chargingblindly

npub1wj8z3wjmv5acpcyzkk8acxskjhd30nmeewxf7dt4f2cqlpama7xskrdgeq

[Strike @Strike]

There's a real conversation happening about how tax policy hits working people.

Worth adding to it: every bitcoin transaction, no matter how small, is currently taxable. A de minimis exemption would help millions of people use bitcoin as money.

[chargingblindly @chargingblindly]

@robin_linus Some much discussion and contention around changing the convention, name, symbol etc. People just got on and started doing it and it all makes so much sense.

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Martti Malmi, one of Bitcoin's earliest developers, just released a new version of Nostr VPN, an open-source mesh VPN that replaces the entire trust model of traditional VPN services.

Traditional VPNs route all your traffic through a central server operated by a company you have to trust. They see your data. They require your email. They can log your activity. They can be subpoenaed, hacked, or shut down. Even modern mesh VPNs like Tailscale, which improved on this by sending data peer-to-peer, still require you to authenticate through a centralized coordination server using third-party accounts like Google or Microsoft.

Nostr VPN eliminates the central server entirely. Your identity is a Nostr keypair, a self-generated cryptographic key pair with no registration, no email, no third-party account. The underlying transport layer is FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System), a self-organizing encrypted mesh network where nodes authenticate each other, route traffic for each other, and establish connections without any central authority or global topology knowledge. Each node's Nostr public key (npub) serves as its network address.

The architecture uses two layers of encryption: hop-by-hop encryption between peers and independent end-to-end encryption between mesh endpoints with periodic rekeying for forward secrecy. When direct connections fail due to NAT issues, the system falls back to Nostr-based multihop routing through other FIPS nodes rather than relying on company-operated relay servers. Peer discovery and NAT traversal happen through public Nostr relays using encrypted gift-wrapped messages.

The new release adds native desktop apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows, an Android app, Nostr-based multihop routing for when NAT holepunching fails, and improved network management. It supports UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and Bluetooth transports simultaneously on a single mesh.

This is what happens when you apply Bitcoin's design philosophy, permissionless, self-sovereign, no trusted third parties, to networking infrastructure. Built by one of the people who helped Satoshi build Bitcoin in 2009.

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Janessa Lopez from Block:

“Any time somebody uses bitcoin as a form of money, it should be treated as that.”

The de minimis exemption for stablecoins only is NOT an acceptable compromise.

Block is fighting for adoption, not corporate half-measures.

[Daniel Batten @DSBatten]

At the end of 2023 I met the person who ran GreenpeaceUSA's campaign against Bitcoin. I expected it to be tense.

But it wasn't.

He told me he'd read almost all of my responses to the posts they'd made on Twitter.

"I wish we'd engaged with you and people like you from the outset," he said.

Two months later he left Greenpeace.

A few months after that they ended the campaign entirely.

It was the most well-funded, yet the worst result in their history. I keep coming back to that phrase.

"People like you." Not me, but a whole group: Troy Cross, Margot Paez, Elliot David, Susie Violet Ward and many others.

We were working independently, with no budget and no coordination.

We just shared data and conviction. It is a great story of a decentralized response beating a multi-million dollar centralized campaign, by a combination of having the truth behind us, and expressing that truth in such a way that reasonable people could see.

That recipe has two parts, and it's like giving a glass of water to someone dying of thirst.

The first part is truth, there must be water in the glass.

The second part is the container, how you hold and deliver that truth matters just as much.

You can have perfect data and still lose people if the glass doesn't reach them, or if the energy behind it makes them flinch instead of drink.

We won because the data was right AND because enough people delivered it with the kind of energy that made opponents think rather than react.

And this recipe, we can use again and again throughout Bitcoin's adoption journey, and each time a Bitcoiner builds a new Bitcoin project that involves outreach to non-Bitcoiners.

[Daniel Batten @DSBatten]

@jemimajoanna If you had spent as much time learning about Bitcoin as you have writing about it you would that because Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer consensus network, Michael Saylor does not speak for Bitcoin, or Bitcoiners

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️If this is accurate, it confirms the structural shift we have been modeling.

