The Collectible Culture

culture

davidw

SN release: not custodians

meta

The update we've been forecasting (https://stacker.news/items/722833/r/k00b, https://stacker.news/items/814839/r/k00b, https://stacker.news/items/814839/r/k00b) has been released.

Most of the conceptual changes are in the posts linked above. There are a few details that are not discussed there:

1. there's a new page `/credits` where you can buy credits and withdrawal your reward sats
    - this is the page you go to when you click on your balance
    - it's also available by clicking on `credits` in the dropdown/sidepanel
2. `/wallets/settings` has been moved to `/wallets`
    - it's available by clicking on `wallets` in the dropdown/sidepanel
3. there are new settings for "dust limits"
    - basically you can say "when someone zaps me less than X sats, give me cowboy credits"
    - also "when I zap someone less than X sats, use cowboy credits"

#### When are sats and when are credits used for zaps?

If the sender and receiver both have wallets attached, the zap exceeds both of their dust limits, and we can predict a successful route with a reasonable fee, the zap prioritizes using the attached wallets and real sats.

If either the sender or receiver don't have wallets attached, the zap is below either of their dust limits, or the route to the receiver is too expensive, the zap prioritizes using credits. 

#### Reward sats vs cowboy credits

For everything, SN prioritizes using cowboy credits. The one exception is when both the sender AND receiver of a zap have wallets attached. 

Reward sats that haven't been withdrawn are only ever used when you spend more cowboy credits than you have. e.g. When you pay for 100 sat post, but only have 50 CCs, your reward sats will be used to pay for the post.

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Thank you to anyone who wasn't a total shithead about this change. And an extra thank you to any of the stackers who were supportive and went the extra mile to help us test and troubleshoot and document all of this. There are too many of you to list but you know who you are.

I know noncustodial lightning is hard, so hard that micropayments seem like they aren't worth the trouble, but this is how it gets better - by trying, and suffering, and complaining. I don't mind suffering to nudge us into the branches of reality that I want. If you don't want to suffer, that's okay. And if someone has promised you something better, I wish you the best.

Last but not least, I'm especially thankful for all the hard work and commitment of @ek over the last year. It truly wouldn't have been possible without him. He leaned in when the weather turned and it means a lot to me. 

Also, thanks to @rblb too for lots of clutch assistance over the last few months.

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When SN first started, people asked what we'd do if we couldn't be custodial. I said we'd go noncustodial. They laughed. I couldn't tell what they were laughing at.

(I'll write a retrospective soon I hope.)

--------------

View all commits here: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/commits/master/

-----------------

We have some merged PRs that haven't been paid yet. I'll get those done when I can.

Since starting the Open Source Contributor Award Rules (OSCARs), we've paid a total of 13.9m sats to 39 contributors for 163 contributions! View an up to date list of contribution awards here: https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news/blob/master/awards.csv

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Previous release: https://stacker.news/items/822636

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[We are hiring.](https://stacker.news/items/141924)



k00b

What's the story behind your nym?

AskSN

The short story is that I find the Aardvark to be a motivational animal for me incase you missed the full story. 

https://stacker.news/items/844843/r/Aardvark



Aardvark

The Power of Ownership

bitcoin

People act differently when they really own things.

In a sense this is obvious. How do you treat your own car versus the rental you got on vacation? How do you treat the park versus your own yard? But the mechanism isn't so obvious and the shift in mentality hard to describe. So in this essay, I'm going to articulate exactly that.

When you own something, you have more room for creativity. This is one of the reasons why Uber has been so successful. The drivers own their cars and so they tend to be cleaner, less cluttered and have more amenities. It's striking seeing the wide variety of different Ubers and how they operate. I've been in many where they'll offer me water, others that have charging cords for different types of phones, still others with a tablet for some form of entertainment. There's a creativity that owning something unleashes.

I'm sure taxi drivers have asked for similar things with their management. But because they don't have ownership of the vehicle, they're both less invested and less able to carry out whatever experiments they want to try with their vehicles. The point is that when you own something, you can try more stuff.

