“The fall of First Republic Bank was the second-largest bank failure by assets in US history, putting us in the 2008 conversation. Times are different, but the bank failures are relatable in size. The total assets of three 2023 failures have already eclipsed the total assets of all the banks that failed during the Great…

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

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

“The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that i hear once in a while: “Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?” To those who ask it, my answer…

“Central Banking is successful alchemy in this sense. The money- issuing institutions of the world have found a way to create new money with no cost. No mining is required. They are the alchemists of our era. The Central Banks’ promise of stable prices is as absurd as the alchemists’ promise of cheap gold. The…

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

“Can you imagine a world in which you are restricted from buying meat for a while because you have already used your “carbon credits” for the month? Your “financial privileges” could potentially be restricted at any time at the whim of a government bureaucrat, and if you are a big enough troublemaker you could be…

The Lightning Network finally strikes in this Bitcoin Basics episode! Now that we understand the fundamentals of keys, wallets, transactions, and the node, we can finally take a dive into Lightning. What is it, what makes it tick, how do you own something that isn’t “on chain,” and what are the best tools to start…

“This was how more mainstream Bitcoin culture degraded from intellectual expressions of ideas (2017-era debates) to tribal recreations of the past. The old enemies were replaced with new enemies who were more convenient for the times, but we retained the “Bitcoiners against the world” ethos of the scaling era, which led to many newbies being…