Nostr notes by

Nostr event nevent1qqsgn5wppp06przm54fu5tma4yr4tnsmqepdtt6h0v3pfh4rycw4smcpfamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68yctjv93xjcfwvdhk6tmev94kj6rgdahx2wnjv4kxz7fwdehhxarjv9exzcnfvyhxxmmd9auk7mnyv4ez6cmfwp5x2u3dwfhk6et0qgsfev65tsmfgrv69mux65x4c7504wgrzrxgnrzrgj70cnyz9l68hjsv97shz

2026-09-01T12:03:02Z

Back to routine.
GM nostr.

@npub16jd…33sv has been doing some interesting stuff with nip17 ...

2026-09-02T07:12:32Z

In reply to nevent1q…jtl0
_________________________

Luxas (npub16jd…33sv) has been doing some interesting stuff with nip17 on nymchat lately. i don't think i've ever had much of a problem with it not working.

sorry i'm pro war and only support mullas now

2026-09-02T07:00:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…gwlr
_________________________

sorry i'm pro war and only support mullas now

it's only just a passive stake...

2026-09-02T06:34:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…d5ks
_________________________

it's only just a passive stake...

#staySAIF #nevent1q…0k53

2026-09-02T05:26:40Z

#staySAIF

quoting
nevent1q…0k53
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wQISoYz_N50

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wQISoYz_N50

2026-09-02T03:15:26Z

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wQISoYz_N50

Man I admire your patience for trying for 10 years! Tbh if ...

2026-09-02T03:11:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…wet7
_________________________

Man I admire your patience for trying for 10 years!

Tbh if he's educated from an ivy league school, he'd probably laugh at this essay. Kinda meant for Muslims that are not working in the mainstream, or Muslims who are fed up with current systems

Very generous of you to even call them a problem spotter 😂 I ...

2026-09-02T03:08:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…3ms2
_________________________

Very generous of you to even call them a problem spotter 😂

I mean, I guess they do correctly identify a problem every now and then....

New node build in progress. Stay tuned.

2026-09-02T00:07:35Z

New node build in progress.
Stay tuned.

I have yet to unlock this skill.

2026-09-01T21:53:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…2y5w
_________________________

I have yet to unlock this skill.

1. How can I make [my-software-project] less dependent on other ...

2026-09-01T21:10:06Z

1. How can I make [my-software-project] less dependent on other services/providers/components?

2. How can I make [my-software-project] easier to use?

If these questions aren’t at the forefront while you’re developing your project, what are you even doing? Are you nostalgically stuck in 2012? If you include even Google’s first G in your repo, you’re disqualified from being taken seriously as a developer, no matter how many excuses you manage to come up with for it.

They are the problem spotter, not the solver.

2026-09-01T20:59:28Z

In reply to nevent1q…djjz
_________________________

They are the problem spotter, not the solver.

Every serious group of online Muslims will eventually host their ...

2026-09-01T20:45:35Z

Every serious group of online Muslims will eventually host their own summit.
Muslim Bitcoin Summit (npub15vs…wsy7) did it first 😌

local models are only good imo if you put the investment into ...

2026-09-01T20:35:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…n5t7
_________________________

local models are only good imo if you put the investment into personal training.

"The problem facing the Ummah is not that we lack ...

2026-09-01T20:31:02Z

"The problem facing the Ummah is not that we lack organizations, institutions, conferences, projects, apps, scholars, political theories or economic proposals. We have plenty of them. The problem is that most of these efforts remain subordinate to the monetary and technological substrate they claim, in one way or another, to resist."

quoting
naddr1qq…4v65

Brother Michael's essay made a fairly straightforward argument, even if the implications of that argument are not straightforward at all. The monetary system we live under is structurally bound up with riba, and because that monetary system sits underneath nearly every other institution we interact with, the effects of riba do not remain confined to mortgages, credit cards, loans, or the more obvious transactions that Muslims have traditionally been taught to scrutinize. They seep outward into family life, saving, charity, business, Waqfs, our time preference, and eventually into the institutional forms of the constitution of the Ummah itself. Bitcoin, from this perspective, becomes interesting to Muslims not because it is a speculative asset to get rich, but because it offers a monetary system with very different properties, one that is not issued as debt and cannot be diluted at the discretion of governments or banks.

But once we accept that argument, even provisionally, another question follows, and I think this question is perhaps more interesting for understanding why the Muslim Bitcoin Summit exists in the first place.

What else is there?

When we ask that question, we really mean it in two related senses. First, if the problem begins with debt-based fiat money, what monetary alternative actually exists that does not simply reproduce the same architecture under another name? The previous essay made the case that Bitcoin is presently the most serious answer we have found. But there is another question that follows from it, and this is the one we are more interested in here: what else exists within the Muslim imaginary that takes a critique of the existing order and joins it to a set of practices ordinary Muslims can begin adopting without first capturing a government, or receiving institutional permission, or waiting for some future political settlement or moment?

We do not mean this in some melodramatic sense, as though Muslims have never built anything worthwhile in the modern world, or as though every Islamic institution outside of Bitcoin has failed and ought to be abandoned. That would plainly be ridiculous. There are Muslim charities that feed people, Islamic schools and seminaries that preserve knowledge, scholars who teach and issue fatawa, businesses employing thousands of Muslims, institutions distributing zakat, activists defending Muslim interests, and countless local masajid doing the unglamorous work of holding communities together. These things are good, and none of what follows should be interpreted as an argument against them.

Nonetheless, there is a deeper problem which, in our view, very few Muslim institutions are actually equipped to confront, insofar as almost all of them operate downstream from a monetary and technological order whose basic assumptions they simply accept as given.

