"bitcoin is a protocol stack which we can expect to be expanding for many decades, and its foundation is that lean, simple database defended by the world’s strongest firewall; the bitcoin blockchain. In sum, we recommend to not worry about “diversification” in cryptocurrencies and to focus exclusively on bitcoin. It’s the right tool for the job, so pick it up and add it to your toolbox." — Adamant Research Today we dive into the amazing report from Adamant Research who have marked the key zones ...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 15 min
"...At some point the entire financial system becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the Federal Reserve" — Peter St. Onge Today we dive into the fiat and banking crisis with Austrian economist Peter St. Onge in exploring the insolvencies of our banking and political institutions, how we got here, and where things are likely heading. What courses of action are available for the US government and the Fed and what can we take away from the historical examples of countries taking this same path to ap...
Jun 21, 2023•1 hr 24 min
"Expect BlackRock to turn around and shill this to banks, and in particular big banks, such that JPMorgan, for example, can itself turn around and offer “Bitcoin” to its own clients. Of course, it will be an IOU to the BlackRock Stack O’Sats™ that you can transfer to your friend’s Bank Of America Bitcoin IOU account at your leisure. In other words, in short order, the entirety of the Blue Banks’ asset base becomes a funnel into the matrix of the pseudo-Bitcoin narrative attack vector... on the b...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr 16 min
"The more wonderful something is, the more passion it will arouse. Bitcoin is among the greatest wonders of the late-modern world, so Greg Foss is understandably very passionate about it. So passionate in fact, that he dropped 11 f-bombs in 31 seconds. Why is such a stalwart bitcoin proponent so concerned? Because two guys in cheap wizard costumes did a cringey Fortnite dance? Surely the stakes must be higher. According to some, there is a battle underway for the future and soul of Bitcoin." — R...
Jun 15, 2023•32 min
"What is Bitcoin? Many have attempted to answer this question, but I believe that our quest to do so is doomed to continue in perpetuity . The continuing development of the protocol is where the cutting edge of research into what Bitcoin is and discussion about what it should strive to be actually occurs. It can be tricky for newcomers to wrap their head around what sort of proposals are more likely to be accepted for Bitcoin because there are plenty of unwritten rules regarding protocol changes...
Jun 15, 2023•1 hr 12 min
"These contributions were pivotal in the image generation space, setting Stable Diffusion on a different path from Dall-E. Having an open model led to product integrations, marketplaces, user interfaces, and innovations that didn’t happen for Dall-E. The effect was palpable: rapid domination in terms of cultural impact vs the OpenAI solution, which became increasingly irrelevant. Whether the same thing will happen for LLMs remains to be seen, but the broad structural elements are the s...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 17 min
"Zapvertising has two forms, and I believe there is a crucial difference between the two. In one version, a company or creator zaps a ton of notes on the Nostr feed. Blockstream has done this for a couple of days at a time, to great success. It is very unobtrusive. Just a gentle reminder that they are there, and it is a way to earn good will that may lead to follows and possibly conversion to sales. This method has already proven itself to be fairly successful, as I think the amount of goodwill ...
Jun 12, 2023•49 min
With the banking crisis just getting started, with the SEC going after Binance and Coinbase, with rumors of Prime Trust declaring bankruptcy, it is no better time than now to take advantage of the most elegant aspect of Bitcoin, that it is a bearer asset that you can own without the permission or liability of anyone else. There is no better time than now, to withdraw. Today's episode will dig into the recent excellent work from Brad Mills, as well as explore the fundamental reasons for our syste...
Jun 09, 2023•1 hr 22 min
"Nostr isn't just a social network, in a similar way that Bitcoin isn't just a transaction network. Both of these things are true, but they each miss the more significant elements of what they accomplish." — Guy Swann Yesterday I was consumed with a mental thread that I couldn't get out of my head, and so decided to set everything else aside and get this idea out. Today we read my short article posted on blogstack.io, and follow it with a Guy's Take on the possible nuance, where I might be wrong...
Jun 07, 2023•1 hr 8 min
"Much like how two nuclear bombs ended World War II, capital-crushing central bank policy rate hikes and Russian sanctions were like two nuclear bombs dropped on the economy and the banking system. The shock wave took one year to make its way around the world, and now we're dealing with the fallout.European banks like Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse were very intertwined with Russia, and tried to resist cutting ties with Russian business lines as this would inevitably lead to their failures, whi...
