They're selling off their gold reserves because the invasion is going quite badly for Russia and they need the money. The "bingo card" of Russian oil refineries that have been hit by Ukraine is pretty brutal:

Ukraine is also hitting their oil and gas export infrastructure, e.g. the temporary shutdown of the port of Novorossiysk, 2% of the world's oil supply. Yes, Russia also has been able to do partial repairs of damaged infrastructure. But these things all add up.

Russian businesses aren't doing well either: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/11/18/russian-companies-face-record-debt-burden-as-high-rates-squeeze-profits-think-tank-a91165

When ~50% of your tax dollars go to an invasion that has been stalled for years, bad stuff happens.

So?

Epstein funded lots of stuff to try to show off to people around him. Bitcoin Core didn't know where the money ultimately came from. Which is true of any project accepting anonymous and pseudoanonymous donations. (Of course, he also had fully served his prison time at that point.)

I have no idea where much of the funding for OpenTimestamps comes from. Or Libre Relay.

The supermajority of donations are anonymous. That's ok.

It's very bizarre for a supposedly pro-privacy media outfit to make a big deal about this... Smells like clickbait.

Note: these on-chain BIP-Knotz futures are not binary futures! They actually have three possible outcomes.

In the third option, a hash power minority mines enough blocks that Knots splits off into a separate currency. In that circumstance, both sides "win": the Knots side wins more Knots coins, and the Bitcoin side wins more Bitcoin.

Of course, as measured in Big Mac purchasing power, the Bitcoin side is almost certainly going to be the winner... But this (quite likely!) outcome does change the pricing for these futures a bit, in theory.

Trusted, off-chain, futures could take this situation into account too...

Nope. You clearly don't understand how Ark works.

As I said, in the current implementation you can get settled funds easily by doing any on-chain transaction. Either sending or receiving on chain funds.

Once more Ark rounds are common, you'll also be able to get settled funds by waiting until someone else needs to do an on-chain transaction and piggybacking on theirs. This option is much more efficient in terms of on-chain transactions, at the cost of tying up liquidity (in many, but not all, circumstances). For many use cases waiting N blocks for fully confirmed funds is perfectly fine.

Sorry, but Ark just isn't clearly bullshit like Drivechains is. It's worth investigating. It may not fully pan out, and probably will only ever be useful for a subset of applications. But hate at this stage simply isn't warranted.

Not necessarily. I could have had gotten settled funds in other ways. At the moment due to low usage doing an on-chain payment (either sending or receiving) is the easiest way. But that's not a requirement for Ark. And even now the trade-offs for liquidity are different than lightning, which means it may be useful.

Ark has HTLCs. As the person paying, that swap was not trusted for me. The service doing the swap is trusting the ASP to not collude with me to double spend until they fully confirm the coins. But that's not a deal breaker.

I did a 10k downzap on this post with Ark.

At this point they do not deserve to be lumped in with Drivechains. It's an experiment that's doing a reasonable job exploring tech. The hate can wait.

That's batshit crazy to feel conflicted about that. California's laws on age of consent are insane.

Minors having sex with others close in age to them is totally normal; criminalizing that is batshit crazy and the police officers and judges participating in the prosecution of that are themselves child abusers. The only ethical thing they can do is refuse to enforce the law, or quit.

It's not good at all that archive.is doesn't provide any way for the rest of us to mirror it.

Also, it would be very good if it did OpenTimestamps. Particularly in combination with a signature signing each archive.

I agree.

We can better account for the costs of certain types of transactions, e.g. use of the UTXO set. But we fundamentally can't stop people from publishing data with Bitcoin. Indeed, the entire reason why Bitcoin works at all is because PoW proves that transactions were widely published, ensuring that double-spends (if they existed) would be seen and rejected.

That's exactly what my OFAC point was getting at. The end-point of what the pro-filter crowd wants is dynamically adjusted blacklists. Which is exactly what the pro-OFAC crowd also wants.

They're the same thing.

Nah, actually that was the result of a lot of prep.

The thing to remember here is I was scheduled to go second. Doing a big pre-prepared formal statement in that circumstance is something I really dislike in a debate like this: my role is to respond to Jimmy. Hence why I tried to get him to nail down what he actually meant by "spam", so I could respond appropriately. Which is a strategy that has worked well in other cases for me. But in this case I really threw off the moderator.

The way I (and many like me) prep for this kind of debate is to go over the likely arguments from the other side and 1) come up with responses, 2) make sure you have the facts memorized. Jimmy repeatedly made basic technical mistakes; he either clearly did not do #2 properly.

Fundamentally an error I think a lot of people are making here is treating this like a highschool debate team. I'm not trying to win points in a scored debate where rhetoric matters more than facts. I'm trying to actually sway an audience. It looked like slightly more people agreed with me on the end than before, so on that basis I'm happy.

So basically we're shooting the horse... 🤔

This is definitely out of date. There's no way migrants are getting from Moscow to Kyiv right now...

My comment on Twitter:

Not good.

Anyway, the only ethical option for Signal if this passes is to refuse to comply. Signal shouldn't even block the EU: let the EU block them.

It should be the only legal option too: implementing Chat Control is a crime against humanity. The US should explicitly criminalize compliance.

One crazy thing about Chat Control is that Signal is heavily used in Europe for military communications. They're proposing to backdoor the exact same system that they rely on for national security.

The EU bureaucrats pushing this are just psychopaths who want more power.

This is why I use Qubes on all my laptops and desktops. Qubes basically let's you do everything in separated VMs. So I do all my web browsing in disposable VMs, completely separate from the VMs I use to write and maintain code.

They don't actually explain how payment would happen; clearly lightning would be a good solution.

This isn't an insane move. It's a calculated, rational, plan to keep on escalating to split NATO apart. If successful, Russia will demonstrate that Russia can attack NATO countries without actually triggering a real response, paving the way to actual ground invasions.

Russia wants Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, etc. Unless we respond with force to attacks like this, Russia will eventually win.

Secondly, all these drone attacks are collecting intelligence. These drones are not one-way deals. They all have satellite and/or cellphone communications (e.g. with SIM cards) back to Russia, allowing Russia to collect intelligence with each flight.

It's disappointing that Signal is not going to allow you to use your own backup server. Better than nothing. But I'd rather use my own.

Better to wait until this is actually announced officially you know. The tag is a last step. But mistakes can happen and it's nice to give devs one last chance to check things over. It also gives time for deterministic builds to be done.