There is no “single solution” to scaling to the whole world, and lightning was never claimed (except by people who didn’t understand it” to scale to the whole world’s transaction demand. The likely scaling limits are literally discussed in the whitepaper and the people who act like it’s not admitted or that it was dishonest were never paying attention, imo. Blockchains don’t scale, that’s what bugs me about people who say “Lightning doesn’t scale” as if the lack of a universal, complete solution to all scaling in Lightning, somehow means their preferred alternative (with vastly worst limits) should be recommended. The simple fact is that Lightning scales at a significant multiple to any blockchain based payment system, likely in the 100x range. Maybe I’m more annoyed than I should be, but serial complainers with solutions to exactly none of the problems just feel like such a waste of time to me these days. Maybe I just need more patience and my kids are taking all that energy from me already 😂

Actually it isn’t interesting. He’s just trying to force what he cares about onto people who don’t care about it and the complaining that no option solves literally every single problem of money, payments, and finance all at the same time… which is just an absurd notion, imo. Of course don’t recommend something hard to use or costly, but the fact that he jumps on Monero at the end and pretends it doesn’t have a vastly worse scaling problem, has even more limited options for layering, and the person is gonna have to KUC on some exchange to buy it anyway, shows this isn’t actually a conversation about trade offs, it’s just shilling. 🤷🏻‍♂️ “Lightning doesn’t scale, use Monero.” Is like saying, “IP addresses won’t scale, that’s why I tell people to write physical letters.” 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

It says the question was “resolved.” So what was the answer? 🤣

Am I supposed to know the context for the image of the boobs? 😆

Vibe coding is fun

Ai is awesome... Also Ai:

Why do so many engineers fail to grasp the difference between building an app, and building money? #Bitcoin wasn’t built to impress software engineers. It was built to change the world. Let's get into Read_889 - "Bitcoin for Engineers" by 🔗 https://fountain.fm/episode/FQXtIVB4Naznmp1j0Tdo

We're going to anyway.

Yes these would be significant indicators. But even these can be widely varied when you get into concrete examples: 1.a Control over development to prevent/stall soft forks or features. (accepted risk of decentralization, likely to happen whether naturally or by “capture”) 1.b Control over development through dev funding and attempting hard fork. (Unlikely, and will cause extreme disruption and would be the worst battle and economic fallout of Bitcoin’s history. Blocksize war but with Wall Street players) 2. This is why I’ve been talking about DATUM non stop and have called it on numerous occasions the most important project in Bitcoin currently. 3. This is not even reasonable to define and is subject to massive guesswork. The social sphere is *always* in flux and there will be ebbs and flows on all issues/values, imo. Theres also some significant sampling problems that make this hard to assess - ex. There are 10 people talking about self custody in a room. 490 people enter the room. There are now 20 people talking about self custody, and 480 talking about stickers. Did the percent of people talking about self custody fall from 100% to 4%? Or did the number of people who care about self custody double? 4. Yes, but must consider it in the context of number 3 and 1 and how they would skew an apparent, but less real, change in those things. In other words, we could have more people caring and developing toward the core values of Bitcoin than ever, but the total loss of that focus in the reference client developers and 90% of “the community” talking about stickers. So it would APPEAR like total loss of values, but it would only be because we are being too targeted and centralized in *where and how* we expect to see them manifest.

First off, these are generic, broad concerns that apply to various degrees perpetually, but “ETFs are here and Bitcoin treasuries have captured bitcoin” aren’t explained by just listing possible ways in which influence *could* be used. Decentralization isn’t the absence of means of influence, it’s when a system has so many variant ways that influence can be both used and then defended against, that no single avenue dominates unilaterally. That said I’ll give a few caveats about the ones you bring up anyway: 1. Holding bitcoin doesn’t not mean control over the protocol or network. And there’s no major concern about the current distribution. Institutions were always going to be here at some point. 2. This is a boogie man very often carried out that is based on common ignorance about markets and what “manipulation” actually is. 3. This has nothing to do with any of the above. It’s just its own issue and I talk about it constantly because it’s actually a problem that exists and is tangible. 4. Regulations have gone lax. I’m more concerned of complacency because things are going our way on that front. In short, you just listed generic ways in which there is influence over various elements of the social sphere or of the various infrastructure used by businesses or institutions. But this is a vast chasm away from “bitcoin has been captured.” I never made the claim that there aren’t dozens of players who could influence things, who operate various parts of the infrastructure, or that there are certain jurisdictions that can set some standards for good or bad - to the contrary that’s exactly what I am and have argued and talk about all the time. But I’m talking about people who literally say “ETFs have bought some bitcoin, bitcoins treasury companies are buying some, therefore bitcoin is captured.” And I’m pointing out, correctly, that this is a nonsense take, and isn’t anything of substance. ———— If none of this is getting through, I’ll use an analogy: - Let’s say we’ve been talking about various risks to bitcoin mining for years. We have real conversations about which pools present which risks, which jurisdictions pose concerns, which protocols allow for block hijacking, etc. Actual substance around the mining problem. - Blackrock makes a mining pool that gets a few percent of the hashrate. Say 10% - People just start instantly claiming Blackrock destroyed Bitcoin. It’s captured, we’re screwed, 51% attacks. The end. - I ask for what the various risks and likelihood are. - Someone screams at me like I’m retarded and says “DUH They’ll 51% attack you moron!” - I say, well yeah but that’s a vague category of thing that CAN happen, you have presented no *substance* here as to how Blackrock now has control over everything. This is what I’m getting at. There’s this weird religion that people who hate Wall Street have, who actually seem to “anti worship” them. They think they are evil, but importantly, they think they are evil *gods* who have total control over whatever they involve themselves in by virtue or simply showing up. And they can’t seem to grasp that they’ve said nothing at all.

