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.

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.

₿logging ₿itcoin
848,231

debtclock

All my blogs are available for free and written using under the CCO-1.0 licence.

If you found value in this please consider giving your time talent or treasure in return 🧡

📧Subscribe on Substack or
🍐Join my Keet Room If You Prefer To Learn About New Blogs With No Email Signup

🫙 Tip Jar

🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

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.

₿logging ₿itcoin
[854,854]https://timechaincalendar.com/en/block/854854)
debtclock

• All my blogs are available for free and written using under the CCO-1.0 licence.

• If found value in this please consider giving your ⏲️ time , 🤹talent, or treasure ⚡Treasure in return. 🧡

• 📧Subscribe on Substack or

• 🍐Join my Keet Room If You Prefer To Learn About New Blogs With No Email Signup

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.

nostr:note1c6ltsuxkagcvtg392vevs74p9npa5dxlvwxv09lzw724d9qdetssz7jm5x

₿logging ₿itcoin
849,850
debtclock
🧡 Support this blog by using the ⚡Value 4 Value model⚡
📧Subscribe on Substack
🍐Join my Keet Room If You Prefer To Learn About New Blogs With No Email Signup
💵Fiat-To-Sats Calculator
🫙 Tip Jar
📻 Stream sats on Fountain
🎉Send a Boostagram
🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

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

₿logging ₿itcoin
848,675
debtclock
🧡 Support this by using the ⚡Value 4 Value model⚡

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

₿logging ₿itcoin
848,231
debtclock
🧡 Support this blog by using the ⚡Value 4 Value model)⚡
📧Subscribe on Substack
🍐Join my Keet Room If You Prefer To Learn About New Blogs With No Email Signup
📻 Stream sats on Fountain
🎉Send a Boostagram
🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

-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.

₿logging ₿itcoin
847,370
debtclock
🧡 Support this blog by using the Value 4 Value model.
⚡[Zap This!(10% Goes To OpenSats)]https://nosl.ink/tadiqmv-)
🍐Join my Keet Room To Learn About New Blogs With No Email Signup
📻 Stream sats
❓Send a Boostagram
🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

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.

₿logging ₿itcoin
846,769
debtclock
🧡 Support this blog by using the Value 4 Value model.
⚡[Zap This!(10% Goes To OpenSats)]https://nosl.ink/tadiqmv-)
🍐Join my Keet Room To Learn About New Blogs With No Email Signup
📻 Stream sats
❓Send a Boostagram
🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

Stack Sats

Code Is Speech, Cypherpunks Write Code

Crypto Means Cryptography

Get On Nostr To Get Sats

RoboSats

Mutiny

Aqua Wallet

Sparrow Wallet

Run Your Own Node

Stainless Steel Is The New Precious Metal

ColdCard

KeyStone

Seed Signer

Specter DIY

Seed Picker on Tails

MultiSig

Colloborative Custody

Seed Hammer

Sell Hash

Build A Community

I bought belt from LeatherMint and liked it so much, I decided to write a testimonial. This is a value 4 value testimonial, not a paid ad. I’ve always been suspicious about ads. I know rhetorical tools like ethos are a super-duper effective form of persuasion, but I’ve always found it suspicious. I understand Michael Jordan was the GOAT basketball player. If Jordan has advice for becoming a better basketball player, you should listen to him, but his ability to pick underwear might not be a slam dunk.

Even if someone paid me to tell you camel hair underwear is the most comfortable underwear on the planet, I wouldn't want to write a testimonial about it. I am shilling LeatherMint’s belts because they are low time preference accessories.

I needed a good belt. I'm a bitcoiner and we're cheapskate's. We don't like to spend our precious sats. I keep my underwear until it has more holes than the moon. That's why I need a good belt. I know privacy is not a popular right these days, but I don't want my pants to fall because I don't expose my holy underwear to the world. Privacy is a human right. I use my belt to protect my privacy.

The belt is custom made to fit my waist. If you're not sure about your belt size, his guide explains how to find it easy-peasy style. He even makes half-sizes. Maybe you learn this if you shop at Nordstrom's or something, but I never knew how to choose a belt size. Most belts I buy have a range of sizes like 34-36, but not my belt from LeatherMint. It's made just for me.

The buffalo leather is smooth and sturdy. Many belts I've owned flap around and stretch out. Not this one. The brass hardware looks better than the crap metal and stitches on my old belt. For the record, I may know a lot about bitcoin, but my fashion sense is abysmal. I've always bought belts that were too long and didn't fit right. Maybe that's why my other belts flapped around like that. Regardless, this belt was 4 times more expensive than my old belt, but it was worth every sat. I think it will last longer than a store bought belt. Besides, the Bitcoin And Podcast discount was was also too sexy to resist.

I bought my last belt from J.C. Penny's for $25.00 on Black Friday. It can best be described as black, flimsy, and cheap. According to the words stamped on the leather: "hecho in India." It's branded with the Levi's jeans logo. Levi's was my favorite brand of jeans in the 80's. Founded in San Fransisco in the midst of the gold rush. They sold low-time preference clothes at a time when people panned for low time preference money. Levi's were made in America and rugged. I used to care about that, but almost nothing but arrests are made in the US these days. Back in the day, they had commercials that said, "buy American and American's work." Fast food is just abput the only thing the US still makes.

This belt was made in Canada, but as far as I'm concerned, it was made by a ₿itcoiner. Buy from a ₿itcoiner and ₿itcoiners work. LeatherMint put his proof of work into this belt and it shows.

Most clothes, like fiat money, are not built to last anymore. It's difficult to build a long lasting wardrobe in a world of fast fashion, but bitcoin fixes this. It makes you think twice about spending money on clothes you'll need to replace in less than a year and it seems like LeatherMint makes belts that are built to last.

Proof of Respect

proof of respect

The belt shipped to my PO box in a black box with a proof of respect card with a QR code on the back. I assumed it was a reciept, but I was wrong. It's a bitcoin address. People send bitcoin to this address as a tip.

According to LeatherMint, "There's a respect vibe to leather. And respect goes both side. I feel it from my clients and I try to show them too.

And yeah respect is important to me. Before money I think my real goal is gaining respect from the Bitcoin community. Money will flow from there."

I never thought much about this before, but it makes sense. It's simmilar to the importance of reputation the cypherpunks emphasized decades ago. Belts should be respected because it cost the life of a buffalo. Great care and craftsmanship went into making this belt. I can see how respect is required in leatherwork. LeatherMint puts his proof of work into his craft. You won't be sorry for buying one of his belts.

Clothes made under the fiat standard are not built to last anymore. It's difficult to build a long lasting wardrobe in a world of fast fashion, but bitcoin fixes this. It makes you think twice about spending money on clothes you'll need to replace before they see 52,000 blocks and LeatherMint makes low time preference belts that are built to last.

If you want a belt that

• Fits properly
• Built to last
• Made with high quality materials

Buy a badass belt from LeatherMint

₿logging ₿itcoin [841,975](https://timechaincalendar.com/en/block/841975
debtclock

🧡 Support this blog by using the Value 4 Value model.

Follow Me on Nostr

⚡[Zap This!(10% Goes To OpenSats)]https://nosl.ink/tadiqmv-)

🍐Join my Keet Room

📻 Stream sats

❓Send a Boostagram

🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

This should go without saying, but this stuff is not actually for sale.

Coffee $0.01

Click Here To Pay For Coffee

Tea $0.02

Click Here To Pay For Tea

Made with

• Habla.news

• PlebPay

The only thing the business owner needs is a Strike username.

