Friends don’t let friends use browser-based wallets.

The greatest cognitive dissonance in Bitcoin is probably from Bitcoiners who correctly identify Ethereum as a fiat grift, but still use browser or Javascript-based wallets. The complete opposite of low-time preference and being fundamentally sound.

AI and Bitcoin are discoveries. They reveal themselves once we’ve fully harnessed the power of moving atoms at the speed of light, fueled by an inordinate amount of energy. The entire century before this was just preparation.

Agreed.

The world is converging on two forces: AI and Bitcoin. It’s probably not a coincidence that both rely on power-hungry chips and vast amounts of energy—two sides of the same coin. Prediction: an energy race is coming to see who dominates both fields. The next 10 years will be wild. P.S. We thought the Internet was our final form. Turns out it was just a stepping stone to discovering AI and Bitcoin. 😀

If I have to guess, it’s likely because it isn’t written natively.

I don’t think people fully grok the risk of KYC in Bitcoin. KYC honeypots & data leaks are already dangerous in the analog world. But zoom out and fast-forward 20 years into a hyper-digitized, hyper-bitcoinized future, and that risk 10x’s. In the analog, pre-hyperbitcoinized world, if someone gets your family’s name, SSN, and address, what’s the worst the can happen? Maybe they impersonate you. Maybe they sell your data to ad companies. It’s bad, but not end-of-the-world bad. But with Bitcoin — a digital bearer asset — it’s different. Once someone knows your family holds a large stack, you’re a forever target. You don’t get spammed. You get hunted. By North Korean hacker teams and ransomware crews from every corner of the world. Forever. You do not want a target on your family’s back for eternity. Zoom out & think long-term. KYC isn’t just a risk. It’s a ticking time bomb. P.S. Some historical context: KYC was invented before the Internet. Not only has it failed its objectives, its creators NEVER anticipated a world shaped by the Internet & Bitcoin. The ramifications of this outdated policy will be insane in the years to come. A lot of people will get hurt.

Self-custody is the cornerstone of Bitcoin. The day self-custody dies, Bitcoin dies with it. Nunchuk is fully committed to improving free self-custody tools—it’s 1000x more important than our paid services. Principle over money.

When the Internet was invented, everyone thought it would democratize knowledge. Fast forward 30 years, it got so incredibly centralized and censored that it took one man buying Twitter to (hopefully) save it from itself. What’s the equivalent of that threat in Bitcoin?

IMO, one of the biggest threats to Bitcoin is the ratio of Bitcoin held by exchanges and ETFs compared to the total supply. We sort of got lucky that Wall Street ignored Bitcoin for the first 15 years, resulting in an ownership distribution that currently favors individuals (>50%). 2 problems: (a) it could be temporary (b) high coordination costs among individuals in the event of a fork As Bitcoin goes mainstream, complacency and a loss of vigilance among ‘Bitcoiners’ is almost inevitable. The further we get from the last fork crisis, the more likely this becomes — if not with today’s Bitcoiners, then perhaps in 10-20 years. And I want to emphasize that this is a UNIQUE problem to Bitcoin. Gold doesn’t have this problem. You can perhaps find ways to inflate its supply, but you cannot fork gold. Or real estate. It is a unique problem because Bitcoin relies on continual PoW/Nakamoto Consensus. At the heart of Bitcoin is a system that sustains itself with ‘heartbeats’ roughly every ~10 mins. Each one secures the network, but also retroactively locks down the entire ledger, all the way back to the genesis block. In other words, Bitcoin is a LIVING thing. Unlike gold which is an inanimate object. And because Bitcoin is a live and living thing, it CAN be tampered with. Extremely difficult, but possible. Bitcoin incentive scheme must hold and Bitcoiners must remain vigilant for the whole thing to work. Proper checks and balances. This is why self-custody is so incredibly critical to Bitcoin’s success. Without the economic majority holding Bitcoin in self-custody, the system can be co-opted, bringing us back to square one: the reunification of money and state. This is also why I see most concerns about Bitcoin as secondary. Yes, Bitcoin can and will improve on privacy. Yes, it can be a decent, “good enough” MoE. But it doesn’t need to excel at these. It must first lock down the self-custody and SoV use case — or the whole system will collapse like quicksand. To reiterate: it must be INSANELY EASY to self-custody Bitcoin, or the rest of the stuff we build doesn’t matter. Not one bit. P.S. About Saylor, I suppose his vision is a future where Bitcoin and the state co-exist peacefully. In other words, the state will gladly accept Bitcoin as a check on its once unchallenged power to print money. But that’s just one possibility — and it doesn’t seem like the likely one.