An Islamic charity still holds its funds in fiat money. A Muslim startup still relies on banks, payment processors, app stores, cloud providers, subscription models, centralized user accounts, analytics companies and whatever other layers have become necessary to make a modern software slop company function. An Islamic school still has to operate within a regulatory and financial system that it did not design. A political movement ultimately has to win elections, influence governments, lobby or bribe the state, or somehow convince people who already control institutions of power to adopt its program. Islamic finance, perhaps most obviously, begins with the modern banking system as an established fact and then spends enormous intellectual and institutional energy trying to determine how Muslims can operate within it.

Be that as it may, there is an important distinction here between asking how Muslims can survive inside an existing system and asking whether Muslims should accept the structure of that system in the first place.

This is one reason why Islamic finance, as both a concept and application, has always seemed somewhat unsatisfying to many of us. Its problem is not simply that one may object to this murabaha contract or that sukuk structure, or accuse one financial product of resembling conventional interest too closely. Those arguments have gone on for decades and will likely continue long after we are gone. The more fundamental limitation is that Islamic finance usually begins with fiat money, central banking, inflation, debt markets and the architecture of modern finance as immovable features of reality, and from there asks how a Muslim might transact or invest without technically crossing one particular juridical boundary.

In other words, the question they have settled for is, how do we make modern finance halal? But, what we are trying to ask is something closer to: why should modern finance be the starting point at all?

The same institutional limitation exists elsewhere, although in different forms. Scholars and students of knowledge are indispensable insofar as we need them to preserve the deen, teach us its limits, explain its obligations and prevent us from simply making Islam conform to whatever technological enthusiasm happens to be fashionable this decade. But scholars are not software engineers, protocol designers, network architects or monetary economists merely by virtue of being scholars, and many scholarly institutions themselves are dependent upon governments, universities, donors, banks and regulatory regimes which naturally narrow the range of possibilities they are capable of seriously entertaining. Expecting the scholarly class to design the technical means of exiting the monetary system misunderstands the function of scholarship in much the same way that expecting a programmer to independently derive fiqh from first principles would misunderstand the function of programming.

Academia has a similar problem. It is very good at producing papers, describing crises, critiquing modernity, organizing conferences, forming committees and identifying an ever-growing vocabulary with which to explain why things are bad. Some (little) of that work is useful. But at some point we have to notice that a Muslim can read a hundred books and papers about financial and technological sovereignty and remain completely dependent on the same bank, the same operating system, the same social media platform and the same monetary infrastructure after finishing the hundredth paper.

And then there is Muslim tech, which perhaps deserves its own particular frustration because the possibilities ought to be so much greater than what we usually end up getting.

Almost always, "Muslim tech" means taking the same centralized model already produced by Silicon Valley, attaching Islamic branding to it, locking Muslims into a subscription, gathering the same user data and selling it to an Israeli tech startup, relying on the same cloud infrastructure and app stores, and then presenting the result as some kind of civilizational achievement because there is an Arabic word in the logo. We can make a Muslim social network, a Muslim AI assistant, a Muslim fintech app, a Muslim productivity platform, and yet insofar as the underlying infrastructure is still owned and permissioned by somebody else, the basic relationship has not changed very much. We have essentially created Muslim content inside a machine belonging to someone else, usually of Zionist orientation.

This is the point we are trying to get at. The problem facing the Ummah is not that we lack organizations, institutions, conferences, projects, apps, scholars, political theories or economic proposals. We have plenty of them. The problem is that most of these efforts remain subordinate to the monetary and technological substrate they claim, in one way or another, to resist.

And here we find that Bitcoin produces something rather unusual, because it does not merely give us another opinion about what is wrong. It gives us a certain praxis that we need to be paying attention to.

Look, we can spend another fifty years discussing the harms of riba, or we can begin reducing our exposure to riba-based money right now. We can complain about banks, or we can learn self-custody. We can discuss the dangers of centralized monetary authorities, or we can run a node and verify the monetary rules ourselves. We can criticize surveillance capitalism, or we can begin using free and open-source software, encrypted communications, self-hosted services and permissionless protocols. We can lament the weakness of Muslim institutions, or we can start forming direct economic and social relationships with other Muslims without waiting for a government ministry or a corporate platform to coordinate us.

None of these things individually constitutes some grand Islamic revival, obviously. Running Linux is not some act of clever statecraft, and operating a Bitcoin node does not magically restore the Waqf or resolve the political problems or conflicts of the Muslim world. But that is not really the point.

The point is that these practices begin altering our relationship with the institutions around us.

If a Muslim learns that he can hold his savings without a bank, something has changed in his imagination. If he can verify his own money without trusting a central authority, then perhaps verification should matter elsewhere too. If he can communicate over protocols that are not owned by a single corporation, perhaps the social networks through which Muslims organize do not have to depend upon a corporate moderator, an algorithm, or some gay Jewish oligarch in California deciding what is acceptable speech. If he can run software whose code is available to inspect and modify, perhaps technological dependence is not simply a fact of nature.

This is one way of understanding what we have called Digital Hijrah. It is not a rejection of technology, nor is it a fantasy of disconnecting from the modern world and retreating into some electronically fortified village where everyone runs a server and refuses to speak to anyone using Windows. It is, rather, the gradual and recurring process of recognizing which dependencies are unnecessary, which dependencies are dangerous, which dependencies compromise our values, and then deliberately replacing them where alternatives exist.

Bitcoin happens to be the most obvious place to begin because money sits underneath so much of this. And Bitcoin also introduces another peculiar feature which I think makes the Muslim Bitcoin movement different from many previous attempts at revival, that is, the praxis contains within it a positive feedback loop.