The payments can be instantly converted to fiat if the business owner prefers. I obviously think this is a bad idea, but that's none of my business.

nostr:naddr1qqr4q3mnxpe9s7gzyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2qcyqqqgtwcgzhehs

Notes:

• PlebPay created Paywalls.
• Each item on the menu can have it's own price.
• Price is denominated in fiat.

All payments in this example go to Sam Samskie, the PlebPay dev

• "Wen Lambo"
• "To the moon!"
• Forever Laura!

It's all fiat-maxi language disguised as bitcoin maxi rhetoric. I would be lying if I said I didn't care about the price at all, but I became interested in bitcoin for ideological reasons. It's nice that I can buy more groceries today than I could a couple years ago, but that's not what turns my crank. I may have heard about bitcoin from Antonopolis, but Ayn Rand orange pilled me before that.

I want to be financially free from banks. I'm not all the way there yet. I have a mortgage I pay in fiat. I have a few hundred bucks in a savings account and about eight bucks worth of change in my office. I also carry a couple hundred dollars worth of green paper in my soft wallet. It's getting harder to use that green paper these days because more and more businesses would rather pay a sales tax to the bank than accept cash.

I don't talk about the fiat price much. I don't trade "crypto," but fell in love with cryptography. I prefer nostr to Twitter. I earn sats, save sats, and spend sats and started using bitcoin as peer 2 peer electronic cash about a decade ago.

My blog is nostr. You can follow me on there. This is not financial advice, it's not even a blockchain. Nostr is a decentralized communication protocol that uses public-private key pairs. You know... cryptography.

My New Podcast

I decided to turn this blog into a podcast. The idea is to read my blog posts out-loud, using AI because I sound like a mumbling dweeb.

This podcast has no paid ads, but I plan to showcase businesses who participate in what I call the elliptic curve economy, also known as the circular economy. These are not paid ads. My goal is to bring plebs business through word of mouth advertising because I believe this is the best form of advertising. I consider these value 4 value ads. Hopefully my podcast will bring these pleb businesses some extra revenue, but this is no act of altruism. In my opinion, the more people who use bitcoin as a medium of exchange, the faster we can remove bitcoin off the exchanges. If you buy something from a bitcoin business, another pleb stacks more bitcoin. The more bitcoin that gets stacked, the more valuable my store of value becomes. It is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Value 4 Value

I am using the value 4 value model. After my blog, I will answer call-in questions about bitcoin to the best of my ability. Ask a question by sending a boostagram on your favorite podcasting 2.0 player.

I'll do my best to answer the question on the next show.

Here's the pod. I'm, still working on the kinks like audio quality, editing, et cetera, but I find this technology much more fascinating than how much fiat you can obtain with 100 million sats.

https://fountain.fm/episode/sHUSVAIQlMLRNqvPITqw

₿logging ₿itcoin
836127
debtclock
🧡 Support this blog by using the Value 4 Value model
Follow Me on Nostr
⚡Zap Me
🍐Join my Keet Room
📻 Stream sats
❓Send a Boostagram
🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

I started writing this blog two years ago. It's my third attempt at writing a bitcoin blog. I My Economics teacher in High Schools was part owner of a small bank before changing careers. He taught us how little one needs to start a bank because of a concept called fractional reserve banking. I felt it was an unfair system, but powerless to do anything about it. This was about 735,840 ten minute intervals before January 3rd, 2009, give or take.

309,334 blocks after the genesis block, I heard about it on the Joe Rogan Experience and went down the rabbit hole. I used it as my poker bankroll because I lost a little money trusting it with Full Tilt Poker. After about six months of stacking, I heard Wences Casares say there is a 50% chance bitcoin will reach a price of $1,000,000 within 15-20 years on block 366,235. I told my then girlfriend(now wife), "I know this sounds crazy, but there's a decent chance this bitcoin thing I've been using to play online poker with will be worth a million bucks in like 20 years. It would be a mistake to not save some. "

The poker site converted my bitcoin to fiat to save me from the volatility. I made about a .03% return on my poker playing skills, but the price of bitcoin doubled so I stopped playing online poker and took self custody of my bitcoin. I then played small no limit hold em cash home games, 4-8 Limit Hold Em with a Kill at San Manuel, and a tournament at Pechanga about once a month. If I won, I would deposit the cash into my bank account and buy more bitcoin on coinbase until they sent me a nasty letter. If I lost, the sats were gone, but we didn't use the term 'sats" back then. The casino games were much softer. I made about the minimum wage in those days. I always felt embarrassed about how little I made, but in retrospect, I'll never make that much money again. Few understand this.

I also use bitcoin everyday. Back then I sent 'a buck a show' to Dan Carlin. Each "buck" must be worth more than $200 today. I once took a trip to San Francisco in 2015 and asked the poor woman at the Golden Gate toll booth, "Do you accept bitcoin?"

"No, what's that?" she asked.

My wife still tells this story to her friends. They laughed at me for a few years. I talked about it so much, my daughter bought me this shirt in 2020.

I went to my brother in law's bachelor party around block 347,801 and spread the good news about bitcoin. I've never seen a stripper look so bored. She said, "So do you like buy drugs on the Internet?”

My wife got tired of me talking about bitcoin, so she suggested I write about it online and join bitcoin groups online. I decided to write about using bitcoin.

I still think bitcoin is the greatest thing since sliced gold, but most people don't want to talk about bitcoin. They like to talk about how many fiat fuckery bucks they can buy with 100 million sats. Fiat is boring unfair and buys less and less stuff. I don't want to read about fiat prices. I don't want to read how bitcoin is useless water boiling technology, so I decided to write about how I use bitcoin everyday.

I earned a B.A. in creative writing.

The alarm ringtone on my phone is a reading of "So You Want To Be A Writer,” by Charles Bukowski My wife got tired of me talking about bitcoin, so she suggested I write about it and join bitcoin groups online.

In high school, my favorite book was Tropic of Cancer. It was banned in the United States until 1973 when he won Miller vs. California which overturned obscenity laws and strengthened the first amendment. Guess I've always been a first amendment maxi. It's why I love Phil Zimmermann's story. It's one reason I write on nostr. Why I believe nostr is important. Why I don't like the government interfering with corporate social media. Why the government should free Jullian Assange. Why I enjoy finding creative ways to use swear words.

"If you can't say fuck, then you can't say fuck the government."

--Lenny Bruce

TikTok Next Block

I sometimes see Xwitter BTC maxis say things like

• "I don't understand nostr."
• "The juice is not worth the squeeze"
• :"Nostr is like yelling buy bitcoin in the closet,"

I won't name names, but they say nostr is unimportant. The fight for better money belongs on the corporate controlled platforms. I disagree. Nostr is freedom of speech protected by a communications protocol. In other words, bitcoin computer networking nerds using their computer networking skills to build a censorship resistant communications protocol. We achieve this with cryptography, but it is not another one of those blockchain pump n dump schemes you may have heard about on YouTube.

I don't watch the news much, but I heard Congress passed a bill to ban TikTok. It still just a bill on the hill or however that song goes, but it's pretty alarming . By the way, back in the day, I subscribed to Rolling Stone just to read [Matt Tiabbi](Matthew Taibbi) . I got to teach him to download wallet of satoshiabout a year ago. I hope he still has access to those sats.

I've never Tiked nor Toked, but like it or not: Code is speech. TikTok developers write code. I may not agree with this code, but how the hell should I know? It's not open source. All social media should be open source. If it's a threat to national security that is. If it's a security hole, we need as many people as we can get reading the code. "See something, say something, but don't read that insecure code," might not be the most game theoretically optimal way to protect national security. That's just my two sats.

Am I concerned the CCP has access to American's information? Sure, but I'm also concerned that American corporations have access to American's information. Those corporations are notoriously bad at keeping this information secure. Forcing the sale of a Chinese corporation to an American corporation does not fix this.

