This is a second test of obsidian on nostr. I prefer the nostr blog clients to write long form notes, but I want to see what this looks like. Testing LInk

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Sed mi turpis, ~~tristique at venenatis id, scelerisque a libero. Sed non est elit. ~~ Pellentesque pulvinar quam ac dolor mollis suscipit sollicitudin id erat. Phasellus imperdiet posuere pharetra. Morbi luctus, massa at suscipit tincidunt, purus libero dignissim diam, ut convallis eros neque sed turpis. Cras eleifend vitae enim in vestibulum.

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I've been writing this blog as a nym for about a year. I like to wear a mask because my real life job is in an area wear most people get most of their information from MSNBC. To most of my co-workers, bitcoin is boiling the oceans, making people sick, and using more energy than the entire shithole country of whatever. Why would I want to use a cryptocurrency that destoys the planet when it only does 7 transactions per second? To them, bitcoin is evil because a noble prize winning economists said so. It is also useless, but used by criminals.

I got tired of hearing about quantum computing and other ridiculous arguments so I began writing about how I use bitcoin over the lightning network everyday. I followed K3tan's guide and set up a blog on a virtual private network. Then I used Yunohost on a raspberry pi until I learned about blogstack. Suddenly, I could host a blog without paying a monthly fee or becoming a Linux Systems Administrator.

I have also started coming out of my shell. I started a meetup and began meeting other hard-core bitcoiners and teaching Coinbasers how to take self-custody, why video games on a blockchain are scams, and how bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange.

Alby Hub is lightning-node software that Get Alby sells as a service. It's also free and open source. You can run it on a node such as Umbrel or Start9. I even was able to run it on Ubuntu. I was lucky enough to try the Alby Hub early. I even tested the software as a service before it was released to the public. I "forgot my password," though. Actually, I never knew it. I use VaultWarden as a password manager and copy and paste all my passphrases. I was in a Jitsi meeting. You know how it is. Bitcoiners are super interesting smart people. I got distracted talking to these smart people and must have copied and pasted the wrong passphrase because...I got distracted. I opened a channel and then got locked out. It's my fault. I take complete responsibility. I take complete responsibility. I hadn't even written down my seed phrase yet.

I didn't lose any sats though; aside from the 10,000 sats, it cost me to open up the channel. This is because I am very careful about sending larger sums of bitcoin to wallets before I write down the seed or test them. I might send 21,000 SATs or something like that to see if I can recover them before I send more. We used to say "don't be reckless," but that ethos can get lost in all the excitement of this cutting-edge technology we call the lightning network. If I sent thousands of dollars of bitcoin to this Alby Hub wallet I was beta testing, those sats would have been HODLED forever. It is important to use new technology with small amounts of bitcoin. It is important to use new technology with small amounts of bitcoin." This way, you mitigate your risk of a catastrophic loss. This is especially true if you ever find yourself beta-testing.

The Bright Side of Forgetting My Passphrase on Alby Hub

)

There is an orange lining to this story. The other beta tester in the meeting got it to work. He played a game called Zappy Bird. This is not an endorsement of Zappy Bird. I think it's a gambling version of Flappy Bird. I am not a gamer, and I would just lose my seat if I played this for any length of time. This allowed me to see the possibilities of Alby Hub, however, even though I screwed up my first try. My mother, like many of your mothers, I'm sure, always said, "If at first you don't succeed, then try again."

" Even though it didn't work for me at first, I got a glimpse into how awesome Alby Hub was anyway. Even though it didn't work for me at first, I got a glimpse into how awesome Alby Hub was anyway. That motivated me to try again. The second time I Alby Hub on PopOS! by following the instructions on the README file. That worked. It was surprisingly easy, but we were in the early days, and my channel was force closed. The issue seems to be fixed now that it's released to the public. I'm amazed at how much cleaner it is now. I also had a few other problems connecting my node to my Alby account because it was connected to the original node. The good people at Get Alby fixed that, however. I'm really impressed with their customer service. Screwing up my first node gave me the opportunity to learn this about the company.

Screwing up my first node gave me the opportunity to learn this about the company. I continued to use the GetAlby API during this time. I continued to use the GetAlby API during this time. I thought API's were super scary. 3 I don't even know what API stands for. Thanks to some of the people like Bitkarrot from Plebnet.dev, I am comfortable using them. A few weeks ago, I was able to make some video tutorials that teach businesses how to accept bitcoin. I am aware most businesses prefer fiat. It occurred to me: why would a business care if the fiat in their bank account comes from Strike or Mastercard? Of course, businesses that want to accept bitcoin can keep the sats. One business owner I know who is listed on BTCmaps did not want to use Strike because he liked seeing the stats on his phone.

Get Alby On Umbrel Or Start9

As I eluded to earlier, you can now run GetAlby on Start9 or Umbrel. They have videos and guides in[ ]this tutorial](https://guides.getalby.com/user-guide/v/alby-account-and-browser-extension/alby-hub/alby-hub-flavors/umbrel-start9-etc). If you already have one of these machines laying around and are comfortable getting your fingers dirty in the command line, you should try it. If not, you should try the software as a service. If you're a command-line ninja, run it on Ubutnu. Don't be reckless. Only use amounts you are willing to lose. Ably doesn't have access to your seeds, but it is still a hot wallet. It is also still very new. Expect bugs. Expect channel closures. Don't just be a whinny complainy-pant about it. Help improve it. Make a pull request if you must. If you are not as technical. Don't worry. They plan to be on the Umbrel and Start9 app stores soon.

Alby Hub on Umbrel or Start 9 require the Lightning Node app. If you self-hose, your seed is on your Lightning Node app. Write these 24 words down and keep them safe. You will need these to recover your bitcoin in case something breaks. If you use the cloud service, follow the directions to back up your keys here. Opening a channel is easy. You just send the 10,000 sats or whatever the fee is to open it. It's a node in the cloud service similar to voltage, I suppose. To be honest, I'm not sure how it works on the back end, but this abstracts away much of the complexities of running your own lightning node. You don't need to worry about finding a node to connect to, inbound liquidity, or balancing channels. That's like full-time IT work. Alby Hub makes running a lightning node easy-peasy lemon squeezy. Alby Hub makes running a lightning node easy-peasy lemon squeezy. This opens bitcoiners up to a world of possibilities.

Why I Am So Excited About Alby Hub

Although I did some beta testing for GetAlby's Alby Hub, I didn't receive any sats from them aside from a couple zaps here and there, but this is not a paid ad or sponsored blogpost. I don't think I can make a better guide than they have on their website. I am excited about Alby Hub because it makes accepting bitcoin so easy. I am excited about Alby Hub because it makes accepting bitcoin so easy. I'm not sure your grandmother could do it, but most computer-literate people could easily run Alby Hub. But wait... There's more.

Thanks to these wonderful people on nostr, I learned how to find my keys in the lightning node of my Umbrel. This also means my lightning node works for other apps besides Alby Hub. It also works with the LNbits installed on my Umbrel. I bet it works with BTCpayServer too, but I haven't verified this yet. This means businesses will soon be able to accept bitcoin by:

• Buying a $400 minicomputer like Umbrel or Start9 ($800).
• • Using Alby Hub in the Cloud and integrating it into other clients that use Nostr Wallet Connect
• • Setting up an online bitcoin store on Shopster or Plebeian Market will be easy.
• -+ The Uncle Jim Model just got 10x easier.

For example, what if I sold LNBit's POS extension and gave someone access to use my LNBits as a POS? shop could use LNBits as a POS terminal all of a sudden. I could build a bitcoin POS system for a local business using old comouters in my strategic computer reserve. Okay, I admit it. I'm a computer hoarder. I never recycle old computers unless they are unrepairable. There are so many ways to use the lightning network now. Find out more at https://getalby/hub. We can use these tools in creative ways. What if, instead of using BTCpayServer to help businesses accept bitcoin, we create a BTCpayServer-like product list on Shopster instead?

Using Alby Hub to Monetize My Blog

As I thought more about this, it occurred to me I should start a business with all of this stuff. Some people at my local meetup have asked me to help them set up a lightning node. Tools exist that make it easy enough to do consulting for anyone over tools like Keet or Hivetalk.org/. I also want to sell T-shirts. I've had the idea to sell bitcoin t-shirts that say Pay Me In Bitcoin. This one time, I played poker in Vegas during Def-Con. I was there for poker at the time. I've never been to DefCon. Some nerd had a QR code on his T-shirt. I'm not sure what it was. It was the first time I ever saw a QR code.

I was able to design this T-shirt with the help of Dell E 3. I'm using some of the techniques I learned in the 4-hour workweek to design this shirt, but instead of hiring a graphic designer in a third-world country, I hired computer power from PayPerQ. A website I learned about on getalby.com. Around the time of the halving, some dude at my job asked me if I think he'll ever be able to afford a whole bitcoin for each of his kids. I said I didn't know. He told me he makes way more than my family, but he hasn't started stacking SATs yet. He also told me he pays for Chat GPT because it is "only $30 a month." That's $360 of sats he could have stacked per year. I wouldn't be surprised if $360 stacked in bitcoin is worth $3,600 in five years.

Many people who say they will never spend bitcoin often spend money on other fiat things because they were raised with a hyper-consumer mental framework. Many others think AI will kill us like the Terminator, but people like Andreas Antonopolis and Paul Vigna wrote books about bitcoin getting used as a medium of exchange for AI almost a decade ago. The lightning network was clunky and difficult back when I first ran a MyNode and entered my public key into yalls.org to write about bitcoin. I bought a sticker from Blockstream with the Eclair Wallet back then, but it was hard to see how the lightning network could come over the technical hurdles for the majority of the people.

Tools like Alby Hub give me hope for the future. I listened to Natalie Brunell's Coin Stories this morning. The guest is a gold bug. She said something my wife is even still concerned with. The government will never allow bitcoin to be used for payments. They will capture it before this happens.