Consider that most movements require their participants to sacrifice now for some victory which may or may not arrive later. Join the organization, attend the meetings, donate money, distribute pamphlets, campaign, build membership, persuade the public, and perhaps after twenty or fifty years the political circumstances will change and something meaningful will finally happen (looking at you, Hizb ut-Tahrir)

We contend that Bitcoin produces a rather different and unfamiliar dynamic.

A Muslim begins stacking sats, usually for very ordinary reasons. He wants to save money in something that cannot be debased, cool. Over time he becomes more attentive to his time preference because saving is no longer merely holding a melting unit and hoping to outrun inflation. He learns proper self-custody, which forces him to learn responsibility because there is no customer service department that can reverse his mistakes. He learns how Bitcoin works, perhaps starts running a node, and suddenly concepts such as verification, trust minimization and sovereignty become more than abstractions.

Then these habits begin spreading. He starts asking why his money should be self-custodied while his data is not. Why should his financial life be sovereign while his communications remain entirely dependent on permissioned platforms? Why should he verify Bitcoin but blindly trust Google or Apple that controls everything else he does? Why should Muslims complain about censorship while building their communities on infrastructure capable of censoring them?

Then he meets other Muslims asking the same questions. Perhaps they begin transacting with each other. Perhaps one starts a business. Perhaps another teaches self-custody. Another sets up a Lightning node and opens up a channel with a friend. Another organizes a local Majlis. Another starts a Nostr relay. Another begins thinking about how a Waqf might operate on a Bitcoin standard, or how a masjid treasury might use multisig custody, or how Muslims in different countries might transfer value directly without passing through layers of correspondent Jewish owned banks.

And here there is perhaps a third sense in which we can ask the question, what else is there? Once the exit is no longer merely theoretical and Muslims begin practicing it together, what else might begin forming around that practice?

Something interesting happens at this point because there are really two recursive processes reinforcing one another.

The first is material. People accumulate savings, acquire technical knowledge and competence, reduce dependencies, build businesses/organizations and develop the capacity to undertake projects that would have been harder before. The people participating in the movement can become materially stronger through participation in the movement itself, and each successful act of exit creates additional capacity for another act of exit.

The second is more social and communal. People who repeatedly practice these things together develop a common language, shared norms, technical competence, trust and eventually a kind of "digital asabiyyah." Shared praxis makes cooperation easier; successful cooperation strengthens trust; greater trust makes more ambitious forms of coordination possible; and those new forms of coordination further reinforce the shared culture which produced them in the first place.

We think the two loops feed one another. Material sovereignty gives the network greater capacity to act, while social cohesion makes that capacity easier to coordinate. The community gradually becomes both more capable and more cohesive through the very practices that define it.

We might call this something like "recursive sovereignty," or where every successful act of exit creates additional capacity for another act of exit, while the relationships formed through that process make collective action increasingly possible and harder to stop.

This is one of the reasons Bitcoin Majlis does not quite resemble the Muslim organizations we are used to. It is not a political party, an NGO, a corporation, a tariqa, an academic institution, or an organization asking Muslims to subordinate themselves to some new hierarchy. The "toxic" Muslim Bitcoin culture that has emerged is far looser than that, and at times admittedly much harsher. It consists of Muslims from different countries, theological orientations and social backgrounds who share some fairly uncompromising assumptions about riba, Bitcoin, self-custody, sovereignty and the need to reduce dependence upon fiat institutions, even while they may disagree about almost everything else.

Muslim movements have historically struggled with the question of how much ideological agreement is required before Muslims can meaningfully organize together. If agreement requires identical views on politics, fiqh, madhhab, theology, methodology, geopolitics and every other controversy Muslim Twitter manages to discover, then very little coordination is possible outside increasingly narrow camps.

Bitcoin Majlis, by contrast, has emerged around something closer to a narrow but hard consensus.

Riba is destructive. Fiat money is structurally compromised. Bitcoin offers a credible monetary alternative. Permissionless self-custody or nothing. Muslims should become less dependent upon institutions whose incentives are hostile to them. Beyond this, there is considerable room for difference.

This creates the possibility of a network that does not need to grow in the way conventional organizations grow. There does not have to be one Bitcoin Majlis headquarters coordinating every Muslim Bitcoiner on earth. A group in London can organize one way, Somalis somewhere else can organize another, Malaysians another, and if different communities eventually establish their own relays, local gatherings, educational programs, businesses or charitable institutions, there is no contradiction in that. This is actually encouraged. The network can spointer and reproduce itself without everyone joining one bureaucracy.

In that sense, the model is more distributed, even somewhat swarm-like, although we do not mean that in the sense of disorder. It means that coordination can occur through shared protocols, norms and incentives rather than through a single chain of command. Our own notes (nevent1q…zhxh) on Bitcoin Majlis have described this as a movement without the usual institutional form, held together more by praxis, common protocolized culture and a rigid anti-riba monetary orientation than by membership in a formal organization.

This brings us back to the Muslim Bitcoin Summit.

If the Summit were merely two days of people explaining why Bitcoin has a fixed supply, that would be quite boring, and there would honestly be little reason for it to exist. There are already thousands of hours of podcasts, books, videos and conferences explaining Bitcoin, and nobody needs another man standing on a stage explaining the 21 million supply cap for the nine-thousandth time.

The reason for a specifically Muslim Bitcoin Summit is that something else is happening around the monetary question.