There's also more skin in the game. It's the revolutionaries that have nothing who want to "burn it all down." The people that have stuff have little interest in creating chaos. Thus, for any society, there's a natural conservatism (literally desire to conserve) by those that own things. Nobody likes having their stuff taken from them and rule of law is part of the security around your stuff. The people that have things become more respectful of other people's things. Such behavior leads to social stability. It's the people with nothing to lose that are most likely to commit crime.

Finally, there's the desire to make the property worth more. This results in improvements of various types and a general bettering of the things that they own. That means the rest of society gets better goods and services that the property provides, which is what builds up civilization.

Unfortunately, the current monetary system is one of theft, so money itself is being debased constantly. That means, in a sense, that we are not really owners of our own money. And because of the monetary debasement, there's a faster debasement of goods that don't store value well and a premium on things that do. Thus, fewer people own stuff. You get a class of have-nots.

The political solution has been to give these have nots something from the haves. But this presents problems, because the people that get stuff for free generally don't tend to value the stuff nearly as much. It matters *how* they got their stuff.

Bitcoin has a huge advantage here because you can truly own it. And it doesn't debase. And for all the owners of Bitcoin out there, there's incentive to take care of Bitcoin both locally (self custody) and globally (supporting development). But even more importantly, it takes away the store of value premium from a lot of other assets, making them more affordable. And more people owning stuff means a more stable and prosperous civilization.

jimmysong

Attending to What We Own

Ownership once entailed a sense of intimacy, familiarity, and responsibility towards belongings. People would invest time and effort in comprehending and maintaining their possessions to suit their needs, their individuality. Whether a pocket watch inherited from their POW father or a used car, _our things were more than just things_; they represented us and they were evidence of our ability.

Unfortunately, with the rise of mass production and planned obsolescence, the essence of ownership has undergone a profound shift. Many of the products we interact with today are disposable. They are built to be garbage not salvaged. Smartphones, furniture, clothing--durability is not the standard. I'm sure that says something about us and our culture. 

We have detached ourselves from our stuff. There would be a time when people would read the entire manual, not letting a detail slip by their understanding. Their mind ticked along with how their watch was ticking, and if it broke, they had at least some idea of how to get it ticking again. A throwaway culture makes that watch unworthy of our attention; it's absurdly complex and is damned to the trash for breaking down. 

Aside from the pile of fixable things in landfills, my concern is for our attention. That wall that we hit before we give up--I fear we have built it higher and higher. The cost of rapid human innovation has been our ability to focus on and fix our things. Our attention, the way we tend to things, cannot help but be superficial. A deep understanding of most of our things takes great study, specialization, and in many cases expensive and unique equipment. 

I believe we are aware of these limits--or rather the heightened cost of investment--and justifiably, we ready ourselves to find a suitable replacement (and sometimes outsource the fixing) of soon-to-be broken stuff. We make ourselves ready by lowering our guard to an unending stream of advertisements and huckster product reviews.  That is the passive consumption of information by people who want our money instead of the active, deep engagement of information that allows us to keep our money. 

Consider:
- What important thing do you possess but utterly do not understand? 
- When was a time you deeply engaged in learning about something you own, and was experience/outcome worth the time and effort?

ablunderfilledlife

Stackers' Pets (continued)

Animal_World

"I'm not spoiled. You're spoiled to have me in your life."


![IMG_5579.jpg](https://m.stacker.news/13051)

Facts!

grayruby

Release v0.4.17 - NWC Budgeting · MutinyWallet/mutiny-node

teoraroa

@nym's bio

Remove all NIP authors by fiatjaf

nostr

Rsync25

[For Sale] My record collection, maybe???

