Tag: Opinion

When Explaining Bitcoin, Persuasion Works Better Than Force

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This is an opinion editorial by Brooks Lockett, a freelance writer and Bitcoiner who fell down the rabbit hole in 2018.

Have you ever inspired someone to get into Bitcoin? What worked?

Have you ever accidentally repelled someone away from Bitcoin? What didn’t work?

The frustrating reality that 99 out of 100 people on the street still don’t “get” Bitcoin is driving a lot of Bitcoiners to conclude that there is no cure for Cassandra’s Curse other than time and patience. Cassandra’s Curse meaning that — despite the dangerously-close-to-collapse state of the fiat monetary system — the masses still haven’t discovered that a viable solution exists in Bitcoin.

Yes, it’s early. Embryonic, in fact. But that shouldn’t mean we can’t create more vibrant conversations with those “pragmatists, conservatives and skeptics” who are unfamiliar with the Bitcoin ecosystem.

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Close your eyes and think: How many conversations across the globe — online and offline — do you think happened in the past 24 hours where Bitcoin was mentioned?

Hundreds of teachable moments?

Thousands of teachable moments?

Tens of thousands of teachable moments?

Each of those moments represents an opportunity to properly apply persuasion and behavioral psychology to explaining Bitcoin.

Just because the person isn’t equally as receptive to a monologue about the Byzantine Generals Problem doesn’t mean they should “have fun staying poor.”

The fact that Bitcoin naturally challenges widely-held preexisting beliefs makes it especially vulnerable to the Backfire Effect. It’s up to the Bitcoin community to frame the technology in ways that aren’t perceived as unwelcome evidence or threats to their ideology.

Minimizing Bitcoin’s “Backfire Effect”:

In the Bitcoin community, we love distributed networks, Lightning channels, multisig setups, decentralization and the merits of a sound money standard.

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The collective jargon, shared goals and shared values unify industry insiders who’ve spent years in the space. It’s fun to get together and say “hoorah!”

But outside the community — which is currently the vast majority of people on the planet — these are terms that might as well be a galaxy away.

It’s not unsimilar to your jacked friend who really wants you to join his CrossFit gym. The fact that he looks fit and healthy is still not enough to get you to join.

Case Study: How I Got My Lawyer Friend Into Bitcoin

A good friend of mine is an intellectually-curious guy. He’s sharp, works in legal and always enjoys discussing economics, finance, politics, etc.

For years he’d ask generic questions in passing about Bitcoin because knew I was active in the space. And for years I’d try to give my most thorough, soup-to-nuts overview.

Each time I got the same subtle, discouraging, eyes-glaze-over reaction.

But one day I tried the inverse approach and sent the questions back his way. After some discovery I noticed all he wanted to talk about was Bitcoin’s potential role during wartime. Something we’d never discussed before.

I explained how a Bitcoin sound money standard could very well make wars significantly less affordable for authoritarian governments to finance.

I also walked him through how refugees who are able to memorize or hang on to their seed phrases can transport 100% of their net worth stored in the network with them while fleeing their countries.

Once he realized that Bitcoin is a universal language — a network that can be tapped into from anywhere in the world with 24 words — was what inspired him to do his own research and gravitate towards the space.

“Brooks, this is so obvious… why does this matter?”

I know. But had I gone on about mining, digital signatures or the importance of the software being open-source … I would’ve gotten the inevitable eyes-glaze-over moment, and we’d probably have one less Bitcoiner in the space.

What seems obvious in your head could be the light-bulb moment for another person.

If an opportunity comes up to discuss Bitcoin with a newbie, instead of jumping into an explanation of who Satoshi is, inflation graphs, or hash rate growth – I highly recommend starting with probing questions instead:

– “What are your opinions on the legacy financial system?”

– “Have you ever had a frustrating experience or delay with your bank?”

– “How large of an impact would you say the world wide web has had on the world?”

– “If you were in a position of high power, how would you go about making wars more difficult to finance?”

– “Do you feel as if your overall purchasing power has increased or decreased in the last decade?”

– “Would you consider yourself an early, middle or late adopter of new technology?”

Asking simple, but related questions will uncover the information you need to have a more vibrant conversation that helps build the other person’s knowledge base instead of reinforcing your existing knowledge base.

It’s the IKEA Effect in action: for the same reasons consumers place disproportionately high levels of value on products they’ve assembled themselves, people attribute more value to conversations where they’ve been an active participant in.

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Let’s look at some example scenarios of how to get to the IKEA Effect.

The Counter-Productive Approach:

Other person: “Bitcoin is going to get shut down by the U.S. government.”

You: “That’s actually technologically unachievable. It’s a distributed network of computer nodes and if you don’t understand basic computer science then you’re not really allowed to have an opinion on this.”

Other person: “The government can shut down anything they want. They have the top hackers in the world working for them.”

You: “Whatever, you just don’t get it and you’re going to miss out on Bitcoin with that mindset.”

Net: Nobody wins.

The More Productive Approach:

Other person: “Bitcoin is going to get shut down by the US government.”

You: “I thought that at first too. You’d actually be really interested in it. Have you ever looked into distributed networks or cryptography before?“

Other person: “Not really. I’m not super tech savvy.”

You: “Would you say the separation of money and state is a good or bad thing?“

Other person: “I’d say it’s a good thing. Inflation is really doing damage and pricing younger generations out of society. It’s funny how much money older generations paid for nice homes with land versus what the situation is now. It’s honestly super unsustainable in my opinion, but I’m no expert.”

You: “Do you see that continuing or improving?”

Other person: “At this point, probably continuing.”

You: “What do you see as a viable alternative?”

Other person: “I’m not sure. Maybe you could explain to me how Bitcoin works?”

Net: Other person talks themselves into Bitcoin.

Of course, it won’t always be straightforward. But this simple shift in your approach can be the difference between a newbie spending 8 months of their life shitcoining instead of starting out Bitcoin-only in the first place.

Robert Cialdini discusses in his book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” which states that humans have a deep psychological need to be perceived as consistent.

How can we leverage this principle when explaining Bitcoin to others?

Doing the work to understand the other person’s specific context will lead to a lot less frustration than getting aggressive & annoyed when they fail to see Bitcoin from your perspective.

It’s the polar opposite of the high-pressure salesperson that jumps straight to the signature on the dotted line.

The best possible emotion you can invoke in someone when it comes to adopting new technology is curiosity.

Personal relevance is one of the biggest factors in those early conversations, says Joshua Guest, who provides Bitcoin education at The HiFi Bitcoin Letters. He explains, “There are few forces in the world that have a greater capacity to change individuals and society for the better than Bitcoin does. So helping new and veteran entrants to the space learn how Bitcoin can be personally relevant to them can have profound results.”

You’re already savvy with Bitcoin as a technology. Why not be equally as savvy at explaining it to newbies?

The higher our collective conversion rate as a community, the faster the network spreads, and the faster fiat dies.

Conclusion:

1. In Bitcoin, persuasion is better than force

2. Persuasive psychology is extremely complex, so the time to start experimenting heavily is now

This is a guest post by Brooks Lockett. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 12, 2022
Bitcoin Exemplifies Fair And Transparent Rules

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This is an opinion editorial by Tim Niemeyer, a Bitcoiner since circa 2018 and co-host of the Lincolnland Bitcoin Meetup in Springfield, Illinois.

“I tell the kids, somebody’s gotta win, somebody’s gotta lose.

Just don’t fight about it. Just try to get better.” — Yogi Berra

Let’s pretend we’re playing a game of baseball. Aside from the occasional blind umpire, the rules are pretty fair and consistent. In our particular game though, let’s pretend I’m not only the opposition but also the umpire, rule maker and historian. When you score a run, I can overturn the call. After the game, I can change whatever rule could have prevented your run in my favor. Just for good measure, because I can, I strike your run from the record books. How long would you want to play before you chose to quit and play a different game?

Bitcoin’s rules of the game are set and consistently enforced with no entity able to change the rules to benefit themselves.

There may be some that prefer playing a game where a central authority makes the call. Seems legit — neither team has ultimate control, so it should be fair, right? In this situation, both sides must (should) agree to not only the rules but who makes and enforces said rules. Unfortunately, human nature creeps in; handshakes are made, backdoor agreements are done and, before you know it, one team has colluded with the central authority to gain some level of control over the ruleset. When a game like this happens, where one side benefits from being nearer to the source of control, we claim the game is rigged.

Everyone, regardless of political orientation, has witnessed numerous situations where the “other side” has seemed to rig the game in their favor. The easy route is to blame the other side and call them bad, evil or cheaters. The fault lies though in the way the game was set up in the first place. If two sides were playing a game, and I walked up wanting to play, what options would I have? If I had friends on one side, I could jump right in with them. If I were a little more opportunistic, I could watch an inning and determine which side is currently dominating, then join that side. This becomes an endless cycle of not playing the game, but playing the game inside the game — tug of war over the rulebook.

As I watch this game more intensely, I observe many players looking like they don’t even want to be playing. They look, by choice or unconscious habit, like they are just going through the motions because they either don’t realize that the game is rigged or they do in fact realize the game is rigged and they just keep playing and hoping their side somehow seizes control of the rulebook. It seems like there are a lot of disillusioned spectators. I wonder if they can sense it’s a rigged game.

The more I watch this game, I notice the players spending an unnecessary amount of time, not actually playing the game, but rather bickering over balls and strikes. Each inning is more about debating the rules than it is playing the game. I wonder why they choose to keep fighting over their game, then I see one of the multitude of rules posted — you must play this game only; players are not allowed to make their own game and rules.

At this point, I scoff and walk away. The game just loses its appeal. Why would I choose to play a game that I don’t have any say over if or how I get to play or not? Can I consider it a game if I’m coerced to play by an ever-changing rule set manipulated by players with clout and connections? Doesn’t seem fair. What’s not fair about it is not the outputs but the inputs. When the inputs are subject to change by whomever is the most politically connected, the outputs become increasingly distorted. This is not a game I’m willing to play.

Fiat and CBDCs presuppose the people creating the rules will not succumb to human nature and adjust the rules to benefit themselves and their immediate circle.

What if, when I first walked up to the game already playing, I was perceptive enough to notice it was already rigged. Then I looked across the way and noticed another game. As I watch this game, I notice all players are there voluntarily. Although they have friends playing in the rigged, top-down created game, they’ve chosen to play a game in a fair, bottom-up created game where the rules were set prior to gameplay, no one regardless of power, status, or hierarchy has the ability to change the rules, and the rules are enforced by an impartial observer. This new, fairer game is Bitcoin.

As venerable gigabrain Robert Breedlove states, “In games, fixed rules lead to peaceful gameplay. If you’re spending time fighting over the rules of the game, then you’re not playing the game, you’re engaging in politics. In economics, such fighting lessens aggregate wealth creation. Bitcoin is fixed rules fixing economics.”

As far as this meager rules-based article is concerned, spoiler alert, Bitcoin is the ultimate tool to compensate us for our time and energy in a way that is moral, unconvoluted, incentivised, and unwaveringly enforced. On the other hand, fiat and now Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are in stark contrast.

While you may want a game’s rules to be set and consistently enforced with no entity able to change the rules to benefit themselves, the centralized ruleset of fiat and CBDCs are ever-changing, ever-growing, and immorally incentivised to benefit those with the control. While aiming for a monetary system that is equal is admirable, it presupposes the people creating the rules will not succumb to human nature and adjust the rules to benefit themselves and their immediate circle. Can you criticize fiat (and eventually CBDCs’) umpires without getting kicked out of the game? Well, you can just ask truck drivers in northern North America or nonviolent citizens in Europe…

Furthermore, allowing a central authority to change the rules at their whim, we are allowing damaging incentives to enter into the game. This manipulates basic market economic signals, which distorts reality. When one small group has the ability to choose who plays (permission to spend), adjusting pitch clocks (money expiration), have only one scoring card (centralized “node”), inconsistently enforced (unpredictable policy), or scoring based on perceived “niceness” (social credit scores), you create a game that’s immoral, convoluted, incentively misaligned, and inconsistently enforced.

Bitcoin is the “safe” option.

Bitcoin … well, fixes this. It’s a fair game. It’s ironic that early Bitcoiners were ones who disregarded legacy rules to opt into a fair, rule-based system; rules without rulers, ya know? Playing the game of Bitcoin, you can play knowing the rules are fair (spend without permission or expiration), you can have ownership over the rules (run your own node & securely self-custody), and you can play the game more freely with predictable and set rules (fixed supply & monetary policy). You can do all this by simply opting out of the current centralized game of fiat and its digital kissing cousin, CBDCs.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, please share this with your normie, precoiner, and non-technical friends. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my favorite books, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein:

“I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

This is a guest post by Tim Niemeyer. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Tim Niemeyer

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December 12, 2022
Time to Denounce Antisemitism Worldwide
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Source: Antisemitism Worldwide Report 2021.
- Opinion by Joseph Chamie (portland, usa)
- Monday, December 12, 2022
- Inter Press Service
PORTLAND, USA, Dec 12 (IPS) – It’s time to step up, speak out and object to antisemitism. Antisemitic remarks, behavior and events cannot continue to be swept under the rug, unethically edited for political media consumption, or ignored in hopes that they will simply go away.

Events several weeks ago as well as those from the recent past that took place at the highest political levels of an advanced developed country, the United States, are indicative of the worrisome rising trend of antisemitism in many parts of the world.

On 22 November former president Trump had dinner at his home with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and antisemite Kanye “Ye” West. The notorious event was followed by the largely silent responses of many Republican officials and leaders, including some seeking the presidential office.

The repeated behavior and words of the former president, including his troubling response to the Charlottesville tragedy in 2017, and the tepid reactions to antisemitism by most of his supporters legitimizes the animosity expressed toward Jewish Americans.

Such behavior and remarks cannot be excused as being insignificant instances that have been blown out of proportion by the news media. Nor can they be simply deflected, diminished or explained away with references to irrelevant overseas diversions.

