A #Bitcoin DCA keeps poverty away 🧡 • Memes • #BTCorGFY • Staying humble & stacking #sats through DCA + BTFD is how you store your time & energy in #BTC
Venice built the greatest commercial empire in European history without a central bank, without industrial policy, and without a single economic development agency. While Byzantine bureaucrats strangled Constantinople with regulations and Frankish kings debased their currencies, Venetian merchants created wealth through voluntary exchange and sound money.
The lagoon dwellers who fled Attila's hordes in 452 AD had nothing but salt marshes and fish. No natural resources. No agricultural surplus. No inherited infrastructure. What they possessed was something far more valuable: distance from the coercive apparatus of mainland states. This geographic accident forced them to survive through trade rather than taxation, commerce rather than conquest.
Venice's constitution deliberately fragmented power to prevent any single authority from controlling trade. The Doge held ceremonial functions while competing merchant families checked each other's ambitions. No guild could monopolize an industry without rivals organizing alternative trading networks. When the state tried to restrict private commerce in 1297 with the Serrata del Maggior Consiglio, it marked the beginning of Venice's decline, not its peak.
The Venetian ducat maintained its gold content for over 500 years while every other European currency suffered debasement. Merchants could calculate profits across decades, plan investments across generations, and accumulate capital without worrying about monetary manipulation. Compare this to England, where Henry VIII cut silver content by 83% in just 20 years.
Voluntary association and sound money create abundance. Coercion creates poverty. Venice proved this. The same economic laws that enriched Venetian merchants still operate today, waiting for governments brave enough to get out of the way.
Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.
When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.
They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.
In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.
The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.
We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.
Does anybody know how I can get in touch with @virtualben89?
It's about a Bitcoin lightning channel I have opened with his node many years ago and I cannot close it, because I'm missing the channel.db file 😩
@virtualben89@umbrel@RTL_App@lightning maybe you know or have any other idea how to help. I used the channel backup file from the broken node, but never knew of a channel.db file, and was probably not even able to download it, as the node became unable many years ago.
Does anybody know how I can get in touch with @virtualben89?
It's about a Bitcoin lightning channel I have opened with his node many years ago and I cannot close it, because I'm missing the channel.db file 😩