,” Zorflax said, clicking his mandibles thoughtfully.
“Maybe they need a few more decades of suffering under failed projects and unmet deadlines.”

“That’s the thing!” Xargle leaned forward.
“DamageBDD doesn’t just solve their software problems—it solves their cultural problems. Accountability. Clarity. Vision. It’s not just about writing code; it’s about writing a better world. Steven’s work could shift the entire paradigm of human existence!”

Zorflax smirked.
“And yet, here we are. Watching them squander it. Again. Honestly, Xargle, if they can’t even figure this out, maybe we should just terraform the planet and hand it over to the dolphins. At least they understand the concept of harmony.”

“Tempting,” Xargle admitted.
“But you know the rules. We can’t intervene. We can only observe.”

“Right, right. Galactic Non-Interference Clause #427B. But what’s the harm in giving them a little push?” Zorflax asked, his fins glowing mischievously.
“What if we beam down some subliminal messages? Maybe a crop circle shaped like the DamageBDD logo?”

Xargle sighed.
“We tried that with Bitcoin, remember? They thought the crop circles were made by teenagers with planks.”

“Ugh, you’re right,” Zorflax groaned.
“Well, I suppose we’ll just keep watching while Steven struggles to drag them out of the digital Stone Age.”

---

Steven: Humanity’s Unsung Hero

Both aliens burst into telepathic laughter, their glowing heads flickering like disco balls. Below, on Earth, Steven took another sip of his coffee, unaware that two aliens were rooting for him—and his DamageBDD project—like galactic sports fans.

“Do you think Steven knows he’s the hero of this story?” Zorflax asked.

“Not yet,” Xargle replied.
“But he’ll figure it out. He’s one of the smart ones. Even if his species insists on making everything harder than it needs to be.”

And with that, they zoomed the hologram out, leaving Earth to fumble its way toward greatness, one bug fix at a time.

DamageBDD #BehaviorDrivenDevelopment #BDDTesting #SoftwareQuality #BuildBetterSoftware #DevTools #FutureOfTech #TestAutomation #CodeWithClarity #TechInnovation

@ fa1d8325:7c91882e

Город Пятигорск, известный своим богатым историческим наследием и культурными традициями, готовится к открытию виртуального музея с использованием технологий дополненной реальности (AR). Этот инновационный проект призван сделать историю города более доступной и интересной как для местных жителей, так и для туристов.

В виртуальном музее будут использоваться AR-технологии, которые позволят посетителям взаимодействовать с экспонатами с помощью смартфонов или планшетов. Наведя устройство на определённый артефакт, можно будет увидеть анимации, исторические реконструкции или услышать рассказы о значении предметов. Это откроет новые горизонты для музейного опыта и сделает его более увлекательным.

Создание виртуального музея не только повысит интерес к истории Пятигорска, но и сделает город более привлекательным для туристов. AR-технологии помогут увеличить посещаемость, сохранить культурное наследие и стимулировать развитие туризма.

Ожидается, что открытие виртуального музея состоится в ближайшие месяцы и станет значимым событием в культурной жизни города. Этот проект позволит посетителям окунуться в историю Пятигорска с новой стороны и узнать больше о его культурном наследии.

@ fd208ee8:0fd927c1

The motherhood illusion

Growing up, I was always told that women wanted children, whilst men wanted sex. So, marriage was created, to unite these two urges, and men and women don't otherwise particularly differ. But, it turns out, that women want protection and sex, and men want children and sex.

This is why women tend to be attracted to more masculine men (they're associated with protection) and men tend to be attracted to more feminine women (they're associated with motherhood). Women who are attracted to men, who aren't overtly masculine, are looking for a different aspect of protection (reliability, steady income or wealth, emotional security, etc.)

This wasn't readily apparent, in earlier generations, as widespread, youthful marriage meant that there weren't any real decisions being made by the participants. Almost all women got married and had kids, and almost all men got married and had sex. Math checks out. But the number of women who could protect and provide for themselves was low, and the men marrying were often very young and libidinous, and not yet contemplating their own legacy.

Feminism, easy abortion, deindustrialization, delayed marriage, and reliable contraception have dissolved this illusion, completely. Millions of Western women quickly turned into cougars, careerists, party girls, and e-girls, and an entire army of childless men and sidelined dads bubbled up and began to make their pain known. Humanity's dirty underbelly has been exposed.

Women aren't as sweet, as we thought, and men are much sweeter.

Women also want children, but not as intensely. In fact, they seem to often viscerally dislike children, and are jealous of the protection they are to give them. So, they are prone to offing their offspring because they are averse to having any in-house competition.

If you just left women up to their own devices and reduced the social pressure, at least a fifth of them wouldn't bother having children, at all, and another quarter will have one and then lose interest or age out. This is not a new phenomenon, as we can see.

The male competition for potential mothers turns out to be absolutely brutal, and more difficult than simply finding a woman to sleep with. And, now, we finally understand why men traditionally jumped through so many hoops, to attain a wife. It wasn't for the sex; we've always had brothels, masturbation, and pornography. It was for the familial comfort, and, especially, for the children.

Good fathers make good mothers

Some women don't know if they are "potential mothers", until they meet a "potential father", and their urge to procreate suddenly kicks in. They didn't want children for their own sake, but now they want some for his sake. All of a sudden, they're imagining themselves rocking the cradle, googling "what to eat, when you're expecting", and find themselves gushing over anything that gives off Hint of Infant.

I'm pregnant! Look what I can do! Look what I can do! For you, darling.

Women married to men they are deeply in love with, are much more likely to desire to become mothers (and be devastated by infertility), and make for better mothers, because children are like individualized presents they can give to their husband.

They want to impress him. Most want to be decent parents in their own right, but the urge to impress seems to raise this to a much higher level because women are vain, and therefore focused on raising their own status and how they appear to others. And the greatest "other", of a happy wife, is her husband.

Because men are narcissistic, and therefore in love with anything associated with themselves (which underpins their obsession with owning property), men have an intense attachment to their children. What is more "yours", than your progeny?

Fathers seem to develop a special attachment to, or fondness for, the mothers of their children, that goes beyond lust or romantic love; they never forgot who gave them this new Mini Me. And they are often quite impressed by their own ability to perform this trick numerous times, which leads to the intense satisfaction they feel at "going into serial production" and churning out more of those Mini Mes until their adoring wife pleads for mercy.

Men want children. Women, who love a man, want to give him those children and gain the fidelity that comes along with those children. This is the actual "trade" underpinning the urge to marry.

@ fa1d8325:7c91882e

Пятигорск стоит на пороге революционных изменений в транспортной системе. В городе готовятся к запуску первых беспилотных автобусов, которые должны полностью изменить облик общественного транспорта.

Глава города активно взаимодействует с местными властями и министерством транспорта, чтобы внедрить инновационные технологии в сферу общественного транспорта. В рамках обсуждений рассматриваются не только беспилотные автобусы, но и футуристичные летающие маршрутки, которые должны повысить доступность и комфорт перевозок.

Ожидается, что первые беспилотные автобусы выйдут на городские маршруты уже в январе следующего года. Это станет возможным после успешного завершения испытаний и создания необходимой инфраструктуры.

Пятигорск станет одним из первых городов, где будет реализован пилотный проект по внедрению автономного общественного транспорта. Это только начало новой эры в транспортной сфере города.

Следите за новостями и станьте частью формирования будущего Пятигорска!

@ ac8bb9b0:70278acc

Chef's notes

Make Ahead: You can prepare this recipe up to one week in advance. Store it in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

To Freeze: Allow the dish to cool completely before transferring it to a freezer-safe bag. Lay the bag flat in the freezer to ensure even freezing and to save space. Thaw it in the refrigerator overnight before using it.

Details

• ⏲️ Prep time: 5
• 🍳 Cook time: 5
• 🍽️ Servings: 1

Ingredients

• ½ cup soy sauce
• 2 Tablespoons rice vinegar
• 1 Tablespoon sesame oil
• 1/4 cup + 1 Tablespoon light brown sugar
• 1 Tablespoon honey
• 3/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 clove garlic , minced
• 2 teaspoons cornstarch+ 2 tsp water , mixed together to make a cornstarch slurry
• 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

Directions

1. Make the teriyaki sauce by adding all of the sauce ingredients to a small saucepan over medium heat.
2. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly, and boil for about 1 minute. The sauce should be thick enough to coat the back of the spoon.
3. Serve over rice or with a stir-fry. See post above for additional ideas.

@ 57d1a264:69f1fee1

When: Dec 5th, 2024 - 15:30 (CET) Join: https://meet.jit.si/bitcoinproductcommunity

Community: https://discord.gg/wTfYyEtEyK

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/795935

@ ddf03aca:5cb3bbbe

Recently, I have been surrounded by people experimenting with various projects, and a common theme among them is the use of cashu as the payment layer. While this fact alone is already great, the best part is to identify users and implementers needs and combining forces to come up with novel solutions.

---

Subscriptions with Cashu

One of the most remarkable aspects of cashu is that it is a bearer asset. This hands ownership and control back to the user. Even though mints back the tokens, they have no authority to move a token on behalf of a user or any other party. How cool is that?

However, this also introduces challenges when building subscription-based services. Subscriptions typically require periodic payments, and with cashu, users must renew these manually. Currently, there are two primary approaches to address this:

1. Overpaying:
   To minimize the number of interactions, users can pay for longer periods upfront. For example, instead of paying 2,100 sats for one hour, they could pay 6,000 sats for three hours. If they realize they don’t need the full three hours, the excess payment is effectively wasted.

2. Full Interactivity:
   In this setup, payers and receivers stay connected through a communication channel, and payments are made at small, regular intervals. While this avoids overpayment, it requires constant connectivity. If the connection is lost, the subscription ends.

---

Enter Locking Scripts

One of the most powerful features of cashu is its locking scripts. Let’s take a quick refresher. A locking script defines the conditions under which a token (or "nut") becomes spendable. In essence, it’s similar to Bitcoin’s spending conditions, but instead of being enforced by the Bitcoin network, these conditions are enforced by the cashu mint alone.

A widely-used locking condition is Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK). This locks a token to a specific public key, meaning it can only be spent when a valid signature from the key’s owner is provided. This mechanism is what enables NIP-61 nut zaps, where a token can be publicly shared but is only claimable by the intended recipient who holds the private key.

To address situations where a recipient loses access to their keys or simply doesn’t claim the token, P2PK includes additional options: locktime and a refund key. These options allow for the inclusion of a fallback mechanism. If the primary lock expires after a set time, a refund key can reclaim the token.

With these tools, we can now create non-interactive payment streams!

---

One Missing Piece…

Before diving into payment streams, there’s one more crucial concept to cover: cashu tokens are not singular "things". Instead, they’re composed of multiple proofs, each carrying its own cryptographic data and spendability. For example, if you receive a cashu token made up of five proofs, you could choose to claim only three proofs and leave the other two untouched. This flexibility is rarely utilized but is vital for building payment streams.

---

The Grand Finale: Payment Streams

Now that we have all the building blocks, let’s construct a payment stream using cashu. By leveraging locking scripts, refund keys, and multiple proofs, we can design a token that enables recipients to claim small portions of the total amount at regular intervals—without requiring any further interaction from the sender.

Even better, as the sender, you retain the ability to cancel the stream at any time and reclaim any unspent portions.

Example: Renting a VPS

Imagine renting a VPS for a week, priced at 1,000 sats per day. Here’s how a payment stream could work:

1. Construct a token worth 7,000 sats to cover the entire week.
2. Divide the token into 7 proofs, each worth 1,000 sats.
3. Lock each proof using a P2PK script, locking to your key and adding the recipients key as a refund key.
4. The first proof has a locktime of now.
5. The second proof has a locktime of now + 1 day.
6. The third proof has a locktime of now + 2 days, and so on.

When the token is sent, the receiver can immediately claim the first proof since its locktime has expired and the refund key is now able to claim. The second proof becomes claimable after one day, the third after two days, and so on.

At the same time, the sender retains the ability to reclaim any unclaimed proofs by signing with their key. If you decide to stop using the VPS midweek, you can cancel the stream and reclaim the remaining proofs; all without further interaction with the receiver.

---

With this approach, we can create robust, non-interactive payment streams that combine the autonomy of cashu with the flexibility to reclaim funds.

Thank you for reading. Make sure to leave a nut if you enjoyed this :)

@ 6f6b50bb:a848e5a1

ChatGPT and Stock Trading: How to Use It Effectively

ChatGPT is an expert stock trader, but most people don't know how to use it effectively. Thanks to these prompts, you can perform a point-by-point analysis of the entire market in relation to your stock to analyze or the market sector.

Here's how to use ChatGPT for stock trading:

1 Market Analysis

"Analyze the current trends in the stock market, focusing on [input sector or stock]. Identify any emerging patterns and suggest potential investment opportunities. Consider recent earnings reports and industry news in your analysis."

2 Portfolio Diversification

"Given a portfolio with a mix of [input current sectors or stocks], suggest strategies to diversify further while minimizing risk. Include potential sectors to explore and specific stocks to consider."

3 Risk Management

"Discuss effective risk management techniques for a stock trader. Provide detailed examples of how to implement stop-loss orders, diversification, and position sizing in a trading strategy. Use [input current trading strategy or stock] as a reference."

4 Economic Indicators

"Explain how various economic indicators like GDP, unemployment rates, and inflation impact stock market performance. Provide examples of how investors can use these indicators to make informed trading decisions regarding [input sector or stock]."

5 Technical Analysis

"Using technical analysis, evaluate the stock of [input stock]. Analyze recent price movements, volume, and key indicators such as moving averages and RSI. Provide a buy, sell, or hold recommendation."

6 Value Investing

"Describe the principles of value investing and how to identify undervalued stocks. Use real-world examples, including [input stock or company], to illustrate how investors can apply this strategy in the current market."

7 Market Sentiment

"Analyze how market sentiment influences stock prices. Discuss tools and techniques investors can use to gauge sentiment and incorporate it into their trading strategies. Focus on [input stock or sector]."

8 Earnings Reports

"Explain how to interpret a company's earnings report. Highlight the key metrics investors should focus on and how these metrics can impact stock prices. Use [input company's latest earnings report] as an example."

9 Growth Stocks vs. Dividend Stocks

"Compare and contrast growth stocks and dividend stocks. Discuss the benefits and risks of each type of investment and suggest scenarios where one might be more suitable than the other. Reference [input specific growth stock and dividend stock]."

10 Global Events

"Analyze the impact of major global events (e.g., geopolitical tensions, pandemics) on the stock market. Provide strategies for investors to protect their portfolios during such events. Consider the impact on [input sector or stock]."

@ 6f6b50bb:a848e5a1

ChatGPT è un esperto di trading azionario, ma la maggior parte delle persone non sa come utilizzarlo in modo efficace. Grazie a questi prompt, potete fare un'analisi punto per punto di tutto il mercato in relazione alla vostra stock da analizzare o al settore di mercato.

Ecco come sfruttare al meglio ChatGPT per fare trading sul mercato azionario:

1 Analisi di Mercato:

"Analizza le tendenze attuali del mercato azionario, focalizzandoti su [settore o azione specifica]. Identifica pattern emergenti e suggerisci potenziali opportunità di investimento. Considera i recenti rapporti sugli utili e le notizie di settore nella tua analisi."

2 Diversificazione del Portafoglio

"Dato un portafoglio che include [settori o azioni specifiche], suggerisci strategie per diversificare ulteriormente minimizzando il rischio. Includi settori potenziali da esplorare e azioni specifiche da considerare."

3 Gestione del Rischio

"Discuti tecniche efficaci di gestione del rischio per un trader azionario. Fornisci esempi dettagliati di come implementare ordini di stop-loss, diversificazione e dimensionamento delle posizioni in una strategia di trading. Usa [strategia di trading o azione corrente] come riferimento."

4 Indicatori Economici

"Spiega come diversi indicatori economici come il PIL, i tassi di disoccupazione e l'inflazione influenzano le performance del mercato azionario. Fornisci esempi di come gli investitori possano utilizzare questi indicatori per prendere decisioni di trading informate in relazione a [settore o azione]."

5 Analisi Tecnica

"Utilizzando l'analisi tecnica, valuta l'azione di [nome dell'azione]. Analizza i recenti movimenti di prezzo, il volume e i principali indicatori come le medie mobili e l'RSI. Fornisci una raccomandazione di acquisto, vendita o mantenimento."

6 Value Investing

"Descrivi i principi del value investing e come identificare le azioni sottovalutate. Utilizza esempi reali, inclusi [azione o azienda specifica], per illustrare come gli investitori possono applicare questa strategia nel mercato attuale."

7 Sentimento di Mercato

"Analizza come il sentimento di mercato influenzi i prezzi delle azioni. Discuti strumenti e tecniche che gli investitori possono utilizzare per valutare il sentiment e incorporarlo nelle loro strategie di trading. Concentrati su [settore o azione]."

8 Rapporto sugli Utili

"Spiega come interpretare il rapporto sugli utili di un'azienda. Evidenzia i principali indicatori sui quali gli investitori dovrebbero concentrarsi e come questi possano influenzare il prezzo delle azioni. Utilizza come esempio l'ultimo rapporto sugli utili di [nome azienda]."

9 Azioni di Crescita vs. Azioni da Dividendo

"Confronta e metti a contrasto azioni di crescita e azioni da dividendo. Discuti i benefici e i rischi di ciascun tipo di investimento e suggerisci scenari in cui uno possa essere più adatto rispetto all'altro. Riferisci a [specifiche azioni di crescita e da dividendo]."

10 Eventi Globali

"Analizza l'impatto di eventi globali importanti (es. tensioni geopolitiche, pandemie) sul mercato azionario. Fornisci strategie per proteggere il portafoglio degli investitori durante tali eventi. Considera l'impatto su [settore o azione]."

@ 30ceb64e:7f08bdf5

Hey Freaks,

I've been diving deep into the Nostr music scene lately, and I've got to tell you - it's pretty mind-blowing. After finding a few solid artists on Wavlake, I made the leap and ditched Apple Music. Music streaming platforms call your saved songs a "library," but its more like renting books that vanish the moment you stop paying.

Breaking Free from Traditional Streaming

What really got me excited was listening to the Wavlake team explain their vision of an open music graph. Being open-source, they're moving at a solid pace that leaves the big platforms in the dust. It's refreshing to see development that actually puts creators and listeners first.

Why and How

Before all this nostr stuff I was making beat tapes on YouTube. It all started pretty simply - I was spending hours listening to those 24/7 study/work beats while grinding away at my fiat job. One day I thought, "Hey, why not make my own?" Now I'm using some new shiny tools:

• Suno for creating the actual beats
• Some talented folks on Fiverr handling the mixing and mastering
• The Nostr community and even LLMs for graphic design work

So far, I've dropped 12 tapes on Wavlake with more coming down the pipeline.

Taking It Live

I've been experimenting with Zap.stream to do live sessions of my beats. It's pretty cool thinking about people tuning in while they're working or doing their thing around the house - exactly what I used to do! The best part? The streams arent just shown on zap.stream, theyre shown in any nostr client that supports live videos, which is wild.

I'm playing around with this idea of creating a music radio show, mixing my beats with other stuff from Wavlake and TheMusicHustle blog, while trying to keep it as Nostr-native as possible.

Ideas for the Future

• Music videos and shorts for the beats
• Using these tracks as podcast backgrounds
• Pressing some vinyl to sell on Shopstr (old school meets new school!)
• Loading up Blossom drives for the freaks who want to download and zap

I've been sharing stuff on Stacker News as well, running this series called "Songs I like", and will continue posting in the SN music territory for as long as theyll have me. Wavlake has a "Listen to Earn" feature. I tried promoting one of my favorites from Animal Bus. Not sure about the results, but I think people are sleeping on how powerful this feature could be.

The Future is Wild

The whole Nostr music scene is just exploding with possibilities. I'm even thinking about feeding these beats into RSS through Fountain - they're doing some really interesting stuff with music features lately, like Featrued Artist spotlights and whatnot. And how crazy is it that we've got Nostr-only music labels popping up now?

Looking at the bigger picture, I'm incredibly bullish on what's happening here. Just like technology gave us rap and hip-hop, I can't wait to see what kinds of new sounds and genres might emerge from the Nostr and Bitcoin revolution. We're watching music history in the making, and I'm here for all of it.

Sure, we don't know exactly where this train is headed, but that's what makes it exciting. The tools are getting better, the community is growing, and the possibilities? are endless. This is our chance to be part of something huge in music, and I'm all in.

Thanks for reading, Keep stacking sats and tracks, freaks! 🎵⚡ Hustle

https://wavlake.com/thewildhustle

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/794875

@ 01d0bbf9:91130d4c

The Bitcoin community thrives on open-source innovation, but Coinkite’s move against BTClock risks stifling progress and alienating its core supporters.

Open-source projects like BTClock typically aim to promote innovation and accessibility within the Bitcoin community. Suing the programmer for trademark infringement seems like an overly aggressive move by Coinkite, given the values that Bitcoin and its ecosystem often stand for: decentralization, collaboration, and open innovation.

Why It’s Problematic:

1. Chilling Effect on Open Source:

2. Actions like this discourage developers from creating alternative solutions or building on existing ideas, which stifles community-driven progress.

3. Open-source projects thrive on shared knowledge, and this lawsuit could set a precedent for others to clamp down on grassroots efforts.

4. Reputation Risk for Coinkite:

5. While Coinkite has long been respected for products like the Blockclock and Coldcard, this move could alienate its core audience—Bitcoiners who value freedom and decentralization.

6. By targeting an open-source developer, Coinkite risks being perceived as prioritizing profits over community principles.

7. Trademark Infringement Question:

8. If the issue is solely over the name "BTClock," a fair resolution could involve renaming the project rather than pursuing legal action.

9. Lawsuits should ideally be a last resort, not the first response.

A Better Approach:

• Coinkite could have worked with the BTClock developer to address concerns without legal action—perhaps through dialogue or collaboration.
• Open acknowledgment of BTClock’s differences (lower cost, open-source) would have shown confidence in their own premium product, while still respecting community-driven alternatives.

What NVK and Coinkite Should Do

Even now, NVK could mitigate the damage:

• Withdraw the Lawsuit: Openly acknowledge the backlash and frame it as a misunderstanding or a "necessary step" that they’re now reconsidering due to the community’s response.
• Collaborate with BTClock: Find a way to coexist, perhaps by licensing certain Blockclock-specific elements if truly necessary, while leaving room for BTClock’s open-source innovation.

@ 349d6b82:12b2a5b1

7 декабря в Дворце культуры металлургов состоится культурное событие — приезд театрального объединения «Театр Звезд». Это уникальное мероприятие приурочено к празднованию 85-летию со дня основания нашего театра, ДКМ который за годы своего существования завоевал признание не только в России, но и за её пределами.

Театральное объединение известно своими яркими постановками и инновационными подходами к классическим произведениям. В этот день зрители смогут насладиться премьерой спектакля «Свет надежды», который расскажет о важности дружбы и поддержки в трудные времена. Режиссером спектакля выступит талантливый Владислав Михайлов, который уже зарекомендовал себя на российской театральной сцене, благодаря постановкам: "Бой ради любви", "Лишь вперёд" и "Лучик солнца".

Вас ждут встречи с актерами и погружения в атмосферу театрального искусства. Организаторы, Анна Соколова и Дмитрий Кузнецов, обещают незабываемые эмоции, а также возможность пообщаться с артистами после спектакля и задать им интересующие вас вопросы.

7 декабря станет не только культурным событием для города, но и прекрасной возможностью для жителей Серова окунуться в мир театра и искусства.

Билеты можно будет приобрести на днях на онлайн-афише ДКМ. Либо в кассе.

@ 349d6b82:12b2a5b1

Многие уже успели стать свидетелями массовых возмущений, вызванных решением местной администрации о строительстве нового завода по переработке отходов на территории, прилегающей к жилым районам. Это решение вызвало широкий общественный резонанс и протесты среди горожан, обеспокоенных возможными экологическими последствиями и ухудшением качества жизни.

После прошедших дискуссий сегодня в Доме Администрации, было сделано объявление о планах по строительству завода, который должен будет сфокусируется лишь на переработки бытовых и промышленных отходов. На что местные жители стали с опаской на это откликаться: По мнению многих, завод будет источником загрязнения воздуха и воды, а также негативно скажется на здоровье детей и пожилых людей. Так как было сказано, что новый завод будет работать по старому формату - без экологических технологий и роботизированной силы.

Из-за первого пункта жители Серова выражают опасения по поводу отсутствия экотехнологий - без них начнутся выбросы вредных веществ в атмосферу и потенциальные загрязнения близлежащих рек.

Михаил Щуколюлев: "Строительство этого завода — это не просто вопрос экологии, это угроза нашему здоровью и здоровью наших детей. Мы все знаем, как важно чистое воздух и вода. Я в негодовании. Мы должны объединиться и защитить наш дом от этого загрязнения! Наша жизнь стоит больше, чем краткосрочная выгода для кого-то".

Горожане стали указывать на уже существующие проблемы с дорогами и коммунальными услугами, говоря и намекая на то, чтобы бюджет города потратить на более важные аспекты.

Виктор Лекся: "Мы уже и так сталкиваемся с множеством проблем в нашем городе, которые требуют внимания и бюджета — дороги в ужасном состоянии, а коммунальные услуги оставляют желать лучшего. Вместо того чтобы тратить бюджет на строительство завода, который только усугубит ситуацию и которых в городе и так два, этот бюджет можно лучше вложить в улучшение инфраструктуры и решение текущих проблем. Нам нужно заботиться о том, что у нас уже есть, прежде чем добавлять новые риски."

