Guy

We need to make gold, Bitcoin, and Monero money. People need to be free to choose. No one should be prohibited from using any of these as media of exchange or money.
If any of them is best as a medium of exchange, that means it will be best as a store of value too. In order for the thing to be a medium of exchange, it must be valued at the time of the first exchange, and also be valued at the time of the later exchange, thus a "store of value." So to be a better medium of exchange necessarily means to be a better store of value or a better money.
Value isn't really stored anywhere, valuation takes place in the minds of the valuers, so it's kind of an idiom to talk about "store of value" in the first place. You have no guarantee that the thing you are keeping will be valuable in the future, even if it's money, because its future value depends upon the minds of the individuals later in time.
Is an appreciable asset a store of value that is not a medium of exchange? Sure. But if Bitcoin is not easily exchanged, it has lost its way and value should go to near zero. What other function does it have besides its ease of transfer? It might be kind of like "owning" the name of some distant star: just kind of a fun curiosity or game. But that's not money. That's not a medium of exchange.
The reason we talk about "store of value" is probably due to some flawed econ textbooks of the past saying that money needs this special attribute.
Let's make gold, Bitcoin, and Monero money. If it doesn't work as money, we have work to do.

2024-10-16 17:17:39 GMT

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I build freedom tech. I also need help.
Oh, but did you mean help doing the building of the freedom tech? Whoops, my mistake.

2024-10-16 17:11:30 GMT

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No, Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html lays out the ideas.
He emphasizes the moral case for Free Software versus the Open Source folks emphasizing the practical or technical case for Open Source Software. There has always been confusion over the word "Free" in "Free Software" and "Open" now suffers the same problem (look at all these LLM licenses claiming to be Open Source), and I think "Freedom Tech" is a pretty good way of talking about the same thing.
The Free/Libre Open Source Software community has a lot of overlap and similarity but can be split into two camps:
1. I am truly free if I am allowed to contract myself into slavery (BSD-ish, permissive licensing).
2. It is not freedom to be allowed to contract myself into slavery (GNU-ish, copyleft licensing).
Maybe that's an unfair or unrealistic characterization but that's how I tend to think of it.
I disagree with a lot of Stallman's views (he's on the left) but the four software freedoms are legit. See Stephan Kinsella's excellent summary of similar views from a more right-libertarian perspective at https://mises.org/library/book/against-intellectual-property

2024-10-16 17:02:39 GMT

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Mises explained that the "store of value" function of money is derived from the "medium of exchange" function. And therefore it's superfluous to talk about a "store of value" function of money as though it were separate from "medium of exchange." I read the first few paragraphs and it sounds like you basically agree with Mises. Except Mises was talking about money and what makes money money.
In the beginning, we wanted Bitcoin to become money. It was a wonderful medium of exchange for a while. Then some things happened that made it more cumbersome as medium of exchange. Some people recognized the problem and started working on solutions. Other people seem to have moved the goalposts by talking about "store of value." You're right to say that in order for Bitcoin to be a "store of value" it needs to be valuable over some time interval, between two exchanges. The question now is: do we still want Bitcoin to become money?

2024-10-16 16:47:23 GMT

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I agree with Stallman that the best way to get started is to start replacing your proprietary apps with free apps and work your way down. @npub1fkl…j48l has a lot of posts about this. First, care about freedom. Second, find Free software and use it. Third, communicate improvements to developers of that software. Fourth, help build improvements.

2024-08-14 21:21:22 GMT

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And that's just running the already trained model. I assume it's something like millions of times more energy to generate the training data and then train.

2024-08-14 20:19:54 GMT

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I can hear my fans whirring as the model runs haha. I do have an idea because I run ollama locally. It is quite laggy and whirry.

2024-08-14 14:07:26 GMT

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Surely a model can be trained to recognize text from the most common models out there. Then we can run this model in our browser and use it to auto-block pages that were written by models.

2024-08-13 21:04:48 GMT

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Suppose you grew up in an area where only two firearms manufacturers were permitted and only two calibers of ammo were permitted. Then suppose you go to a major gun show. The variety of offerings at the gun show is overwhelming. This might be something like going from a Windows vs Mac world into the Free world of computing. There are so many damn options it is mind boggling. So be it, that is freedom, right?

2024-08-12 20:39:45 GMT

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Generative Pre-trained Transformer, but your point remains.
And also to your point, anything it generates depends on its pre-training. So the more content that gets created with GPTs the more pre-training that happens with later GPTs, and a lot of noise results.

2024-08-12 17:28:27 GMT

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GPT models are good at speech to text and text to speech. I read GPT was designed for those kinds of things.

2024-08-09 18:26:20 GMT

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Ukrainians might object to that policy.

2024-08-07 17:54:02 GMT

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I don't know. What is static typing? Type checking at compilation? When is the web compiled? Perhaps that is his point, it's not compiled.