The Summit is where a network that usually exists across cyberspace, group chats, Nostr relays, online communities, local meetups and scattered friendships becomes physically present in one place. It is where Muslims can encounter people who have already begun applying these ideas to their own lives, not merely by buying Bitcoin, but by thinking seriously about self-custody, privacy, open-source software, business, family wealth, network states, charity and community institutions, riba and the question of what Muslim sovereignty could mean in an age increasingly defined by monetary instability, mass surveillance and accelerated AI development.

Perhaps most importantly, we are not trying to sell people another institution upon which they should become dependent. If anything, the opposite should be true.

The successful attendee of the Muslim Bitcoin Summit should leave needing fewer institutions than when he arrived.

He should understand his money better. He should understand custody better. He should understand the technological systems around him better. He should have met Muslims capable of helping him learn things which previously seemed inaccessible. He should leave with the uncomfortable realization that many of the dependencies he assumed were permanent are simply habits.

And this is ultimately why we keep returning to the question: what else is there?

Islamic finance can give us another fiat financial product. Muslim tech can give us another app. Academia can produce another critique. Political movements can give us another platform. NGOs can give us another campaign. Scholars can give us another fatwa. Again, all of these have their place, and we do not pretend otherwise.

But where else are Muslims gathering around an attempt to confront riba hegemony at the monetary layer of civilization while simultaneously giving ordinary Muslims the tools to begin acting upon that conclusion themselves?

Where else do we find monetary exit joined to technical praxis, self-custody joined to open-source software, sound money joined to long-term thinking, online networks joined to physical community, and individual sovereignty deliberately understood as something which should eventually strengthen families and communities rather than merely produce isolated individuals dependent on some state?

Perhaps some other movement will eventually answer these questions better than we do. That would be a good thing. Bitcoin Majlis does not need to become the official institution of anything, and the Muslim Bitcoin Summit does not need to become another annual conference whose continued existence becomes more important than the reasons it was created.

For now, however, we are telling you that something genuinely unusual is taking shape and you need to be paying attention to this.

There is a growing network of Muslims who are not merely criticizing the riba-based monetary system but gradually attempting to leave it without working within the confines of a gold standard or political movement, who are acquiring the tools necessary to make that exit real, who are learning to organize without waiting for permission, and who are discovering that every step toward greater individual and communal sovereignty can make the next step easier.

So after understanding why Bitcoin is important for Muslims, perhaps the next question is no longer whether we need a Muslim Bitcoin Summit.

The more interesting question is simply this:

What else is there?

Come to the next Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London on October 10th and 11th. Get your tickets here: https://mslmbtcsummit.com/

We look forward to seeing you there inshaAllah.

i've gotta get this setup 🕰️

2026-09-01T20:26:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…02y2
_________________________

i've gotta get this setup 🕰️

"This shit's so cool" is what I think every time I ...

2026-09-01T20:17:43Z

"This shit's so cool"

is what I think every time I enter

'routstrd start' or 'routstrd top' into my terminal. #iykyk

Our common culture is the shared mindset! Great essay. ...

2026-09-01T19:56:20Z

Our common culture is the shared mindset! Great essay.

quoting
nevent1q…we6q
This is my attempt at explaining why the Muslim Bitcoin Summit (npub15vs…wsy7) offers something genuinely different from all the Muslim institutions and movements that are out there, and what becomes possible when Muslims begin building around sound money, sovereign tech, and a shared praxis of actual exit from riba.
naddr1qq…4v65

This is my attempt at explaining why the @npub15vs…wsy7 offers ...

2026-09-01T18:46:43Z

This is my attempt at explaining why the Muslim Bitcoin Summit (npub15vs…wsy7) offers something genuinely different from all the Muslim institutions and movements that are out there, and what becomes possible when Muslims begin building around sound money, sovereign tech, and a shared praxis of actual exit from riba.

quoting
naddr1qq…4v65

Brother Michael's essay made a fairly straightforward argument, even if the implications of that argument are not straightforward at all. The monetary system we live under is structurally bound up with riba, and because that monetary system sits underneath nearly every other institution we interact with, the effects of riba do not remain confined to mortgages, credit cards, loans, or the more obvious transactions that Muslims have traditionally been taught to scrutinize. They seep outward into family life, saving, charity, business, Waqfs, our time preference, and eventually into the institutional forms of the constitution of the Ummah itself. Bitcoin, from this perspective, becomes interesting to Muslims not because it is a speculative asset to get rich, but because it offers a monetary system with very different properties, one that is not issued as debt and cannot be diluted at the discretion of governments or banks.

But once we accept that argument, even provisionally, another question follows, and I think this question is perhaps more interesting for understanding why the Muslim Bitcoin Summit exists in the first place.

What else is there?

When we ask that question, we really mean it in two related senses. First, if the problem begins with debt-based fiat money, what monetary alternative actually exists that does not simply reproduce the same architecture under another name? The previous essay made the case that Bitcoin is presently the most serious answer we have found. But there is another question that follows from it, and this is the one we are more interested in here: what else exists within the Muslim imaginary that takes a critique of the existing order and joins it to a set of practices ordinary Muslims can begin adopting without first capturing a government, or receiving institutional permission, or waiting for some future political settlement or moment?

We do not mean this in some melodramatic sense, as though Muslims have never built anything worthwhile in the modern world, or as though every Islamic institution outside of Bitcoin has failed and ought to be abandoned. That would plainly be ridiculous. There are Muslim charities that feed people, Islamic schools and seminaries that preserve knowledge, scholars who teach and issue fatawa, businesses employing thousands of Muslims, institutions distributing zakat, activists defending Muslim interests, and countless local masajid doing the unglamorous work of holding communities together. These things are good, and none of what follows should be interpreted as an argument against them.

