My comment on earning my rent in 3 days 30 yrs ago wasn't based on somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Many of you may be familiar with the cost of housing these days in the Austin area. For those not around in the 90s, let me give you a glimpse of what life was like there and then, that no doubt contributed to "Keeping Austin Weird", as we had more time, attention, and resources to devote towards being creative.

The rent for a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with a 1/2 backyard that went down to the Colorado river, located 2 miles from the Capital Building was only $695. My girlfriend bought the place my friends and I had been renting for only $80k. I didn't want anyone else to rent the 2/1 house next door I rented it for only $500/month so we could have adjoining patios in the back all to ourselves. I was earning $25/hour (in cash with no taxes taken out) working for myself as an independent green building contractor working on cob/super adobe houses, ferro-cement cisterns/ponds, and biodynamic tea fertilized wicking beds. So my rent for my half of the house at that time literally took only 10 hrs of work each month!

How different can you imagine your current life would be IF you could cover your housing costs in less than 1 1/2 days of labor, doing fulfilling work for good people while owning my own schedule and being challenged mentally, creatively, and physically..?

This IS the lifestyle that the money printing over the last 30 yrs has stolen from ALL of us. What I did NOT have back then, was hope for escaping the rigged game I knew I had been born into, OR a means of saving my surplus savings, energy, and time with protection against it all being stolen by the Government/Bankster Cartels. For those of you in your 20s and 30s today, it seems foolish to overpay for your homes that have been inflated in fiat prices due to the monetization of real estate. What you DO have today is hope, hard money, and an intellectual advantage over your peers who do not yet understand that the fiat Emperors Are Naked, with the fiat cloaks exposed as the illusion of wealth they are by Bitcoin!

So work hard, live simply, stay humble, and stack sats my friends. Because 20 years from now you will be FAR better off than your Boomer parents and grandparents with their overpriced dog houses are now. Their over-sized and under-built houses, fixed fiat incomes, and permissioned retirement accounts provide an illusion of wealth, while your self-custodied UTXOs provide the real thing. They are "house slaves" living in gilded cages falsely believing they are smart and free, while you are still early in the untelevised revolution of the entire monetary systems able to front run the money masters leaving the fiat plantations behind to build your Bitcoin Citadels where proof of work reigns.

Part of the problem with V4V is that almost everyone is having so much value stolen from them on a daily basis through money printing that they exist in a perpetual state of scarcity. Those who've spent their entire lives in a fiat world know that their work, their savings, and their time are perpetually losing purchasing power when denominated in something that others get to create for free. This scarcity prevents the possibility of gratefully compensating others for the value they have brought us, because we are not capturing and collecting value ourselves.

IF/WHEN people have multiple sat-streams established, that they control and own, then circulating that wealth will come more naturally. Only when people feel like they have 'enough' already will they comfortably spend any more than is necessary. Those used to fixed incomes, that inevitably lose purchasing power over time, will choose cheap, convenient, low quality every time they have a choice. Not ever having 'enough' creates a justification for not spending anything anytime it's not required.

A perpetual state of abundance, where I create surplus value with everything I do, where I gratefully reward those who upgrade my knowledge, skills, and tool sets so they can provide me even more value tomorrow; THIS will take generations to become the common paradigm for most of humanity.

Knowing the value I deliver to the marketplace, because I'm not a useless Bankster, government Administrator, or a shill for corporations feeding my Fans up to these parasites like chum fed to sharks, I don't promote others' goods and services, only my own. Free content, with or without the Value stack, is best kept limited in depth and breadth when made available to the general public, with the most valuable, wide-ranging, depth of value provided to our private community membership association.

Public offerings with a fixed prices for goods/services put us within the jurisdiction of the public entities tasked with protecting the general public, making voluntary, flexible, donations an effective defense against regulatory attack. Private offerings remove us, and our communities, from the purview of the Nanny State, and allow us to more safely engage in commerce with our true peers using private, not government 'flag', money like sats.

The Way of Bitcoin Banking is to bypass the government compliance concerns by using their own weapons against them. Those who write the rules value their own financial privacy more than anyone and will fight tooth and nail to protect their own wealth. By using private contract business and asset protection Trusts, along with Private Membership Associations, even the 5% of world population that are subject to US jurisdiction can capture and retain financial privacy for themselves.

