As a Japanese language enthusiast, I remember a saying The nail that sticks out gets hammered down vividly. Japanese society is rather homogeneous, so it doesn’t feel all that weird to me - the fact that people who dare to be different will attract negative attention and be judged.
Recently, I read about how a similar concept exists in Latin America. People who try to pull others down - by the tails of their jackets - to prevent them from rising more than they should have are called jacket pullers. This seems to be an illustration of the crabs in a basket syndrome in real life. So, crabs will drag each other and tumble to the bottom of the bucket. I would have thought that Latin America, a place known to have infectious and exuberant life energy, would be a good environment to foster independent thought. Guess not.
This got me to reflect on my own country. In Singlish, we actually have a phrase called spoil market. We use it disparagingly on people who set the bar so high that the rest of us commoners cannot keep up. Sometimes, it’s said in jest, but other times, it is said as a warning for over-zealous associates not to supersede everyone else.
In other words, regardless of the kind of society we live in, there are bound to be naysayers and detractors who just cannot stand what we are doing. If we get ourselves too drawn into their criticism, we might lose heart and not carry out our plans. We will not become the person we’re destined to be because we get sidetracked by others’ perceptions.
Though perhaps getting swayed by others’ judgement may not be such a problem for Bitcoiners. Choosing to live the Bitcoin Standard suggests that we embrace the path less taken and are oblivious to people who are blinded by the empty lure of fiat. With Bitcoin, we gain the conviction to tune out the noise and focus inwardly. What is the ideal life I want to carve with my sats? we ask ourselves and then execute our plan. If we are more ambitious, we might even think of transforming our community or even society with sats. We are not adverse to be the nail that sticks out because we can withstand the pounding.
For what it's worth, these efforts might indirectly pay off for all the external wallet services that use NWC, etc. Often a chicken and egg problem, you've created demand for stable ways to connect external wallets hence incentivizing those services to develop their tools. Just guessing here.
Looking forward to the territory and subterritory stuff.
Celebrate a bit first though. Have a beer or burger on me at Fat Sal's if they are still around. Last time I was in Austin was ages ago. Might be there in December for work.
I just bought NostrComments.com
just trying this site out for the first time... not a great first impression
Day 100 of snailposting everyday 'til BTC hits $100k.
__@_'-'
In a way it's almost "good" that it happens publicly and not behind our backs no?
I think the idea that bitcoin/lightning will unite people into "good" is a bit like the Myth of the Peaceful Savage -- we're only kind of united now because it's "us vs them", but in a Bitcoin-only world where the LN trumps VISA, we will start fighting amongst ourselves. Maybe with less inequality, we'll see.
At least Amboss is seen as a friendly adversary and it's better they develop this tool than someone else behind our backs, to see how we can counter it.
You are much more knowledgeable in the subject and I don't fully disagree with you -- it's obviously painful to see it. Just want to play devil's advocate and realize that for every good we bring in bitcoin there will be bad. For every bad someone does to us, there will be good.
Lol omg
Bye bye hosted SN Wallet! All zaps will now come from my node! 😎
Section 988 of the IRS Internal Revenue Code says that foreign currencies have a de minimus exemption of $200, which means if you sell bitcoin for something and accrue less than $200 on the sale, you don't need to report it. This is my tax advice.
Today was a "family skate day" :)
My wife is on level 6 (on a scale of 10), our son is 3 (same scale), and our daughter is just learning now to skate.
And me....level zero :D I don't like to skate, but I'm going with them, and enjoy a glass of mulled wine :)
Here are the pictures (idk about quality of pictures, because I had to make a print screen of a video):
https://m.stacker.news/13930
https://m.stacker.news/13931
The monetary system strongly effects almost all aspects of our existence. It is the most fundamental infrastructure of society.
It is painfully obvious to me that our current societies are sick and self-destructive, and it seems like the most effective way to help heal is to accelerate the transition to a strong monetary system, that is based in math, to recover from this weak fiat money that is toxic to everyone, even including the people who think they'd profit from printing it...
It is really cool. This goes into it and mentions Flow 2.0 https://blog.mutinywallet.com/mutiny-wallet-open-beta/#just-in-time-channels.
Flow 2.0 appears to be the service Mutiny is using in order to provide liquidity to the wallet users. It is called an LSP and it is created by opening up zero-conf channels. This link goes into it: https://voltage.cloud/blog/voltage-announcements/introducing-flow-v2/?ref=blog.mutinywallet.com
So the wallet is a node and can hold on-chain Bitcoin. To move into and through the Lightning network you need liquidity from the Lightning network to open a channel. This is a problem.
So Mutiny solves this by creating a wrapped Bolt 11 invoice to create a just in time channel for your node (the wallet). Usage of the LSP does not violate privacy or introduce compromise in security. The Bolt 11 invoices are wrapped and include your preimage hash which an LSP node is not aware of.
Once funds are in your wallet on the Lightning network you can go to your settings and you will see how many channels you have open. It shows you a very easy to understand split graph of your inbound and outbound liquidity from all your channels.
This is a big step because now you can self host all the backend stuff for privacy while not having to worry about the nightmare of managing a live node and balancing channels just so you can have liquidity and privacy.
Here is the cool part. Mutiny lets you configure and set up your own LSP anyways. So you still have as much control as you could possibly want. They literally just took multiple user experiences and compressed it down to one pipeline. Incredible work.
Lyn talks about money from a perspective of technological determinism: as if the fate of money were an inevitable consequence of its functional characteristics. A few years ago, my previous favorite btc intro was Boyapati's Bullish Case for Bitcoin, which contains this chart:
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*_63fojX4ZSQxWlLNR6brLQ.png
According to the chart, btc is strictly better in almost every way than gold, and way better than fiat. It's not even close, right? And yet it's worth being mindful of what is not included in this chart, and the implications of what is included.
For example: a six month old child has the neural machinery to understand commodity money -- she knows that if I take your gold coin, you no longer have it, and if I put it behind my back, it's still there. However, there is no built-in machinery to process the curious "physics" of btc -- it is abstract, purely symbolic, and strange.
This is not a matter of 'education' or 'better ui', it's a statement about the innate difficulty of the concepts required to understand btc, which is a function of the built-in hardware we have available in our brains. Put another way:
My take is that a cognitive revolution is needed to make the underlying concepts graspable, and they may not be graspable to some people, ever. So, given all this, how comfortable are you with Lyn's "technological determinism" argument?