Thoughts about Bitcoin and other things.
It’s been two weeks, to the day. Two weeks since the beginning of the coldcard catastrophe , aka entropy emergency , aka the big suck . Two weeks since I buried my mother . Two weeks. I barely slept in these two weeks. The adrenaline is slowly but surely leaving my body. I’m tired . Everything hurts. My nervous system is trying to recalibrate from emergency mode back to normal. Normal. What does…
There is this one quote about betrayal that’s been stuck at the back of my mind for a while now: “that’s the thing about betrayal. It never comes from the enemy.” That’s why it hurts so much. If you don’t trust someone, if he (or she) is your enemy, betrayal doesn’t happen. Trust has to come first, and after that betrayal can happen. The world runs on trust, and to a large degree it has to. You…
I saw a post yesterday (or was it today? the days have been blurring together for almost two weeks now, so who knows) that speculated that humans will start to emulate the writing of Claude, which is to say that humans will produce, in addition to human slop, stuff that sounds and reads like LLM slop. Even if you don’t use LLMs to write your prose, you’re eventually going to start talking like…
My thoughts around the recent catastrophe are still evolving. The dust hasn’t settled yet; neither have all transactions that are moving funds into attackers’ wallets (It’s safe to say that not all of them were even broadcast yet). And while I’ve broadcast GM and GN multiple times, I have yet to get a full night’s sleep. It was a weird couple of days, to put it mildly. For thousands (tens of…
It’s going to be borderline impossible to collect my thoughts, but I’ll try anyway. Like many others, I haven’t slept much since Friday. My mind (or my body, or my soul) will wake me up after 3-5h of sleep, no matter what I do. No matter how tired I am, or when I go to sleep, and so on. The damage from the COLDCARD catastrophe is hard to measure. And I’m not necessarily talking about the financial…
Yes, things fucking suck right now. Something that should’ve never happened has happened , and is still happening as I’m typing these lines. The consequence? Innocent, hard-working people are getting rekt. Life savings gone. No recourse, no undo button, no number to call. Just an empty balance and utter disbelief. Hard to think of something that’s more devastating. The draining of funds won’t stop…
Unfiltered thoughts are a beautiful thing. I think that’s in part why people enjoy long-form conversations , or the unhinged stuff that kids will say from time to time. You can’t self-censor for three hours straight, and kids haven’t developed the ability to self-censor in the first place. The current world is a filtered world. There are certain things that are kosher when it comes to evening…
Typing at midnight, just for the sake of it. I got a new keyboard recently. It’s something I don’t do often: buying stuff for myself. I never spend money because I never had any, and I’m still terrible at spending money. But a couple of weeks ago I was like “fuck it,” and I pulled the trigger, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in recent months. For the first time in what feels like…
Sovereign Engineering exists because of one guy: John Vervaeke. Few people know about him, even fewer people can pronounce his name properly, and even though I’ve been ranting and raving about him and his work for the last 5 years or so, I doubt that more than a handful of people have actually listened to his lectures and ingested his vast body of work. (If this is you, please stop reading this…
Sayings. My mother loved sayings. She got most of them from her mother, who loved sayings too. “Who knows what it’s good for” was one of her favorites. When I was younger I didn’t understand most of them. Now that I’m older, I’m slowly but surely turning into an idiom connoisseur, just like my grandmother used to be. “Who knows what it’s good for.” I understand it now. I know what it means , or at…
Cancer. Fuck cancer. Fuck cancer sideways. With a rake. I was sitting on the same bouncy ball that I’m sitting on right now when my mum called me, telling me that my dad killed himself. He had cancer too, by the way. I’m not sure if I ever mentioned it. Lymphocytic leukemia. Cancer of the blood and bone marrow. I don’t think that he killed himself because of it, since he was surprisingly stable in…
Forgetting is a gift. We don’t like to forget, but it’s a gift nonetheless. If you’d ask random people on the street whether they’d like to have perfect memory, most of them would probably say yes without giving the question another thought. But imagine for a moment, if you may, the absolute curse of perfect, eternal memory. All your mistakes, all your regrets, all the terrible things you did in…
