Are You Using Bitcoin?
Are You Using Bitcoin?
Joshua Sheets had this great question about using alternatives to the dollar. If you are really worried about the loss of the USD reserve currency status, you should use the Yuan, gold, or bitcoin. He is absolutely correct. Here is the clip. You can use bitcoin by liking that clip and sending me sats. My likes are set at 25 sats. This is not much money. I am not buying a house with 25 sats just yet even though CK thinks 37 sats will one day be generational wealth.
I recently posted some of my first blogs from Ghost on nostr. In one of my first articles, I wrote about asking for 250 sats for every article. At the time, that was worth about ten cents. Today it would be about 8 cents and the value has gone up and down during that year. It wasn't my best ideas, but it made me think about how I value other people's blogs and micro-blogs. I agree with Joshua Sheets. Bitcoin will not an cannot become the world's reserve currency if nobody ever uses it.
Hodl never Sodl was a great mantra, and one I wholeheartedly agree with, but Hodler's need to set a side a certain number of sats and spend them. The world currently looks at bitcoin as a speculative asset bought and sold by degen nerds. You have seen these people, haven't you? You probably have some of them in your family. They are the people rolling their eyes at you every time you bring up the b word. The problem is that you speak of bitcoin as an investment, something that will be worth mucho dollars someday. When someday comes, you will presumably sell your bitcoin for dollars. That's what most bitcoin nerds talk about, right?
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I have been thinking about earning sats instead of dollars for about five years now. I saw the lighting network emerge and could see the potential., but 5 years ago, it wasn't built up enough. Running a node was difficult. It was slow. Payments failed about half the time. There were no lightning addresses back then and even when they were live, Not many people had lightning addresses. It was really hard 5 years ago. I gave up setting up BTCpayServer on the clear net for several months because using putty seemed like trekking the Oregon Trail without dying of dysentery.
It got easier. You can now set up a BTCpayServer with one click for ten backed by nothing fiat bucks per month on Luna Node. They even take bitcoin. This is not an ad. They don't pay me to say this.
Nostr Changes This
21,000 blocks ago, most Bitcoiners didn't post lightning addresses on their Twitter handles. Even the few who did almost never saw anyone use them. You had to stop scrolling through Twitter and copy and paste the lightning address into Phoenix or Wallet of Satoshi. There was too much friction. It took too much effort to zap anyone.
Suddenly, lightning addresses are so ubiquitous on nostr, we have Zapathons. I'm still not sure what this means, but I think it's indicative of a growing number of people who are able to receive bitcoin using the lightning network. This means even micro-bloggers and meme makers can collect zaps.
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We also have software developers developing clients, relays relaying relays, boosts, likes, AI pictures oh my!
I started writing this blog because many people wrote about what bitcoin is or how many dollars it is worth or will be worth in the future, but very few people actually wrote about using it. Now zaps are a thing. Zaps are not something I can write. They are something you need to see, so I made a video . If a picture is worth a thousand words, hopefully this video is worth at least a thousand sats.
My Zaps
In a perfect orange world, bitcoin is the unit of account, but this is just not the case. A year ago, 250 sats was about 10¢. Now it's about a 7¢. If Balaji is right, that will be worth $2.50 in a few months. I don't think he's right. I also don't even look at the price of bitcoin all that much.
I think the solution is to set a budget. I had a bitcoin budget, but these zaps have made me to redo this budget. I want to spend 100,000 sats per month. The idea is to spend and replace this every month. It's not much money right now, but we all expect 100,000 sats will one day be $1,000 bucks, don't we?
I will zap people
* 21 sats to micro blogs I like.
* 210 sats for a boost.
- 500 sats for photos I like
- 1000 sats for using a photo
* 1000 sats for helping me solve a problem.
* 2,100 for a boostagram
Zaps First, Houses Later
Sheets says we should worry about the dollar losing the reserve status when your neighbors start selling their houses for bitcoin. As bullish as I am, we are not quite there yet. the zapathons make it obvious. On the other hand, I am also not aware of anybody sending gold through the mail to random people they meet online either. I do not know of anywhere that allows people to buy gift cards with gold either. I am not an expert on gold, so if you have heard of these things, please let me know. That sounds interesting. I might read a blog written by someone who uses gold to pay people every day. That would be a subscribe worthy blog.
Thanks for reading.
Blogging Bitcoin
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