Why I Write On Nostr
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I started writing this blog two years ago. It's my third attempt at writing a bitcoin blog. I My Economics teacher in High Schools was part owner of a small bank before changing careers. He taught us how little one needs to start a bank because of a concept called fractional reserve banking. I felt it was an unfair system, but powerless to do anything about it. This was about 735,840 ten minute intervals before January 3rd, 2009, give or take.
309,334 blocks after the genesis block, I heard about it on the Joe Rogan Experience and went down the rabbit hole. I used it as my poker bankroll because I lost a little money trusting it with Full Tilt Poker. After about six months of stacking, I heard Wences Casares say there is a 50% chance bitcoin will reach a price of $1,000,000 within 15-20 years on block 366,235. I told my then girlfriend(now wife), "I know this sounds crazy, but there's a decent chance this bitcoin thing I've been using to play online poker with will be worth a million bucks in like 20 years. It would be a mistake to not save some. "
The poker site converted my bitcoin to fiat to save me from the volatility. I made about a .03% return on my poker playing skills, but the price of bitcoin doubled so I stopped playing online poker and took self custody of my bitcoin. I then played small no limit hold em cash home games, 4-8 Limit Hold Em with a Kill at San Manuel, and a tournament at Pechanga about once a month. If I won, I would deposit the cash into my bank account and buy more bitcoin on coinbase until they sent me a nasty letter. If I lost, the sats were gone, but we didn't use the term 'sats" back then. The casino games were much softer. I made about the minimum wage in those days. I always felt embarrassed about how little I made, but in retrospect, I'll never make that much money again. Few understand this.
I also use bitcoin everyday. Back then I sent 'a buck a show' to Dan Carlin. Each "buck" must be worth more than $200 today. I once took a trip to San Francisco in 2015 and asked the poor woman at the Golden Gate toll booth, "Do you accept bitcoin?"
"No, what's that?" she asked.
My wife still tells this story to her friends. They laughed at me for a few years. I talked about it so much, my daughter bought me this shirt in 2020.
I went to my brother in law's bachelor party around block 347,801 and spread the good news about bitcoin. I've never seen a stripper look so bored. She said, "So do you like buy drugs on the Internet?”
My wife got tired of me talking about bitcoin, so she suggested I write about it online and join bitcoin groups online. I decided to write about using bitcoin.
I still think bitcoin is the greatest thing since sliced gold, but most people don't want to talk about bitcoin. They like to talk about how many fiat fuckery bucks they can buy with 100 million sats. Fiat is boring unfair and buys less and less stuff. I don't want to read about fiat prices. I don't want to read how bitcoin is useless water boiling technology, so I decided to write about how I use bitcoin everyday.
I earned a B.A. in creative writing.
The alarm ringtone on my phone is a reading of "So You Want To Be A Writer,” by Charles Bukowski My wife got tired of me talking about bitcoin, so she suggested I write about it and join bitcoin groups online.
In high school, my favorite book was Tropic of Cancer. It was banned in the United States until 1973 when he won Miller vs. California which overturned obscenity laws and strengthened the first amendment. Guess I've always been a first amendment maxi. It's why I love Phil Zimmermann's story. It's one reason I write on nostr. Why I believe nostr is important. Why I don't like the government interfering with corporate social media. Why the government should free Jullian Assange. Why I enjoy finding creative ways to use swear words.
"If you can't say fuck, then you can't say fuck the government."
--Lenny Bruce
TikTok Next Block
I sometimes see Xwitter BTC maxis say things like
- "I don't understand nostr."
- "The juice is not worth the squeeze"
- :"Nostr is like yelling buy bitcoin in the closet,"
I won't name names, but they say nostr is unimportant. The fight for better money belongs on the corporate controlled platforms. I disagree. Nostr is freedom of speech protected by a communications protocol. In other words, bitcoin computer networking nerds using their computer networking skills to build a censorship resistant communications protocol. We achieve this with cryptography, but it is not another one of those blockchain pump n dump schemes you may have heard about on YouTube.