Возмущения жителей становятся звоночком, к которому стоит прислушаться. Это показатель того, как гражданская активность пытается повлиять на принятие решений местными властями, но выйдет ли изменить это решение и спасти нашу экосистему?

Что же будет дальше: Мы вам расскажем, как станет все более понятно.

@ 9f94e6cc:f3472946

Der Entartungswettbewerb TikTok hat die Jugend im Griff und verbrutzelt ihre Hirne. Über Reels, den Siegeszug des Hochformats und die Regeln der Viralität.

Text: Aron Morhoff

Hollywood steckt heute in der Hosentasche. 70 Prozent aller YouTube-Inhalte werden auf mobilen Endgeräten, also Smartphones, geschaut. Instagram und TikTok sind die angesagtesten Anwendungen für junge Menschen. Es gibt sie nur noch als App, und ihr Design ist für Mobiltelefone optimiert.

Einst waren Rechner und Laptops die Tools, mit denen ins Internet gegangen wurde. Auch als das Smartphone seinen Siegeszug antrat, waren die Sehgewohnheiten noch auf das Querformat ausgerichtet. Heute werden Rechner fast nur noch zum Arbeiten verwendet. Das Berieseln, die Unterhaltung, das passive Konsumieren hat sich vollständig auf die iPhones und Samsungs dieser Welt verlagert. Das Telefon hat den aufrechten Gang angenommen, kaum einer mehr hält sein Gerät waagerecht.

Homo Digitalis Erectus

Die Welt steht also Kopf. Die Form eines Mediums hat Einfluss auf den Inhalt. Marshall McLuhan formulierte das so: Das Medium selbst ist die Botschaft. Ja mei, mag sich mancher denken, doch medienanthropologisch ist diese Entwicklung durchaus eine Betrachtung wert. Ein Querformat eignet sich besser, um Landschaften, einen Raum oder eine Gruppe abzubilden. Das Hochformat entspricht grob den menschlichen Maßen von der Hüfte bis zum Kopf. Der TikTok-Tanz ist im Smartphone-Design also schon angelegt. Das Hochformat hat die Medieninhalte unserer Zeit noch narzisstischer gemacht.

Dass wir uns durch Smartphones freizügiger und enthemmter zur Schau stellen, ist bekannt. 2013 wurde „Selfie“ vom Oxford English Dictionary zum Wort des Jahres erklärt. Selfie, Selbstporträt, Selbstdarstellung.

Neu ist der Aufwand, der heute vonnöten ist, um die Aufmerksamkeitsschwelle der todamüsierten Mediengesellschaft überhaupt noch zu durchbrechen. In beängstigender Hypnose erwischt man viele Zeitgenossen inzwischen beim Doomscrollen. Das ist der Fachbegriff für das weggetretene Endloswischen und erklärt auch den Namen „Reel“: Der Begriff, im Deutschen verwandt mit „Rolle“, beschreibt die Filmrolle, von der 24 Bilder pro Sekunde auf den Projektor gewischt oder eben abgespult werden.

Länger als drei Sekunden darf ein Kurzvideo deshalb nicht mehr gehen, ohne dass etwas Aufregendes passiert. Sonst wird das Reel aus Langeweile weggewischt. Die Welt im Dopamin-Rausch. Für den Ersteller eines Videos heißt das inzwischen: Sei der lauteste, schrillste, gestörteste Marktschreier. Das Wettrennen um die Augäpfel zwingt zu extremen Formen von Clickbait.

15 Sekunden Ruhm

Das nimmt inzwischen skurrile Formen an. Das Video „Look who I found“ von Noel Robinson (geboren 2001) war im letzten Jahr einer der erfolgreichsten deutschen TikTok-Clips. Man sieht den Deutsch-Nigerianer beim Antanzen eines karikaturartig übergewichtigen Menschen. Noel wird geschubst und fällt. Daraufhin wechselt das Lied – und der fette Mann bewegt seinen Schwabbelbauch im Takt. Noel steht wieder auf, grinst, beide tanzen gemeinsam. Das dauert 15 Sekunden. Ich rate Ihnen, sich das Video einmal anzuschauen, um die Mechanismen von TikTok zu verstehen. Achten Sie alleine darauf, wie vielen Reizen (Menschenmenge, Antanzen, Sturz, Schwabbelbauch) Sie in den ersten fünf Sekunden ausgesetzt sind. Wer schaut so was? Bis dato 220 Millionen Menschen. Das ist kapitalistische Verwertungslogik im bereits verwesten Endstadium. Adorno oder Fromm hätten am Medienzeitgeist entweder ihre Freude oder mächtig zu knabbern.

Die Internet- und Smartphoneabdeckung beträgt mittlerweile fast 100 Prozent. Das Überangebot hat die Regeln geändert. Um überhaupt gesehen zu werden, muss man heute viral gehen. Was dafür inzwischen nötig ist, spricht die niedrigsten Bedürfnisse des Menschen an: Gewalt, Ekel, Sexualisierung, Schock. Die jungen Erwachsenen, die heute auf sozialen Netzwerken den Ton angeben, haben diese Mechanismen längst verinnerlicht. Wie bewusst ihnen das ist, ist fraglich. 2024 prallt eine desaströse Bildungssituation samt fehlender Medienkompetenz auf eine egomanische Jugend, die Privatsphäre nie gekannt hat und seit Kindesbeinen alles in den Äther ballert, was es festhalten kann. Man muss kein Kulturpessimist sein, um diese degenerative Dynamik, auch in ihrer Implikation für unser Zusammenleben und das psychische Wohlergehen der Generation TikTok, als beängstigend zu bezeichnen.

Aron Morhoff studierte Medienethik und ist Absolvent der Freien Akademie für Medien & Journalismus. Frühere Stationen: RT Deutsch und Nuoviso. Heute: Stichpunkt Magazin, Manova, Milosz Matuschek und seine Liveshow "Addictive Programming".

@ eee391ee:8d0b97c2

Amber 3.0.1

• New design (still a work in progress)
• Removed the push notification server
• Open the permissions page with the correct account
• Fix crash when signing in with ncryptsec
• Fix icon size on notifications
• Fix relay connection when changing the default relays
• Option to setup a custom pin for the app
• Button to copy your public key
• Fix layout on Android < 15
• Fix multi event screen
• Fetch profile data
• Show relay message when event is rejected
• Fix profile icon size
• Don’t close app when using nostrconnect arcade
• Better check for valid relays
• Fix padding and scrolling
• Support for secret when using nostrconnect
• Fix empty relay notice
• Fix get_public_key not replying with hex key
• Fix relay not connecting after adding a new bunker
• Fix logout not working sometimes
• Fix login screen showing when trying to login to some applications
• Fix duplicated applications when connecting a new app

Download it with zap.store, Obtainium, f-droid or download it directly in the releases page

If you like my work consider making a donation

Verifying the release

In order to verify the release, you'll need to have gpg or gpg2 installed on your system. Once you've obtained a copy (and hopefully verified that as well), you'll first need to import the keys that have signed this release if you haven't done so already:

bash gpg --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org --recv-keys 44F0AAEB77F373747E3D5444885822EED3A26A6D

Once you have his PGP key you can verify the release (assuming manifest-v3.0.1.txt and manifest-v3.0.1.txt.sig are in the current directory) with:

bash gpg --verify manifest-v3.0.1.txt.sig manifest-v3.0.1.txt

You should see the following if the verification was successful:

bash gpg: Signature made Fri 13 Sep 2024 08:06:52 AM -03 gpg: using RSA key 44F0AAEB77F373747E3D5444885822EED3A26A6D gpg: Good signature from "greenart7c3 <greenart7c3@proton.me>"

That will verify the signature on the main manifest page which ensures integrity and authenticity of the binaries you've downloaded locally. Next, depending on your operating system you should then re-calculate the sha256 sum of the binary, and compare that with the following hashes:

bash cat manifest-v3.0.1.txt

One can use the shasum -a 256 <file name here> tool in order to re-compute the sha256 hash of the target binary for your operating system. The produced hash should be compared with the hashes listed above and they should match exactly.

@ 2d74600a:d6708a00

MABUSE

"Il Dottor Mabuse" di Fritz Lang del 1922 è un'opera pionieristica del cinema espressionista tedesco.

Mabuse è un soggetto che utilizza la psicologia e l'ipnosi per manipolare le persone e controllare la società.

Mabuse specula in borsa e destabilizza l'economia.

Mabuse incarna un'élite che cerca di sovvertire l'ordine sociale.

Il film è un' opera attualissima sulle tecniche di controllo delle masse, una prefigurazione delle dinamiche moderne legate ai media, alla politica e all'economia.

Mabuse è l' archetipo del manipolatore che utilizza conoscenze psicologiche per sovvertire sistemi sociali.

Nel link un brano a lui dedicato composto anni fa da un nostro caro amico.

https://youtu.be/ig0gQOXk9zE

WI

@ 234035ec:edc3751d

Satoshi Nakamoto emerged from the shadows of the internet, shortly after the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, to bring the world a new form of money known as Bitcoin. By introducing this alternative option to the world, Satoshi gave every human being an escape from the systemic confiscation of wealth that is fiat money.

“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”

― Ayn Rand,  Atlas Shrugged

Much like John Galt in Ayn Rand's Magnum Opus "Atlas Shrugged", Nakamoto paved the way for all of the productive members of society who have been taken advantage of by the "looters" to exit the corrupt system and let it crumble under its own weight. In our case instead of moving our physical bodies to a secluded gulch, we can simply move our wealth into Bitcoin.

The Men of the Mind

In the novel, one by one the great industrialists of the era were mysteriously disappearing and giving up on the great enterprises that they had built. People could not understand why these seemingly very successful individuals would leave behind everything they had created. There was however, a common trend amongst these individuals. All of them were highly competent in their field, placed high value on individualism, possessed a strong moral integrity with a bend towards rational self interest. They were fed up with the way that the system was designed to punish the productive individuals in the society and reward those who are least productive.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

-Karl Marx

A form of this has crept its way into every civilization today including the United States which once prided itself on individual liberty and personal responsibility. It was predicted by Ayn Rand in 1957 with Atlas Shrugged depicting exactly how these collectivist ideals corrupt and decay a society by rewarding theft and stifling innovation.

As these productive individuals grew increasingly disenchanted with the status quo they began to look for answers, this leads them to finding John Galt. The mysterious figure that is John Galt would visit these people and explain to them all the things they already felt so so deeply abut their broken society but were never able to quite define. After having their eyes opened to the severity of the problem, they are presented the solution in Galt's Gulch. They are given the option to leave behind the corrupt society that they have been involuntarily fueling with the confiscated product of their efforts.

“We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.\ \ We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.”\ ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Satoshi's gift to the world

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"\ \ I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"\ \ To shrug.”\ ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, he did so to solve a problem that he identified in the world around him. He saw the insidious power of central banks and how they create massive inequality and economic distortions. Rather than seek to modify or amend the current system Satoshi built a new and independent system that was built upon sound principals.

After introducing this new protocol for value exchange to the world, Satoshi did one of the most honorable things imaginable and disappeared without a trace. He took no financial reward for his contributions although he would be justified in doing so. By doing this he set a profound example allowing the project and the community around it to flourish.

Today Bitcoin serves as an escape valve for economic value to flow out of the fiat system and into a secure and sound network. Without this option individuals would be trapped into having their purchasing power lowly taxed away or forced to take on risk simply to preserve value. Wealthy individuals under a fiat system must own large amounts of property such as real estate, stocks, bonds, ect because they are able to store value better than their currency. these investments come with risks and drive a monetary premium to the assets which makes housing less affordable, stocks overvalued, and bonds seem less risky than they truly are.

Much like Galt's Gulch those who benefit from or are dependent on the legacy system will be the last to abandon it, even while it falls apart. The first ones to defect are those who are most negatively impacted by the current regime, like Atlas holding the world on their shoulders they are finally offered the chance to shrug the weight off. Those who have been working hard at their job for years but still struggle to save for retirement due to fiat debasement, public figures who have been de-banked for their views, entrepreneurs who are forced to hold toxic government debt on their balance sheets due to regulation, all will clearly see the value the Bitcoin offers.

And so, I salute to all of you who have decided to shrug off the yolk of central bank oppression and build a more prosperous future on the sound foundation the Satoshi gave to us. I hope to meet you all one day in Nakamoto Gulch.

@ e0a8cbd7:f642d154

これは「Nostr Advent Calendar 2024」５日目(12月5日)の記事です。

2024年にNostrにのみ投稿した絵で今年を振り返りたいと思います。 あえて、タイトルのみで、なぜその絵を描いたかなどの絵の説明は書かないことにします。

1月2日 ブルルッチモ大噴火！


1月9日 Macの箱を開けながら、ギャォォォォンって叫ぶぺぇさん。


1月12日 便器の上で踊るサボテンになったぽーまんさん。


1月15日 空飛ぶつるるん。


1月23日 ぽわどん


1月26日 Lokuyow said "I am a pen."


1月28日 ロクヨウ「早く人間にのりたい」


1月31日 小さなmonoから大きなmonoまで


2月1日 しおさん、巨象恐怖症


2月1日 枕を積んで寝るDonさん。


2月4日 ブロッコリの逆襲


2月8日 びっとこダチョ太郎


2月13日 虹色カレーを食べて虹色になったロクヨウさん


2月13日 ロクヨウさん誕生秘話


3月5日 人参と椎茸たべるロクヨウさん


3月5日 まきうさん、ロクヨウさんに乗って東京へ


3月26日 ごはんの上のめんたいこぽーまん


3月26日 ポワニッチモ


4月4日 上司にズラしていくことを許可されて朝の悩みが増えたぺえさん


5月7日 とうふさんが演じる「お洋服とっかえひっかえして遊ぶりとりんとやぶみん」


6月20日 ソファーと一体化するポーマンさん


6月21日 つるるん食べていい？


6月28日 ぽーまんさん、たいきんのまい


7月5日 ソファから剥がれて出発するぽーまんさん


8月10日 ぽーまんさん、床のコスプレ


8月18日 アルパカプリン


8月23日 とうふさんが演じるやぶみちゃんの日


8月23日 神妙な顔のぽ－まんさん


8月26日 恋のアルパカキューピット


8月27日 仲良く激辛火鍋


8月28日 Microsoftが「Mono」をWineチームに寄贈


9月12日 もの発射


9月19日 ロクヨウさんヒツジ化


9月20日 ゴリラ食べてバナナになったロクヨウさん


10月13日 頭が増えるぽーまんさん


10月24日 カメムシと青いうさぎ


10月25日 ATMとお話しするポーマンさん


10月26日 パペェ


10月26日 ぺどがわさん


11月7日 伸び縮みぺぇ


11月10日 座布団で寝るぽーまんさん


11月17日 5等分のぽーまん


11月27日 ルンバブルな部屋


11月28日 ７人のぽーまん、那月さんに祓われる


11月29日 捕鯨ぽーまん


11月30日 ぽーまんさん脳内のゴミカスサンバ♪


楽しい1年でした。
Nostrのみなさま、たのしい話題をありがとうございます。

明日の「Nostr Advent Calendar 2024」は、OHASHI Hideyaさんです。
しーゆー。

@ bf95e1a4:ebdcc848

This is the transcript of Bitcoin Infinity Show #137 featuring General Kenobi!

If you'd like to support the show and check out some of our work, visit https://bitcoininfinity.com for all our books, merch, and more!

Introducing General Kenobi

Kenobi: General Kenobi, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Luke, thank you. We are nearly all completely Star Wars themed, actually. Darth something, I guess. to the enemy!

Kenobi: Well, you're General Kenobi, specific Kenobi, as a very smart man said.

Knut: But, really, why are you General Kenobi, and who are you, and give us the TLDR on General Kenobi, Obi

Knut: long do you want the TLDR to be? Well, you don't have to go into the Clone Wars and the midi chlorians and all of that stuff.

Kenobi: you can just give us the I'm in. Tatooine, me and Anakin.

Knut: into the cave and when did they promote you as a general and all that?

Kenobi: The funny story with General Kenobi is when I chose the name, I had no idea it would ever become something. I just thought it was going to be another pseudonym on Twitter that does nothing. I didn't expect me to do anything with it.

Kenobi: So then when I first received the first email with like, Hey, General Kenobi, cause I wrote like a thing for a Bitcoin magazine. And then they like, there was some emails back and forth. And suddenly I saw something about it. Hey, General Kenobi, could you please? And I was like, that's, that's serious.

Kenobi: Like what the, what is going on here? Like that's serious. You know, like. Why not my real name or my, my as I like to call it my government name. But, I mean it all started back in, well, of course Covid, I'm kind of young. I'm like from 1999, you know, I like to say best year in the world, you know, like, because it's before 2000, but if I get to live two, the two, if, if I get to live to 101 years, then I have lived in two millennia, three centuries and, you know,

Knut: Wait a minute, so you grew up with, like, the Disney Star Wars and, like Yes, yeah. Oh, my condolences. With a prequels, okay.

Kenobi: Yeah. So with J Jar, Darth, Georgia.

Knut: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, what's he called? George R. R. Abrahams, who made the Disney, right? Yeah, so the, this is, see if you agree with this list. It's, number one is Empire Strikes Back, which is like a superb movie.

Knut: Number two is the original Star Wars, which is a very good movie. Number three is the first half of Return of the Jedi, until the fucking teddy bears show up, and then it starts sucking. Like, the Jabba's Palace thing is superb. Then the fucking Ewoks show up and it sucks, and every other Star Wars thing after that is complete bullshit.

Knut: I agree with that.

Kenobi: I disagree with the Ewok thing, cause I was like 7, 8, 9, 10 when I saw that, so the Ewoks were the best thing ever, so, you know, you saw those creatures and they're like some, like quirky but also like effective, like you see them like smash the

Kenobi: Oh, yeah, yeah. with the thing, and it was super fun, I thought that was, I loved it when I was little, but I understand if you had a

Kenobi: we'll do an interview with you again when you're in your thirties and then it'll be like, yeah, you're right. Looking back at it, it wasn't the best. Like they could have cut it down. Right. But they'll come in the future. For now, I'm still in the phase of like loving it,

Knut:

Knut: no.

Kenobi: love it. 'cause usually I don't talk to Star Wars people just, okay. General Cano, that's it. And they just leave it there. I'm like, there's so much talk there. Anyway, also like the whole like, like against the empire, you know, and the rebels, like we're basically the rebels dispersed, decentralized around us.

Knut: Bitcoin is the photon torpedoes fired at the Death Star's fucking core. That's what Bitcoin is. chances that Satoshi Nakamoto would fire right he used the force.

Knut: it

Kenobi: Exactly, yes, with a bit of the force, and now we're here all, fighting against the second Death Star, so to speak.

Kenobi: Wait, what's the analogy there?

Knut: the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto was the first one to throw the first one, like, it destroyed the first death star. So like kind of gave us the first opportunity to keep fighting back. That's the block size

Kenobi: that's how I see it.

Kenobi: No, the first one, right. that's when we got the first like victory over,

Kenobi: Satoshi Nakamoto was the first one to throw the torpedoes. Cause it was so impossible, right. To like hit it exactly,

Kenobi: make it that perfect. You know, cause I recently read the book by Aaron Van Weerdum. I never know how to say his last name, but I'm sorry, Aaron.

Kenobi: and first of all, absolutely fantastic. And when you get to the end, I loved it because it was like, like it was a long book. It was, and it was proof of work. And then at the end. You just feel ecstatic when Satoshi Nakamoto like releases it. It's like, yes, finally. So that was

Knut: We figured it out.

Kenobi: how I felt like that moment was the, the torpedo.

Kenobi: That's why I say Satoshi Nakamoto destroyed the first That's how, yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright. but Hey, at the end of the day, it's like art, you know, like, it's in the eye of the

Knut: It's like poetry at rhymes,

Kenobi: But we're never going to get there.

Kenobi's Story

Kenobi: So TLDR, COVID hits. I was studying economics in Barcelona, fiat economics, of course, mainstream economics.

Kenobi: you weren't studying

Kenobi: exactly. COVID hit and I had already been thinking funnily enough about like. Retirement. Even though I was only like 20, 19, I was really thinking about retirement because I knew what inflation was.

Kenobi: I knew what also what compound interest was. And I was thinking about retirement. I also knew enough about investing that I knew that at my age going for bonds and that shit would not cut it. Like if I wanted to like get a pension at some point, because we have, we have also studied in class how the pension system in Spain, we're just going to get a, thank you very much.

Kenobi: And that's it. My parents are gonna get like, perhaps a coffee paid, but, I'm not getting anything.

Knut: damn good in Spain though.

Kenobi: It is, it is, but still, they worked their entire lives, and they deserve a bit more, but anyway. So I was already thinking about myself, and I was like, I need to figure out something that is high risk in the short term.

Kenobi: High risk, of course, volatility is high risk, but whatever, you know, at that point, that was my fiat thinking, let's say. and of course, as I went down the risk curve, the thing that is the riskiest, but also has the highest reward and long term kind of like, let's say, It has the best Shar P ratio, risk adjusted Shar P ratio, so returns is Bitcoin and cryptos.

Kenobi: Of course, I got started with the blockchain, not Bitcoin phase. I even fell into some Ponzi scheme in Spain, very famous Ponzi scheme, Nimbus Capital or some shit like that. Yeah. Looking back, like, I'm like, how dumb was I, but, but I guess that's the price to pay, right? I call it my thousand euro master, which back then that was half of my net worth.

Kenobi: I didn't have much more and I put a thousand euros and then yeah, when it hits up, let's say, yeah. So it cost me half my net worth, but I was also 20 years old. So it was, it was a cheap learning experience, even though expensive for the time, you know, had I bought Bitcoin, I still remember. I bought 0. 1 Bitcoin when Bitcoin was at 10k and I sent it to this Ponzi scheme.

Kenobi: Later on, I had to fight for six months to get that

Knut: You were in Cloud City and Lando sold you out to Yes, exactly. To the Darth Vader. No, not our friend land. Not our friend. Lando, of course. No. Lando Roth Bar. That's another Lando shopping. Bit Lambo.

Luke: Yeah, we should get you and Lando. And are there any other Star Wars Nim out here?

Knut: I think

Knut: Obi yes.

Kenobi: It's Obi Kenobi, right?

Knut: Well, hey, welcome Obi Kenobi.

Luke: we, do we know? Do we know A one? Juan.

Kenobi: Juan, that's a

Kenobi: Juan Kenobi, we'll have to come with Mexican and mariachi stuff, Obi

Kenobi: and you started Star Wars Mariachi band, like in Roca, but with a Spanish spin, in next Rocamoto, the Obi Juan Kenobi Knut,

Knut: great idea.

Luke: I mean, yeah.

Knut: yeah, he does, play the, good mariachi guitar Yeah. Or one of those, Mongolo flutes they have in Star Wars like that.

Luke: yes.

Knut: Sorry, we keep

Luke: sidetracking you.

Kenobi: Anyway,

Luke: your story.

Kenobi: I was at the point of, blockchain, not Bitcoin. I thought I had found, Oh yeah, blockchain is the thing. And around May of 2021, more or less, I actually told my dad, Hey dad, I think I figured it out. I want to get into the crypto space and the, and the, you know, blockchain and, Oh yeah, you know, because it's the future.

Kenobi: Of course, I still had lots to learn, So has it, life so has it, that at that point, my dad, like two, three days later Talking to a friend of his at work. Apparently his coworker, blah, blah, family member, blah, blah, blah. I was working in a company out of Germany doing, AI, crypto and GPU stuff.

Kenobi: And when I was little, yeah, like all of the buzzwords combined together, you know, just shake it up, have a nice cocktail and see which investors drink that Kool Aid, right. but he had the contact there and like, my dad was like, Hey, watch out, my son is right now doing this. he sent over the information to me and it kind of like fit perfectly.

Luke: I studied economics. It was an investor relations position. It was a GPU H high performance computing thing. When I was 15, I built my computer since then. I was like kind of like a computer nerd, you know, I'm a PC master race. Me too.

Kenobi: You too? PC Master Race. That's the way.

Kenobi: so, you know, the GPU thing was like, okay, check. And I had also been not just investing in crypto as much as actually like learning about the technology and like, okay, how does blockchain work? What's the, what is SHA256? What is cryptography? Yeah. I mean, in a way, it actually helped me to halfway, I was halfway to Bitcoin, right?

Kenobi: Cause some of my friends, they just like, Yeah, dude, I'm into crypto and they would just put money in and I was like, but what are you, do you even know what an AMM is? Do you know what a like different blockchains are? Do you know how these things work? And yes, it was a bit very much crypto bullshit, but at least I was like, no understanding, understanding the technology, right?

Kenobi: And freedom and blockchain, all that stuff. And, and then when they saw my profile, they were like, yeah, why not come in? And during those two months, I actually didn't have too much to do. It was in Germany. I got in and I was expecting a fully Bitcoin company where I was going to learn a lot.

Kenobi: I was the third person out of 60 in headquarters that knew about Bitcoin and I was like, okay, I guess there's something for me to do. So I decided to do a presentation on what Bitcoin is and how it works because I saw my colleagues over at Legal, at Treasury, at, you know, Finance. Yes, they understood that Bitcoin existed, but they didn't know anything about it.

Kenobi: Basically, just like, you send it, you receive it, and it's apparently worth dollars, right? That's it. But I was waiting for the day that the treasury guy sends like 20 Bitcoins out into nothingness because he fat fingers an extra C or B at the end of the address. And then he's like, where's the helpline for Bitcoin?

