Freedom On The Internet
The first meetup was a success. I met one person who lived near me over coffee. He even runs Node and Nostr Relay. What are the odds? I assume it's really low. According to Clark Moody's dashboard, there are about 17,000 available nodes. I haven't verified this number, but this is the first person I met in the wild who runs a bitcoin node.
This gives me hope. I know starting a meetup on a little-known Internet protocol has a snowball's chance in a pizza oven of working, but I'm rationally optimistic. I saw a lot of plebs post their npubs on Saturday because the Twitter chief pissed them off. I don't know why, but it's indicative of the importance of permission-less computer networking. I used to rub my peach fuzz and think the Internet would give people power back from the corporations. TV was just a way to sell soap, drugs, and cars. The corporations didn't even let you use the word "ass." Then they had experts like Colin Powell tell us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I didn't believe him because I watched the videos of trucks and warehouses, but evidence of trucks and warehouses is not evidence of weapons. Who was the conspiracy theorist? Me, or Colin Powell? I thought the Internet would fix this. I was active on MySpace and there were no ads.
Then Facebook happened. Then Instagram, which had no ads at first, until it got bought by facebook. Then Facebook experimented with affecting people's moods. . Things got strange. In 2016, the Donkey team accused Russians of influencing the elections. [Cambridge Analytica did some fuckery]9https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Elections) I don't fully understand, allegedly influencing elections is the US, Australia, India, Kenya, Matla, Mexico, and the UK. In 2020, the Elephant team accused the elections of being rigged. So for about 8 years, a significant portion of the united states as not trusted the results of an election. What do you think the odds of distrust in this upcoming election? I wouldn't bet many sats on it going smoothly.
"A third point is the confirmation of the central role that former spies played in October 2020 in framing the Hunter Biden story in a way that made it easier for Twitter and Facebook to justify their censorship." (Wall Street Journal)
When you zoom out, you realize this is not just about American politics. Similar things are happening all over the world. One day, you see riots in Shi Lanka. A few months later riots in France. Many people blame free speech, but what is free about the algorithms? Facebook also has the right to write code. Code is speech, cypherpunks write code. In my opinion, Facebook is bad speech. The answer to bad speech is more speech Nostr is more speech, better speech in my opinion.
"Cryptography is a surprisingly political technology. In recent years, it has become more so, with the controversy surrounding the Government's Clipper chip, the FBI wiretap legislation, export controls on cryptographic software, and the balance of power between a government and its people. Historically, cryptography has been used mainly by governments for diplomatic and military traffic. But with the coming of the information age, ubiquitous personal computers, modems, and fax machines, this is changing. With an emerging global economy depending more and more on digital communication, ordinary people and companies need cryptography to protect their everyday communications. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies want access to all of our communications, to catch people who break the law, and detect threats to National Security. Civil libertarians want to keep the Government out of our private communications, to protect our privacy and maintain a healthy democracy."
--Phil Zimmermann
Nostr Fixes This
I don't like talking about politics because so many people are programmed to get triggered when you mention certain hot-button topics, but it's possible to use cryptography in a way to preserve freedom. The Twitter files revealed government censorship on the blue bird app. This is relevant to us because public key cryptography because there are no twitter files. The government needs to censor all the relays, not just a single corporation that is too afraid to pay for advertising on shows that use the word "shit." It's time we start thinking of using technology in terms of the Sovereign Individual. Normies debate weather or not a web developer or graphic designer should be compelled to write code or create art they don't agree with. Meanwhile, I used free and open source software to make my own webpage, but if you don't know HTML, Chat GPT does. I made most of the photos using Stable Diffusion. Apple can ban zaps from their apps, but can they ban SamSamskies from writing code?
Until nostr, we didn't have freedom on corporate-controlled, government-censored social media. This is not a blog about politics. It's about communication. I don't want the red team or the blue team to control what the public may or may not see.. I do not wish to be booted from Meetup.com again because I do not identify the color of my skin, my email address, or the name my mother gave me I'm not joining an apple pod bitcoin meetup. I want free speech and freedom from undue influence. It's not that I'm mad at meetup.com. They are a company and can do anything they want, but so am I. There is not a real person named meetup.com just like my mother did not name me blogging bitcoin. I'm amazed that anybody showed up to this meetup at all. It was an awesome experience. It's nice to have freedom on the Internet once again.
Fix the Internet, fix the world wide web.
Snowden Is Back
Edward Snowden was exiled to Russia by the United States Government. He wrote a book titled Permanent Record. The US government confiscated the proceeds of that book. Now he gets zapped on a censorship-resistant communications protocol named nostr.*
Some hate him. Some think he's a hero. Regardless what you think, Snowden did not make a dime from his book; but he gets zapped for notes.
If Edward Snowden can get zapped, they can't stop us.
I would be lying if I said I didn't like NGU, but that's the least interesting thing about bitcoin.
I'm not flying to Washington. I won't write my congressman or bribe my senator to overturn the laws that allow the government to censor the proceeds of books in the United States , but I have the option to zap a man who was exiled to Russia. I'm not a drug dealer, and you probably aren't one either. Maybe it's not such a good idea to use your real name, address, and credit cards to sign up for ubiquitous websites in case they deem sending 1 penny to someone is illegal. IT might be a worse crime than growing marijuana flowers. Be careful. Don't accidentally zap the wrong citizen of the world if you have a blue check.
Says the Elephant Skeleton, "Ban the abortion pill!"
Says the Donkey Skeleton, "Guns will kill!"
Yes, [we will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography,] but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.” ~ (Satoshi Nakamoto)
Bitcoin is freedom money, but freedom isn't free. You have to fight for it. You can't just send your bitcoin to BlockFi or Bitconnect 2.0 and wave your bitcoin goodbye. 👋 You must insist on self custody. Use collaborative custody if you need hand-holding. You can't expect to be an expert chart doodler and digital art curator if you do not know the difference between these two jpegs.
That's why my meetup is bitcoin only.
Nostr makes it easy to teach people proper key management with lower stakes. I think creating a nostr key and joining our meetup chatroom is good practice for holding your own bitcoin keys. If you screw it up, at least you won't lose your life savings.
Eventually, I will probably capitulate and join Meetup.com like Neo went back into the Matrix. If so, I still want to use Nostr to post the location of meetups. Even cottage cheese sushi swappers should learn how to use Nostr. They can get a taste of freedom before making their next trade on rug-pull-my-crypto.exchange. They'll come back when rug-pull-my-etf.com screws them over.
Blogging Bitcoin
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sauces
Author's preface to the book: "PGP Source Code and Internals
[The New Libertarian Manifesto[