2024-07-26 14:01:52 GMT

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Content-type?

2024-07-26 13:53:24 GMT

FBI director unsure if city of Butler is a hoax.

2024-07-26 13:52:32 GMT

FBI director unsure about gunshots or firecrackers.

2024-07-26 13:51:33 GMT

FBI director unsure if Trump was on stage or it was his stunt double.

2024-07-26 13:50:49 GMT

FBI director unsure if rifle fired 5.56mm bullets or airsoft pellets.

2024-07-26 13:46:15 GMT

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Another thought.
Media of exchange facilitate social cooperation therefore media of exchange are the true social media.

2024-07-25 17:40:32 GMT

Can someone point me to a comprehensive list of publicly available videos of the Butler shooting? It seems most of them are just the "TV channel pointing at the podium and connected to the audio from that podium mic" view.

2024-07-25 17:35:46 GMT

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Keen observation. Wow.
Did you hear this somewhere?

2024-07-22 17:39:59 GMT

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Slowly making it harder to download videos and slowly removing select videos.

2024-07-19 17:40:09 GMT

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They obviously weren't tested, then. If the test system went down due to the change, it never should have gone to production.

2024-07-19 17:30:54 GMT

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It appears there are two outages, from https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status:
> We are aware of an issue that started on July 18, which resulted in customers experiencing unresponsiveness and startup failures on Windows machines using the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, affecting both on-premises and various cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud).
>
> It’s important to clarify that this incident is separate from the resolved Central US Azure outage (Tracking Id: 1K80-N_8). Microsoft is actively providing support to assist customers in their recovery on our platforms, offering additional guidance and technical assistance.

2024-07-19 17:11:05 GMT

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Are there two separate outages? One from a crowdstrike product and one from Azure? Or are they the same outage?

2024-07-19 15:07:19 GMT

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Wait. People's Windows desktops were affected? That is nuts.

2024-07-19 15:03:38 GMT

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As long as the updates are tested, and as long as one can roll back quickly, higher frequency can be higher reliability.

2024-07-19 14:58:05 GMT

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"Eternal computer troubleshooting is the price of liberty." But seriously, it is getting easier.

2024-07-19 14:49:37 GMT

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"a backend cluster management workflow deployed a configuration change causing backend access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the Central US region. This resulted in the compute resources automatically restarting when connectivity was lost to virtual disks hosted on impacted storage resources."
So it wasn't a person at all, according to this theory. It was a "workflow." Perhaps AI is to blame! I think your theory was right.

2024-07-18 14:24:34 GMT

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Unless I put my finger through his ear, I will never believe.

2024-06-13 19:00:01 GMT

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Nifty.

2024-06-13 18:44:26 GMT

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I'm listening.

2024-06-13 18:34:53 GMT

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I usually hear it more like "this is what is called a quote unquote asymmetrical response" which, to your point, is off.

2024-06-13 18:15:19 GMT

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For java, The Maven Central Repository is the de facto centralized repository. But it is not official. For C and C++, is there any package management system at all?

2024-05-07 15:10:26 GMT

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I know your point was about the bond market, but I'm curious about this fast food that is literally to die for. What restaurant was it?

2024-05-07 15:07:34 GMT

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Remember wheresgeorge.com? I expect cash has been tracked for some time now. It wouldn't be that expensive: make the banks and NCR do it. The tracking wouldn't be complete, however, and some privacy is still there in those untracked hops.

2024-05-07 15:03:53 GMT

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For in-person small transactions, cash is still faster, easier, cheaper, and more secure than Bitcoin. I wish it were not so but the boomer sense is right in this situation. Bitcoin wins for online, long-distance, or large transactions.
Suppose we present Bitcoin as a complement to gold and silver coin rather than as a replacement for all the money. Suppose we acknowledge its deficits. I think that would go further with the boomers.

2024-05-07 14:58:39 GMT

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I think at some point electronic dollars became money and paper notes became claims redeemable in electronic dollars.

2024-05-07 14:56:24 GMT

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Consider the saying "cold, hard cash." Cash pre-dates banknotes.

2024-05-07 14:50:02 GMT

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This was probably part of the warmongers' "compassionate" strategy.

2024-04-30 13:43:03 GMT

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SIBO is a thing and SIBO tests are too.

2024-04-24 19:01:21 GMT

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It comes from the idea that we must tie a real identity to every online persona. No, we don't have to.

2024-04-20 23:19:35 GMT

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Yes.

2024-04-20 00:08:20 GMT

Happy Halving!

2024-03-09 20:43:08 GMT

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Oh, also to your point, I see a chunk of KDE dependencies, just not the full desktop. Meh.