Nonetheless, there is a deeper problem which, in our view, very few Muslim institutions are actually equipped to confront, insofar as almost all of them operate downstream from a monetary and technological order whose basic assumptions they simply accept as given.

An Islamic charity still holds its funds in fiat money. A Muslim startup still relies on banks, payment processors, app stores, cloud providers, subscription models, centralized user accounts, analytics companies and whatever other layers have become necessary to make a modern software slop company function. An Islamic school still has to operate within a regulatory and financial system that it did not design. A political movement ultimately has to win elections, influence governments, lobby or bribe the state, or somehow convince people who already control institutions of power to adopt its program. Islamic finance, perhaps most obviously, begins with the modern banking system as an established fact and then spends enormous intellectual and institutional energy trying to determine how Muslims can operate within it.

Be that as it may, there is an important distinction here between asking how Muslims can survive inside an existing system and asking whether Muslims should accept the structure of that system in the first place.

This is one reason why Islamic finance, as both a concept and application, has always seemed somewhat unsatisfying to many of us. Its problem is not simply that one may object to this murabaha contract or that sukuk structure, or accuse one financial product of resembling conventional interest too closely. Those arguments have gone on for decades and will likely continue long after we are gone. The more fundamental limitation is that Islamic finance usually begins with fiat money, central banking, inflation, debt markets and the architecture of modern finance as immovable features of reality, and from there asks how a Muslim might transact or invest without technically crossing one particular juridical boundary.

In other words, the question they have settled for is, how do we make modern finance halal? But, what we are trying to ask is something closer to: why should modern finance be the starting point at all?

The same institutional limitation exists elsewhere, although in different forms. Scholars and students of knowledge are indispensable insofar as we need them to preserve the deen, teach us its limits, explain its obligations and prevent us from simply making Islam conform to whatever technological enthusiasm happens to be fashionable this decade. But scholars are not software engineers, protocol designers, network architects or monetary economists merely by virtue of being scholars, and many scholarly institutions themselves are dependent upon governments, universities, donors, banks and regulatory regimes which naturally narrow the range of possibilities they are capable of seriously entertaining. Expecting the scholarly class to design the technical means of exiting the monetary system misunderstands the function of scholarship in much the same way that expecting a programmer to independently derive fiqh from first principles would misunderstand the function of programming.

Academia has a similar problem. It is very good at producing papers, describing crises, critiquing modernity, organizing conferences, forming committees and identifying an ever-growing vocabulary with which to explain why things are bad. Some (little) of that work is useful. But at some point we have to notice that a Muslim can read a hundred books and papers about financial and technological sovereignty and remain completely dependent on the same bank, the same operating system, the same social media platform and the same monetary infrastructure after finishing the hundredth paper.

And then there is Muslim tech, which perhaps deserves its own particular frustration because the possibilities ought to be so much greater than what we usually end up getting.

Almost always, "Muslim tech" means taking the same centralized model already produced by Silicon Valley, attaching Islamic branding to it, locking Muslims into a subscription, gathering the same user data and selling it to an Israeli tech startup, relying on the same cloud infrastructure and app stores, and then presenting the result as some kind of civilizational achievement because there is an Arabic word in the logo. We can make a Muslim social network, a Muslim AI assistant, a Muslim fintech app, a Muslim productivity platform, and yet insofar as the underlying infrastructure is still owned and permissioned by somebody else, the basic relationship has not changed very much. We have essentially created Muslim content inside a machine belonging to someone else, usually of Zionist orientation.

This is the point we are trying to get at. The problem facing the Ummah is not that we lack organizations, institutions, conferences, projects, apps, scholars, political theories or economic proposals. We have plenty of them. The problem is that most of these efforts remain subordinate to the monetary and technological substrate they claim, in one way or another, to resist.

And here we find that Bitcoin produces something rather unusual, because it does not merely give us another opinion about what is wrong. It gives us a certain praxis that we need to be paying attention to.

Look, we can spend another fifty years discussing the harms of riba, or we can begin reducing our exposure to riba-based money right now. We can complain about banks, or we can learn self-custody. We can discuss the dangers of centralized monetary authorities, or we can run a node and verify the monetary rules ourselves. We can criticize surveillance capitalism, or we can begin using free and open-source software, encrypted communications, self-hosted services and permissionless protocols. We can lament the weakness of Muslim institutions, or we can start forming direct economic and social relationships with other Muslims without waiting for a government ministry or a corporate platform to coordinate us.

None of these things individually constitutes some grand Islamic revival, obviously. Running Linux is not some act of clever statecraft, and operating a Bitcoin node does not magically restore the Waqf or resolve the political problems or conflicts of the Muslim world. But that is not really the point.

The point is that these practices begin altering our relationship with the institutions around us.

If a Muslim learns that he can hold his savings without a bank, something has changed in his imagination. If he can verify his own money without trusting a central authority, then perhaps verification should matter elsewhere too. If he can communicate over protocols that are not owned by a single corporation, perhaps the social networks through which Muslims organize do not have to depend upon a corporate moderator, an algorithm, or some gay Jewish oligarch in California deciding what is acceptable speech. If he can run software whose code is available to inspect and modify, perhaps technological dependence is not simply a fact of nature.

This is one way of understanding what we have called Digital Hijrah. It is not a rejection of technology, nor is it a fantasy of disconnecting from the modern world and retreating into some electronically fortified village where everyone runs a server and refuses to speak to anyone using Windows. It is, rather, the gradual and recurring process of recognizing which dependencies are unnecessary, which dependencies are dangerous, which dependencies compromise our values, and then deliberately replacing them where alternatives exist.