Yesterday I relapsed. Not alcohol, or drugs, or gambling, or anything of that sort. It was something worse: having an argument online. Back when twitter was still called twitter I found myself getting into many an argument. Not because I wanted to, but because—at least back in those days—the algorithm encouraged it . A constant back-and-forth between two stubborn people is off-the-charts on all…
Things are insane right now, and maybe I’m too. Be that as it may, I feel like I’ve been a broken record for the last 18 months. Maybe longer. Some nights I wake up at 3am, startled, sweaty, and I hear myself screaming “ VERVAEKE! ” before I cry myself back to sleep. He’s right about everything, you know, this John Vervaeke . Well, maybe not everything. But most things. I believe he’s right about…
I didn’t leave the internet—the internet left me. And despite the “it’s not X it’s Y” structure of the previous sentence, and the em-dash used, a real human wrote this. Or more accurately: is currently (trying to) write this. This human is me . I love the internet. Or should I say I: I used to love the internet? I’m not even sure what “the internet” is anymore. It sure as fuck isn’t Facebook, even…
It all started with a simple question: “What could I demo next Friday ?” Oh, what an innocent question. Who would’ve thought that one of the consequences of asking it would be me going borderline insane over text highlights? I didn’t have a clear answer to the question at first. But I know that I wanted to show the crew the “flight mode” functionality that I’ve been talking about a bunch. Here’s…
Every time we speak into the void of the internet, we are entering into a dialogue with the world. The world reacts, and even if we can’t see the faces of our audience, their reactions are real. They manifest in the digital realm, in conversations, in shared ideas, in the birth of new projects. Dialogue is at the core of Sovereign Engineering . It is why the program was created, why we made the…
We may enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life and speak the real language. Virginia Woolf My dad killed himself today. He hanged himself in the morning. I’m not sure what to say, what to feel, what to write, or if writing…
I was speaking to a friend recently and the problem of free speech came up. I shouldn’t call it a problem, actually, as it is the solution to a problem. The problem is a perennial one, which is another way of saying a really really hard problem, one that we will continually face, for as long as we’re human. The problem is this: what is the right problem to solve? It’s a problem about problems,…
Bitcoin ist nun 14 Jahre alt, und wie fast alle Teenager ist die orange Münze meist un- und missverstanden. Bitcoin ist digitales Geld , Bitcoin ist elektronisches Gold, Bitcoin ist nur für Verbrecher, Bitcoin ist schlecht für die Umwelt, Bitcoin ist dies, Bitcoin ist jenes. Manche sind schon einen Schritt weiter. Sie haben akzeptiert, dass Bitcoin ist, und nun fragen sie sich, warum Bitcoin so…
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. At least according to Philip K. Dick. But what if something unreal sticks around and lingers? Does it become real, or have you lost touch with reality? I’ve been away for a little while—a very short little while, actually—and yet it feels like a long stretch of time. The reason for that is, I believe, that reality was suspended…
Lethargy. A state of comatose torpor. Oh, what beautiful words. Oh, what a horrible condition of relentless agony. I’m not sure if there’s a way to do this right. I wanted to say what I’m going to say for a long while now, but I never mustered the courage to do so. Doing it Wrong “If you’re not having fun in the bitcoin space you’re doing it wrong,” is something I’ve said a long time ago. I used…
Als Bitcoiner haben wir das Argument rund um die Energieverschwendung schon zu genüge gehört: Bitcoin verbraucht mehr Energie als ein kleines Land, Bitcoin bringt die Ozeane zum Kochen, Bitcoin verdreckt und verschmutzt, macht unnötige—ja sogar sinnlose—Berechnungen, erzeugt Elektroschrott, und wird sowieso nur von Verbrechern und anderen bösen Menschen verwendet. Die Konklusio ist immer die…
Bees are marvelous creatures. As are most creatures, I guess. Without bees, there wouldn’t be any flowers. Without flowers, there wouldn’t be any bees. I was walking along a beautiful path today, as I do most days. To think, enjoy, meander. An intense buzzing stopped me in my tracks. Bees. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. Busying themselves with the things that bees busy themselves. It was a…
Lightning ändert alles. Es ist nicht die einzige Lösung, und es ist auch nicht das Ende der Fahnenstange, aber trotzdem ändert es alles. Lightning ist Bitcoin und setzt Bitcoin frei. Lightning lässt Sats fließen, ermöglicht Lichtgeschwindigkeit ohne Kredit. Es bringt gesundes Geld in Meat- und Cyberspace. Und das ändert alles. Geld und Kredit Bitcoin ist die Antwort auf eine Frage. Was Geld ist,…