2024-03-09 20:27:22 GMT

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I don't think it requires KDE, it's a Qt5 app. Your original point was "simplest" though and given the dependency tree of kdeconnect, you're right. Perhaps kdeconnect is easier.

2024-03-09 16:54:41 GMT

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What about kdeconnect?

2024-03-08 20:17:53 GMT

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And you will find your home IP address is now on a bunch of naughty lists.

2024-03-07 01:44:44 GMT

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Nothing

2024-03-06 18:32:09 GMT

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More free/libre games of note: Yorg, Hedgewars, OpenTTD. I haven't played OpenTTD, though.

2024-03-06 18:15:09 GMT

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What's wrong with silver?

2024-03-06 18:09:58 GMT

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Suppose she had 0 USD, 100 BTC, and 0 grams silver. Not bad in that case. Money is for using, including to buy other money. Suppose she had 10000 USD, 1 BTC, and 10000 grams silver, I agree, not a great move.

2024-03-06 18:02:01 GMT

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Another option: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view/

2024-03-06 17:58:09 GMT

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* Use curl, wget, links2
* Use Firefox with images disabled: https://kb.mozillazine.org/Permissions.default.image#2
* Use less web, more gemini, more desktop Nostr
The extension to specify particular faces to censor would be pretty neat, though.

2024-03-04 19:51:19 GMT

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Did you find any good racing games? I liked the Trackmania series before the free/libre switch.

2024-03-04 19:35:37 GMT

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Me too. It's still a medium of exchange and to me not quite money. "A medium of exchange which is commonly used as such is called money." says Mises. Maybe I do not use it enough and maybe you do. "The notion of money is vague, as its definition refers to the vague term 'commonly used.' There are borderline cases in which it cannot be decided whether a medium of exchange is or is not 'commonly' used and should be called money." Meh. You say tomato I say tomato. Fair enough.
How about this, though: the purchasing power of Bitcoin (based on the entire array of prices of all the goods and services in the market) keeps rising to new highs regardless of which money is used for calculation. Right?

2024-03-04 18:53:48 GMT

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Xonotic is pretty good.

2024-03-04 18:47:45 GMT

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😆 It still is is not money yet.

2024-03-04 18:30:25 GMT

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Look at the home pages for Google Wallet and Apple Wallet. Yuck.

2024-03-02 20:22:29 GMT

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I assumed you were asking about 0 AD here, that's what I am talking about.

2024-03-02 20:21:17 GMT

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As far as I know, yes. I have watched a few matches live from the lobby.

2024-03-02 19:52:33 GMT

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I never played AoE but 0 AD is pretty fun. Free/libre. Check it out.

2024-03-02 01:23:16 GMT

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I think it would saturate the bandwidth of any/all relays that are trying to serve it. And fill their drives if there are many streams. That and I doubt there is a video streaming protocol on top of nostr yet. But I mean even if there were. I suppose you're right that a paywall would help pay for the bandwidth. Then again, https://zap.stream/, how does that one work?

2024-03-02 01:18:22 GMT

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I think it means that if you're a target, they can get it. None of the mobile baseband software is free/libre. They probably attacked his phone rather than breaking Signal or its protocols directly. At least that is what I hope: active target (screwed) vs passive collection (secured). Another explanation could be that Signal is a US company and is therefore subject to National Security Letters. Not much Signal could do about those, I imagine. So it could be completely compromised. I hope not.

2024-03-01 17:27:23 GMT

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I know you meant it rhetorically. But it is probably too much data, right?

2024-03-01 16:54:44 GMT

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It is also confusing to say "store of value" because value cannot be stored in a thing. Value is exclusively in the mind of the valuer. On the other hand, LvM argued that there is objective purchasing power of money, so I might be picking nits.

2024-03-01 16:44:19 GMT

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This is going to be so 2023, sharing my conversation with an LLM. The follow-up is an important point, I think.
I said "Bravo. But Ludwig von Mises points out that the commonly quoted "store of value" function of money is superfluous. Store of value is already present in medium of exchange. In order to use a medium of exchange, there must be one exchange followed by the passage of time followed by another exchange. In order for the medium of exchange to work as one would expect, the medium must be valuable at the moment of the earlier exchange and at the moment of the latter exchange. Thus, to say "store of value" is unnecessary and distracting. Money is simply a medium of exchange, right?"
Answered dolphin-mixtral dutifully:
> You're correct that Ludwig von Mises argued that the "store of value" function of money is superfluous when you consider that a medium of exchange must already possess this property to be effective. The reasoning behind this is that for money to serve as a medium of exchange, it must hold its value over time between transactions. If people were unable to reliably use their money in the future, they would not accept it as payment, rendering it an ineffective medium of exchange.
>
> So yes, while money does indeed have a "store of value" function, this can be seen more as a necessary consequence of its role as a medium of exchange rather than a distinct function. In summary, according to Mises' viewpoint, money is primarily a medium of exchange that inherently possesses the property of being a store of value.

