“Whether you’re a rekt crypto bro or a friend of fiat, there is one thing that is especially difficult to accept. The one thing that sets Bitcoin apart: it all works without anyone in charge.”<br

“It might feel as if the promised future is perpetually out of reach, but building Lightning is a lot like climbing a mountain. Climbers never really see the summit until they’re standing on top of

“Izzy said there could be inflation in a hyperbitcoinized world. And she’s right. Calm down, maxis, calm down! Explaining why this is true sheds light on yet another of Bitcoin’s quasi-magical properties and paints our

“The foregoing considerations are by no means an exhaustive account of the cultural and spiritual legacy of fiat inflation. But they should suffice to substantiate the main point: that fiat inflaiton is a powerhouse of

“During the peak transaction fee times over the past month, our example transaction would be dust even for .001 BTC. That’s a little less than $50 at current market conditions. This feels incredible. 100,000 sats

“For too long, the world has had to endure the fallout of subpar academic research on bitcoin mining’s energy use and environmental impact. The outcome of this bullshit research has been shocking news headlines that

“NWC is useful for far more than simply integrating Lightning into Nostr applications as well. The entire design philosophy of Nostr itself as a protocol was centered around keeping it simple enough that the entire

The main promise of quantum computing is the ability to solve problems far faster than classical computers, but exactly how much faster varies. There are two applications where quantum algorithms appear to provide an exponential

“One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago. It wasn’t as if those former top companies were

“One night during my visit to Bondo, Carl asked me to pause as the sunset was fading, to look at the hills around us: the lights were all turning on, all across the foothills of

“To put it simply, there are now corporations with billions of dollars of investment in not just the asset, but the ecosystem. Mining is a huge economic drain on the system, and all it accomplishes

“Bitcoin enables perhaps the most powerful mode of ownership ever devised; it would be akin to gold inside a safe that can’t be penetrated with all the energy the universe, and with a password that

“Retrospectively, a lot of ex-DigiCash employees understand why Chaum was so paranoid. As a cryptographer you have to assume the whole world is trying to rip you off. A certain amount of paranoia is part

“Part of the problem of Lightning’s shortcoming regarding scalability of Bitcoin ownership is that in order to open a channel, or control a UTXO, you actually have to transact on the base layer. After that

” Channel liquidity and offline receives, in my opinion, are the two most obvious reasons why self-custodial lightning is not popular. When most users hear about any of these, they just think “screw that” and

“The computers used to create valuable new Bitcoin tokens and validate transactions consume around the same amount of energy as a medium-sized country such as Sweden would generate. Hence the stinging critique of how this