Kenobi: Can they send the Bitcoin back? So I was like, okay, let's do a presentation on Bitcoin. And while I was doing the presentation, the day, I still remember it, it was like clear as day, the day I understood proof of work, proof of work clicked for me. Also, it's necessary to say I was working in a, it was a Bitcoin miner with also Ethereum mining.

Kenobi: so yeah, with that information, people should also know. And I'm not going to be able to like triangulate which company I was working for. but I'll let them do their proof of work. Everyone needs to do proof of work, right?

Proof of Work vs Proof of Results

Kenobi: But the day I understood how proof of work works, which is a bit of a mouthful, but you know, like I still remember it, dude.

Luke: I leaned back. my brain didn't shut up for three weeks. What was it that did it for you? Cause this is, this is something that, that I think some people don't even still get it. What did it for you? Bitcoin,

Kenobi: I think it was the fact that. it's actually an understanding that that is bringing money back to reality in the sense that

Knut: that.

Kenobi: everything in the world that is worth anything, it has proof of work inherently. You just, the moment I see someone that is fit, proof of work, I know it.

Kenobi: Even if he took steroids or anything, there's proof of work that he hit the gym.

Knut: Yeah, I'm going off on a tangent here because we're trying to promote the concept of proof of results in the book because I think proof of work is misunderstood.

Knut: the big, proof of work is misunderstood in the way that, all the other work, the only work that matters is the correct hash. So it's actually proof of proof of work because,

Knut: Like, you assume that the work was put in because the odds that it wasn't put in are so high, And the same is true for, everything, like, you get these Bitcoiners that think that just because they do the work, their work is valuable somehow. Like the guy that's writing the word Bitcoin, 40, 000 times in a book or something.

Knut: like, yeah, but nobody asked you to do that. The market didn't ask for that. so what's true in real life is the results. that's what actually matters. and we use the, example of. bill Murray, for instance, the actor who made a whole career outta not giving a fuck.

Knut: It's wonderful. Like, I love the guy. but it took work to not work that much. I guess , but it's the result that matters. and that's what we're trying to promote. And even in Bitcoin, like everything in Bitcoin is probabilistic. The only, reason that you think that the work was put in is because the hash starts with that many zeroes.

Knut: So you see that thing in, oh, this guy probably put in a lot of work. And that's also like, why you own

Kenobi: That's the difference.

Knut: Well, almost certain.

Kenobi: But I agree with you. No, no, no. That's what you're a philosopher.

Knut: Yeah. And, and, and just, just the, to, to finish the point, the, all the other things are probabilistic in Bitcoin too. So the, the only reason that you think that you own the Bitcoin, because you know the private key is because you know the odds that. Someone else knows them is so low that is you practically own them for all practical purposes And the 21 million limit like you you know that that will not change Because the probability that all the bitcoiners will agree on changing it is so low.

Knut: So everything is probabilistic. Really.

Quantum Physics

Kenobi: But then you're getting into quantum, basically, you're getting into the depths of,

Knut: almost

Kenobi: everything is probabilistic at the day, right? and I mean, that gets into attention of a question that I had cause before getting into studying economics, I actually wanted to do physics and particle physics and go to CERN.

Kenobi: That was like my dream. But then my dad told me what it actually meant. And that meant sitting in front of a computer 2000 meters below earth, but like, you know, 400 meters below earth and just repeating the same analysis a thousand times. And I was like,

Knut: No. And Bitcoin is the, like CERN is the particle accelerator for physics nerds, right? And Bitcoin is the testicle accelerator for, for, for Austrian economics nerds, . And that's much more fun.

Kenobi: Exactly. At that point, I didn't know that, but one of the questions that I had back then, and that gets back to this thing of is everything probabilities or is anything certain is the fact that if you just take. Normal physics, like, Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, let's say, like relativity, higher levels of magnitude than us, then everything is certain.

Kenobi: Like if I, it's certain that if I threw a ball, it's going to have this with these initial things, then it's going to end up there. But at that point, if you think this way, Then if we knew all of the initial setup for, before the big bang, so all of the, how every particle was arranged, what their spin was, what the direction was, all of that, then we don't have free range.

Kenobi: We are just the result of that, right? But then when you look into quantum, you realize that everything is probabilistic. We like electrons. They don't actually spin around the nucleus of the neutrons and the protons. They just are in probabilistic. Clouds, like clouds of probabilities in different high levels of energy.

Kenobi: And that's also when we get into like chips, that's super interesting because now we're hitting, that, well, people are going to think, well, why are we going to get into chips? Does this guy have anything to do with that? But once we finish my TLDR, which is going to be. Very

Kenobi: long.

Kenobi: I'm a Bitcoin mining analyst. So that's one of the things that I get into. Right. and with this thing of quantum and electrons being just like, waves of probabilities, we are now in this day and age hitting The end of the Moore's law of tic tac of every two years, you multiply times two and then you improve and then you multiply it times two, the amount of transistors, right?

Kenobi: We're hitting a limit on that because now our gates, our logic gates, as they're known, they're getting so small, so tiny that there is a non zero probability that electrons will just jump over the gate and they will not register. So that's actually a problem, right? so, so that's super interesting. And that's leading to now, instead of having just 2D chips, just flat surface chips, they're starting to, AMD is starting to do stuff like 3D chips where they like stack them up this way in the same die size, you can have more transistors, but you're going vertical, right?

Kenobi: Anyway, Let's finish the TLDR. What do you want to go into? Like

Knut: Yeah, no, that's it.

Kenobi: Yeah, wrap up your, and the proof of work tangent, I mean, the only thing I wanted to get at was, like, sort of, what's the, what was the thing that clicked for you, that, that, got you to understand that, But I think what Knut said basically is that, like, when you see someone that is very muscular, for example, that is proof of results.

Knut: Stop muddling.

Kenobi: but that's a very scientific thing, right?

Kenobi: Science, scientists, they never claim anything is a hundred percent true. They just claim it's 99. 99%. It's beyond reasonable, right? Like with the jurors,

Knut: It's

Kenobi: the best theory we have at the moment. exactly. And in this case with energy though, it's kind of like obvious. If someone hits the gym every day and you see them later on, there will be results.

Kenobi: Unless they're like a total tool that like what you said, right? Cause you can just go to the gym. All of these girls just. Lifting one kilo weight. There's no results there. You need to lift heavy, for example. But then that's just one thing. But then in anything else, like if you wrote a book, that's proof of work.

Kenobi: You had to sit down and do it. Even if it was with AI, you had to sit down and at some point, use calories, use energy to do that. Anything that's worth anything. If we're talking, if we're breathing, if we are walking, if we're thinking, that's watts. And if that's worth anything, That's energy. And what is not proof of work? zero, zero, zero, zero, print. That's made up. That doesn't exist. That's, that's Mickey Mouse economics. You know? And that, the moment you realize that that's how our system works so far, and that's what I realized at the moment, right? Like we have been living with a Mickey Mouse, proof of nothing, proof of stake, if you might say, equal proof of nothing, right?

Kenobi: A system. And we finally, for the first time, we figured out a proper universally, coherent system. proof of work system, like it aligns with the laws of physics of everything that we do. That was the moment.

Knut: It ties the subjective world to the objective world. Like, it's the bridge between human action and physics. it's beautiful.

Kenobi: Only

Luke: though, right?

Knut: Only probably. It probably does. Yes, exactly. The thing with probabilistic, it's like, it's connected to free will somehow, and I don't know exactly how, but like, if the universe was deterministic, free will couldn't exist.

Knut: No, so it's, and maybe it doesn't, by the way.

Knut: oh, you mean the whole matrix thing, Well, we can't know if it exists, but we have to act as if it does because we have no choice but to have free will, right? So it's a paradox in itself, but like, you're going to love the book, by the way, but let's not get into that.

Knut: Let's finish the TLDR and get on with

Kenobi: now on it's kind of like very quick because the moment I realized that like I still had a bag of shit coins and over the next two months I just basically sold them all at a loss or at whatever point. I just didn't care. I realized that better to have some sats than have some whatever shit coins, you know, that yeah, perhaps they're going to pump better and whatever.

Kenobi: I had friends still in crypto when, when 2RO, 3RO's capital collapsed, when FTX went down. They were like, Oh my God, what's happening with my coins? I was sleeping like a baby. Why? Because my coins were on cold storage and only on Bitcoin.

Kenobi: That's it. But anyway, so I finished the presentation. I became a Bitcoiner. I presented it to the, team and they were quite impressed. So they were like, would you be willing to not go to college for a while and just work with us? And I was like, a hundred percent, let's do that.

Kenobi: So I just jumped, headfirst into the opportunity. And over the course of the following year, I didn't go to class. I was in Frankfurt, but I was going to Erasmus in Mannheim. so, I basically did not attend class and I just worked for them, dove deeper into Bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin mining, because,

The TLDR Continued

Kenobi: the position that I ended up crafting for myself was like Bitcoin mining analyst, which encompasses also, Knowing everything else about crypto.

Kenobi: But the funny thing is I became like an internal crypto consultants for the company. And anytime they would come to me and be like, Hey, what do you think about starting something with this crypto? I will be like, Hmm, okay. Interesting. Two days later, no, actually no. Without doing any work, I would just get back.

Kenobi: Like, I don't think it's a good idea. Yeah, exactly. Cause it's, it's a shit coin.

Knut: Yeah. financial advisor is the easiest job in the world for the next hundred years.

Kenobi: If exactly, if you're a Bitcoin , it's your work is cut out for you. but yeah, for example, at one point they even came to me, I was like. February, March of 2022. So Bitcoin had already touched 69 K, 70 K. And what's going down peoples, I know, right? nice number .

Kenobi: they came to me with the helium, like, oh, we should start doing the helium Internet of things. Things, whatever, whatever. And I was like,

Knut: Helium?

Kenobi: it was a shit coin. And apparently it was like, if you got a node, which they sent you, it would be like super profitable. You buy for 300 and in two months you've already done 300 whatnot.

Kenobi: Three months later, it was discovered that they had been lying about their partnerships with Volt and well, you know, with those last mile scooters and with Uber, they had been basically lying about it. And therefore the coin just basically, went to zero

Kenobi: Big

Kenobi: who would have thought? I mean, Thank God I told them for some weird reason that it was a shitcoin, but anyway, so then I worked for one year with them. in between, I also started getting involved with stuff like European Bitcoiners, you know, at a European level, but also organizing the meetups in Barcelona, which by the way, you're invited any of you two guys to come to Barcelona and we'll try to get a meetup together.

Knut: I also love Barcelona.

Kenobi: and also the meetup has a, Like the whole story of Barcelona and the meetup is quite interesting because there used to be one, COVID killed it. And then somehow we found ourselves again in a new generation, the new guard, as we like to say it. And now we're like one of the best meetups in the Hispanic community.

Knut: Did Covid sort of cleanse out the shitcoiners?

Kenobi: Yes. Yes. In a way. Yes. Because a few months after creating the meetup, the new meetup in Barcelona, actually one of the old guard noticed us and he was like, Hey, you guys are doing meetups, right? And we were like, oh shit. He's the original guy. And then he came in and now we're super chill.

Kenobi: He's part of the new guard, so to speak with us, and he's helping us organize every meetup. he's part of the team. and he would tell us stories of the last couple of years, you know, 2017 to 2019 before covid. And, you know, creative destruction is positive.

Knut: This is so great because there's an actual evolutionary perspective to, the COVID measures doing an evolutionary thing and making, ANCAPs and Bitcoiners survive better, in the long run.

Kenobi: What is it, Alan Farrington's, Only the Strong Survive, right? the whole, yeah, 100%. Anyway, so that happens, but then, I was already organizing meetups, part of European Bitcoiners, like, you know, but this thing is a bit of a decentralized, pleb driven, volunteer thing, so it's morphed a bit over the years, because volunteers come and volunteers go, right?

Kenobi: We don't force anyone, it's like Bitcoin, right? When you do this type of stuff, it gives you so much more perspective for how hard it was the first years in Bitcoin, like trying to get anyone involved. And that also brings new appreciation for how important Hal Finney was. Like, like this man, we would not be here today without Hal Finney, at all.

Kenobi: Like we owe Hal Finney everything, like, or Ross Ulbricht. Yes. Hats off if I had one for him and for Ross Ulbricht as well, and for Marty Malmy and all of these guys, early guys. But anyway, so it brings you new appreciation. But then I had been already working for them for a full year, I still had my studies halfway through, and a combination of Few things like a lot of social pressure from one end, also from the company, they were like, it's still German fiat company in a way.

Kenobi: And they were like, we don't want to support someone dropping college. and my family also like, are you sure about this? And the price going down. And I was also tired of living by myself in Frankfurt. So I was, you know what, fuck it. I'll go back to, you know, living the fiat life. my mom cooks, I just clean sometimes and, you know, I live at my mom's house.

Kenobi: No budget balancing, no whatever, you know, I just live life for a minute, right? So I went back to college. I recently finished my studies, economic studies, man, was it tough because the first two years of economics, I was a, I was a

Fiat Economics Education

Kenobi: I was full in. I was actually one of the best in my class, but then I became like a mid corner.

Kenobi: I studied a bit of Austrian economics, I understood the main things, and then I came back and I was like. Aw, shit.

Knut: I'm gonna lie here.

Kenobi: yes, yes, yes. Oh, I still remember because I managed to get one of my friends. I turned him into a Bitcoin, I orange pilled him and he was with me in class and we had a macroeconomics 2 class and at one point the teacher, we had something about money printing and whatnot.

Kenobi: They actually recognized that one of the revenue streams for the government was seniorage, which was printing. And I was trying to, you know, like, It's like poke the bear kind of, into like saying that, Hey, it's basically stealing, you know? and inflation is, comes basically from money printing.

Kenobi: And the teacher was so adamant about like, no, no, no. And anyway, it was also a weird thing cause like you don't want your teacher to hate you because then the classes were small enough that they would know you and how you write and all of that. So if they wanted to, they could just fail your class all the time and then you don't pass.

Kenobi: Right. So this power imbalance made it so at one point, me and my friend, we had to just like Bitter Tongues and eat the shit and say thank you and then puke it out the lies on the exam. And that was a great exam. You know, we passed by just lying through our teeth. But anyway, so two tough years. I still want to do the analysis of my grades of like first year.

Knut: What was my average grade second year? I mean, just unpack that for a minute. how horrible is it that in order to get a degree in economics, you need to admit that theft is not only okay, but necessary? Like it's so vile, it's so vulgar.

Kenobi: And it's worse than that because for example, many of the changes that were made to the course over the years, weren't properly communicated even to the teachers, at the beginning of my course, I was doing economics and English, not just economics. I'm in Spain, so usually classes and universities are in Spanish, but I chose to do economics in English, it was a smaller set and the teachers, have been doing that for the past seven years.

Kenobi: And at the beginning, there was a course on, history of economic thinking, so it would present you the Austrian school, the Chicago school, you know, all of these other ways of thinking, right? But at some point between the start of the course and me doing it, they scrapped it and they didn't tell any teachers.

Kenobi: So at one point I went to a teacher and was like, Hey, by the way, like, when are we going to do anything about Austrian economics? And you know, like the Chicago monitors. Cause I also kind of want to like study the enemy to like properly understand them and be able to refute them. And also study our own things, you know, Austrian economics and also behavioral economics.

Kenobi: That's something I've been getting more or less into. I mean, my thesis was on Bitcoin and behavioral economics, so that's that. and the teacher was like, oh, you haven't had a class yet? And I was like, that was in the third year, right? After going back. And I was like, no, it was like, oh, there used to be one.

Kenobi: And I'm like, wait, you scrapped it? And you're not even aware of that? Like the college, they just scrapped it and didn't tell you. And then going back to your question. So that's one of the first things, right? This is like, Covert propaganda of like, we're just going to scrap the things we don't like and keep the things that we like, right?

Kenobi: And then, I mean, it wasn't that horrible because there was no other way. Like, they build it in a way, they build this world where the answers that the teacher gives you, because you haven't seen anything else, right? The Austrian school doesn't exist, the behavioral economics school doesn't exist, the Chicago school doesn't exist, right?

Kenobi: So, the only thing, the only economics that is valid and real is the ones that the teacher present to you. And whatever they present to you, that's the truth. And if they don't say, they just say seniorage, right? Oh yeah, part of the revenue from the government. You know, it's, it's taxes, it's, I think it was debt also, even though I was like, but isn't that also taxes in the future?

Kenobi: But anyway, and then seniorage, which I was like, isn't that also taxes? But anyway, but the teacher didn't say that, right? and they have, of course, the authority in the class. Right. They come prepared with their story. They have their story clear, right? And kind of like properly packaged.

Knut: There's a Rothbard book called a history of economic thought which is really good if you want to study like the differences in way And it goes back to Greek times. great book

Bitcoin Mining Analysis

Kenobi: So you finished your studies, but I assume also this whole time you've been active in the Bitcoin community and all this, and now you've been doing a lot of great Bitcoin mining analysis, so where are you now? The thing is, with the Bitcoin mining analysis, it was usually done for my company privately, so I didn't publish it much. I would just sometimes do commentary, like for my pseudonym Twitter account. now I'm trying to just be on Nostr, which I think, you know what, that's the way to go.

Kenobi: I would just comment on a few things sometimes, like if someone presented something, I would read it from my work, and then publish some potentially like some responses back on Twitter, like, hey guys, you could have done this, or very good on that and whatnot. And also, compilating a lot of, sources and reports and things that people produce and also producing some for my own company, nothing too high level, but enough that they would have a better understanding of what's going on, so to speak, but of course, private, so that's why there's nothing on Twitter about this.

Kenobi: So then for the past two years while I was studying economics, I was still going to conferences because that was kind of my escape, that and the meetups from all the bullshit. so going to conferences, if I could get a speaking slot perfect and talk a bit about Bitcoin and whatnot, or what we're doing in the meetups or in European Bitcoiners, the community level.

Kenobi: And, if not, Just attend the conference and be around Bitcoiners and escape the, you understand it, right? When you talk to a Bitcoiner. There's no preamble. You don't need to tell them anything. They already understand. They're there because there's proof of

Knut: You can skip the formalities.

Knut: You're on the same level. And even if you disagree, there's still a base fundamental thing that you agree on. they're above a certain number of thresholds already

Kenobi: exactly. And you know that this person has done at least a certain amount of work because there's nothing worse than someone that has just eaten propaganda that comes to you and says, Oh, but you have no idea because the TV said, and I'm like, That's your only source of information, the TV.

Kenobi: So, and then you cannot have real conversations about like anything that's happened over the past four years, or let alone 20 years, 15, 50 years, right? Like nothing. so anyway, going to conferences was my, my escape and, yeah, that's, that's also why I'm here now, to escape from that type of, you know, Life, so to speak, but at this point, well, the last semester, they, my company called me back again, like, Hey, Kenobi, would you like to Come back on board, start working for us again.

Kenobi: And by the time you're done, be full time with us. And I was like, why not? Let's do it. I mean, this way I can get some sats, you know, keep stacking sats. and potentially I could also go to a conference with my company and whatnot. This way, I don't have to pay for out of pocket. I don't have to burn sats myself.

Kenobi: once I graduated, I decided, you know, I've been long enough with this company. let's see what's new, what's out there.

Decentralizing Mining

Kenobi: And now I'm working for the past kind of week and a half, cause in Lugano, we actually shook hands on it for demand pool. The first Stratum V2 pool out there. So helping decentralize Bitcoin proliferate nodes.

Knut: Cause the idea is to have a node on every miner. People don't know this yet, but miners, they don't have nodes. Yeah, let's really dig into this, because honestly, this is a big area of discussion for us generally. We've had a lot of guys from Ocean on, mostly just Mechanic actually. Yeah, but we've had other ocean proponents on

Luke: Yeah, exactly, and I mean, we're really big into this whole mining decentralization thing and miners being able to select their own block template and all this.

Luke: And so, can you explain anything and everything about Demand Pool, Stratum V2, I'll leave it up to you to organize it,

Kenobi: Yeah. So from what I know so far, Stratum V1 was created in 2012 and Stratum V2 was proposed just a few years later in 2014 15, if I'm not wrong. In 2018, Matt Corallo came up with BetterHash, that was the improvement to Stratum V1 or Stratum at this point, because there was no Stratum V2.

Kenobi: but it had a few missing pieces, so it didn't go anywhere, but it helped set the stage for like, hey. We actually need to start worrying about this. And then around 2020, 2021, the proper stratum V2, initiative was started.

Kenobi: The SRI stratum reference implementation. And it was a collaborative effort between a few independent, Coders, Brains and Matt Corallo, as far as I'm aware, please don't trust Verify, right? that's the story I know so far. I've only been working for Strataview 2 for the past two weeks, but I've been following on and off for the past two weeks.

Kenobi: That's why I'm kind of aware of it to this degree. and then for the past three years, they've been working on setting up the basis and also figuring out all the problems with implementing it, like kind of game theory, like wargaming it, like game theory, like how it pans out.

Kenobi: Because at this point the current setup is basically, Pools have kind of a lot of power because they create the templates and they also manage the payments. and miners, yes, they have power in the sense that they can just switch pools, but at the same time, when half of the pools are just proxies for the two biggest pools and the other half of the pools, they are, let's say the same, but with a different color.

Kenobi: Right, because at this point, it's FPPS only everywhere, and to be honest, FPPS is dying, and it should die, in my opinion. And the biggest winners will be miners, because they will get paid more, when that's the setup, miners don't really have that much power. Like, Oh yeah, but they can just redirect the hash rate.

Kenobi: Yes, they can. But first of all, there's two types of miners, publicly traded and let's say bigger miners like enterprise miners and say not smaller, but medium to small miners, you know, more nimble, more agile. These guys, yes, they can do that. But the bigger ones, many of them, they have some sort of, let's say Nash equilibrium where trying to get out of it is a bit.

Kenobi: It's a bit tough, because from a regulatory perspective, from a tax perspective, they are in this, like a false Nash equilibrium, I don't know if you've seen those things of a hill with a ridge and then the ball falls there and it just stays there and it's like a false equilibrium and you just need to get it over to then properly go to the right place from a game theoretical perspective.

Knut: That's it, right? And that's where they're at right now. It's like a false equilibrium. Too big to fail problem?

Knut: It's more of a very big, therefore regulation. and then they have auditors Too big to change.

Kenobi: they're also KYC, right? Too big to change. Yeah. That, I think that would be the way to put it because they already KYC.

Kenobi: They don't care about KYC and the only thing they care about is, Proper reporting, proper auditing, and also modifying their tax status like with shortbread, right? In the UK, it's called shortbread and not just cookies, even though they're cookies, because I don't remember, I think it was in the 1800s or 17th century, there was a fight over What it was, because cookies, they were taxed in the UK at like 12 or 15 percent the exports, but bread was taxed only at 2 percent or something like that.

Kenobi: So they decided to call it shortbread in order to like have lower tax, on or lower tariffs, right? And therefore sell more than cookies. And the same is happening with miners. Most miners, publicly traded ones from a tax perspective, they are not miners. They're just compute providers and the actual miners are the pools, And by doing that. And they become just a data center, like any normal Amazon data center, and then their tax regime, like their taxes, are lower, because if they were, the miners, they would be selling a finished product to the pool, and then they would have to pay VAT on that, right? So Yeah. That's what they do.

Kenobi: Yes, technically everyone can do that. But, right? but all of this,

Kenobi: so they're not miners. Exactly, exactly, exactly. And this is like hash salesmen. that's what we've been trying to push that, that kind of explanation for it. Like in so many, that goes deep because you can't really call yourself a miner unless you know what block you're mining on. yes. In a way, but, of course, this is the world we live in, kind of.

FPPS Is Dying

Luke: Yeah, and so we were on a panel yesterday that went into a whole bunch of current mining trends and all of this, and you touched on one of the points that FPPS is dying, and I really like this, I think this ties into both of these things, like the Stratenvy 2, the decentralized mining and all this, but why is FPPS not going to work?

Luke: Yes.

Kenobi: it would be good to start with how pools appeared. Pools appear because there's 144 blocks. The way I like to explain it is every day we bake a pie and it has 144 slices. And then if there's 144 kids, there's a high probability that everyone will get there and get their own piece of pie, right?

Kenobi: But at some point, if you have a big family and you're 700, some of the kids will go hungry for various days in a row because they're not the first ones to get there. So then they decide to Band together and be like, okay, when you get a piece of pie, you share it equally with all of us.

Kenobi: And when I get a piece of pie, we share all equally, right? That's what happened with pools. The first one was a slush, November, of 2010. So one year after the creation of Bitcoin, was it? No, no. Two years after Bitcoin mining started. So January of 2009.

Knut: yeah.

Kenobi: but yeah, so that was the first pool because at that point, GPUs were slowly starting to pick up. That was about eight, seven, eight months from when Laszlo Haniek published his GPU, implementation. And at that point, something that most people don't know is that the first GPU implementations, they were not that more efficient.

Kenobi: they were more powerful. but from an efficiency standpoint, they were actually potentially even worse. They were using more electricity.

Knut: okay.

Kenobi: So that's the thing. But yes, for the same machine, you were getting more hash rates. So that's why, how Laszlo Hanye managed to get a lot of coins. But by that point, they Many people had already figured it out.

Kenobi: They were actually starting to be more efficient, therefore more economical, but there was more competition. And at that point you can go over the Bitcoin talk forums and people like, we're talking about like getting a block every four years. Nowadays, as a solo miner, it's getting a block every 400. So good old times, right?

Kenobi: They didn't know how good they had it. but that was the first pool from there they created. I don't remember exactly what the method for the distribution like, Oh, you bring in so much work, you're going to get that much amount. what it was, but basically how modern pools work after that one, they had some trouble.