Bitcoin taught me the most important thing you can do to keep information safe is to keep it off the Internet. Giving Corporations your phone number, address, political affiliations, address, and selfies of your inner thighs is no way to safeguard private information. I would support a bill that requires all social media platforms to stop collecting all personal data. I also want to ride a unicorn, but there's nothing I can do about that either, but I can write on nostr.

Can the Chinese Communist Party use TikTok to manipulate US elections? I'd bet a hundred sats they can. I'd bet you a thousand sats they can use American social media platforms to do the same thing.

Nostr is not a platform controlled by a single cabal. It allows us to create connections on the Internet without giving anyone our email address, credit card number, the secret 3 digit code on the back of our credit cards required to spend fiat on the Internet. You literally must give your keys to the corporations so they can collect a monthly fee like a tax. Nostr does not ask for a phone number. If China steals my nostr key, they won't even get my legal name.

How did we get here? The red team and the blue team can't agree on anything except who should be in charge of the Federal Reserve and TikTok must be sold. It's almost as if the two old fart candidates were pre-ordained. It certainly wasn't up for debate. So far, neither candidate participated in one of those.

I suspect the censoring algorithms are the real Matrix, Why else has political discourse been reduced to trivial low time preference issues. We're manipulated into arguing about pronouns, race, and class, but not to talk to each other like human beings. On nostr, you can have a cordial conversation and send sats to transgendered people, black people. white people(even white people living in Russia), expats living in China, and billionaire's alike. We don't talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion because we include the whole world and consider each other peers.

The the political arena is a shit-show. They talk about low time preference problems on stage. What other problems can a president in his 80’s solve? What will they do about the 34.5 trillion dollar problem? Another glittering generality, another budget double the size of all the wealth the billionaire's own?

We, The People of the world speak on nostr.

The answer to safeguarding American, or any other citizen of the world's information is simple: DON'T GIVE IT TO AWAY. If it's so important the Chinnese Communist Party be denied access to this information, the information is also too sensitive to be trusted with American corporations. What if the CCP were to hack Twitter? This is not so far fetched. The platform was hacked before.

DISCLAIMER: Do not send bitcoin to people old enough to have sent more snail mail than email, especially if they say they will double your bitcoin.-- This is not financial advice, but in case you didn't know, Those things are always scams.*

Every Bitcoiner worth his or her sats knows you must assume anything you put on the Internet is pwned. For those of you born before WWII, that means you must assume criminals and foreign adversaries possess that information. That's why any bitcoiner worth his or her sats doesn't keep their bitcoin keys in the cloud. If you want our data out of the hands of the CCP, you must assume the American corporate social media will eventually get hacked by the CCP. When this happens, passing the Dear Commy China Party Don't Use Our Data Against Us Pretty Please law won't help.

Or, we could just use social media without putting our sensitive data on the line. We could use a censorship resistant communications protocol that doesn't require an email or password. We can own our own content. We can cryptographically notarize everything we write. They can't manipulate my algorithms because their are no algorithms. There is no corporation to force sell. Well...there's a 501c nonprofit corporation that funds some of the devs, and Jack Dorsey is damn generous, but that's not the same thing.

That's why I write on nostr.

Stay Free 🤙

₿logging ₿itcoin
834667
debtclock
🧡Support this blog by using the Value 4 Value model.
⚡Zap Me
🍐Join my Keet Room
🛒Shop my Nostr Store
🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy
Share my blog
Give Feedback

https://habla.news/u/bloggingbitcoin@iris.to/why-i-write-on-nostr

In my last blogpost, I wrote about a clear path to buying coffee with bitcoin. Of course, this plan is predicated on the coffee shop owner actually agreeing to do this, but it is technically feasible in 2024, even if the coffee shop is as alergic to bitcoin as my son is allergic to peanuts.

        Today I'm writing about buy me a cup of coffee when Starbucks doesn't directly accept bitcoin. This is a taboo subject nowadays. The new bitcoin Jesus thinks bitcoin is not p2p electronic-cash. I know the people who make this argument twist the words. They say cash comes from the French word, which means blah, blah, blah. It's a red-herring. Satoshi never described this so-called French word. He said:


        "It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.""
         


        Subscription sites that need some extra proof-of-work for their free trial so it doesn't cannibalize subscriptions could charge bitcoins for the trial.

        "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, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.""


        "If a merchant actually has a problem with theft, they can make the customer wait 2 minutes, or wait for something in e-mail, which many already do. If they really want to optimize, and it's a large download, they could cancel the download in the middle if the transaction comes back double-spent. If it's website access, typically it wouldn't be a big deal to let the customer have access for 5 minutes and then cut off access if it's rejected. Many such sites have a free trial anyway.

        Sathoshi seemed to think bitcoin peer 2 peer electronic cash wa cash money. Price is nice, but I write this blog to show people how bitcoin works as cash money. We can use it to solve real world problems and it has real-life use cases. In this post, I'll show you bitcoin is more than mere property. It's a super power that lets people send money without providing your information to every Tom, Dick, and Larry Fink.

        When Satoshi talked about peer to peer electronic cash system, he meant cash like the cypherpunks meant cash.  Cypherpunks did not talk about the French origins of the word cash. They used the word in the coloquial sense like cold, hard, cash. Satoshi didn't site any papers that talked about the word "casse". He cited tools created by crypto anarchists like wei dai's  Peer-money. Here's a quote from this wei dai's b-money. As a reminder this essay was cited in Satoshi Nakamoto's White paper.


        "I am fascinated by Tim May's crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word "anarchy", in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It's a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.

        Until now it's not clear, even theoretically, how such a community could operate. A community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and **efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money) and a way to enforce contracts**. Traditionally these services have been provided by the government or government sponsored institutions and only to legal entities. In this article I describe a protocol by which these services can be provided to and by untraceable entities."

        Satoshi was clear. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It's an integral part of the game theory. Cash is decentralized. Property is not decentralized. Property gets taxed. Fiat cash gets taxed via inflation. Peer 2 peer electronic cash is not property. It's cash. The keys are property. Your steel plate is property. The twelve words you head are property, but the transactions on the time chain are not property. We should work to keep it that way. 

        When I first Andreas Antonopolis talk about bitcoin, I thought it was an awesome idea, but I was skeptical. There was no way in hell I would just sign up with coinbase and buy bitcoin just because he said so. I didn't trust it. I had to verify it. So I thought, if this is peer to peer cash is legit, someone ought to be able to send me a little. So I asked someone on twitter to send me some hash tag bitcoin. Someone sent be a buck fifty and told me to buy a cup of coffee with it. That's my bias. I can buy coffee with it. I did a couple years ago. I still have most of those sats from 2014.

        Maybe I'm just a crotchety old man waving my cane in the sky and screaming "Get off my drought resistant landscaping!" Then again, maybe more people would get on-boarded if we sent them bitcoin peer to peer. That's why I'm bullish on nostr. We should stop telling people to "buy bitcoin." **We should tell them to get on nostr and try bitcoin**. It sounds better than, buy bitcoin, [peer-to-peer electronic property](https://primal.net/e/note10v7ns6kerrmayj4z5rspxu5dls9asn322a964xql5g9huvhy2thqglcdln)




        ## How To Buy Coffee With Bitcoin

        Say you are allergic to bitcoin like I'm allergic to fiat. Don't like VoLiTiLiTy? No problemo! Sign up for an account at https://strike.me. 

        Set up your account and choose a username. You will get a lightning address that is `yourusername@strike.me`

        Despite how it looks, that's not an email address. It's a lightning address. This address is all you need to accept payments on the Internet. All you need to do is put it on your webpage, substack, Twitter, or whatever.