The former president and his various enablers have minimized, dismissed and legitimized antisemitism events in the United States, including harassment, threats, vandalism, assaults, killings and bombings. The failures to address the antisemitism facing America are inexcusable, disgraceful and dangerous.

The Jewish population of the United States is a relatively small proportion of the country. In 2022 Jewish Americans are estimated to represent slightly more than two percent of America’s population of 333 million inhabitants. In contrast, the largest religious group, Christians, is close to two-thirds of country’s population (Figure 1)

Source: PEW Research.

Despite Jewish Americans representing a relatively small proportion of the U.S. population, the number of reported antisemitic incidents involving assault, harassment and vandalism reached an all-time high in 2021 of 2,717, or more than seven incidents per day and nearly triple the level in 2015 (Figure 2).

Source: Anti-Defamation League.

The reprehensible incidents of the recent past took place in various places across the United States, including in places of worship, community centers, schools and colleges. The motivations for the antisemitism were not always evident as they typically lacked an identifiable ideology or belief system.

One notable exception, however, is the “great replacement” theory being promoted by U.S. white supremacist groups. They believe in the conspiracy that white Christians are being intentionally replaced in the population by individuals of other races through immigration and other means.

That great replacement, they believe, is leading to white Christians no longer being the dominant majority in America. In their various demonstrations and gatherings, including the Charlottesville event in 2017, the neo-Nazi marchers often chant out such hateful antisemitic nonsense as ”Jews will not replace us”.

In the American Jewish Committee’s “The State of Antisemitism in America 2021” report, an estimated 60 percent of U.S. adults indicated that antisemitism is a problem for the country. However, approximately one-quarter of the respondents felt that antisemitism wasn’t a problem for the country.

In contrast, some 90 percent of Jewish Americans in the report indicated that antisemitism is a problem for the country and approximately three-quarters of Jewish Americans felt that there is more antisemitism in the country today than there was about five years ago. A majority of Jewish Americans, 53 percent, reported feeling personally less safe than they did in 2015.

Contributing to antisemitism is the apparent self-induced amnesia among some extremist groups regarding the methodical persecution followed by the horrendous events that were committed against Europe’s Jews approximately eight decades ago. That amnesia is easily dispelled by a viewing of the illuminating Ken Burns’ documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust”. The Holocaust resulted in the murder of approximately six million European Jews, or roughly 63 percent of Europe’s Jewish population at the time.

Sadly, antisemitism was also evident in America’s refugee policy with respect to European Jews seeking asylum from their harrowing persecution in Nazi Germany.

Perhaps the most memorable single event reflecting its ignoble refugee policy in the past is the refusal of the U.S. government in 1939 to grant entry to about 900 Jewish refugees seeking asylum aboard the USS St. Louis that had reached Miami, Florida. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where nearly one third of the passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.

In addition, America too often has chosen to ignore its troubling antisemitic past and the many popular figures who were openly antisemitic in their public attacks on the character and patriotism of Jewish Americans. Among those ignoble figures are Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Charles Coughlin, Fritz Kuhn, Coco Chanel and Louis Farrakhan.

Furthermore, besides facing educational quotas at major universities in the 1920s, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, Jewish Americans experienced discrimination among the major professions and restrictions on residential housing. They were also denied membership to most clubs, camps, resorts and associations, with some hotel advertisements explicitly excluding Jewish Americans.

While that recent tragic history remains beyond doubt, many of America’s antisemitic white supremacists, including Fuentes and West, continue to deny the existence of the Holocaust, express hateful rhetoric and discriminate against Jewish Americans. They attempt to negate the historical facts of the Nazi genocide, promote the false claim that the Holocaust was invented or greatly exaggerated in order to promote the Jewish interests, and display the Nazi swastika flag and make the “Heil Hitler” gesture.

Antisemitism also fueled vocal criticism and opposition to many U.S. political leaders in the past who attempted to address the discrimination against Jewish Americans. For example, at conference of some 20,000 people in New York City in 1939, Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund, mocked President Franklin Roosevelt as “Frank D. Rosenfeld”, referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal”, and declared Jews to be enemies of the United States.

Some current U.S. political leaders, including some eagerly seeking to become president, continue to dismiss or ignore antisemitism. When confronted with offensive behavior and words such as the former president’s recent dining with two notorious antisemites, the initial reluctance verging on muteness of many political leaders to express outrage only contributes to antisemitism.

No matter the place, occasion or time, the U.S. electorate cannot tolerate or support those who promote, permit or condone antisemitism. In particular, U.S. elected and appointed government officials must be held accountable for their words and deeds.

An encouraging development in the U.S. was a letter recently signed by more than one hundred members of Congress to President Biden calling for a unified national strategy to monitor and combat antisemitism in the country. The letter also recognized that rising antisemitism is endangering people in Jewish communities both in the U.S. and abroad

Another encouraging development aimed at recognizing the rise of antisemitism was the 2022 Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism. More than 25 mayors from around the world and dozens of local government officials participated in the two-day Summit held in Athens, Greece, from 30 November to 1 December.

The Summit highlighted the significant problem of rising antisemitism worldwide and presented strategies and solutions to address it. Various countries around the world have reported a rise in antisemitic incidents between 2020 and 2021. In addition to the rise of incidents of approximately one-third in the United States, higher percentage rises were reported in Australia, Canada and France (Figure 3).

Source: Antisemitism Worldwide Report 2021.

The Mayors Summit also provided a framework for exchange of ideas and cooperation between cities. The meeting also emphasized the particular role of mayors in creating inclusive societies for their cities.

Finally, recalling the tragic lessons of the recent past and troubled by today’s rising antisemitism, it’s time for everyone to speak out and denounce the hate, discrimination and violence. Tolerating antisemitism is categorically wrong and poses a serious moral threat to the world in the 21st century.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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December 12, 2022
Bitcoin Stops The Bleeding: A Sound Money System Is The Only Cure For What Ails Our Economy

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This is an opinion editorial by Conor Chepenik, a Bitcoin pleb.

When a doctor operates on a wounded patient, the first thing they do is make sure they can stop the bleeding. No point operating if you can’t get the bleeding under control because the patient will die. Money facilitates mutual exchange and helps market actors coordinate price discovery — it is the literal blood of the economy. As fiat currencies slowly bleed out in value, they incentivize fewer people to save. If you want to stop the bleeding in your financial life, you are going to need to find a way to store your wealth in something else. There are plenty of options, but only one that is programmed to stop all bleeding in 2140.

As peoples’ money bleeds out, so too does their education, time and, I’d even argue, their mental sanity. Blood isn’t oozing out egregiously, but rather being siphoned off from tiny cuts, so most people do not even realize it’s happening. This is a hard pill to swallow. Most Western societies teach people not to question authority: raise your hand if you want to ask questions, and trust the experts. Breaking out of this mentality is difficult. Watch this clip of the White House press secretary to get an idea of how those at the top will treat people who dare question the narrative.

Pain Is The Best Teacher

Narrative is everything when trying to coerce the masses to accept a “Great Reset” (if you have no idea what the Great Reset is, you can read about it here). The scope of this article won’t cover what the Davos elite is attempting to impose on the rest of the world, but rather why Bitcoin stops money from bleeding out. Trying to calculate all of the variables that bring about the emergent, complex behavior of society is futile. Governments stole trillions of dollars via quantitative easing and blamed their theft on COVID-19.

It should not be a surprise that what followed has been chaos in the form of protests and supply chain issues. The Federal Reserve is following up its quantitative easing with tightening monetary policy at record paces trying to get inflation under control. This demand destruction is wreaking havoc all over the economy but is necessary to weed out unprofitable businesses.

For better or worse, pain is the best teacher. Hard Money recently reported that Trezor has seen a 300% increase in sales revenue after the FTX debacle. The whole point of Bitcoin is to not trust ,but verify for yourself. Many ignored this because FTX had the stamp of approval from many mainstream news outlets, politicians and celebrities.

In the wake of its blow, FTX created tons of new Bitcoin maximalists who now understand why not verifying Bitcoin with your own node means that you are trusting potentially-corrupt third parties. The mainstream media is not doing itself any favors with puff pieces like the one below. Articles like this only serve to increase the pain of those who were robbed and convince more people that the mainstream narrative is corrupt:

Source

But Self Education Helps Too

The remedy to most of these problems is a better education. Tools like Saylor.org, Udemy and plenty of others have lowered the barrier tremendously. It just requires a desire to learn.

For me, I found that desire by going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Ironically, answering one question would lead me to more questions and that number of questions grew exponentially. It made me wonder how much people are not taught intentionally during their traditional schooling. There is only so much time in the day and teachers must prioritize their curriculums accordingly. I just don’t understand why taxes, how to vote and basic financial literacy aren’t at the top of most public school curriculums. The reader can come to their own conclusions. What’s important is finding a teacher who speaks your language and a subject that brings out your natural curiosity. Learning becomes one of the most euphoric feelings in the world when those two needs are met.

The standard way of learning has horrible mental models for teaching people, like memorizing things for a test. Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, “Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” People are so focused on learning from the experts that they forget that those who changed the world didn’t ask for permission to do so. They just did it. People want a hero to fix all of their problems but the truth is that no one is coming to save you. I’m not saying one should not find great mentors; it’s super valuable being able to listen to those who have become experts in their fields in order to learn. I’m saying one should not worship people like gods who can’t make mistakes. Just look at Sam Bankman-Friend, who many thought was a hero.

Source

Despite all of the educational content out there, the reality is most people will come to understand the difference between paper bitcoin and bitcoin you actually hold the keys for via an expensive lesson. When the majority of Bitcoiners self custody their coins, and stop blindly trusting their heroes, that is when we will see fireworks in regards to bitcoin’s price action. Every person is different and has various forms of risk tolerance. For those who are discouraged by recent events, remember: Rome was not built in a day. Sometimes the only way to get a lesson through someone’s head is for them to suffer the pain of said mistake.

FTX And Central Planners Are Not So Different

What’s interesting about watching FTX fail so rapidly is that the same thing would happen with our traditional financial system if we didn’t have central banks acting as lenders of last resort. FTX violated its own terms of service by using customer funds to make bets, but 99.9% of the world just turns a blind eye when banks do this because their terms of service legally allow fractional reserve banking.

In his book “Human Action,” Ludwig von Mises writes:

“The rich, the owners of the already operating plants, have no particular class interest in the maintenance of free competition. They are opposed to confiscation and expropriation of their fortunes, but their vested interests are rather in favor of measures preventing newcomers from challenging their position. Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow and whose ingenuity will make the life of coming generations more agreeable. They want the way left open to further economic improvements. They are the spokesmen of progress.”

Technology getting better should lead to massive deflation from productivity gains. Regulatory moats and monopolies prevent this. Fractional reserve banking creates an inflationary environment where tons of capital is misallocated. In a free market, most commercial banks would be insolvent.

FTX tried to create its own fractional reserve monopoly by lobbying Congress and creating a regulatory moat around its business which would’ve made it impossible for competitors to compete in the crypto ecosystem. The world is fortunate FTX’s system blew up before it was able to get its way with D.C.

Mises was right: It is not the incumbents who will create a more agreeable future, it is entrepreneurs and ideas competing in a free market. Bitcoin has over 10,000 competitors, and that number is growing every day. Many, if not all of these tokens, are Ponzi schemes in my opinion, but the idea that D.C could do a better job deciding this than the free market could is ridiculous.

I understand regulation is difficult when technology is changing things at such rapid rates. The little piece of glass in our pocket allows us to hail a ride, order food or listen to some of the greatest minds on the planet whenever we want. All of these things would seem magical to someone who lived before the creation of smartphones. There are going to be hiccups along the way as humanity tries to come to grips with these new tools. This is why I keep this Hal Finney quote as my Twitter header:

Source

For all of the wonders that technology can do for humanity, it can also drive a whole new level of control. Free markets lead to optimal price discovery. Too much central planning and markets start to break. Price discovery in a free market is like a hash function. It takes inputs of data and spits out an output that only goes one way.

With a normal hash, the algorithm works so that it is unfeasible to reverse-calculate the data. You can verify a hash by making sure the same output is achieved based on the input, but you can’t take the output and figure out the input. In this same vein, a free market will set the price of a good, but you can’t figure out how all of the labor, work, travel and other variables created the price of the good. The function only goes one way.

Market actors get upset when the coercion variable is notched up and price increases happen. The blame is typically pushed on to the producers rather than the central planners who are causing such issues. Sound familiar? Like say the U.S. government, which is calling out greedy fossil fuel companies for raising the price of gas while at the same time advocating for the end of fossil fuel use. If price controls are imposed, price discovery completely breaks down, resulting in shortages. Until the creation of money is no longer heavily intermingled with politics these issues will continue to play out.

Bitcoin Is More Important Now Than Ever

As central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and digital identities are rolled out, it has never been more important to point out why Bitcoin is the remedy. Bitcoin allows the individual to go down a hero’s journey where they can keep the value of their labor in their head. CBDCs and digital IDs offer governments tools to enact monetary policy at the individual level, be at the center of every transaction and turn off people’s money as they see fit.

Bitcoin offers a better system, one that no one can cheat if they want to be in consensus with the rest of the network. Preston Pysh said it best: “Bitcoin is like the infinity stone.” It takes a great deal of faith to hold on to an asset that has had multiple 70% to 90% drawdowns before recovering to new all-time highs. Not many can hang on to their bitcoin but those who do over long periods of time are greatly rewarded.

The network effects of Bitcoin are insane. There is a Bitcoin website paying people 21,000 satoshis to post a sticker that it ships to you around their cities. Think about that. You can earn sats and increase the value of those sats by helping raise awareness. Bitcoin is full of these win-win scenarios. The tech is exciting, but the passion I see from Bitcoiners in real life is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Bitcoin as a technology, a new form of money and an idea are bringing hope to humans around the world who have been disadvantaged because governments have a monopoly on violence. Bitcoin empowers the individual to fight back like never before. There will be growing pains along the way and more turmoil in the short term for those obsessed with measuring things in fiat. The way to fix that is to orient yourself around the new system.

