gladstein

Lots of debate about the Saylor / Saifedean conversation
I thought it was really interesting
No one really knows what credit will look like in a Bitcoin Standard
They both make good points
I tend to think that (young, less capitalized, etc) people will of course still borrow to buy a car or or a home, to Michael's point
But I also agree with some of Saifdean's points about the inevitable decline in value of government debt
People seemed to hyperlock onto a short clip of it on X and spit takes instead of listening to the whole thing which is unfortunate
There's way too much 100% agreement in this space so a 2-hour animated conversation with two people who do share a lot in common but really disagree strongly on some stuff and aren't afraid to push back is very refreshing

2024-09-18 01:47:07

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Yep 😉

2024-09-18 01:46:50

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See my essay for more context on that
https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/

2024-09-18 00:16:28

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🐘 ⛰️ 🤙

2024-09-17 18:48:20

"We can't entrust our primary communications network to a handful of corruptible humans. And now we don't have to."
I had the pleasure to work with Reason on this Nostr explainer video this summer
Happy to see it in the wild!
https://m.primal.net/KsvE.mov

2024-09-17 05:24:37

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Because it’s insane? Would you like to live in a world where you could go to jail for a t shirt?

2024-09-17 01:14:51

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You think this is fake news?

2024-09-16 05:02:51

Police state city 😢 https://image.nostr.build/2aff88e63064d00f4ad6a39b52781b28c677e785350ba4ac1d18715ca0f2622a.jpg

2024-09-14 01:32:08

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Every day

2024-09-13 22:12:15

AMA on Stacker News
https://stacker.news/items/683717

2024-09-10 01:33:43

Trump's monetary policy seems to be:
1) Devalue the dollar (to become more competitive with manufacturing)
2) Force other countries to still use it (through a <checks notes> 100% tariff on countries who try to use other currencies)
Post-fiat historians will look back at these times with a lot of wonder and fascination
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-07/trump-pledges-100-tariff-for-countries-that-shun-the-dollar

2024-09-06 22:30:17

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Yo 😉

2024-09-05 18:41:57

I had the honor to interview María Corina Machado, the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, about how fiat money was weaponized against the Venezuelan people by the Chávez and Maduro regimes
She says Bitcoin is a "lifeline" and "vital means of resistance" and said that a future democratic Venezuelan government will use Bitcoin to rebuild the national reserves that the Chávistas stole and put Venezuela back on a path to peace and prosperity
I've put out a lot of content in the past few years but I think this is the most important thing I've done -- the implications are vast considering a) Venezuela is one of the world's largest energy exporters with some of the world's largest oil reserves and b) María Corina Machado is not some rogue leader or dictator but a US ally
I hope you can watch 🇻🇪
https://m.primal.net/KfiC.mov

2024-09-04 06:20:25

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Be the change you want to see in the world 😉

2024-09-04 05:53:42

https://m.primal.net/KdMI.png
Started using Nostr to collect fantasy football dues for the 6th annual SatBowl
10/10, no notes
In the near future there will be fantasy football apps entirely built on nostr, looking forward to that
P.S. before you jest, remember that close to 70 million (!) Americans play fantasy sports, all together sending billions of small transactions every year

2024-09-01 19:37:19

💜 #note16rj…d56r

2024-08-29 21:03:07

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🔥

2024-08-29 19:32:44

A good morning is a morning catching waves w/ Paul and @npub1330…2k82
☀️ 🤙 https://image.nostr.build/0b0c63fb3ce0546f63e9952f72d3410b9feebbf6e44c8d55c39b428c79da55a4.jpg

2024-08-28 23:05:35

+1 #note1a7t…rnkg

2024-08-25 08:47:31

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Soon, hopefully!

2024-08-25 02:20:22

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Can’t argue with that

2024-08-24 03:50:18

Yellowstone is truly amazing
Couldn’t believe this was real https://video.nostr.build/51b18a74f4ff5e9c5a66f4afc36a6827557048644ae404098c39951e91503b8d.mp4

2024-08-23 05:50:17

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Thx!