        First, you should choose to take the orange pill or the green pill.  Do you want fiat or do you want bitcoin? Again, I know a lot of people hate bitcoin. Mention the word on blue sky if you don't believe me.

        Click on the little anthropomorphic person on the upper right hand corner.


        ![man](https://i.nostr.build/L5dm.png)



        Next, scroll down until you see the settings menu. Next, click the "Bitcoin" tab.

        ![bitcoin menu](https://i.nostr.build/gdqY.png)

        Now it's time to choose the orange pill or the green pill.  Click on Passive incoming payments.

        ![Bitcoin tab](https://i.nostr.build/VjRv.png)


        You'll have the option to choose to accept incoming payments as bitcoin or cash. Of course, if someone sends you less than a penny, it can't be converted to fiat cash. Anything more than a penny gets converted to USD in my jurisdiction. I assume people in other countries get the cash converted to their local fiat currency, but don't quote me on this. I don't really know. As you can see, I took the orange pill, but you can do whatever you want to do.

        ![choose currency](https://i.nostr.build/9m5E.png)

        Remember, your lightning address is your username at strike.me.  I'm using a lightning tips address, but the process is the same.+
        ### Accept Payments Anywhere On The Internet

        You can put your lightning address anywhere on the Internet, but this is about coffee so I created a Buy Me A Coffee page. I won't do a tutorial because I assume you know how to set up a profile on the Internet.

        Remember when congress questioned Zuck about his stablecoin? Well, I hate to break it to you Congress we don't need Zuck bucks. You can add a lightning address right to a Facebook profile.  


        ![Facebook](https://i.nostr.build/EzRo.png)


        Here's my page. You won't find it on Facebook.

        https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bloggingbitcoin

        I added my lightning address to https://sendsats.to  It comes in handy for making a clickable page. There's not much of a tutorial needed. 

        The page is https://sendsats.to/bloggingbitcoin@ln.tips

        Just replace my lightning address with your lightning address and you too can accept magic Internet money.


        **WTF Does This Have To Do With Coffee?**

        Go back to the Strike welcome screen, scroll down to shop with lightning.



        ![coffee](https://i.nostr.build/PrR7.png)

        ### Shop With Bitcoin Straight From Strike

        I wrote about Bitrefill in one of my early blogs, but now it's integrated right into the Strike App. You can buy coffee, or just about anything else you want with your newly acquired sats or fiat. You might want to hang on to some sats if you don't have any, just in case, but you could totally buy a cup of coffee if you want to. Many Saylor disciples accept the thesis that bitcoin is property. They will never spendl. They also know Saylor says you should orange pill as many people as possible. What better way to orange people than send them a little bitcoin. I'm not saying to buy some fancy-schmancy car like a 1976 Ford Pinto with your bitcoin. I'm saying to buy a five dollar cup of coffee. I mean an eight dollar cup of coffee.  Don't spend your bitcoin if you're worried about your taxes or whatever. Holdl dollars in your Strike account. Don't "buy bitcoin" with those dollars. Turn the dollars into sats for a gift card. It might cost you some fiat flyer miles. So what? Tell the barista you bought your gift card with bitcoin.


        `We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.`

        You can do this because bitcoin solves the double spending problem. It solves the double-spending problem so well, someone can send you ten bucks worth of bitcoin from Australia. You'll get it within about three seconds. You can buy a Starbucks gift card with those sats and sip yourself shakey straight-away. You could also send the bitcoin to the Cash App and buy a gift card there too. I suppose you could buy Bank of America stock in the Cash App right away too. I don't know why the hell you would do that, but it's possible. You'll need to sell the bitcoin on the Cash App first, but guess why you can do this? Because bitcoin solves the double spending problem. Can you do that with Bank of America? No, it takes at least three days to send dollars from Bank of America to Wells Fargo.



        ![Starbucks](https://i.nostr.build/347P.png)

Buy Me A Cup of Coffee

In my last blogpost, I wrote about a clear path to buying coffee with bitcoin. Of course, this plan is predicated on the coffee shop owner actually agreeing to do this, but it is technically feasible in 2024, even if the coffee shop is as alergic to bitcoin as my son is allergic to peanuts.

        Today I'm writing about buy me a cup of coffee when Starbucks doesn't directly accept bitcoin. This is a taboo subject nowadays. The new bitcoin Jesus thinks bitcoin is not p2p electronic-cash. I know the people who make this argument twist the words. They say cash comes from the French word, which means blah, blah, blah. It's a red-herring. Satoshi never described this so-called French word. He said:


        "It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Once it gets bootstrapped, there are so many applications if you could effortlessly pay a few cents to a website as easily as dropping coins in a vending machine.""
         


        Subscription sites that need some extra proof-of-work for their free trial so it doesn't cannibalize subscriptions could charge bitcoins for the trial.

        "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, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.""


        "If a merchant actually has a problem with theft, they can make the customer wait 2 minutes, or wait for something in e-mail, which many already do. If they really want to optimize, and it's a large download, they could cancel the download in the middle if the transaction comes back double-spent. If it's website access, typically it wouldn't be a big deal to let the customer have access for 5 minutes and then cut off access if it's rejected. Many such sites have a free trial anyway.

        Sathoshi seemed to think bitcoin peer 2 peer electronic cash wa cash money. Price is nice, but I write this blog to show people how bitcoin works as cash money. We can use it to solve real world problems and it has real-life use cases. In this post, I'll show you bitcoin is more than mere property. It's a super power that lets people send money without providing your information to every Tom, Dick, and Larry Fink.

        When Satoshi talked about peer to peer electronic cash system, he meant cash like the cypherpunks meant cash.  Cypherpunks did not talk about the French origins of the word cash. They used the word in the colloquial sense like cold, hard, cash. Satoshi didn't site any papers that talked about the word "casse". He cited tools created by crypto anarchists like wei dai's  Peer-money. Here's a quote from this wei dai's b-money. As a reminder this essay was cited in Satoshi Nakamoto's White paper.


        "I am fascinated by Tim May's crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word "anarchy", in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It's a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.

        Until now it's not clear, even theoretically, how such a community could operate. A community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and **efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money) and a way to enforce contracts**. Traditionally these services have been provided by the government or government sponsored institutions and only to legal entities. In this article I describe a protocol by which these services can be provided to and by untraceable entities."

        Satoshi was clear. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It's an integral part of the game theory. Cash is decentralized. Property is not decentralized. Property gets taxed. Fiat cash gets taxed via inflation. Peer 2 peer electronic cash is not property. It's cash. The keys are property. Your steel plate is property. The twelve words you head are property, but the transactions on the time chain are not property. We should work to keep it that way. 

        When I first Andreas Antonopolis talk about bitcoin, I thought it was an awesome idea, but I was skeptical. There was no way in hell I would just sign up with coinbase and buy bitcoin just because he said so. I didn't trust it. I had to verify it. So I thought, if this is peer to peer cash is legit, someone ought to be able to send me a little. So I asked someone on twitter to send me some hash tag bitcoin. Someone sent be a buck fifty and told me to buy a cup of coffee with it. That's my bias. I can buy coffee with it. I did a couple years ago. I still have most of those sats from 2014.

        Maybe I'm just a crotchety old man waving my cane in the sky and screaming "Get off my drought resistant landscaping!" Then again, maybe more people would get on-boarded if we sent them bitcoin peer to peer. That's why I'm bullish on nostr. We should stop telling people to "buy bitcoin." **We should tell them to get on nostr and try bitcoin**. It sounds better than, buy bitcoin, [peer-to-peer electronic property](https://primal.net/e/note10v7ns6kerrmayj4z5rspxu5dls9asn322a964xql5g9huvhy2thqglcdln)




        ## How To Buy Coffee With Bitcoin

        Say you are allergic to bitcoin like I'm allergic to fiat. Don't like VoLiTiLiTy? No problemo! Sign up for an account at https://strike.me. 