She is right in a sense. I am sure the governments of the world will not want to give up the power to print money and expand and contract the economy as they see fit. The digital alternative to central banking will not be welcomed by governments. Plebs build it anyway. The government of the United States has the most powerful weapons ever known to humankind. This government has an arsenal big enough to destroy the world many times over. I'm not certain bitcoin will survive an existential event such as this. I do not doubt the POTUS could Executive Order 6102.2 every Saturday in the ETF's overnight. To ban tools that make it easy to use the bitcoin lightning network as payments requires banning computers and banning software distributed all over the world. It seems like governments would have a difficult time banning computers.

Now that I think of it, Natalie Brunel could use Alby Hub to accept steaming sats and boosts to her podcast. She can host it in the cloud or on a plug and play node like Umbrel or Start9.

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Merch

I began writing this blog before zaps existed. I used the LNBits demo version to create a tip jar I added to the end of my blogs on Ghost. I didn’t make a ton of sats, but it felt great to get tips every now and then. We will get back to this tip jar in a minute, but in the beginning, I wrote about my half-assed attempts to orange pill merchants at my local farmers market. I didn’t have a plan. I just walked up to random women selling zucchini and asked, “do you accept bitcoin?”

Out of a hundred people I asked, only one person said yes.

I now to to a brewery that accepts bitcoin using the Aqua Wallet. This works, but we haven't figured out how to allow him to accept bitcoin when the owner of the brewery isn't there. I think I found the answer. The brewer can print out a QR code with a single Liquid address. Anyone with the address can see the amount of fees paid on each transaction. They will see how many transactions were associated with this address, but they won't be able to see the amounts of the transaction. The butcher can buy a beer using this address. The baker can also buy a beer with this address. The brewer knows how much the baker and the butcher paid, but the baker cannot see the amount the butcher paid and vice-versa.

The employees will also not be able to see how much customers pay, but the baker can reveal the amount by clicking the View unblinded transaction in Explorer.

The amount paid is shown on the sent page, so the bartender(an employee of the brewer) can verify the payment went through as well as the total amount. Of course the amount is denominated in L-BTC. If the bartender needs to know how much this amount of sats is worth in dirty fiat, she can use the sats converter webpage from plebnet.dev. In this example, 1,838 sats equals $1.07 at the time of this writing. We simply convert the decimal to sats by removing all the zeros. This is very easy and requires very little technical know-how.

Coinos

nostr:naddr1qqr5wmzcvedysnczyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcg02j4f

We can also create a Point of Sale Service. Coinos is the easiest way to do this and they charge a very small fee. also creates a nostr key. You could use this to advertise your business on nostr, a decentralized communications protocol where a lot of people who like spending bitcoin on the Internet hang out. You can also use Coinos to obtain a lightning address. Lightning addresses look like an email address, but people send you sats instead. Here is a 16 minute video I created to teach you how to use Coinos as a bitcoin payment terminal. Coinos

nostr:naddr1qqr5wmzcvedysnczyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcg02j4f

BTCpayServer

BTCpayServer let's you set up bitcoin wallets in several interesting ways. You can use Greenlight to create a self custodial lightning wallet using a key made of 12 valid BIP39 words(also known as a regular bitcoin wallet). There's no need to find liquidity or run any specialized hardware. I suppose you don't even need to run a node, but you should do that anyway. The easiest way to set up BTCpayServer is to deploy it on LunaNode. This is my favorite way to run it because it has the best uptime and gives me the least headaches. It costs about $15.00 per month which adds up to $180 per year. That get's expensive over a while.

You can also run it on a $400 computer from Umbrel too. I can only get the payments to work on my local network and TOR however. I learned how to host it on the clearnet(also known as the normal Internet) using CloudFlare, but the payments won't work on BTCpayServer for some reason.

I was also able to run LNBits on the clearnet using Start9 but this instance does not allow us to install the required plugins we need to run these fancy nodes in the cloud. It is the same instance that you see on the BTCpayServer Demo site. I'm not sure why they are different. This is not a complaint My Start9 is a bad ass computer. It also lets me host websites out of my closet on the clearnet.

BTCpayServer has several interesting features.

• Sell downloadable tutorials
• Instantly convert bitcoin to dollars(or your local national currency) using the Strike plugin
• Run a Custodial Lightning Wallet in the cloud using Greenlight.
• Create a store on Shopify or WordPress
• Automatically delete customer information every two weeks.

BTCpayServer is for those who want to run a bad ass bitcoiner business for bitcoiners by bitcoiners.

How To Use BTCpayServer with the Strike API

nostr:naddr1qqr4q3m9fe34wdgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsygr4hu34xxhflxxx9x2m5pcereygat28t96nw8tr6l0ag677r0agj5psgqqqskasw0nrwh

How To Use BTCpayServer with Greenlignt with the Breez Plugin

nostr:naddr1qqr4jsmv2e6n2tgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejsygr4hu34xxhflxxx9x2m5pcereygat28t96nw8tr6l0ag677r0agj5psgqqqskassqw0d5

LNBits

LNBits has a new feature. It allows us to sell our software as a service. We can become an uncle Jim. I run an instance of LNBits using an API from getalby. I also have the GetAlby Hub, but have not switched API's yet. We can also use other API's like from ZBD or opennode. I run mine on Start9 and it works over the clearnet, although I hope to use a reverse TOR proxy soon. It's easy to run on an old Linux computer. They have great docs If you don't want to bother with that, you can also run this on Start9 or Umbrel.

Sell Extentions As A Service

The most interesting thing about LNBits is that it allows you to sell software as a service. This is a little known fact, but it's an interesting way to turn our nodes into a software as a service business. Bitkarrot mentioned this on this episode of Bitcoin Audible. Ben Arc also announced it on Citadel Dispatch. I'm going to sell extensions for 10,000 sats. I don't expect to make much money. I would consider myself lucky if I earned enough to buy a cup of coffee, but this is an interesting concept. Keep in mind, this is a custodial service. I use an Alby API. Don't keep to many sats on this. Treat it like a cash register. You You should withdraw your sats to self custody every day like a business empty's it's cash register out every day and puts the cash in a safe.

LNBits POS Tutorial

nostr:naddr1qqrkcaj5xqchyugzyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcr947q9

If you want to accept bitcoin at a shop, try it here.

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Fiat is my only shitcoin. I am a shitcoin minimalist. The problem is, most people don’t want bitcoin. Most corporations are fiat maxis. Most business owners are fiat maxis. To be honest, most bitcoiners care more about the fiat price than running a node. Most bitcoiners also feel as if they don’t have enough, myself included. The problem with using bitcoin as a medium of exchange is the coincidence of wants. Bitcoiners don’t want to spend bitcoin. Shops want fiat. There is no coincidence of wants. The corporations don’t want to mess around with converting their payment terminals into a bitcoin accepting machine.

• They don’t want to spend time training employees how to use bitcoin.
• They Think it’s bad for the environment unless you mine bitcoin with Tesla batteries or something.
• It’s too slow.
• There are only 7 transactions per second…

They’re wrong, but the suits are still stuck with 2015 arguments.

I still believe we can use the lightning network to pay for coffee. This can be done very easily. I will not need every business around me to accept bitcoin. I don’t need them to HODL. I just need about ten places near me, where I can spend my bitcoin.

Strike Tried To Fix This

A couple years ago, Jack Mallers told Matt Odell we would soon be buying groceries at WholeFoods and cheeseburgers at Wendy’s. He built it like the Field of Dreams, but they didn’t come. It could totally work, but they just don’t get it and like Satoshi said, “If you don’t get it or don’t believe me, I’m sorry, I don’t have time to convince you.”

https://fountain.fm/clip/rOwhyibbPOTehTXSfwPY

Maybe we can't buy overpriced groceries at Whole Foods yet, but it is possible to add Strike to some payment terminals like Clover. How would that work though? “Hi. I’ve listened to more bitcoin podcasts than anybody you know. May I please hack your Clover machine so I pay you in bitcoin?”

It's not going to work.

I know the government collects a sales tax( A.K.A. capital gains). According to the chapwood index, inflation is not much less than this sales tax where I live. It was even higher than 15% for a while. The point is, I want to spend bitcoin. Fewer businesses accept bitcoin than American Express. There is no coincidence of wants and most business owners don’t want me hacking their point of sale machines.

BTCpaySigns

Bitcoin is awesome, but few understand this. Most people don’t want to put in the 100 hours to learn about bitcoin. It’s a sign of the times. Speaking of signs, most businesses understand them. Here are businesses that sell signs to no-coiners. People like signs. I read that most people choose fast food restaurants by signs in Fast Food Nation. Signs are an old idea. We see then on the road and at brick and mortar businesses.

Apps are also ubiquitous. It occurred to me that I can pay a shopkeeper by using a lightning address they obtain from Strike. I can also pay them with their Strike Tipping page at https://stike.me/theirstrikeusername. For example, you can send the personwith the username Odell sats on strike at https://strike.me/odell. I haven't verified this username belongs to the person behind npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx. Regardless, the business owner receives the sats right away, but he or she can choose to accept incoming payments in bitcoin or fiat. Of course, I think they should keep the sats and put them into self-custody, but I don’t have time to convince anybody.

Here is an example of how this sign works.

My goal is to find 10 local small business that will allow me to pay for coffee, groceries, or hamburgers using bitcoin. I'm not trying to orange pill Starbucks. I want other people to do this too.

Here's the plan.

1. Onboard a local business onto Strike. Show them how to use it. Don't try to convince them. Let them accept dollars or bitcoin. If they choose dollars and bitcoin does what we think it will, we won't need to convince them.

2. Make them a sign, or buy one from https://btcpaysigns.com and I will make you one. I'll just need the Strike Username.

3. Pay with bitcoin. If you prefer to pay with fiat, for tax purposes, or because you don't hace enough bitcoin, use the Strike app yourself. You can also keep fiat on the Stike app while using the ligntning network as a payment rail. It will turn your dirty fiat into bitcoin and give the business owner the form of payment they prefer.