The possibilities that will come out of this Bitcoin renaissance are endless. Grappling with what this new form of money means is difficult because the world is full of so many paradoxes. When you learn, you become smarter by ending up with more questions. Monopolies have brought about some of the most prosperous and technologically advanced times in human civilizations while also making George Orwell’s “1984” look like a very plausible path for the future. The internet is connecting people like never before and at the same time, loneliness is increasing. Number go up technology is associated with greed and is what initially attracts people to Bitcoin, yet many stay because they realize Bitcoin is the true effective altruism movement. These paradoxes are a bit mind bending but I do think there is value to be had from chewing on these ideas.

It can be easy to get bogged down with all of the bleeding going on in the fiat world. Bitcoin is the Band-Aid to fix it. It gives me a lot of confidence knowing my money is secured by open-source software and math rather than 12 individuals who decide when it is okay to steal and when it’s time to practice fiscal austerity.

I’m glad the Fed has finally decided to do the right thing for the economy but it has manipulated the cost of capital for so long that it now risks destroying the entire system if it keeps tightening. The problem is that the Fed’s only other option is to lower rates again, which causes more bleeding via inflation. Bitcoin offers humanity a way out of this paradox where central planners try to fix the bleeding by siphoning more blood out of the patient. Every time central planners manipulate the cost of capital it becomes more clear that market participants are playing a rigged game. Bitcoin is the fairest game humanity has ever created and the best chance we have of separating money and state.

This is a guest post by Conor Chepenik. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 12, 2022
How Dozens Of Denver Middle Schoolers Became Bitcoin Entrepreneurs

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This is an opinion editorial by Ryan Brisch, Anthony Feliciano and Mark Maraia, who recently spent a few weeks helping 85 middle schoolers operate a pop-up shop running on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.

On November 18, 2022, about 85 students braved a cold snowy Friday morning at STRIVE Prep – Lake middle school in Denver, Colorado to participate in a unique program. Even though they got a late start because of snowfall the night before, there was a sense of eager anticipation in the air.

Ryan Brisch, a Denver Bitcoiner, had been frequently talking to his significant other about issues Bitcoin could help solve, or some new Bitcoin product that he was excited about. His wife, Nicole, is a sixth grade math teacher at STRIVE Prep and had started to respond that he should come and speak to her class about some of the basic mathematical foundations of Bitcoin.

In October, Nicole was telling Brisch about an enrichment class led by her coworker, Rawa Abu Alsamah, which was working with an outside group, We Thrive. We Thrive offers entrepreneurial apprenticeships in which youth start their own ventures, earn real revenue and gain mentorship. Alsamah’s seventh- and eighth-grade students were creating their own businesses through the guidance of We Thrive and would be selling their products at a pop-up market later in the month.

When hearing about this event, Brisch’s first question was, ‘’Do you think they would be interested in being able to buy and sell their products in bitcoin?”

From there, the idea was in motion and Brisch reached out to his local Bitcoin Telegram group for the content experts that would be needed to make the idea work. Anthony Feliciano and Mark Maraia quickly volunteered not only their expertise on money, Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, but also their time, energy and sats. Over the next three weeks, Brisch, Feliciano and Maraia, met, spoke and quickly devised a plan of action. Maraia would teach the kids about money and Bitcoin and Feliciano would focus on the use of the Muun wallet and the Lightning Network.

The first week’s presentation was focused on getting the students to think about money, how it worked, who currently controlled it and then question them about how it could be different and how the Bitcoin network and monetary system worked. It ended with a little homework assignment: to download Muun wallet. The next week, the morning of the pop-up shop, the three men were back at the school, passing out sats that were fundraised over the previous week and showing students how to create and pay invoices. Needless to say, the digital-native students took to Muun wallet and Lightning payments like fish to water!

On that cold snowy morning, dozens of student vendors arrived before the pop-up event so they could learn how to receive sats in payment for their product or service from other students. The plan called for these students to use the Lightning Network exclusively and that meant the student entrepreneurs needed to know how to create an invoice.

These student entrepreneurs received $5 to start their day and were encouraged to let the other students know they would accept payment in sats. Within a few minutes, each student had learned wallet basics and went to their booth armed with the knowledge of how to accept bitcoin in payment for their product or service. (The week prior, they had raised about $500 in bitcoin as seed capital for this event with support from a generous group of Rocky Mountain Bitcoiners.)

Earlier that morning, these young entrepreneurs had set up their booth in the school gym featuring signage which advertised their product/service and a price list offering a wide variety of goods such as homemade cupcakes, cookies, waffles and other handmade goods as well as services such as neck shaves and shoe shines.

The event began with the students downloading Muun wallet and learning how to create invoices. Next, the students were all instructed to create Lightning invoices to receive $5 worth of sats, as they headed down to the pop-up shop in the gymnasium. Just over 80 students and a couple of teachers were loaded with sats to spend. Some of the boldest students came back to reload after they spent their first sats. It really was a sight to see, just a mere few hours earlier, students were downloading Muun. Sooner after, merchants were creating invoices for goods, kids were running around performing transactions, and through all of the excitement, you could hear merchants yelling “I accept bitcoin!”

The level of enthusiasm that the students showed toward learning how to send and receive sats was inspiring and would make any Bitcoiner optimistic about our future. The event was a huge success, with many of the students thanking our local Bitcoiners for the lessons and sats. The students, being digital natives, were able to grasp how to use the technology with incredible ease. They were all told of the importance of remembering their four-digit code and using the security features to backup and recover the Muun wallet as needed. This began their first, tentative steps toward owning a form of property with a level of responsibility that none had ever known.

By the end of the event, the most industrious vendors held more than 180,000 sats in their wallets and a growing awareness that this new kind of money spelled opportunity.

Our local Bitcoiners also took the time to educate a few of the teachers on how to download a wallet and receive sats. After receiving sats on her Muun wallet, one teacher was blown away with the idea that she didn’t have to provide a phone number, or an address, or a social security number and that it did not require permission from a bank or government. All it takes is a phone and an internet connection to send money to someone on the other side of the world.

And as our local Bitcoiners left the event, there were many shouts of thanks as they walked out confident that the rabbit hole was drawing near for a new crop of bitcoiners. At the very least, a cohort of seventh and eighth graders were much more curious about Bitcoin.

The only thing that can top that feeling is to see another million Bitcoiners march into a local school near them and do something similar. If you are interested in learning more please contact Brisch.

This is a guest post by Ryan Brisch, Anthony Feliciano and Mark Maraia. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 11, 2022
How Bitcoin Can Enrich Our Interior Lives

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This is an opinion editorial by Logan Bolinger, a lawyer and the author of a free weekly newsletter about the intersection of Bitcoin, macroeconomics, geopolitics and law.

“I’m more interested in asking the question, is the world that we want to live in one where we need to hyperfinancialize every aspect of an individual’s life because financial conditions on a macro level are such that you have to financialize your whole being in order to keep up or get ahead? Is that truly a victory for democracy and for the kind of psycho-spiritual wellbeing of all of us and the lives we want to live? Versus something like Bitcoin, that’s a definancializing force that basically says because we think a world might be better where you’re actually able to save money and you don’t just have to spend it or go invest or speculate on some stuff, would that unlock ways for you to feel more fulfilled or satisfied as a person and would you then be able to pursue other things? I think ultimately the end of Bitcoin is that we all think collectively less about money and more about other things that we’re interested in.”

I made these statements on a recent episode of the “What Bitcoin Did” podcast in a discussion about Bitcoin and the ways I think it can catalyze positive changes in our interior lives, as contrasted with the contemporary state of Web 3.

We frequently discuss and theorize the ways in which Bitcoin can reshape or reconfigure our external realities, whether they be political, monetary, legislative, etc. But I don’t think enough attention is paid to how Bitcoin can initiate a similarly monumental reshaping of our interior lives, a process which, in the aggregate, can lead to a trickling up of priorities and values.

I want to talk about two different conceptions of freedom to illustrate why I think we fixate so much on one of them. When folks describe themselves as “freedom maximalists,” they’re primarily referring to the idea of negative freedom, a freedom from intrusive external constraints. This type of freedom is obviously of fundamental, paramount importance. Without freedom from certain external constraints, meaningful pursuit of self-realization, what we would refer to as positive freedom, is difficult, if not impossible to pursue.

We tend to get so focused on the negative freedom aspects of Bitcoin that we fail to fully appreciate the positive freedom that Bitcoin facilitates. Which is to say we get so fixated on the ways in which Bitcoin precludes external intrusions or constraints (freedom from) that we don’t explore the ways in which Bitcoin can create an environment that allows us to more rigorously pursue the fullest expression of our selves (freedom to).

[N.B. for my humanities/philosophy friends: Yes, I am drawing on the work of Isaiah Berlin with these positive/negative freedom terms]

I would argue that freedom maximalism is not sustainably fulfilling long-term, because it’s not really an end state. It’s a necessary liminal posture, a means to achieving a certain environment in which positive freedom can be productively exercised. However, negative freedom without positive freedom is like having an infinite number of TV channels but no idea what you want to watch. It’s like having the freedom to pursue anything you want without any way of determining what you actually want to pursue or what’s worth pursuing.

Americans are particularly attuned to ideas of negative freedom, but not particularly adept when it comes to positive freedom. We can see this everywhere, including in the Bitcoin space. If one makes a living, builds a following, or crafts an entire identity around being a “freedom maximalist,” one’s livelihood and sense of self depends on the continuing existence of external constraints for one to decry. One can unwittingly (and mostly subconsciously) become the bird that has grown to love its cage, as author Lewis Hyde once wrote of irony.

So while freedom maximalism (negative freedom) is vitally important, we should also pursue and prioritize what my wife has aptly coined intentionality maximalism (positive freedom), which is a perspective and a way of living in our interior lives. Bitcoin does not get enough credit for its ability and its potential to foster this type of inward-looking change.

What does intentionality maximalism look like in our everyday experience of life? One salient example is our relationship with the unbridled consumerism endemic in a fiat monetary system.

Allow me to share some statistics that illustrate just how warped this relationship has become:

Per the Los Angeles Times, there are 300,000 items in the average American home.

Per NPR, the average size of the American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years.

Nevertheless, one out of every ten Americans rent offsite storage, which is the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry over the past four decades.

British research found that the average 10-year-old owns 238 toys but plays with just 12 daily.

The average American family spends $1,700 on clothes annually, while also throwing away, on average, 65 pounds of clothing per year.

You get the idea. There is practically no end to the data showing the absurd amount of shit we own and the growing space (physical and mental) that this shit occupies.

Americans are consuming more than ever.

Source: FRED

Despite their purchasing power not meaningfully growing.

Source: U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics

What explains this? One factor is that we measure our economic health by how much we spend, a singularly fiat and Keynesian way of gauging economic vitality. Consumer spending is roughly 70% of GDP. If we spend less, the metric we use to gauge economic health drops.

There’s also the fact that we see more ads than ever.

But, most importantly, there’s a widespread high time preference that is, I think, part of the very fabric of our culture.

Here’s where I think Bitcoin comes into play. So much of this rat-race orgy of consumption is high-time-preference behavior incentivized by the fiat monetary system, which ensures your money loses value over time. Since your purchasing power is sand in an hourglass, and since you work harder than ever just to keep up, consumer spending serves both a practical and a pacifying purpose. In other words, we are incentivized to spend because not spending or investing means our money just sits and loses value. And if we work so hard, many of us at jobs we don’t particularly enjoy, just to keep up, shouldn’t we also buy all the new cool stuff to make us feel like it’s all worth it?

If we remove ourselves from some of the rat race stuff it clears space for us to think less about money, which means we can be more intentional about everything else. Hence the idea of intentionality maximalism. We sort of reclaim our positive freedom, our freedom to pursue the highest expression of ourselves. Bitcoin, in my opinion, is ultimately about looking for a sustainable alternative to the rat-race model.

It’s really a contrast of values. Consumerism is a value of the fiat system. It is both literally a value, since we measure economic health in large part by measuring consumption, and also an ingrained mode of behavior. By disincentivizing mindless, reflexive consumption and incentivizing a lower time preference, Bitcoin, if it continues to grow in adoption, offers the promise of a cultural foregrounding of deeper things, like fulfilling pursuits, relationships, creativity, contribution to community, presence, etc.

When it comes to this interior transformation, this intentionality maximalism, and the ways in which Bitcoin moves us in that direction, I think Bitcoin shares some fundamental principles with minimalism, a movement that has deep, ancient roots, but has been gathering more popular momentum in the last decade or so. Proponents of minimalism, mindful of the constraints unchecked consumerism can place on our lived experience, pursue lives with fewer unused, unnecessary possessions in order to reclaim freedom and mastery over one’s life and the space to pursue what’s important. Which is to say the pursuit of a more intentional life.

Joshua Fields Millburn, co-founder of theminimalists.com, describes minimalism as “the thing that gets us past the things so we can make room for life’s important things—which aren’t things at all.”

The promise of Bitcoin, to borrow Millburn’s articulation, is to be the money that, through its soundness, allows us to get past thinking about money all the time so that we can make room for life’s important things – which tend to get lost, neglected, and/or sacrificed in consumption and the systemically coerced pursuit of more and more money.

We spend so much time thinking about money (how to get it, how to get more of it, how to make it grow, how to keep up with inflation, how to invest it, how to spend it, what to spend it on, how to get rich quick, how to pay the bills, etc). And to a certain extent this will always be true. I am not advocating for the Platonic form of communism here.

But when money does not hold its value, when it is continuously debased, when the sovereign debt is so massive it must be inflated away, and when the economic health of a country is measured by how much it consumes, it creates an environment in which money is practically all we think about.