        Set up your account and choose a username. You will get a lightning address that is `yourusername@strike.me`

        Despite how it looks, that's not an email address. It's a lightning address. This address is all you need to accept payments on the Internet. All you need to do is put it on your webpage, substack, Twitter, or whatever.

        First, you should choose to take the orange pill or the green pill.  Do you want fiat or do you want bitcoin? Again, I know a lot of people hate bitcoin. Mention the word on blue sky if you don't believe me.

        Click on the little anthropomorphic person on the upper right hand corner.


        ![man](https://i.nostr.build/L5dm.png)



        Next, scroll down until you see the settings menu. Next, click the "Bitcoin" tab.

        ![bitcoin menu](https://i.nostr.build/gdqY.png)

        Now it's time to choose the orange pill or the green pill.  Click on Passive incoming payments.

        ![Bitcoin tab](https://i.nostr.build/VjRv.png)


        You'll have the option to choose to accept incoming payments as bitcoin or cash. Of course, if someone sends you less than a penny, it can't be converted to fiat cash. Anything more than a penny gets converted to USD in my jurisdiction. I assume people in other countries get the cash converted to their local fiat currency, but don't quote me on this. I don't really know. As you can see, I took the orange pill, but you can do whatever you want to do.

        ![choose currency](https://i.nostr.build/9m5E.png)

        Remember, your lightning address is your username at strike.me.  I'm using a lightning tips address, but the process is the same.+
        ### Accept Payments Anywhere On The Internet

        You can put your lightning address anywhere on the Internet, but this is about coffee so I created a Buy Me A Coffee page. I won't do a tutorial because I assume you know how to set up a profile on the Internet.

        Remember when congress questioned Zuck about his stablecoin? Well, I hate to break it to you Congress we don't need Zuck bucks. You can add a lightning address right to a Facebook profile.  


        ![Facebook](https://i.nostr.build/EzRo.png)


        Here's my page. You won't find it on Facebook.

        https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bloggingbitcoin

        I added my lightning address to https://sendsats.to  It comes in handy for making a clickable page. There's not much of a tutorial needed. 

        The page is https://sendsats.to/bloggingbitcoin@ln.tips

        Just replace my lightning address with your lightning address and you too can accept magic Internet money.


        **WTF Does This Have To Do With Coffee?**

        Go back to the Strike welcome screen, scroll down to shop with lightning.



        ![coffee](https://i.nostr.build/PrR7.png)

        ### Shop With Bitcoin Straight From Strike

I wrote about Bitrefill in one of my early blogs, but now it's integrated right into the Strike App. You can buy coffee, or just about anything else you want with your newly acquired sats or fiat. You might want to hang on to some sats if you don't have any, just in case, but you could totally buy a cup of coffee if you want to. Many Saylor disciples accept the thesis that bitcoin is property. They will never spendl. They also know Saylor says you should orange pill as many people as possible. What better way to orange people than send them a little bitcoin. I'm not saying to buy some fancy-schmancy car like a 1976 Ford Pinto with your bitcoin. I'm saying to buy a five dollar cup of coffee. I mean an eight dollar cup of coffee. Don't spend your bitcoin if you're worried about your taxes or whatever. Holdl dollars in your Strike account. Don't "buy bitcoin" with those dollars. Turn the dollars into sats for a gift card. It might cost you some fiat flyer miles. So what? Tell the barista you bought your gift card with bitcoin.

        `We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.`

You can do this because bitcoin solves the double spending problem. It solves the double-spending problem so well, someone can send you ten bucks worth of bitcoin from Australia. You'll get it within about three seconds. You can buy a Starbucks gift card with those sats and sip yourself shakey straight-away. You could also send the bitcoin to the Cash App and buy a gift card there too. I suppose you could buy Bank of America stock in the Cash App right away too. I don't know why the hell you would do that, but it's possible. You'll need to sell the bitcoin on the Cash App first, but guess why you can do this? Because bitcoin solves the double spending problem. Can you do that with Bank of America? No, it takes at least three days to send dollars from Bank of America to Wells Fargo.

        ![Starbucks](https://i.nostr.build/347P.png)

₿logging ₿itcoin
834667
debtclock
🧡Support this blog by using the [Value] 4 Value model](https://value4value.info/).
⚡Zap Me
🍐Join my Keet Room
🛒Shop my Nostr Store
🛒Shop The Elliptic Curve Economy

[Audio part 1()

[Audio part 2])

** Note: The audio files were created using pleb ai. Special thanks to Arun Nedun who was gracious enough to let me use this for free. The voice is created using the text 2 speech app on pleb.ai. ** I’m not very good at reading stuff outloud. I mumble too much, talk too fast, and don’t pause for punctuation. I wrote this with my own natural intelligence, but I assure you this AI voice sounds better than I my natural voice.

Have you ever wondered why 21 million?  I have. I never had an answer though, until now. At least I think I do. As the saying goesm “don't trust, verify.” I don't have a way to verify this, but Martti Malmi posted this note yesterday  He says it's his email correspondence with Satoshi in 2009-2011.  Malmi was the second person to work on bitcoin software, assuming Satoshi was one person. According to Malmi:
``
"Satoshi - Sirius emails 2009-2011
 
This is the correspondence between myself (Martti Malmi, AKA Sirius) and Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. I did not feel comfortable sharing private correspondence earlier, but decided to do so for an important trial in the UK in 2024 where I was a witness. Also, a long time has passed now since the emails were sent. The archive is incomplete and contains only emails from my address @cc.hut.fi. My university email addresses changed to @aalto.fi in early 2011, and I don't have backups of those emails. There are some passwords and a street address mentioned in the emails, but those are no longer valid or relevant.

``
In my last blog, I mentioned that e-mail kinda sucks. When I wrote that of course, I didn't know someone just made some of Satoshi's emails public. Satoshi's e-mails don't suck. They give us a glimpse into the mind of a genius.  Like I said, I have no way of verifying if this email correspondence is true. I am somewhat putting my trust in Malmi, but I assign a low probability of forgery here. If this e-mail was sent to he who shall not be named, I wouldn't trust it at all. This was not an email sent to he who shall not be named, however. It's sent from Satoshi's first volunteer and the dude who built the Iris nostr client.(It's the same dude by the way).
 
I've mentioned this before, but my favorite bitcoin quote is by Knut Svanholm. “Absolute mathematical scarcity achieved by consensus in a sufficiently decentralized, distributed network was a discovery rather than an invention. It cannot be achieved again by a network made up of participants aware of this discovery since the very thing discovered was resistance to replicability  itself.”
Why 21 million?  Why is that the magic number?  What was Satoshi's inspiration for limiting the total supply to 21 million? Why not 100 million or 1 million?  If we believe this email to be true, Satoshi gave an answer.

![21m]]()

There we have it. The answer to why Satoshi chose 21 million. It was an educated guess. It was a difficult choice. We are stuck with the network. The only question now is will it be used for a fraction of world commerce, or a large portion of world commerce?

On the latest episode of TFTC , Mežinskis says bitcoin actually does about twice the amount of transactions that FedWire does. My man, NunyaBidness posted the actual numbers on this note. 
Bitcoin only has a 1 trillion dollar market cap however. Bitcoin's final settlement layer is already about twice as much as the Federal Reserve's settlement layer. In other words, the bitcoin peer 2 peer transaction electronic cash system is already more efficient than the Federal Reserve system. We also know that a small fraction of the world is using bitcoin, but it’s still worth about a trillion dollars. We also know the new inventory of this tool which is X more efficient than the Federal reserve is dropping by 50% in a couple of months. We tend to focus on the BTC/fiat price, but the price is not important. The value is more important. I think bitcoin is undervalued because it is not understood by most people.