4. Bring them business. Bring a meetup to the business. Put them on BTCpayMaps.org. Let all the bitcoiners you know they accept bitcoin. If accepting bitcoin does not bring the business more customers, they will not have an incentive to adopt the bitcoin standard.

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I saw this post
and wrote this long rant in response so I decided to post it as a long-form article.

I read the declaration of independence and the u.s. constitution on the 4th of july every year for like 7 years, until 2020.

the people of the enlightenment had such great ideas. money had to be minted from gold and silver. it wasn't a bad rile, it's just the government decided not to follow that rule. or maybe they were incapable of following that rule. it didn't scale.

the post office was the best idea to facilitate private communication. people like james madison and thomas jefferson obtained even higher levels of privacy using encryption like the jefferson wheel. the founders, in many ways were analog cypherpunks. that's why we have the bill of rights. the anti-federalists fought for those rights and won...for a little while.

people forgot about cryptography. they started using email. private communication became part of history. when was the last time you sent a letter over snail mail? you might send a christmas card here or there, but the biggest ad companies in the world are like santa clause. he knows whe you are sleeping. he knows when you're awake. he knows whrn you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

cbdc's are a real political issue nowadays. it's strange. it's not as if the masses started reading david chaum or something. they don't want cbdc's, but how is that system much different than credit cards?

frankly, most people don't give a damn, but they feel as if they can't get ahead. the complain about inflation, but take nonsteps to save fiat. why would they? saving fiat means getting less stuff in the future.

satoshi thought #bitcoin could help people achieve freedom.

i view bitcoin and public key cryptography as a way to achieve the rights guaranteed by the us constitution on the internet...at least for a little while, but if we do it right, we can achieve freedom for a long time. one time, i bought a tv. then i tried to buy groceries the same day and my credit card wouldn't work. i understand why and a quick phone call cleared it up, but it shows how easy they can cut people off of the financial rails.

as costs rise, more people will be cut off from those rails. that's the problem with the double spending problem.
#bitcoinfixes this.

I saw this post
and wrote this long rant in response so I decided to post it as a long-form article.

I read the declaration of independence and the u.s. constitution on the 4th of july every year for like 7 years, until 2020.

the people of the enlightenment had such great ideas. money had to be minted from gold and silver. it wasn't a bad rile, it's just the government decided not to follow that rule. or maybe they were incapable of following that rule. it didn't scale.

the post office was the best idea to facilitate private communication. people like james madison and thomas jefferson obtained even higher levels of privacy using encryption like the jefferson wheel. the founders, in many ways were analog cypherpunks. that's why we have the bill of rights. the anti-federalists fought for those rights and won...for a little while.

people forgot about cryptography. they started using email. private communication became part of history. when was the last time you sent a letter over snail mail? you might send a christmas card here or there, but the biggest ad companies in the world are like santa clause. he knows whe you are sleeping. he knows when you're awake. he knows whrn you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

cbdc's are a real political issue nowadays. it's strange. it's not as if the masses started reading david chaum or something. they don't want cbdc's, but how is that system much different than credit cards?

frankly, most people don't give a damn, but they feel as if they can't get ahead. the complain about inflation, but take nonsteps to save fiat. why would they? saving fiat means getting less stuff in the future.

satoshi thought #bitcoin could help people achieve freedom.

i view bitcoin and public key cryptography as a way to achieve the rights guaranteed by the us constitution on the internet...at least for a little while, but if we do it right, we can achieve freedom for a long time. one time, i bought a tv. then i tried to buy groceries the same day and my credit card wouldn't work. i understand why and a quick phone call cleared it up, but it shows how easy they can cut people off of the financial rails.

as costs rise, more people will be cut off from those rails. that's the problem with the double spending problem.
#bitcoinfixes this.

A few months ago, I watched the Madoff documentary on Netflix. According to the documentary Madoff was a respected, founder of the NASDAQ stock exchange, and ran the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history. He also happened to be of Jewish descent.(This is important an important detail to the story, no anti-semitism intended). Because of his ancestory, Madoff befriended prominant rich people within the Jewish community. He leveraged his religion, culture, and esteem to his advantage. Steven Spielberg and Elize Wiezel were among his victims.

Spielburg is one of the most famous directors, but Wiesel was best known for his memoire, Night, a book about his experience at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He told the story of waving goodbye to his mother and sister as they stood in line for the oven. Oprah interviewed him. Bernie Madoff made promises. He promised to invest his client's money. I would bet his victims spoke highly of capability given his high returns. He was Jewish too. Most people tend to like other people who share the same cultural values as they do. This is not unique to Jewish culture, it's a hypothesis of every culture. Who could understand the investment needs of Jewish people better than someone who observed Chaunaka and understood the struggles Jewish people had to suffer? In other words, some smart people found Bernie Madoff easy to trust because his cultural heritage matched their cultural heritage. There was just one problem. All cultures include a certain percentage of untrustworthy people like a bug in computer software.

Bernie Madoff was a crook and although he did not cause the Great Financial Crisis, he became the poster boy. When things go bad, good people look for a scapegoat. Bernie did not make his money off of these plants but stole some of the money from a Holocaust survivor. I'm not saying drugs are good, but Bernie Madoff deserves a special place in hell.

He didn't have anything to do with the collapse of Lehman Brothers though. He didn't cause the bank runs. He didn't buy or sell Mortgage-backed securities and derivitives. Almost nobody went to prison for the great financial crisis. Most people involved got a bailout of almost one trillion dollars. Bernie, founder of the GOAT Ponzi died in prison.

The Anatomy of A Ponzi

The word Ponzi comes from the con-man, Charles Ponzi who is credited with inventing the scheme. It works like this. The scammer tells Paul, "I've been getting 21% returns in the stock market. Do you want in on this?"

Paul thinks..."That sounds too good to be true, but I know Charles. He's a good guy. He also belongs to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster just like me! 👍"

”Sure. Here's $100,000. TO THE MOONBEAM!"

Charles takes the $100,000. That's it. He doesn't invest it.

"Yo Peter! I got this hot investment tip. I've made 21% for 5 years. It uses 'blockchain technology.’ You know what that means?

"TO THE MOONBEAM! Here's a check for $200,000,” Peter says.

Charles doesn't invest Peter's money either.
He calls Paul instead. "You're not gonna believe this. Video games on a blockchain already went to the moonbeam. I can give you $125,000 or you can let it ride."

"Doood...That's awesome. I'll take my chips off the table," Peter says.

Charles pays Peter $125,000. He made $75,000 off this scam. What if Peter wants his money back? No problem. Mary just called. "Hey! I ran into Paul at the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He tells me you made his money Moonbeam. I have $400,000, my life's savings. Can you make it moonbeam?"

"Of course. TO THE MOONBEAM!"

Video games on a blockchain are an obvious scam-coin Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes come in many shapes and sizes, but you've heard this story before --Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Ponzi schemes are yet another way to describe something we've been over before -The double spending problem. That's all a Ponzi scheme is. Peter gives Charles money. He spends this money on Paul and keeps some for himself. Meanwhile, Peter thinks Charles did not spend his money and still believes that money is still there for him to spend in the future. We have an idiom in the United States. "You can't have your cake and eat it too." If you eat the cake, it ceases to exist. Therefore, you no longer have it once it is eaten. Paul gave Charles his piece of cake with the expectation of eating 1.21 cakes in the future. Charles already ate Paul's cake though, so he had to give Paul Peter's cake.

The same is true of money. You can't have your money and spend it too. You also can't have your money if Charles spends your money unless Charles robs Peter to pay Paul. Then, Peter can't have his money unless Charles also robs Mary. When there's no money left to rob the entire system falls apart.

Fractional Reserve Banking Is A Ponzi Scheme And Bitcoin Fixes This

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
-- Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer To Peer Electronic Cash System

"I've developed a new open-source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It's completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust. Give it a try, or take a look at the screenshots and design paper...

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, and trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible."
- Satoshi Nakamoto. February 11, 2009

"Hey, Paul. Are you interested in a blockchain? Look at my charts. To the moo..

"Nah, man. I got this new thing. Here's how it works. First, I write down 12 words. Then, I tell you to go fuck yourself."

Now Paul holds his own keys. His money becomes valuable by doing nothing. Nobody can guarantee this, but those who accept the quantity theory of money expect bitcoin to get this as long as more people adopt it. Almost every other asset on the planet requires permission to own and must be held by a trusted third party. Your stocks can be confiscated. Most people need permission from a bank to buy a home. They don't print money for everyone. Many people may never qualify for a mortgage, but the value of their savings will degrade faster than house paint. We will learn later that all other cryptocurrencies suffer this same fate.

This money goes down because the government is incentivized to print money, but they can't print steer. Therefore, more dollars chase more ground beef. Ground beef, as well as everything else, goes up in price when compared to dollars. This is why Dollar Tree no longer sells anything for less than $1.25 and many items cost much more. This is also why so many people young people saving in dollars will find it so difficult to buy a mortgage now.

Paul saved fiat to put a down payment on a house for five years. Then the pandemic happened. Peter stayed home. Paul stayed home. The government gives Paul $1,200 and a cushy unemployment check. They also cut a $1,200 check to Peter plus an additional $80,000 "loan." When the loan is forgiven, Peter buys a second home and rents it for 40% more than he could have got before the pandemic because the house is worth 40% more. When Paul begins working again. He had $20,000 saved for a down payment, but can no longer compete with $80,000 down payment Peter has. He is priced out of the market and has student loans to pay.

People blame capitalism, but this is not capitalism. This is the Cantillon effect under a socialist monetary system. Adam Smith wrote about capitalism in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. He described it as an invisible hand. The baker, the brewer, and the butcher all work to make life better for themselves. The baker sells his bread to the butcher, the brewer sells beer to the baker and they all prosper based on their proof of work. The free market is the invisible hand. The modern financial system is something else, not capitalism as Adam Smith described. There is no more "invisible hand." There is a hand that picks winners and losers and everyone can see it like a trick a bad magician attempts.