Kenobi: Some new pools appeared and they fixed on that was basically. The way Bitcoin mining works is you have to find a number that is lower than the difficulty adjustment. You have to think of it like a limbo, right? You go underneath the thing, right? but what the pool does in order to not get all of the trials, because what your ASIC is doing is just hashing once and once, like, again and again and again, and all of them, They have some, let's say they're a proof that they're doing work, right?

Kenobi: And you want to check that people are doing work as a pool, right? But you don't want to receive all of the trials. Cause then from a data bandwidth perspective, that would be, you will be

Knut: So you want the computing power rather than the hashes.

Kenobi: exactly. So what you want to do is you want to get a fraction of the hashes.

Kenobi: So what the pools do is, yes, this is the, so this low is the difficulty of Bitcoin. So if you get a hash underneath this, like a number underneath this, We are getting bitcoins, yippee, awesome, good times, but we are 50 people in this pool, or 50 entities with varying levels of hash rates, and I don't want to be receiving 400 quadrillion strings of data every second.

Kenobi: Right? So I want to just receive let's say one, every second from each of you guys. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give each of you a different difficulty level. And if you get a number that is below that, so here's the Bitcoin mining difficulty, like the whole network, and this pool is choosing client A, we'll have it here.

Kenobi: And by knowing your difficulty level and how many shares you provide an hour, I can calculate your hash rate.

Kenobi: And therefore I can calculate what's your percentage of the work. And then, but then of course, you don't want to give a Bidax the same difficulty as fucking Riot. Because Riot, they're going to give you 400 quadrillion strings either way. So then you get different difficulty levels for different miners in your pool.

Kenobi: And using that, you're going to get, let's say, I'm making it up, but I think it's, usually it's like, 10 shares per second, but I don't know, right? And also every pool can choose a different metric, right? But let's say one share per second. If you have not too much hash rate, they will give you a higher difficulty.

Kenobi: And then if you have a lot of hash rate, they will give you a lower difficulty. So now we have created the concept of shares. Because shares are hashes that are low enough that you have to submit them. Or not have to, but you're willing to submit them because they're worth something, but not low enough that they give you Bitcoin, right?

Kenobi: Because they're not giving you a block in the network. So then, every pool created a system like that, and then we get into the first, systems using shares. If I remember correctly, the first one was PPLNS. So per the last, so they're going to look at the last, quadrillion shares provided from all the miners and they're going to see the distribution of them.

Kenobi: So, okay. You provided this amount of shares with this hash rate. That means that you will get this. When we find a block, we will look back into all of the shares that were submitted in the past four hours. And then we will give you that percentage, right? And if you provided more shares at a higher difficulty, then you're getting more of that block, right?

Kenobi: But of course, what's the problem with that? You only get paid when a block is found. Because the moment a block is found, they look backwards and they say, How much were you guys working on? then from this block you get this percentage, this percentage, this percentage.

Kenobi: That's when we get into the thing of variance. There's only 144 blocks a day, and if you're less than 1 percent of the network, so if you're 0. 7 percent of the network, then you are supposed to get one block a day, on average, because there's 144 blocks, so If you do the math, it's around 65 percent. But what happens?

Kenobi: It's probabilistic. Some days, it can happen, you don't get a block. And it could also happen that the next day, you don't get a block. And the next day as well. What are the probabilities of doing that? You know, then you have to poison distributions and all of that. It gets very mathematical.

Kenobi: But anyway, I do understand it, but like, how the math works behind it is a bit still like, Okay, it works, but like, I don't understand why, but it still can happen. So if you're not too big, it could happen that for a few days, you don't get blogs, you don't get paid out. So then it feels like, and then there were also ways to play it where if a blog was just being found on another pool, you would jump to that one because of some, anyway, there were some attacks that you could do where you could Scoop off, profitability of pools and therefore start stealing from them, so to speak.

Kenobi: so then pools and, and, and miners, they started looking for new alternatives. And the one that they came up with and that has been prevalent for the past three to five years has been FPPS. So we went from let's look at the shares that you gave us over the last X hours, once the block is found and then we will calculate it to we will give pay you regardless.

Kenobi: Why? Because the expected value of any hash is the same. Like any hash could be the hash that gets you a block. It's like with I like to compare it like the metaphor uses the digital marketing, like with advertisements, you know, people, they pay for, they pay a hundred dollars for a million clicks in Facebook.

Kenobi: They don't know which click will give them revenue, but they know that every million clicks they can expect at least more than a hundred dollars of revenue. Otherwise they wouldn't buy it. so in a way what you're saying is like the expected value of your hash rate, so from a probabilistic point of view.

Kenobi: is this amount.

Knut: so FPPS is pay per click,

Kenobi: kind of,

Knut: That's the equivalent in the advertising world, rather than a referral, like whenever you get a sale, you, yeah.

Knut: Yeah. No, that's just how I heard it. Yes.Cause I hadn't thought those steps extra, but yes, it's that, that will be the way to think about it. And it's a very simple calculation. You just get all of the Bitcoin mined per day at this point, 450.

Kenobi: Plus, transaction fees divided by the total network hash rate. And that's it. You're getting, if you have one extra hash, you should be getting this amount.

Knut: The problem is that you're getting paid regardless of if the block is found or not.

Knut: So that were like the, the pools could still have bad, sets of luck, which then means they have to like, it's almost like you're withdrawing from the bank, even though there's no money there. fractional reserve.

Kenobi: it's worse than fractional reserve. I was, I think it was Alan.

Knut: It's exactly fractional reserve.

Kenobi: I would say it's worse.

Knut: the gold rather Cause they're, they're working on the promise that they will find gold because meanwhile

Kenobi: With fractional reserve, at least. The gold was there beforehand. Theoretically, theoretically, lots of air quotes. Right. but with this one is like, Oh no, we are sure we're going to get gold.

Kenobi: Right. Don't worry. just get paid. You're welcome. so it requires a lot of financing. You need to have big bags in order to do all of this, which leads to the centralization, but also from a historical perspective, how it evolved is at the beginning when FPP has arrived, the formulas that we're using were very simple.

Kenobi: Basically, for example, let's look over the last 144 blocks, aka one day. what was the payout to the average of that? And then that's what your terahash or petahash or exahash. What's worth for the last day, and we'll pay you that amount. That's the expected value of your TeraHash for the past day.

Kenobi: and they would also be very fair, let's say. They would be very close to the actual expected value. Let's call it 100%. And then on top of that, or below that, they would skim between 2 and 4%. That's the pool fees. Perfect. Makes sense. But as the time went on, they realized that The financing needs were so big on their end and the risk was so big on the pool's end that they needed more revenue to justify it, right?

Kenobi: Because otherwise they were basically, I would say like picking pennies in front of a steamroller, right? so as time went on, they started modifying the formulas and then suddenly it was not just, Hey, the last 144 blocks, transactions included. So Coinbase plus transaction. And that's it.

Kenobi: We're going to actually like subtract the last, the least profitable 10 and, but also the most profitable 10 or, or, or they're good and they start playing with that. Right. And then suddenly they, everyone calls it FPPS, but FPPS from this pool and that pool and the other pool, they use slightly tweaked formulas.

Kenobi: And then also, to a certain degree, you have to trust them that they're doing the formula right. And over time, what started happening is, you know what happens with exchanges, right? Like, like you go there and they tell you, Oh, 0 percent fee, there's no fee. But then there's a spread, you know, that's also a fee, right?

Knut: so let me get this, see if I got it right. so the longer the time horizon, the more financing you need, but also the more assured you can be that it's, you're actually going to find the blocks, right? Like, because the probability that you will, it just goes up with, with more time.

Kenobi: Yeah. But also the longer the time horizon, the higher the probabilities that you will have a bad week or a bad month. And what a bad month means is that You got less blocks and then you're dipping deeper into your reserves or into your financing.

Knut: That's hence the more financing you need,

Kenobi: so that's where they realized like we need to get more money.

Kenobi: Like we need to get more revenue because this way the payouts are lower. So there's, we have to pay less out, but also we're creating a bigger cushion in the good times, so to speak, almost like, you know, Keynesian, like, Balancing of the thing, of the, of the government revenues and taxes, right?

Knut: Keynesian. which is great in theory, but communism is also great in theory.

Knut: No, it's not great in theory, but let's not go there.

Kenobi: In theory, communism is awesome. What? Everyone gets everything and they're happy? Now do it. Good. Luck.

Knut: but it's not great in theory also the theory has big holes like the, Labor theory of value. Yeah.

Kenobi: Proof of work. Exactly, So, as a Mickey Mouse experiment, communism is wonderful. But, and FPPs as well. FPPs as well. that's the thing. FPPs could be seen as like the communism of Bitcoin mining and pool payout

Knut: So what's the solution?

Kenobi: so, the solution is basically, we're Going to see, like with communism, the system fails by itself, right?

Kenobi: Because what's, what's been happening over the past few years is that as time went on, the spread, like with, with the exchanges, right? They tell you, Oh, 0 percent fee or lower fee than the others, but they're increasing their spread, right? And so you, you put a thousand euros in, but you get, you know, Ninety years ago you actually got 990 euros worth of bitcoin.

Kenobi: And then two years later, you actually get 980 euros worth of Bitcoin. So, even though they say 0 percent fee, they just paid you 20 euros less. 10 euros less before, 20 euros less now. And that's what's happening now. The FPPS formula is getting more and more successful. Weirder and stranger and more complicated and harder to understand and harder to verify.

Kenobi: That's something that at the Manpool we're trying to like, change. we have created a system of auditability where the miners, they can actually challenge us and they can check if we're doing our work right and in a public manner, right? if demand pool became 100%, like there was only demand pool, we would be the last suckers because we would have no power.

Kenobi: Like if Anpool becomes the biggest or Foundry becomes the biggest, ooh, they're KYC, fully controlled, regulated by the government. But if we become the biggest pool, we have 100 percent of the hash rate. It doesn't matter because we don't control the blocks and we can also not steal from miners because at any point they can audit us in a very transparent manner, in a very public manner.

Kenobi: If we're actually doing something wrong, they'll catch us as quick as, as it gets.

Pools Decentralizing

Luke: so, do you think other pools are going to start adopting alternatives to FPPS? Because I think this was the interesting point when you said FPPS is, yes, yes and no. Cause there's so much path dependence on the pool side of things. Especially if you're already part of Anpool, like there's pools that they're basically, they started as an Anpool proxy. That's it. That's been their whole business model. They don't know anything else, right? does that work, by the way? Anpool gives them the template, or what does that mean?

Kenobi: It's an API, basically, to a certain degree. Anpool just says, hey, here's your API, just send it to your, guys. They don't need to care about any of the infrastructure or the coding or maintaining software or maintaining anything, right? as a pure proxy pool.

Kenobi: Then of course there's also examples of pools that were, PPLNS or other forms of payouts that then move to Ant Pool and I don't know how that works

Knut: But Proxy is also about the ownership structure of the pool, right? So that the Bitmain owns the pool, but very indirect

Kenobi: in a debt trap type of way. Because if you don't have our platform, So if you're looking for finance or deep pockets, then you're going to go bankrupt real quick. Yeah. I didn't finish the point about how, FPPS dies. every time they've been getting a bigger, like they've been increasing the spread while saying that the fees are the lowest, right?

Kenobi: And miners, because it's hard to check on that because the formulas are getting bigger. Harder and harder. They went from making a hundred percent of their expected value, minus 2%. That's a fee to suddenly was 2% spread, which they don't say right, and two, two to two to 4% a fee. So at that point, the minor is getting between 96 and 94% of the value of their hash rate 88 and 94 percent of what their hash rate is actually worth, because the spread has kept increasing. So, the pools are getting a bigger share of the pie, even though they've been giving the same service as the beginning, right? That's why they're justifying it with, Oh, but we're going to give you cheaper financing or we're going to provide you the machines or ride the whole foundry and, and, and pool thing, right?

Kenobi: Where, Oh, it's the. It's the ancillary services that we provide, right? It's like the support and the after sales support and all of that. so just by its weight, it's already dying because it's taking so much from, it takes so much stealing basically to, to keep up that when miners join pools, like in this case, oceans, and in the future, our pool, they realize, wait a second, I'm getting more money.

Kenobi: How does that work? Like, aren't they supposed to be filtering high value transactions and therefore we should get less money? No, because these guys, because when you're a PPLNS, PayPair Last N Shares Pool, you don't have any financing needs, because you, you're like a full reserve bank. The moment that a block is found, it goes into your, into your reserves, and a hundred blocks later, because that's also something people don't know, you cannot spend a Coinbase for the next a hundred blocks.

Kenobi: whenever the miner wants to check out, we already received upfront. You're just getting out what you already worked for, right? There's no, Oh, we're going to pay you in front and we're going to trust that we're going to get blocks later, you know?

Knut: so let me see if I get this right. Hearkening back to the ad paper click analogy. Yes. So, what we say FPPS is, is paper click. No, it's, it's, it's paper click,

Kenobi: Yes.

Kenobi: I sell you a million clicks.

Knut: Yeah, but you have no way of knowing, like they also take the revenue part, they take your sales profits and you don't know how many sales you got,

Knut: Yes. they could just be lying about that theoretically. But with a, PLL, you get the, you get the actual, you get the transparency, there are no guaranteed sales, but you see every sale and you see exactly how much you get.

Knut: Alright, so in a way, it's not FPPS, it's not pay per click, but it's more akin to, okay, you can buy an ad in my magazine for 10, 000 bucks, and you have absolutely no way of knowing how many people saw it, or if it's

Luke: I can tell, I can give you an average of how many people buy my paper. Right. But I cannot assure you anything and you will not know unless someone tells you how many shoes that you're selling or, No, no, so that they're basically selling your product and saying that this is the profit, but you never see the sales numbers. Yeah. In a way that's a good way to put it. So to kind of pull this all together then, your thesis somewhat is that miners are going to choose to move to pools that are open, transparent, using payout methods that are actually fair, or at least getting closer to the total expected value. And so, I mean, the pools that already exist, how do you think they're going to adapt to this?

Luke: What do you think they're going to do when the hashrate starts dropping?

Kenobi: well, something they can do is they can reach out to us at the demand pool and we can help them set up a Stratum V2 pool You know, so they can basically do that with their pool and their miners. And suddenly, hey guys, you're, you're in, now in a stratum V2 pool. And, and we don't have these financing risk and we're not going to go bankrupt tomorrow. And suddenly you don't get your payouts that you work for, for the past three, four, five days.

Kenobi: Right? so I think that's something that if they want to, that can happen. But if they just want to stick it out and stay at the FPPS, While miners slowly realize the truth that, hey, they're stealing from us. Okay.

Mining In The Future

Luke: you dropped one more bomb in the panel we had, and I think this might be a good last topic to hit on here. Was that mining is going to stop 10 years.

Kenobi: Yes.

Luke: But there was a nuance to that, so can you

Kenobi: Yes. So I do believe that Bitcoin mining pure Bitcoin mining only will not make nominally financial sense in 10 to 15 years. Nominal financial sense means from a pure balance sheet perspective or PNL perspective of like, I made 10 in and I have costs of 5.

Kenobi: That's where we live now. In the future, you're going to make 10, but your costs will be 12, 15, right? So from a nominally, like from a pure economic perspective, it's not going to make sense if you only take into account, rational market participants. But of course, if you're a solo miner or a home miner with like just two or five tera hash, and you just want to get some KYC free sats.

Kenobi: You don't care if you pay 15 and you get 10 out of it, because those 10, they may be worth much more, right, than 15 now. If you do your yearly PNL in 15 years and you're a solo miner only doing Bitcoin mining, it will not make sense. I don't believe it's going to be profitable in the mainstream, in the classical way of the word.

Knut: Not fiat profitable.

Kenobi: Not feel profitable.

Luke: what went into this? What, brought you to

Kenobi: basically the fact that in the past two, three years, All, everyone has started talking about secondary sources of revenue, either be it by, doing ancillary services for the grid. So helping balance the grid or by selling the heat in one way or another, or doing secondary types of things.

Kenobi: You know, some people are distilling water in Spain, actually a guy, super smart guy. They're distilling water with Bitcoin mining. So in a way they're subsidizing the electricity costs and then getting something that actually what every kilowatt hour that they put in is subsidized by Bitcoin mining at this point.

Kenobi: And it's already in profit, but then per kilowatt hour, the amount of, industrial output of a set of hash rate, but also if the distilled water is 10 times more expensive. So they sell it for 10 times more. so at some point, Bitcoin mining, they don't care if Bitcoin mining only covers 20 percent of the electricity costs or whatever, they don't care because they're making 10 times more

Kenobi: on the is, this is the whole energy companies will be miners in the future and vice versa thesis, In my thesis is that in 10, 15 years, every grid, national grid operator will have a Bitcoin mining team, which will be nominally at loss, meaning we're all, we're always, They're always pumping money into them and they're never giving back, but on the other end, they're fixing or they're balancing the grid so that they don't have these like outages and therefore they're saving on maintenance on destroyed capital and all of that, right?

Knut: So yes, they're losing money on paper, but they're saving us a hundred. So we're pumping 20 million over here, but they're saving us a hundred million over there. So, you know, that, that's what I mean, and anyone who's not doing that in the future, They're throwing away money.

Kenobi: they're not, it's not going to be profitable.

Kenobi: Like, we still have like five to eight years where it's going to most likely make sense still to do pure Bitcoin mining, but, unless you have free electricity or near free electricity, I don't see a future in 10 to 15 years for pure Bitcoin miners.

Luke: and does this have anything to do with the block reward is decreasing and all this, or is this even, divorced from that?

Kenobi: I mean, no, it also has to do, but the problem with that is yes, the blocked, like the Coinbase reward decreases, but also the price multiplies

Knut: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Kenobi: every cycle, right? And electricity bills are still paid on dollars or euros. So, right. It kind of balances out to that. but what we're seeing is that Inevitably, the hash price per kilowatt hour is going down.

Kenobi: It's slowly, you know, like perfect market, perfect

Kenobi: market competition. Yeah. And like price equals marginal cost and the marginal cost of, of Bitcoin mining. The global marginal cost is not what the publicly traded miners have. It's what Gridless has with some places where they have free electricity.

Kenobi: It's what the Venezuelan miners have with free electricity that the government gives them. Yes, there's nothing free. Someone's paying for it, I know. But for them, from their P& L perspective, it makes sense or it's, for example, many miners like Riot recently, I think they had, I think it was in August or July, they had a cost per Bitcoin mine for that month of negative 7, 000 or something like that.

Knut: Why? Because they participated in demand response programs and they are so much more lucrative than Bitcoin mining that they got so many credits that at the end they were getting paid for the electricity that they consumed at the end of the month. So the beauty of this is like, doesn't this mess with miner incentives? But the only way it does that is in the right direction. Because it makes people sats minded rather than fiat minded. And it makes the miners, it forces them to be sats minded. Yes. And it forces them to think in Bitcoin terms because that is the problem with mining today.

Knut: These are fiat companies. They have fiat incentives. that's why we have the centralization issues and it's, it's, but the game theory still works out. And this why Bitcoin is beautiful.

Mining in Finland and the Nordics

Kenobi: And in a way, it also helps decentralize it because, for example, if you live in Norway, Finland, Sweden, and it's winter, you can either pay 25 cents per kilowatt hour, which is the price currently, miners, they're looking for 3. 5 cents, so it's almost like 10 times more expensive, right?

Kenobi: You can pay 20 cents per kilowatt hour. to just, get heat, or you can connect an ASIC miner, get part of that electricity subsidized, and still get the same amount of heat out of it. So, like, what are you gonna do? Like, are you just gonna, like, not pick up the money from the floor? Like it's waiting there for you to pick it up.

Knut: just bend and take it, you know? it's gonna incentivize many more people to just start doing small mining operations. Just two machines in your house, in your attic, which provides heat in the winter. And in the summer you turn off or you don't, who knows? Well, and Finland also has this, and other countries too, but Finland has this district heating thing, and so basically the municipalities are just paying bitcoin miners to connect to their system and provide the heat, and they need it year round because they need hot water year round, 15 years, it's not going to make sense because there's three main categories of things that provide secondary revenue. Those are the ancillary services to the grid, so grid balancing. Then there's the, acid unshackling, so, flared gas, Oh, yeah, yeah. It's suspension mechanism in a way.

Kenobi: In a way, yeah, it's a way to like, hey, you're, Just letting millions of dollars flow out of there and you're not getting them. Just install this and you're going to get them. You know, it's that simple

Luke: Plus, save the thing from being flared,

Kenobi: plus save the fees and the fines from the government and all of that. It makes a lot of sense. And there was a third category, which I think, I know it's the heat, heat, reuse.

Kenobi: So, grid balancing, asset, I hate it. Flared gas, which could also be a methane right out of landfills. So, and then also, heat reuse, heat resell.

Knut: kicker is that none of this is internet bandwidth dependent. Because Bitcoin miners, like I was talking to the guys at gridless and like, The bandwidth that you use in a month for like one container with 300, 400 is the amount, like, It's nothing. It's, it's less than a gigabyte. could send out, I found the correct hash with a fucking Morse code.

Kenobi: with Morse code if you want,

Knut: It's tiny.

Stratum V2

Kenobi: that's, that's something that Stratum V2 improves upon, and I'm not sure if Ocean also does it, but I know we do it, and it's the fact that right now, and that's also one of the advantages of Stratum V2, going back to that question, the communications between the pool and the, and the miner, Unencrypted.

Kenobi: So it's plain text. So you can actually like intercept the traffic and read it, right? That's 2002 internet levels, like before HTTPS, right? so what does that mean? When the pool is sending the work out, it doesn't matter because it's just, Hey, do the work for me. Right? But when the miner is sending the responses back, the shares that we spoke about before, right?

Kenobi: there could be a man in the middle attack, meaning someone gets 2 percent of your hash rate. Usually people, like when we talk about this attack, we talk about 2, between 1 and 5 percent because it's low enough that someone would just chuck it up to something else and not think, Oh, we're being hacked, right?

Kenobi: So imagine you have 10x a hash. 0. 6 Bitcoin per exahash, that's what you're getting. So you're getting about 40, 000, 50, 000 per exahash a day, right? You have 10 of them, so you're getting half a million dollars a day. So imagine now someone knows a man in the middle attack.

Kenobi: Where they're taking 1 2 percent of your hashrate and they're redirecting it to another pool. So every 100 shares that you provide, they stop one or two of them and they send them to a different pool under their account. They have effectively now stolen, what is that?

Kenobi: 5, 000 a month, more, no, half a million, 1%. Yeah, 5, 000 to 20, 000 a month and you don't really know because again with FPPS, the formulas are so weird that you just basically have to don't verify, trust the

Kenobi: pool. So that's why FPPS is dying and it's going to

Kenobi: for the win. I've seen the whole time people passing and doing like caricatures or what not.

Wrapping Up

Kenobi: General Kenobi. in my experience, there is no such thing as luck as General Kenobi himself said, like in the, from the first Star Wars movie, right? When Luke refers to Well, Luke, we got Luke with the Star Wars. about the most obvious one.

Knut: Anyway, that's a weird transition.

Knut: Anywhere you want to send our listeners before, because I think this has been a great conversation. it needs, people need to hear this.

Kenobi: 100%, 100%. I hope I've done a good job at simplifying it for everyone. I hope so. I will hear it from the people. I don't have a Twitter account, because it got suspended and, I don't care to go back there. So, they can go to, I'm on Nostr, so you can find me by just Kenobi, I believe.

Luke: Yeah, we'll put it in the,

Kenobi: Yeah. And then otherwise, demand pool. We do have a Twitter, but we also have a Nostr. So find us there. also support decentralizing Bitcoin mining and, stay humble and stack sats. There you go.

Luke: Kenobi, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for joining us. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Thank you for listening.

Knut: Goodbye.

Kenobi: See ya.

@ eac63075:b4988b48

Based on a recent paper that included collaboration from renowned experts such as Lynn Alden, Steve Lee, and Ren Crypto Fish, we discuss in depth how Bitcoin's consensus is built, the main risks, and the complex dynamics of protocol upgrades.

PT-BR version

Podcast https://www.fountain.fm/episode/wbjD6ntQuvX5u2G5BccC

Presentation https://gamma.app/docs/Analyzing-Bitcoin-Consensus-Risks-in-Protocol-Upgrades-p66axxjwaa37ksn

1. Introduction to Consensus in Bitcoin

Consensus in Bitcoin is the foundation that keeps the network secure and functional, allowing users worldwide to perform transactions in a decentralized manner without the need for intermediaries. Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin is often described as an "immutable" system designed to resist changes, and it is precisely this resistance that ensures its security and stability.

The central idea behind consensus in Bitcoin is to create a set of acceptance rules for blocks and transactions, ensuring that all network participants agree on the transaction history. This prevents "double-spending," where the same bitcoin could be used in two simultaneous transactions, something that would compromise trust in the network.

Evolution of Consensus in Bitcoin

Over the years, consensus in Bitcoin has undergone several adaptations, and the way participants agree on changes remains a delicate process. Unlike traditional systems, where changes can be imposed from the top down, Bitcoin operates in a decentralized model where any significant change needs the support of various groups of stakeholders, including miners, developers, users, and large node operators.

Moreover, the update process is extremely cautious, as hasty changes can compromise the network's security. As a result, the philosophy of "don't fix what isn't broken" prevails, with improvements happening incrementally and only after broad consensus among those involved. This model can make progress seem slow but ensures that Bitcoin remains faithful to the principles of security and decentralization.

