42 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 8 May \ on: Global debt continues to rise econ
Let's not forget most of that global debt is denominated in dollars... that sucking sound you hear is hyper-dollarization, the first step in hyper-bitcoinization
They're right, for the wrong reasons ofc...
This is the dilemma the fiat ponzi finds itself in, printer faster and faster or enter an unstoppable deflationary collapse...
It's only new spending that can balance the dollars destroyed in a debt-based system.
The earmarked money not being spent right away is by design, that's the merger of the Treasury of the Fed, one creates the supply while the other distributes it. This is how huge sums get "spent" but are dripped slowly into the economy to contain a run on the currency and create the appearance of stability.
The fake pandemic was the opposite, they had to flood money to prevent the deflationary spiral, hastily via stimmies/PPP was the only option... and locking down the economy was necessary to slow that new monies velocity.
The fake pandemic happened and trillions in new printercoins in an election year, it's election time again and the fed/treasury is trapped🍿 Get your extended blackout supplies ready.
They're playing a shell game right now where the Fed and Treasury have basically merged to keep the music going, can't taper a ponzi though so I imagine the catalyst will be shortly after treasury burns down the April tax receipts
Election year, no coincidences!
The US Treasury is launching its first buyback program since 2002, scheduled to start on May 29, 2024. The program is designed to improve liquidity in the Treasury market and is expected to run through July 2024. During this period, the Treasury plans to hold weekly liquidity support buybacks of up to $2 billion per operation, with up to $500 million allocated for TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities). This initiative aims to ensure the Treasury market remains the deepest and most liquid in the world, addressing concerns about market functioning and resilience.
OA is low-key one of the most promising Means of Exchange projects in Bitcoin
It's incredibly profound how Lightning fits into bootstrapping a marketplace for personalized agents, the fiat AI companies are being dis-intermediated faster than they can ship
A request for proposal (RFP) is a project announcement posted publicly by an organization indicating that bids for contractors to complete the project are sought. The RFP defines the project, for the company that issues it as well as the companies that respond to it.
The organization in this context is the banks that own congress
The contractors are their operatives in the private sector
What is a news paper but a curation of written articles?
Their flaw however was in the obstacle of physical distribution, something quite costly, geo-bound, making it difficult for new entrants to compete. Thus, an industry prone to capture by those who use narratives as a weapon.
The internet has somewhat obviated this, but not completely. The distributors of the internet, companies operating servers and databases and UX designers, became the new curators. A hybrid of technical and social engineering dug moats of "network effect"
Email lists and RSS feeds have long offered independent distribution, but self-curation with these is a tedious after-thought in their design.
The unfiltered noise of Nostr may however be the pendulum swinging back by showing us the need for curation. A permissionless and cost-nominal standard for distribution breaks legacy network-effects, and in so doing illustrates our dependence on filters.
ECash isn't money, it's credit that's only useful with the server that created it. It's not tied or pegged to anything, it's completely trust based. The server can simply just break the connection with Lightning or whatever else they claim you're getting a share of.
It's basically an API token, but differs because it uses signatures instead of being mapped to a user account in a traditional database. The theory behind this being that with a sufficient anonset it could make interactions between a client and server a little more private by not having accounts. Unless the mint is a large bank or exchange though, this anonset is unrealistic, and large custodians present even worse problems for privacy because of flow capture on the settlement layer.
As is common, spooks and scammers have the twisted narratives of ECash's functionality to exploit users who don't have the capacity to question it. There's an active campaign with 10s of millions of dollars being invested into these mint architectures so that Bitcoin software might be future-compatible with dollarized government ECash. (read the ECash Act and understand it's an RFP signal)
The most insidious aspect is that even though ECash is useful at one mint, it's being astroturfed as a decentralized payments system by these spooks and scammers. The reason for that is because native Lightning makes Bitcoin a more serious threat to the established order.
Bitcoin is easily captured via institutions as a store of value, and so the "then they fight you" stage is against Bitcoin as a means of exchange. If Bitcoin leaked into the economy at large as a means of exchange it could no longer be captured as velocity would be too high.
This is why these scammers with their hands out to the tunes of 10s of millions of dollars are astroturfing ECash as a payment system, so the government/banks can simply stay in power by turning up their own e-mints.
The end-game is your Lightning wallet using a bank or government e-dollar mint.
I remember the climate change psyop in public school decades ago now where they once brought in a touring speaker to tell us that India and Pakistan would go to war over water...
And that we should be extra scared because both are nuclear armed countries...
My dad being a Navy veteran, I asked why they don't just use nuclear-powered desalination like are used on Navy vessels...
CLASS DISMISSED
I believe in that scenario, the current state is up to the task,
Digressing, I also think that's the case now and not a hypothetical. My thesis is Bitcoin is a white-hat psyop by NSA/military intelligence to save America from the Triffin dilemma and inevitable global reserve collapse. We're just watching this op, among many others, like a movie🍿
In any event, US adoption ends in it becoming a foreign reserve backing the dollar, the US Treasury and it's foreign peers basically becoming giant ECash mints (see ECash Act)
Why is this path inevitable? Because anything else requires destroying Bitcoin as we know it. No scaling proposal can accommodate the ridiculous hypotheticals of ~8BN people using it to buy coffee self-custodially and remain Bitcoin. At best, we're talking a peg, with a weaker form of consensus.