The point is, that you cannot trust the government. You can verify every sat you own with a $400 computer and about ten minutes of competition. You cannot verify the amount of Social Security you will receive or what age they will give it to you. (if at all) Say you make $40,000 a year. This means about $100 of your paycheck goes to social security. If the government put bought bitcoin with that money for nine years, you would have $1,656,380 for your retirement at the time of this writing.

If you retire at 65 and expect to live to 100, you could spend 47,325.14 every year for the rest of your life. Of course, this assumes bitcoin ceases to go up in price. That is capatalism. That is capital. Social Security is socialism. What other context do you think the word "social" means?

Bitcoin is real capitalism. The economic regimes of the world are not capitalism. They are a Frankenstien-esque amalgomation of socialism, capatalism, communism, and fachism. Natalie Smolenski says this new economic system is being called a controlled economy by modern French economists. This is the best definition I've heard, dirigisme h/t Natalie Smolenski

Bitcoin Is Hope

That's why Bitcoin is hope. This is not the glittering generality you might see on a presidential campaign poster. My mom remembers buying mayonnaise for a nickel. In End The Fed, Ron Paul says he "learned the value of a penny," as a kid. A few weeks ago, while in my office, my 14-year-old son screamed, "Dad! Get down here!”

I thought he was bleeding. "Wh...Wha..What happened?!!!"

”These cheese and pretzels used to have 6 pretzels and now they have 5! IT'S SHRINKFLATION!"

Before the pandemic, 6 pretzels and a gob of cheese product cost $1.00. Now 5 pretzels and a smaller gob of cheese product cost $1.99. When teenagers notice inflation like your grandparents, there's a problem. Another way to put it is there is a double spending problem. Do you see it?

That is the hope of Bitcoin. We hope the technology that solved the double spending problem fixes this. If it does, Peter can hold his own money. He doesn't need to keep it in a savings account that pays 0.01% interest. He doesn't need to hand it over to an investment banker, a corporation that buys all the houses, a government that promises to take care of you in your old age, or the next Bernie Madoff.

He just needs to hold Bitcoin himself. Bitcoin will do what it is programmed to do. He runs a node. He stamps steel. He learns how to use passphrases and multi-signature. He stacks sats.

What If Bitcoin Is The MySpace of Money?

I never heard FTX until about 2016 blocks before the collapse. I heard SBF paid politicians like a Wiseguy, paid for commercials with Tom Brady on the Superbowl, and gambled customer bitcoin away. Bitcoin had an immaculate conception. It wasn't worth anything for two years.

I haven't watched the Super Bowl in over a decade. I don't know why people scream when someone scores a touchdown. I know American Football players are notoriously bad with money. I have no idea why anybody would take investment advice from someone who spends as much time learning about football as I have spent learning about Bitcoin.

I suspect it's an old-fashioned affinity scam. Tom Brady plays for "my team," whatever that means. He's a winner and I want to be on team winner. He's betting on FTX so I'm betting on FTX. People trust Tom Brady like they trusted Bernie Madoff. Humans are hard-wired to trust people who have a lot of money, claim to believe the same religious stories or wear a nice suit. We have a motto to protect us from this tendency.

Don't trust, verify.

Ronald Regan is credited with saying, "Trust, but verify," but I haven't actually verified this quote. Nevertheless, bitcoiners modified this quote to reflect the fact that Bitcoin is math and can be verified the same way a high school freshman verifies algebra. It's all math on a computer network. Therefore, if you run your own full node, you can verify you retain control of every sat you owe.

The centralized fiat debt system has:

• Bank bailouts
• National debt
• Unfunded liabilities
• The Cost of the top 150 items Americans Spend Money On
• Multi-trillion budgets
• Stimulus checks
• PPP loan forgiveness
• Soverign wealth confiscation

There Is No Next Bitcoin

]

"Absolute mathematical scarcity achieved by consensus in a sufficiently decentralized distributed network was a discovery rather than an invention. IT CAN NOT BE ACHIEVED AGAIN since the very thing discovered was resistance to replicability itself"

--Knut Svanholm. Independence Reimagined.

This book is titled after the first sentence of the the bitcoin white paper. Now it's time to peruse the second sentence. "Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending." Digital signatures are cryptography. Cryptography is math. Cryptography is useful. You might find a few uses for a couple of shitcoins, but value is subjective and not determined by utility. Nostr is an example of a digital signature. It uses the same cryptography bitcoin uses to sign transactions to sing notes... and other stuff. In other words, signing a nostr note and signing a bitcoin transaction share one attribute: The same type of digital signature.

As a matter of fact, a Bitcoin key is not much different from a nostr key. When we posted a note on nostr, we were digitally signing that note with our private key and broadcasting it. We will also do this with bitcoin transactions, but that's where the similarity ends. According to Satoshi, digital signatures are not the only thing required for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. They are only part of the solution.

Digital signatures have utility. They are great for PGP, holepunch, bittorrent, nostr, and secure websites. I hate to admit it, but even banks use cryptography. The three digits on the back of your credit. card are also a private key, but the problem is, you need to give this private key to every merchant. Cryptography is useful. The cypherpunks thought it could be used to achieve freedom. I tend to agree.

Although cryptography has utility, this does not mean there will ever be the "next bitcoin." Don't fall into the trap, like so many shotcoiners, of thinking Bitcoin is the MySpace of crypto. Bitcoin is a protocol. It is the https:// of https://www.myspace.com and https://www.facebook.com. Maybe MySpace died, but it didn't kill https. Maybe Congress can ban TikTok, but it would be much more difficult to ban https. How would you log in to your bank?

Bitcoin is the only viable alternative to central banking. There is no bitcoin alternative. There is no "next bitcoin." As Knut Svanholm says, it's our one shot. There are some digital signatures that are useful, but there is no way to re-discover absolute mathematical scarcity. Monero is not absolute digital scarcity. Neither is Ethereum, but it is also not decentralized. It's more like a Central Bank that uses digital signatures to earn fees on Ponzi schemes. Stablecoins might be a better shitcoin than the shitcoins of some shithole nations, but it's still a shitcoin. None of the other coins or tokens are a viable alternative to central banks and Ponzi schemes. But...what about Shibu Inu, NFTs, dogecoin or...? Don't be a fucking dolt. Anyone who says you should invest in or save any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin is either confused or lying.

A made a chart that describes my strategy because I know so many people like looking at charts, and doing technical analysis. Therefore, I decided to make my own chart. I call it the fuck fiat model. Look at the chart and compare it to more popular models like the stock-to-flow model. It's a simple chart. I used PSI and bowling ball bands to come up with this chart. Oh...and of course, this is not financial advice.

According to Jack Mallers, all but two of the top ten coins on coinmarketcap are proof-of stake. Proof of stake is just a complicated way nerds re-imagine central banks. Proof of work tethers a currency to the reality of physics. In reality, you cannot have your cake and eat it too, but in fiat philosophy we can eat more cake than we can bake. Fiat has not been tethered to reality since 1971. Then this happened. Proof of stake is just another currency by decree. Dogecoin also uses proof-of-work, but it's dumb because the supply schedule was changed. Bitcoin is the only game in town where the rules cannot be changed by decree. Therefore, bitcoin is the only non-fiat currency. Some may argue precious metal like gold and silver are another exception, but it's a moot point, because it still requires the government to follow the rules. The rules of the US constitution are difficult to change on paper. There was no constitutional amendment to change these words:

"No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts;"

The government changed the rules anyway

Most people in the world today care more about the fiat they can put in their Financial Institutions than they care about purely peer-to-peer electronic cash systems. I would bet most people still think the US dollar is "backed by gold," so it must be tied to reality. That's what it says in the constitution. Why would they believe otherwise? Some companies take advantage of this tendency by giving fiat loans to people to give them control of their bitcoin. Some of these are legitimate businesses, but you should avoid lending your bitcoin unless you know how to assess risk.

Every bitcoin loan involves risk of loss. You can mitigate this risk by never loaning your bitcoin. Bitcoin has no interest. It goes upon value relative to dollars that go up in circulation. They print more and more fiat. Bitcoin prints less and less sats. There isbno such thing as a bitcoin savings account.

If you must take a loan, demand to hold one of three keys in a multi-signature quorum. Don't risk more than you are willing to lose. If you lose your job and can no longer make payments, you will still lose your sats. If bitcoin flash crashes 50%, you can kiss those sats goodbye. Bitcoin collateralized loans avoid rehypothecation risk, but not risk of loss from a crash or missed payments.

BlockFi bought ad space on the most popular bitcoin podcasts. Many "influencers" were paid to tell people to sedn their sats to blockFi. It always seemed strange to me that peopel who say "not your keys, not your coin" also say you should send your sats to people wearing suits. Blockfi rehypothicated. There is no other way to obtain earn more bitcoin without mining. They traded customer bitcoin to make more fiat to buy more bitcoin. The trouble is, they lost the Bitcoin. The same thing happened with SBF. So many people were fooled by the promise of more bitcoin. They forgot about the first few sentences of the bitcoin white paper.

”A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.”
-Bitcoin white paper

Bitcoin solves the double spending problem. Russia thought the money it kept in a Belgian bank would be there for Russia to spend. Russia thought this money would be spent by Russia in the future. This money was spent on the Ukraine instead. Your opinion of Russia or Ukraine does not change this fact. Fuck Russia and the Ukraine, but it is easier to achieve peace when everyone plays by a set of rules that cannot be changed without the agreement of everyone involved. That's what makes bitcoin such an important discovery. Bitcoin is not a way to make more fiat. Bitcoin is anti-fiat.

I highly encourage you to watch Jack Mallers speech about alt-coins.