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2. Technical Components of Consensus

Bitcoin's consensus is supported by a set of technical rules that determine what is considered a valid transaction and a valid block on the network. These technical aspects ensure that all nodes—the computers that participate in the Bitcoin network—agree on the current state of the blockchain. Below are the main technical components that form the basis of the consensus.

Validation of Blocks and Transactions

The validation of blocks and transactions is the central point of consensus in Bitcoin. A block is only considered valid if it meets certain criteria, such as maximum size, transaction structure, and the solving of the "Proof of Work" problem. The proof of work, required for a block to be included in the blockchain, is a computational process that ensures the block contains significant computational effort—protecting the network against manipulation attempts.

Transactions, in turn, need to follow specific input and output rules. Each transaction includes cryptographic signatures that prove the ownership of the bitcoins sent, as well as validation scripts that verify if the transaction conditions are met. This validation system is essential for network nodes to autonomously confirm that each transaction follows the rules.

Chain Selection

Another fundamental technical issue for Bitcoin's consensus is chain selection, which becomes especially important in cases where multiple versions of the blockchain coexist, such as after a network split (fork). To decide which chain is the "true" one and should be followed, the network adopts the criterion of the highest accumulated proof of work. In other words, the chain with the highest number of valid blocks, built with the greatest computational effort, is chosen by the network as the official one.

This criterion avoids permanent splits because it encourages all nodes to follow the same main chain, reinforcing consensus.

Soft Forks vs. Hard Forks

In the consensus process, protocol changes can happen in two ways: through soft forks or hard forks. These variations affect not only the protocol update but also the implications for network users:

• Soft Forks: These are changes that are backward compatible. Only nodes that adopt the new update will follow the new rules, but old nodes will still recognize the blocks produced with these rules as valid. This compatibility makes soft forks a safer option for updates, as it minimizes the risk of network division.

• Hard Forks: These are updates that are not backward compatible, requiring all nodes to update to the new version or risk being separated from the main chain. Hard forks can result in the creation of a new coin, as occurred with the split between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash in 2017. While hard forks allow for deeper changes, they also bring significant risks of network fragmentation.

These technical components form the base of Bitcoin's security and resilience, allowing the system to remain functional and immutable without losing the necessary flexibility to evolve over time.

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3. Stakeholders in Bitcoin's Consensus

Consensus in Bitcoin is not decided centrally. On the contrary, it depends on the interaction between different groups of stakeholders, each with their motivations, interests, and levels of influence. These groups play fundamental roles in how changes are implemented or rejected on the network. Below, we explore the six main stakeholders in Bitcoin's consensus.

1. Economic Nodes

Economic nodes, usually operated by exchanges, custody providers, and large companies that accept Bitcoin, exert significant influence over consensus. Because they handle large volumes of transactions and act as a connection point between the Bitcoin ecosystem and the traditional financial system, these nodes have the power to validate or reject blocks and to define which version of the software to follow in case of a fork.

Their influence is proportional to the volume of transactions they handle, and they can directly affect which chain will be seen as the main one. Their incentive is to maintain the network's stability and security to preserve its functionality and meet regulatory requirements.

2. Investors

Investors, including large institutional funds and individual Bitcoin holders, influence consensus indirectly through their impact on the asset's price. Their buying and selling actions can affect Bitcoin's value, which in turn influences the motivation of miners and other stakeholders to continue investing in the network's security and development.

Some institutional investors have agreements with custodians that may limit their ability to act in network split situations. Thus, the impact of each investor on consensus can vary based on their ownership structure and how quickly they can react to a network change.

3. Media Influencers

Media influencers, including journalists, analysts, and popular personalities on social media, have a powerful role in shaping public opinion about Bitcoin and possible updates. These influencers can help educate the public, promote debates, and bring transparency to the consensus process.

On the other hand, the impact of influencers can be double-edged: while they can clarify complex topics, they can also distort perceptions by amplifying or minimizing change proposals. This makes them a force both of support and resistance to consensus.

4. Miners

Miners are responsible for validating transactions and including blocks in the blockchain. Through computational power (hashrate), they also exert significant influence over consensus decisions. In update processes, miners often signal their support for a proposal, indicating that the new version is safe to use. However, this signaling is not always definitive, and miners can change their position if they deem it necessary.

Their incentive is to maximize returns from block rewards and transaction fees, as well as to maintain the value of investments in their specialized equipment, which are only profitable if the network remains stable.

5. Protocol Developers

Protocol developers, often called "Core Developers," are responsible for writing and maintaining Bitcoin's code. Although they do not have direct power over consensus, they possess an informal veto power since they decide which changes are included in the main client (Bitcoin Core). This group also serves as an important source of technical knowledge, helping guide decisions and inform other stakeholders.

Their incentive lies in the continuous improvement of the network, ensuring security and decentralization. Many developers are funded by grants and sponsorships, but their motivations generally include a strong ideological commitment to Bitcoin's principles.

6. Users and Application Developers

This group includes people who use Bitcoin in their daily transactions and developers who build solutions based on the network, such as wallets, exchanges, and payment platforms. Although their power in consensus is less than that of miners or economic nodes, they play an important role because they are responsible for popularizing Bitcoin's use and expanding the ecosystem.

If application developers decide not to adopt an update, this can affect compatibility and widespread acceptance. Thus, they indirectly influence consensus by deciding which version of the protocol to follow in their applications.

These stakeholders are vital to the consensus process, and each group exerts influence according to their involvement, incentives, and ability to act in situations of change. Understanding the role of each makes it clearer how consensus is formed and why it is so difficult to make significant changes to Bitcoin.

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4. Mechanisms for Activating Updates in Bitcoin

For Bitcoin to evolve without compromising security and consensus, different mechanisms for activating updates have been developed over the years. These mechanisms help coordinate changes among network nodes to minimize the risk of fragmentation and ensure that updates are implemented in an orderly manner. Here, we explore some of the main methods used in Bitcoin, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as historical examples of significant updates.

Flag Day

The Flag Day mechanism is one of the simplest forms of activating changes. In it, a specific date or block is determined as the activation moment, and all nodes must be updated by that point. This method does not involve prior signaling; participants simply need to update to the new software version by the established day or block.

• Advantages: Simplicity and predictability are the main benefits of Flag Day, as everyone knows the exact activation date.

• Disadvantages: Inflexibility can be a problem because there is no way to adjust the schedule if a significant part of the network has not updated. This can result in network splits if a significant number of nodes are not ready for the update.

An example of Flag Day was the Pay to Script Hash (P2SH) update in 2012, which required all nodes to adopt the change to avoid compatibility issues.

BIP34 and BIP9

BIP34 introduced a more dynamic process, in which miners increase the version number in block headers to signal the update. When a predetermined percentage of the last blocks is mined with this new version, the update is automatically activated. This model later evolved with BIP9, which allowed multiple updates to be signaled simultaneously through "version bits," each corresponding to a specific change.

• Advantages: Allows the network to activate updates gradually, giving more time for participants to adapt.

• Disadvantages: These methods rely heavily on miner support, which means that if a sufficient number of miners do not signal the update, it can be delayed or not implemented.

BIP9 was used in the activation of SegWit (BIP141) but faced challenges because some miners did not signal their intent to activate, leading to the development of new mechanisms.

User Activated Soft Forks (UASF) and User Resisted Soft Forks (URSF)

To increase the decision-making power of ordinary users, the concept of User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) was introduced, allowing node operators, not just miners, to determine consensus for a change. In this model, nodes set a date to start rejecting blocks that are not in compliance with the new update, forcing miners to adapt or risk having their blocks rejected by the network.

URSF, in turn, is a model where nodes reject blocks that attempt to adopt a specific update, functioning as resistance against proposed changes.

• Advantages: UASF returns decision-making power to node operators, ensuring that changes do not depend solely on miners.

• Disadvantages: Both UASF and URSF can generate network splits, especially in cases of strong opposition among different stakeholders.

An example of UASF was the activation of SegWit in 2017, where users supported activation independently of miner signaling, which ended up forcing its adoption.

BIP8 (LOT=True)

BIP8 is an evolution of BIP9, designed to prevent miners from indefinitely blocking a change desired by the majority of users and developers. BIP8 allows setting a parameter called "lockinontimeout" (LOT) as true, which means that if the update has not been fully signaled by a certain point, it is automatically activated.

• Advantages: Ensures that changes with broad support among users are not blocked by miners who wish to maintain the status quo.

• Disadvantages: Can lead to network splits if miners or other important stakeholders do not support the update.

Although BIP8 with LOT=True has not yet been used in Bitcoin, it is a proposal that can be applied in future updates if necessary.

These activation mechanisms have been essential for Bitcoin's development, allowing updates that keep the network secure and functional. Each method brings its own advantages and challenges, but all share the goal of preserving consensus and network cohesion.

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5. Risks and Considerations in Consensus Updates

Consensus updates in Bitcoin are complex processes that involve not only technical aspects but also political, economic, and social considerations. Due to the network's decentralized nature, each change brings with it a set of risks that need to be carefully assessed. Below, we explore some of the main challenges and future scenarios, as well as the possible impacts on stakeholders.

Network Fragility with Alternative Implementations

One of the main risks associated with consensus updates is the possibility of network fragmentation when there are alternative software implementations. If an update is implemented by a significant group of nodes but rejected by others, a network split (fork) can occur. This creates two competing chains, each with a different version of the transaction history, leading to unpredictable consequences for users and investors.

Such fragmentation weakens Bitcoin because, by dividing hashing power (computing) and coin value, it reduces network security and investor confidence. A notable example of this risk was the fork that gave rise to Bitcoin Cash in 2017 when disagreements over block size resulted in a new chain and a new asset.

Chain Splits and Impact on Stakeholders

Chain splits are a significant risk in update processes, especially in hard forks. During a hard fork, the network is split into two separate chains, each with its own set of rules. This results in the creation of a new coin and leaves users with duplicated assets on both chains. While this may seem advantageous, in the long run, these splits weaken the network and create uncertainties for investors.

Each group of stakeholders reacts differently to a chain split:

• Institutional Investors and ETFs: Face regulatory and compliance challenges because many of these assets are managed under strict regulations. The creation of a new coin requires decisions to be made quickly to avoid potential losses, which may be hampered by regulatory constraints.

• Miners: May be incentivized to shift their computing power to the chain that offers higher profitability, which can weaken one of the networks.

• Economic Nodes: Such as major exchanges and custody providers, have to quickly choose which chain to support, influencing the perceived value of each network.

Such divisions can generate uncertainties and loss of value, especially for institutional investors and those who use Bitcoin as a store of value.

Regulatory Impacts and Institutional Investors

With the growing presence of institutional investors in Bitcoin, consensus changes face new compliance challenges. Bitcoin ETFs, for example, are required to follow strict rules about which assets they can include and how chain split events should be handled. The creation of a new asset or migration to a new chain can complicate these processes, creating pressure for large financial players to quickly choose a chain, affecting the stability of consensus.

Moreover, decisions regarding forks can influence the Bitcoin futures and derivatives market, affecting perception and adoption by new investors. Therefore, the need to avoid splits and maintain cohesion is crucial to attract and preserve the confidence of these investors.

Security Considerations in Soft Forks and Hard Forks

While soft forks are generally preferred in Bitcoin for their backward compatibility, they are not without risks. Soft forks can create different classes of nodes on the network (updated and non-updated), which increases operational complexity and can ultimately weaken consensus cohesion. In a network scenario with fragmentation of node classes, Bitcoin's security can be affected, as some nodes may lose part of the visibility over updated transactions or rules.

In hard forks, the security risk is even more evident because all nodes need to adopt the new update to avoid network division. Experience shows that abrupt changes can create temporary vulnerabilities, in which malicious agents try to exploit the transition to attack the network.

Bounty Claim Risks and Attack Scenarios

Another risk in consensus updates are so-called "bounty claims"—accumulated rewards that can be obtained if an attacker manages to split or deceive a part of the network. In a conflict scenario, a group of miners or nodes could be incentivized to support a new update or create an alternative version of the software to benefit from these rewards.

These risks require stakeholders to carefully assess each update and the potential vulnerabilities it may introduce. The possibility of "bounty claims" adds a layer of complexity to consensus because each interest group may see a financial opportunity in a change that, in the long term, may harm network stability.

The risks discussed above show the complexity of consensus in Bitcoin and the importance of approaching it gradually and deliberately. Updates need to consider not only technical aspects but also economic and social implications, in order to preserve Bitcoin's integrity and maintain trust among stakeholders.

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6. Recommendations for the Consensus Process in Bitcoin

To ensure that protocol changes in Bitcoin are implemented safely and with broad support, it is essential that all stakeholders adopt a careful and coordinated approach. Here are strategic recommendations for evaluating, supporting, or rejecting consensus updates, considering the risks and challenges discussed earlier, along with best practices for successful implementation.

1. Careful Evaluation of Proposal Maturity

Stakeholders should rigorously assess the maturity level of a proposal before supporting its implementation. Updates that are still experimental or lack a robust technical foundation can expose the network to unnecessary risks. Ideally, change proposals should go through an extensive testing phase, have security audits, and receive review and feedback from various developers and experts.

2. Extensive Testing in Secure and Compatible Networks

Before an update is activated on the mainnet, it is essential to test it on networks like testnet and signet, and whenever possible, on other compatible networks that offer a safe and controlled environment to identify potential issues. Testing on networks like Litecoin was fundamental for the safe launch of innovations like SegWit and the Lightning Network, allowing functionalities to be validated on a lower-impact network before being implemented on Bitcoin.

The Liquid Network, developed by Blockstream, also plays an important role as an experimental network for new proposals, such as OP_CAT. By adopting these testing environments, stakeholders can mitigate risks and ensure that the update is reliable and secure before being adopted by the main network.

3. Importance of Stakeholder Engagement

The success of a consensus update strongly depends on the active participation of all stakeholders. This includes economic nodes, miners, protocol developers, investors, and end users. Lack of participation can lead to inadequate decisions or even future network splits, which would compromise Bitcoin's security and stability.

4. Key Questions for Evaluating Consensus Proposals

To assist in decision-making, each group of stakeholders should consider some key questions before supporting a consensus change:

• Does the proposal offer tangible benefits for Bitcoin's security, scalability, or usability?
• Does it maintain backward compatibility or introduce the risk of network split?
• Are the implementation requirements clear and feasible for each group involved?
• Are there clear and aligned incentives for all stakeholder groups to accept the change?

5. Coordination and Timing in Implementations

Timing is crucial. Updates with short activation windows can force a split because not all nodes and miners can update simultaneously. Changes should be planned with ample deadlines to allow all stakeholders to adjust their systems, avoiding surprises that could lead to fragmentation.

Mechanisms like soft forks are generally preferable to hard forks because they allow a smoother transition. Opting for backward-compatible updates when possible facilitates the process and ensures that nodes and miners can adapt without pressure.

6. Continuous Monitoring and Re-evaluation

After an update, it's essential to monitor the network to identify problems or side effects. This continuous process helps ensure cohesion and trust among all participants, keeping Bitcoin as a secure and robust network.

These recommendations, including the use of secure networks for extensive testing, promote a collaborative and secure environment for Bitcoin's consensus process. By adopting a deliberate and strategic approach, stakeholders can preserve Bitcoin's value as a decentralized and censorship-resistant network.

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7. Conclusion

Consensus in Bitcoin is more than a set of rules; it's the foundation that sustains the network as a decentralized, secure, and reliable system. Unlike centralized systems, where decisions can be made quickly, Bitcoin requires a much more deliberate and cooperative approach, where the interests of miners, economic nodes, developers, investors, and users must be considered and harmonized. This governance model may seem slow, but it is fundamental to preserving the resilience and trust that make Bitcoin a global store of value and censorship-resistant.

Consensus updates in Bitcoin must balance the need for innovation with the preservation of the network's core principles. The development process of a proposal needs to be detailed and rigorous, going through several testing stages, such as in testnet, signet, and compatible networks like Litecoin and Liquid Network. These networks offer safe environments for proposals to be analyzed and improved before being launched on the main network.

Each proposed change must be carefully evaluated regarding its maturity, impact, backward compatibility, and support among stakeholders. The recommended key questions and appropriate timing are critical to ensure that an update is adopted without compromising network cohesion. It's also essential that the implementation process is continuously monitored and re-evaluated, allowing adjustments as necessary and minimizing the risk of instability.

By following these guidelines, Bitcoin's stakeholders can ensure that the network continues to evolve safely and robustly, maintaining user trust and further solidifying its role as one of the most resilient and innovative digital assets in the world. Ultimately, consensus in Bitcoin is not just a technical issue but a reflection of its community and the values it represents: security, decentralization, and resilience.

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8. Links

Whitepaper: https://github.com/bitcoin-cap/bcap

Youtube (pt-br): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rARycAibl9o&list=PL-qnhF0qlSPkfhorqsREuIu4UTbF0h4zb

@ dadbe86a:9c493e92

Opinion about Green: Bitcoin Wallet (android)

Green Wallet is a mobile Bitcoin wallet developed by Blockstream, The Wallet aims to provide users with a trustworthy and feature-rich Bitcoin wallet experience. Given that the wallet supports liquid assets, it is not bitcoin only. This is a cons for pure bitcoiners but something good for other users.

Pros: - Support for testnet, passphrase, fee control, coin control, custom node, tor, timelocks - The in-app keyboard and seed phrase autocomplete increase the security if you need to enter your seedphrase or passphrase - Open source - Full taproot support soon

Cons: - Missing some advanced features like user added entropy or seedQR. - It has a non standard multisig implementation - Partial support to connect with hardware wallets

Version reviewed: v4.0.27

thebitcoinhole.com

WalletScrutiny #nostrOpinion

Join the conversation!

@ 6bae33c8:607272e8

I blew it last week, going 2-3 and basically drawing dead already for Q4 unless I were to go 20-0 or something insane. I was sick, just getting the bare minimum done last week, and probably didn’t give it the proper amount of marination. Not that I haven’t gone 1-4 plenty of times when I was perfectly well too.

Heading into Week 14, I’m 33-31-1, not going to cash this year, but with a strong finish can still have a respectable overall record which is what I’m aiming for now.

Packers at Lions — I’ll make this Packers +2.5 because the Lions have so many defensive injuries. I might take the Packers, but probably a stay away.

Jets at Dolphins — Let’s make this 4.5. The Jets are a cursed team, something’s just wrong with them, and I can’t put my finger on it. The Dolphins are pretty good, just below a playoff team. I’ll probably pass on this one though. If anything the Jets are the buy-low, but as I said, something’s off.

Falcons at Vikings — The Falcons are a lot like the Jets. Kirk Cousins looks fine, but something’s off. The team isn’t clicking. I’ll say Falcons plus 4.5 and probably stay away for the same reason. It should be a Falcons buy-low, but something’s wrong.

Saints at Giants — The Giants are destroyed. They lost just Dexter Lawrence and Theo Johnson now too. Andrew Thomas and Lawrence are the poor man’s Trent Williams and Nick Bosa. And the 49ers went from great to average, the Giants go from below average to out of the league. Saints -5.5, stay away.

Panthers at Eagles — The Panthers hang with everyone these days, and this is a trap game for the Eagles after the big win over the Ravens Sunday night. I’ll say +11.5 and maybe take the Panthers.

Browns at Steelers — The Browns caught the Steelers the first time, but I don’t think it happens again. I’ll say Browns +6.5 and probably lay the wood, but the Browns offense is for real.

Raiders at Buccaneers — I’ll make this Raiders +8.5 and be inclined to stay away. If anything, I’d lean Bucs.

Jaguars at Titans — Jeff Spicoli sure got his bell rung, but Mac Jones actually played decently in relief. I’ll make this line 4.5 and probably take the Titans.

Seahawks at Cardinals — I’ll make this Seahawks +2.5 and take the Cardinals to bounce back, even though Seattle has played well of late.

Bills at Rams — The Bills are a juggernaut, but this is a sneaky-tough road game. I’ll say Bills -4 and maybe lean Rams.

Bears at 49ers — The whole 49ers team is injured. I’ll say Bears +2.5 and stay away.

Chargers at Chiefs — The Chiefs play close games with the local high school team, but it’ll still be Chargers +3 at Arrowhead. I’d probably take the Chiefs.

Bengals at Cowboys — I’ll say Bengals -3 and probably stay away. The Cowboys can rush the passer, and the Bengals can’t stop anyone.

@ 24e36cf3:6b26ae15

My husband and I have been talking a lot about capitalism and socialism lately. We've watched countless videos, read books about it, discussed the topic with friends and family. Even though we've been left-leaning all our lives due to social programming from our families, we've radically changed our views in the past couple of years and are now convinced that any form or socialism is bad for humanity.

Here's a colloquial summary of our thought process as explained to an acquaintance, who is still pro-socialism:

Let's look at the animal kingdom for some context

My initial thought regarding victim and perpetrator ... take, for example, lions and gazelles in Africa. At first glance, the lion seems to be the problem because it comes and kills the poor gazelles who just want peace. Now let's look at the other side:

• The lion was not asked, whether it wants to be born a lion
• The lion cannot help that it has to eat gazelles
• It's not funny to chase after its food and if you're too slow after the 3rd attempt you'll probably won't have any strength left and die

\ If you think about it a little more, you could argue that the gazelle is actually the perpetrator. She runs away and then the lion starves. Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator?

Now ... why did nature design the system this way? Why aren't all creatures nice to each other and the lion only eats what is absolutely necessary and the gazelle just lies down and waits to be eaten?\ You will now think that's nonsense and can't be like that, but it is. You surely know the fish that swim upstream in the river, get so extremely red and pale, become parents and then die so that the next generation has something to eat. There are dependencies in nature that are stronger than the life of an individual. But only rarely ... why?

If gazelles considered the lion's feelings and just laid down if he's having a bad day, the lion would get lazy, sick and weak. Unfortunately, that's the way it is. Nobody likes to run for their food. If nature had programmed it that way, the lion would eventually realize it and start running slower. Survival of the fittest is how evolution works and the weaker lions would perish. The gazelle running as fast as it can is good for the lion. Removing the slowest animals from the herd is beneficial for the gazelles. It's an extremely cruel system, but that's the way nature works and we are all a part of it.

Capitalism is this system applied to humans. Capitalism emerges voluntarily and spontaneously between free individuals and everyone benefits from it.\ If two people are stranded on an island and one starts farming the land for fruits and the other diverts the river for more water, they both benefit. Both are better off. Each pursues their own interests (like a lion and a gazelle), but both end up benefiting.\ You work on something useful and someone else rewards you for your work. That's it. There are no victims or perpetrators ... there are only actors. Everyone works for themselves and everyone is better off.

All the problems you mentioned (deteriorating environment, poverty, social injustice, ...) arise when the collective (the state or other authorities) come together and suppress this natural system; because of poor gazelles and wicked lions. In reality, no one cares about the poor gazelles because:

• They are not poor.
• They only care about maintaining their power.

Let's talk about Jeff Bezos' Amazon, which is often vilified

One hears constantly that Amazon workers are exploited (victims) and the poor shops everywhere have to close because Bezos destroyed all other stores. What you hear about the workers at Amazon is fake news. For example here is a "negative video" because Bezos makes so much money ... but check out what the guy says:\ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OvSkhpCsUmY\ The workers there are not victims. They come voluntarily. No one forces them to work at Amazon.

If you think about it some more: Why don't you work at Amazon?\ Very likely because you have other options. You don't necessarily have to stand behind the conveyor belt. Apparently some others do. You can't control that some people have little education, ability or motivation, so that they have to do this work. They would probably starve without Amazon. Amazon is simply utilizing these people who are just there and is making something productive out of it ... which is good for us all. Imagine the difference compared to charity: With Amazon the worker earns something and is useful for society. The unemployed does nothing and wastes society's energy. The difference is enormous.\ And to make that clear again ... the workers are not victims. Many don't want to do anything else. Many are too lazy and are wasting their hard earned money on cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. Still, there are people, who are actually sick and weak among us. This is sad and I'll say more about them later.

Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GltlJO56S1g Do you see an evil person, there? I see a man who risked everything to build this empire and who made huge losses for years. Why? For the purpose of providing an outstanding customer service. To you. In my opinion, Jeff Bezos is a hero.

Now for other companies:\ Compare them to the "in the sun-basking gazelles" (shops) and the attacking lions (Bezos). Now imagine a committee comes in and says: "Stop, don't eat these gazelles". WTF?

• Bezos would be starving. It's a catastrophe ... Bezos needs to get rewarded and thankfully was rewarded.
• The shops would still be lazy.
• We would still be in the stone age and sit together in the dark and starve. The world would still be poor.

Now often the consumer behavior is criticized. Amazon is to blame for all the trash, because people send everything back and it ends up in the landfill. But who sends everything back? Amazon? Amazon provides the service, people send everything back. Why is Amazon to blame? From a consumer's perspective, Amazon is a tool ... like a screwdriver. It was designed by humans exactly the way they wanted it. Some use a screwdriver to murder someone. Is the screwdriver now the problem? Should we all just stop making it more difficult for disadvantaged people who can't or won't send it back? Aren't we all grown-ups?

Some more examples of high-achievers

Watch this video from Bryan Johnson at Blueprint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djiU_pFTEVE. Does this man look like a monster to you? He works around the clock to deliver me fresh and healthy food. He was already a millionaire to start with and could have done nothing but enjoy himself. Instead of partying, he enriches my life. I am grateful forever when Bryan becomes a billionaire!

Watch the videos from Ben "Ungeskriptet": https://www.youtube.com/@ben_ungeskriptet. He constantly invites successful people. No one of them needs to work anymore. Everyone would prefer to spend more time with their family but they are driven to make society better. They earn money by doing so... yes. Once you earn a few million dollars however, money is no longer important. Everyone of those successful people confirms this. They do the hard work because they are purpose driven and we should be grateful for them.