2024-08-23 02:29:42

Wyoming is awesome 👌 https://image.nostr.build/dad225a6ccb68e06d54e33d85a899cc8dccf777c4295ec1fc58b8ab811333b63.jpg

2024-08-18 01:16:27

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Thank you!

2024-08-16 00:44:29

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Welcome!

2024-08-15 21:12:00

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I mean. If anything I think the bitcoin dollar is temporary

2024-08-15 16:03:23

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Yes - who’s gonna buy long dated debt?

2024-08-15 09:56:50

I would strongly recommend this book
It hasn't gotten a lot of attention but is definitely worth it
The thesis is simple
Just as the dollar moved from being based on gold to being based on oil (the petrodollar), it is today in the process of moving to a new base of Bitcoin, with the help of stablecoins
But thankfully the book doesn't end there with that dark outcome
It heavily implies that through proper engineering and layering and technologies like ecash, we can defeat the fiat system
https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/products/the-bitcoin-dollar-book

2024-08-15 09:49:00

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Ahmed is an amazing person and I am very proud that we could host him in Oslo. I don’t think we watched the same talk. Did you see the part where he walked through person by person all of his family that Israel killed?
Mustafa Barghouti also spoke, which you might be interested in. Video below.
Just FYI the suffering in Gaza received more stage time and focus at HRF’s annual event than any other topic this year (more than China, Russia, etc)
https://oslofreedomforum.com/talk/gaza-what-happens-next/

2024-08-15 04:18:18

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You’re already on Nostr :)

2024-08-14 07:48:18

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It’s becoming much more authoritarian over time

2024-08-14 05:35:51

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It was pleasure! So fun

2024-08-14 03:23:53

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Maybe a little saccharine but CODA was highly enjoyable

2024-08-14 03:18:56

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Thank you!!

2024-08-13 20:39:23

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Only the first half! Thanks!

2024-08-13 20:38:49

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Thx!!!

2024-08-13 20:38:39

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So bad
Good reality check though