Structuring our Private Bitcoin Membership Associations as NodeRunners, LSPs, Relay Operators, AND eCash Mints will bypass these regulatory attacks being made by the Naked Emperors. By never touching their corrupted monetary systems, those who've left the plantation need not worry about the rules the Slave Owners force upon their chattel. The rule is "He who creates it, controls it." Using government IOUs at all gives them subject matter jurisdiction, so we simply apply Bucky Fuller's wisdom and build a better system entirely outside of the existing monetary system, and let the outdated systems atrophy and die on their own.

Governments cannot stop people from growing and using cannabis, or even prevent us from 3d printing our own firearms, they will be no more effective at controlling NodeRunners. The more they try, the stronger our defenses will become and the more energy they waste in an ineffective game of Whack-a-mole.

I've been dry fasting for many years now, going over 100 hrs dry more times than I can count now. It helps get the body "fat adapted" to go on a "fasting mimicking diet" for a few days on either side of going dry. Myself, I'm going thru that process at the moment, on day 3 of nothing but liquid fats for fuel, i.e. bulletproof coffee in the mornings, bone broth in the afternoons, and a non-caffeinated Dandy-Blend hot drink with some coconut oil added in the evenings.

Tonight at midnight, after properly hydrating and mineralizing with plenty of water, baking soda, and some fresh squeezed lemon juice, I'll stop all fluid intake at midnight. Consuming nothing but air over the next few days at least, it gets easier when I wake up the 2nd day, about 32 hrs dry, as I generally feel great and have no desire to consume anything at all. After 3-5 days, depending on my activity level and local temps, I'll start back on the liquid fats diet for a few more days.

Going "dry" lowers all inflamation throughout the body, resets and boosts the immune system, and eliminates many of the fats that may have been storing toxins. Breaking down bodyfat for water provides the highest quality "living water" we can find anywhere and regularly using the ketone energy pathway helps make me "metabolically flexible". My relationship with food/hunger and water/thirst have changed drastically, as my Will now rules over my Body, rather than the other way around as for most of the human population. The impacts on my personal discipline, immune system, and overall health have made this a lifetime practice that needs no outside sources to validate the benefits of to my health.

This does tend to have an impact socially, though, as so much of socializing revolves around food and drink and we tend to not notice until we stop altogether.

Good luck. Fear not, trust your ability to listen to your body, we are not nearly as fragile as we're made out to be. Unless you're under 10% bodyfat, there's little risk of dying after 3 days with no water as we're taught. Muscle cramps and potentially kidney stones are the main risks and proper preparation and discipline manage those easily.

When it comes to privacy, using the herd as camouflaged obscurity depends on the size of the "anonymity set", the communication channels, and access points used. Private money, whether LN, XMR, and eCash can be made ineffective IF not used with disciplined OpSec. Using a KYC'd phone, a KYC'd internet provider, and communicating over unencrypted channels will eliminate the anonymity of your transactions. The 1st thing to understand is that Anonymity means not knowing who you are and Privacy means knowing what you are doing, where you are, and who you are interacting with. Each of these variables must be managed for proper OpSec, especially when using DNMs.

Also, liquidity and provenance matter. As in, how big of a marketplace exists for moving into and out of these currencies. Almost ALL digital currency liquidity exists between fiat & BTC, with very few options for moving fiat into and out of XMR in cash. These on/off ramps cannot handle the volume of flow that big money requires and will take time to be built for both LN and eCash. But, public entities that control by far the vast majority of the world's wealth cannot and will never use private-by-default currencies. We must in a "sly roundabout way" bring privacy for ourselves, our families, and our businesses in through the back door. This is what LN and eCash are enabling, for those willing and able to put forth the effort to learn and to act with discipline.

Once eCash mints begin popping up with every employer/employee relationship, as the already have semi-trusted ongoing financial relationships, THEN "mult-nut" payments and eCash herd obscurity and liquidity will arrive. The size of both the herd and those joining/leaving it must grow over time before they'll become effective forms of financial camouflage.

Ecash is a proven protocol, but integrations with LN, Nostr, and businesses will take time to spread enough to grow both the on-off ramps and the anonymity set.