There are worse places to live than Nairobi. “Green city in the sun”

The Kenya VASP bill is poor execution on a bad idea. It’s a gift to rent seekers and a blow to innovation that punishes startups with red tape. Loose definitions of virtual “assets” and “tokens” increase uncertainty and allows regulatory overreach. They’d be better off just defining bitcoin vs other cryptocurrencies as commodity vs securities and letting the already existing Capital Markets Authority deal with it. PDF of the bill: 📄.pdf

Adults need self control. Powerful adults need it more.

Doing a Bitaxe giveaway at our monthly bitcoin meetup this evening at Waitabit Coffee.

Rose Njeri, a 35 year old software engineer and mother of two, was picked up and held by police for 5 days in Kenya. Why? Because she created a site to allow people to easily write an email to their representatives - pushing back on the new Finance Bill 2025. Back in 2016-2018 we spoke about how bad this “Computer misuse and cybercrimes act of 2018” was for Kenyans, and that it would be used for spurious charges like this against people just like Rose Njeri. This is wrong and we need to both push back on new bills as well as change old ones.

I was able to travel to see the 100MW Penguin bitcoin mine in Paraguay last year. They didn’t start by wanting to mine. They had a software academy that they needed money to support. So they took advantage of stranded power, and have used this to fund education to the tune of $1.5M. The power of bitcoin mining is not just jobs, stable grids, and less expensive power… it also can be used to finance amazing projects like this!

Excellent talk by @calle Crypto wars 1.0 “Code is speech” >> US Supreme Court says, “Spending money is speech” >> Crypto wars 2.0 “Tornado cash and Samurai Wallet founders indicted” Threatens the notion that we have the right to privacy in our money.

“Critical news can’t beat cat pics” Old friend Anjan (@anjansun) is launching a Stringer News on Nostr architecture.

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Worth supporting.

This is more like it. Sun today.

Off to Oslo.