Bitcoin Audible

"Permission can only be denied if it is requested. Direct, peer-to-peer interaction obviates permission and equalizes market power. Don’t request permission to transact; transact. Don’t tinker with the system; supersede it." — Roy Sheinfeld Today we dive into a great piece just dropped from Roy Shienfeld with a great way to think both about Bitcoin and lightning adoption by the mainstream, and als...

"The biggest complaint members of my audience make about Nostr is the sheer dominance of Bitcoin content. This is understandable. Nostr uses a means of identification and account management very similar to Bitcoin, it has Bitcoin Lightning integration and Bitcoiners tend to be somewhat techy nerds and early adopters. Hence mostly Bitcoin type folks were the first to see Nostr’s potential and get o...

"Bitcoin transaction fees limit network abuse by making usage expensive. There is a cost to every transaction, set by a dynamic free market based on demand." — Matt Odell Is Bitcoin broken, are the high fees the end of Bitcoin as money? Are the fees themselves even the problem? How does this relate to not wanting people to be pooping in the park? Today we dive into a short, but solid post by Matt...

"This very dominance is causing certain countries to seek a way to be less dependent on the USD and the UST. To extract themselves from the whims and needs of a central bank that lives a world away from their own economy. Yet still finds a way to dominate it." — James Lavish Today we take a ride through a twitter thread by James Lavish, exploring the major developments in the splintering of the wo...

"The question of who controls the ability to merge code changes into Bitcoin Core’s GitHub repository tends to come up on a recurring basis. This has been cited as a “central point of control” of the Bitcoin protocol by various parties over the years, but I argue that the question itself is a red herring that stems from an authoritarian perspective — this model does not apply to Bitcoin. It’s cert...

Bitcoin is a public good. The maintenance and stewardship of the network rests on the conviction and work of 10s or 100s of thousands of node operators who work to validate and ensure consistency among the rules and the truth of the data propagated throughout. NFTs and BRC tokens have come to the Bitcoin timechain, stamping large amounts of data to the chain, and causing bloat in the UTXO set, as...

"The fall of First Republic Bank was the second-largest bank failure by assets in US history, putting us in the 2008 conversation. Times are different, but the bank failures are relatable in size. The total assets of three 2023 failures have already eclipsed the total assets of all the banks that failed during the Great Financial Crisis" — Nik Bhatia, Joe Consorti Today we dive into a short breakd...

"If Tor is an anonymous remailer, meaning a protocol facilitating the anonymous forwarding and receiving of messages between peers, Nostr can function as an anonymous bulletin board. CoinJoin coordinators can publish their services via a Nostr event type, and CoinJoin wallets can be enabled to automatically pull from those relays to display within their clients." — L0LA L33TZ Today we dive into a...

"Banks are highly regulated public-private partnerships in an environment where new charters are excruciatingly hard to obtain, and as such remain de facto arms of the state. It has been and remains trivial to deputize them to carry out political objectives. If there was any doubt, it’s now evident that the Obama administration and its successor in Biden’s regime are comfortable circumventing the...

"The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that i hear once in a while: "Why do you use the word 'selfishness' to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?" To those who ask it, my answer is: "For the reason that makes you afraid of it." But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing t...

"Central Banking is successful alchemy in this sense. The money- issuing institutions of the world have found a way to create new money with no cost. No mining is required. They are the alchemists of our era. The Central Banks’ promise of stable prices is as absurd as the alchemists’ promise of cheap gold. The whole point of a value- measurement tool, or a type of money, is in its costliness. It h...

"I believe that in the open /attention/ information economy we find ourselves in, value will mostly derive from effective curation, dissemination, and transmission of information, not the exclusive ownership of it." — Dergigi Today we dive into another great piece from Gigi exploring more possibilities and incredible shifts in the dynamics of information, censorship, and control with the addition...

"Can you imagine a world in which you are restricted from buying meat for a while because you have already used your “carbon credits” for the month? Your “financial privileges” could potentially be restricted at any time at the whim of a government bureaucrat, and if you are a big enough troublemaker you could be “de-platformed” from the system permanently." - Tyler Durden Check out the original a...

