I know this is an old thread at this point, but I wanted to throw out that the Proton suite does ping Google's apis for some unexplained reason despite opting out of any crash reports and telemetry.

I personally decided to use Tuta and Thunderbird (for throwaway email accounts) to avoid google telemetry on my phone.

Ultimately, if you think of bitcoin as money, which is what I do then it isn't exactly selling. It is just spending your money. So you can spend the money on whatever a human may need. Like a house or a banana or a car or a vacation.

But ultimately money is just a man-made abstraction that we use to trade for things with actual value (food, shelter, etc...) during our short time on this planet.

Hmm... I'm not sure what point you'd like to zoom out to. But from a purely objective mathematical perspective, if we zoom out to the origin date of eth, buying eth at that point would have been a better investment than buying bitcoin.

But that argument is of course silly, kind of like bitcoiners who dunk on goldbugs saying bitcoin is the best performing asset over the last 15 years.

Yeah, I've never owned eth myself either. The only reason I bring it up is because of the number of bitcoin 'influencers' celebrating the death of eth (price) over the last month or so. It is interesting that we all forget these cycles tend to occur and unfortunately the shitcoinery does suck up some amount of liquidity from bitcoin and burns a lot of new ppl who are told to "invest in a basket of crypto" vs. staying humble and stacking sats.

"Promises made, promises kept"?

People have been so delusional in claiming we have our first bitcoin president. The man is a literal multi-billionaire and he has purchased exactly 0 sats over his lifetime.

@remindme in 80 days

In the words of the late great George Carlin, "There's no such thing as rights... They're privileges"

Jesus, $42B over 3 years. That is massive for one company. I think this will be hard to ignore for the fortune 500.

Depending on when they deploy capital, this could be a way to stave off the 80%+ bear markets we typically experience

100% agree with you @DarthCoin

I've followed Fred (unfortunately) since earlier this year when he was telling people he would sell over 50% of his bitcoin in order to buy ETF products instead because of how much he trusted it.

It is a disservice to the bitcoin mission to have people like this advocating for owning pieces of paper IOUs from the corrupt fiat system that bitcoin was made to save us from.

I also watched his video (linked by OP). He makes no argument for there not being paper bitcoin other than, trust me bro. That is it. His entire video is that people like blackrock are too big and too reputable to play games and since they are regulated, of course they will do what they are supposed to.

Search online for how many times blackrock and other wall st banks have been fined by regulators for not doing what they were supposed to do. Now multiply that by 100 because 99/100 times they don't get caught criming.

I have no proof that there is paper bitcoin. But to state there is no paper bitcoin without something like proof of reserves at a minimum (which also doesn't necessarily prove no paper as it doesn't account for liabilities) is simply bullshit.

I believe a given religion, just like a political party or government or other organization, is just a collection of people with some shared beliefs. People act in ways that are good at times and in ways that are bad, and I believe there are some people who are fundamentally more 'good' (altruistic in nature) vs. others who are more 'bad'.

Organizations of large groups of people tend to attract people attracted to power to seek leadership positions within them. I believe there was a behavioral study on the CEOs of major companies and the number who were categorized as sociopaths was quite alarming. I don't doubt the same is true for political leaders or religious leaders. When you seek and attain life changing amounts of power where you quite literally are "above the law" the normal rules of right & wrong no longer apply to you and perhaps your true human animalistic nature is revealed.

To get to your actual question, sure religion has done some good things. I think when my local church feeds some homeless people, that is unequivocally good. However, on balance, I think "religion is the opiate of the masses" is a fair statement. It is a way to give hope to the otherwise hopeless and prevent them from demanding some form of fairness/justice/etc... in this life because there is a promise of something better after death if you follow some set of rules in this one.

This is a form of mass manipulation to prevent the non-wealthy from realizing their power in this lifetime and demanding/taking a better life now. There is no population of monkeys/lions/other animal, where one monkey has 250 billion bananas while 50% of the monkeys around him don't have enough bananas that they go to sleep hungry. It simply wouldn't be possible in natural animal rules world.

Religion, additionally, is responsible for brainwashing the masses to commit horrendous atrocities. Unfortunately, humans are quite susceptible to herd behavior as seen more recently by political diviciveness. When you are committed to your 'team' based on a 'belief', you can do no wrong and you see your 'opponent' as sub-human. You can then commit the most egregious crimes against them and justify it to yourself. Divide and conquer is a tactic well understood by the elites.

It has been said that more murder has been committed in the name of religion than any other cause. I don't know if that is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Looking at the christian crusades, the muslims marauding through India, christians mass killing native americans and the native peoples of modern day mexico/south america, etc...

On balance, I think religion is more bad than good. I think that because it is a version of the Matrix. You can believe it to make yourself feel better, to justify why some things are the way they are. But the reality is, you are an animal just like a monkey or a lion or an ant, and you are living in a man eat man survival of the fittest world. There are some of us animals who realized that in order to hoard riches that even kings of old could not dream of, they need to continue to brainwash the masses into submission with fairytales.

Take the pill, understand the harsh but still amazingly beauty of this world and short life we are so lucky to experience. Life is better without the opiate of religion numbing you from reality.

I appreciate the kind words and wholeheartedly agree with you that the crypto goes to zero eventually. It is unfortunate that it confuses people who are new coming to the space as they get bogged down with the thousands of other BS projects. Its so sad when someone new to the space gets burned putting thousands of dollars into a scam coin (whether its shibu inu or Trump's jpg nft or Trump's latest liberty financial scam) and they then tell their friends "I got burned investing in bitcoin" because they conflate all of it.

I'm hopeful we get there eventually but looking at how much profit there is to be made selling unregistered insider premined securities, and how much money those scammers give to politicians, I think its going to take longer than my limited human lifespan may like!

I think JD is also a 'crypto' type guy, not a bitcoiner. Now RFK on the other hand is a hardcore bitcoiner who really seems to get it. I think Trump is going to keep him at arms length though given how big industry does not like RFK (because he fights for less pesticide usage, fights the pharmaceutical industry, etc...). Trump mentioned on Rogan that he needs to keep RFK in his lane...

Not only that, he launched his own exchange that will make him the most amount of money if shit coin casinos (like coinbase) have lots of volume. And it isn't just him, Elon is literally trying to name a new government agency DOGE (department of government efficiency) so he can continue to pump his (and his kid's) shitcoin of choice.

Yeah, and I don't blame them.

Were I new to this concept of digital currency and if I didn't have the time to study all the nuances, if someone told me there was a market weighted or equal weighted basket of the top 10 or 20 that would feel safer to me than just picking one.

People would naturally make the assumption that it is similar to buying the s&p 500 instead of individual stock picking. Unfortunately they'd be dead wrong, but the passive flows would certainly keep a lot of the shitcoins boosted in price for a very long time. Similar to how there are so many zombie companies in the s&p

That is true. You could always use a bitrefill gift card you bought with lightning if you really wanted to!

Haha congrats my friend!

I guess ultimately you still must pay for things like your cell phone service or vpn (if you use one) etc... My point is that using fiat directly for that service or spending btc and replacing it with the fiat you would have used is basically the same thing (in terms of your btc balance).

But it is another step and some extra work that may not be worthwhile to you, so completely understand!

Agreed, silent.link can get pretty pricey depending on where you're visiting.

I prefer using https://www.airalo.com especially if I'm going somewhere for a week or more. You can purchase without providing them any kyc info and the pricing has been really reasonable the handful of times I've used it!