Benjamin Chodroff

Made my pitch: AI BattleBots in China. I want to see the world’s best human driven battlebots compete against fully autonomous AI battlebots in China. This is ping-pong diplomacy for a social media era. If the CCP were to invite a niche TV show to compete, the western media would lose their minds.

Watching as IBM China R&D closes, and laid off all 1000+ people. I don’t think most people understand how significant this move is, and the signal it is sending to both China and the world. https://www.reuters.com/technology/ibm-close-china-rd-department-affecting-over-1000-jobs-yicai-reports-2024-08-26/

Spent the day learning about zero knowledge proofs to create privacy UTXO tokens managed on Ethereum.

Working on my pizza making game #foodstr

My OSL Hong Kong account has been mysteriously shut down after only 3 months of opening, with a single BTC trade. I can’t tell if it was because one of my verified wallets gave them concerns, or perhaps because I am American (maybe they changed their policy), or perhaps because they found I am a permanent resident in China? Or maybe they don’t like that I only did 10k HKD and found their service ludicrously expensive. Who knows. It’s quite disappointing to see the state of Hong Kong these days. I also was denied a bank account at ZA due to being American and the HKMA complaint resulted in “oh well.” State of the world.

I have been thoroughly impressed with the CoinJoin plugin inside @BTCPay Server. I’m not an expert on it. It has so many configurations possible to run your own coordinator, and I’m a bit lost on knowing the full risks and costs of using other coordinators. I’ve started small, and hope to keep learning as I go.

Keybase had a great way of associating proofs of identity (dns, social media, wallets, etc) to a private key. I wish there was something like that for Nostr clients like Damus so I could start to easily filter spam accounts impersonating other users. Centralization is not always bad, as long as I can toggle the service provider and retain my data without censorship.

Monsoon activities in Pune, India