Any OG that thinks it’s been captured because some ETFs were launched and Wall Street wants to buy some is stupid and I hope they sell. We lose some OGs who don’t get the bigger picture every cycle. We lost way more to Bcash. Good riddance, they will readopt it anyway when they realize that the global infrastructure was always going to operate on the soundest, most accessible money, and that they let it go for literal trash. Their ignorance is, and always has been, good for the rest of us.

I have said absolutely nothing of the sort and I can't possibly understand how you pulled that from anything I have said. I simply ask for someone to give some evidence or some actual useful information as to what "captured" means and how anything that has happened has resulted in "capture." But that's never given, they just say "this exists, thus captured," literally without defining what that means or how what they point out means it... Which your comment is another decent example of. You don't back it up, you just use my lack of acceptance of this default, reasonless logic, as evidence of some absurd statement like "you just think there can never be any negative impact," a literal light years leap away from demanding some sort of evidence as to what the negative impact is in any material sense and how it means bitcoin is "captured."

I don’t think there is a single part of your comment that wasn’t 100% imagined from thin air. But don’t mind me keep going 😆👍🏻

People who say this like its a bad thing don't understand how to bootstrap networks. 100,000 users on a network talking about 100,000 different topics dies in a matter of days, because there's literally nobody to talk to about *your* topic and no cohesion at all in the network. 100,000 users in one community is a solid network. Look at every successful network in history, it *always* starts with an atomic, self sustaining network around a single community or purpose. - Amazon. Only sold books. - Uber, Lyft, and pretty much any rideshare service. All got a critical mass in ONE city before expanding. - Airbnb. Started exclusively and got success in San Francisco. - Napster. Started with almost exclusively music - Facebook. Exclusively Harvard students - Twitch.tv started as just one guy streaming his life and then targeted gamers. - Pinterest, focused entirely on "mom-bloggers" This list goes on and on. What he is describing is literally *the only way alternative networks are ever successful.* So contrary to the idea that this is bad, it's actually the only reason Nostr is still here. Because you can find most of the best bitcoiners, tons of great holistic lifestyle content, and cypherpunks wanting to build awesome shit. That's actually a fantastic start and we should LEAN INTO THIS MORE, not steer away from it. We do so at our own detriment if we just complain about and fail to embrace the community we DO have. - Tinder. Literally grew itself locally one frat and sorority party at a time.

As society becomes more productive and technologically advanced, money is *supposed* to grow in value. This is literally the mechanism by which the fruits of all our labor are shared. By all the things we need and want becoming more affordable. If everything is getting more expensive while technology is advancing, someone is stealing from you.

Decided to post video episodes native to Nostr going forward. This was an awesome conversation I had with Mauricio, co-founder of Ledn, and his and his brother's story of mining bitcoin in the early days, escaping hyperinflation, and building a global bitcoin company.

Moneyball is one of my favorite movies of all time.

I’m going to repeat this incessantly until we realize this is one of the best set of trade offs we could possibly have for onboarding new people to Nostr.

It is generating keys (but the host cant see them), its just blinded from the user. And there are still obvious trade offs, but thats not the point.

If you could “sign in with Apple” to all Nostr related apps and pull the same keys and have your same account in every app… I wouldn’t discount how powerful that would be for the user experience.

The metrics aren't the same The community isn't the same The value isn't the same There's no 1:1 comparison with platform social media and I think we do ourselves a disservice by looking at legacy metrics as the most important. That doesn't mean they cant be useful in some ways, but I think we should recognize just how much noise there is in a typical network that makes a useful comparison extremely difficult. Especially when what you get out of it, how likely your followers are to see your content, and the level of connection to the community can vary so greatly.