Putting Bessent as Treasury Secretary and top economic adviser
with Hassett as Fed Chair
would be nothing less than a total inversion of the post-2008 monetary regime.

This is a regime rewrite.

The Fed would go from “independent guardian of price stability”
to a liquidity instrument aligned with the executive branch.

Treasury would become the ideological center of economic policy again.
Just like in the 1940s and 1950s.

That era ended with the rise of pure central bank dominance.

This would reverse it.

1. The combination implies coordinated policy to manage debt, liquidity, and growth simultaneously.

Bessent understands one thing extremely well:

You cannot shrink a debt load this large without blowing up the system.
You can only outgrow it or inflate it away.

Hassett understands political economy better than any Fed Chair in decades.

Together, this points toward:

• A return to financial repression
• Liquidity engineering
• Growth-first policy
• Soft-cap on yields
• Implicit QE structures
• Treasury-Fed coordination reminiscent of WWII

This supports asset prices.
It supports risk.
It supports Bitcoin.

It does not support savers.
It does not support fixed-income holders.
It does not support austerity.

This would be a world where owning assets is survival, and holding cash is slow death.

2. The markets will pretend to be confused, then realize how bullish this is for risk assets.

Why?

Because the era of “higher for longer” would be structurally over.

Hassett as Fed Chair = political Fed
Bessent as Treasury + top adviser = liquidity Fed

Together, they give Trump the ability to run a coordinated macro regime:

• Lower real rates
• Higher nominal growth
• Dollar managed through policy tools
• Deficits not treated as moral sin
• Controlled inflation tolerated

This is exactly the macro environment Bitcoin thrives in.

3. This is not just policy. This is ideology.

Powell represents the post-GFC worldview:

• Independent Fed
• Inflation hawk signaling
• Balance sheet normalization theatre
• Market discipline through rates

Bessent and Hassett represent a new worldview:

• Growth is priority
• National strength comes from liquidity and industry, not rate sermons
• Treasury and Fed must act together
• Deficits are not the problem
• Stagnation is the problem
• Real economy > academic orthodoxy

This is an ideological alignment between fiscal and monetary policy that we have not seen since the 1940s.

4. The deeper truth: This is a strategic move aimed at China.

A coordinated Treasury-Fed regime allows for:

• Industrial policy acceleration
• Re-shoring capital flows
• Dollar supremacy maintenance
• Controlled inflation weaponized against foreign creditors
• AI, energy, defense, and infrastructure spending without austerity constraints

This is geopolitical economic warfare.

It is the United States preparing for the next 10-year arc.

[Bitcoin Ekasi @BitcoinEkasi]

Holy moly🤯
The entire map is basically 🟠

🧡🚀🔥👀🤩

@MoneyBadgerPay making Bitcoin everyday money in 🇿🇦

And this is only 10% of all locations. (Apparently the map is too slow to keep adding more..)
😂😅😅🫡💥

[Andrei Verdes @theandreiverdes]

My coworker got promoted over me.

He was worse at coding. Better at politics.

I wrote better code. Fixed more bugs. Shipped faster.

He talked in meetings. Took credit. Played the game.

He got the promotion. I got "keep up the good work".

That's when I realized: corporate rewards politics, not performance.

Six months later I quit. Started freelancing.

Now I make 3x his salary. No politics. No credit-stealing. Just solving problems and getting paid directly.

The best developers rarely get promoted. They get used.

Companies optimize for compliance and communication. Not competence.

If you're technically great but politically terrible, you'll never win at corporations.

Leave. Build your own thing. Get paid for your actual value.

[chargingblindly @chargingblindly]

My favourite habit when posting a complaint over email is to sign it off “Retards” instead of “Regards” and claim it was a spelling mistake.

[chargingblindly @chargingblindly]

Fantastic summary of the business vs political disconnect

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

I sit in Parliament listening to these ministers, and it’s all just so depressing - the vast majority of them have never run a business, and it SHOWS. You would not believe how bad it is.