This is why I have been so critical/skeptical of some of the proposals in other corners of the crypto world, many of which seem to be seeking to financialize every corner of our lives. I think this perpetuates, and perhaps intensifies, our high-time-preference environment.

In contrast, the implications and downstream effects of collectively lowering our time preference, which I think necessarily involves less consumerism, simply cannot be understated. Imagine an entire population finally able to save in a sound money and to spend more time and energy on the things that mean the most to them.

Now, again, I’m not envisioning a utopian end-state here where we’re all singing songs around the campfire (though I do enjoy songs and campfires). I’m talking about returning some headspace and some presence back to folks who have, by necessity, grown accustomed to spending every waking moment thinking about money and consumption. I’m talking about a transformation of our interior lives, one that clears space for more intentional living. And I think an under-appreciated aspect of Bitcoin is its potential to catalyze such a transformation.

So be a freedom maximalist, because it’s important. But don’t stop there, because that alone won’t keep you full, long-term. Be an intentionality maximalist, too.

Many people live lives like this – compelled, constrained, and unintentional within a fiat system:

Happiness

I think Bitcoin is about escaping this.

This is a guest post by Logan Bolinger. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 10, 2022
How Erlay Helps Preserve Bitcoin’s Decentralization

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This is an opinion editorial by Kudzai Kutukwa, a passionate financial inclusion advocate who was recognized by Fast Company magazine as one of South Africa’s top-20 young entrepreneurs under 30.

Satoshi Nakamoto brilliantly laid out in a few short sentences the major problem with the current financial system; it’s dependency on trust. “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.” In other words what really drives the fiat monetary to a great extent is trust, because without it the system as we know it wouldn’t be functional, however the trust is being placed in untrustworthy individuals and institutions. The Bitcoin monetary system is trustless and decentralized by design and is reliant on cryptographic proof instead, thus removing altogether the need for “trusted intermediaries” in every financial interaction, from the central bank all the way down to transactions between individuals.

The Blocksize War of 2015-2017 is one of the most significant events in Bitcoin’s history. This was really a battle between those that favored centralization of the protocol by a handful of developers, exchanges and miners (akin to what you have in Ethereum today) versus those that favored decentralization, security and resilience over the long term. For the first time in its existence Bitcoin faced a potential hostile takeover engineered by powerful corporate entities that wanted to capture and impose their will on Bitcoin. What started out as a disagreement on how to scale Bitcoin, whether the size limit of the blocks that make up the Bitcoin blockchain should be increased or not, eventually morphed into a two year long tug of war over the very soul of Bitcoin itself. Two camps emerged; the “big blockers”, who were in favor of increasing the block size as their priority was ensuring faster and cheaper transactions at the base layer thus making Bitcoin into a global payments system that would rival Visa (i.e. corporate control); and the “small blockers” who were more focused on Bitcoin being a new form of money, which had to remain fully decentralized if it was to achieve the goal of separating money and state (i.e. individual control).

Jan3 CEO, Samson Mow, who was at the frontlines of the block size war, in a recent article made the following remark about the small blockers, “They prioritized integrity, resilience and security, arguing that if blocks became big, it would become expensive for users to run a node and would thus incentivize hosting nodes in data centers; a one-way street towards centralization and control by a few, not much different from other systems like banks. This would mean the death of the dream of an apolitical, incorruptible, decentralized money.” The small blockers foresaw a scenario in which overtime it would be expensive for users to run full Bitcoin nodes which would have led to further centralization and thus recreating the trusted third parties in another form; the very middlemen that Bitcoin was designed to disrupt. Satoshi designed Bitcoin with the intention of it remaining a technically and socially robust peer-to-peer (P2P) network which should never be “corrupted” through centralization. He summarized it this way, “Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted party is still required to prevent double-spending.”

In order for Bitcoin to remain user-controlled, every attempt or form of centralization has to be fiercely resisted, especially given the innate human tendency to lean more towards centralized systems with a leader. If a handful of business entities and developers could force such a significant change without consensus would that not be akin to how the Federal Reserve plans the economy by dictating interest rates and maintaining “price stability?” As stated earlier, it wasn’t just about block sizes anymore but it was now an ideological clash about control. Who had control, was it the users or the miners or the developers that would steer the protocol? In the book, “The Blocksize War,” the author accurately described this phenomenon and how it was an underlying driver for the big blockers when he noted;

“In some people’s minds, the idea of a system controlled by end users is too difficult to grasp. Instead, they look for somebody or some entity who controls the system. Some people cannot fathom the idea of a system which has global consensus, but lacks a leader…As for whether Bitcoin really is the leaderless system it proclaims to be and whether this will always remain the case, the jury is still out. However, after the drama and shenanigans of the blocksize war, one thing is clear: there is still hope that the claim is true.”

Ultimately, it was the small blockers that prevailed and as a result Bitcoin remained firmly in the users’ control.

When it comes to Bitcoin most of the attention is focused on bitcoin the asset and less on the infrastructure required to maintain this global, decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network. While the small blockers’ victory in the blocksize war secured Bitcoin’s path towards future mass adoption, it still remains unclear to most people why running a node is so important that it was worth fighting for. Let’s start by defining what a node is. A full node is any computer that maintains and stores the entire Bitcoin blockchain; in order to verify and record new transactions as they happen, according to a common set of network consensus rules. In the absence of a central party, it’s these nodes that act as referees of the Bitcoin network by independently validating all transactions and blocks; and filtering out invalid transactions. This is how the Bitcoin network removes trust in any centralized entity and ensures the integrity of its 21 million supply cap.

While running a full node is important, it’s still optional to do so. Running a full node, grants anyone the ability to broadcast transactions (or blocks) on a permissionless basis. The more nodes there are on the network, the more decentralized Bitcoin becomes. This not only increases redundancy, but it results in Bitcoin being more secure by making it increasingly harder to corrupt or censor. Each full node executes the consensus rules of the network, an important element being Bitcoin’s fixed supply. Bitcoin Core developer, Luke Dashjr, perfectly summarized it this way, “All of Bitcoin’s advantages — including its security from outright theft and the 21 million BTC cap — stem from the assumption that the majority of the economy are using their own full nodes to verify payments to them. Centralized verification and third-party/custodial wallets are a bigger threat to Bitcoin than anything else.” In other words, nodes are very important parts of the Bitcoin network’s defense mechanism with regards to processing transactions, and they are the last line of defense against centralization and malicious actors. More information regarding running your own node can be found here.

Despite the critical role that nodes play in the Bitcoin ecosystem, it’s estimated that the number of Bitcoin nodes has dropped considerably from a peak of 200,000 in 2018 to less than 45,000 today as of time of writing according to Dashjr’s data. Given the fact that users being able to run full nodes was one of the biggest factors that culminated in the blocksize war, it’s definitely of great concern that we are seeing a reduction of nodes on the network in 2022 when compared with 2018. This could potentially make the Bitcoin network less secure and much more prone to centralization. Furthermore from a geographical standpoint, 32.8% of Bitcoin nodes globally are located in just seven countries — the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Canada, Finland and the United Kingdom, as of time of writing according to data from BTC nodes analytics platform Bitnodes.

Ironically in the global south where there is a huge need for Bitcoin from a financial inclusion perspective, there is a paucity of Bitcoin nodes in that part of the world. There are numerous reasons that can explain the decrease of Bitcoin nodes or the lack thereof in other regions; firstly there are a lot of people that are not educated about the importance of running a full Bitcoin node, especially given the current obsession with number go up. Secondly, due to the significant bandwidth usage of Bitcoin full nodes especially as the network scales, the costs of doing so are prohibitive; especially in places with subpar internet connectivity. This is where Erlay comes in. Erlay is a new efficient transaction relay protocol that aims to significantly minimize the bandwidth usage required to connect Bitcoin full nodes.

Approximately 50% of the bandwidth required to run a Bitcoin node is used just for announcing transactions. When a new bitcoin transaction is broadcast, it is sent to all nodes on Bitcoin’s p2p network and this occurs in two ways. Firstly, after receiving a transaction, a node sends a transaction identifier (i.e. transaction ID) to all of the peers it’s connected with. This transaction ID is subsequently verified by all these peers to ensure that they haven’t received the transaction in question from another peer. If not, the whole transaction is requested from the node that sent the transaction ID. This process repeats continuously and the end result is that there is a plethora of redundant messages being shared on the Bitcoin network, thus unnecessarily consuming a lot of bandwidth. It’s estimated that 44% of overall bandwidth used between nodes consists of these redundant messages. The long and short of it is that this approach has high redundancy and poor bandwidth efficiency. The bandwidth costs therefore become a huge impediment for some users to run a full node, which severely limits the extent of decentralization of the network.

Secondly, the decentralized nature of the network gives rise to another critical issue with regards to Bitcoin’s node connectivity, which is that it also uses large amounts of bandwidth to keep the connection open with all the other nodes. In other words the current protocol increases bandwidth consumption as the number of connections between nodes increases. This also increases the costs to run a Bitcoin full node as the network scales, which would make the network more prone to centralization. Over and above that, since the security of the Bitcoin network is heavily reliant on the connectivity between nodes (i.e. higher connectivity results in a more secure network) fewer connections between nodes would be bandwidth efficient but would result in a less secure and borderline centralized network. According to the white paper that was co-authored by Gleb Naumenko, Bryan Bishop, Pieter Wuille, Greg Maxwell, Alexandara Fedorova and Ivan Beschastnikh; Erlay will reduce the amount of bandwidth required to maintain current levels of connectivity between Bitcoin nodes by 40%, while simultaneously maintaining bandwidth usage as the connectivity between nodes increases. To put this in perspective, currently a connection to 32 nodes utilizes approximately 17.3GB per month to relay transactions and Erlay drastically reduces this to a meager 0.94GB per month! This is a huge quantum leap for bandwidth efficiency as shown by the diagrams below:

The paper further states that; “By allowing more connections at a small cost, Erlay improves the security of the Bitcoin network. And, as we demonstrate, Erlay also hardens the network against attacks that attempt to learn the origin node of a transaction.” In other words Erlay significantly improves bandwidth efficiency by reducing bandwidth used for transaction relay as well as scalability of connections between peers thus making the network more resistant to partitioning attacks and fortifies single nodes against eclipse attacks. While Erlay protocol support signaling has successfully merged into Bitcoin core, this was a development that took three and a half years to materialize, given the extensive review and testing that had to be done beforehand, because stability and security at the base layer are everything.

While Bitcoin is a significant breakthrough in creating a trustless and decentralized monetary system with superior monetary properties, its success is not guaranteed unless we the users remain committed to defending the principles upon which it is anchored. The victory by the small blockers in the blocksize war wasn’t handed to them on a silver platter but it came about through relentless commitment to the goal of separation of money and state. It was all or nothing. Many more attempts to control Bitcoin at the protocol level will be launched, however they will be doomed to fail if we remain resolute and unwavering in preserving the network’s core tenets; of which decentralization is chief among them, in my humble opinion. By keeping the costs of running a node as low as possible,more individual users from around the world are able to participate in validating the network, this is what Erlay represents. It’s a defense against centralization of the network by larger players thus preserving Bitcoin’s identity as a fully decentralized, permissionless and trustless peer-to-peer monetary system.

This is a guest post by Kudzai Kutukwa. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 9, 2022
How Bitcoin Helped Me Escape A Doomsday Cult

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This is an opinion editorial by Jonathan Leger, a software developer and author of the Regarding Bitcoin newsletter. A version of this article was originally published on Substack.

I was raised in a doomsday cult that taught that God was getting ready to wage the war of Armageddon and bring about the end of the current world order. The governments, all ruled by the devil, would be replaced with the Kingdom of Heaven ruled by Jesus Christ. The cult discouraged any kind of real financial planning because of this worldview. After all, what was the point of investing in a system facing imminent destruction?

This extreme religious upbringing — and my eventual escape from it — helped me in my path to understanding Bitcoin Maximalism.

Discovering Bitcoin

My Bitcoin experience began with a losing trade in the summer of 2014. After reading a few articles about this “magic internet money,” I bought my first whole coin for about $500. I wasn’t prepared for how volatile the price swings would be, though, and sold at a loss later that year. If only I had known…

The last five years have been an intense learning experience for me. At the end of 2017, I left the cult with my wife, who is currently shunned by her entire family (as required by cult doctrine). I lost all of my “friends” as well. We had to learn how the real world worked and how to build a social network outside of the ready-made set of “friends” handed to us by the church, as getting close to non-members was deeply discouraged. All non-members were going to die by God’s hand at Armageddon anyway, so there was no point in getting too familiar. Plus, their wicked ways might rub off on you, so it was best to keep your distance for fear that you might get hit by a stray fireball when the end came.

After leaving the cult, I embraced life with the fervor of a wrongly-jailed prisoner embracing freedom upon exoneration. I studied politics for the first time, since members didn’t vote or participate in any form of campaigning due to the belief that all earthly governments were Satanic. I read books on how far humanity had advanced and how much better off we all are than in centuries past, however imperfect the current world may be. I was excited and optimistic for the future.

In 2004, I had started and grew a successful business as a software developer and internet marketing coach. The tools our team developed helped people compete with larger companies for getting websites to the top of the search results in Google, as well as other related use cases. For many years, searching Google for “coolest guy on the planet” returned my website as the number one result, demonstrating the importance of the Bitcoiner mantra, “Don’t trust, verify.”

Despite making millions of dollars in successful software product launches, I lost most of it through poor financial decisions coupled with intensifying competition from much better capitalized companies. On top of that, I went through a very expensive, acrimonious divorce.

“Love is grand,” they say, “but divorce is a hundred grand.” I grew up poor and had little formal or personal education in how to properly manage money or what money even really was, so when I finally “made it” I didn’t know how to properly handle it.