2024-03-01 15:54:30 GMT

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I got a pleasantly surprising answer from dolphin-mixtral. I was expecting it to follow the IRS or ETF crowd and say "stock."
> Bitcoin is more like money than stocks because it functions as a medium of exchange and a store of value, similar to traditional currencies. While there are some similarities with stocks (such as being subject to market fluctuations), the primary purpose of Bitcoin is not for investment or ownership in a company but rather for use as digital cash.

2024-03-01 15:51:38 GMT

Is Bitcoin more like a stock or more like money?

2024-03-01 15:04:46 GMT

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If the use for a second protocol is non-browser non-JavaScript non-JSON then there is no need to support JavaScript. If the goal is to fully replace WebSockets/JSON, then yes, it would need to be something with wide support such as gRPC.

2024-03-01 15:01:00 GMT

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What makes Fennec (or Firefox Focus) not useful?

2024-03-01 14:43:47 GMT

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Stack whatever you regularly use.

2024-02-29 18:56:54 GMT

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You can lower the bar to such systems if you want. When can I use it as money?

2024-02-28 17:53:46 GMT

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At first I thought gRPC/protobuf is not a transport protocol. Then I see that WebSockets has data framing and messaging. Is gRPC/protobuf light weight, though? What about Cap'n Proto? Or what about plain old UDP? I already see the bulk of relays have <50% connection success, so we're not expecting reliable transport are we? I guess UDP would mean reinventing some stuff. Again, I am speculating as an aloof user.

2024-02-28 16:28:22 GMT

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I mean do you know of anybody who received this or a similar letter, lawyered up, and fought it in the courts?

2024-02-28 16:24:58 GMT

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These are not all eSIM, but I found some SMS services here: https://kycnot.me/?t=&q=sms

2024-02-24 23:51:13 GMT

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Do you know anyone who has fought this? This is too much.

2024-02-24 19:53:06 GMT

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Fair. Or the Tax Courts might recommend bringing back the firing squads or something.

2024-02-24 01:18:35 GMT

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A growing movement to go to prison? I suppose if a large enough proportion did it, they couldn't build prisons fast enough.

2024-02-23 20:00:07 GMT

https://image.nostr.build/cfef2718f02e30a3fb026f986af1e6670df66442cae81426b8b4c8c2bf7dc2fc.png

2024-02-23 17:49:08 GMT

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TIL I need to use a new git alias: pushf = push --force-with-lease

2024-02-22 17:12:12 GMT

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🤔

2024-02-21 19:55:36 GMT

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I see. Yes, I can be among those cynics, too. Especially when it comes to placing hope in politicians. The silver lining is that regardless of who is in authority, it is ultimately public opinion that enables (and disables) those authorities.

2024-02-21 18:15:42 GMT

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What do you mean by 50%+ allocation? Ongoing basis allocation of savings or existing allocation across all assets? Or allocation of spending using bitcoin?

2024-02-21 18:11:35 GMT

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I guess very few. It is convenient to host many domains on one machine with one IP address. But running on bare IP address would remove the DNS-takedown censorship opportunity, right?

2024-02-21 16:03:56 GMT

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Context?

2024-02-21 15:55:49 GMT

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I had to look it up, yes. It appears to be a nice device. But I can't trust a company that sells privacy or security related products while they use Google Analytics on their site.

2024-02-21 15:25:02 GMT

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Verification is "free": it only costs your freedom. To support privacy and freedom, check out @npub188x…gcqf by @npub1tut…mv92.

2024-02-16 16:04:32 GMT

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Have an electrical engineer compare the device with the free/libre hardware designs, have a security person review the hardware and software designs, and maybe run some tests. In short, it's hard to know with certainty but we can increase confidence. I haven't heard of a Coldcard, though.

2024-02-15 16:42:33 GMT

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I have yet to read the protocol(s) in-depth, but what would stop a relay from offering an alternative transport and falling back on WebSockets?

2024-02-15 16:36:26 GMT

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Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

2024-02-15 15:42:21 GMT

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I have been scratching my head about the WebSockets too. But here we are. And it seems to work fine.

2024-02-15 15:41:02 GMT

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Production of anything is a giant shit show. The fact that anybody produces at all and that anything works at all is a miracle and probably just a temporary anomaly.
Thank you for your work and thank you to all who made nostr, especially @npub180c…h6w6.
There are alternatives and anyone can potentially make something but who did make something?

2024-02-13 18:12:05 GMT

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Does this mean folks are 24x as gullible toward custodial bitcoin as they are toward custodial gold? Therefore with gold about 13x the so-called market capitalization of bitcoin it means bitcoin is 1.8x oversold. Prove me wrong.