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by Blogging Bitcoin

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism 

I write a free and open source blog about using bitcoin as peer to peer electronic cash. This is a compilation of some blogs I've written over the last two years. I wanted to write a book, but always felt paywalls are contrary to the free and open-source software movement. I still might publish this on dead trees, but want it to be free for anyone to read like the code you can find on https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/. This is also an example of what bitcoin makes possible. Andreas Antonopolis once compared bitcoin to the invention of the printing press.

I may not agree with everything he says, but he was right about that. Bitcoin allows me to get paid directly by the consumer. It is possible to sell my words without jumping through the Amazon hoops. App developers can publish apps, but Apple will not be levy their 30% tax. I'm not advocating tax evasion or fighting the IRS, but why should we pay corporations to publish and censor us when we can be paid directly from our audience?

This is a compilation of 21 of my favorite blogs I wrote on nostr over the last two years. It is written using the Value 4 Value model. To support my work, please pay the paywall, send zaps, or contribute your time treasure, or talent in another way.

Most bitcoin books try to convince you to buy bitcoin. They talk about how bitcoin is worth more today than ten years ago. You should buy bitcoin because it's going to a moon 69,420 light-years away in a galaxy called WhenLambo. I get it. 125 sats will most likely buy you something at the dollar tree one day. At the time of this writing, 1,922 will buy you a single item at the dollar tree, but 1,538 sats will buy you a paper NFT with George Washinton's mug shot. This is not about NFT's, trading crypto, or how many dollars 100,000,000 sats are worth. It's the musings of some nerd on the Internet who believes cryptography equals freedom in the electronic age. It's about how I use bitcoin and freedom tech in an unfree fiat tech world.

All of my work is written under a Creative Commons Licence. To support my work, please pay the paywall or send zaps. I have published this blog behind this paywall. Paywalls kinda suck because they block so many people from reading your work--At least they think they do. Most paywalls can be bypassed by a simple google search

₿logging₿itcoin

Using p2p Electronic Cash, by Blogging Bitcoin

1)My Nym Is Blogging Bitcoin

2 Support Yo0ur Local Circular Economy To Drain The Exchanges

3)Then They Fight You

4)Use Bitcoin To Protoest Inflation

5)Stacking Sats On Substack

6)Bitcoin Is Not A Belief

7)Why I Write On Nostr

8)The Nostr Tip Jar

9)Privacy Is Necessary For An Open Society In The Electronic Age

10)Fix The Money, Fix The Music

11)Build The Bitcoin Economy On Nostr

12)I don't trust the Cold Card: How to Verify Dice Rolls Using Tails

13)Recurring Bitcoin Donations with OakNode

14)Crypto Means Cryptography

15)Doge Is Dumb

16)Instransigent Tipping
17)Explain The Blockchain To Me(Like I don't Know How To Use The Command Line)

18)Freedom On The Internet

19)How Bitcoin Works In A Nutshell

20)Stacking Sats Is For Everybody

21)Using p2p Electronic Cash

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This is not another orange pill. There are no more orange pill books to be written. Like Satoshi said, "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I'm sorry, bur I don't have time to convince you."

This is not about reading charts or looking for dildos that would make a great pattern for an ugly Christmas sweater. I offer no price predictions because in 150 years, your great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will read about the fractional reserve fiat ponzi scheme in history books written by large language models. Meanwhile, fiat is an endangered species. I understand most people come to bitcoin for the fiat gains. I suspect my blog would be more popular if I wrote things like bitcoin will reach $1,000,000 in 48-72 hours according to my scribbles transcribed over a price chart. Sorry, I can't tell you what the fiat price of bitcoin will be within 72 hours or 72 years. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know how to measure the scarcest asset in the world against this:

This is a guide designed to teach you how to use bitcoin as peer to peer electronic cash and store your wealth for seven generations. I would like to turn it into a book and sell more books than the woman who wrote Harry Potter, but I also think it is important to keep this information free for anyone who cannot afford it. The amount of money printing is making me more and more concerned about fiscal stability of the global financial system. This is not financial advice. It is a life jacket. Think of it as a seat cushion in an airplane. I hope you never need this flotation device, but I want it available, just in case. I hope our great senile leaders can fix this, but I wouldn't hold my breath, so I want to teach people how to use bitcoin before it's too late. But first, let's pop the purple pill..=

In the first chapter, I showed you the secret message Satoshi left in the genesis block, "Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks." In the second chapter, I wrote about why the Cypherpunks wanted private, electronic cash in the first place. The purpose of this chapter is to teach you how to use a custodial bitcoin wallet on a corner of the Internet where people use bitcoin for electronic payments. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that does not require a corporation or government. Nostr is The Internet without any corporations or government required to operate. If you sell stuff on Amazon, you must pay fees to Amazon. Therefore, Amazon is your master. If you sell stuff on a nostr powered marketplace like Shopstr, you have no master.

Covid taught us the collective tend towards authoritarianism during times of crisis(perceived or otherwise). The Twitter Files taught us there is a partnership with legacy social media and agents of the United States Government. If a legacy social media company in the United States is not controlled by a U.S. corporation, expect them to ban it unless it can be sold to an US corporation. If the government trending towards a "closed society" cuts off your bank account for protesting forced vaccinations, these communication networks become important. Nostr makes sending payments to bitcioners as easy as Venmo without any government imposed red tape.

The Social Bitcoin Payment Layer

Nostr has become the de-facto, social bitcoin payment layer. Most people still think of it as a boring alternative to addictive social media like Twitter, but it is much more than this. This guide is published on habla.news a website that allows anyone with an npub to publish long-form content. People can send me sats for this content and I can send sats to content creators and developers.

Nostr has a marketplace similar to what you might find on Zuck's face tracking book. It has YouTube like video and twitter spaces like audio. To use these tools, you will first need to create a public/private key pair. Your public key, npub, can be shared with anyone. Your private key, nsec, must remain a secret. If your nsec is compromised, your identity is compromised and we can no longer trust your notes are from you. That would suck, but it's good practice for storing bitcoin keys. If your identity gets compromised, you could spin up a new one. If you lose the keys to your life savings, it won't be so easy to get it back.

Current, A KYC Free Custodial Bitcoin Social Wallet

Current Tutorial

Nostr is a decentralized communications protocol that stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relay

• Available on Google Play and The App Store.

• Available in the jurisdiction with the most draconian anti-privacy laws.

• Uses a 12 word backup

• Gives you a nostr key pair.that can be used with all nostr services.

• Includes a free custodial lightning address.

Keep in mind that this is a custodial wallet so not your keys not your bitcoin applies. This is a beginner wallet that allows anyone on the nostr network to send you sats, but you don't want to use this for your life savings. The wallet also has cutting edge features like data vending machines that allow you to pay for AI generated images and chats. You can even use AI to turn text to voice, but we will not cover these advanced features in this guide.

To get started, download the App at https://app.getcurrent.io

Current has an excellent Guide here.

Video Tutorial

nostr:naddr1qqrkcn28fdn5j5qzyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcefdcdw

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Yes, 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

I was a big Napster nerd back in the day. until the drummer from Metallica got his leather panties in a bunch so I began to use p2p alternatives like Gnutella, Lime Wire, and BitTorrent. BitTorrent was, and still is glorious, but the intellectual property police disagree. Therefore I no longer download copyrighted material using BitTorrent.

I still use it to download books and software in the public domain. I still pay for Spotify to listen to music, but it kinda sucks for them. It's easier than using BitTorrent for me, but I would prefer to pay the artist directly while downloading their music. Aside from maybe Taylor Swift and Beyonce, most musicians don't make that much money off these subscriptions. For example, according to the Spotify website, a musician who has 10,000 monthly listens and owns 100% of royalties can expect to earn $23.80. A musician like [Ainsley Costello](Ainsley Costello) gets 654 listeners a month for a whopping royalty check of $1.56. That's barely enough money to buy a single thing at the Dollar Tree!

A thousand sats was about 70 cents. that means my one 1,000 sat zap was worth as much as 407 ears. In other words, each listen earns $0.002. The people paying money to support musicians instead of downloading the music for free on BitTorrent allow the artist to earn 1/5 of a penny. Therefore most musicians would be better off using podcasts like Fountain
I bet Lars would make more money too.

My Blog's Business Plan

I don't know what a successful Medium writer makes, but I guess it's similar to the way Spotify pays musicians. I hear Substack can be lucrative, but I don't want to earn fiat. I want to write about bitcoin and get paid...I don't know..." without going through a financial institution," as Satoshi described in the white paper.

This blog is written under the Creative Commons Licence, using the Value 4 Value model. I publish all my articles on GitHub. It's a free and open source blog. You are free to use it however you want. All I ask is for attribution. I also publish these blogs on nostr. Therefore, they can be read here

https://highlighter.com/bloggingbitcoin@nostrplebs.com/posts

and here

https://habla.news/u/bloggingbitcoin@nostrplebs.com/

I write about a blog a week. I will send out one of these blogs every Monday with a short synopsis and a paywall.

What if I'm a cheapskate and don't want to pay 500 sats?

You can still read the article on highligher.com, habla.news, or GitHub. I also publish it on Ghost over TOR.

http://4l2l6ts6mjiybalowepplgfc3df4hahz3vwavi6vnhsidhchmffiw6yd.onion

You can zap me at the end or zap me next time. I don't want anyone who can't afford less than two bucks a month to miss out on any of my articles. Just do me a big favor. Share it on legacy social media to help me grow my audience. You might have noticed I suck at graphic design so if you can help me make a better banner--That would be awesome too!

What if I want to send more?
Of course, you can! Each article has a a link that lets you zap me any amount. 10% goes to OpenSats.

If you find my work valuable please consider sending me your time, talent, or treasure in return.

What If I Have No Sats To Send?

Sign up with Strike or sell Amazon Gift Cards for sats on Robosats. These are not affiliate links. Although these businesses do offer affiliate money, I do not get paid if you click on them. I recommend each of them, but I want my writing free from undue advertising influence.

Thank you for reading.