As you might imagine, it wasn’t all bad. The money afforded me many incredible personal experiences. But my personal and home life were a mess, I was still a true believer in the doomsday cult praying for the end of the world, and on balance was very unhappy. I felt like the wealthy writer of Ecclesiastes, “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

In 2019, I was 42 years old, had escaped the cult and was remarried to a wonderful woman whom I adore. I spent much of my time studying markets to prevent repeating past mistakes and working to develop a retirement plan. I did well with stocks that year but kept hearing about Bitcoin and how it was like nothing else. After reading “The Bitcoin Standard,” I finally understood why sound money was important and why fiat was doomed to fail. I again bought into BTC, this time at around $9,000.

Contagion Hits

When COVID-19 first reared its ugly head in early 2020, I did what many people did: listen to the “experts.” But as the scenes of pandemic theater played out, I began to understand that politics exhibited many of the same attributes as the cult I came out of. There were leaders that could not be questioned and members who would shame and shun anyone who dared to speak up. Their god was “The Science,” their Pope, Anthony Fauci, their clergy, the CDC and politicians. Rights were eroded and small businesses shut down while big box chains and mega-corporations raked in record profits, including Big Pharma. Trillions of dollars were printed out of thin air, proving true the Cantillon effect that says the largest beneficiaries of changes in money supply are the people and corporations closest to the money printers.

Unlike many hardcore Bitcoiners, my investment goals were purely financial, not philosophical. Like so many others in the crypto casino, I was chasing gains. Because of this, I sold my bitcoin at $45,000 and jumped into altcoins with the belief that I could multiply my investment, which I did. In fact, I did well enough to be able to stop writing software for about a year and a half, which was a much-needed hiatus and gave me even more time for the research I was doing.

Then came the market crash of 2022. With inflation clearly not “transitory,” the money printer was halted, and the Federal Reserve began to raise rates at a historically-unprecedented pace. Markets reacted negatively, bringing all cryptocurrencies down with them. The price of bitcoin cratered along with everything else. Low prices exposed the weakness of overleveraged schemes like Celsius and Three Arrows Capital, sending them into bankruptcy. Terra collapsed along with a host of other smaller crypto operations.

The purportedly second-largest centralized crypto exchange in the world, FTX, stepped in with a promise to rescue the industry, only to turn out to be the largest fraud of them all when its own balance sheet was leaked. FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), was accused of stealing investors’ and users’ money and sending it to its trading arm, Alameda, where it was gambled away on high-risk trades that spectacularly failed to the tune of $10 billion.

A massive “hack” of FTX followed shortly thereafter, the repercussions of which are still playing out. Evidence of political intrigue emerged, supported by the fact that most mainstream media coverage treated SBF with kid gloves, some even painting him as a victim rather than a predator. As of this writing, nobody has been arrested. By way of comparison, Bernie Madoff was in handcuffs the day after his fraud was uncovered.

Bitcoin began flying off exchanges while Bitcoiners shook their damn heads at how many people had again ignored one of their most basic truths, “Not your keys, not your coins.” While I was glad to see people finally listening, the damage done was tremendous, both in financial and reputational loss. Since my start with Bitcoin, I always self-custodied my bags and so was unaffected by any of the collapses, at least as far as losing any of my holdings.

Though I never lost my respect for Bitcoin or the principles of decentralization and sound money, these events returned them front and center to my consciousness. I resumed listening to Bitcoiner podcasts, reading long-form articles, watching videos and reminding myself just how badly off the current world financial system really is.

“It’s just math,” say the Bitcoiners, and I believe they are correct. There’s no stopping the debt spiral now. The end is indeed coming, just not in the way I had been taught growing up.

I Finally Get It: ‘Don’t Trust, Verify’

During the time I was trading and HODLing altcoins, I thought Bitcoin Maxis were too extreme. Even though I agreed with their views on sound money and decentralization and agreed that most cryptos were just vaporware rug pulls waiting to happen, I didn’t understand their disdain for every crypto that wasn’t bitcoin. This was especially true for projects that were actively being used in the real world to seemingly beneficial effect.

As a software developer myself, I am aware that there is no single tool that covers all use cases. There’s Windows, or MacOS X, or Linux for computers, Android or Apple’s iOS for phones, and countless different apps that run on all of those platforms that perform different functions, many of them competing for market share. This competition encourages innovation which ultimately makes all software better. That free-market principle is something Bitcoiners honor, so I didn’t understand why they jettisoned it when it came to cryptocurrencies. My assumption was they did so out of self-interest. If people invested in other projects, they wouldn’t put their money in bitcoin, which hurt the Bitcoiner’s own portfolio.

Then there was proof of work. It’s power intensive and comparatively slow, even if far superior to bank technologies like SWIFT in terms of speed and guaranteed settlement. Even if the “green” argument was just fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), why stick with proof of work when other tech had proven far faster and more efficient, making it much more viable for payments systems?

Today, at last, after everything that’s happened over the past three years, I finally get it.

“Don’t trust, verify.”

The whole Bitcoiner philosophy comes down to those three words. Trust has always been abused, even if only by a small minority. But all it takes is a minority of people abusing and misusing your trust to cause you, and everyone else who trusts them, grave harm. So don’t trust, verify.

How does this relate to Bitcoiner’s referring to all other cryptos as “shitcoins” and dismissing them outright? It’s simple. The entire fiat currency system is a Ponzi scheme. Fiat is “money by decree” — it’s not backed by any real asset and only has value because the government says it does. Governments use fiat to rob citizens by printing money without citizens’ consent. This is, in effect, a tax that has not been approved by or voted on by the people. It’s theft.

For example, prior to fiat, governments would need actual hard currency (usually gold) to fund the wars they wanted to fight. If they didn’t have the money, they couldn’t fight the wars without raising taxes, which is never a popular proposition. With fiat, however, the government can print as much money as they want, pulling the money to fund their self-serving conflicts out of the pockets of the people who use that fiat currency: no permission necessary, and without most people realizing what’s happening.

Fiat also keeps people on a perpetual hamster wheel through inflation. If you know the money you have in the bank will be worth less next year than it is this year, you must keep trying harder to earn more money, year after year, just to keep your head above water. This keeps the majority of people as perpetual wage slaves, never quite able to get ahead, at least not enough to stop and enjoy their lives.

Without inflation you could live below your means, save your extra money, and trust in the deflationary effects of technology to make your money stretch much further once you decide to retire. After all, with technology constantly making supply chains more efficient through improvements in transportation and automation, everything should cost less over time, not more. And yet prices keep rising. Why? Inflation.

So what does fiat have to do with cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin? All other cryptocurrencies are working within the current financial system trying to improve it, make it more efficient, provide better privacy, etc. This has some positive effects. For instance, stablecoins give access to the U.S. dollar to people in countries whose currency is undergoing severe inflation and whose banking systems are corrupt or unreliable. But it still requires the fiat Ponzi to function.

You can talk until you’re blue in the face about how a highly-efficient cryptocurrency could give access to the financial system to billions of unbanked individuals, improving their lives by helping them escape their own inflationary currencies and bypassing their corrupt governments. But it doesn’t matter because you’re only providing those people access to another fiat currency, and fiat is murdering the free market. You can talk about how issuing tokens give small businesses the ability to raise money without having to pay billions to big banks to IPO. Doesn’t matter. You’re still working within the fiat system, and the fiat system is the fundamental root of all the problems to begin with.

To the Bitcoiner, cryptocurrencies are decks being built onto the Titanic as it sinks, while Bitcoin is the life raft people need to get on to save themselves. The tech of some cryptos might be great, but it only delays the inevitable demise of the sinking ship. Maxis believe that bitcoin is destined to replace fiat, not shore it up, returning sound money to the world. As they often say, “Bitcoin fixes this.”

For Bitcoiners, this isn’t just about money. It’s a guidestone that influences every aspect of life. It’s a belief system, though I’ll stop short of calling it a religion, since people of every conceivable religion also subscribe to its tenants. To those who aren’t Bitcoiners, maxis can appear to be in some kind of cult, but it’s not a cult. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Bitcoiners are people who, like me, have escaped a cult: the cult of fiat. Once they were like everyone else, brainwashed into believing that the government could be trusted with control over the money printer, that the Fed was capable of central planning of the economy, and that inflation was necessary for economic growth.

Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cage describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave for their entire lives. All they can see is a blank wall and the shadows cast upon it from a fire burning behind them. They give the shadows names, believing them to be actual representations of the real world. One of the prisoners escapes from the cave and, having experienced the actual world, realizes that the shadows are not true representations of it. He returns to the cave to try and convince the other prisoners, but they don’t believe him because the shadows are all they have ever known. Bitcoiners are the escaped man.

The Bitcoiner tribe can be rowdy and crass and harsh, but you must consider what they’re out to achieve and what they’re up against. Their endeavor is not for the faint of heart. It’s a real David and Goliath moment. The Bitcoiner stands, golden coins in hand, looking the giant in the eye with a defiance that onlookers usually perceive as madness. Maybe it is madness, but without that dauntless quality, Bitcoin wouldn’t have come as far as it has. And I, for one, will cheer them on as the giant collapses.

This is a guest post by Jonathan Leger. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 9, 2022
COP15: Super Reefs Offer Hope for Ocean Recovery Ahead of Biodiversity Summit
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- Opinion by Enric Sala (washington dc)
- Friday, December 09, 2022
- Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON DC, Dec 09 (IPS) – Delegates from more than 190 countries are donning thick coats and winter boots to attend the long-delayed UN biodiversity summit in Montreal, Canada—the land of caribou, beluga whales and wolverines.

They are gathering there to iron out the final details of a global deal for nature that seeks to curtail the extinction of one million species and the destruction of the ecosystems they help create.

I’ll join the delegates next week. As I trudge through the cold to speak with them about the urgent need to protect nature, I’ll be thinking of the distant southern Line Islands, a remote archipelago in the Republic of Kiribati, a nation known for its desperate battle against rising ocean levels.

Their islands could be among the first to disappear if we don’t phase off greenhouse gas emissions. But what is less known is that the southern Line Islands provide the strongest evidence that nature protection can foster ocean resilience to global warming.

In 2009, a team of scientists and I first surveyed the marine ecosystems surrounding the uninhabited southern Line Islands. What we saw was like a world from centuries ago. Fish abundance was off the charts; on every dive, we saw abundant large predators, such as sharks—an uncommon sight for even a seasoned diver. Thriving, living corals covered up to 90 percent of the ocean floor.

We thought the pristine and untouched corals were saved forever in 2015, when the government of Kiribati protected 12 nautical miles around the islands from fishing and other damaging activities in what is now the Southern Line Islands Marine Protected Area.

But then disaster struck. The same year, warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures killed half of the corals in the Southern Line Islands. The news discouraged many. If the most pristine reefs were to succumb so rapidly, then all hope is lost. Would they be able to recover?

To answer that question, we returned to the islands five years after the coral died off. I was terrified before the first dive—unsure if we’d see dead or recovering corals. But when I jumped in the water, I could not believe what I saw.

Amid massive schools of fish, the corals were back to their former richness – they had recovered completely. If we hadn’t known that half of the corals had recently died, I would have thought that nothing had changed since my first visit. They recovered faster than ever witnessed before, with millions of new coral colonies per square mile taking over the space left by dead corals.

This miracle was only possible because the reefs were fully protected from fishing. As a result, the fish biomass was enormous. Large parrotfish and schools of hundreds of surgeon fishes kept the reef healthy and seaweed-free by grazing and browsing continuously on the dead coral skeletons. Without seaweed smothering the dead corals, new corals could grow and restore the reef.

Our discovery on this expedition clearly showed that, when granted full protection from fishing and other extractive activities, marine ecosystems can bounce back. Strong protection yields resilience and replenishes our overfished ocean. We have seen this again and again, in Mexico, Colombia and the United States.

The Biden administration has pledged to protect more of the ocean under its jurisdiction, and even created a new Special Envoy for Biodiversity, currently held by Monica Medina. But there is more that countries around the world can do at a global and national level.

That is why I am carrying a strong message to Montreal: we must protect at least 30% of the Earth’s land and ocean by 2030, and we must hurry. Protecting a third of the planet is critical for biodiversity and all the benefits we obtain from it, such as oxygen, clean air and water, and food.

But it is also essential for mitigating climate change. Protecting vital areas in the ocean – and the land – will turn the tide against biodiversity loss and buy us time as the world phases out fossil fuels and replaces them with clean energy sources.

Ocean health hangs in the balance at COP15 in Montreal. But we’re already running out of time, with the summit delayed two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Right now, less than 8% of the ocean is under any kind of protection, and only 3% is highly protected like in the southern Line Islands.

We have eight years to quadruple all ocean protections ever achieved in human history. Some countries have announced new ocean protections, but we need a global action plan that targets the top priorities for conservation of the ocean—for the sake of biodiversity, food and climate.

This means that delegates must roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of ironing out a strong global agreement that doesn’t water down protection goals. There is no more time for podium pledges and empty speeches.

The only acceptable outcome of COP15 is a strong nature agreement including a serious commitment to protect at least 30% of our ocean by 2030.

Enric Sala is the National Geographic Explorer in Residence and the founder of National Geographic Pristine Seas. You can listen to an extended conversation about the Southern Line Islands expedition with Sala on the latest episode of the Overheard at National Geographic podcast.

IPS UN Bureau

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© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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December 9, 2022
Understanding Bitcoin Network Hash Rate Increases

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This is an opinion editorial by Alex, a bitcoin miner with Kaboomracks.

It is important for individuals looking at bitcoin mining for the first time to understand the importance of Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment as well the impact this has on mining profitability. Many newcomers to bitcoin mining will consult the profitability of an ASIC on a mining calculator, expecting that that profitability will stay relatively the same going forwards in the future. This is a misunderstanding as the profitability of any given machine, trends downwards over time. Increases in difficulty should be understood before purchasing an ASIC.