They think ‘work’ means turning up to an office between 9 and 5, answering a few emails, and going home at the end of the day. Nice lunch break, few coffees away from the desk, probably a smoking break or several. It doesn’t - not for the millions of men and women who actually create the wealth that funds the state.

Running a small business isn’t a job. It’s a way of life. It is life. It’s 24/7/365. It’s relentless. You are the accountant, HR department, compliance officer, cleaner, marketer, and customer service team - all in one. There’s no sick pay, no safety net, and no taxpayer-funded pension waiting for you.

Holiday? Good luck. If you do manage to get away, it’s checking the phone all day, every day. Wife/husband obviously getting pissed off. We’ve all been there...

It’s all on you. Every invoice chased, every tax deadline met, every bit of red tape navigated is on you. And if you make one mistake, one error, one small slip-up, the state comes after you - in a relentlessly efficient manner that is never afforded to us when we ask questions of it.

Most MPs have no idea what that feels like. They just don’t. We’re going to see more of this in the budget I’m sure. More hurt. More pain. More tax. They don’t get it.

They don’t understand that when a small business owner gets hit with another tax, it’s not absorbed by a ‘budget’ - it’s taken straight out of their family’s pocket.

There is no ‘deficit’ in the business world - that’s called going bust.

And they certainly don’t understand what real risk looks like. Politicians can vote through a policy on Monday and forget it by Tuesday - a small business owner lives with the consequences of that policy for years, decades. The MP monthly salary is safe. It always has been. In the public sector before, and in the public sector after - if not that, some charity/NGO funded entirely by the public sector.

GET A REAL JOB.

If MPs actually spent a week running a small firm - paying suppliers, tackling VAT, navigating health and safety law, sorting out HR issues, chasing clients for payment, trying to expand while staying compliant with everything from GDPR to local planning regulations - they’d legislate very differently. I can promise you that.

They’d realise that most of Britain’s problems could be solved by the state doing less, not more.

Cutting tax. Simplifying regulation. Slashing back the HRification of the country. Trusting people who actually produce things to get on with it.

Instead, we have a political class that talks endlessly about ‘growth’ while brutally punishing the only people capable of delivering it - especially going after the family businesses/farms, which is a particularly spiteful policy decision.

Small business owners are people who work harder than almost anyone in Parliament could imagine - and who are treated worse for it.

Britain’s small businesses don’t succeed because of politicians, they survive in spite of them.

[chargingblindly @chargingblindly]

@RayDalio A central bank won't take it on because it undermines their core function.

[Hugo @hugomofn]

I've been heads-down working on shipping Miniscript. I look up three months later, and people are STILL debating mempool filters. 😀

Since we have a moment before our next major release, I’ll jot down my thoughts on the matter.

Disclaimer: I have no horse in this race. I don't think keeping the current OP_RETURN limit or raising it will have a material impact. My only interest is the truth and what's best for Bitcoin. Interestingly, I disagree with both sides of the debate (the so-called "spammers" and the "filterers") for reasons I'll explain below.

Let’s first establish some ground truths:
1. Proof-of-Work is more special than you think.

History is filled with rulers who debased their currencies—the original "Proof-of-Stake" systems. Yet, historical PoW money (gold) always prevailed. People in ancient Rome and Confucian China alike knew gold was valuable. This is distilled wisdom, passed down through diverse cultures. Our ancestors have an intuitive understanding of PoW, despite not knowing PoW is (unforgeable costliness). It is the most objective truth we have, independent of language or belief system. Everything else is fake in comparison. The JPEG peddlers don't fully grasp PoW's economic implications, and the filterers gravely underestimate its power as the ultimate filter.

2. Monetary transactions have a higher economic density than data transactions.

A monetary transaction moves value (V) for a fee (F). A data transaction moves value (V) plus some perceived data premium (D1​) for a fee (F) plus an extra fee for the data payload (D2​).

The fee rate for a monetary transaction is F/V. The fee rate for a data transaction is (F+D2​) / (V+D1​).