Jun 06, 2023•53 min
"Price inflation is the highest it’s been in decades. Labor participation is the lowest it’s been in decades. Wealth inequality is continually going in the wrong direction since 1971 and has accelerated during the QE period. The bond markets are more volatile now than they have been in decades, and 2022 was the worst year for stocks and bonds since 1920. The ballooning of the money supply and growth of the debt-based monetary system is not a left versus right phenomenon — at least in America — b...
Jun 02, 2023•56 min
"The idea of a language user interface as the next step from the thumb tapping we’ve become used to over the past decade is fascinating, and what we should be thinking about is how to make these tools new “bicycles for the mind,” as Steve Jobs said about computers. It’s very important we push back against doomer narratives that lean the world toward “approved Ai” in order to avoid such tools becoming yet another appendage of the state." — Aleks Svetski What are the true power and limitations of ...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 2 min
With the Introduction of Ark, the new 2nd layer payments and privacy protocol introduced with Read_734 . I left with a lot of excitement, but I still had a ton of questions, so it felt like time for a chat with Burak, the creator of Ark. We dive into the bigger picture, how this is similar to lightning, how it is different, and then in an attempt to piece together the working parts we go through a bunch of edge cases and detail exactly how the ASP, past owners of Ark balances, and current owners...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 26 min
"This is the first time we've interacted with anything other than a parrot that can string together a coherent sentence. And it sounds stupid, but it's actually true. So we are anthropomorphizing, we are projecting our own consciousness onto this thing, and we are immediately imagining Terminator, Minority Report, God knows what else we are imagining - the Ray Kurzweil's of the world - we're imagining that all of a sudden, that's it, we unlocked it, basically we have discovered God. We did it. T...
May 26, 2023•1 hr 18 min
This episode will be part review, and part just going over some very practical, step by step ways to think about managing your keys with a hardware wallet. What you always need to do, how to not over complicate things, who you are protecting your keys from, and more. This episode will be good for those who had been considering taking the dive into their first hardware wallet, and still feel a little uncomfortable about exactly what to do to make sure their keys are there when needed. Guy's Nostr...
May 26, 2023•45 min
"Ark is a trustless, distinct layer two protocol with unilateral exit. ASPs cannot steal users’ funds or link senders & receivers. Users retain self-custody and can revert their funds to the base layer if something goes wrong on the second layer." — Burak Today we dive into possibly the most exciting announcement to come out of Bitcoin2023, a genuinely unique layer 2 protocol, for non-custodial, fully anonymous, fast, cheap, off-chain payments. Introducing Ark. We are diving right in and I p...
May 25, 2023•42 min
"an unbounded number of assets can be minted and/or moved in a single on-chain transaction. This off-chain first design enables asset minters and transactors to enjoy the permissionless nature of the bitcoin blockchain and scale their businesses without running into bitcoin’s scaling constraints. Users will soon be able to integrate their assets into the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low-fee transactions. This leverages existing network effects and the install base of wallets, exch...
May 23, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Welcome to the first episode of AI Unchained, a new show exploring how AI technology can be a means of empowering the individual, rather than a system of control, and all the tools and perspectives that enlighten that journey. Our first guest is none other than Jeff Booth, the author of "The Price of Tomorrow" on the incredible deflationary force of technology and why our only choice is to embrace it, not fight it. If you are trying to make sense out of the change that is being unleashed, you do...
May 16, 2023•1 hr 36 min
Welcome to the first episode of AI Unchained, a new show exploring how AI technology can be a means of empowering the individual, rather than a system of control, and all the tools and perspectives that enlighten that journey. Our first guest is none other than Jeff Booth, the author of "The Price of Tomorrow" on the incredible deflationary force of technology and why our only choice is to embrace it, not fight it. If you are trying to make sense out of the change that is being unleashed, you do...
May 15, 2023•1 hr 36 min
"Permission can only be denied if it is requested. Direct, peer-to-peer interaction obviates permission and equalizes market power. Don’t request permission to transact; transact. Don’t tinker with the system; supersede it." — Roy Sheinfeld Today we dive into a great piece just dropped from Roy Shienfeld with a great way to think both about Bitcoin and lightning adoption by the mainstream, and also about the path and direction forward to bring the most utility to the most people. Don't build ano...
