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

“The question that the fiat system answers is the following: who is allowed to counterfeit currency, and how much? Further, who is allowed to have access to money, and who isn’t? The answer is political and enforced by violence. The Bitcoin system is answering the same questions, and the answers are as simple as they…

“The financial system in the United States, and for most of the rest of the world for that matter, can basically be thought of as an Excel spreadsheet managed by the Federal Reserve. That’s all it really is. Some of the cells on the spreadsheet are assets, and some of the cells are liabilities. It’s…

I joined John today for an over 2 hour rip on the nature of Bitcoin, numerous technical developments, the trade offs of those in the past, the consequences of changes – even those considered well analyzed and understood, the chaos of consensus around altering consensus, the spirit of Bitcoin vs the letter of the law,…

There is no magic wand. There is no such thing as a free lunch. When we bail out an institution, a bank, or “depositors” for billions of dollars, someone else LOSES billions of dollars worth of wealth. Their life got harder, their job got cut, the car they needed became less affordable, the house they…

“One aspect that is still massively under-utilized is the programmability of Bitcoin. While simple things like scheduled payments and automated payment splits do exist, we are undoubtedly still trapped in conventional thinking when it comes to the flow of sats. I’d like to share a simple idea that was shared with me a couple of…

“One immediate lesson many drew from this event was a reconsideration of the risk of fiat liabilities in an environment where trust is lacking (including the trust not to violate territorial integrity and Westphalian sovereignty). This event reinforced the nature of fiat money as a system of centrally maintained ledger entries denominating a unit of…

“The 20th century was the first where technology enabled forms of violent state competition, as well as peaceful globalization, across the full scale of the Earth. Moreover, the same technology made possible the organization of massive state systems to project power and maintain integrated, centralized control over large, diverse populations and cultures.” – Matthew Pines…

“Lightning is the way to make bitcoin the universal mainstream currency it was designed to be. This is how we’re going to bring open financial services to everyone. And we’re scaling Lightning by inviting people to participate and share in the gains.” – Roy Sheinfeld As a loose follow up to a recent article on…

“Over the long run, I view the outcome, one way or the other, more as a matter of technology than politics. From the top-down side, there is the development of Big Data and automated data surveillance capabilities. From the bottom-up side, there is the development of encryption tools and open monetary/information networks. Whichever direction proves more powerful will play a major role in how all sorts of things operate…