We either continually set and pursue higher goals, or we regress and die mentally. That’s the essence of the saying ‘most people die at 25.’ What I’ve learned is that there’s no in-between. Retirement is a false dream. Stasis is death.

I don’t. That’s probably why.

Why do some Nostr posts/comments show up on Primal but not Damus (and vice versa)? Relay issue? 🤔

In a perfect world, I’d agree with you. But we don’t live in one. I mean take the entire defense industry for example. Many weapons, offensive or defensive, are speculative in nature: you don’t know how effective they are until they’re actually used in a war zone.

I’m more optimistic on decoy wallets. Of cos they don’t address all types of attacks (no security feature ever does), but one can easily imagine how they can be useful *at least* in the case of non-targeted attacks, which will probably become more common when Bitcoin goes mainstream. It will not be unusual for a random person on the street to own Bitcoin. The anecdote you cited about one victim refusing to give up anything and telling the attackers to shoot her: she might very well got lucky - she could’ve ended up dead. At the end of the day, stories/anecdotes are just that. They don’t have predictive power. We don’t have substantial data on how many users have used decoy wallets, and how many have used it successfully or unsuccessfully. TL;DR: Decoy wallets are just one tool in a large toolset. Writing them off based on a few data points seems a bit premature IMO.

“The majority is not always right” is true for normies but also true for Bitcoiners. Bitcoiners got many things right, but many things wrong as well. For examples: 1/ Believe in S2F nonsense 2/ Obsessed with scaling payments use case when the killer use case is SoV 3/ Avoid phones for main savings

Insisting on using desktops for Bitcoin savings is like clinging to mainframes in the era of cloud or sticking with search engines in the age of Gen AI.

> main savings account should be on a separate device from teh one you carry around That’s exactly what I said. Reread point 2. Not sure what you’re disagreeing about. > multisig is not going to help for hot storage I’m NOT discussing hot spending wallets, I’m talking about main savings. (So your LN example also isn’t relevant here).

That’s what I said. The phone (or desktop) should be a watch-only interface.

Part of the infatuation with Bitcoin vaults is believing that you can “have your cake and eat it too”: mixing spending with saving. In reality, people don’t give a shit what they use for spending (e.g., they’ll move USDT on Tron if it’s convenient). They only care about security for generational wealth. You can observe this behavior empirically: when people pick a payment solution, their #1 priority is convenience—“I just want to pay, and pay fast.” That’s why PayPal, custodial LN, and USDT dominate. But for savings, it’s all about preserving purchasing power and security. So at its core, the “problem” vaults try to solve is mixing high-time preference usage with low-time preference usage. And you end up with these Frankenstein setups that are suboptimal for both spending AND saving.

P.S. Nunchuk ships both mobile and desktop apps, but IMO mobile is the future of Bitcoin self-custody.

Nostr might be a great alternative to Medium or Substack for long-lived, long-form content. I’d love to see a separate category for blogs and articles—it would help keep them organized and distinct from quick notes. Off-the-cuff thoughts vs. deep dives.

Great question Big Dan Brown. Let me rephrase your question: What happens to the inheritance service if Nunchuk ceases to exist? The short answer is that just like other types of services, if the business goes away the services will no longer be available. What we recommend to our users to mitigate unexpected events (such as Nunchuk ceasing to exist) is to use a "rolling short timelock" approach: Set an Activation Date not too far in the future, such as one or two years from today. Then the owner can review the inheritance plan every year and push the date back if necessary. To help remind users, we start sending email notifications as the timelock is about to expire, starting at the 6-month mark. This approach allows users to lengthen the time the inheritance can be claimed as needed, while guarding against long-term uncertainties. If something unfortunate happens to Nunchuk, the owner can use their own keys to move funds to a new wallet. If something unfortunate happens to the owner, their beneficiaries can claim the inheritance quickly without having to wait many years. Since the odds that Nunchuk ceasing to exist and the owner passing away within 1-2 years is small, the approach above reduces risks significantly. Hope that answers your question.