Writing, for some reason, is one of the most powerful things you can do. I wrote a personal mission statement a couple years ago. They say you should write things down. They say the pen is mightier than the sword. They say that the Logos is sacred. They say “ask, and you shall receive.” They are all right. Today, I received. 1 I guess I’ll continue writing. 2 788,258 6/21
Out of all the misconceptions when it comes to Bitcoin, the misconception that “miners” are creating “bitcoins” is probably the most asinine one. No, miners are not creating bitcoins. Miners are trying to create valid blocks and are rewarded by the Bitcoin network with newly issued sats if they succeed. This reward is only paid during the network’s bootstrapping phase. Why is this differentiation…
Not too long ago, I tried to paint a picture of what a vision for a value-enabled web could look like. Now, only a couple of months later, all this stuff is being built. On nostr, and on lightning. Orange and purple, a match made in heaven. It goes without saying that I’m beyond delighted. What a time to be alive! nostr Here’s the thing that nostr got right, and it’s the same thing that Bitcoin…
Hesitancy tells you something. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but it is something. If there wouldn’t be something there would be no hesitancy, all there would be is “fuck yes,” followed by immediate action. Sometimes—at the best of times—immediate action is all there is. That’s what surfers are after. That’s what everyone is after, really. Being on top of the wave, propelled by forces beyond…
Someone whose star continues to rise once said that “Bitcoin isn’t just memes.” I disagree. It’s all memes, all the way down. Let me explain. What’s in a meme? Before we get into the weeds of the matter, let’s take a closer look at the words we are dealing with. According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a meme is “a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural…
One aspect that is still massively under-utilized is the programmability of Bitcoin. While simple things like scheduled payments and automated payment splits do exist, we are undoubtedly still trapped in conventional thinking when it comes to the flow of sats. I’d like to share a simple idea that was shared with me a couple of months ago in the hopes that it will spread far and wide and, in the…
We didn’t hear them land on earth, nor did we see them. The spores were not visible to the naked eye. Like dust particles, they softly fell, unhindered, through our atmosphere, covering the earth. It took us a while to realize that something extraordinary was happening on our planet. In most places, the mushrooms didn’t grow at all. The conditions weren’t right. In some places—mostly rocky…
I’ve been bullish on nostr for a while now, but even I am surprised by how swift the ecosystem around this open protocol has been growing. Yes, it’s still early days. But it’s the perfect time to poke around and break build things. How else would you explore and learn? So, after porting my two bots to nostr, I thought why not write a little guide that helps to spark the bot revolution shows how…
Displays rule our world. They dictate our lives, replace our jobs, facilitate our interactions, and filter our world. One day, many years ago, I went to a shopping mall, which is something I usually don’t do. I still remember this day because it was the first time I’d seen large touchscreen displays where McDonald’s cashiers should’ve been. I knew that this day would come, obviously. As a…
Finishing things is hard. Starting things is easier. Not easy, mind you. But easier. I’ve read Start Ugly a while ago, or at least I’ve started to read it. Some things stuck with me. I’m now erring on the side of action, for one thing. I’m not sure if that’s always good, however. Action can be burdensome, too, especially if it leads to a heap of things unfinished. “Happiness is shipping.” There’s…
Editing is divine, or so the saying goes. A wise man once said that “the secret to life is send tweet.” There is no place for editing in this philosophy, even though there is an edit button on Twitter now. Oh, what a strange world we are living in. Editing tweets? What the fuck?! What happened to simplicity? What happened to tradition? Maybe the right approach to editing has always been the ninja…
Yesterday was a good day. Today is not. It’s funny how this works, isn’t it? Nothing changed. Yet everything is different. Feels different, looks different, smells different. The rational mind tries to argue it away. But emotions say otherwise. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can’t go back. And even if you could, you would probably be stuck in a different kind of hell.…
