Here are some important links for you to follow:

https://www.bitcoinbuidlr.xyz/

Bitcoin Design Community

https://bitcoin.design/

2026 Initiatives

https://bitcoin.design/projects/

Beginner Lightning Wallets

https://phoenix.acinq.co/

https://www.walletofsatoshi.com/

Money Dev Kit

https://moneydevkit.com/

https://x.com/moneydevkit

Human Bitcoin Addresses

https://spiralbtc.substack.com/p/making-bitcoin-speak-human

Presidio Bitcoin Jam

https://open.spotify.com/show/0N8ZFqAkTwxNmjDXdIo7cT

https://www.youtube.com/@PresidioBitcoin

Perry Mehrling

Eugene Fama

Josh Hendrickson?

Patriots
Seahawks
80
1100

One bit of context - the old guys in the past actually had cash. These yahoos today are paper billionaires. It can disappear as fast as capitalization goes poof in the market.

Ludwig von Mises:

Or the Swedish economist who was essentially promoting Adam Smith's ideas at the same time, despite not knowing each other. But I've forgotten his name. @denlillaapan knows who I mean, I hope.

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises

Such a "self-custodial" wallet... literally throwing the dead cat into neighbor's yard

...and basically for nothing. Just being scared of a shit regulation that doesn't even have any impact on SN.
SN with this move pushed even more users into custodial solutions.

Alternate take.

We thought Europeans were enlightened. Unlike the US where racist laws require permission to enter... turns out the Swiss don't want to be flooded with "newcomers" either.

I am not a statist but I do reject the idea that moving to the ideal state of things in any order has equal consequences. If we lived in a free voluntary stateless society then yeah... the only borders that matter are property lines. But we don't live in that world. People flooding into a welfare state have consequences on the existing population. You don't have to be a xenophobic racist to think that. You can be, but one doesn't have to be.

I tire of these stupid debates.

Those that claim to be all about the will of the people seem to forget that when they don't like the "will of the people" as they define it.

Whales don’t buy bitcoin on the exchange, they buy OTC!

Lightning is the only L2, period. Everything else is a centralized affinity scam / compliance scam - run by a company that monetizes custodial services and Lightning swaps... and that centralization makes them a surveillance chokepoint.

Lightning is the most private option possible, given its large anonset, true decentralization, and relatively infrequent use of the chain... a chain which has immutable physics making Lightning emergent and everything else a pretender.

to operate a darkweb market at scale requires connectivity to the rest of the network

This would be a design flaw for the market, this AI slop post assumes a darkweb market itself needs to be the custodian (escrow).

That central point of failure will always fail, it's not a payment problem.

A market is a network of individuals. This means in a true "dark" market each user is running their own node (or has access to an array of completely unrelated custodians).

In this way, Lightning is already succeeding for private markets, there's just no centralized larp board associated with it. People stand up their own pages and sell shit, no one knows about payments between the buyer and the seller. It's done and working.

Since markets are decentralized, there is no single node to associate with such a market. Blinded paths mean no node need be associated with a given seller. There's nothing for exchange Lightning nodes to block, everyone is just a node with an optionally ephemeral key.

A market in the centralized sense as you describe, is just a place where you find other people to transact with. Escrow are just another service to buy or sell, thus must also be decentralized like any other market participation.

Again, it's not a payment payment privacy problem, it's privacy larping problem by people that still think the Silk Road was a good idea.

You can use Nostr or any other type of encrypted DM to do business, a buyer and a seller can agree on any 3rd party for escrow. Stand up a website or social page, offer products or services... don't have a reputation? Rent someone elses to act as escrow.

The solution you're looking for is Web of Trust and an advertising board, things Nostr is good at and getting better. Lightning already solved the payments side and is hooking into Nostr more every day.

People aren't using custodial lightning wallets to save on channel opening fees

Not so sure about this, custodial does have economies of scale and sunk costs.

The tinkering user may pay more in custodian fees over time, and a volume user definitely will, but the upfront cost is practically nothing. Users generally have a very high time preference and will gladly pay 10k sats over a year than 1k sats up front.

they don't want to have to open and close channels

Primarily because they see the cost

they don't want to think about liquidity

Phoenix is a good example of idiot-proof automation which is why its done well, but the biggest complaint users have is about costs.

they don't want to run a lightning node

This is likely the biggest factor, and Lightning is a cost center if you're offline. Custodians are always online. Phoenix/Zeus are so expensive because you can't earn money while you sleep, and a great example of why mobile nodes are a dead-end because they'll always be a cost-center not a tool for revenue.

So refine my earlier point, ABSOLUTE COST is not a barrier to adoption... but up-front or mental costs may be.