In a world slipping into chaos more and more, bitcoin is a financial system that is more robust than the world’s reserve currency. That’s the bullish case for bitcoin. Obama called it a Swiss Bank in your pocket in 2015. I think he did this to ridicule it’s privacy, but bitcoin is like Switzerland of cyberspace. 21 million might have been an arbitrary number, but the mathematical scarcity cannot be broken even by world war. Bitcoin is a neutral place to store your wealth that cannot be debased by foreign or domestic government. I suspect, at some point in the future, that will be useful for a large fraction of world commerce. If history rhymes like Mark Twain says, we can expect governments, terrorist groups, the mafia, or whoever will make it useful for a larger fraction of world commerce. That’s the true price of bitcoin: 21Million/A Large Portion Of World Commerce.

Is it enough?
I hope so.

Saying I don't believe in bitcoin is like saying, “I don't believe in the Internet.” Google does not care if you believe in the Internet. The Internet works if you believe in it or not.

Saying "I believe my bank has the money my bank says it has," is a belief. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. We don't actually know, but it's belief. The money is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the nation. That's nothing more than a belief.

Bitcoin is not a belief. Bitcoin is a series of calculations. You roll a pair of dice 100 times and write down the numbers. You calculate your seed on a calculator. In elliptic key cryptography, the math makes an elliptic curve. If you draw a line on one of those points on the curve, you will cross another point on the curve. These two points represent the public/private key pair. Without the secret number, you have no way of altering the data associated with the public key.

If you have the correct secret key and are willing to pay a fee, you can spend your bitcoin. This spend is validated by all the miners around the world competing to include a batch of transactions into the bitcoin time chain. This is more math, fitting the highest bidding transactions into a puzzle that turns all data all the words into binary, the language of the machines. Then, it ads a number to it and performs trillions of calculations a second until someone finds a number with a certain amount of leading hex zeros and wins a block subsidy(for now) plus all the fees.

Part of this calculation is included in the next calculation and the process is repeated. After about 6 of these calculations it becomes virtually impossible for anyone to reverse it. This is not a belief. This is a fact. This is not a belief in nerds full faith and credit. This is math, no more of a belief than 2 + 2 = 4.

If you do it right, Nobody else knows how much bitcoin you have. It cannot be taken by Even if they do, they don't know where you keep the keys. So a company like Unchained Capital can't spend your bitcoin without another one or two of your keys no matter what, not even if the world's largest army came knocking on the door. Even if they tortured or killed you, this would not give them this knowledge. Maybe you get tortured and give them a o key to some.of your bitcoin, but they can't get all of it. Maybe you set a time lock that only allows you to.spend every 4 years. You set the rules, nobody can break the rules.

Ghengis Khan and his army may have killed 40 million people, but they could not change the rules of mathematics and say 2+2=5. Neither can any government. Sure the government of China banned bitcoin mining, but it did not stop bitcoin. Banning bitcoin is banning math. They cannot ban the number 4.. The 2+2=5 quote comes from the book, 198...sorry the last number is banned by the government. I'm not allowed to say it. Please pass the bugs.

It sounds ridiculous, right? Almost as ridiculous as $34,000,000,000,000 national debt. Banning bitcoin is like banning the number 4. It's an idea, not a belief. It is math, calculated and verified on thousands of calculators all across the world. Distributed computer networking is just a fancy word for nerds running computers to crunch numbers and publishing the results of the numbers on a computer network. Bitcoin is not a belief, it's a bunch of calculators. You keep one calculator off the Internet, and put the irreversible and un-guessable result of that calculation on the Internet. You give the computers the ability to "check your answer" without ever seeing your answer. Because if that answer points to a specific point on an secp256k1 curve, you must have the correct secret that allows you to spend your bitcoin.

That is not a belief system. At the end of the day, it's just counting…Well, accounting--A peer to peer electronic accounting system with rules set in stone like:

No more than 21 million bitcoin.
Each bitcoin after the genesis block is released on a schedule.
There are as many private key possibilities as atoms in the universe.
Bitcoin in an unspent transaction output can only be spend by (one-out-of the number of atoms in the universe private key) or certain number of these keys when multisig is used.

Valid transactions pay a fee to be calculated into the chain of blocks thousands of computes around the wold verify. This is not a belief, nor a religion. Bitcoin is not a belief in providence. Sathoshi is not watching over us from the clouds.. Bitcoin is people verifying the integrity of the bitcoin time chain using computers. I have two such computers in my closet and I converted an old S9 miner into a space heater. I don't “believe” in my space heater, the computers in my closet, or the calculator I lost in a tragic boating accident. I know these things exist. I know other people who say they also run these computers. At least they tell me they do. I must admit, I have not verified they run them myself, but I have reason to believe they run them just like me. Do you have any reason to believe what is in your wallet?

₿logging₿itcoin

830,051
debt clock

This blog is written with 🧡 using the Value 4 Value
model.
Please consider hitting theSubscribe button and spend sats in thecircular economy
Book Bitcoin Coaching

Privacy is a fundamental human right, enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. However, revelations by whistleblowers like [Edward Snowden](Edward Snowden) have shown that governments often violate this right in pursuit of national security objectives. To safeguard our privacy, we must take steps to ensure that our communications remain secure from prying eyes.

Bitcoin offers a unique solution to this problem. Its decentralized nature allows users to transact privately without relying on intermediaries like banks or payment processors. Moreover, its underlying technology(math) ensures that transaction data remains immutable and transparent, making it nearly impossible for third parties to manipulate or censor information.

Outlawing Private Bitcoin Transactions: A Slippery Slope

Some argue that allowing complete anonymity in Bitcoin transactions would facilitate criminal activity, such as drug trafficking or terrorism financing, or tax evasion. While it is true that some criminals may exploit these features, outright banning private transactions would not solve the problem. Instead, it would create a chilling effect on legitimate uses of Bitcoin, stifling innovation and undermining individual freedoms.

Moreover, attempting to regulate or control Bitcoin would likely prove futile due to its inherently decentralized nature. Even if authorities were able to trace a portion of transactions, they could never fully eliminate the possibility of anonymous transactions being conducted via alternative methods (such as offline trading, using different cryptographic protocols, or writing 12 words on a piece of paper, stuffing an envelope, and licking a stamp).

Conclusion

In conclusion, protecting privacy through the use of Bitcoin is essential for maintaining democratic values and upholding civil liberties. By embracing innovative technologies like bitcoin, we can foster greater economic freedom and empower individuals to assert their rights against overreaching governments. It is crucial that policymakers recognize the importance of preserving privacy in the digital age and refrain from implementing measures that infringe upon this fundamental human right.

nostr:nevent1qqs07qg79tetg9pqp3qf4dmt0dmefdw838vnqrvww8ke6h7herk2qvcpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtczyp6m7g6nrt5lnrrzn9d6quv3ujyw44r4jafhr43a0h75d00ph75f2ywxv2q

nostr:nevent1qqstd9lkty5d6jf682da5xy7nwxs2zvazn4vg4d7zcdprfdfrflrxlcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfdupzqadlydf3460e333fjkaqwxg7fz82636ew5m36c7hml2xhhsml2y405x8ve
Onward

₿logging₿itcoin

825,150
US Debt Clock

Support by:
🧡 zapping,
🧡sharing or
🧡 [shopping]https://plebeian.market/p/b9680763f7af15c7ee848a06cc32bd643c37e986529444f2697254b741dd87ad/stall/2e29901dea521baa35a2d93e5970f8ed72449a26df7978cb1c9234efbd0b02fa).