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~~~~

This is not another orange pill, there are no more orange pill books to be written. Like Satoshi said, "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I'm sorry, bur I don't have time to convince you." This is a guide designed to teach you how to use bitcoin as peer to peer electronic cash and store your wealth for seven generations.

This is not about reading charts or looking for dildos that would make a great pattern for an ugly Christmas sweater. I offer no price predictions because in 150 years, your great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will read about the fractional reserve fiat ponzi scheme in history books written by large language models. Meanwhile, fiat is an endangered species.

The purpose of this guide is not to teach you how to make a million fiat bucks with bitcoin. The purpose is to teach you how to use bitcoin in case a million fiat bucks doesn't buy more than a bag of groceries. It is not financial advice. It's a drill. In the first chapter, I showed you the secret message Satoshi left in the genesis block, "Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks." In the second chapter, I wrote about why the Cypherpunks wanted private, electronic cash in the first place.

Covid taught us the collective tend towards authoritarianism during times of crisis(perceived or otherwise). If there is a crisis, expect the fiat price of bitcoin to crash hard, but resist buying fiat with your bitcoin. Buy gift cards for groceries with your bitcoin instead. Even the hodliest of hodlers needs to eat.

The Social Bitcoin Payment Layer

Nostr has become the de-facto, social bitcoin payment layer. Most people still think of it as a boring alternative to addictive social media like Twitter, but it is much more than this. This guide is published on habla.news a website that allows anyone with an npub to publish long-form content. People can send me sats for this content and I can send sats to content creators and developers.

Nostr has a marketplace similar to what you might find on Zuck's face tracking book. It has YouTube like video and twitter spaces like audio. To use these tools, you will first need to create a public/private key pair. Your public key, npub, can be shared with anyone. Your private key, nsec, must remain a secret. If your nsec is compromised, your identity is compromised and we can no longer trust your notes are from you. That would suck, but it's good practice for storing bitcoin keys. If your identity gets compromised, you could spin up a new one. If you lose the keys to your life savings, it won't be so easy to get it back.

Current, A KYC Free Custodial Bitcoin Social Wallet

Current Tutorial

1. Nostr is a decentralized communications protocol that stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relay

• Available on Google Play and The App Store.
• Available in the jurisdiction with the most draconian anti-privacy laws.
• Uses a 12 word backup
• Gives you a nostr key pair.that can be used with all nostr services.
• A way to get a free custodial lightning address.

Keep in mind that this is a custodial wallet so not your keys not your bitcoin applies. This is a beginner wallet that allows anyone on the nostr network to send you sats, but you don't want to use this for your life savings. The wallet also has cutting edge features like Data Vending Machines that allow you to pay for AI generated images and chats. You can even use AI to turn text to voice, but we will not cover these advanced features

1. Download the App at https://app.getcurrent.io
2. Current has an excellent Guide here

Video Tutorial

https://flare.pub/w/naddr1qqrkcn28fdn5j5qzyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcefdcdw

-Karl Popper, The Open Society And Its Enemies

In the last chapter, Satoshi Nakamoto embedded a secret message into the bitcoin genesis block, "Chancellor on the Brink of a second bailout. 15 years earlier, Eric Hughes wrote A Cypherpunk's Manifesto. This document marks the beginning of the Cypherpunk movement and the quest for private e-cash. It is a short essay and I encourage you to read it. It is only 12 paragraphs. You can also listen to Guy Swann read it on Bitcoin Audible.

"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world."

This is a strange concept in today's world because we are now in the electronic age. At this point in history, the open society might be all but gone. People often take the attitude, "I am not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide," but that's not the main problem. Doing something wrong might not be the only reason you want to hide. You might want to stop getting ads for things Google hears you say or baby clothes from Facebook because your cousin just had a baby.

What if your identity becomes a reason for suspicion? Yesterday, you were an average law-abiding citizen, Today, you are ordered to report to a nearby horse racing track. You and told your family will stay there until further notice. Your property is confiscated. This is not the conjuring of a paranoid fictitious story, this is what happened to people of Japanese descent after the government of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. History is full of examples like this. Peaceful countries go to war, they become totalitarian. One day you live in a fun, free open society. The next day, you are put on a no-fly list, sent to Auschwitz, or become an illegal alien because you left a country dealing with hyperinflation. Maybe this will never happen in your country again, but you can bet bitcoin something like this will happen somewhere, sometime, someplace. What if one day you and some man with a gun and uniform tap your shoulder and say, "Papers please?"

What will you tell him?

I'm not doing anything wrong."

Hughes also writes about financial privacy in this essay. Many Cypherpunks have argued financial privacy is even more important than e-mail privacy. Financial privacy is not just about your bank selling your information to advertisers. The surveillance system gives governments and corporations super-villain powers. Centralized payment systems can be weaponized so they will and have been weaponized. Examples of financial weaponization include [Executive order 6102O]9https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102) [Operation Chokepoint(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point), Canadian Trucker Protest.

Cypherpunks like Hughes were ahead of their time. In A Cypherpunk Manifesto, Hughes writes, "Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction know only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases, personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking what I am saying, or what others are saying to me; my provider only needs to know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself."

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlzx0CYmtn0

Since most digital tools such as email and financial transactions are not private, there appears to be a government-corporate partnership between email, and all financial transactions. Many places no longer accept cash. The government is becoming more intrusive. Governments censor Twitter, shut down social media controlled by China, and many places no longer accept cash. Bitcoin is not 100% private, but we can achieve relatively decent privacy even though the government does not want to lose the power of surveillance.

Bitcoin was not created by what disenfranchised normies call "capitalism," the rigged Wall Street system, that allows hedge funds to short assets they don't have but turn off the buy button when the little guy figures out how to beat them at their own game. Traditional finance is a system where the central bank can just print money out of thin air, loan it to the banks, and allow the banks to print more money to pay back the loan. This system is a far cry from the "invisible hand" Adam Smith wrote about in 1776. There is a hand, but it is not invisible. This is not the laissez-faire capitalism that Ayn Rand wrote about in Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal. It's a mixed economy, with parts taken from dead economic systems like capitalism, communism, socialism, and fascism. It is all of these, yet none of these, a Frankenstein like amalgamation of various economic ideologies. The Federal Reserve is modeled after the fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto:

"Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."

Financial surveillance we are subject to is a fascist wet dream that was technologically infeasible to achieve 80 years ago. In the dystopian novel 1984, Orwell couldn't conceive of a world where people paid for surveillance tools with their own hard-earned, easy money. No, this is not capitalism, fascism, or communism. Governments around the world have created something some French economists are calling Dirigisme, an approach to economic development emphasizing the positive role of state intervention. H/T Natalie Smolenski Bitcoin fixes this.

Centralized Electronic Cash

Bitcoin was not the first attempt at electronic cash. There have been many predecessors. Hashcash is more akin to a digital postage stamp than cash, but the underlying mathematics behind this stamping system is the backbone of the bitcoin time-chain.

Before bitcoin, there was:

DigiCash

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/digicash.asp]

b-money

bitgold

RPow(Reuasable Proof of Work

Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System

The Bitcoin white paper was sent to the Cypherpuink's mailing list on October 31, 2008. It is only nine pages long and has a lot of math. When I first read it, I did not understand much of the math, but I could tell this was a historical document because of its significance. You get the feeling you're reading something like the Rosetta Stone. In the calculations portion of the paper, Satoshi even translates math to c code like the Rosetta Stone translates Greek to Egyptian Hieroglyphics.

Don't worry, you will not need to learn any of this math to use bitcoin. This guide is only concerned with the first few sentences of the Abstract,

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network."

Contrary to what much of mainstream media will tell you, bitcoin is not useless. It allows one party to send payments to another party without going through a financial institution. Despite all the financial surveillance, almost nobody saw the Great Financial Crisis coming. Nobody was arrested. You might think Bernie Madoff was arrested, but his Ponzi scheme had nothing to do with the Great Financial Crisis. He probably would have gotten away with it for much longer except people panicked and when they panic they want their money. Nobody noticed Bernie Madoff never had any of their money until the panic set in.

The double spending problem is not one you hear of often, but maybe it is more accurate to describe it as counterfeiting. If I spend a hundred dollar bill for a bicycle, it is a fair transaction because it is only spent once and received the bicycle. Maybe you use the money to buy a scooter, but it's the same money being circulated into the economy. If I print a copy of my hundred-dollar bill, I can buy the bicycle and the scooter. If I print more copies, I never need to spend the original hundred dollar bill and can buy all the two-wheeled vehicles in town. The problem is you can no longer buy the scooter for $100.00 Now you need to buy a scooter that will cost $200 because I reduced the available supply of scooters in the economy and the laws of supply and demand explain the rising prices. Printed money allows privileged people the ability to purchase more property and who has more privilege than the money printers?

If you replace the word bicycle with a single-family home and the counterfeiter with a bank using fractional reserve--You have the same dynamic on a larger scale. The Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash system is a 100% reserve system. Nobody can create more bitcoin than is pre-programmed to be released. In other words, the bitcoin on the bitcoin system cannot be double spent. If you keep your bitcoin in another system like FTX or an ETF, "the main benefits are lost" because a "trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending."

It's not that I am afraid of Wall Street changing the rules of bitcoin. I don't believe they will ever make bitcoin increase the supply on the network. I don't even necessarily think they will sell paper Bitcoin. I think they might be able to play games like this for a little while, but will eventually get caught by people watching the network.

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Also published on my blogL https://blogging-bitcoin.com/privacy-is-necessary-for-an-open-society/
Recommended Reading:

https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/crypto-anarchist-manifesto/
https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper

!zap]()

Bitcoin is not my first rodeo with peer -to-peer technology. In college, I was a big Napster nerd which makes me old enough to remember downloading Metalica songs over the telephone line. Each song took about 34 minutes to download until we got high speed Internet a few year later. Suddenly, the music industry lost it's walled garden. Lars, the drummer for Metallica, was pissed because anyone with an Internet connection could just download their music via file sharing. The record labels were scared so they used the long arm of the law to sue kids downloading stuff on their computers. They did not understand that information wants to be free.