Channel factories don't solve that any better than batch opens, nor do they absolve the trust and centralization of custodial "graduated" on-boarding.

I'm curious how different the trust assumption is between a single channel with Phoenix LSP and something like Spark.

They're the same because they face the same underlying physics of the chain, the techno-babble Fake L2's use is an effort to distract people from this and why they are scammers.

They have to scam the user so that they be consistent when scamming the regulator, they're big companies that don't want to attract attention as a custodian, and they don't provide any real services they can monetize.

Phoenix bootstraps your liquidity with a trusted LSP credit (Lightning.Pub does this too). During this time it is completely trusted. It has to be this way because if you can't afford to hit the chain you can't afford the security of said chain. They do not feel the need to scam the regulator because what they're custodying is a service credit, not a financial service.

Once you can redeem that service credit for a proper LN channel, it becomes trustless because of the unilateral exit ability since Lighting is chain anchored.

Spark is similar, it's trusted until you exit to a real channel.

Anything above the chain has an online-ness requirement, that doesn't make it not trustless, because you still control whether your defending your claim or not. It's an additional security trade-off you're making to coordinate above the chain, not trust.

Any L2 system will have this trade-off, and there's also no such thing as off-line payments on L2's despite the claims of many a scammer or script kid. You need to be online to communicate with the chain to redeem and defend any claims you may have on layers above it.

I love this question and am kind of obsessed by it.

An interesting thing to consider is, in order to believe X, what else must you believe, in order to make X fit in with the larger belief ecology? The mind resists incompatibilities -- this is what dissonance is -- and it's difficult to integrate incompatible bits with the larger collection of what you already know. The bigger and more consequential the inconsistency, the more the dissonance manifests.

So when you encounter someone who believes something extraordinary (e.g., that women are inferior to and should be subservient to men) it's useful to inspect the larger bundle that that belief nestles into. Or maybe, more practically: to predict what else might be in there, to nurture and give rise to the thing you see demonstrated. Stuff fits together in complex ways, so you shouldn't be too confident, but you can usually make reasonable inferences.

It seems like you could make use of this strategically. What else would you need to believe, to believe you could be a lightning protocol developer? What things do you already believe that might resist integrating those beliefs into your existing edifice? What actions support those beliefs, pro and con?

Here is the full data series of all Saylor's bitcoin buy announcements in 2025 (and the first few in 2026). The dollar numbers are links to his announcements. I also added the average close on Binance for the 7 days before each announcement.

Toronto and Canada's housing market, especially condos, is getting nuked as we speak.

This is a long shot to begin with. adding a rinsing of the housing market this year, and you got a longer one.

"Inclusive" ecosystems aren't desirable for anyone with half a brain who has earning potential.

This has a high chance of becoming a slum if anything comes of it.

If your social credit score drops below a certain level, the SMART city council will send a robot to zap and zip you out of your mortal existence

Your post sparked my curiosity and I wondered how much buying 22,500 bitcoin and Coinbase would push the price up on the order book.

The answer is: a whole lot. To buy even just 4300 bitcoin off Coinbase's current orderbook (the max it'll show), would push the btc/usd price up from $88k to $155k.

Of course, Coinbase is only about 5% of global market share for bitcoin trading volume (accordingt o ChatGPT). So, assuming the orderbooks are similar, that would be saying 86,000 bitcoins would move the market from $88k to $155k.

So what would be the equivalent for 22,500 when factoring in that Coinbase is only 5% of volume? Using Coinbase's orderbook, an equivalent purchase of 22,500 bitcoin would move the market from $88k to about $99k. Smaller, but still significant and much larger than any moves resulting from a Saylor purchase.

If Saylor's buys truly don't move the market consistently in any direction, that suggests that exchange orderbooks are only a small fraction of the latent supply of bitcoins in the market, since Saylor is buying OTC.

The exchanges themselves may also be willing to sell Bitcoin on a very elastic basis, since they probably don't have a strong preference for either dollars or Bitcoin, they make money off volume and they only need enough holdings to cover withdrawal events.

People flooding into a welfare state have consequences on the existing population.

Right. So back when Biden was reopening borders, EU was making deals with Tunisia, just like during Obama's mess in Syria, they made deals with Turkey. Lots of EU tax payer money went to enrich a few people in these countries in exchange for them reducing the migration volume.

I think that just like we shouldn't hold every American accountable for what Barbie cosplays ICEtards into doing, perhaps it would be good to not address "Europeans" as accountable for what some autistic girl says on the interwebs, no matter if we mean Greta or VdL by that. None of these actors represent the people on either side of the Atlantic.

almost as good as Keon Coleman