A simple way of understanding this is comparing an ASIC to any other electronic device. The longer the device is in use, the less relevant it is as new software requires more computing power. If you were to use an iPhone from 6 years ago, its performance would be incredibly frustrating. The older the phone gets, the less utility it has.

A very similar process happens in mining. When you are mining, you are competing with all the other miners around the world. As more miners turn on machines, it gets more difficult to compete. Having newer and more efficient hardware makes you more competitive, but that hardware is quickly moving towards being less competitive.

Picture courtesy of coinwarz.com

Bitcoin Difficulty Adjustment

Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment is something built into the Bitcoin protocol in order to ensure Bitcoin has a stable and predictable supply schedule. If there was no difficulty adjustment, all of the bitcoin likely would’ve already been mined and there would be little to no incentive for miners to secure the network. When more miners join the network, blocks are minted at a faster rate as a result of a hash rate increase. The network responds by adjusting the difficulty higher to ensure that blocks come in around 10 minutes. For miners, increased difficulty adjustments mean less profits. For the average Bitcoin user, it means more security for the monetary network they are using.

Picture taken from insights.braiins.com

Downwards difficulty adjustments mean that miners will be earning more profits as these are a result of hash rate coming offline. The famous example of this happening is when China banned Bitcoin mining and a large portion of the network hash rate went offline for a period of time. Downwards difficulty adjustments are not the norm as mining hardware is always getting more powerful and efficient. Even if there was a stagnation of machine efficiency and hash rate increases, more machines would be produced and plugged in. The Bitcoin mining industry is incredibly immature and there is a tremendous amount of room for growth going forward which means that hash rate is almost certainly going to increase at rapid rates going forward over the long run.

We are currently seeing a bull market in energy prices with a suppressed bitcoin price which means that miners are experiencing quite a bit of pain. There is a possibility that there could be a series of downward difficulty adjustments as hash rate comes offline, but this is not something that miners should put in their models. It is important to prepare for the worst case scenario which is what we have seen the last few months.

New Machines Coming To Market

Every couple years, ASIC manufacturers release a new machine with significant improvements in regards to hash rate and efficiency. Recent network hash rate increases are largely due to seeing Bitmain’s S19 XP and S19 Hydro being deployed. Another factor is that a large amount of older generation machines are finally being turned on as a result of infrastructure being built out.

This chart is an oversimplification just for visual purposes.

When you buy an ASIC, its value will be constantly depreciating as both network hash rate increases and new machines come onto the market. The value will fluctuate depending on the Bitcoin price, but it’s safe to say the machine loses value over time. That is why it is incredibly important to have the machine running when you have it. Buying it to plug in later means you are throwing money away unnecessarily.

Bitcoin Purchasing Power

Bitcoin mining is like taking a long position on Bitcoin, but with a lot of headaches and execution risk. If done correctly, it can be incredibly lucrative. If done incorrectly, it is a fantastic way to get poor quickly. The income the machine makes is fairly consistent, but the purchasing power of that income varies tremendously. Power prices may be stable priced in dollars, but are very volatile when priced in the income you are making from that machine. A S19j Pro may make 38,000-40,000 sats a day in income, but if you are mining on $0.10 a kWh, your power costs will be 41,263 sats with bitcoin trading at $17,461.

This is why it is incredibly important to try and get the lowest possible electricity prices in order to be profitable and ROI on your equipment. Finding cheap electricity is neither straightforward nor easy. Oftentimes there are hidden fees or complications that cause miners to fail. All miners regardless of how big or small are subjected to these economics of variable purchasing power, network hash rate increases, and machine devaluation/obsoletion.

ASIC Pricing

There is a base cost for the manufacturers to produce new equipment. We are currently at or reaching that floor for new equipment coming from the manufacturer. As a result, they are either slowing down or halting production of certain models. Individuals choose to pay a premium for new equipment because they come with warranties. Used equipment on the other hand generally does not come with a warranty, and also uncertainty of conditions that it was run in. For this reason, used equipment is often sold at a substantial discount.

ASIC pricing is variable just like every other industry. Supply and demand are the major factors that determine price. Individuals buying ASICs have a million different reasons why they may want to purchase at a certain time, but Bitcoin price and difficulty are major influences. If the purchasing power of the income being earned by an ASIC is low, there will be less demand and the ASIC price will fall. Bear markets are generally good times to buy because the demand drops significantly.

Moore’s Law And The Future Of ASICs

“Moore’s Law: an axiom of microprocessor development usually holding that processing power doubles about every 18 months especially relative to cost or size.” — Merriam Webster

We are coming to the end of the computer chip revolution as chip makers are pushing the boundaries of physics. In no way is this the end of massive increases in Bitcoin’s network hash rate. The mining industry is very rough around the edges in regards to very basic principles such as heat dissipation, software implementations, and relationships with energy producers. Computer chips may have slower leaps as far as increases in computing power, but we have barely scratched the surface in regards to other technological leaps forward that will ultimately lead to more power being consumed and more computing power expended in order to secure the Bitcoin Network.

As bitcoin becomes more widely adopted, and its value understood, the demand for mining is bound to increase globally. The result will naturally be an increase in Network hash rate. As a miner, this is a painful reality as it means the profitability of my hardware will decrease over time. As a Bitcoiner, it gives me confidence in the monetary network that I use daily.

This is a guest post by Kaboomracks Alex. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 8, 2022
We Indigenous Peoples are Rights-Holders, not Stakeholders
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Places where Indigenous tenure is secure are where lands and waters are best protected. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS
- Opinion by Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, Stanley Kimaren Ole Riamit
- Thursday, December 08, 2022
- Inter Press Service
Dec 08 (IPS) – After four failed rainy seasons, the land of the Maasai has withered. The worst drought in 40 years is a slow-motion storm of devastation in the Greater Horn of Africa, ruining the livestock, the communities, the Maasai way of life. Their cattle have been their greatest source of wealth and nutrition, but with grazing lands shriveled from the dry heat and their livestock emaciated, the entire region is in peril.

In contrast, the storms that smash the Philippines bring intense rains and devastating winds. The Igorot communities on the Island of Luzon have a front-row seat for these storms, and they are hard pressed keeping their way of life intact.

Super-Typhoon Haiyan may have made the biggest impression, hitting south of Luzon during the UN climate change talks in 2013, but in 2018 Luzon was hit directly by Super-Typhoon Mangkhut. Three months ago, Super-Typhoon Noru hammered the same area.

As a Maasai from Kenya and an Igorot from the Philippines, we Indigenous Peoples wake up every day to realities that are a world apart. Our peoples, however, share a deep attachment to our ancestral territories and to the flora and fauna we depend on for spiritual, cultural and physical needs.

The Maasai and the Igorot, as Indigenous Peoples all over the world, also have in common a colonial history that has caused unimaginable loss to our communities and damage to ecosystems that are vital to the global battles against biodiversity loss and climate change.

We have lost and been damaged by the actions of the past. And we can see that governments negotiating this year at the UN’s talks on climate change and biodiversity failed to protect our peoples and our ecosystems from present and future loss and damage.

There was an agreement in principle that there should be a fund to compensate for losses and damages due to climate change, but no specifics or actual funding emerged. Our survival and that of our lands, our cultures, and our traditional knowledge, all of this is at risk.

In the UN negotiations, Indigenous Peoples are not just stakeholders. Instead, we are rights holders. There has been ample conversation about how the tropical forests and peatlands present both climate and biodiversity solutions. These are our lands that contain these carbon sinks and are teeming with life.

Indigenous Peoples and local communities manage half the world’s land and care for 80% of Earth’s biodiversity, primarily under customary tenure arrangements.

Looking at tropical forests in particular, our stewardship has been shown to be the most effective at keeping them intact—better than government run “protected areas” and better than management by other private interests. Places where Indigenous tenure is secure are where lands and waters are best protected.

In its most recent report on climate change this year, the UN’s scientific panel, said: “Supporting Indigenous self-determination, recognising Indigenous Peoples’ rights and supporting Indigenous knowledge-based adaptation are critical to reducing climate change risks and effective adaptation.”

Yet a 2021 study showed, however, that Indigenous communities and organizations receive less than 1% of the climate funding meant to reduce deforestation. Of the $1.7 billion pledged at COP 26 to support the tenure rights and forest guardianship of Indigenous peoples and local communities, only 7% of the funds disbursed have gone directly to organizations led by them, representing only 0.13% of all climate development aid.

There is very little money available for economic and non-economic loss and damage from the climate change induced extreme weather that tears through us. And the UN’s science panel report notes that “Climate change is impacting Indigenous Peoples’ ways of life, cultural and linguistic diversity, food security and health and well-being.”

The transformation that scientists are calling for to meet both climate and biodiversity crises requires just and effective responses, and can only be led by us. At the same time, we need assistance in coping with this extreme weather.

These crises have taken away the middle ground, that quixotic search for compromise that has inevitably delayed effective action. With limited funds available, we face a paradox. The wealth of past exploitation could help alleviate the damages that climate change has caused, or more of this money could be used for adaptation and mitigation, to reduce the worst impacts of what climate change will throw at us—now and in the future.

The urgency of funding both needs has yet to take hold, while the carbon in our lands continues to be viewed as a climate solution, a theoretical commodity to be bought and sold in markets run many thousands of miles away. Profits are made by people and entities who have no role in how we manage and protect our lands, yet very little of the proceeds—like the climate development aid—comes our way.

Ensuring and respecting land rights represents a risk reduction strategy for all of humanity, not just for the people seeking to invest in lands inhabited by the peoples who manage them best. Bringing us to the table in planning and implementing conservation and development solutions—both globally and locally—has never been more important.

We welcome those who want to work with us and provide assistance and resources as we strive to keep our lands and our community wellbeing intact. If we are to escape the worst of what climate change has in store for us, the time for grabbing land, money and power—and clinging to material wealth—has to be relegated to the past.

Instead, all parts of humanity must learn to work together and share equitably, in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. The environmental problems of our planet threaten us all.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, from the Kankana-ey Igorot People of Mountain Province in the Philippines, and a lawyer by profession, is the Global Policy and Advocacy Lead for Nia Tero.

Stanley Kimaren ole Riamit is an Indigenous peoples’ leader from the Pastoralists Maasai Community in southern Kenya. His is the Founder-Director of Indigenous Livelihoods Enhancement Partners (ILEPA) a community based Indigenous Peoples organization based in Kenya.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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<a href="https://www.globalissues.org/news/2022/12/08/32600">We Indigenous Peoples are Rights-Holders, not Stakeholders</a>, <cite>Inter Press Service</cite>, Thursday, December 08, 2022 (posted by Global Issues)

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We Indigenous Peoples are Rights-Holders, not Stakeholders, Inter Press Service, Thursday, December 08, 2022 (posted by Global Issues)
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December 8, 2022

This fund beats the S&P 500 by using just 75 of its components. Here’s how it works.

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What worked well during the years-long bull market through 2021 — a focus on growth, regardless of price — has ground to a halt this year. The rebirth of the value style of investing — and modest valuations overall — has taken hold.

The approach taken by the Invesco S&P 500 GARP ETF has paid off through both bull and bear markets.

Let’s begin with a 10-year chart comparing total returns with dividends reinvested for the Invesco S&P 500 GARP ETF
SPGP,
+0.67%
and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust
SPY,
+0.78%,
which tracks the benchmark S&P 500:

FactSet

So far this year, SPGP is down 12%, while SPY is down 16%. But the long-term chart shows significant and consistent outperformance for SPGP, even during the bull market.

The S&P 500 GARP Index

GARP stands for “growth at a reasonable price.” SPGP tracks the S&P 500 GARP Index, which is reconstituted and rebalanced twice a year, on the third Fridays of June and December. The next change occurs Dec. 16.

S&P Dow Jones Indices assigns a growth score to each component of the S&P 500 by averaging the three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for earnings and sales per share.

The top 150 components of the S&P 500 by growth score are eligible for inclusion in the GARP index. Those 150 are ranked by “quality/value composite score,” which is the average of these three ratios:

Financial leverage — total debt to book value.
Return on equity — trailing 12 months’ earnings per share divided by book value per share.
Earnings-to-price — 12 months’ earnings per share divided by the share price.

The top 75 of the 150 by QV rankings are then included in the GARP index and weighted by the growth score, with portfolio weightings ranging from 0.5% to 5%.

There is a weighting limitation of 40% to any one of the 11 S&P sectors.

Addressing concentration risk

The benchmark S&P 500 Index
SPX,
+0.75%
is weighted by market capitalization, which means it is more heavily concentrated than you might expect — success is rewarded, with rising stocks more heavily weighted over time.

That can backfire during a bear market, with Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
+2.14%
down 47% and Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
-0.34%
down 51% this year, to name two prominent examples.

Looking at the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust
SPY,
+0.78%,
which is the first and largest exchange traded fund and tracks the benchmark index by holding all of its components, six companies (Apple Inc.
AAPL,
+1.21%,
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+1.24%,
Amazon, both common share classes of Alphabet Inc.
GOOGL,
-1.30%

GOOG,
-1.26%
and Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
BRK.B,
+0.06%
) make up 19.2% of the portfolio.

That percentage has come down this year, but a lot of risk remains concentrated in a handful of companies. (Apple alone makes up 6.4% of the SPY portfolio. Tesla is now the ninth-largest holding, making up 1.4% of the portfolio.)

One way to address high concentration in an index fund is to use an equal-weighted approach, which Mark Hulbert recently discussed.

For the Invesco S&P 500 GARP ETF, the underlying index’s selection methodology has resulted in much less portfolio concentration than we see in SPY, with the top five holdings making up 10.9% of the portfolio.