2024-08-13 18:31:21

Here's my profile for Reason on Nostr and why it could very well change the world
Pasting a few paragraphs here, you can find the rest at the link
Feel free to spread far and wide 😉
*************
Can Nostr Make Twitter's Dreams Come True?
Twitter's founder says Nostr is “100 percent what we wanted”—an open, ownerless network
Alex Gladstein | 8.13.2024
Virtually everyone agrees that social media is broken. On Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, people fear out-of-control algorithms, fake news, state actor censorship, and propaganda. Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. YouTube has become arguably "the most powerful media platform in the history of humanity," yet its algorithm is an ever-changing black box to the creators that populate the platform with videos. During the pandemic, federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content.
The problem is centralized control. We can't trust companies to run our primary communications infrastructure. Government regulation only makes matters worse because it creates new legal barriers to entering the industry, which protects incumbent players and stifles innovation.
What if there were an alternative, not owned by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Chinese Communist Party? What if there were a way to control your own data to prevent companies from harvesting and monetizing it? What if you had granular control over what you see in your feed, with the freedom to choose your own algorithms? What if you owned your identity, which could be accessed seamlessly across different clients? That way, if you disapprove of the changes that Elon Musk brought to X, instead of closing your account you could take your handle and followers elsewhere.
That alternative exists. It's called "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays"—or Nostr.
The Decentralized Solution
Invented by a pseudonymous programmer and overwhelmingly funded by grants from non-profit foundations, this decentralized, free, and open-source protocol has been quietly evolving for the past three years. Like bitcoin, Nostr is a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. It has 40,000 weekly active users and a growing ecosystem of clients and applications ranging from social media to long-form publishing to payments.
Nostr is only necessary because our existing internet is so broken.
Fifteen years ago, social media seemed destined to decentralize the world and give power back to the people. In 2009, we watched as Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and help topple several long-standing dictatorships. The promise was that these new social platforms, designed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could help liberate the masses.
It was intoxicating—but turned out to be a mirage. The Arab revolutions stalled out when brutal military regimes cracked down. These platforms became tools for spying and censoring their users. X and Facebook have helped journalists and human rights activists reach bigger audiences, but they haven't fulfilled their revolutionary promise.
Jack Dorsey's Shift from Bluesky to Nostr
This was a major theme at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, which is put on annually by the Human Rights Foundation, where I serve as chief strategy officer. At this conference for democracy and human rights, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told the audience that the problem was, actually, guys like him: The very fact that Twitter, now X, has a CEO makes it a single point of failure. Governments routinely pressured Dorsey to censor content; once the company's offices in India were raided. Dorsey says that under the new Musk regime X complies with whatever governments want.
The X network is proprietary. Known as a "silo," this construct traps a user's identity, followers, and data. X also has the power to evict anyone from the platform and delete what they've written. Several years ago, when he was still running the company, Dorsey became convinced that Twitter should become an application instead, where users could post content to an open, ownerless network. This would make it similar to how bitcoin works, where you use an application called a wallet to interact with the network, but the network itself is neutral and open.
Building a non-proprietary architecture was Dorsey's original vision for Twitter, but over time the need to maximize revenue to build a business and serve shareholders undermined that goal.
Nevertheless, in 2021, Dorsey encouraged the creation of Bluesky—an initiative bootstrapped in-house to create that open neutral base layer. But after Musk bought the company, the managers of Bluesky were afraid they would run out of money and started raising funds from venture capitalists, which undermined the vision of building an open platform. Dorsey grew disenchanted and left the Bluesky board.
At the conference in Oslo, Dorsey explained what happened next:
I asked a question: What open source initiatives should I be funding that would be helpful to the public internet? And people kept tweeting at me that I should be looking at Nostr. I found the GitHub that described it and it was 100 percent what we wanted from Bluesky, but it wasn't developed from a company. It was completely independent. Its paper diagnosed every single problem we saw and had. But did it in a grassroots and dead simple way, that felt like the early Twitter where any developer could get on and really feel it.
Escaping the 'Golden Prisons'
Nostr was created in 2020 by the pseudonymous Brazilian programmer fiatjaf, who describes it as "the simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global 'social' network once and for all."
Though nobody is in charge, Nostr works as promised and is thriving. "It is the solution we've all been looking for," says Miljan Braticevic, founder of Primal, one of the two dozen plus clients now available for the Nostr protocol. "Nostr is not a Twitter competitor or a Mastodon competitor. This is the biggest misconception at the moment. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Nostr is nothing less than the foundation for the new internet. Meaning almost every conceivable app we have today will be built on Nostr."
Braticevic's prediction is echoed by at least a dozen other prominent developers. Martti Malmi, the first coder to work on bitcoin alongside Satoshi Nakamoto, is now a Nostr developer. In a recent talk, he said he had started to work on similar ideas around decentralized identity in 2019, only to come close to giving up. But then he found fiatjaf's invention, which he called a "godsend."
"Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else," Malmi said. "I was there" in the earliest days of bitcoin, "and Nostr is even more intense."
For something that could be world-changing, Nostr is quite simple. To join, you sign up with a mobile or desktop client, which helps you to create a public and private key pair. The public key (or "npub") is used as your identifier, and you share it with clients and other users so that people can find your posts or pay you for your content. The private key ("nsec") is hidden by the user, stored safely (just like a bitcoin seed phrase), and is your way to log in to different services. Unlike platforms like X or Facebook, no other information is required to set up and use Nostr.
This gives users a powerful range of sovereignty. You can use a client, for example, that has strong hate speech controls. Or you can choose one that doesn't have any at all. You can use a client with aggressive algorithms, just like the ones X uses today. Or you can use one without any algorithm at all. Today, when you log in to an app like Primal, you can sort your feed by what's the latest, by what's most popular, by what's most zapped, or by customized keywords. It's up to you.
Last month, the macroeconomist Lyn Alden, author of one of the best books on bitcoin, published a long essay about Nostr's potential:
[Nostr] is a simple set of foundational building blocks that, if widely adopted, could gradually reshape "the Web" as we know it. Instead of a separate set of siloed social ecosystems, we could gravitate toward a more interoperable set of ecosystems, with more of the power dispersed to the content creators and to the audience, and away from the middlemen corporations.
The Nostr network is constructed like a spider web that can morph and regenerate, making it almost impossible to censor. When you set up a client on Nostr (perhaps, Primal or Damus on iOS; Amethyst on Android; or Coracle on the web), you choose from a variety of relays to connect to. This architecture ensures no single point of failure: If you are connected to seven or eight relays, and half of them choose to censor posts, your feed remains censorship-free, as your app will display the net sum of everything broadcast from each relay. If the Chinese government decides to attack your relays—as it did in 2023 when Damus launched on the Hong Kong and mainland app store—then more can be spun up. "The enemy," said Damus creator Will Casarin, "is too numerous."
Prominent bitcoin developer and educator Gigi—who switched to Nostr and deleted his X account—says that what helped it become so resilient is that it has zero exit cost. If the Chinese Communist Party bans YouTube, its domestic users lose everything. There's no way to get back their profiles and followers. The same is true if a user voluntarily closes an account.
Gigi calls these corporate silos "golden prisons" with no escape. Nostr's spider-like architecture makes escaping easy. If one client goes down, or you fail to connect to one relay, you just find another client or connect to another relay. You keep your posts, photos, preferences, contacts, and even algorithms of choice. If you use X, you are an X creator. But if you use Primal, you aren't a Primal creator, you are a Nostr creator.
https://reason.com/2024/08/13/can-nostr-make-twitters-dreams-come-true/

