I moved to NH with the free state project in 2013. That has a certain connotation to it now, because a lot of people who moved really sort of just flailed their arms around and made a performative scene. Still do. What made me come back, and stay, were the people who got in deep and changed things. A lot of freedoms here the loud ones talk about that were unlocked by the quiet ones.

As a poor startup founder I’ve been using desktop Linux and the worst part is manually updating discord every day

My most controversial bitcoin opinion is Dennis Porter made the best use of the Bitcoin engagement farm by flexing it into state level advocacy that’s led to more state level legislation than dedicated Bitcoin think tanks And most of the influencer hate against him is jealousy / envy. It’s a countersignal. There are people out there engagement farming as much as him and ending up on the wrong side of many bitcoin “issues” du jour

Gotta hang on to the freedom tech

If I were wanting to make a big impact on bitcoin payments and I was working with big fintech apps with Bitcoin capability. I’d ship Pay to lightning from fiat. Buy / send out in one step (after confirmation of course) - no btc exposure for people who don’t want it - maximal compatibility globally - further shores up the access argument. Big fintechs can make this happen for many users

How can c= generate such a return with just routing? Lightning liquidity is the most underestimated part of the network. It’s part of what we solve at moneydevkit, but here’s a bit about how we did it at Block 1. Real transactions. Cash is one of the biggest lightning services on the network. It connects millions to lightning, and as Miles pointed out, more and more people are using it everyday. By nature of cash being custodial, we had insights into what people were using lightning for. This was part of the original thesis of c=. There are some big players out there that node runners have no idea about 🤷🏻‍♂️. Lightning privacy works very well. Apologies monero trolls. 2. Liquidity in our favor Most people buy bitcoin on cashapp and withdraw (based) That transaction flow is ideal for lightning, and in the right hands, you can flex it to pay for and make a handsome return on your own payments and operations. For the plebnet inclined— c= is an inbound generator. For its capacity it’s typically had 1-3X+ more inbound than outbound. This is a very unique position on the network. 3. Strategy The management the team did not only improved the experience for Cash users, it compounded payments and fees going through our channels. We expected to get some return, but we were pretty blown away by the volumes and takes. The ROI we collected was not from Cash. This was just step 0.5. The next steps were to flex our position and liquidity to bolster bigger and higher value things. One of those was Square. In the end, the real value comes from real people making real payments. It’s why I’ve always harped on this: We don’t need X protocol or Y L2. The technology is there. We need to do the hard part of bringing it to real people now. For you nostr folks consider— on-chain fees were never even a thought in our minds. Our margins were fat.

Hi Nostr, Launching soon—

moneydevkit — Global Payments at the Speed of Light

moneydevkit makes it easy to start accepting payments anywhere in the world. Just 5 minutes and a few lines of code.

Stripe is the de facto payment solution for developers but theres entire swaths of the globe that aren’t served by it. Similarly, everyday people with legitimate businesses get their payments turned off by stripe because the traditional financial system doesn’t want to serve them. Money Dev Kit is the easiest way to get started taking payments online. Easier than stripe. No onboarding or approvals. 170 countries. Your payments are yours. Under the hood, it’s self-custody and lightning. None of the headache, nodes channels etc. The interface will be truly stripe level and better. After working in lightning for the past few years, the hidden alpha on the network is there are plenty of people sending and able to send payments, but there’s a shortage of people receiving them. Underserved devs are using AI to make the future of the internet, and this will be by far the easiest way for them to receive those payments. Sign up for the mailing list for early access when we launch

If someone asked who I was voting for I made it a point to tell them that the Biden administration was specifically putting people in jail in my industry because they didn’t like it. It was a vote either for people who were actively putting people like me in jail, or the ones that actually were throwing us a bone. View quoted note →

I was sad to see Nick Szabo sign off in 2021. It’s good to see him back in the fray somewhere. Don’t take the old heads for granted. Many have come and gone 🫡