Bitcoin happens to be the most obvious place to begin because money sits underneath so much of this. And Bitcoin also introduces another peculiar feature which I think makes the Muslim Bitcoin movement different from many previous attempts at revival, that is, the praxis contains within it a positive feedback loop.

Consider that most movements require their participants to sacrifice now for some victory which may or may not arrive later. Join the organization, attend the meetings, donate money, distribute pamphlets, campaign, build membership, persuade the public, and perhaps after twenty or fifty years the political circumstances will change and something meaningful will finally happen (looking at you, Hizb ut-Tahrir)

We contend that Bitcoin produces a rather different and unfamiliar dynamic.

A Muslim begins stacking sats, usually for very ordinary reasons. He wants to save money in something that cannot be debased, cool. Over time he becomes more attentive to his time preference because saving is no longer merely holding a melting unit and hoping to outrun inflation. He learns proper self-custody, which forces him to learn responsibility because there is no customer service department that can reverse his mistakes. He learns how Bitcoin works, perhaps starts running a node, and suddenly concepts such as verification, trust minimization and sovereignty become more than abstractions.

Then these habits begin spreading. He starts asking why his money should be self-custodied while his data is not. Why should his financial life be sovereign while his communications remain entirely dependent on permissioned platforms? Why should he verify Bitcoin but blindly trust Google or Apple that controls everything else he does? Why should Muslims complain about censorship while building their communities on infrastructure capable of censoring them?

Then he meets other Muslims asking the same questions. Perhaps they begin transacting with each other. Perhaps one starts a business. Perhaps another teaches self-custody. Another sets up a Lightning node and opens up a channel with a friend. Another organizes a local Majlis. Another starts a Nostr relay. Another begins thinking about how a Waqf might operate on a Bitcoin standard, or how a masjid treasury might use multisig custody, or how Muslims in different countries might transfer value directly without passing through layers of correspondent Jewish owned banks.

And here there is perhaps a third sense in which we can ask the question, what else is there? Once the exit is no longer merely theoretical and Muslims begin practicing it together, what else might begin forming around that practice?

Something interesting happens at this point because there are really two recursive processes reinforcing one another.

The first is material. People accumulate savings, acquire technical knowledge and competence, reduce dependencies, build businesses/organizations and develop the capacity to undertake projects that would have been harder before. The people participating in the movement can become materially stronger through participation in the movement itself, and each successful act of exit creates additional capacity for another act of exit.

The second is more social and communal. People who repeatedly practice these things together develop a common language, shared norms, technical competence, trust and eventually a kind of "digital asabiyyah." Shared praxis makes cooperation easier; successful cooperation strengthens trust; greater trust makes more ambitious forms of coordination possible; and those new forms of coordination further reinforce the shared culture which produced them in the first place.

We think the two loops feed one another. Material sovereignty gives the network greater capacity to act, while social cohesion makes that capacity easier to coordinate. The community gradually becomes both more capable and more cohesive through the very practices that define it.

We might call this something like "recursive sovereignty," or where every successful act of exit creates additional capacity for another act of exit, while the relationships formed through that process make collective action increasingly possible and harder to stop.

This is one of the reasons Bitcoin Majlis does not quite resemble the Muslim organizations we are used to. It is not a political party, an NGO, a corporation, a tariqa, an academic institution, or an organization asking Muslims to subordinate themselves to some new hierarchy. The "toxic" Muslim Bitcoin culture that has emerged is far looser than that, and at times admittedly much harsher. It consists of Muslims from different countries, theological orientations and social backgrounds who share some fairly uncompromising assumptions about riba, Bitcoin, self-custody, sovereignty and the need to reduce dependence upon fiat institutions, even while they may disagree about almost everything else.

Muslim movements have historically struggled with the question of how much ideological agreement is required before Muslims can meaningfully organize together. If agreement requires identical views on politics, fiqh, madhhab, theology, methodology, geopolitics and every other controversy Muslim Twitter manages to discover, then very little coordination is possible outside increasingly narrow camps.

Bitcoin Majlis, by contrast, has emerged around something closer to a narrow but hard consensus.

Riba is destructive. Fiat money is structurally compromised. Bitcoin offers a credible monetary alternative. Permissionless self-custody or nothing. Muslims should become less dependent upon institutions whose incentives are hostile to them. Beyond this, there is considerable room for difference.

This creates the possibility of a network that does not need to grow in the way conventional organizations grow. There does not have to be one Bitcoin Majlis headquarters coordinating every Muslim Bitcoiner on earth. A group in London can organize one way, Somalis somewhere else can organize another, Malaysians another, and if different communities eventually establish their own relays, local gatherings, educational programs, businesses or charitable institutions, there is no contradiction in that. This is actually encouraged. The network can spointer and reproduce itself without everyone joining one bureaucracy.

In that sense, the model is more distributed, even somewhat swarm-like, although we do not mean that in the sense of disorder. It means that coordination can occur through shared protocols, norms and incentives rather than through a single chain of command. Our own notes (nevent1q…zhxh) on Bitcoin Majlis have described this as a movement without the usual institutional form, held together more by praxis, common protocolized culture and a rigid anti-riba monetary orientation than by membership in a formal organization.

This brings us back to the Muslim Bitcoin Summit.

If the Summit were merely two days of people explaining why Bitcoin has a fixed supply, that would be quite boring, and there would honestly be little reason for it to exist. There are already thousands of hours of podcasts, books, videos and conferences explaining Bitcoin, and nobody needs another man standing on a stage explaining the 21 million supply cap for the nine-thousandth time.