2024-08-13 03:49:22

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Executive

2024-08-11 08:14:34

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lol, appreciate you

2024-08-10 06:06:54

If you would like to see a Nostr panel at SXSW next year (one of the world's biggest normie arts, culture, and tech festivals, tens of thousands of attendees, mostly C-level folks) then you can vote here to make it happen!
https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/155651

2024-08-10 00:12:46

I've been working all summer on a long read for Reason Magazine about Nostr.
It comes out in a few days.
Really excited to share it with you all!

2024-08-09 22:09:39

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Thanks Jake!

2024-08-08 00:29:29

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https://youtu.be/24waV3Fwvow?si=y-FUjING249emWE9

2024-08-07 08:07:21

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🙏 🫂 🧡

2024-08-06 19:48:37

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Thank you for helping get Nostr to where it is so I can do stuff like this!!

2024-08-06 19:45:02

Here's my full main-stage keynote from Nashville
It was spread across two days, so that's why I change halfway through 😂
51 minutes but I worked hard to carefully consider each minute
The talk is packed with lessons and examples that I have learned and seen across my entire career of people using Bitcoin to change the world in the most unlikely of places
I walk through how Bitcoin is a revolution for commerce, freedom, and electric power, citing dozens of examples in each case
This one is for every single person who has ever said Bitcoin is useless, just as much is as it's for every person who is curious about Bitcoin and wants to know more
Most people know that Bitcoin is a great savings technology, which is of course its primary use case, but I don't dwell on that
Here we get into everything else it does
No price talk, all utility
Hope this helps
So grateful for the @npub1t8a…56yu team for giving me this opportunity
Onwards!
https://m.primal.net/JqMR.mp4