Here are the 10 largest holdings of SPGP:

Company	Ticker	Share of portfolio
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.	REGN, +0.15%	2.49%
Cigna Corporation	CI, +0.39%	2.26%
Everest Re Group, Ltd.	RE, +0.24%	2.21%
Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated	VRTX, +1.18%	1.98%
D.R. Horton, Inc.	DHI, -0.39%	1.97%
Expeditors International of Washington, Inc.	EXPD, +0.23%	1.96%
Incyte Corporation	INCY, +0.10%	1.92%
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.	GS, -0.51%	1.83%
Ebay Inc.	EBAY, +1.67%	1.81%
Pfizer Inc.	PFE, +3.07%	1.73%
Source: FactSet

Click on the tickers for more information about any company, ETF or index in this article.

You should also read Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

Don’t miss: 10 Dividend Aristocrat stocks expected by analysts to rise up to 54% in 2023

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December 8, 2022

Why I Quit Investing In The Fiat Ponzi And Started Saving In Bitcoin

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This is an opinion editorial by Mickey Koss, a West Point graduate with a degree in economics. He spent four years in the infantry before transitioning to the Finance Corps.

Always up, always having to add more lest you fall behind. I could feel the American dream slowly slipping away every year. We dutifully paid our bills, contributed to retirement accounts, invested prudently and yet it felt like every year things got a little tighter. A little harder to contribute what we needed to. When we found Bitcoin, it gave us hope.

“Striking is mutual suffering. A game of chicken. Bitcoin changed the game. It made striking valuable to the striker.”

–Matt Hill on “Bitcoin Audible,” episode 75

Now my wife and I are on strike, like many of you reading this article probably are. Once the money printers started roaring after the COVID-19 lockdowns began in 2020, I felt a sinking feeling that the world would never be the same again. Ungodly sums of money were mentioned on news stations with such causal indifference. Ultimately, the results speak for themselves:

Top central bank balance sheets

We Need Better Critics

One of the most commonly-cited critiques I hear from seemingly-sophisticated investors and economic PhDs alike is that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme: a game of the greater fool buying from the scammy huckster as the earlier investors dump their bags on the new.

LinkedIn post that inspired this article, accessed on November 27 but since deleted

The above post beautifully illustrated the complete lack of understanding, let alone critical thinking, surrounding this particular line of FUD. The abject lack of intellectual curiosity is astonishing, yet somehow unsurprising given my recent stint in academia:

“The whole thing depends on even more people parting with their savings…”

Is this not true for the stock market? The housing market? The commodities market? By that logic, every market with fluidity of pricing based on supply and demand is a Ponzi scheme. I guess it’s time to go back to the barter economy? Or does the stock market go up on earnings alone without any buyers or demand?

In fact, It appears to me that prices have been going up faster than earnings since about 1980, even when taking inflation into account:

Source

The above image depicts the Shiller PE ratio for the S&P 500. It is the price-to-earnings ratio for the stock market, but adjusted for inflation. Can anyone say “Cantillon effect”?

Fiat Is The Ponzi

Crypto is a symptom, not the underlying problem. Years of pent up nihilism unleashed into get-rich-quick pump and dumps as the world seemingly falls apart around us. It’s not hard to see why. But Bitcoin is not crypto, and crypto is not Bitcoin.

Federal Reserve economic data: M2 money supply vs. S&P 500

In what now feels like the blink of an eye, trillions of dollars were created to prevent the system from imploding. Suddenly, the stock market was booming while it seemed like everything was crumbling. I don’t even blame the central bankers. They responded to their incentives and did what they had to, but the effects were dire. If you weren’t already invested, you lost big, making it just that much harder to get your dollars to work for you, to escape inflation and eventually escape the rat race.

One of the most salient illustrations to me is the below graph. It demonstrates that you should buy a house, any house, it doesn’t matter. Because if you don’t already own a house, if you choose to save instead, you may never actually be able to afford one. It doesn’t take a lot of empathy to understand the financial desperation many are feeling today.

Federal Reserve economic data: M2 money supply vs. housing price index

Now, I admit that I’m not a professional statistician, but the charts appear to have some significant correlation. Perhaps CPI inflation may not be the only problem. Perhaps asset price inflation may be forcing savers to become part-time investors. Supply and demand has a price impact on bitcoin, yes, but does the stock market not require new money to support prices as well?

Bitcoin Is Savings

Savings: Money put by the excess of income over expenditures.

–Merriam-Webster

So, why can’t we just save money anymore? The FRED graphs included here tell it all. If you don’t become an investor, you will never keep up. That is, until now.

Bitcoin is our savings in a world bereft of things worthy of investment. Even if it hits $1 million tomorrow, we’re not selling. What would we even sell it for? To diversify? Into what? A stock market completely dependent upon money printing? An investment property where our tenants won’t have to pay rent following the stroke of a politician’s pen? A shiny rock with “intrinsic value”?

You see, how could Bitcoin be a Ponzi when Bitcoiners don’t even want your dollars? What you don’t understand is that we’re playing a different game now. What you don’t understand is that we’re trying to build something new; a better future for our children and grandchildren.

So, if you think bitcoin is doomed to crash and burn then short it. Try to profit off our demise, though I don’t think you will.

We will just keep buying and holding, continuing to front-run you and Wall Street, and everyone else who refuses to even try to understand Bitcoin. We hold no anger or resentment toward you. We don’t want to eat the rich, or to burn the system down; we just don’t want to play by your rules anymore. And if we go down with the ship, at least we lost it all fighting for something we believed in.

This is a guest post by Mickey Koss. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 8, 2022
To Achieve Human Rights, Start with Food
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The gravity of the situation demands a holistic approach to tackle the hunger problem. We must take a human rights-based approach so as to apply human rights principles in our efforts. Credit: Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos/FAO
- Opinion by Maximo Torero (rome)
- Wednesday, December 07, 2022
- Inter Press Service
ROME, Dec 07 (IPS) – Maximo Torero Cullen is the Chief Economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)This year’s Human Rights Day marks the 74th year since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an international document that enshrines the rights and freedoms of all people. The right to food became a legal obligation for countries to promote and protect as part of the economic, social and cultural rights in 1966.

That fundamental right every one of us is entitled to — to be free from hunger — is at risk today like never before. Amid multiple global crises, such as climate change, pandemics, conflicts, growing inequalities and gender-based violence, more and more people are falling into the hunger trap.

As many as 828 million people faced hunger in 2021, an increase of 150 million more people since 2019, before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most recent projections indicate that more than 670 million people could still not have enough to eat in 2030.

It’s a far cry from the “zero hunger” target the world has ambitiously committed to less than a decade ago. It also shows just how deep inequalities run in societies across the world.

There is enough food to feed everyone in the world today. What is lacking is the capacity to buy food that is available because of high levels of poverty and inequalities. The war in Ukraine has made things worse. It shocked the global energy market, which has caused food prices to surge even more. This year alone saw an increase of $25 billion in food import bills of the world’s 62 most vulnerable countries, a 39% increase relative to 2020.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, a health crisis rapidly evolved into a food crisis, as the virus caused a shortage of farm workers and threatened to break down food supply chains. It taught us the importance of understanding the interlinked challenges of meeting growing food demand while protecting environmental, social and economic sustainability, as envisaged under the Sustainable Development Goals.

Eighty percent of the global poor live in rural areas and rely on farming to survive. Many of them — women, children, indigenous people and people with disability — don’t have access to food and are struggling with poor harvest, expensive seeds and fertilizers, and lack of financial services. They are directly affected by the risks and uncertainties facing our agrifood systems.

The gravity of the situation demands a holistic approach to tackle the hunger problem. We have to fix our broken agrifood systems to make them more inclusive, resilient and sustainable.

It means that we must take a human rights-based approach so as to apply human rights principles in our efforts. International frameworks provide legal and policy guidance to achieve universal, fundamental human rights.

The United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, for example, states that the right to food is indispensable for the fulfilment of other human rights. It emphasizes sustainability in that food must be accessible for both present and future generations. From availability, accessibility and healthy diets to food safety, consumer protection and the obligation of states to provide adequate food to their populations, it provides the foundation upon which to rebuild our agrifood systems.

Creating a coherent policy and legal framework around those core content will promote the right to food.

Since human rights are indivisible and interdependent, a human right cannot be enjoyed fully unless other human rights are also fulfilled. Advocating policies that promote other human rights — like health, education, water and sanitation, work and social protection — can positively impact the right to food as well.

Human Rights Day calls for dignity, freedom, and justice for all. Let us remember the critical role the right to food plays in achieving these important principles. And without these principles, we cannot reduce poverty or improve the well-being of all.

Food is fundamental to life. And it is key to strengthening our global efforts to find lasting solutions to today’s challenges.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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<a href="https://www.globalissues.org/news/2022/12/07/32593">To Achieve Human Rights, Start with Food</a>, <cite>Inter Press Service</cite>, Wednesday, December 07, 2022 (posted by Global Issues)

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December 7, 2022
Castles Made of Sand Dollars: SBF, FTX, and other Three Letter Agents

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The story of Bitcoin has certainly had its fair share of nefarious characters, criminal activity, bad haircuts and worse wardrobes, and yet our anti-hero du jour has seemed to outdo them all. Sam Bankman-Fried, better known by the three letter acronym SBF, burst onto the scene at the peak of the 2017 bubble, founding Alameda Research that September, just four years after graduating from an internship into a full-time position at one of the world’s largest market makers, Jane Street Capital.

SBF is the son of Stanford Law professor and founder of left-wing super PAC Mind The Gap, Barbara Fried, and Stanford professor Joseph Bankman, an expert on tax shelter laws and government regulation. At the start of 2018, SBF had struck digital gold while taking advantage of the arbitrage opportunity presenting itself between a higher demand for bitcoin in the Asian market, colloquially known as the “kimchi premium”. By the end of the year, and after amassing a considerable fortune from this high-volume bitcoin/dollar spread, he officially moved to Hong Kong, formally founding the derivatives exchange FTX in the following spring.

The Bitcoin network that SBF rode from rags to riches and back again was partially launched in direct response to the fiat money experiment rearing its ugly head in the subprime mortgage, real estate and eurodollar crises that culminated into what is now known as the Great Financial Crisis of 2007 to 2009.

“??EThe Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks%”

– Satoshi Nakamoto, January 3, 2009

This now infamous inscription in the genesis block made clear the inappropriate fractional reserve banking and predatory loan fiascos of our regulated banking industry was to be put to rest once and for all by this emergent monetary protocol; a completely transparent and decentralized ledger would de-incentivize fraud and prevent obfuscation of illicit activity. A new competitor to the dollar arose from the ashes of the meltdown, and with it, a new standard for financial fairness, complete with predictable issuance, controlled once and for all by the people for the people. Yet in any system made with good intentions, criminals like SBF and his bought-and-paid-for political and media allies manage to find a way to hurt innocent people for the advantage of an unknown few. Like most intriguing stories of fraudulent financial crimes, this one starts in the Bahamas, and ends with a tidal wave of asset liquidations and broken homes.

“If you think the Bahamas has ruined your global tax system, you have a pretty terrible global tax system.”

– Steven Dean, Summer 2020 [1]

Launching The Stablecoin, CBDC Race To The Bottom

The Bahamas seems innocuous enough, and yet there is a long history of U.S. tax avoidance, complete with rum-running bootleggers during the prohibition era. Continuing this tradition, the Caribbean banking centers, including the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, as of August 2022, were the fourth-largest foreign holders of treasury securities, behind only Japan, China and the U.K. Shortly after the time of its founding, FTX was fully taking advantage of the free money era that began with the 2008 crash and was sustained by low-to-zero interest rates brought upon by the Trump administration.

These rate cuts were started by the Trump-nominated and Biden-renominated Jerome Powell and were further exacerbated by both of their administrations’ COVID responses. An unprecedented pumping of all things dollar denominated occurred, with real estate, stock indexes, bitcoin and a whole bunch of unregistered securities known as altcoins reaching new highs across the board. In June 2019, one month after the founding of FTX, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced Libra, a digital currency based on a basket of international currencies; a novel take on stablecoins. This launched the stablecoin and CBDC race in earnest, and coincidentally enough, the Central Bank of the Bahamas became the first such institution to announce its own CBDC, the sand dollar, in October 2020. The sand dollar itself was pegged to the Bahamian dollar, which is itself pegged to the United States dollar, and thus with its government-sanctioned launch, the birth of the first central bank-issued stablecoin dollar came to be on the sandy beaches of SBF’s new home.

“What is the reserve currency of the crypto economy going to be? Right now it’s unambiguously the USD. And interestingly it’s USD whether or not you’re looking at the American crypto economy.”

– Sam Bankman-Fried, November 5, 2021

While the U.S. government feigned fear of systemic risk at the time, the Chinese government understood the Libra project to be a backdoor dollarization of the G7 currencies rumored to be included in its basket. A Metaverse-held take on the 1985 Plaza Accord, this plan of coordinated central banking would spread USD network users across the internet’s biggest network, sped up by the high velocity available in centralized digital payments and globalized by the borderless nature of the Facebook user base.

The digital yuan was trialed in April 2021 with great haste in reaction to this development, and by the Winter Olympics 2022, had launched for foreign attendees in Beijing. Not to be outdone by these new-look, same-shit fiat cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin made its own financial history when President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador took to the stage at Bitcoin 2021 to announce the legal tender aspirations of his small but dollarized nation. On March 9, 2022 President Joe Biden signed Executive Order #14067–”Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”, which included aspirations for mitigation of financial risks in digital asset markets, as well as a clause stating that within 210 days, the attorney general, in consultation with the secretary of the treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, must provide a formal proposal for a government-issued CBDC.

By this point, the Bitcoin financial system had been utterly and properly dollar-ified, with billions of dollars in liquidity of dollar-denominated trading pairs making up the lion’s share of market activity. The same can be said for the Ethereum network, which has seen its compliance-driven perversion by non-native assets taking the wheel from its token Ether, as stablecoin and other dollar derivatives now uphold the majority of economic weight of the system. Both stablecoin giants Circle, issuer of USDC, and Tether came out in support of the merge, further ossifying their stake in the now-nearly-70%-OFAC-compliant blockchain. [2] As of this article’s writing, over 15.5 million ether are currently staked without active withdrawals in the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, worth nearly $18 billion dollars.[3] Fortunately for Bitcoin, the consensus weight of its system is not manipulated by user stake, and thus the Bitcoin market has been seemingly unaffected – negatively anyway – by this decade-long development. At least until scammer Do Kwon and his ponzi-scheme Luna wreaked havoc on investors at the start of May of 2022.