Elon Musk wants to inspire us humans to make a colony on Mars. That's his only goal. He could also just sit at home and do nothing. Instead he works on his dream and we all benefit from it. If you don't want to work for Elon Musk, then you are free to do something else. If you can't find anyone who hires you, then you are free to start your own business and out compete Elon. If we all didn't want him to make a colony on Mars, we shouldn't buy his products. Oops... the state buys the rockets. The state gives him money. Who is the problem?\ If you don't want Starlink, don't buy it. Then he built his rockets in vain. He earned his money before and if he chooses to spend it like this, that's his own choice. If he fails, he'll have to deal with the consequences. That being said...the only problem here is that the state subsidizes SpaceX rockets against the interest of the people.

Now to the two most important points that are not often mentioned:

• We want the same thing. I am for a social system. I like that everyone is doing well. I am for supporting the weak. If I could, for example, give away 10% of my possessions and help people, I would do so immediately. I support many people in my environment with a lot of money, time, and effort. The problem is not helping unproductive or disadvantaged people ... the problem is that you steal from successful people and distribute a small part of the loot to the unproductive, so that you get more votes (Socialism). If 50% of any given country came together and hired a company to support the poorest in their society that would be awesome. I'd be on board right away. But why do you have to force me? Why do you have to steal my money and contribute it to a system that doesn't deliver results? Why don't we use the market? If the company that supports the poor doesn't use the money correctly, you can change the "provider." Unfortunately, I can hardly change the state, and that's where the problem arises. The theft is the problem... not the social system. The state is, in fact, nothing more than a monopolistic company that cannot be disrupted by competition... this wouldn't exist in a free market, and it’s fatal.
• The problem with capitalism is that you don't recognize the benefit right away. If the productivity of the world increases by 5% per year, you unfortunately don’t benefit from it. Productivity increases through Amazon, Bryan Johnson, Elon, and 1000+ companies working around the clock. All research and technology also come from the market. It’s an investment for more profit later. But for what? Your life doesn't get better, does it? There’s the problem. Actually... if the monetary system were right... everything should become 5% cheaper per year. We should have deflation. If the world gets better, everything should get cheaper, and therefore, everyone should benefit. What does actually happen? The rich get richer. Why? Because the state prints money and steals from you... about 7% per year because the central bank wants 2% inflation. Just enough so that no one notices, and no one hangs them for it. The state steals all the benefits of capitalism and distributes them to itself. The rich are the ones who can defend themselves... thus, they get richer, along with all the bureaucrats who benefit as well. About 7% per year compared to you. But this is not because of the rich. It’s because of the state. In my opinion, this is the biggest problem, and Bitcoin is the solution. Bitcoin emerged from the market for the people. A solution from the free market against the oppression of the state. Very poetic, if you ask me. With Bitcoin, prices will fall forever... even if there is no more fiat money... because the supply is fixed, and if someone starts the next Amazon and the world becomes 0.1% more productive, everything will also become 0.1% cheaper.

Let's finish with some more eye-opening content suggestions:

This video opened my eyes. I've watched it again since... it's not that impressive... but somehow it worked for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6tDV3BhrcM

Watch this, regarding the environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJdqJu-6ZPo

Milton Friedman is always enlightening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

And here again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_mGlqyW_Zw\ The ending is crazy. Nobody wanted to hire black people, and no social program would have changed that ... because everyone was racist back then. Even the shop owners ... and yet, they hired black people, which gave them an income. Now you can call it exploitation, but it's about the result. There's nothing that would have worked better in that environment. It doesn't sound nice, but it works.

And that's exactly how, but in the opposite way, Communism, Marxism, and Socialism work. It sounds good, but it produces Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

@ 2063cd79:57bd1320

Der dieswöchige Aufhänger ist die Nachricht über die Schließung der Kryptowährungsbörse Bitzlato. Obwohl sich die groß angekündigte Offensive des US-Justizministerium als mindestens genauso große Luftnummer erwies (vor der Nachricht hat wirklich niemand jemals von Bitzlato gehört), hat die Nachricht doch wieder den Stimmen Gehör verschafft, die seit jeher nach mehr Regulierung von Kryptowährungen, Börsen und Dienstleistern rufen.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/doj-shuts-down-bitzlato-crypto-exchange

Besonders in den USA herrscht eine andauernde Diskussion darüber, wie Bitcoin und andere Kryptowährungen eingestuft werden sollen, damit anschließend die Gerichtsbarkeit, bzw. die Kompetenzen verteilt werden können. Im Prinzip gibt es dabei nur zwei Ansichten: Die eine Gruppe hält Bitcoin für ein Wertpapier (Security), die andere hält Bitcoin für eine Ware oder einen Rohstoff (Commodity). Wir wollen uns diese Woche anschauen, was den Unterschied ausmacht und was die Implikationen für Bitcoin wären, wenn man es als das eine oder das andere klassifiziert, und was es darüber hinaus für die Zuständigkeit diverser Behörden und Regierungseinheiten bedeutet.

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Die Gretchenfrage bei der Regulatorik von Bitcoin ist relativ schnell erklärt. Es wird darüber gestritten, ob Bitcoin als Wertpapier (Security) oder als Rohstoff / Ware (Commodity) eingestuft werden soll. Dies ist insofern wichtig, als dass die Kategorisierung darüber entscheidet, welche Aufsichtsbehörde mit ihren Regeln aktiv werden kann / muss. In der anhaltenden Diskussion über das Thema wird verallgemeinernd meist über die Einordnung von Kryptowährungen gesprochen, und damit Bitcoin als eine von vielen Kryptowährungen mit einbezogen (Bitcoin ist keine Kryptowährung - das wird dieser Artikel aufzeigen), jedoch wollen wir der Einfachheit halber zunächst die Diskussion auf der breiter gefassten Ebene führen. Zunächst lohnt es sich zu schauen, was Wertpapiere und Rohstoffe / Waren unterscheidet.

Wertpapiere (Securities)

Zunächst mal muss man sagen, dass eine genaue Unterscheidung der beiden Anlageklassen in allen Fällen - nicht nur bei Kryptowährungen - oft schwierig ist. Vor allem in der heutigen Zeit ist es nicht mehr so einfach schwarz und weiß zu unterscheiden, da es für alles, was sich in irgendeiner Form handeln lässt, auch Derivate gibt. Früher sagte man vereinfacht, dass Wertpapiere zum Investieren und Rohstoffe zum Handeln sind, aber dass dies nicht richtig ist und in beide Richtungen entkräftet werden kann, sollte so ziemlich jeder auch weit gegen den Wind riechen können.

Prinzipiell handelt es sich bei einem Wertpapier um ein Finanzinstrument, dessen Ausgestaltung typischerweise von der Gerichtsbarkeit abhängt, in der die Vermögenswerte gehandelt werden. In den USA und Europa gelten im Großen und Ganzen alle frei gehandelten Vermögenswerte als Wertpapiere und werden in drei Hauptkategorien unterschieden: Beteiligungspapiere (Equity) – einschließlich Aktien, Schuldverschreibungen (Debt) – z.B. Anleihen und Banknoten und Derivate – zu gehören Optionen und Futures (👇). Anders als Rohstoffe sind Wertpapiere anders und meist strenger reguliert. In den USA ist für die Regulierung die SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) und in Europa die ESMA (Europäische Wertpapier- und Marktaufsichtsbehörde), bzw. in Deutschland die BaFin (Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht) zuständig ist.

Rohstoffe (Commodities)

Traditionelle Beispiele für Rohstoffe sind Getreide, Fleisch, Gold, Öl oder Erdgas, also die drei großen Kategorien Landwirtschaftliche Produkte, Edelmetalle und Energie. In der heutigen Zeit werden diese Waren weltweit gehandelt und eine Warenbörse, wie die CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) in den USA, handelt sowohl mit physischen Waren, als auch mit Warenkontrakten und damit verbundenen Anlageprodukten. Wie aus meinem Artikel über Bitcoin-Hashprice Forwards bekannt, gibt es zwei gängige Formen von Warenkontraken: Futures und Forwards.

https://www.genexyz.org/post/18-block-761575-bitcoin-hashprice-forward-ks72ec/

💡Futures sind eine Form von Derivaten, die Parteien verpflichten, einen Vermögenswert zu einem vorher festgelegten zukünftigen Datum und Preis zu handeln. Hier muss der Käufer den Basiswert zum festgelegten Preis kaufen oder dem Verkäufer verkaufen, unabhängig vom aktuellen Marktpreis zum festgelegten Zeitpunkt der Abwicklung.

Forwards hingegen stellen eine ähnliche Form von Terminkontrakten dar, die auch einen zukünftigen Preis zu einem zukünftigen Datum festlegen, nur dass Forwards außerbörslich (OTC) gehandelt werden. Hinzu kommt, dass Forwards anpassbare Bedingungen haben, die zwischen den Parteien und dem Händler individuell vereinbart werden. Forwards sind im Gegensatz zu Futures nicht standardisiert.

Wie nun ersichtlich ist, muss eine Grenze zwischen dem direkten Handel mit Rohstoffen und dem Handel mit Rohstoff-gebundenen Titeln (digitale Rohstoffe) einerseits und Finanzprodukten ohne Bezug zu Rohstoffen andererseits gezogen werden, denn für den Rohstoffhandel sieht sich in den USA die CFTC (U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission) zuständig, die Futures- und Optionsmärkte reguliert, die dem Commodity Exchange Act unterliegen.

Die Kategorie der digitalen Rohstoffe ist relativ neu. Derzeit überwacht die CFTC die Regulierung für Derivate von Rohstoffen zusätzlich zu dem zugrunde liegenden Rohstoff selbst.

Wie also unterscheidet man, ob es sich bei einem Finanzprodukt, oder in unserem Fall einer Kryptowährung, um ein Wertpapier, oder um einen Rohstoff / eine Ware handelt?

Zunächst ist festzustellen, dass man nicht die gesamte "Anlageklasse" der Kryptowährungen als entweder oder einstufen kann. Wie bei allen Finanzprodukten muss im Einzelfall entschieden werden und das jeweilige Produkt im Einzelnen betrachtet werden. Es gibt kein "Krypto" oder "Kryptowährungen", sondern viele tausende Produkte, die sich grob einer Produktkategorie zuordnen lassen.

Der Howey Test

In den USA unterscheidet man zwischen Securities und Commodities mit Hilfe des Howey Tests. Der Test basiert auf einem Verfahren der SEC gegen W.J. Howey, bei dem zu einem Urteil kam, das diesen vierstufigen Test zum ersten Mal definierte. Seitdem wird die Klassifizierung von Investitionsobjekten durch die SEC, aber auch die CFTC und andere amerikanische Behörden anhand dieses Tests durchgeführt. Erfüllt ein Investitionsobjekt alle vier genannten Kriterien, handelt es sich dabei zweifelsfrei um Wertpapiere und unterliegt somit der Gerichtsbarkeit der SEC. Gemäß dem Urteil lautet der Test wie folgt:

• An investment of money
• In a common enterprise
• With the expectation of profit
• To be derived from the efforts of others

Auf deutsch bedeutet dies einfach, ob 1) eine Geldanlage 2) in einem gemeinschaftlichen Unternehmen, 3) mit einer Gewinnerwartung stattfindet und 4), ob diese Gewinne von den Bemühungen Dritter abhängen.

Anlageobjekte, wie Tokens, Coins, Assets, Cryptos, NFTs, Contracts, etc. bei denen diese vier Fragen alle im Positiven, also mit einem „Ja“, beantwortet werden können, werden als Wertpapier eingestuft und unterliegen damit den Regeln der SEC. Somit müssen Verantwortlichen, Initiatoren oder Geschäftsführer dieser Projekte die gleichen Genehmigungen einholen und Regeln befolgen, wie alle anderen registrierten Wertpapiere / Anbieter.

Anwendung auf Kryptowährungen

Wie schon erwähnt, kann man die Regeln nicht einfach anwenden, denn es gibt natürlich bei jedem Projekt, jeder Währung, jedem Coin viele Faktoren, die eine Rolle bei der Interpretation des Tests spielen. Bei den tausenden existierenden Projekten sind Bandbreite und Spektrum groß, was auch viel Raum für Interpretation offen hält. Bei der Einordnung jeder einzelnen Kryptowährung muss man also die Testfragen im Einzelfall auswerten und anwenden und somit sehen, wo man auf dem Spektrum landet. Regulatorisch gesehen am weitesten weg von Wertpapieren sind alle Kryptowährungen, die mit Hilfe von einem dezentralisierten Mining-Protokoll auf einer funktionierenden dezentralen Blockchain laufen. Das Mining ist ein wichtiger Aspekt, da Miner für ihre Arbeit / Investition von Ressourcen entlohnt werden, und damit nicht, wie Investoren bei ICOs oder anderen Verkaufsrunden, oder sogar bei Airdrops, von vorab produzierten Coins profitieren. Bei der Unterscheidung von Coins und Tokens müssen Coins im Einzelfall bewertet werden, wohingegen Tokens oft der Definition des Netzwerks oder Protokolls unterliegen, auf welchem sie beheimatet sind. Wenn ein Projekt dezentralisiert ist, ist es viel weniger wahrscheinlich als Wertpapier eingeordnet zu werden, da argumentiert werden kann, dass es sich bei dem Projekt nicht um ein gemeinschaftliches Unternehmen handelt.

Hier muss man natürlich auch wieder differenzieren, da viele Projekte sogenannte DINOs darstellen. Also Decentralized In Name Only sind, was oft auf einer geschickten Vermarktung des Produkts / Protokolls / Netzwerks basiert. Wenn also ein Protokoll / eine Blockchain ohne weiteres angehalten, neugestartet oder zentral gepatched (ich schaue dich an, Solana), oder gar zurückgedreht werden kann (du bist gemeint Ethereum), muss es einen Entscheidungsträger oder zumindest ein kleines Entscheidungsgremium geben, das als gemeinschaftliches Unternehmen gelten kann (sollte!).

Die Gewinnerwartung ist genauso auslegbar. Als einfaches Beispiel lässt sich hier Dogecoin heranziehen. Die Geschichte von DOGE ist tatsächlich sehr sehr unterhaltsam und einen kleinen Ausflug in die Abgründe des Internets wert, aber nicht jetzt. Kurz gesagt ist DOGE ein Meme-Token, geboren als Parodie auf Kryptowährungen und niemals als wirkliches Investitionsobjekt gedacht. Die ersten Käufer von DOGE hatten keine Gewinnerwartung, sondern wollten Teil einer Community von "Insidern" sein, einer Gruppe, die den Hunde-Witz versteht. Das Wachstum kann als organisch beschrieben werden, da es DOGE viele Jahre gab, bevor es zu dem wurde, was dann 2021 in dem kulminierte, was jeder kennt. Worauf ich hinaus möchte, ist dass es keine gemeinschaftliche Unternehmung gab, die dem Wert von DOGE zuträglich gewesen wäre und "Investoren" (sprich Internet-Kiddos und Meme-Trottel) nie eine wirkliche Gewinnerwartung hatten.

Einordnung von Bitcoin

https://x.com/Satsback/status/1617902548870127617

Das führt uns zu unserem geliebten allseits verehrten Freund, dem Rohstoff (oh nein, Spoiler-Alert) mit dem orangenen B-Logo. Wir wissen jetzt, dass die Anwendung des Howey-Tests einer im Einzelfall auszulegenden Beurteilung der vier Fragen bedarf. Dies ist nicht anders bei Bitcoin. Zu diesem Thema haben sich zum Glück schon viele prominente Personen geäußert, weshalb ich einige Interpretationen hier auslegen möchte:

https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/7231-15

Rostin Benham, der Vorsitzende der CFTC (☝️), stellte z.B. richtig fest, dass Kryptowährungen, je nach Ausgestaltung entweder als Commodity oder als Security klassifiziert werden können (ja Junge, wissen wir doch schon!). Darüber hinaus sagte er, dass er und seine Kollegen sich sicher wären, dass sowohl Bitcoin als auch Ethereum als Rohstoff einzuordnen sind, während andere Token vielmehr Wertpapiere darstellen.

Da der CFTC-Chef sowohl Bitcoin als auch Ethereum nicht als Wertpapier einstufen will, kann der Howey-Test eigentlich nicht für diese Entscheidung herangezogen worden sein. Denn wir haben ja schon gesehen, dass Ethereum am Test scheitert und sich somit recht leicht als Wertpapier einordnen lässt.

https://archive.ph/9vNAW

Auch die Vorsitzenden des Senatsausschusses der USA haben bereits Gesetze vorgeschlagen, die die Aufsicht über Bitcoin und Ethereum der Bundesbehörde CFTC übertragen würden, und somit Bitcoin als Rohstoff klassifizieren. Warum Bitcoin und Ethereum immer zusammen genannt werden und von anderen Währungen abgegrenzt werden, entzieht sich mir, aber immerhin schaffen diese geriatrischen Papageien die geistige Akrobatik zwischen verschiedenen Kryptowährungen zu differenzieren.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/heres-whats-in-senator-lummis-bitcoin-bill

Auch US-Senator Lummis erklärte, dass Bitcoin, gegenüber jedem anderen Krypto-Vermögenswert, vollständig dezentralisiert ist und dass die Person oder die Gruppe (Satoshi) keine vorab erzielten Gewinne generieren. Im Gegensatz zu allen anderen Kryptowährungen, die von zentralisierten Personen oder Gruppen gesteuert sind und oft riesige Gewinne generiert haben. Cynthia versteht sogar den Unterschied in der Natur von Bitcoin und Ethereum.

Lummis Gesetzentwurf soll weiterhin ausschließen, dass Wertpapiere gleichzeitig als digitale Rohstoffe bezeichnet werden. Damit würden alle als Wertpapier gekennzeichneten Kryptowährungen in die Zuständigkeit der SEC fallen.

Auch SEC Oberhäuptling Gary Gansler, ehemaliger MIT-Professor für Blockchain-Technologie, digitale Währungen und Finanztechnologie, hält nur Bitcoin für eine Commodity und meint weiter auch, dass die meisten Kryptowährungsprojekte, die sich mit Wertpapieren befassen oder solchen ähneln, in den regulatorischen Zuständigkeitsbereich der SEC fallen sollten.

Während die meisten Kommentatoren die Einschätzung der oben genannten Repräsentanten unterstützen und somit deutlich wird, warum ein und für alle Male klar ist, warum Bitcoin und Kryptowährungen nicht das gleiche sind, gibt es einige Stimmen aus den USA, die meinen, dass die Einhaltung der geltenden CFTC-Vorschriften für viele Bitcoin-Startups zu kostspielig wäre, was dazu führen würde dass sich viele innovative US-Unternehmen gezwungen fühlen dürften, ihre Operationen ins Ausland zu verlagern.

https://decrypt.co/105693/sec-coinbase-lists-nine-crypto-tokens-securities

Bitcoin stellt also, im Gegensatz zu allen anderen Kryptowährungen, kein Wertpapier dar. Das macht Bitcoin einzigartig und deshalb kann man getrost sagen, dass Bitcoin keine Kryptowährung ist. Denn Bitcoin ist ein Rohstoff, der, wie alle anderen gehandelten Commodities, frei in der Natur vorkommt. Bitcoin ist ein digitaler synthetischer Rohstoff.

🫳🎤

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In diesem Sinne, 2... 1... Risiko!‌

@ 6d8e2a24:5faaca4c

It happened.

Bitcoin surpassed $100,000 Wednesday, capping a year when Wall Street embraced the cryptocurrency as a bona fide new asset class, and investors, emboldened by the election of crypto-friendly Donald Trump as US president, piled in.

Investors have been closely watching the asset toy with the key, six-figure threshold, before slipping off the mark in a multi-week global seesaw. A few weeks after it fizzled out at $99,600, Bitcoin’s price crossed $100,000 at 9:40 New York time, according to CoinGecko.

By soaring more than 139% this year, Bitcoin demonstrated that the existential angst following the collapse of FTX in November 2022, and the subsequent conviction of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, were mere speed bumps on the expressway to greater riches.

Even Fed chair Jerome Powell is now singing a new tune. “It’s just like gold, only virtual,” he said on Wednesday.

Laser eyes Across social media, Bitcoin investors are celebrating the new milestone, and insisting they will keep their laser eyes focused on new thresholds.

Indeed, analysts at Standard Chartered forecasted Bitcoin will hit $125,000 by the end of the year. Analysts at research firm Bernstein expect Bitcoin to hit $200,000 by December 31, 2025.

Matt Hougan, chief investment officer for exchange-traded fund provider Bitwise, did him one better — earlier this month he said Bitcoin would cross the $500,000 line.

“You’re still early,” Hougan wrote in a note to clients. “In fact, you’ll be ‘early’ until Bitcoin crosses $500K.”

$1 million BTC? You don’t have to look far to see numerous other predictions — Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX and a leading market influencer — said Bitcoin would eventually hit $1 million thanks to US deficit spending.

“Sentiment would be: we are so back, we are so dead, we are going to a million,” Scott Melker, renowned crypto analyst wrote.

Ether rallies In the meantime, Ethereum’s Ether, the second most valuable cryptocurrency, is finally bucking its bearish trend. It broke through $3,800 for the first time since early June, and is up 35% since the US election on November 5.

Even more telling, Solana, Ethereum’s archrival, has skyrocketed 40% in that period, largely thanks to its support for red-hot memecoins. The cryptocurrency reached a new all-time high of $263 on November 23.

Ripple’s XRP is the most sought-after cryptocurrency lately. The asset is up more than 360% in the past thirty days, driven in part by retail investors in South Korea. Analysts expect an explosive rally coming up.

@ b4403b24:83542d4e

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/795722

@ 2063cd79:57bd1320

Meiner Meinung nach kann man in letzter Zeit eine deutliche Verlagerung bei der Benutzung bzw. dem Umgang mit Bitcoin feststellen. Vor einigen Jahren stand außer Frage, dass man zum Erwerb von Bitcoin auf Plattformen wie Binance, Coinbase oder Bitstamp gehandelt hat. Es gab ja auch kaum Alternativen. Der erste Wandel hat stattgefunden, als viele Nutzer//innen erkannt haben, dass Börsen keine gute Option bieten, um angesparte Bitcoin sicher zu verwahren. Viele Nutzer//innen haben daraufhin angefangen ihre Ersparnisse in Selbstverwahrung zu nehmen und/oder gänzlich auf Börsen zu verzichten und vermehrt auf Bitcoin-Only-Broker, wie Relai, Swan oder Pocket zu setzen.

Ein weiterer Trend lässt sich bei der Wahrnehmung von Privatsphäre feststellen. Während das Gros der Nutzer//innen früher weniger Wert auf non-KYC Lösungen gelegt und beim Kauf von Bitcoin bereitwillig persönliche Daten preisgegeben hat, machen sich mehr und mehr Menschen Gedanken darüber, wie sie schon den Erwerb von Bitcoin möglichst privat wie möglich gestalten, um zukünftigen Problemen aus dem Weg zu gehen. Denn wie wir ja wissen ist alles, was auf der Blockchain stattfindet, pseudonymisiert, aber keineswegs anonym.

Was bedeutet, dass wenn einmal eine Verbindung zu einer Adresse hergestellt ist, man z.B. nach einer Adresse suchen kann, um alle Transaktionen sowohl zu, als auch von dieser Adresse nachzuvollziehen. Das hat natürlich für viele ein gewisses "Geschmäckle". Doch ist der Erwerb von non-KYC Bitcoin (noch) nicht besonders nutzerfreundlich, mutet etwas zwielichtig an und birgt, gerade für viele nicht-so-Technologie-affinen Nutzer//innen, ein paar Stolpersteine. Oft erwerben auch viele ihre ersten bitcoins, weil sie auf schnellen Reichtum hoffen, einfach nur spekulieren wollen, oder von Freunden und Bekannten dazu überredet wurden und kümmern sich wenig um Privatsphäre, KYC vs. non-KYC, etc. Erst später befassen sie sich mit dem Thema Bitcoin intensiver und fallen dann in den sogenannten Bitcoin-Hasenbau (aka das Rabbit-Hole, das meines Erachtens nach der Honigdachsbau heißen sollte, aber naja) und haben Bitcoin in ihren Wallets und Cold-Storages, die sie nachträglich gerne etwas weniger öffentlich besitzen wollen. Zudem ist es Best-Practice für diejenigen, die Zahlungen in Bitcoin erhalten, diese erstmal von ihrer Transaktionshistorie zu säubern, denn man schreibt ja auch nicht auf jeden Geldschein beim Bezahlen seinen Namen und den Verwendungszweck drauf. Ein 10 Euro-Schein ist ein 10 Euro-Schein, egal ob dieser frisch aus der Bundesdruckerei kommt, oder ob dieser schon 100 Besitzer//innen gewechselt hat, dabei ein paar Runden in der Waschmaschine mitgemacht hat, genutzt wurde, um den Geruch von Spiegeln im Detail zu überprüfen, in Zigarettenautomaten überwintert oder sonstige Abenteuer erlebt hat.

Im Endeffekt steckt er in der Geldbörse und lässt sich zum aktuellen Tageskurs im Supermarkt der Wahl für ein Päckchen Butter eintauschen (ohne Wechselgeld), ohne dass nach seiner Reise gefragt wird. Warum sollte das bei Bitcoin Zahlungen anders sein? Zum Glück gibt es für alle oben genannten Szenarien eine relativ einfache Lösung: CoinJoins. Was das ist, wie sie funktionieren und was es zu beachten gilt, schauen wir uns diese Woche an.