2024-08-06 18:44:10

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Yes, wishful thinking

2024-08-06 06:45:44

Helpful chart to understand why the people rose up in Bangladesh and tossed their leader out of power
Now the coordinators of the student body that led the protest against Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule have declared the formation of an interim government with the country's only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Professor Muhammad Yunus, as its Chief Advisor
Let’s hope they can start to build a free and prosperous society without military rule 🙏
https://m.primal.net/Jpdm.jpg

2024-08-06 06:29:06

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Thanks!
Fedimint is NOT a replacement for self-custody. I tried to make that very clear
It is ecash — very private cheap digital money — that can be used in conjunction with bitcoin

2024-08-05 05:55:01

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🤝

2024-08-04 23:56:51

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🔥

2024-08-04 06:04:39

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Bad

2024-08-04 03:36:31

We love Bitcoin Summer
w/ @npub1s05…eyhe + @npub1rxy…hnp8
https://m.primal.net/JnRI.jpg

2024-08-04 01:03:14

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Thank you!

2024-08-03 01:14:53

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Occam’s Razor is that a human rights activist invented Bitcoin :)

2024-08-01 02:49:37

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Full details:
https://www.lummis.senate.gov/press-releases/lummis-introduces-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-legislation/

2024-08-01 02:24:41

Which hardware wallets is the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve going to roll with?
Multi-sig or distributed single-sigs?
What kind of entropy? https://image.nostr.build/cdba8e1540b0b18465e1f61d3db7cd63b2a788a95cd1d271d9f45df53c288f8e.jpg

2024-07-30 00:57:36

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Soon!

2024-07-29 06:08:36

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🙏

2024-07-28 23:37:31

Happiness is not what you own, it’s what we share
A beautiful quote and something I feel so deeply
The ovation that so many of you gave me at the end of my keynote in Nashville filled me with enough inspiration for a lifetime
Eternally grateful to be part of this movement
We’re gonna win ✌️
https://m.primal.net/JhVS.jpg

2024-07-28 22:56:31

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lol this was hilarious

2024-07-28 22:56:10

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Bingo. I describe this in my upcoming Reason essay on Nostr :)

2024-07-28 07:22:20

Every time a government official says “bitcoin strategic reserve” —
Drink!

2024-07-28 01:25:16

"Louisiana is a leader in bitcoin—banning CBDCs and protecting self-custody. We should continue to lead by having a strategic reserve of bitcoin"
-The governor of Louisiana, just now
I wonder what the average person thinks when they read that in the news
Wild times!

2024-07-26 23:51:52

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Yep will be out soon

2024-07-26 23:51:43

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The US is providing weapons that are killing innocent Palestinians

2024-07-26 21:17:38

My final slide from my keynote today on the main stage in Nashville
Onwards! ✌️
https://m.primal.net/JfXG.jpg

2024-07-25 17:18:47

tfw
https://m.primal.net/JeBE.jpg

2024-07-23 20:42:16

I was surprised by this
But glad that Bitcoin ownership has a wide ideological base in the USA 🇺🇸
Full study: https://www.thenakamotoproject.org/
https://m.primal.net/Jbkc.jpg

2024-07-22 22:04:21

Step 5 is wrong
It’s Bitcoin, not bullets
The collapse (or fading away) of dollar hegemony is inevitable but doesn’t mean chaos
Ending the fiat currency caste system will usher in a new age of global peace and collaboration ✌️
https://m.primal.net/Jacf.jpg

2024-07-20 19:31:22

Not having control of your money takes on new meaning in some places: it can be the difference between life and death
In Gaza's "currency desert," people have to try and wait up to 15 days, dodging airstrikes, heatstrokes, and looters simply to withdraw their wages and remittances into cash
There are only 3 working ATMs, and living costs have quadrupled since October 7th. Most people can't access their money anymore and live on handouts
The craziest part: the paper currency that merchants most widely accept in Gaza are Israeli shekels. Meaning, the very notes issued by the state that is currently bombing Palestinians to smithereens
Fiat currency is so irredeemably broken
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2024/0703/gaza-war-palestinians-cash-atms