We all know that the Web is broken in more ways than one. Clickbait, misinformation, bot farms, anonymous "troll-demons"—the list is as endless as it is depressing. How did we end up here? I believe there is a single-phrase answer to all these ills. But single-phrase answers are often too simplistic and thus too easily dismissed. So instead, let us first break down the problem into more manageable…
Bitcoin is the rediscovery of money. It is money reconsidered . It is the removal of counterparty risk. It is the purest, fastest, soundest money, re-imagined from the ground up. It is computational proof of historical events, building up an incorruptible history without relying on trust. Bitcoin is the realization that cryptography is not enough . It is the admission that trusted third parties…
Cryptography is only one side of the coin, and cryptography is not enough. Why? Cryptography is not enough because cryptography requires secrecy. It requires key holders, and when it comes to a global monetary system, we don't want anyone to hold the "master key." In Bitcoin, your private key is only one-half of the equation. You also need the so-called public ledger, which records the information…
Bitcoin ist 12 Wörter, verschränkt mit dir. Und doch wird es mehr als 12 Wörter brauchen, um dies zu erläutern. Wenn man ein Dutzend verschiedene Leute fragt, was Bitcoin ist, bekommt man zwei Dutzend verschiedene Antworten. Bitcoin ist sowohl einfach als auch kompliziert. Verschwenderisch, und dennoch effizient. Zu langsam, und trotzdem das schnellste Geld, welches jemals existieren kann. Zu…
It should be obvious by now, but I'm afraid I'll have to spell it out anyway: Bitcoin, not blockchain. Bitcoin, not crypto. Bitcoin, not distributed ledger technology. Bitcoin, not DeFi. Bitcoin, not Web3. Bitcoin, not CBDCs. Bitcoin, not yield farming. Bitcoin, not centralized neo-banks that sell you fractional-reserve paper bitcoin. Bitcoin. If you think that Bitcoin is dead, you've been fooled…
We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people. Information is alienated experience. Information is not something that exists. Indeed, computers don’t really exist, exactly; they’re only subject to human interpretation. This is a strong primary humanism I am promoting. As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense…
Creativity is a mystery. It is creation, inspiration, and—of course—transpiration. You actually have to sit down and do the thing. You have to be creative. But what does it mean, “to be creative?” A creative solution is a new solution, a non-obvious solution. It might be obvious in hindsight, but it is non-obvious at present. Only a genius can come up with a new, non-obvious solution. The genius…
Warning: This presentation contains example private keys. Do not import any sample keys or send bitcoins to any of the associated addresses; you will lose your money. Watch on YouTube This talk was originally given in Riga at #BH2022 . Recording: YouTube , BitcoinTV Slides: PDF , PNGs Images: Here Act 1: TWELVE Knowledge is power. Francis Bacon code = speech “You shall not steal” bitcoin = bacon…
I miss the old Satoshi, straight from the node Satoshi. Chop up the code Satoshi, set on his goals Satoshi. I hate the new Satoshi, the lawsuit Satoshi. The always rude Satoshi, go on a cruise Satoshi. I miss the sweet Satoshi, chop up the tweets Satoshi. I gotta say at that time I’d like to meet Satoshi. See he invented Satoshi, it wasn’t any Satoshis. And now I look and look around and there’s…
It can’t be said often enough: Bitcoin is confusing. However, it’s not complicated like a Rube Goldberg machine is complicated. It’s just very foreign and thus very misunderstood—it is a completely new thing. “There’s nothing to relate it to,” as Satoshi put it in one of his posts . Because there is nothing to relate it to, we are all having a hard time wrapping our heads around the various…
We take many things for granted: running water, electricity, washing machines, the internet, our mobile phones, and a myriad of other technologies. But it’s not only tangible things that we don’t think twice about. In free and open societies, we take intangible things for granted as well: language, writing, property rights, free speech, the privacy of our homes—the list goes on. None of these…
Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead. Video bitcoinized by RD ₿TC , based on an edit by Ampleforth . Original source: An interview with F.A. Hayek (1984) Law. Language. Money. The three paradigms of spontaneous and emergent order in society. Moral questions are at the root of it all: Who should be allowed to speak? Who should be allowed to publish? Who…
You’ve heard it before: "Bitcoin fixes this." It sounds like a joke at first. An off-hand comment uttered by a complete fool, by someone who is at least partly delusional. Surely, bitcoin doesn't fix this ? Right? Many idioms are like that: borderline nonsensical, outrageous, not to be taken literally. "Jesus died for our sins." "Live and let live." "Fix the money, fix the world." It's all…