May 12, 2023•1 hr 14 min
"The biggest complaint members of my audience make about Nostr is the sheer dominance of Bitcoin content. This is understandable. Nostr uses a means of identification and account management very similar to Bitcoin, it has Bitcoin Lightning integration and Bitcoiners tend to be somewhat techy nerds and early adopters. Hence mostly Bitcoin type folks were the first to see Nostr’s potential and get on it. There is a finite limit to growth though with any topic on social media and instead of complai...
May 11, 2023•25 min
"Bitcoin transaction fees limit network abuse by making usage expensive. There is a cost to every transaction, set by a dynamic free market based on demand." — Matt Odell Is Bitcoin broken, are the high fees the end of Bitcoin as money? Are the fees themselves even the problem? How does this relate to not wanting people to be pooping in the park? Today we dive into a short, but solid post by Matt Odell to make sense of what is going on with fees, and then a Guy's Take to clear up some previous d...
May 10, 2023•34 min
"This very dominance is causing certain countries to seek a way to be less dependent on the USD and the UST. To extract themselves from the whims and needs of a central bank that lives a world away from their own economy. Yet still finds a way to dominate it." — James Lavish Today we take a ride through a twitter thread by James Lavish, exploring the major developments in the splintering of the world monetary and banking system. While the dollar remains dominant through sheer inertia, the trend ...
May 09, 2023•50 min
"The question of who controls the ability to merge code changes into Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository tends to come up on a recurring basis. This has been cited as a “central point of control” of the Bitcoin protocol by various parties over the years, but I argue that the question itself is a red herring that stems from an authoritarian perspective — this model does not apply to Bitcoin. It’s certainly not obvious to a layman as to why that is the case, thus the goal of this article is to explai...
May 06, 2023•1 hr 5 min
Bitcoin is a public good. The maintenance and stewardship of the network rests on the conviction and work of 10s or 100s of thousands of node operators who work to validate and ensure consistency among the rules and the truth of the data propagated throughout. NFTs and BRC tokens have come to the Bitcoin timechain, stamping large amounts of data to the chain, and causing bloat in the UTXO set, as well as validation and bandwidth costs. Is the sky falling? Is this totally unimportant? Or is there...
May 03, 2023•1 hr 4 min
"The fall of First Republic Bank was the second-largest bank failure by assets in US history, putting us in the 2008 conversation. Times are different, but the bank failures are relatable in size. The total assets of three 2023 failures have already eclipsed the total assets of all the banks that failed during the Great Financial Crisis" — Nik Bhatia, Joe Consorti Today we dive into a short breakdown of the breakdown of the banking system with The Bitcoin Layer. The banking crisis is here to sta...
May 03, 2023•40 min
"If Tor is an anonymous remailer, meaning a protocol facilitating the anonymous forwarding and receiving of messages between peers, Nostr can function as an anonymous bulletin board. CoinJoin coordinators can publish their services via a Nostr event type, and CoinJoin wallets can be enabled to automatically pull from those relays to display within their clients." — L0LA L33TZ Today we dive into a really cool topic on how major privacy concerns can be thought of in relation to our interactions wi...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 9 min
"Banks are highly regulated public-private partnerships in an environment where new charters are excruciatingly hard to obtain, and as such remain de facto arms of the state. It has been and remains trivial to deputize them to carry out political objectives. If there was any doubt, it’s now evident that the Obama administration and its successor in Biden’s regime are comfortable circumventing the First Amendment by engaging nominally private companies to do their dirty work." — Nic Carter Today ...
Apr 27, 2023•1 hr 47 min
"The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that i hear once in a while: "Why do you use the word 'selfishness' to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?" To those who ask it, my answer is: "For the reason that makes you afraid of it." But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies, yet who are unable to formulate my actual reason or to identify the p...
Apr 26, 2023•1 hr 53 min
"Central Banking is successful alchemy in this sense. The money- issuing institutions of the world have found a way to create new money with no cost. No mining is required. They are the alchemists of our era. The Central Banks’ promise of stable prices is as absurd as the alchemists’ promise of cheap gold. The whole point of a value- measurement tool, or a type of money, is in its costliness. It has to somehow connect to reality because of the subjective nature of value. Money created without co...
Apr 24, 2023•34 min