2024-07-19 00:43:55

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2024-07-17 03:51:09

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Gaza was unlivable by any standard *before* the war

2024-07-15 01:30:35

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Check out the fedimint protocol
This is the idea
The main app right now is Fedi
https://fedimint.org

2024-07-14 05:32:30

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Based on the fact that Gaza has been bombed and starved now for 9+ months with very little food and medicine or doctors and there are tens of thousands unaccounted for. There are massacres left and right every few days

2024-07-14 02:52:39

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The 38k number is a massive undercount

2024-07-13 19:11:42

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Cc: @npub1szp…h3td

2024-07-13 18:14:22

https://m.primal.net/JPVo.jpg

2024-07-13 00:24:01

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Anytime. Our next grant round will be announced around Sep 1. Shipping another billion sats to amazing projects worldwide ✌️

2024-07-13 00:07:54

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We aren’t the Red Cross or something. We don’t exist to give money to other people. We have some special funds that do that like the BDF but we are generally speaking an advocacy organization. If you give money to for example the Freedom Fellowship it gets split across: a) paying the people who make it happen - the main cost b) some travel and accommodations for workshops and retreats c) a stipend we give the fellows d) some equipment and other smaller misc costs

2024-07-13 00:05:55

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https://x.com/phoenixwallet/status/1808760085025346006?s=46&t=n7crMAWVvpABU4HOlO19Lg

2024-07-12 23:55:14

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We have two dozen programs. They are all unique. Some programs are 100% funding a person to do research or legal work. We hire lawyers to get people out of jail for example. Some programs are grants like BDF or specific programs we have to make grants to civil society in Belarus or Hong Kong. Some are event production like the Oslo Freedom Forum. Do you have a specific question? Would you like to make a donation to something?

2024-07-12 23:52:57

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Let me be clear. We pay people fairly and I am evidence that you can grow a lot provided you work hard and are happy and productive for many years. At the same time, all of our salaries are proportionally less than working at a big company like Google or AirBnB or what have you.

2024-07-12 23:37:49

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It depends. If someone donates to our Art in Protest program for example it may cover some of the salary of the director of that program. BDF is special and any grants earmarked to that go straight into grants with nothing taken off the top.

2024-07-12 23:36:39

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No. You aren’t understanding what I am saying. We pay everyone fairly and offer them opportunities to make more as they progress in their careers. I have worked extremely hard to get where I am all the way from the bottom and it took nearly 20 years.

2024-07-12 23:32:38

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General operating grants are donations made to us that aren’t earmarked for anything in particular
They support staff salaries and whole range of other things
I can assure you all of my colleagues kick major ass and are the kind of highly productive people one would want to support
Were not just sitting around doing nothing

2024-07-12 23:29:12

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This is very ignorant. We pay people way less than what they would make in the private for-profit sector. This is a constant issue for us, losing people to big companies who pay more
When I started at HRF in 2008 full time I made $30k a year
I have worked up to the executive level after working very very hard for 17 years and again am proud of it

2024-07-12 23:27:02

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We work extremely hard and produce a lot of change in the world and I am very very proud of all the things we do
If you don’t think the work we do is worth it, then simple, don’t donate
And BTW, just for clarity, any donations earmarked to the Bitcoin Development Fund go directly to developers, nothing is skimmed
Donors give us “general operating” grants when they want to support the truly awesome humans who work for us

2024-07-12 21:26:54

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“No privacy at all” Chuck you can now donate to HRF via bolt12 offer

2024-07-12 21:26:05

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Awesome, thanks!

2024-07-12 21:18:35

Fun to see the “tip jar for activists” finally live and in production
Here is HRF’s tip jar
[email protected] or QR :)
https://m.primal.net/JOSg.jpg

2024-07-12 18:03:57

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Great question. Check out Zeus? More to come.

2024-07-12 17:58:54