The Lightning Network finally strikes in this Bitcoin Basics episode! Now that we understand the fundamentals of keys, wallets, transactions, and the node, we can finally take a dive into Lightning. What is it, what makes it tick, how do you own something that isn't "on chain," and what are the best tools to start exploring? All this and much more in today's show. Here are the many links for furth...

"This was how more mainstream Bitcoin culture degraded from intellectual expressions of ideas (2017-era debates) to tribal recreations of the past. The old enemies were replaced with new enemies who were more convenient for the times, but we retained the "Bitcoiners against the world" ethos of the scaling era, which led to many newbies being overly defensive of their beliefs. It’s worth noting tha...

"“In the old days they didn’t even use tables and chairs. They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You’d be surprised how much fun that was. Somehow it made old men feel young again. And they’d drink beer out of cans or growlers. Those beefsteaks were run in halls or the cellars or back rooms of big saloons. There was always sawdust on the floor. Sometimes they had one in a bo...

"Of all the objections to Bitcoin, the objection that it “wastes” electricity is the most absurd. This thinking betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how electricity works, how markets work, and what waste is." – Beautyon Today we take a break from all the discussion of doom and impending economic obliteration to hit a favorite topic of mine, from a simple, but important angle. This article ca...

"Generally, what we’re talking about here is unregulated (or lightly regulated), uninsured investors, LLCs, Funds and privately controlled “Shadow Banking” assets. In 2021, these OFI Assets scattered around the planet amounted to $152.0 Trillion (Again, not including China’s non reported OFI) or roughly 172 x JP Morgan’s relatively miniscule $884 Billion of Cash and Equivalents immediately availab...

Prices are relative, Bitcoin is infinitely scalable, stability for the sake of stability is undesirable, maximal instability in prices maximizes resilience in the markets, and so much more. Today we dive into a bit of a wandering Guy's Take to follow El Gato's piece on the idea of a free banking system and what it might look like in a future with PBDCs, instead of CBDCs. I break down where he has...

"and the uniparty is in strong agreement here. both know that losing control of the money and the banks is an existential threat to their aristocratic and unaccountable powers. sure, this all sounds like a lot of change and a lot of risk and a wildly new set of systems, but you’re not going to fix that which has become this broken without change. the mal and mis-incentives are far too great and th...

"Thus was the dubious “clear and present danger” standard born. Holmes himself sought to redefine the standard later that same year when he dissented in Abrams v. United States (1919). The Justice felt that the court was not applying his own standard appropriately and openly questioned the government’s ability to limit free speech. But by then, the slippery standard was off and racing. It would fl...

Bitcoin is ultimately just a piece of software, the network – the global, censorship resistant, immutable system – is ultimately just a collection of millions of people individually confirming and agreeing on what Bitcoin is. And to be truly sovereign as a bitcoiner, to confirm the truth of Bitcoin for yourself, & to participate in that global network, is to run a Bitcoin Node. This is Bitcoin Bas...

"The question that the fiat system answers is the following: who is allowed to counterfeit currency, and how much? Further, who is allowed to have access to money, and who isn't? The answer is political and enforced by violence. The Bitcoin system is answering the same questions, and the answers are as simple as they are ethical: nobody is allowed to counterfeit money, and anyone can access it. No...

"The financial system in the United States, and for most of the rest of the world for that matter, can basically be thought of as an Excel spreadsheet managed by the Federal Reserve. That’s all it really is. Some of the cells on the spreadsheet are assets, and some of the cells are liabilities. It’s just a ledger that they administrate, and that we all use." – Lyn Alden A subtle but important shif...

I joined John today for an over 2 hour rip on the nature of Bitcoin, numerous technical developments, the trade offs of those in the past, the consequences of changes - even those considered well analyzed and understood, the chaos of consensus around altering consensus, the spirit of Bitcoin vs the letter of the law, and SO much more! This was such an awesome discussion on the nuance and complexit...