The reason for a specifically Muslim Bitcoin Summit is that something else is happening around the monetary question.

The Summit is where a network that usually exists across cyberspace, group chats, Nostr relays, online communities, local meetups and scattered friendships becomes physically present in one place. It is where Muslims can encounter people who have already begun applying these ideas to their own lives, not merely by buying Bitcoin, but by thinking seriously about self-custody, privacy, open-source software, business, family wealth, network states, charity and community institutions, riba and the question of what Muslim sovereignty could mean in an age increasingly defined by monetary instability, mass surveillance and accelerated AI development.

Perhaps most importantly, we are not trying to sell people another institution upon which they should become dependent. If anything, the opposite should be true.

The successful attendee of the Muslim Bitcoin Summit should leave needing fewer institutions than when he arrived.

He should understand his money better. He should understand custody better. He should understand the technological systems around him better. He should have met Muslims capable of helping him learn things which previously seemed inaccessible. He should leave with the uncomfortable realization that many of the dependencies he assumed were permanent are simply habits.

And this is ultimately why we keep returning to the question: what else is there?

Islamic finance can give us another fiat financial product. Muslim tech can give us another app. Academia can produce another critique. Political movements can give us another platform. NGOs can give us another campaign. Scholars can give us another fatwa. Again, all of these have their place, and we do not pretend otherwise.

But where else are Muslims gathering around an attempt to confront riba hegemony at the monetary layer of civilization while simultaneously giving ordinary Muslims the tools to begin acting upon that conclusion themselves?

Where else do we find monetary exit joined to technical praxis, self-custody joined to open-source software, sound money joined to long-term thinking, online networks joined to physical community, and individual sovereignty deliberately understood as something which should eventually strengthen families and communities rather than merely produce isolated individuals dependent on some state?

Perhaps some other movement will eventually answer these questions better than we do. That would be a good thing. Bitcoin Majlis does not need to become the official institution of anything, and the Muslim Bitcoin Summit does not need to become another annual conference whose continued existence becomes more important than the reasons it was created.

For now, however, we are telling you that something genuinely unusual is taking shape and you need to be paying attention to this.

There is a growing network of Muslims who are not merely criticizing the riba-based monetary system but gradually attempting to leave it without working within the confines of a gold standard or political movement, who are acquiring the tools necessary to make that exit real, who are learning to organize without waiting for permission, and who are discovering that every step toward greater individual and communal sovereignty can make the next step easier.

So after understanding why Bitcoin is important for Muslims, perhaps the next question is no longer whether we need a Muslim Bitcoin Summit.

The more interesting question is simply this:

What else is there?

Come to the next Muslim Bitcoin Summit in London on October 10th and 11th. Get your tickets here: https://mslmbtcsummit.com/

We look forward to seeing you there inshaAllah.

Yup. But that historically meant we moon in October.

2026-09-01T18:09:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…a0ts
_________________________

Yup. But that historically meant we moon in October.

The fiat system is not waiting for validation. It’s already ...

2026-09-01T18:04:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…n403
_________________________

The fiat system is not waiting for validation. It’s already here. I’m actually actively trying to leave it.

“It’s no different with shitcoins” - I believe it is.

Yeah. Basically. I already do this. But I want to improve the ...

2026-09-01T18:02:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…6mkc
_________________________

Yeah. Basically. I already do this. But I want to improve the quality.

Not yet. I want to exhaust open source local models first.

2026-09-01T17:35:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…9y3q
_________________________

Not yet. I want to exhaust open source local models first.

did you try elevenlabs?

2026-09-01T17:04:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…mmwp
_________________________

did you try elevenlabs?

I don’t give any validity to other coin. I would never mine ...

2026-09-01T17:00:08Z

I don’t give any validity to other coin.

I would never mine another coin and convert it to bitcoin.

I would not accept other coins and convert it to bitcoin.

#bitcoinonly

Nostr event nevent1qqst2mlx0zlhv22entzddqs8f3lg7pt2yc9qjuak2tghmep6k5v20rspfamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68yctjv93xjcfwvdhk6tmev94kj6rgdahx2wnjv4kxz7fwdehhxarjv9exzcnfvyhxxmmd9auk7mnyv4ez6cmfwp5x2u3dwfhk6et0qgsqwkx6erlx2tytnrp5vh0vegndgr2d2cs0wn5hldc680jy8wq7rlqhfldxg

2026-09-01T13:55:58Z

Gram الرابط الخاص بك 😍
قريباً ستستطيع يكون اسم المستخدم الخاص بك على تيليقرام هو رابط موقع إلكتروني خاص بك

حيث قامت شركة تيليقرام بتقديم طلب إلى منظمة الإنترنت للأرقام والأسماء المخصصة ICANN

وذلك للحصول على الإمتداد الرئيسي gram بحيث سيتمكن المستخدمين لاحقاً بإستخدامه

حتى الآن لم يتم الإعلان عن فوز الشركة بالإمتداد، وفي انتظار النتائج
#Telegram

Nostr event nevent1qqsq5usxr8r8sd4j8zp8ev9x0hhaa5stuq9h3erf9tzpuyjpzq2va3spfamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68yctjv93xjcfwvdhk6tmev94kj6rgdahx2wnjv4kxz7fwdehhxarjv9exzcnfvyhxxmmd9auk7mnyv4ez6cmfwp5x2u3dwfhk6et0qgsqwkx6erlx2tytnrp5vh0vegndgr2d2cs0wn5hldc680jy8wq7rlqxsxdm0

2026-09-01T13:51:20Z

رسميًا بدأ تطبيق تيليجرام بطرح Gram Wallet لمليار مستخدم..
وهي محفظة عملات رقمية داخل التطبيق نفسه، بحيث يقدر المستخدم يخزن ويستقبل ويرسل العملات الرقمية بدون الحاجة لتطبيق منفصل وبدون رسوم.