I don't watch the news much, but I heard Congress passed a bill to ban TikTok. It still just a bill on the hill or however that song goes, but it's pretty alarming . By the way, back in the day, I subscribed to Rolling Stone just to read [Matt Tiabbi](Matthew Taibbi) . I got to teach him to download wallet of satoshiabout a year ago. I hope he still has access to those sats.
I've never Tiked nor Toked, but like it or not: Code is speech. TikTok developers write code. I may not agree with this code, but how the hell should I know? It's not open source. All social media should be open source. If it's a threat to national security that is. If it's a security hole, we need as many people as we can get reading the code. "See something, say something, but don't read that insecure code," might not be the most game theoretically optimal way to protect national security. That's just my two sats.
Am I concerned the CCP has access to American's information? Sure, but I'm also concerned that American corporations have access to American's information. Those corporations are notoriously bad at keeping this information secure. Forcing the sale of a Chinese corporation to an American corporation does not fix this.
Bitcoin taught me the most important thing you can do to keep information safe is to keep it off the Internet. Giving Corporations your phone number, address, political affiliations, address, and selfies of your inner thighs is no way to safeguard private information. I would support a bill that requires all social media platforms to stop collecting all personal data. I also want to ride a unicorn, but there's nothing I can do about that either, but I can write on nostr.
Can the Chinese Communist Party use TikTok to manipulate US elections? I'd bet a hundred sats they can. I'd bet you a thousand sats they can use American social media platforms to do the same thing.
Nostr is not a platform controlled by a single cabal. It allows us to create connections on the Internet without giving anyone our email address, credit card number, the secret 3 digit code on the back of our credit cards required to spend fiat on the Internet. You literally must give your keys to the corporations so they can collect a monthly fee like a tax. Nostr does not ask for a phone number. If China steals my nostr key, they won't even get my legal name.
How did we get here? The red team and the blue team can't agree on anything except who should be in charge of the Federal Reserve and TikTok must be sold. It's almost as if the two old fart candidates were pre-ordained. It certainly wasn't up for debate. So far, neither candidate participated in one of those.
I suspect the censoring algorithms are the real Matrix, Why else has political discourse been reduced to trivial low time preference issues. We're manipulated into arguing about pronouns, race, and class, but not to talk to each other like human beings. On nostr, you can have a cordial conversation and send sats to transgendered people, black people. white people(even white people living in Russia), expats living in China, and billionaire's alike. We don't talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion because we include the whole world and consider each other peers.
The the political arena is a shit-show. They talk about low time preference problems on stage. What other problems can a president in his 80’s solve? What will they do about the 34.5 trillion dollar problem? Another glittering generality, another budget double the size of all the wealth the billionaire's own?
We, The People of the world speak on nostr.
The answer to safeguarding American, or any other citizen of the world's information is simple: DON'T GIVE IT TO AWAY. If it's so important the Chinnese Communist Party be denied access to this information, the information is also too sensitive to be trusted with American corporations. What if the CCP were to hack Twitter? This is not so far fetched. The platform was hacked before.
DISCLAIMER: Do not send bitcoin to people old enough to have sent more snail mail than email, especially if they say they will double your bitcoin.-- This is not financial advice, but in case you didn't know, Those things are always scams.*
Every Bitcoiner worth his or her sats knows you must assume anything you put on the Internet is pwned. For those of you born before WWII, that means you must assume criminals and foreign adversaries possess that information. That's why any bitcoiner worth his or her sats doesn't keep their bitcoin keys in the cloud. If you want our data out of the hands of the CCP, you must assume the American corporate social media will eventually get hacked by the CCP. When this happens, passing the Dear Commy China Party Don't Use Our Data Against Us Pretty Please law won't help.
Or, we could just use social media without putting our sensitive data on the line. We could use a censorship resistant communications protocol that doesn't require an email or password. We can own our own content. We can cryptographically notarize everything we write. They can't manipulate my algorithms because their are no algorithms. There is no corporation to force sell. Well...there's a 501c nonprofit corporation that funds some of the devs, and Jack Dorsey is damn generous, but that's not the same thing.
That's why I write on nostr.
Stay Free 🤙
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