If I show up at the pupusería with only bitcoin, they don’t have to sell to me. And in practice, almost never will. There is never a debt that they are forced to settle with my bitcoin.

It was the $800 clue in Double Jeopardy, "Business & Finance History". The actual clue:

(This is actually not accurate; businesses are not required to accept bitcoin in El Salvador.)

Yes, there are economic nodes but it’s a confusing term because it doesn’t necessarily correspond with people’s personal full nodes.

Bitcoin is a way for people and organizations of people to transact with each other. If a subset of this community disagrees with another subset on what the rules of bitcoin should be, they may not all agree on what constitutes a valid transaction.

When one subset declares adherence to a certain rule, their power to enact and enforce that rule depends on the might of their economic nodes. This has nothing to do with numbers. 51% is no guarantee of anything, whether it’s people, coins, or computers running Bitcoin Core.

Instead it’s the power of the threat to divide the network economically. How badly is the subset not enacting the rule going to feel about not being able to transact with the subset enacting the rule, and vice versa?

The magic of the UASF in 2017 was that enough ordinary users favored decentralization and scaling via Lightning that the miners were scared they’d be wasting a lot of resources mining blocks that a significant enough subset of the network would not care about. Thus they were compelled, economically, to signal for SegWit activation.

Craig Wright is not a cypherpunk or bitcoin OG. He can't even write code. You might find this informative: https://medium.com/blockchain-biz/craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nakamoto-40e50eb219f7

He is also not wealthy, although he did convince someone who is wealthy (Calvin Ayre) to finance his ongoing scamming and harassment of bitcoin community members.

I emphatically do not recommend memorizing 12 BIP-39 words as a long term storage solution. Suggestions like that give ammo to provocateurs like Wertheimer.

Those things that people memorize are things that people routinely misremember, if not forget entirely.

Yes. It's the simplest and most reliable way to exchange cash for non-KYC, completely anonymously acquired bitcoin, so the premium is worth it to me.

Here is a helpful guide to avoiding KYC at bitcoin ATMs: https://archive.org/details/how-to-use-text-verified-to-buy-non-kyc-bitcoin-at-a-bitcoin-atm/mode/2up

Richard Heart became known in the bitcoin community in 2017 for his bitcoin commentary streams on YouTube, and particularly for his debate with Roger Ver which stood out for how civil and respectful both sides were while Heart did a decent job defending against the big blocker argument:

After the crash of 2017/2018, Richard, if you want to take him at his word, got badly rekt. He used to shill BitMEX referral links so he may have been also playing with a lot of leverage at the time and gotten liquidated. Here he is nearly brought to tears as he explains this in an interview at the time:

So having accepted that bitcoin was not going to be a simple path to immediate mega-wealth, and likely with a lot of jealousy of the unscrupulous ICO pumpers of the time, he says plainly (from earlier in the same interview) that he is planning to join their ranks:

And sure enough he did, having raised an enormous fortune in the following years from his several coin launches. My guess, based on the SEC's track record and the fact that Richard has been based overseas for many years, is that he will remain a very wealthy man when all this is said and done.

RaspiBlitz and Umbrel will both sell you a pre-assembled device running their Bitcoin+Lightning software suite. You can also make your own by downloading their software onto your own Raspberry Pi or other machine.

"Plug and play" might not be the right term for it though, even if it's easy to get it up and running initially. There is a bit of a maintenance burden associated with running a Lightning node. Setting up channels and dealing with random force closures will require your attention and intervention in a way that a regular bitcoin node doesn't.

If you're tipping on SN then the person posting was not paid for a service, they originally put it up for free for the world to read. You are just giving them a gift afterwards.