How are stablecoins - Tether's USDT - actually transferred between users? Do they have a Layer 2 like Lightning? If they just have a Layer 1, then how long does it take to get a confirmation?

Wikipedia will survive And I think it's absurd to put it in the same category as the others 🙂. It's a very different project than Tiktok, and I would expect the cypherpunks to support it

Hardship, or inequality? I know it's not easy to distinguish this two thing, but I think that inequality means that poor people generally have less control over life choices If everyone's equally poor, my hunch is that we'd see more children

That same argument is often used by people to dismiss any argument they don't understand. I'm not saying it's what's happening with you now of course 🙂; I'm just saying that it's not convincing to everyone Before telling someone to start a family, or indeed any other advice, have you asked yourself if you're the first person to have told them to do that? In a variety of debates, I can't really blame people for making bad arguments, but I blame people for making arguments that they know I've heard 100 times before 🙂

I've just started reading this book, on your recommendation. I'm now reading three books simultaneously, so I hope I make time to finish it 😃

You're making a number of different points in just that reply, and so it's difficult to respond. You talk about intervention, as if there is an obvious non-interventionist or less-interventionist alternative. And you also imply that governments should spend less. I'm not sure how to respond; very many different points have been made by both of us in this thread

That's cool. Thanks for engaging. I'm very new to Nostr, and the discussions here are more interesting than on other platforms. In a non-Bitcoin world, I think I'd be a fan of 'functional finance', it's an approach that doesn't require a central bank (although that's not the main selling point) In particular, the three 'rules for fiscal policy' here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_finance

I'll choose my words carefully, because it's possible that we'll fall into a very repetitive trap of making the same arguments that have been made around these topics for centuries 😃 I assume you accept that economics is not a zero-sum game? For example, living standards have improved pretty consistently over centuries, for example with technology and process improvements? Neither of us think that a central planner can make perfect decisions, but we agree that governments can make harmful decisions? Is that okay so far?

The economy isn't a zero-sum game; some decisions are better than others at improving average living standards. The scenario here is where deflation - or deflation expectations - is causing harm to the economy because everybody is delaying purchases waiting for the price to fall. It becomes a vicious circle of decreasing prices and decreasing employment. The experts, correctly, decide that the money supply needs to increase to break this cycle. In this scenario, the only question is: who should get the newly-created money? The goal is to make more people active again, i.e. increase employment (in productive industries)

Gold bugs can learn the benefits of money-printing just by learning from gold's history 😃 Every year, more gold is mined. Roughly 1.5% each year, but it varies a lot. The USD price of gold was fixed for much of the 19th century, but the interesting thing is that the rate of mining was quite high - compared to previous centuries - in the 19th century. And mining increased more dramatically in the final decades; this is also considered the 'Gilded Age', when the US did particularly well So perhaps the healthy economy was due to this high rate of "gold printing". Fixing the USD/gold price is good only if the amount of gold is increasing at the right rate I hold bitcoin because it's good for my own future, but we shouldn't expect the fixed 21 million bitcoin cap to be good for the overall economy Full chart: https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/global-gold-production-full-size.html

The other two books I'm reading now are 's "Broken Money" and a sci-fi book called "Inversions" by Iain M Banks. I'm nearly finished the latter, so I'll try to finish it before going too far into the other books A question: when are we going to get an e-book reader where we buy books by directly paying the author with Bitcoin?

Satoshi might have been female I guess it's not likely, as most folks in that space were - and still are - men. But it's possible

Coinbase wanted this to happen, so they could generate publicity via this "ban" narrative

Can you provide some evidence? Some of the Christian-right/MAGA/tech-oligarch people hate Wikipedia because they want to control all the information, and hence they spread fake news about Wikipedia Are you saying that Wikipedia is worse than Fox news/CNN/DailyMail/AlJazeera? (choose any or all that you dislike 🙂)

Sorry for zapping you some BTC, when I should have zapped some USDT instead 🙂

Maybe it will have to be switched off in the UK, but that's the UK's own fault of they lose access to Wikipedia Wikipedia fights against censorship more than many other platforms, where it sometimes switches itself off - or is blocked - in countries rather than censoring itself. For example, it's blocked in China

So how do noobs get started here? I'm guessing that the important thing is to reply to others' posts, and not (just) write your own post (I just started with Nostr yesterday, still trying to work this out)

Noob question: when I try to copy my Lightning address from the Phoenix wallet into Primal, it gives an error and "invalid Lightning address (lud16) I've tried both of these two options. Same error each time

I just stumbled upon the learnmeabitcoin website. Great resource I thought I knew about Bitcoin, but the Script language is more impressive than I expected! https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/script/

I liked it. I quite like MMT for the pre-Bitcoin world I guess there are very few of us that are very bullish on Bitcoin, but also fans of Keynes and MMT and so on 😃

If the US is going to buy Bitcoin with the gold revaluation, or some other trick, does it have to be public about every step? I guess it could buy more cheaply by buying quietly and secretly. i.e. maybe in a few weeks we'll see an announcement about huge purchases already made for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve #Bitcoin #Gold #SBR

BCH ("Bitcoin Cash") is the big scam; a shitcoin designed to block Lightning and to allow centralisation of miners

What's an "energy transportation company"? They work on the wiring that delivers electricity over large distances? Bitcoin mining will often be directly by the energy source in the future, and therefore no energy to transport

Does Rizful act as a proxy, forwarding the @rizful.com LNURL to the wallet of our choice, e.g. forwarding to a Bolt12 address? Or are Rizful users required to use the Rizful wallet?

For sending, you don't need to use Primal's built-in wallet. I believe that any Nostr app (I also use Amethyst) supports sending from any wallet (I usually use Phoenix on Android) For receiving, you can use any wallet that has an LNURL. The Primal Wallet is convenient, but Primal can easily use any LNURL-supporting wallet for receiving zaps I expect/hope that Bolt12 addresses will become more popular for receiving, and that all wallets and Nostr clients will support them