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That line really grinds my gears too because it implies that Americans are the bitcoin community and that we are the bitcoin community. I reject the premise of the statement because bitcoin is being used everywhere as intended. He himself likely doesn't use bitcoin for any exchange of goods or service so it's easy for him to just spout.
I think a cool tool to have would be a metal stencil sheet with all 2048 BIP39 words that way you can quickly and neatly engrave seeds into metal sheets
at the BJJ Gym in Austin 10th Planet - they love bitcoin so they accept it
ok so i'm moving to austin, sweet
As teenagers with too much freedom and too much time and not yet shackled by screen-society we found ourselves once again in the back of our local BestBuy. The loading dock area always proved to be a wonderful source of entertainment for many reasons. We could jump off the dock on our skateboards, people would unfortunately (fortunate for us) dump all sorts of "trash" that would serve as toys for us, or after heavy rains the loading dock would flood and we would make boats out of dumpsters and try to tip each other over with two by fours. Flood wars, we called it.
One day something magical appeared behind that BestBuy, a large couch. What an exciting day! We lounged about and smoked pot and skated and spent a good few hours back there with our new toy. We all had lighters and were all a bit of degenerate pyros and someone discovered that when you light any spot on this particularly fuzzy couch it would create a small ring of fire that expanded outwards indefinitely until you put it out yourself. Well there were four of us and were each a bit lost in making these rings of fire all over the couch we were sitting on until a realization dawned on us all simultaneously.
A lot of this couch was on fire, we should probably do a bit of damage control. But it was too late. We went from giggling fun to frantic effort in a blink, and we were trying every method possible our young panicked minds could muster. I remember grabbing a two by four to try and beat some flames out but I hit something hard inside the couch and sent painful vibrations through my arms and all the way to my shoulders. I abandoned that idea quickly. We tried everything before we made our final mistake--a collective decision to roll the couch over in attempt to smother the flames. Nope. The flames rose and the entire couch was now completely covered in fire and the surrounding area was getting hot. The next collective decision was plan B: Run.
We knew our city well and we would use the storm drain system for quick travel under instead of over the streets, evading police or angry civilians, or just hanging out--so that's where we went. It was a 100 yard sprint to the nearest fence that when hopped would get you in the storm drain. The first two to arrive at the fence had the best place for jumping where the pole-supports would offer great hand and feet placements and I was third to arrive seconds later. But I didn't want to wait my turn in my frantic state of mind. I decided to jump the fence in the less-ideal spot where I had to put my hands right on top of the twisted metal ties at the top and on my right hand I still have the scar, 25 years later, where on tie punctured the meaty part of my palm. We escaped as I bled into the sewers (we called it but it's a stormdrain) to safety and watched from our neighborhood as flames rose higher than the building and black smoke filled the surrounding air. Fire truck sirens got louder and louder as responders came to clean up our idiot-mess.
This story sums up quite nicely what a lot of my teenage years were like. We were punks with too much time and too much freedom. But I must say that I cherish those years deeply. We as a group were very close from ages 5 to 20 before we slowly started separating geographically. As everyone approaches 40 we still get together for big events and keep up with each other and we spend hours and hours reminiscing about stories just like this. Although some of the things we did were a bit horrendous, in some weird way they are what made us the successful humans we are today. Some of us went to prison, some to rehab, but every one of us is now a well functionating adult and we have each others backs, forever.
Not yet! If/when it does happen to me I'll be pissed and it will strengthen me as a bitcoiner because i'll be further motivated to ensure it doesn't happen again.
It gets easier. The key is to not get complacent and keep practicing. Now is the time to play with bitcoin. create, recover, and use many different self custodial wallets. I have never used bitstamp, but it should be normal even for exchanges to send you a TX ID so that you can watch your transfer in a mempool visualizer during that scary interim time. Here's an example:
dbf41dcffc64152d896f4fe90571b108a905ebfce7e3311a848b3357bc74aca8
This one is cool and simple. If you paste this into your favorite block explorer such as mempool.space we can see that the sender sent .016 BTC somewhere from a single UTXO of .066 BTC and the change was sent back to him. This TX is still uncofirmed but should be confirmed too.
Now that you have some sats offline i suggest you simply play as much as possible. Spend fees getting practice to the point where you won't be sweating when you withdraw from an exchange or move your stash or recover your stash. Don't practice with your new stash of course, you don't need much bitcoin to practice the important things.
Welcome and good luck
Though I do love the chessbrahs, epecially of old, my name is as you guessed my repertoire and no influenced by the brahs. I basically only play the English as white attempting mostly to get some sort of Botvinnik and I have for a long time exclusively play the French against 1.e4 Love the French :)
Beautifully written and a well painted grim picture. I encourage you to read the article, but I'll try to sum up what Nabourema wrote here.
She starts by explaining a story many of us have heard before. Africa has many countries, and many currencies. There's a big issue in cross boarder payments, forceful currency conversions, predatory government loans, chaotic exchange rates that common people have no control over, and clear efforts to keep it that way. So, it's no surprise that when she first learned bitcoins fundamentals are rooted in clarity and fairness, she found hope. Hope that Africa can use, finally, a stable and fair monetary system as a foundation for genuine growth. She says at the end "The objective was never to build organizations that survive on Bitcoin. The objective was, and remains, to build an Africa that can thrive because of it."
You see, there's a big, nasty issue that she's bringing awareness to: Bitcoins message of sovereignty or freedom is being exploited by what she describes as an "NGO-style savior complex". She describes quite sadly that on the surface it may look like bitcoin is flourishing there in the continent as "Hundreds of Bitcoin initiatives now claim to exist across Africa. New projects surface almost weekly, new communities appear on social media every month, and new organizations announce, with great confidence, ambitious missions to transform the continent." But don't let that fool you. In her article she highlights these projects as initiatives as ungenuine. They are using the African people as proof of their "help" to receive clout and more importantly, funding from elsewhere. She writes: "the community itself remains largely unchanged, while the one person whose life consistently improves is the founder who built the project in its name."
You can tell she's worried. She's worried about her home, her people, and the state of Bitcoin in Africa currently. With the seemingly endless projects sprouting up resources and funding are being diverted away "from the builders doing serious work" and subjects, yet again, the very people being dubbed helped to exploitation. She desperately wants the objective to shift back to Bitcoin being used for African growth instead of Africans being used for the financial growth of a few grifters.
My thoughts:
It seems to me the issue is the same as everywhere else in the space. We need real users and we need users encouraging others to use. I suspect that will forever be true. I am hopeful, however. Perhaps I'm foolishly optimistic, I've been told such, but I can't help but smile when I think of the resiliency slowly being hardened underneath the immense weight of bullshit that sits on top of genuine growth and adoption. The grifting NGO-style groups she mentions, treasury companies, financialization of bitcoin, in fighting, commercial-scale mining, shitcoin scams, the funneling KYC squeeze of government and large-scale exchanges. Under all that weight and pressure, the diamond at the center of it, real adoption, slowly grows. Resilience grows, users grow, Bitcoin grows.
https://btcmap.org/merchant/34660
https://btcmap.org/merchant/35190
go to these palces! No matter where you're from. Owner seems to be on the right path, but i'm the only person who's spent sats there so far. I don't want to lose them :(
This was such a cool read and by far my favorite piece from you, thank you for making it. I would love more incite from the hacker who tried to break bitcoin early on. I wonder at details of what he tried to do and how it didn't work. And I'd love more details on him thinking either a team or a genius defending the network. I want to know, too, where and how "attack removed" was posted.
Fascinating read!
Hey @billytheked, I can vouch for Tony! Awesome movie I would see it again. :)