This blog is sponsor free, but I created some v4v ads to promote the use of bitcoin as a payment solution. These are word of mouth ads designed to promote the bitcoin circular economy.

This blog was edited by https://unleashed.chat/

Every New Year’s eve, I stay up past midnight, drink non-alcoholic beer, pop poppers, and throw little pebbles wrapped in rough toilet paper that explode on impact. Such is my family tradition. T

Although I love new years day, January 3rd is my favorite holiday. It’s a time I like to spend thinking about the contents of the message embedded into the genesis block. It’s a day where I where this t-shirt

This will be my tenth year in bitcoin. The main reason I was interested in it back then was because I did not think fractional reserve banking was fair. It makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. You need permission to hold on to your value in the current system. You can’t get 100x returns unless you are already an accredited investor with at least a million dollars in net worth. You can’t buy a house if you don’t make the right amount of income. If you have a low income like I did ten years ago, you might only be able to scrape up $20.00 a month to save. If you put it in a savings account, you’ll have $20.20 at the end of the year. You’ll need to pay taxes on your 20 cents of capital gains. There are creative ways of saving more if you are willing to live in a van or eat nothing but lentil soup, but these days it’s getting more and more difficult for professionals to hold on to spending power and qualify for a mortgage without moving into a van.

When I heard Andreas Antonopolis tell Joe Rogan the secret message embedded in the genesis block, it was as if he was saying Hey Blogging Bitcoin. I’m talking to you. Look into this bitcoin thing because it is a solution to a problem you’ve been irked by for over a decade.” Weird how my mom named me Blogging Bitcoin , right?

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”

Back then, I could listen to every podcast ever created with bitcoin as the subject matter. There were two or three Joe Rogan podcasts, a couple of EconTalk episodes, an an episode about Occupy Wall Street on Ari Shafir’s Skeptic Tank. In this episode, the protester guests said they were protesting the banks and saw bitcoin as a viable alternative to these fuckers who gambled people’s houses away and got bailed out by the government.-- The type of people Elizabeth Warren used to fight before becoming big banks bill-shiller. The episode must sound like a crazy conspiracy theory to normies, but if you read the secret message embedded into the genesis block, how can you come to any other conclusion?

Proof of Keys

Proof of keys is another tradition for me like popping poppers on New Year’s day. The phrase comes from Trace Mayer. The idea is to have everyone take their bitcoin off the exchanges on the anniversary of the genesis block. If everyone did this any paper bitcoin would be wiped out every year. We could prove if the bitcoin exchanges hold on our behalf is really in our account, or if it was gambled away by some diabolical dork-mastermind.

A friend of mine recently told me she met Sam Bankman Fried at a meetup. She told me FTX was an acronym for Full Tilt Exchange. It’s almost as if Fried knew he ran a casino. He paid off politicians to run this casino like an autistic gangsta. It looks like he even named it after an online poker room that infamously turned into a Ponzi Scheme, Full Tilt Poker. I can’t prove this, but both Full Tilt Poker and Full Tilt eXchange turned out to be Ponzi Schemes. Both of them hid their actions behind a thin veil of regulation. Full Tilt was licensed by some official sounding Internet Gaming Commission. Full Tilt eXchange was regulated by some ABC government agency. These regulations purportedly protect consumers. Do they? I don’t need to write a ten page essay arguing for this. You just need to watch the nightly news on NBC to find out. I went on Twitter to shill my local bitcoin meetup and saw a slew of sat stackers singing glory hallelujah because they believe the BTC ETF will be approved by the regulators!

Oh YEAH! Govern me harder. make my number go up until my toes curl. Approve me right there Uncle Sam!

Some Random Dude on nostr argued Bitcoiner’s arguing against an ETF are full of cope. They thought they had more time to stack. This is a straw man argument. Do I wish I had more bitcoin, sure—who doesn’t? If Saylor doesn’t have enough bitcoin, do you think some pleb writing a blog for about 30K sats a month does? That’s not the point. Weaher or not, I have enough bitcoin is not the problem with ETF’s. If it makes the price $10,000,000, I won’t complain. I’ll even sell a little on Strike and pay off my house. I’ll pay the taxes too. It is not that I am against NGU. I am against trusted third parties. I might trust Strike to hold my fiat until I can pay my mortgage off for a little while, but I wouldn’t trust Strike with my entire stack for any meaningful length of time even though I like Jack Mallers and think his company is on the up and up. This is the point:

I understand there is not enough block space or time in the universe for 8 billion people to own a Unspent Transaction Output. I get that, but the solution to that problem can’t be giving up the ability for people to protect themselves from trusted third party fuckery(double-spending).

Bitcoin ETF’s exist outside the US. I think Canada has one. How does the Canadian ETF treat proof of keys day? How does Grayscale prove they are not pulling a full tilt move? How will Blackrock prove they have the keys to the bitcoin they say they have? These are genuine questions I have and don’t have answers to. I can balance a checkbook, but I don’t know how fiat accounting works.

I’m an expert by no means, but I do have a basic understanding about how accounting on LNBits, Liquid, or Fedimints work. I’m not happy with some of the things I hear about Blackrock(Rumers has it, they are gobbling up the American real estate market). That’s probably good for the equity in my house, but I think it’s bad for millions of people who struggle to obtain permission to buy a home. If the ETF makes bitcoin NGU as much as the ETF maxis say it will, I can pay off my house, quit my job and write every day even on 30k sats a month. That would be awesome, but how will the ETF Maxis participate in proof-of-keys day?

How To Regulate an ETF

The amount of bitcoin you have or what you do in bed with regulators is none of my business, but I hope those who do want to be in bed with the regulators practice safer exchanging. A better ETF would not be raw animal regulation. It would be more like soft porn. Again, not everyone with a Blackrock etf can receive a key in the mail with a UTXO for many reasons I won’t get into. What if you had a Liquid MultiSig Wallet with a UTXO holding Liquid BTC. We can call this a Liquid BTC Exchange Traded Unspent Transaction Output. The hardest of the hardcore maxis would find this trade-off unacceptable, but I think it addresses the main issue I have with ETF’s. Namely, the trust is no longer reliant on a single trusted third party, but a federation of a third fourth, and 40th trusted third party. You would also be able to log in to your normie Blackrock User Interface and see your liquid Xpub that shows your balance is where black rock says it is. You can verify this on Blockstream's website. Technical users can even run their own liquid node. This would be a safer way to practice ETF. A Fedimint could also work like this and the tech would make it easy to withdraw, but I don’t think a trusted third party like Blackrock is interested in giving it’s clients this power. That’s okay. They are free to make ETF rules however they like. It’s not something I can prove on proof of keys day anyway. Unchained has a great article about using a [network of keys(https://unchained.com/features/bitcoin-network-of-keys).

From Bitcoin Needs A Network of Keys

Imagine if:

• Blackrock holds one keys.
• Fidellity holds another key.
• Grayscale holds another key
• ...you get the idea.

Say Blackrock has 40 bitcoin, Fidelity has 35, and Vanguard has 25 bitcoin in a collaborative multisig wallet. These are small numbers, but it makes it easier to explain the concept. The regulators approve each one of their ETF’s. If Blackrock sells 41 bitcoin in their ETF, Fidelity and Grayscale raise a red flag. This is possible because of the transparency multi-sig on the bitcoin network enables.

Accountants will still need to do their accounting magic, but something like this will make it easier for accountants to audit the supply, They can do it every year on January 3rd. I got into bitcoin at a time when it was popular to say not your keys not your bitcoin, so I can’t see myself using a BTC ETF, but I am not opposed to an ETF using the minimal structure required to prove the aggregate bitcoin in an Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund using gettxoutsetinfo. I would even recommend an ETF structured like this to my friends and family.