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Wie immer fangen wir mit der Erklärung einiger Konzepte an. Also, was sind CoinJoins?

Ein CoinJoin ist eine Form des Mixings. Dies ist eine On-Chain-Lösung, die entwickelt wurde, um das Problem der "Common-Input-Ownership-Heuristik" zu brechen. Vereinfacht ausgedrückt beschreibt dieses Problem die Annahme, dass mehrere Inputs einer Transaktion relativ sicher dem gleichen Besitzer gehören.

Um es deutlicher zu veranschaulichen zitiere ich einen früheren Artikel:

Ein ganz einfaches Beispiel: Wenn ich eine bestimmt Menge Bitcoin bei einer Börse erwerbe, bei der ich mich zuvor ausweisen musste, um die Dienstleistungen in Anspruch zu nehmen, und mir anschließend diese erworbene Menge Bitcoin auf meine Wallet überweise, um sie in Selbstverwahrung zu halten, ist es gewissen Teilnehmern möglich, meine Wallet zu identifizieren, bzw. mir zuzuordnen. Die Börse, und damit im Zweifelsfall auch ein Gericht oder ein Staat, kennen die Bitcoin-Adresse, die sie meinen Ausweisdaten zuordnen können. Die Transaktion und die damit verbundenen UTXOs sind damit auch mir zuschreibbar und die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass ich Eigentümer der Zieladresse bin, ist auch sehr hoch - vor allem, wenn ich öfter Transaktionen von der Börsen-Adresse zu der gleichen Zieladresse ausführe. Dieses Verfahren wird auch Heuristik genannt und bedient sich wahrscheinlicher Annahmen, also z.B. wiederkehrender Muster.

Das Common-Input Problem geht noch eine Stufe tiefer, aber das lassen wir mal für einen Artikel über UTXOs übrig. Ein erweitertes Verständnis über UTXOs ist sicherlich ratsam, um das Konzept von Inputs und Outputs einer Transaktion besser zu verstehen, aber ich werde mir die größte Mühe geben, alles so einfach wie möglich darzustellen und ich glaube, dass es reicht zu verstehen, dass Transaktionen in der Blockchain historisch miteinander verknüpft sind. Diese Verknüpfung entsteht dadurch, dass die Outputs einer Transaktion immer die Inputs der nächsten Transaktion darstellen.

Dabei können viele kleine Inputs zu einem Output zusammengefasst oder große Inputs aufgeteilt werden, um kleine Outputs zu bedienen. Sobald es in dieser Transaktionskette ein Verbindungsstück in die "nicht-digitale" Welt, unser "echtes" Leben, gibt, kann jeder mit genügend Zeit und Ressourcen (wie Blockchain-Analyse Firmen) damit beginnen, diese Links herzustellen, indem sie das frei zugängliche Public-Ledger von Bitcoin beobachten und Verbindungen knüpfen.

CoinJoin hilft, dies zu verhindern. Und um den Artikel möglichst verständlich zu halten, werde ich im Weiteren erstmal von "Coins" sprechen, die im weitesten Sinne verbunden, also "gejoint" werden.

Wie also funktioniert ein CoinJoin?

Die Grundidee besteht darin, dass man einen Coin nimmt, der aus mehreren UTXOs besteht, und diesen einem Pool zuführt. Das ist in etwa so, als hätte man 10 Euro in Ein-Euro-Münzen im Portemonnaie und träfe sich mit 9 weiteren Fremden, die auch alle 10 Euro in Ein-Euro-Münzen haben. Nun werfen alle Beteiligten ihre Münzen in einen Topf und man erhält einen Topf mit 100 Ein-Euro-Münzen. Der Topf wird kräftig geschüttelt und jeder Beteiligte bekommt zufällig 10 Ein-Euro-Münzen zurück (der Einfachheit halber bekommt niemand eine Gebühr oder ein Honorar für den Service ausgezahlt). Niemand wird jemals in der Lage sein, die Ein-Euro-Münzen dem Portemonnaie zuzuweisen, aus dem sie dem Topf zugeführt wurden.

Ziemlich genauso funktionieren ConJoins, oder anders genannt Mixer. Es gibt eine Reihe von Diensten, bei denen man seine Coins zum Mixen an einen Pool senden kann. Diese Dienste erhalten für die Vermittlung, Zusammenführung und das Stellen der Infrastruktur eine kleine Gebühr. Namhafte Dienste sind z.B. Samourai’s Whirlpool oder Wasabi. Jeder dieser Anbieter hat - wie bei fast allem im Leben - seine Vor- und Nachteile. Zusätzlich zu den Mixing-Fees kommen natürlich auch die herkömmlichen Transaktionskosten.

Um bei Bitcoin zu bleiben, bedeutet dies, dass Transaktionen aufgebaut werden, die es Überwachungsfirmen oder anderen Beobachtern sehr schwer machen, genau zu wissen, welcher Transaktion-Output zu welchem der Input-Steller gehört. Das bedeutet keineswegs, dass Transaktionen gänzlich unsichtbar gemacht werden oder Inputs verschwinden, denn alles sitzt festgeschrieben und für immer einsehbar in der Blockchain. Allerdings können sich im besten Falle diejenigen, die Transaktionen beobachten oder nachverfolgen wollen, eine Reihe möglicher Szenarien ausdenken oder herleiten, um zu einem von vielen potentiellen Ergebnissen zu gelangen, wer welches Stück Bitcoin besitzt, jedoch kann man sich dessen niemals zu 100% sicher sein.

Alle Anbieter ähneln sich insofern, als dass sie gewisse Mixing-Beträge vorgeben. So kann man bei Samourai z.B. auswählen, ob man seine Coins in 0.01, 0.05 oder 0.5 BTC Pools mixen möchte. Hier kommt es natürlich darauf an, wie viel Vermögen/ Bitcoin gemixt werden soll. Wenn ich 0.5 Bitcoin mixen möchte, sollte ich natürlich nicht den 0.5 BTC Pool auswählen, sondern den 0.05 BTC Pool, da mir nach erfolgreichem Mixen 9 "saubere" UTXOs ausgehändigt werden. Warum nicht 10? Natürlich zahle ich ja auch für die Dienstleistung und für die Transaktion. Das heißt aber nicht, dass ich automatisch 0.05 BTC dafür zahle, sondern nur die Kosten (z.B. 2% der Pool Kosten + Transaktionsgebühren), der Rest der 0.05 BTC in diesem Beispiel würden mir als "unspent" zurück "überwiesen".

Diese Services bieten darüber hinaus auch an, die durch den Mixer generierten Coins im Mixer zu lassen, sodass sie über einen längeren Zeitraum weiter gemischt werden. Man stelle sich eine Waschmaschine vor, in der nur weiße Unterhosen derselben Größe und derselben Marke gewaschen werden. Nach jedem Waschgang nimmt man alle Unterhosen bis auf eine heraus und fügt neue, dreckige, gleiche Unterhosen derselben Größe und Marke hinzu. Die Wahrscheinlichkeit, die eigentlich dem ersten Waschgang hinzugefügte Unterhose zu finden, nimmt mit jedem Waschgang ab.

Man kann CoinJoins natürlich auch komplett selbstbestimmt und fernab von Anbietern durchführen. Das ist das Schöne bei Bitcoin, denn es gibt nichts, was man nicht selbst und selbstbestimmt machen kann. Alle Dienstleister und Anbieter von Services erleichtern den Nutzer//innen lediglich das Leben, indem sie die Netzwerke bereitstellen, die gewisse Unternehmungen einfacher machen und weiter streuen können, als es einem/einer einzelnen Nutzer//in jemals möglich wäre. Einen sehr guten und ausführlichen Guide hat zu diesem Thema der wichtige Arman veröffentlicht:

https://armantheparman.com/cj/

Jetzt habe ich natürlich einen groben Fehler begangen, indem ich CoinJoins und Mixer im gleichen Atemzug erwähnt, bzw. in austauschbarer Weise verwendet habe. Wenn man es ganz genau nehmen mag, ist CoinJoin die gewünschte Maßnahme, wohingegen ein Mixer der Dienstleister einer solchen Aktion ist. Generell sollte bei Anbietern von Diensten Vorsicht genossen werden, da in diesem spezifischen Fall der Dienstleister die UTXOs durcheinanderbringt und die vermischten Transaktionen eines anderen zurücksendet. Damit könnte der Dienstleister natürlich Informationen über genau die Datenpunkte erlangen, die es zu verschleiern galt. Zudem kommt hinzu, dass man seine Coins zunächst einem Custodian, also einem vertrauenswürdigen Dritten sendet, in der Annahme bzw. Hoffnung, dass man den eingezahlten Wert (minus der Gebühren) auch wirklich zurückbekommt.

Tamam! Jetzt habe ich also alle meine Coins von meiner Hardware-Wallet gejoint, zurück auf meine Hardware-Wallet, und habe im Endeffekt einfach nur weniger Sats als vorher, oder? Zusätzlich gab es schon Fälle, in denen Dienstleister (nicht die zuvor genannten) Nutzer//innen markiert haben, die zuvor von einem CoinJoin-Dienst gebrauch gemacht haben. Dementsprechend wussten diese Anbieter über die Herkunft der Coins Bescheid und konnten diese "blacklisten" und haben KYC-Informationen bereitgestellt. Dies führt dann dazu, dass andere Dienstleister solche Nutzer//innen und deren Transaktionen/Keys nicht mehr annehmen.

Darüber hinaus kann man sich die ganze Mühe des Mixens auch sparen, wenn man die gesamte Anzahl an gemixten Coins (UTXOs) wieder ausgibt, oder an ein anderes Wallet sendet (in einer Transaktion). Wie bei allen Themen im Bitcoin-Kosmos, gibt es auch hier wieder die Möglichkeit, sich tiefer mit der Materie auseinanderzusetzen, aber ich hoffe ich konnte einen guten Überblick über den Nutzen und die Funktionalität von Mixing Tools, spezifisch CoinJoins, vermitteln. CoinJoins sind, wie eingangs beschrieben, natürlich nur eins der Mittel, um Bitcoin-Transaktionen noch mehr zu pseudonymisieren, was dem Narrativ der Bitcoin-Gegner in die Karten spielt. Gleichzeitig sind Vorfälle, wie die Verhaftung von Entwicklern dieser Softwarelösungen (TornadoCash) nicht von der Hand zu weisen und Nutzer//innen haben ihre Konten bei gewissen Dienstleistern vorübergehend gesperrt bekommen, weil einige ihrer Transaktionen mit CoinJoin durchgeführt wurden. Jedoch sollte man sich gut überlegen, ob und wieviel man preisgeben möchte.

https://archive.ph/144G5

Wie bei allem ist die persönliche Einstellung zu Sicherheit und Privatsphäre der eigentliche Schlüssel. In einer Zeit, in der viele Menschen ihre Informationen bereitwillig im Internet preisgeben, haben sich viele daran gewöhnt, ihre "Sicherheit" auszulagern und anderen anzuvertrauen. Dies fängt bei Passwort-Managing Apps, wie LastPass an und hört bei Banken auf.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/22/lastpass-customer-password-vaults-stolen/

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Allerdings muss man sich bewusst sein, dass eine digitale Währung im Internet und, wie im Falle von Bitcoin, auf einem öffentlich einsehbaren Ledger lebt. Wenn man Sicherheit in Form von Selbstverwahrung praktiziert, sollte man sich auch überlegen, ob den Schritt auch konsequent zu Ende gehen möchte und sein Erspartes zumindest so anlegt, dass es für Dritte möglichst schwierig ist, dieses auch öffentlich einsehen zu können.

🫳🎤

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In diesem Sinne, 2... 1... Risiko!‌

@ 37043134:0e04e271

Started writing, must ha ve auto wrapping on word boundaries, it does. Also spell checking. Follows a copy-paste:

Fine, since i cannot find the articles in procedure, or you pointed to the wrong ones?(procedure, not criminal code(these are all in my database), so i cannot be precise as to the technical matter of statute of limitations.

Make your appeal in as concise as possible and take a "hard" stance on the State Prosecutor: according to me the accusations i make are to crimes punishable by up to three years in prison, both the logging(State land, National Park(special purposes), and the appropriation(of State land). I think you are wrong there. They also are crimes to be prosecuted "ex officio" in case the appeal rejects the call to expiration of the statute of limitations?!

Secondly the parcel 413/2 was appropriated in part, that makes me a direct victim, contrary to a "whistle blower" as you hint at(the maps show this clearly), ...i am a whistle blower as to the appropriation of parcel 620, yes. So that makes me both.

The suspension of expiration of the statute of limitations, is according to me(again i do not have the articles and go by the text you sent me over viber), justified on multiple grounds: Tuzilac Bijelo Polje(), petition to the kadaster(), our official requests to the forestry services in Plav and Bjieljo Polje, the ongoing civil court case in Plav, repeat offenses(), the "consequences" of the crime still ongoing(danger of logging). Indeed we have a "strong" case.

It is not about the appeal resulting into sending the complaint to court, it is about documenting ourselves, so we have something to stand on in the future. Send me your draft in Montenegrin so i can assure myself that you take this head on. I insist you add my copy in English to the file you send of.

i regret you did not give me a print copy of the answer of the State Prosecutor, as i expected, you did not answer my repeat request earlier on as to the deadline to appeal, so you left me in "ignoramus" mode, which i have to pay now by being "un-briefed" on the specifics of the matter,

My compliment to the contrary for having set up your team, a permanent presence(your sister back-up here while away), that is expected, but still it is nice to see it done on your own initiative"(a copy-paste)

@ 7ec80607:128517c5

Landscaping is an essential part of creating a beautiful, functional, and harmonious outdoor environment. It not only enhances the aesthetics of a property but can also improve its value. The right landscaping design can transform a simple outdoor space into a sanctuary, combining elements like plants, trees, water features, and hardscaping to create an inviting and peaceful atmosphere. Below are 10 of the best landscaping examples that incorporate a variety of design elements, from stunning plant arrangements to innovative hardscaping features.

**1. Tropical Oasis Landscape ** A tropical oasis landscape features lush, vibrant greenery, colorful flowers, and often, water features like ponds or waterfalls. This style is perfect for creating a serene getaway right in your backyard. Key elements of a tropical oasis include: Lush Foliage: Use of large-leafed plants like banana trees, palms, and bamboo to create a dense, jungle-like atmosphere. Water Features: Adding a small pond or a bubbling water fountain can enhance the tropical feel, creating soothing sounds. Colorful Flowers: Brightly colored flowers like hibiscus, bougainvillea, and bird of paradise add pops of color. The lush greenery and vibrant flowers of a tropical oasis can bring a piece of the tropics to your home, ideal for those looking to create a vibrant, tranquil environment.

1. Zen Garden Landscape Inspired by Japanese traditions, the Zen garden is designed to promote peace and mindfulness. These gardens often use minimalist design principles and focus on simplicity, harmony, and balance. Important elements of a Zen garden include:

Rocks and Gravel: The use of stones or gravel is a defining feature. Gravel is often raked into patterns to represent water or to mimic waves. Bamboo and Evergreens: Bamboo is a staple in Zen gardens for its calming and serene appearance. Evergreen trees, such as Japanese maples, are also commonly used to maintain year-round beauty. Water Features: While Zen gardens typically use dry landscapes, small, serene water features like fountains or small ponds can be added to introduce a sense of tranquility. Zen gardens are ideal for homeowners seeking a low-maintenance, minimalist landscape that focuses on tranquility and a sense of balance.

1. Modern Minimalist Landscape The modern minimalist landscape design focuses on simplicity, clean lines, and functional design. It utilizes a restrained palette of plants and materials, making the most of space and emphasizing architectural features. Key elements include: Hardscaping: A minimalist landscape often incorporates large, geometric pavers, concrete walkways, and steel accents. Low-maintenance Plants: Choose a limited selection of low-maintenance plants such as succulents, grasses, and boxwoods. Open Spaces: The design tends to keep the lawn area open and unobstructed, with well-defined edges to enhance the simplicity. This design style suits contemporary homes and urban settings, providing a sleek, uncluttered look with a focus on clean lines and a structured environment.
2. Cottage Garden Landscape A cottage garden creates a charming, whimsical, and cozy outdoor space filled with a mix of flowering plants and lush greenery. These gardens often evoke a sense of nostalgia and can make your garden feel like an English countryside retreat. Key features of a cottage garden include: Dense Planting: Layering plants such as roses, lavender, daisies, and geraniums in a loose, informal arrangement. Paths and Arbors: Winding paths made of natural materials like cobblestone or gravel, with arbors and trellises to support climbing plants like ivy and wisteria. Rustic Elements: Incorporating rustic furniture like benches, birdbaths, or vintage watering cans adds to the charm. Cottage gardens are ideal for those who want a vibrant, naturalistic garden that feels both personal and inviting.
3. Desert Landscape Desert landscaping, or xeriscaping, is designed for dry climates and focuses on water conservation by using drought-tolerant plants and minimal water usage. This landscaping style can create a stunning, low-maintenance environment. Key features of a desert landscape include: Succulents and Cacti: These hardy plants, such as agave, aloe, and prickly pear, are central to desert landscapes. Gravel and Sand: The use of gravel, pebbles, and sand in place of grass creates a clean, open aesthetic and reduces water needs. Rock Features: Boulders and large stones can be incorporated to create visual interest and mimic natural desert formations. Desert landscaping is ideal for homeowners in arid climates, offering both beauty and efficiency while minimizing water usage.

**6. Formal Garden Landscape ** A formal garden is all about symmetry, structure, and order. These gardens often feature geometric shapes, carefully manicured plants, and neatly trimmed hedges. Key features of a formal garden include: Symmetrical Layout: Paths, hedges, and flowerbeds are arranged in precise patterns, often with a central focal point like a fountain or statue. Topiary and Hedges: Neatly trimmed hedges and topiary (shaped plants) add a sculptural element to the landscape. Classic Elements: Use of classical features such as statues, urns, and decorative vases enhances the formality of the design.

A formal garden is well-suited for large properties or historic homes, where precision and elegance are important.

**7. Coastal Landscape ** A coastal landscape embraces the relaxed, breezy feel of the beach and sea, often incorporating elements like salt-tolerant plants and open spaces. Key components of a coastal landscape include: Native Coastal Plants: Plants such as sea oats, beach grass, and dune lilies are ideal for coastal landscapes because they can thrive in salty, windy environments. Natural Stone: The use of large stones or driftwood can evoke the rugged beauty of the shoreline. Relaxed Layout: Coastal gardens tend to have a more informal, flowing design with wide open spaces and paths that blend seamlessly with the natural surroundings. This style is perfect for beachfront properties or those looking to bring the calming ambiance of the coast to their outdoor space.

**8. Woodland Garden Landscape ** Woodland gardens are designed to create a natural, forest-like environment, often under the canopy of large trees. These gardens offer a cool, shaded area full of texture and variety. Key elements include: Shade-loving Plants: Ferns, hostas, and primroses thrive in shaded environments and provide rich textures and colors to the garden.

Layered Planting: Woodland gardens often feature a variety of plant layers, with ground covers, shrubs, and trees creating a rich, natural composition. Natural Pathways: Winding, organic paths made from mulch, stone, or wood chips help maintain the natural feel of the garden.

Woodland gardens are perfect for areas with mature trees or shaded locations, offering a peaceful retreat with a focus on nature’s tranquility.

**9. Edible Landscape ** An edible landscape integrates functional food-producing plants into the garden, making it both beautiful and practical. These gardens focus on incorporating fruits, vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers into the overall design. Key features of an edible landscape include: Raised Beds and Containers: Raised garden beds, pots, or containers allow for easy cultivation of vegetables, fruits, and herbs.

Fruit Trees: Incorporating fruit trees like apple, pear, or citrus adds both beauty and function. Edible Flowers: Incorporating flowers like nasturtiums or lavender can provide color as well as culinary benefits.

Edible landscaping is ideal for those looking to combine aesthetics with sustainability, growing their own food while enhancing the beauty of their outdoor spaces.

**10. Water-Wise Landscape ** Water-wise landscaping focuses on creating beautiful outdoor spaces while minimizing water usage. This is especially important in regions where water conservation is a concern. Key features include: Drought-Tolerant Plants: The use of native plants that require less water, such as lavender, succulents, and yucca, is a key element. Efficient Irrigation Systems: Drip irrigation systems are commonly used to minimize water wastage while ensuring plants get the right amount of hydration. Mulching: Applying mulch around plants helps retain moisture, reduce evaporation, and keep the soil cool. Water-wise landscaping is ideal for homeowners in dry climates, providing an eco-friendly and cost-effective solution to maintaining a beautiful garden.

**Conclusion ** Landscaping offers an incredible range of possibilities to transform outdoor spaces into beautiful and functional environments. From tropical oases to formal gardens and water-wise landscapes, each type of landscape design brings its unique elements and benefits. Whether you are looking to create a peaceful retreat, a low-maintenance garden, or a functional space for growing your own food, the best landscaping examples provide inspiration and ideas to make your outdoor space truly spectacular. By selecting the right elements for your climate, lifestyle, and aesthetic preferences, you can create a garden that enhances both the beauty and value of your property.

@ e83b66a8:b0526c2b

When we had the Gold standard, gold only backed assets.

Now we are approaching the Bitcoin Standard, what will happen if Bitcoin is used to back debt?

$MSTR is the Alpha release

Trumps USA will be the Beta release.

If it works, the world has $315T of debt. That will be the full release V1.0

In comparison, the world has $454T of assets.

Can it be done?

What happens when you back a negative debt with a positive asset?

Has it ever been tried?

Is it possible?

The problem with the debt is it isn't "owed" to anyone.

If I lend you $10 you owe me $10.

To explain further:

If you lend me $10 worth of gold, then I can pay you back $10 of money if it's backed with gold - the gold standard.

If you lend me $10 worth of gold, and I pay you back with unbacked fiat, the repayment is arbitrary.

Like for like you can back any backed money with any asset.

Without a backed money, you can only repay an asset with an asset, otherwise paying with fiat, the global books don't balance.

In the current fiat world, if the US government print $10 and sells it to the market for $10 + interest, their is no creditor. You are simply diluting all other dollars.

When they have to pay back the debt to the “creditor”, they can't return the original $10 because that's been spent and they haven't generated any wealth (they are a government, not a company), so everything they return (the original lent $10 + interest) is printed again.

This is monetary recursion and destroys all fiat systems eventually.

So what happens when you insert a hard asset into the equation? Do you destroy or weaken that asset, you certainly don't strengthen it.

Does this turn Bitcoin into an inflationary currency despite its inherent deflationary properties.

After all, the U.S. had to come off the gold standard, because they didn't have enough gold to pay back.

I think best case scenario is Bitcoin repeats what happened to gold. It weakens Bitcoin until it makes it flacid, at which time the government will be forced to leave the Bitcoin Standard and Bitcoin will be a shadow of its potential.

Why?

Currency can be created and destroyed.

Money (the measure of wealth) is absolute.

I think this is the fundamental flaw, we believe money can be created and destroyed simply because we are used to printing or burning government fiat and have copied that model for Crypto currencies like Ethereum or Tether, which are mined or burned.

So money (invent better word) cannot be printed or destroyed, it is a measure of wealth and if you increase or decrease the supply you change the unit measurement, not the money.

So what are the potential end point valuations of Bitcoin?

Can Bitcoin approach a $21M coin valuation? i.e. 21M Coins at $21M?

If Bitcoin only backs assets, then it can't exceed, or even approach the total value of world wealth, currently $454T

At $21M for 21M coins, this approaches world wealth.

If Bitcoin is used to back debt, then you can add a further $315T of value, so if we assume $100T (about 1/4) of asset value + $300T of debt value, then we approach $21M per coin.

Another potential way of projecting the eventual stable price of Bitcoin:

If world wealth is currently around $454T

And world debt is currently around $315T

then can we consider it like a company and consider the profit to be $454T - $315T = $139T

Would that be a good expectation for final Bitcoin price?

i.e. $139T / 21M = $6.6M per BTC

However, I'm not certain Bitcoin can survive being used to back debt.

Gold never did that.

@ eac63075:b4988b48

The future of physical money is at stake, and the discussion about DREX, the new digital currency planned by the Central Bank of Brazil, is gaining momentum. In a candid and intense conversation, Federal Deputy Julia Zanatta (PL/SC) discussed the challenges and risks of this digital transition, also addressing her Bill No. 3,341/2024, which aims to prevent the extinction of physical currency. This bill emerges as a direct response to legislative initiatives seeking to replace physical money with digital alternatives, limiting citizens' options and potentially compromising individual freedom. Let's delve into the main points of this conversation.

https://www.fountain.fm/episode/i5YGJ9Ors3PkqAIMvNQ0

(PT-BR version here)

What is a CBDC?

Before discussing the specifics of DREX, it’s important to understand what a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) is. CBDCs are digital currencies issued by central banks, similar to a digital version of physical money. Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which operate in a decentralized manner, CBDCs are centralized and regulated by the government. In other words, they are digital currencies created and controlled by the Central Bank, intended to replace physical currency.

A prominent feature of CBDCs is their programmability. This means that the government can theoretically set rules about how, where, and for what this currency can be used. This aspect enables a level of control over citizens' finances that is impossible with physical money. By programming the currency, the government could limit transactions by setting geographical or usage restrictions. In practice, money within a CBDC could be restricted to specific spending or authorized for use in a defined geographical area.

In countries like China, where citizen actions and attitudes are also monitored, a person considered to have a "low score" due to a moral or ideological violation may have their transactions limited to essential purchases, restricting their digital currency use to non-essential activities. This financial control is strengthened because, unlike physical money, digital currency cannot be exchanged anonymously.