In the long run, the on-chain data premium (D1​) trends toward zero, except for a few special truly rare sats (not artificially rare). As this happens, monetary transactions become vastly more economically efficient and will inevitably outcompete data transactions for block space.

3. Relying on data alone to prove a positive is a logical fallacy.

Data can help formulate a hypothesis, but that hypothesis is fragile. It only takes one contradictory data point to destroy it. For instance, I've seen the argument: "Our OP_RETURN filter must be working, otherwise why would there be significantly more transactions with under 80 bytes of data than over 80 bytes?"

This logic is trivially debunked. For 16 years, we rarely saw transactions paying less than 1 sat/vB, a long-standing mempool policy. One could have concluded the policy was an iron law. Yet, in just a few months, 0.1 sat/vB transactions have become common, proving the policy was a transient heuristic, not a fundamental truth. It works until it doesn't.

Here’s another analogy: A society that lives next to a volcano for a thousand years without an eruption might theorize that fire can never fall from the sky. That theory, based on a millennium of "data," will one day get them killed. Data is insufficient without being coupled with first-principles analysis.

[@melissa @melissa]

one time as a kid, my dad told me about some old research he'd read

he said, maybe asian kids are better at math because they just try 50% longer

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Owning a house is not an “investment” in the same category as equities, crypto, or AI exposure.

It is a consumption good with embedded optionality - shelter plus leveraged exposure to a slow, politically protected inflation hedge.

Calling it a bad investment is as incomplete as calling oxygen a bad asset - it’s not meant to be an alpha driver, it’s meant to anchor survival and stability.

The American Dream myth was never about ROI maximization, it was about anchoring belief in permanence, rootedness, and intergenerational continuity. That function still exists - but it has decayed structurally. ZIRP-era financialization turned housing into a speculative leverage vehicle.

The Fed and Treasury engineered it into collateral for the entire credit system. Once an asset becomes collateral - it stops being a dream and becomes an instrument of systemic control.

Now, in this decade, AI and Bitcoin/crypto are where reflexive growth lives. They compound belief and capital at 10x the velocity of real estate. But they don’t provide stability - they provide acceleration.

So if one allocates everything to “high growth” and rents, they gain flexibility but lose sovereignty. Land and shelter insulate you from systemic shocks. That insulation becomes priceless the moment liquidity seizes or states weaponize mobility.

So the unfiltered synthesis is this:
•Housing is no longer the American Dream - it’s collateral in a decaying fiat system.
•Tech/crypto are the growth vectors - they are the ignition arcs of wealth creation.
•The real edge is synthesis: own sovereign shelter to anchor, deploy surplus into reflexive ignition assets to scale. Only one without the other leaves you structurally exposed.

The highest coherence: the future is not “home vs. crypto” - it is home as sovereignty, crypto as acceleration. Anything else is a half-truth.

[Bam 🛳️ @bamskki]

Transactions fees are the only way to filter what you call “spam”. Here’s Andreas Antonop. explaining how implementing filters creates what he calls a “dictatorship of developers”.

Everyone knew this all along, up until yesterday.

[Woody 🇨🇦🍷 @_woodward17]

I hear ya. At 35, I can really notice the effects of even 1 glass of wine.

I’ve tried to minimize quantity and stop by 7pm. The earlier the better so it doesn’t affect my sleep.

Hydration and stress play a key role for me to. If I’ve had a long day at work and haven’t hydrated properly, 1 glass will for sure ruin my sleep.

Wine (and cider) quality are really important. Find something that makes you feel good both during and after. There are some wines that I know are not for me after 1 sip. Don’t waste your life drinking crappy wine.

[Naithan Jones @NaithanJones]

Let simplify this entire game for you

The world is set up to try to convince you to hate yourself and quit, and your entire mission in life is to love yourself and refuse to quit

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Unpopular opinion: airport lounges should not exist.

Lounges only exist to buffer delays and worries about missing flights. We are scared into arriving at airports early.

Imagine curb to jet in 15 min guaranteed. Then most of what we call "airport" can just be deleted.