AGORA

I'm considering letting go of my records. I don't want to deal with eBay or give them away at a music shop. But if anyone is interested here I will post some pics. Most of what I have is new in plastic or like new. Some are older in good shape.  Some bands I have records for are:

Nine Inch Nails
Tool
A Perfect Circle
Puscifer
Oliver Tree
Eminem
Pink Floyd
Gorillaz
TV on the Radio
John Vanderslice
Awolnation
Billie Eilish
Twenty One Pilots
Artic Monkeys
Daft Punk

Thanks for looking

DesertDave

benthecarman

All About Coinjoins with Ben Carman · Issue #19 · PlebLab/PlebLab_Workshops

PlebLab

GitHub - fiatjaf/njump

AR0w

Golden Flashback: How to Change "Ownership" Without Taking Custody (JEH 2019)

econ



Had occasion to look into this great article today: "[The Gold Pool (1961–1968) and the Fall of the Bretton Woods System: Lessons for Central Bank Cooperation](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/gold-pool-19611968-and-the-fall-of-the-bretton-woods-system-lessons-for-central-bank-cooperation/5D875965F46BF6AE6F63B4A6AE409667)" (2019, _Journal of Economic History_). 

Dealing with the Gold Pool (which I've touched upon in MONEY CLASSes -- https://stacker.news/items/764988/r/denlillaapan), there's a segment in the article describing how gold was traded between nation's central banks. 

![](https://m.stacker.news/68303)

Pretty wild to think that _the base settlement media of the entire monetary system_ shifted ownership by merely re-assigning the label of the gold bars in the Bank of England's vaults. Ownership without custody is some special sort of madness, really. 

People sometimes ridicule the [rai stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones) from the [island of Yap](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money) and how this peculiar "money" changed hands by social convention, the monetary stones rarely even moving location. 

...and then the base layer of the Western world's entire monetary system, as late as the 1960s, operated in precisely that way. Cray-cray. 
_Wiiiiild_, too, that the cool term for this was "loco"... because that sort of describes the entire patchwork-fake-gold standard. 

Could you imagine running an entire bitcoin standard on, like, the FTX ledger(?!) with the bitcoin never actually moving but some Sam Bankman-Fried character re-assigning the nominal ownership every time some banking institutions settle up??

Peace, 
/J






denlillaapan

Cashu library in Rust by Clark Moody

nout

Cashumints.space - Cashu Mint directory

lightning

Michilis

Creed Launches Ordinal Collection FollowIng Interest From Bitcoiners

thebitcoinbugle

James O'Beirne on OP_VAULT

@bitcoinnym's bio

bitcoinnym

Global Censorship Hub Reached Agreement with State to Conceal Government Grants

conspiracy

> NED entered an unusual agreement with their Department of State Grants Officer to label the entirety of their $315 million congressional appropriation for 2024 “sensitive,” allowing them to hide all U.S. taxpayer-funded NED grantee information and activities from the public. 

> It expect to never be subject to ordinary transparency requirements again, with taxpayers almost completely in the dark about how its $300-million budget – which has been used in the past to advance a global regime of online censorship with blowback against Americans – is spent

If you've listened to much of Mike Benz, the whole point of NED and groups like it is do the work of the CIA but without being subject to the same rules and oversight - so this agreement isn't surprising. Nonetheless, it's cool to see all the wires going into the black box.

Has anyone shared their nyms with trusted no-coiner friends in a playful way?

It would be interesting experiment to share our nyms with __trusted__ friends and family members and have them set up an account and __not__ tell us their nym - has anyone tried this?

Doing this could be fun. It might appeal to them as a challenge and interesting way for them to converse with us in a fun way - and playfully watch us as we converse with the community.

We might, of course, wish to create an alt if we've got reservations and offer them this nym instead.



So probably best to choose friends who are playful, smart and trustworthy.

On the subject of trust, best to explain to them the importance of not accidentally revealing our true identities.

This might be a _terrible_ idea - or a brilliant one - I'm guessing the former - but you never know.

It's good to be playful sometimes.

Bitman

Stackers' Pets

Personally, I would like to see more stackers post pics of their pets in this territory.

Here is my pooch trying to follow a squirrel up a tree a couple months back. 



![IMG_5367.jpg](https://m.stacker.news/9142)