دوروف رئيس تليجرام وصفها بأنها أكبر إطلاق لمحفظة كريبتو غير وصائية في تاريخ البشرية.
#Telegram

We have to. Bitcoin is dead.

2026-09-01T12:55:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…kd6v
_________________________

We have to. Bitcoin is dead.

We all have problems. But some people’s problems are ...

2026-09-01T12:54:56Z

We all have problems. But some people’s problems are disturbing.

Hope you all have a great day keeping the monsters away.

Eeek.

2026-09-01T12:51:24Z

In reply to nevent1q…92pd
_________________________

Eeek.

Good night ...

2026-09-01T06:47:35Z

Good night

As I understand it, routstr is the actual software, and Private ...

2026-09-01T05:20:41Z

In reply to nevent1q…wf5a
_________________________

As I understand it, routstr is the actual software, and Private Provider is the provider that bundles everything together into one package. Right? Private Provider (npub1fet…jzfa) , routstr (npub130m…l29s) ?

Nostr event nevent1qqsrm5hj43cd659gur8v047y5rg7e3c6dv7lzxty8yaayu7w094n6qgpfamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68yctjv93xjcfwvdhk6tmev94kj6rgdahx2wnjv4kxz7fwdehhxarjv9exzcnfvyhxxmmd9auk7mnyv4ez6cmfwp5x2u3dwfhk6et0qgs02f70juxwyc88gfsjzjlkzt50wkjemvvrtmt7gpfnymplvh3r9mskkggwg

2026-09-01T05:15:26Z

quoting nevent1q…3uqg

#memestr

Turkish relay online: @npub1a52…sgqp Beni listeye eklediğiniz ...

2026-09-01T05:02:31Z

Turkish relay online: Nostr.org.tr (npub1a52…sgqp)

Beni listeye eklediğiniz için teşekkürler, ama burada neredeyse hiç Türkçe paylaşım yapmıyorum.

Sorry to hear you were hit by the btcpayserver bug.

2026-09-01T02:53:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…sn6a
_________________________

Sorry to hear you were hit by the btcpayserver bug.

If you have a dev clanker and you are tired of the language it ...

2026-09-01T02:52:03Z

If you have a dev clanker and you are tired of the language it uses. Pick one of these and ask it to talk with this style:

1. Follow Google’s Developer Documentation Style Guide.
2. Use Smart Brevity.
3. Use ASD-STE100.

Research which one you like most and ask your clanker to only use this language style.

Every now and then, some bitcoiners go into this shitcoinary ...

2026-09-01T02:32:34Z

Every now and then, some bitcoiners go into this shitcoinary phase.

Then reality hits them in the face and they snap back to maximalism.

Missed opportunity to call it the Hardware Wallet centipede. ...

2026-09-01T02:29:43Z

Missed opportunity to call it the Hardware Wallet centipede.

quoting
nevent1q…qedy
Cool frostsnap demo by nick (nprofile…unvz) at #bitcoinasia

Exciting to see novel approaches to multisig.

If you remove bets like this, Bitcoin can become a stable coin ...

2026-09-01T01:27:46Z

If you remove bets like this, Bitcoin can become a stable coin 😂

quoting
nevent1q…72hl
🐂 Long Rekt: 8.53 BTC on OKX @ $78386.90 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

This degen just lost $668,757.84.

I don’t know, I tried again now and it worked instantly. So not ...

2026-09-01T00:27:16Z

In reply to nevent1q…vg5m
_________________________

I don’t know, I tried again now and it worked instantly. So not really sure what happened a couple of days ago.

Nsec*

2026-09-01T00:23:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…ayxp
_________________________

Nsec*

Just tried again and it worked. 🤷‍♂️

2026-09-01T00:21:31Z

In reply to nevent1q…0rr5
_________________________

Just tried again and it worked. 🤷‍♂️

Btw, during the whole primal incident, I pasted my back into Halo ...

2026-09-01T00:19:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…3kg0
_________________________

Btw, during the whole primal incident, I pasted my back into Halo and nothing happened. It did not sign in.

"constantly doing in order to be seen as special or to be ...

2026-08-31T23:32:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…34qa
_________________________

"constantly doing in order to be seen as special or to be someone"

That's the problem right here. The intention. Other people will always disappoint, they never do justice.

He even adds himself to a github repo as a contributor

2026-08-31T22:14:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…3nfm
_________________________

He even adds himself to a github repo as a contributor

... and @npub1man…v8me in New York and @npub1tay…x3y7 from ...

2026-08-31T22:12:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…mx5c
_________________________

... and Manzara Cafe (npub1man…v8me) in New York and taylan (npub1tay…x3y7) from Ankara. But they're not very active anymore.

There's also @npub1hxp…w6td and @npub1ryc…pr3m

2026-08-31T22:04:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…mx5c
_________________________

There's also Ayşe (npub1hxp…w6td) and vezire (npub1ryc…pr3m)

Yep. But not living in TR.

2026-08-31T22:01:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…2whc
_________________________

Yep. But not living in TR.

#58TGang ?

2026-08-31T21:05:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…vy4t
_________________________

#58TGang ?

we hit $40T what feels like a couple of hours ago, and we are ...

2026-08-31T21:03:25Z

we hit $40T what feels like a couple of hours ago, and we are already $100b higher.

quoting
note1qs5…awtp
$40,104,097,482,666.58 (+ $27B) #NationalDebt