Napster was shut down, but the cypherpunks created BitTorrent in reaction to this news. BitTorrrent downloads pieces of each song using distributed hash tables and other nerdy cryptographic stuff. At one point, Bittorrent accounted for about 35% of Internet traffic This made the record companies change tactics and introduce streaming services, also known as subscription hell. These services require the listener to pay a monthly fee to stream any music they want. Nowadays, it's easier to just pay the $16.00 a month or whatever the music service ransomware fee is these days, to listen to any song you want.

The trouble is, the lion's share of the money goes to the suits, while the artists get pennies, if anything. This gives power, and most of the money to corporations, while simultaneously screwing the artists. There are other alternatives like Tidal who promise to give more of the money to the musicians. but nostr now gives us another way to support our favorite musicians with something called value for value...Ugh..I'm not sure what the hell this is called--But it's freaking awesome! It allows us to pay musicians in interesting ways without going through a recording Industry institution

For example, while listening to The Bitcoin And Podcast, Nunya Bidness said the following(transcript from fountain):

This is not the first ime Nunya Bidness has done this, but this was the first time I heard him play an artist I've seen on nostr. Come to think of it, I've also seen her on BlueSky and I know she held some zapstream concert a while back. The combination of these things made something in my brain click so I boosted this part of the show. Then I went on Twitter to ask Ansley if she got the zap. She happened to be on some Twitter Spaces or something, but was kind enough to reply back to me.

Nostr Gives Power Back To The People

To recap, I was dong chores while listening to The Bitcon And Podcast. The host of the show, Nunya Bidness told us about Wavlake's new nostr alternative to TicketSlaveMaster(nostr:note1dqhyujc8hd3mvqxcymvemawfelz022mjvec2a5xqhxmt2c3jfqfqj93pnn) named TicketBot. Here's a quote from WavLake's blogpost.

"The potential here is great. Imagine an artist having the ability to sell tickets to preferred individuals at scale, using prior engagement as a way to filter out the true fans from the resellers. Tickets could be verifiable using cryptography. Once sales open to the public, the availability of tickets could be transparent for all to see. And any secondary market sellers would not have to be locked into a specific website.

All of this is possible."

This means, nostr can fix scalping. The tickets can go to the fans willing to pay sats to the artist before being released to the rent-seeking ticket scalpers. No exclusive credit card benifits that let people with good social credit scores buy tickets first. It gives power to see concerts to the true fans instead of the people with VIP credit scores that cane game the system. In other words, it removes the Cantillon effect ticket scalpers enjoy, but I digress.

Nunya Bidnes set up zap splits on his podcast 2.0. Podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain.fm allow you to send stream or boost sats to your favorite content creator. Nunya Bidness is on the cutting edge of this technology. He set up his podcast to automatically forward boosts sent during the music plying portion of the show to the artist. Thus, when I sent a thousand sats to is podcast, fountain.fm forwarded those thousand sats to [Ainsley Costello](Ainsley Costello). This is what we can do with programmable money. It doesn't need to stop there. In the future, we can use this technology to:

Pay bills

Use Smart Home technology without surveillance.

Make charitable donations

The future is bright orange.

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Stay Humble, Stack Sats

"Stay humble, stack sats" is a term used by Matt Odell that summarizes the investment thesis of every Bitcoiner. Staying humble is the art of accepting that we do not know what the price of bitcoin will be in the short term. A "crash" is one China ban or unscrupulous exchange rug-pull away. Those who were rug-pulled think bitcoin is a scam, but the people who understand how the protocol works and take self-custody of their wealth will have an opportunity to stack more sats. Be the latter group, not the former.

In other words, sats flow from those who do not understand bitcoin to those whom understand bitcoin. The bitcoiners who take self custody of their bitcoin are un-ruggable because they hold their own keys. The SBF's of the world cannot gamble away our sats because they do not own our sats.

A common trope among pre-coiners is, "don't invest in things you don't understand." This is good advice, but bitcoin is not an investment. It is money built on a decentralized computer network. It is created by laws of mathematics not government.

📸 study bitcoin.

The purpose of this guide is to teach you how to stack sats without going through a financial institution". History is filled with examples of breaches of trust, monetary debasement and currency death, the result is double-spending.

This is a counter-culture created by bitcoiners who run nodes, mine bitcoin, write code or create bitcoin art like paintings, books, and music. Each bitcoin wallet has an identity, like a fingerprint that cannot be changed. It is binary in a non-binary world, freedom in an unfree world. "Stay Humble, stack sats," is a great tagline. The alliteration is phenomenal, but the way I see it, the goal is to earn sats, spend sats, and save sats.

Take your time. It won't happen over night. There is much to learn. Most people have heard the advice, "don't invest in things you don't understand." This is great advice. If you do not understand bitcoin, you will almost certainly lose money. Some scammer will call you and give a scary story or tell you you they will give you more bitcoin if you deposit some with them first. Some of these are akin to Nigerian prince emails. Other times, famous people on Twitter get hacked and say they will send 2 bitcoin for every one bitcoin you send them. This one time, a company bought ad space on the biggest bitcoin podcast and told everyone they would pay a 7% yield on bitcoin deposits. The most recent heist was pulled off by some vegan pervert who claimed to be an autistic genius and effective altruist. The plain fact is, solving the double spending problem means there is no way to recover your bitcoin if it gets stolen or swindled. You must be vigilant. One whole bitcoin might be worth 10 million dollars in ten years, but if your bitcoin gets stolen or lost, you and your posterity will be unable to spend it.

To protect ourselves, we must:

NEVER GIVE ANYONE YOUR 12 OR 24 WORD SEED PHRASE

REMAIN AS PRIVATE AS POSSIBLE

STAY HUMBLE

Staying humble is not as easy as it sounds, but it is necessary. If you get too over-confident, you might make mistakes. Mistakes can be disastrous. We have all heard stories of people combing through landfills hoping to find laptops worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You don't want to be that guy. The goal of this guide is to teach you how to use bitcoin as it was meant to be used--as peer-to-peer electronic cash.

What Is Bitcoin?

"Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There's nothing to relate it to."--Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. This is a simple sentence composed of nine words to describe a new monetary system Satoshi explained in nine pages. It contains a lot of math most people don't understand and that's just the calculus. The white paper doesn't have any cryptography because much of the cryptography behind the bitcoin timechain comes from Adam Back's HashCash. Therefore, bitcoin is difficult to explain to a general audience because it is a synthesis of many different components very few people are familiar with. Understanding the intricacies of bitcoin requires background knowledge in distributed computer networking, public key cryptography, Austrian economics, computer science, game theory, calculus, probability, and the history of money.

Most people receive very little( if any) education about these subjects in public school and only a small percentage of college graduates learn anything about these subjects. This makes the bitcoin white paper a work of art very few people can appreciate. I had no idea what most of the White Paper meant when I first read it because I knew almost nothing about these subjects back then. I never heard of cryptography and failed Algebra II in high school and I never took calculus either. I was obsessed with low-stakes, limit hold 'em before studying bitcoin, but that gave me just enough background knowledge to understand this was a serious project.

Satoshi Nakamoto was a brilliant mathematician. He made me realize math is a language like C++ or English. He often translated the code into math, math into code, and code into plain English. In many ways, the bitcoin white paper is like the Rosetta Stone, but one can argue it's historical significance is greater than the Rosetta Stone. This may sound like a bold statement to the uninitiated, but I consider it to be a work of art. I believe anyone with an average IQ can comprehend the bitcoin white paper given enough time, and I encourage you to read it. Then study bitcion more. Read it again. Rinse and repeat.

For the purpose of this guide, however, we will only focus on a the first few sentences.

*A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital Signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.

The purpose of this guide is to teach you how to use bitcoin the way it was meant to be used-- without going through a financial institution.

Explain It To Me Like I'm 5

A decade ago, bitcoin was difficult to learn, but now we have cartoons. This guide aims to make bitcoin easily understandable by anyone with a high school education. If you want to know the gist of why bitcoin is important, watch this three minute clip of the first bitcoin cartoon. You don't need need to learn much about math to use bitcoin if you don't want to. You just need the basic idea behind what the math accomplishes. Here is a three minute explanation from the Tuttle Twins.

This Is Not Financial Advice

Bitcoin is math. This guide is written from the perspective of a dad teaching his kids how to use that math to save bitcoin without going through a financial institution. This is education not financial advice. The point of this guide is to teach you how to stack sats. A million sats is a million sats. I can't predict when a million sats will buy $10,000 and even if I could...Who knows what $10,000 will buy. This guide is bitcoin only and is not concerned with measuring this peer-to-peer electronic system to the money printer go brrrrrr fiat system.

There are no guarantees and it is written with no warranty. If you lose your keys, no one can help you spend your bitcoin. As Satoshi said, it becomes a donation to everyone on the network. Therefore it is important for you to remember the following:

NEVER TYPE YOUR KEYS INTO A COMPUTER CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET

NEVER GIVE YOUR KEYS TO SOMEONE ASKING FOR THEM.

NEVER SEND BITCOIN TO SOMEONE WHO CLAIMS HE WILL GIVE YOU MORE BITCOIN IN RETURN

Financial Institutions Are The Double Spending Problem

The bitcoin white paper was released on October 31st, 2008. The software went live on January 3rd, 2009. The day the genesis block was born using an obscure branch of mathematics known as cryptography. Crypto means secret and graph means writing. Therefore, cryptography is a type of secret writing that has existed for thousands of years. Satoshi left a secret message in the scriptsig(hex) of this block. I said is not necessary to learn much about math if you want to use bitcoin, but the math in the first block is one exception. To the uninitiated, this is just a random string of letters and numbers, but it is actually a huge insight into why bitcoin is important and what solving the double-spending problem achieves

scriptsig(hex)
04ffff001d0104455468652054696d65732030332f4a616e2f32303039204368616e63656c6c6f72206f6e206272696e6b206f66207365636f6e64206261696c6f757420666f722062616e6b73

Challenge 1

Decrypt the secret message Satoshi left in the genesis block.