We already have pegs without destroying the base layer, so there's no rationale to add risk to the base layer because a peg is inherently a downgrade.
Reasonable scaling improvements (optimization within current design space) are marginal by comparison so they tend to not be as exciting. They are also unquantifiable until they are actually needed- and we have the real data necessary to quantify them.
Scalooors like Paul and the CTV clowns do a disservice by taking resources away from projects that want to get us to that very achievable milestone of 1BN users.
"At all costs" means introducing a new consensus that is not Bitcoin, basically a shitcoin "pegged" to Bitcoin that introduces unknown incentives into Bitcoin itself through a potentially deleterious fork.
The counter-evidence is the fact that fees are still only 10% of block subsidy, and they're not even in an up-trend despite FUD over things like jpegs.
There's also nearly 0 new demand for self-custody relative to adoption. This is evidence we've reached a self-custody maximum, not because it's expensive, but because Bitcoin isn't here to obviate credit.. it's a measuring stick against the Cantillon effect of central banks with added systemic optionality.
Anyone interested in self-custody has had ~15 years to decide that. Hell, even the fake maxi's on Nostr are mostly ECash simps these days. New adoption is going to off-chain governance, like ETF's and Corporate Treasuries.
Even 10s of millions in Liquid astroturf marketing can't find a meaningful userbase.
Reality is Bitcoin is NGU tech first and foremost, as much as Agorist-minded folks like myself would like to see more means of exchange.
Now, hopefully the observations supporting a self-custody maximum are misleading, and new tools (like those I'm working on for that matter) re-accelerate self-custody and make it viral as MoE... But even then Bitcoin could still onboard a billion to Lightning with existing batching tech. The knocks on Lightning today are largely downstream of the high-time-preference stupidity and wastefulness of mobile nodes. Just imagine how much more efficient Lightning will get when bozo's aren't buying unstable channels tied to one mobile device.
At the end of the day, the scale ceiling is nowhere in sight, so the conclusion we must draw is that it's a red herring being exploited by scammers with the help of of their virtue-signaling useful idiots.
PS is a one-man cult, many analogues to the CTV cult but at least CTV'rs generally admit they're grug brains shilling something too esoteric for them to understand themselves.
Scaling frauds like Paul somehow stay in the roadmap conversation anyway because there's some built-in virtue signaling element to saying we must scale at all costs, despite a preponderance of counter-evidence.
But clearly, these scalooors must love Bitcoin and poor people more than anyone.
Fact is that every scaling proposal requires baseless assumptions about demands and wild speculation on utility. It's sad how much attention this recycled garbage gets any time someone has to pay a slightly higher fee than they did a few weeks prior.
bug bounties or processes
I think this is more cultural than needing to be specifically outlined in OSS. The majority of eyes on decentralized/oss are the users of it.
Is this person equally concerned with the supply chain as well? libs, operating sytems, and so on?
a red team sponsored for the lightning network
Based on all the Lightning FUD that comes from grantees, competing initiatives to Lightning are that by default.
There's disincentives at work in a sponsored red team model... at least a bounty or successful attack is based on results
Implementations are also not the network, who's to say whom Lightning Labs or Blockstream hire for review in private?
more projects like lnsploit being sponsored
Maybe because no one uses this one in the first place?
concept of a red team was new to me
Probably because it's antiquated, was more of a closed-source commercial thing. Who needs it more? Microsoft or Debian?
real attackers are already incentivized
That and not just from he honeypot aspect, FUD as mentioned above is incentivized by competition... and its already a david .v goliath battle.
best preparation for a war is being attacked by your enemy
The only alternative is fighting the last war
We want well financed good guys attacking bitcoin, right? Is that a bad idea for some reason, or is it just not necessary?
Seems like the wrong question unless we assume resources are infinite? Assuming not, should it be a higher priority? Empirically there seems to be little to no justification for it.
Federated Lightning Addresses for Mutiny+ Users
Hoax. There's no such thing, the webserver serves any invoice it pleases... makes you wonder what else they misrepresent
You could run your own server, but that's pointless, just run a real node instead of some constantly offline mobile nonsense
Imagine being clued in enough to know about lightning and not know Tor is a useless honeypot probably run by Intel agencies
The same people that fall for traps like Tor fell for traps like Samourai... Enjoy your FISA warrants
If you really cared about obfuscating your IP address you wouldn't flag yourself by using something so stupid, there are countless better ways
Considered writing up something but I can't think of any pros...
Proponents will say it's more private, but that's a hoax since all the privacy features are already happening separately
It can obviate lnurl-pay web servers, but so does nostr via lightning.pub or AMP
I guess it's good if you're a Neobank/shitcoiner since it's really meant for ECash
I guess it's good if you're the state and want to bifurcate the network effect of lightning as a means of exchange (attack)
The retro-futurism is on-point...
Retro because it's basically a re-implementation of Tor
Futurism because it's destined for the same fate, slow and unreliable and overrun with shitcoiners