On to Los Angeles and then Houston this week. The US tour continues.

NYC trip was made amazing by the invite to @npub1key5...lt3h - great community! View quoted note →

By my friend Gado in Kenya. Foreign Aid is (mostly) bad. Though I can make room for specific disaster relief.

NEMS 2025 was excellent. Signal > noise. Loved seeing the Pod256 Foundation win a block and now their largest founder is the Bitcoin Network. Thanks to @Rod @econoalchemist @skot9000 and Rob Warren.

NEMS is high signal. Great people who are hands-on mining. Block 881423 hit live yesterday too.

Touchdown 30 hours later for the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit!

…the problem isn’t that African countries solicit foreign help and expertise. The paradigmatic examples of rapid modernization and economic development in Japan, South Korea, the Gulf, and China all involved a fair amount of local adaptations/deployment of foreign expertise. This, in fact, is supposed to be a key advantage of being a late developer. In my view, the real problem is how African states use foreign expertise. Instead of helping with questions of “how to get things done,” outsiders are often recruited into the driving seat and tasked with deciding “what is to be done.”

What explains the “ambition gap” among Africa’s (ruling) elites?

On the drivers of African elites’ addiction to muddling through developmentalism

?

It’s been 5 years. 4 since we knew these weren’t necessary. Why don’t airports remove them?

Cool demo by @UNCLE ROCKSTAR and Bernard Parah (Bitnob) of a point of sale system that prints #bitcoin  vouchers and activates/uses cards at the Africa Bitcoin Conference. #btcpay