Again, I am not against an ETF. I just want a BTC ETF to be structured more like a federation or multisig wallet than a gold ETF. After studying bitcoin for about a decade, I believe common sense regulations like this can go a long way in protecting retail and corporate investors. It also allows them to celebrate Proof-of-Keys day, a holiday which is very important to the people in the bitcoin community.Many argue about the semantics of this statement, but we have our own customs and traditions like any other group of people. January 3rd is like our new year's day, but we have other holidays as well such as:

• Bitcoin Pizza Day
• The Halvening happens every 4 years or 210,000 ten minute blocks for the orthodox nerds our there
• The day some drunk guy misspelled the word HOLD.

We Bitcoiners use often recite another meme, "bitcoin is for enemies". I wouldn’t go so far to say Blackrock is my enemy, but I want them to respect the traditions of my culture , not because I am some religious nut, but because I want to prevent them from accidentally becoming someone’s enemy. Most people don’t set out to create a Ponzi scheme. I don’t think Full Tilt Poker, Mt. Gox, or FTX set out to start a Ponzi. It just happened because trusted third parties are security holes.

We have the tools to create a BTC ETF that does not rely on a single trusted third party. Any BTC ETF worth buying would use these tools. If not, then what’s the point of the white paper? What is so innovative about a single trusted third party holding a lot of people’s money? It’s just a gold ETF by another name. We already have a gold ETF(I bet we have more than one). We need one BTC ETF with multiple trusted parties

This ETF would allow investors to be reasonably sure there money is in the bank. That is the real innovation of bitcoin. If the digital dollar could do that, businesses would not ever be suffer credit card charge-backs. I would like to see an innovative BTC ETF approval.

I do not want a gold 2.0 ETF. Gold has no multi-signature capabilities. It must rely on a trusted third party or be buried in your back yard. Bitcoin is different and we should treat it as such. This is better for investors and has the added benefit of letting the IRS know exactly how much each BTC ETF owner owes in taxes. I believe a BTC ETF can give millions of Americans a bright orange future if it is done right. Please urge your local regulators to regulate the BTC ETF in a way that makes it safer for retail investors by approving a BTC ETF which does not rely on a single trusted third party.

Happy Proof of Keys day.

Onward,

฿logging฿itcoin
0 + 824,201 confirmations
US Debt Clock

Support by:
🧡 zapping

🧡 shopping
🧡 highlighting
🧡Sharing this blog on survielence social media platforms

This blog is sponsor free, but I created some v4v ads to promote the use of bitcoin as a payment solution. These are word of mouth ads designed to promote the bitcoin circular economy. These companies do not pay me to shill their products. They are companies I have spent sats with and recomend you shop the circular economy to promote the use of bitcoin as peer-2-peer electronic cash.

!

I asked the lady at the counter if I could please take a picture of it. She said "Sure, but why?"

"I write this blog about bitcoin. Don't worry I won't say anything bad about the shop. Quite the opposite."

Then I went looking at more motorcycle helmets. A young woman asked if she could help. She also aid, " I just got into trading crypto. What's the name of your blog. I gave her the URL to my website https://bloggingbitcoin.pages.dev.

"It's on nostr, a new communications protocol on the Internet. You can also find the Bitcoin meetup group on meetup.com."

Then I thought about why I first started this blog. I want to show the world Bitcoin is not just some information on an exchange you use to capture more printer go brrrrrr bucks. It was designed as an alternative to banks bailed out after the Great Financial Crisis. Bitcoin is a parallel financial system. Bitcoin is not Wall Street. Bitcoin is a protest like Occupy Wall Street-- Exit Wallstreet. Code is speech. Bitcoin is code written in C++ but Congress will authorize dumb-ass bureaucrats to abridge our speech. They want us to petition the government to redress our grievances.

![genesis block](https://i.nostr.build/7WAV.jpg0

I want to 🍊 Pill the world, starting with my home town. So I started a local newsletter. The goal is to show how easy it is to accept bitcoin in your store. You don't need to HODL, but you will save credit card fees and get free ad space on my newsletter.

They Are Fighting Us

![illegalsoftware]()

It's a little un-nerving to me. I prefer to be anonymous. I don't want to be "an activist." Bitcoin has been my nerdy hobby for almost ten years . My family still makes fun of me. They they still think bitcoin "crashed." They talk about inflation. It's on the news. They talk about supply chains, corporate greed and striking unions, unaffordable housing, and bank runs.

I write about achieving freedom though the use of cryptography in a world increasingly becoming more hostile to the branch of mathematics I fell in love with. The bitcoin white paper is illegal in the United Kingdom. The country also declared end-to-end encryption illegal.

Similar laws are being proposed in the so-called land of the free. I am not given permission to play poker online by the State of California. a state where Brick and Mortar poker is legal. The law pissed me off in 2011, but to be honest, unregulated trusted third party casinos were a problem. Full Tilt Poker was a Ponzi Scheme. Bitcoin allows me to play poker online like I would at a brick and mortar casino. My sats remain in my wallet, under my control. To buy in to a game at lighting-poker.com, I put 10,000 sats at risk.

I might lose those sats because it's gambling. Gambling has the risk of loss like the stock market or the spending power in your Wells Fargo savings account. I can also win, and cash out into my own wallet. No trusted third party is needed. This means it can't be used to launder money. Sending sats to one wallet to another is no different than sending sats to a wallet on an online poker room. It's peer-to-peer electronic cash.

Does it matter where the person lives if they want to play poker? I have no idea who the person I am playing is or where he lives. He could be a 40 year old man in Beverly Hills or a Hamas suicide bomber handcuffed to an American child in Gaza. I don't agree with the Hamas Suicide Bomber's decision to play poker while handcuffed to an American child. I support the government's right to intervene and stop the Hamas suicide bombing poker player from taking innocent lives, but that has nothing to do with me playing poker with this idiot.

Maybe that's a far-fetched example, but what if I play poker with Edward Snowden? I like Edward Snowden. I follow him on nostr. I consider him a hero, but my government has exiled him to Russia and levied sanctions on Russia. What if I played poker with Snowden and lost 10,000 sats? It's about $4.20 worth of USD these days. Is that illegal? How would I even know it's him? The government confiscated the proceeds from his book sales. What if I sent him 1,000 sats on nostr? That's about 42 cents these days. Is that illegal?

Bitcoin Is Civil Disobedience

.

Voting does not work. The public is captured by the corporate controlled media. It's almost as if the United States is distracted by the culture war so they don't notice [Social Security is expected to die in 2035](https://www.fool.com/retirement/2020/05/30/can-social-securitSocial Security is expected to die in 2035.

Bitcoin is not a vote for a corrupt politician. Bitcoin is not the lesser of two evils. Bitcoin is good, sound money. Bitcoin is freedom. Bitcoin does not have bank runs. Bitcoin does not have inflation. Bitcoin is civil disobedience, a middle finger raised to the powers that be. I don't care about who uses what bathroom and I don't give a fuck about the federal reserve. It's not like voting changes who is in charge of the federal reserve anyway. Bitcoin is crypto anarchy. It doesn't mean I can use bitcoin to light Molotav cocktails and riot in the streets. It means I don't need to riot in the streets to achieve my objectives. If I don't like how the policy of the federal reserve affects my long-term savings, I don't use federal reserve bucks for my long term savings. I

Blogging Bitcoin

823578

Support my work using the Value4Value model

P.S.

Pretty sure Andreas Antonoplis coined this phrase, Exit Wallstreet.