Practical Example: The Case of DREX During the Pandemic

To illustrate how DREX could be used, an example was given by Eric Altafim, director of Banco Itaú. He suggested that, if DREX had existed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government could have restricted the currency’s use to a 5-kilometer radius around a person’s residence, limiting their economic mobility. Another proposed use by the executive related to the Bolsa Família welfare program: the government could set up programming that only allows this benefit to be used exclusively for food purchases. Although these examples are presented as control measures for safety or organization, they demonstrate how much a CBDC could restrict citizens' freedom of choice.

To illustrate the potential for state control through a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), such as DREX, it is helpful to look at the example of China. In China, the implementation of a CBDC coincides with the country’s Social Credit System, a governmental surveillance tool that assesses citizens' and companies' behavior. Together, these technologies allow the Chinese government to monitor, reward, and, above all, punish behavior deemed inappropriate or threatening to the government.

How Does China's Social Credit System Work?

Implemented in 2014, China's Social Credit System assigns every citizen and company a "score" based on various factors, including financial behavior, criminal record, social interactions, and even online activities. This score determines the benefits or penalties each individual receives and can affect everything from public transport access to obtaining loans and enrolling in elite schools for their children. Citizens with low scores may face various sanctions, including travel restrictions, fines, and difficulty in securing loans.

With the adoption of the CBDC — or “digital yuan” — the Chinese government now has a new tool to closely monitor citizens' financial transactions, facilitating the application of Social Credit System penalties. China’s CBDC is a programmable digital currency, which means that the government can restrict how, when, and where the money can be spent. Through this level of control, digital currency becomes a powerful mechanism for influencing citizens' behavior.

Imagine, for instance, a citizen who repeatedly posts critical remarks about the government on social media or participates in protests. If the Social Credit System assigns this citizen a low score, the Chinese government could, through the CBDC, restrict their money usage in certain areas or sectors. For example, they could be prevented from buying tickets to travel to other regions, prohibited from purchasing certain consumer goods, or even restricted to making transactions only at stores near their home.

Another example of how the government can use the CBDC to enforce the Social Credit System is by monitoring purchases of products such as alcohol or luxury items. If a citizen uses the CBDC to spend more than the government deems reasonable on such products, this could negatively impact their social score, resulting in additional penalties such as future purchase restrictions or a lowered rating that impacts their personal and professional lives.

In China, this kind of control has already been demonstrated in several cases. Citizens added to Social Credit System “blacklists” have seen their spending and investment capacity severely limited. The combination of digital currency and social scores thus creates a sophisticated and invasive surveillance system, through which the Chinese government controls important aspects of citizens’ financial lives and individual freedoms.

Deputy Julia Zanatta views these examples with great concern. She argues that if the state has full control over digital money, citizens will be exposed to a level of economic control and surveillance never seen before. In a democracy, this control poses a risk, but in an authoritarian regime, it could be used as a powerful tool of repression.

DREX and Bill No. 3,341/2024

Julia Zanatta became aware of a bill by a Workers' Party (PT) deputy (Bill 4068/2020 by Deputy Reginaldo Lopes - PT/MG) that proposes the extinction of physical money within five years, aiming for a complete transition to DREX, the digital currency developed by the Central Bank of Brazil. Concerned about the impact of this measure, Julia drafted her bill, PL No. 3,341/2024, which prohibits the elimination of physical money, ensuring citizens the right to choose physical currency.

“The more I read about DREX, the less I want its implementation,” says the deputy. DREX is a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), similar to other state digital currencies worldwide, but which, according to Julia, carries extreme control risks. She points out that with DREX, the State could closely monitor each citizen’s transactions, eliminating anonymity and potentially restricting freedom of choice. This control would lie in the hands of the Central Bank, which could, in a crisis or government change, “freeze balances or even delete funds directly from user accounts.”

Risks and Individual Freedom

Julia raises concerns about potential abuses of power that complete digitalization could allow. In a democracy, state control over personal finances raises serious questions, and EddieOz warns of an even more problematic future. “Today we are in a democracy, but tomorrow, with a government transition, we don't know if this kind of power will be used properly or abused,” he states. In other words, DREX gives the State the ability to restrict or condition the use of money, opening the door to unprecedented financial surveillance.

EddieOz cites Nigeria as an example, where a CBDC was implemented, and the government imposed severe restrictions on the use of physical money to encourage the use of digital currency, leading to protests and clashes in the country. In practice, the poorest and unbanked — those without regular access to banking services — were harshly affected, as without physical money, many cannot conduct basic transactions. Julia highlights that in Brazil, this situation would be even more severe, given the large number of unbanked individuals and the extent of rural areas where access to technology is limited.

The Relationship Between DREX and Pix

The digital transition has already begun with Pix, which revolutionized instant transfers and payments in Brazil. However, Julia points out that Pix, though popular, is a citizen’s choice, while DREX tends to eliminate that choice. The deputy expresses concern about new rules suggested for Pix, such as daily transaction limits of a thousand reais, justified as anti-fraud measures but which, in her view, represent additional control and a profit opportunity for banks. “How many more rules will banks create to profit from us?” asks Julia, noting that DREX could further enhance control over personal finances.

International Precedents and Resistance to CBDC

The deputy also cites examples from other countries resisting the idea of a centralized digital currency. In the United States, states like New Hampshire have passed laws to prevent the advance of CBDCs, and leaders such as Donald Trump have opposed creating a national digital currency. Trump, addressing the topic, uses a justification similar to Julia’s: in a digitalized system, “with one click, your money could disappear.” She agrees with the warning, emphasizing the control risk that a CBDC represents, especially for countries with disadvantaged populations.

Besides the United States, Canada, Colombia, and Australia have also suspended studies on digital currencies, citing the need for further discussions on population impacts. However, in Brazil, the debate on DREX is still limited, with few parliamentarians and political leaders openly discussing the topic. According to Julia, only she and one or two deputies are truly trying to bring this discussion to the Chamber, making DREX’s advance even more concerning.

Bill No. 3,341/2024 and Popular Pressure

For Julia, her bill is a first step. Although she acknowledges that ideally, it would prevent DREX's implementation entirely, PL 3341/2024 is a measure to ensure citizens' choice to use physical money, preserving a form of individual freedom. “If the future means control, I prefer to live in the past,” Julia asserts, reinforcing that the fight for freedom is at the heart of her bill.

However, the deputy emphasizes that none of this will be possible without popular mobilization. According to her, popular pressure is crucial for other deputies to take notice and support PL 3341. “I am only one deputy, and we need the public’s support to raise the project’s visibility,” she explains, encouraging the public to press other parliamentarians and ask them to “pay attention to PL 3341 and the project that prohibits the end of physical money.” The deputy believes that with a strong awareness and pressure movement, it is possible to advance the debate and ensure Brazilians’ financial freedom.

What’s at Stake?

Julia Zanatta leaves no doubt: DREX represents a profound shift in how money will be used and controlled in Brazil. More than a simple modernization of the financial system, the Central Bank’s CBDC sets precedents for an unprecedented level of citizen surveillance and control in the country. For the deputy, this transition needs to be debated broadly and transparently, and it’s up to the Brazilian people to defend their rights and demand that the National Congress discuss these changes responsibly.

The deputy also emphasizes that, regardless of political or partisan views, this issue affects all Brazilians. “This agenda is something that will affect everyone. We need to be united to ensure people understand the gravity of what could happen.” Julia believes that by sharing information and generating open debate, it is possible to prevent Brazil from following the path of countries that have already implemented a digital currency in an authoritarian way.

A Call to Action

The future of physical money in Brazil is at risk. For those who share Deputy Julia Zanatta’s concerns, the time to act is now. Mobilize, get informed, and press your representatives. PL 3341/2024 is an opportunity to ensure that Brazilian citizens have a choice in how to use their money, without excessive state interference or surveillance.

In the end, as the deputy puts it, the central issue is freedom. “My fear is that this project will pass, and people won’t even understand what is happening.” Therefore, may every citizen at least have the chance to understand what’s at stake and make their voice heard in defense of a Brazil where individual freedom and privacy are respected values.

@ a012dc82:6458a70d

Table Of Content

• The Challenge of Sustainability in Bitcoin Mining

• Embracing Renewable Energy Sources

• Optimal Location Selection

• Energy-Efficient Hardware

• Collaborative Mining Pools

• Managing Operational Costs

• The Rise of Green Certifications

• Balancing Profitability and Environmental Responsibility

• Conclusion

• FAQ

Bitcoin mining, once an energy-intensive endeavor, has evolved significantly over the years. As the popularity of cryptocurrencies soared, so did concerns about its environmental impact. In this article, we will delve into the concept of sustainability in Bitcoin mining and explore how the industry is adapting to revenue constraints while being conscious of its ecological footprint.

The Challenge of Sustainability in Bitcoin Mining

The advent of Bitcoin brought about a revolutionary decentralized digital currency, empowering individuals and businesses to conduct transactions without the need for intermediaries. However, the process of mining Bitcoins, which involves solving complex mathematical algorithms to validate transactions, requires substantial computational power and energy consumption. This energy-intensive nature of mining has raised concerns about its environmental sustainability.

Embracing Renewable Energy Sources

In recent years, the Bitcoin mining community has taken significant strides towards embracing renewable energy sources. By transitioning from traditional fossil fuels to sustainable alternatives such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, miners aim to reduce their carbon footprint significantly. This shift not only addresses environmental concerns but also ensures long-term viability for the industry. By harnessing clean and renewable energy, miners can continue their operations without exacerbating environmental issues.

Optimal Location Selection

One of the critical strategies for sustainable Bitcoin mining is choosing the right location. Mining operations tend to thrive in regions with abundant renewable energy resources, enabling them to power their data centers efficiently. Countries with progressive policies promoting green energy have become attractive destinations for miners seeking sustainability. Selecting an optimal location ensures that miners can run their operations with minimal reliance on non-renewable energy sources, reducing their overall environmental impact.

Energy-Efficient Hardware

Advancements in technology have led to the development of energy-efficient mining hardware. Miners now have access to Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that offer better performance while consuming less power. By upgrading to these energy-efficient machines, miners can maximize their hashing power and revenue while minimizing energy consumption. Utilizing energy-efficient hardware is an essential step towards creating a sustainable mining ecosystem, where efficiency and profitability coexist harmoniously.

Collaborative Mining Pools

In an effort to enhance sustainability, miners are increasingly joining collaborative mining pools. These pools allow multiple miners to work together and share their computational resources, reducing individual energy consumption. Moreover, the pool's reward system ensures a more consistent income stream, mitigating revenue constraints. By pooling resources, miners can optimize their energy usage and achieve higher profitability, while also fostering cooperation within the mining community.

Managing Operational Costs

Sustainability in Bitcoin mining also requires effective management of operational costs. Energy expenses are a significant part of mining operations, so miners are constantly seeking innovative ways to optimize energy usage. Implementing smart energy management systems and adopting best practices in data center cooling are some of the approaches employed to reduce costs. Efficient cost management not only improves a miner's bottom line but also contributes to overall sustainability by minimizing resource wastage.

The Rise of Green Certifications

To prove their commitment to sustainability, several mining companies now seek green certifications. These certifications authenticate that a mining operation is using a substantial portion of renewable energy, providing transparency and building trust among investors and stakeholders. Green certifications serve as a testament to a miner's dedication to reducing their environmental impact, which can attract socially responsible investors and customers. As the demand for environmentally conscious practices grows, green certifications become a valuable asset for sustainable mining businesses.

Balancing Profitability and Environmental Responsibility

While sustainability is a priority, miners must also navigate revenue constraints in a highly competitive market. Striking a balance between profitability and environmental responsibility remains a challenge. However, the industry's evolution towards sustainability demonstrates its commitment to minimizing its ecological impact. Miners face the delicate task of maximizing revenue while adopting environmentally friendly practices. By continually innovating and optimizing operations, miners can secure their financial viability while contributing to a greener and more sustainable future for Bitcoin mining.

Conclusion

Sustainability in Bitcoin mining is no longer an afterthought but a crucial aspect that miners are actively pursuing. By embracing renewable energy sources, optimizing hardware, and employing collaborative approaches, the industry is adapting to revenue constraints while mitigating its environmental footprint. As technology continues to advance, it is likely that Bitcoin mining will become even more sustainable, ensuring the longevity of this groundbreaking digital currency for generations to come.

FAQ

What is sustainability in Bitcoin mining? Sustainability in Bitcoin mining refers to adopting practices and technologies that reduce the environmental impact of mining operations while ensuring long-term viability for the industry.

How are miners embracing sustainability? Miners are embracing sustainability by transitioning to renewable energy sources, using energy-efficient hardware, joining collaborative mining pools, and optimizing operational costs.

Why is renewable energy important for Bitcoin mining? Renewable energy is vital for Bitcoin mining as it significantly reduces the carbon footprint associated with energy-intensive mining operations, promoting environmental responsibility.

What are collaborative mining pools? Collaborative mining pools are groups of miners working together and sharing their computational resources to improve efficiency and achieve a more consistent income stream.

That's all for today

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.

@ 502ab02a:a2860397

ผมไถ tiktok ก่อนนอนตามประสาคนเสพแสงฟ้า 555 พบว่ามีไวรัลอาหารเช้าแบบนึง ที่มีคนทำคลิปกันเยอะพอสมควร ชื่อว่า Balkan Breakfast ก็อดสงสัยไม่ได้เลยกลายเป็นว่า ต้องไถหาข้อมูลเพื่อทำความเข้าใจ จนมาสรุปย่อให้เพื่อนๆที่อาจสงสัยเหมือนผม ได้อ่านกันขำๆไว้ด้วยครับ ออกตัวไว้ก่อนว่า ผมไม่ใช่ชาวบอลข่าน จึงไม่ได้รู้ดีแบบลึกซึ้งนะครับ

เรื่องมีอยู่ว่าในแถบคาบสมุทรบอลข่าน (Balkan Peninsula) ที่เต็มไปด้วยวัฒนธรรมและประวัติศาสตร์อันยาวนาน อาหารเช้านั้นจึงถือเป็นสิ่งสำคัญที่สะท้อนเอกลักษณ์ท้องถิ่นได้อย่างชัดเจน Balkan Breakfast คืออาหารเช้าที่ผสมผสานความเรียบง่ายและวัตถุดิบธรรมชาติไว้อย่างลงตัว ซึ่งในแถบบอลข่านครอบคลุมพื้นที่หลากหลาย เช่น เซอร์เบีย บัลแกเรีย โครเอเชีย และมาซิโดเนีย อาหารเช้าในภูมิภาคนี้ได้รับอิทธิพลจากทั้งวัฒนธรรมออตโตมัน ยุโรปตะวันออก และกรีก ตัวอย่างเมนูที่มักพบในอาหารเช้าแบบ traditional นี้มักจะประกอบไปด้วย - Burek: แป้งฟิโลสอดไส้เนื้อ ชีส หรือผักโขม - Kajmak: ครีมชีสที่มีรสชาติเข้มข้น มักทานคู่กับขนมปัง - Ajvar: ซอสพริกหยวกแดงและมะเขือยาว มีรสชาติกลมกล่อม - Proja: ขนมปังข้าวโพดที่นิยมเสิร์ฟพร้อมโยเกิร์ต - ผักสด: เช่น แตงกวา แตงกวาดอง Bell Pepper มะเขือเทศ หรือ หัวหอมใหญ่ เพิ่มความสดชื่นและสีสันให้จานอาหาร

อธิบายอาหารเพิ่มเติมเพื่อให้เห็นภาพนะครับ Burek (บูเร็ก) คือขนมอบที่มีต้นกำเนิดจากแถบบอลข่าน โดยเฉพาะในประเทศตุรกี, เซอร์เบีย, บอสเนีย, มาซิโดเนีย และประเทศอื่นๆ ในภูมิภาคนี้ Burek เป็นขนมอบที่ทำจากแป้งฟิโล Burek มีหลายรูปแบบ โดยทั่วไปจะทำเป็นพายหรือม้วน ขึ้นอยู่กับการห่อหรือจัดรูปทรง โดยส่วนใหญ่จะใช้แป้งฟิโลห่อไส้ให้เป็นชั้นๆ แล้วนำไปอบจนได้ความกรอบและสีน้ำตาลทอง ไส้ของ Burek สามารถมีได้หลากหลายชนิดเช่น บูเร็กไส้เนื้อวัวหรือเนื้อแกะ บูเร็กไส้ชีสโดยมักใช้ชีสเฟตาหรือชีสมอสซาเรลล่า ไส้ผักที่ใช้ผักโขมหรือมันฝรั่ง หรือบางทีก็ไส้ผสมกันไปเลยครับ เนื้อกับชีส เนื้อกับผัก ชีสกับผัก เอาจริงๆก็แล้วแต่สะดวก

ส่วนแป้งฟิโล (Phyllo Dough) นั้นเป็นแป้งชนิดหนึ่งที่ใช้ในอาหารหลากหลาย โดยเฉพาะในอาหารเมดิเตอร์เรเนียนและแถบบอลข่าน ลักษณะเด่นของแป้งฟิโลคือความบางเหมือนกระดาษและความยืดหยุ่น มักใช้เป็นชั้นๆ ซ้อนกันในเมนูที่ต้องการความกรอบเมื่ออบหรือทอด ต่างจากแป้งพัฟ (Puff Pastry) ที่มีไขมันผสมในเนื้อแป้ง แป้งฟิโลมักใช้น้ำมันหรือเนยทาแยกแต่ละชั้นเพื่อเพิ่มความกรอบ ส่วนประกอบของแป้งฟิโลจะมี แป้งสาลี น้ำ เกลือ

Kajmak (อ่านว่า ไค-มัก หรือ คาย-มัก) เป็นผลิตภัณฑ์นมชนิดหนึ่งที่มีต้นกำเนิดจากแถบบอลข่านและคอเคซัส นิยมใช้ในอาหารหลากหลายประเภททั้งในเซอร์เบีย บอสเนีย มอนเตเนโกร ตุรกี และประเทศใกล้เคียง Kajmak คือ ครีมชีสดั้งเดิมทำจากนมดิบ เช่น นมวัว นมควาย หรือนมแพะ ที่มีลักษณะคล้ายครีมหนาและเนย อุดมไปด้วยไขมันและมีรสชาติที่นุ่มละมุน บางครั้งจะมีรสเปรี้ยวเล็กน้อยเนื่องจากกระบวนการหมัก เนื้อสัมผัสนุ่มคล้ายครีม มีความมันสูง

Ajvar (อ่านว่า ไอ-วาร์ หรือ อัย-วาร์) เป็นเครื่องจิ้มและเครื่องเคียงที่มีต้นกำเนิดจากภูมิภาคบอลข่าน โดยเฉพาะในประเทศเซอร์เบีย มาซิโดเนีย และประเทศรอบๆ Ajvar เป็นที่นิยมในอาหารท้องถิ่นและมักเสิร์ฟคู่กับขนมปัง เนื้อย่าง หรืออาหารประเภทอื่นๆ Ajvar นั้นทำมาจาก พริกหวานแดง (Red Bell Pepper) เป็นส่วนผสมหลัก บางสูตรอาจเพิ่ม มะเขือยาว และ กระเทียม เพื่อเพิ่มรสชาติ มีเนื้อสัมผัสที่เนียนละเอียดหรือหยาบเล็กน้อย แล้วแต่สูตรครับ วิธีทำ Ajvar คือ ย่างหรืออบพริกหวานและมะเขือยาว เพื่อให้ได้กลิ่นหอมและรสชาติที่เข้มข้น จากนั้นปอกเปลือกเอาเปลือกที่ไหม้ออกเพื่อความนุ่มเนียน แล้วจึงนำไปบดหรือปั่นส่วนผสมจนได้เนื้อที่ต้องการ จบด้วยการผัดในน้ำมันเคี่ยวส่วนผสมทั้งหมดในน้ำมันจนเข้ากันดี Ajvar มี2แบบคือ แบบหวาน (Sweet Ajvar) จะไม่มีพริกเผ็ด รสชาติเข้มข้นแต่ไม่เผ็ด แบบเผ็ด (Hot Ajvar) จะใส่พริกเผ็ดหรือพริกป่นเพื่อเพิ่มความเผ็ด

Proja (โปรยา) เป็นขนมปังที่อร่อยและสะดวกในการทำ เป็นทางเลือกที่ดีในการรับประทานอาหารประเภทขนมปังที่แตกต่างจากขนมปังสไตล์ตะวันตกที่เราคุ้นเคยกัน โดยเป็นขนมปังข้าวโพดหรือขนมปังประเภทแป้งข้าวโพดที่มีต้นกำเนิดจากแถบบอลข่าน โดยเฉพาะในประเทศเซอร์เบีย, มาซิโดเนีย, บอสเนีย และโคโซโว Proja มักเสิร์ฟเป็นอาหารข้างเคียงกับจานหลัก เช่น เนื้อย่าง ไส้กรอก หรือ ซุป หรือเสิร์ฟกับ โยเกิร์ต และ ชีส สำหรับมื้อเช้า บางครั้งก็จะมีการใส่สมุนไพรหรือชีสลงไปในเนื้อขนมปังเพื่อเพิ่มรสชาติ ลักษณะของ Proja นั้นจะเป็นขนมปังที่มีความหนานุ่ม เนื้อแน่น และมักจะมีรสชาติหวานนิดๆ หรือเค็ม ขึ้นอยู่กับสูตรและการปรุง มีรสชาติคล้ายขนมปังข้าวโพดแบบดั้งเดิม แต่เนื้อสัมผัสจะมีความเบากว่า

มื้อเช้าสไตล์บอลข่านมักจัดอย่างเรียบง่ายแต่เต็มไปด้วยรสชาติและคุณค่า โดยมีเครื่องดื่มเสริม เช่น กาแฟหรือชาสมุนไพร หรือโยเกิร์ต ส่วนบางคลิปใน tiktok จะเห็นว่ามีการดื่มน้ำมันมะกอก หรือ เอาขนมปังจิ้มน้ำมันมะกอกด้วย อันนี้เท่าที่หาข้อมูลมา ยังไม่ปรากฎว่ามีใน balkan breakfast แบบทั่วไปนัก น่าจะเป็นการประยุกต์ในยุคนี้ครับ เพราะวัตถุดิบจะใกล้เคียงกับเมดิเตอเรเนียนไดเอท รวมถึงน้ำมันมะกอกถือเป็นส่วนสำคัญของอาหารในแถบนี้ เนื่องจากพื้นที่บอลข่านบางส่วน เช่น แอลเบเนีย โครเอเชีย และมอนเตเนโกร มีการปลูกมะกอกคุณภาพสูง น้ำมันที่ได้จึงเป็นน้ำมันมะกอกบริสุทธิ์ (Extra Virgin Olive Oil) ซึ่งมีรสชาติและกลิ่นเฉพาะตัว

ใน TikTok นั้น Balkan Breakfast เป็นไวรัลคลิปได้ง่าย เพราะการถ่ายทำแบบ ASMR ที่เน้นเสียงการกินที่ดังกว่าปกติ ทำให้ดึงดูดสายตาให้หยุดดูคลิปได้ง่าย บนโต๊ะประกอบกับผักสดต่างๆเช่น แตงกวา Bell Pepper และหัวหอมใหญ่ ที่จัดเรียงบนจานร่วมกับชีส โยเกิร์ต ส่วนของบางอย่างอาจใช้ของทดแทนแบบง่ายๆเช่น ขนมปัง หรือบาแกต แทน Burek ซอสมะเขือเทศ แทน Ajvar

การกลับมาเป็นที่นิยมของ Balkan Breakfast ใน TikTok ช่วยให้วัฒนธรรมบอลข่านนี้เผยแพร่ไปทั่วโลก พร้อมแสดงให้เห็นว่าอาหารเช้าแบบ traditional สามารถผสมผสานกับไลฟ์สไตล์ยุคใหม่ได้อย่างลงตัวอยู่เหมือนกัน

บางกรณีก็บอกว่า Balkan Breakfast เป็นมื้ออาหารที่ช่วยกระตุ้นการทำงานของโพรไบโอติกส์ เนื่องจากมีโยเกิร์ตและผักต่างๆและซอสที่มีคุณสมบัติพรีไบโอติกส์รวมเข้าด้วยกัน

บางกรณีก็บอกว่าเป็นแค่แฟชั่นฉาบฉวย กินแบบไม่ตรงต้นฉบับ ต้องการแค่ของมากองๆหน้าจอแล้วกัดให้ดังๆ ซู้ดให้มีเสียงเพื่อเรียกยอดวิว

ก็เรื่องอาหารจะเช่นเดิมครับ ผมมองว่าไม่มีผิดไม่มีถูก สำหรับผมแล้วมองว่า การกินแยกกันทีละคำแบบนี้ ถ้าจับอย่างละนิดหน่อยมารวมกัน ในชิ้นเดียวก็แซนวิชดีๆนี่แหละครับ enjoy การกินแบบไหนก็แบบนั้นไปได้เลยครับ คนเรากินตามที่ชอบที่ชอบอยู่แล้วครับ คิดมากฉี่เหลือง ถ้ามองสารอาหารกรณีที่ไม่ได้ limit คาร์บ ก็ถือว่าเป็นมื้ออาหารที่ไม่แย่ กรณีถ้ามีไส้กรอกก็พยายามดูตัวที่ไม่ได้อุตสาหกรรมมาก ส่วนถ้าใคร limit คาร์บก็พึงระวัง เพราะคาร์บหนักพอสมควรเนื่องจากเน้นการให้พลังงานครับ

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