Video Tutorial

Why do you think Satoshi left this message in the bitcoin genesis block?

Stay Humble, Stack Sats

"Stay humble, stack sats" is a term used by Matt Odell that summarizes the investment thesis of every Bitcoiner. Staying humble is the art of accepting that we do not know what the price of bitcoin will be in the short term. A "crash" is one China ban or unscrupulous exchange rug-pull away. Those who were rug-pulled think bitcoin is a scam, but the people who understand how the protocol works and take self-custody of their wealth will have an opportunity to stack more sats. Be the latter group, not the former.

In other words, sats flow from those who do not understand bitcoin to those whom understand bitcoin. The bitcoiners who take self custody of their bitcoin are un-ruggable because they hold their own keys. The SBF's of the world cannot gamble away our sats because they do not own our sats.

A common trope among pre-coiners is, "don't invest in things you don't understand." This is good advice, but bitcoin is not an investment. It is money built on a decentralized computer network. It is created by laws of mathematics not government.

📸 study bitcoin.

The purpose of this guide is to teach you how to stack sats without going through a financial institution". History is filled with examples of breaches of trust, monetary debasement and currency death, the result is double-spending.

This is a counter-culture created by bitcoiners who run nodes, mine bitcoin, write code or create bitcoin art like paintings, books, and music. Each bitcoin wallet has an identity, like a fingerprint that cannot be changed. It is binary in a non-binary world, freedom in an unfree world. "Stay Humble, stack sats," is a great tagline. The alliteration is phenomenal, but the way I see it, the goal is to earn sats, spend sats, and save sats.

Take your time. It won't happen over night. There is much to learn. Most people have heard the advice, "don't invest in things you don't understand." This is great advice. If you do not understand bitcoin, you will almost certainly lose money. Some scammer will call you and give a scary story or tell you you they will give you more bitcoin if you deposit some with them first. Some of these are akin to Nigerian prince emails. Other times, famous people on Twitter get hacked and say they will send 2 bitcoin for every one bitcoin you send them. This one time, a company bought ad space on the biggest bitcoin podcast and told everyone they would pay a 7% yield on bitcoin deposits. The most recent heist was pulled off by some vegan pervert who claimed to be an autistic genius and effective altruist. The plain fact is, solving the double spending problem means there is no way to recover your bitcoin if it gets stolen or swindled. You must be vigilant. One whole bitcoin might be worth 10 million dollars in ten years, but if your bitcoin gets stolen or lost, you and your posterity will be unable to spend it.

To protect ourselves, we must:

NEVER GIVE ANYONE YOUR 12 OR 24 WORD SEED PHRASE

REMAIN AS PRIVATE AS POSSIBLE

STAY HUMBLE

Staying humble is not as easy as it sounds, but it is necessary. If you get too over-confident, you might make mistakes. Mistakes can be disastrous. We have all heard stories of people combing through landfills hoping to find laptops worth hundreds of millions of dollars. You don't want to be that guy. The goal of this guide is to teach you how to use bitcoin as it was meant to be used--as peer-to-peer electronic cash.

What Is Bitcoin?

"Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There's nothing to relate it to."--Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. This is a simple sentence composed of nine words to describe a new monetary system Satoshi explained in nine pages. It contains a lot of math most people don't understand and that's just the calculus. The white paper doesn't have any cryptography because much of the cryptography behind the bitcoin timechain comes from Adam Back's HashCash. Therefore, bitcoin is difficult to explain to a general audience because it is a synthesis of many different components very few people are familiar with. Understanding the intricacies of bitcoin requires background knowledge in distributed computer networking, public key cryptography, Austrian economics, computer science, game theory, calculus, probability, and the history of money.

Most people receive very little( if any) education about these subjects in public school and only a small percentage of college graduates learn anything about these subjects. This makes the bitcoin white paper a work of art very few people can appreciate. I had no idea what most of the White Paper meant when I first read it because I knew almost nothing about these subjects back then. I never heard of cryptography and failed Algebra II in high school and I never took calculus either. I was obsessed with low-stakes, limit hold 'em before studying bitcoin, but that gave me just enough background knowledge to understand this was a serious project.

Satoshi Nakamoto was a brilliant mathematician. He made me realize math is a language like C++ or English. He often translated the code into math, math into code, and code into plain English. In many ways, the bitcoin white paper is like the Rosetta Stone, but one can argue it's historical significance is greater than the Rosetta Stone. This may sound like a bold statement to the uninitiated, but I consider it to be a work of art. I believe anyone with an average IQ can comprehend the bitcoin white paper given enough time, and I encourage you to read it. Then study bitcion more. Read it again. Rinse and repeat.

For the purpose of this guide, however, we will only focus on a the first few sentences.

*A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital Signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.

The purpose of this guide is to teach you how to use bitcoin the way it was meant to be used-- without going through a financial institution.

Explain It To Me Like I'm 5

A decade ago, bitcoin was difficult to learn, but now we have cartoons. This guide aims to make bitcoin easily understandable by anyone with a high school education. If you want to know the gist of why bitcoin is important, watch this three minute clip of the first bitcoin cartoon. You don't need need to learn much about math to use bitcoin if you don't want to. You just need the basic idea behind what the math accomplishes. Here is a three minute explanation from the Tuttle Twins.

This Is Not Financial Advice

Bitcoin is math. This guide is written from the perspective of a dad teaching his kids how to use that math to save bitcoin without going through a financial institution. This is education not financial advice. The point of this guide is to teach you how to stack sats. A million sats is a million sats. I can't predict when a million sats will buy $10,000 and even if I could...Who knows what $10,000 will buy. This guide is bitcoin only and is not concerned with measuring this peer-to-peer electronic system to the money printer go brrrrrr fiat system.

There are no guarantees and it is written with no warranty. If you lose your keys, no one can help you spend your bitcoin. As Satoshi said, it becomes a donation to everyone on the network. Therefore it is important for you to remember the following:

NEVER TYPE YOUR KEYS INTO A COMPUTER CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET

NEVER GIVE YOUR KEYS TO SOMEONE ASKING FOR THEM.

NEVER SEND BITCOIN TO SOMEONE WHO CLAIMS HE WILL GIVE YOU MORE BITCOIN IN RETURN

Financial Institutions Are The Double Spending Problem

The bitcoin white paper was released on October 31st, 2008. The software went live on January 3rd, 2009. The day the genesis block was born using an obscure branch of mathematics known as cryptography. Crypto means secret and graph means writing. Therefore, cryptography is a type of secret writing that has existed for thousands of years. Satoshi left a secret message in the scriptsig(hex) of this block. I said is not necessary to learn much about math if you want to use bitcoin, but the math in the first block is one exception. To the uninitiated, this is just a random string of letters and numbers, but it is actually a huge insight into why bitcoin is important and what solving the double-spending problem achieves

scriptsig(hex)
04ffff001d0104455468652054696d65732030332f4a616e2f32303039204368616e63656c6c6f72206f6e206272696e6b206f66207365636f6e64206261696c6f757420666f722062616e6b73

Challenge 1

Decrypt the secret message Satoshi left in the genesis block.

nostr:naddr1qqrkuw2gwdaxj7qzyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwc23zmhl

Why do you think Satoshi left this message in the bitcoin genesis block?

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----- WARNING -----

This is for advanced users who know what they are doing.

Exposing your server on the internet brings a lot of responsibility and can expose your server/service to all kind of attacks.

Don't be reckless!

----- WARNING -----

Be careful. Make sure you don't expose something private or secret. For example, it is possible to expose your LND instance to the whole world, but doing so would also expose your private keys. That's obviously a bad idea so be careful.

If you find this useful,thank Remco Ros with a [zap](Remco Ros)

How To Host Start9 Services On Clearnet

Step 1

Download the latest release of Cloudflare Tunnel under the releases tab as shown on the bottom right hand corner of this picture.

Step 2

Under the System Tab of the Start9 operating system, click on "Sideload a Service."

Step 3

In Cloudflare: Navigagte to Networks > Tunnels. Then click create a tunnel. Click next.

Step 4

Click on your tunnel name.(eg. start9)

Step 5

Click "Edit"

![edit](

Step 6

copy the string of letters and numbers after word "install". In this example, we would copy"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.fMihDAKKp2FLS-qit4DN7s5818FWt3dc0u" but your characters will be different.

⚠ Handle this command carefully. It includes a sensitive token that allows the connector to run. Anyone with access to this token will be able to run the tunnel.

Step 7

Paste this token into the token field of the Config "Customize Cloudflare Tunnel" tab. Then click SAVE and Start the service

Step 8

Navigate back to the tunnels page on Cloudflare. Click the public hostname button.

Step 9

Click "add a public host name."

Step 10

On the Public Hostname Page add a domain. You can also add a subdomain in the subdomain section(eg. ghost for the ghost app)

Under type, enter HTTP

**The URL will depend on the service you are adding.

Say you want to add Ghost. Search for Ghost repository under https://github.com/orgs/Start9Labs/repositories

It can be found here: https://github.com/Start9Labs/ghost-startos

Next, click on the manifest.yaml file use the id for the program, in this example it is "ghost". It would be "btcpayserver" if we were exposing the btcpayserver app, but the ID is ghost in this example so we will intere "ghost.embassy:2368 in the URL field of the Public Hostname Page back on Cloudflare.

The number "2368" is the port number and I found it under the port-mapping. In this case on line 53

So our Public Hostname Page should look something like this:

Your domain will be different of course but it will look follow this format:

Type HTTP

URL id.embassy:port_number

Then click save hostname.

After a few minutes you can access your website on the clearnet.

If you want to add LNBits, it would look like this: http://lnbits.embassy:5000.

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Read this article on my blog

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