“[Crypto is] obviously serious…you want to do right by it in the regulatory space.”

– President Bill Clinton, April 27, 2022 (Allegedly) [4]

Contagion Spreads

Only a few weeks after SBF hosted a keynote with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton at the FTX-organized Crypto Bahamas conference, one of the largest-ever over-the-counter bitcoin purchases was announced by the LUNA team.

Terraform Labs and the non-profit Luna Foundation Guard, two entities headed by Do Kwon, had begun a campaign to purchase bitcoin as a reserve asset in the event that their algorithmic stablecoin, UST, deviated from its $1 peg. Shortly before their collapse, the plan had ballooned to the lofty goal of stacking over $10 billion in the hardest known digital commodity known to man. This purchase was financed with Three Arrows Capital, or 3AC, and was facilitated by cryptocurrency broker Genesis.

“Terra’s remarkable growth has continuously reshaped crypto markets over the last two years”, said Joshua Lim, head of derivatives at Genesis. “Genesis is excited to be a liquidity partner to the Terra ecosystem, connecting it to a broader audience of institutional market participants.”

With the bitcoin reserves of Luna Foundation Guard totalling 80,394 BTC, valued at over $3.1 billion on May 5, 2022, this purchase placed LFG among the top-10 bitcoin holders in the world. [5] But only for a moment, for while it might feel like a lifetime ago, what happened next should look awfully familiar; the peg was attacked, the recently-purchased bitcoin fortune was liquidated, Binance, led by CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), aptly halted all trading on LUNA and UST pairs – with notable exceptions to their own stablecoin BUSD – and Kwon seemingly fled to outside of U.S. jurisdiction to Asia. [6]

Thus begins our first of many repeatable points of inquiry; where exactly did this bitcoin go? According to an audit released in November 2022, over 33,000 bitcoin were transferred to Binance on May 10, 2022, and sold along with other assets while failing to defend the peg. [7] The same day the nearly $1 billion dollars worth of bitcoin hit Binance’s order books, bitcoin’s USD price broke below $30,000, falling from $40,000 just a week before.

On May 13, SBF purchased a 7.6% stake in Robinhood, the trading platform that came under scrutiny for halting trading during the GameStop fiasco in early 2021. Bloomberg had reported that around 40% of Robinhood’s revenue came directly from selling customers orders to firms such as Two Sigma Securities, and Citadel Securities. [8] Citadel had been fined $700,000 in July 2020 for front running trades placed by customers orders, and in September of that same year, Robinhood itself was questioned by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for improperly informing clients of selling stock trades to known high-frequency trading firms.

Previously in December 2020, Robinhood had agreed to pay $65 million to settle charges of repeated misstatements for failure to disclose their receipts of payments from said trading firms. [9] When newly-nominated Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen briefed newly-elected President Joe Biden on this conflict of interest in February 2021, she herself had to acquire an ethics waiver due to having received at least $700,000 in speaker fees from Citadel LLC the year prior. [10] SBF had disclosed this purchase via a filed Schedule 13-D form with the SEC, costing $648.3 billion dollars and giving him 2.8% voting power in their dual-class share structure, under the entity Emergent Fidelity Technologies; a name said to be randomly generated. [11]

“On July 13, Coinbase Exchange will be unifying USD and USDC order books. As part of the unification process, USDC order books will be merged under USD order books to create a better, more seamless trading experience with deeper liquidity for USD and USDC.”

– Coinbase Exchange Twitter, June 29, 2022 [12]

Circle, the entity behind the increasingly utilized USDC stablecoin, had previously expanded their international offerings with a subsidiary operation based in Bermuda with an announcement made on July 22, 2019. [13] This entity, filed under the Digital Assets Business Act of 2018 (“DABA”) meant that Circle was the first major stablecoin issuer to receive a Class F (“Full”) DABA license that covered their operation of custody, payment services, exchange, trading and more financial services within the digital asset realm. Circle’s other banking partners, Signet, Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital had made USD loans to Celsius, Voyager, Block Fi, Three Arrows Capital and Alameda Research. By the time this article was written, all had filed for bankruptcy. Two of their other business affiliates, Galaxy Digital and Genesis, have also reported massive losses in the FTX collapse, with rumors of further contagion effects coming. Coinbase, a publicly-traded exchange under the ticker $COIN, announced in its Q2 2022 shareholder letter that nearly one third of total revenue was derived from interest on USD-denominated holdings, including a large USDC position:

“Interest income was $33 million, up 211% compared to Q1. The increase was primarily driven by our USDC activity, as well as higher interest rates as we generate interest on fiat customer custodial funds… at the end of Q2, we had $6.2 billion in total $USD resources. In addition, we had $428 million of crypto assets.” [14]

When the letter was released in late August 2022, interest on USDC holdings for 12 months was up to 4.7%, while one-month yields were an even 4%. By November 16, 2022, USDC yields were down to 0% across all time frames.[15]

“1) Binance converts USDC –> BUSD, and we see the change in supplies. Thus begins the Second Great Stablecoin War.”

– @SBF, October 23, 2022 [16]

On September 4, 2022, Binance announced that it would be auto-converting all USDC, USDP and TUSD, three major dollar stablecoins, into its self-issued BUSD, effective in just 25 days. [17] This led to continued concerns about Binance’s solvency with the preceding few months, especially July 2022, seeing the largest known outflows of bitcoin in the exchange’s history, eclipsing even March 2020’s black swan bottom.

On October 11, 216 days after Biden’s executive order with the aforementioned 210-day clause, BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian bank with over $43 trillion on the books, and coincidentally, the custodian of Circle’s reserves backing USDC, announced the launch of its digital asset custody program. [18] Involved with more than 20% of the world’s investable assets, the bank founded by the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, was also listed as a partner in the FedNow pilot. [19]

Despite these institutional developments, a continued bear market weighed heavily on the now-plummeting bitcoin price. Paradoxically, more and more Bitcoin hash rate poured onto the network. These concurrent movements saw Bitcoin’s hash price plummet to an all-time low, spurring a massive liquidation of bitcoin liabilities off mining operators books. On October 26, Core Scientific, then the largest Bitcoin mining operation in the world, filed for bankruptcy with millions of dollars in debt liabilities, thousands of ASICs, and yet in their filings, held only 24 bitcoin total when the circus came to town. [20] Where exactly did all this bitcoin go? On that same day, barely two weeks before the FTX collapse, Binance saw its largest single day outflow, with 71,579 coins, totalling over $1.1 billion in dollar terms. [21] This pushed net outflows to nearly 95,000 coins from the world’s largest exchange since just that July. Again, where exactly did all this bitcoin go? The very next day, October 27, 2022, SBF appeared on The Big Whale and announced future plans for FTX to launch its very own stablecoin. [22]

More Sand Than Dollars

“CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and caribbean islands. They are going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex gf who was a spy. They will torture me to death.”

– Nikolai Muchgian, October 28, 2022 [23]

On October 24, 2022, the MakerDAO approved a community proposal to custody nearly $1.6 billion USDC with Coinbase Prime. [24] Four days later, Nikolai Muchigan, the co-founder of MakerDAO and inventor of Rai, a DAI-fork stablecoin, tweeted that his life was in danger due to a Caribbean island blackmail ring, supposedly backed by Israeli and U.S. intelligence agents. Three days later, on Halloween, the 29-year-old coder Muchigan was found dead, having drowned in the sea off Condado Beach in Puerto Rico. [25]

Two days later, on November 2, 2022, CoinDesk reporter Ian Allison released findings that over a third of all assets – around $5.8 billion of $14.6 billion – on the balance sheet of SBF’s Alameda Research was intrinsically, and soon to be fatally, linked to FTX’s exchange token FTT. A “bank” run commenced, and after three days of nearly $6 billion in withdrawals, FTX was left with literally one single bitcoin. Where exactly did all this bitcoin go? The next day in an interview with Fortune, Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong made note that USDC will become the de facto central bank digital currency in the U.S. [26]

“The policymakers in the U.S. will set the framework that need to be followed so that the private market will actually create the solutions, and USD coin has been on a really rapid rise… the regulatory environment is one of the biggest unlocks we’re going to have in terms of growing this industry and perhaps even getting the prices to go back up in the right direction”

– Brian Armstrong, November 3, 2022

On November 6, CZ announced Binance would liquidate a remaining portion of FTT it had acquired from exiting FTX’s equity, having received around $2.1 billion in BUSD and FTT. Minutes after his announcement, Caroline Ellison, SBF’s partner and the CEO of Alameda Research, offered to purchase the tokens at $22 each, in an over-the-counter fashion. [27] By November 8, CZ and SBF had a phone call and seemingly came to a tentative deal for acquisition, reserving the right to back out of the deal at any time, while interestingly also leaving both U.S.-based proprietary exchanges, Binance.us and FTX.us, outside the scope of the deal.

“Things have come full circle, and FTX.com’s first, and last, investors are the same: we have come to an agreement on a strategic transaction with Binance for FTX.com (pending DD etc)”, SBF tweeted. [28]

Later that evening, FTX officially suspended all asset withdrawals. As part of the conditions of the acquisition, SBF was forced to open the FTX books and show the bottom of his pockets; seeing more sand than dollars, CZ backed out of the deal. A few important statements were made in the 48 hours or so that led up to this sudden cataclysm, including from the awfully-quiet U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission itself.

“Liquidating our FTT is just post-exit risk management, learning from LUNA. We gave support before, but we won’t pretend to make love after divorce. We are not against anyone. But we won’t support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs. Onwards.”

– CZ, November 6, 2022 [29]

On November 7, 2022, the SEC officially deemed LBRY, or Library Coin, an unregistered security offering, setting a devastating precedent throughout the extended cryptocurrency market. [30] In the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire, the memorandum and order read, “The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) contends that LBRY, Inc. offered and sold unregistered securities in violation of Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933”, the act colloquially known as The Howey Test.

Due to LBRY reserving a pre-mine of nearly 400 million LBC tokens, and the knowledge that the company to date had spent approximately half of its pre-mined LBC, the SEC determined common enterprise complete with a lack of disclosure and proper filing of its now alleged security offering through required channels in the Gary Gensler-chaired SEC. The implications of this filing sent shockwaves across the pre-mined token industry, including exchanges listing these tokens as well as the entities behind their issuance. Conveniently, the next day was November 8, the United States’ midterm elections, with the balance of the senate and the house — and perhaps the regulatory path of the digital asset industry — once again at stake.

Searching for FTX on FEC.gov brings up 456 individual campaign contributions from SBF, CEO Ryan Salame, and others. [31] Salame’s contributions total over $14 million towards GOP candidates, while SBF’s “effective altruism” contributed over $20 million in donations to DNC politicians. Having been the second leading donor to the Biden campaign, by the time the final tallies from election night rolled in, SBF’s bankroll had finally caught up with his morals, and he found himself nearly completely bankrupt.

By November 9, the day after the elections, SBF had reportedly lost 94% of his net worth, down to $1 billion from more than $15 billion, leaving him with the largest single-day loss by a person according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. [32] Early in the morning of November 10, SBF took to Twitter to explain what happened, writing “I’m sorry. That’s the biggest thing. I fucked up, and should have done better”, before making a specific note that “THIS IS ALL ABOUT FTX INTERNATIONAL, THE NON-US EXCHANGE. FTX US USERS ARE FINE!” [33]

Chapter 11

“The administration […] has consistently maintained that without proper oversight, cryptocurrencies risk harming everyday Americans…The most recent news further underscores these concerns and highlights why prudent regulation of cryptocurrencies is indeed needed.”

– White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, November 10, 2022 [34]

On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, FTX and Alameda Research officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and SBF stepped down as CEO. In addition, 130 affiliated companies connected or associated with FTX also commenced voluntary proceedings under Chapter 11. [35] The tide had gone out, and nearly everyone involved got caught swimming naked, as a near-endless tidal wave of dollar-denominated liquidations made quick work of SBF’s Caribbean empire.

While the first trickles of a dollar CBDC may have started in the Bahamas, the monsoon of coming regulation and contagion of the Second Great Stablecoin War is far from over. The dollar, having fallen 10% off 35-year DXY highs since September, looks for new ways to innovate and further dollarize markets across the globe.

On November 15, just four days after the SBF tsunami crashed to shore, BNY Mellon, as well as a dozen or so other banking institutions, announced the start of a twelve-week digital dollar pilot program with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. [36] On the very same day, BlockFi announced plans for bankruptcy filings, only five months after taking a $250 million loan from FTX, and Circle announced users would now be able to settle payments by accepting Apple Pay. [37,38] With a significant 43% discount now showing on the highly-regulated Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, further community requests for proof of reserves are growing around Genesis and Grayscale, both owned by the Digital Currency Group, and even their custodian, Coinbase Custody. [39,40] As of this writing, these requests have so far been denied for security reasons.

While appearing to be riding the wave of the booming digital asset revolution, gathering celebrity endorsements and political allies alike, it turns out SBF was drowning in debt and capital misallocation amongst the loud, mainstream praise. Later that month, on November 30, SBF was set to appear in person at a New York Times event, sponsored by Accenture, alongside Secretary Yellen, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, former Vice President Michael Pence, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and others; tickets for the event were listed at $2,499 per attendee.[41] The interview between SBF and Andrew Ross Sorkin was streamed as advertised, albeit with both parties shooting remotely.

Bitcoin tends to be a ballast of truth, bringing all sorts of ballooning fraud rushing to the surface. FTX and Alameda Research will take their place amongst the seemingly too-big-to-sink players that ended up doing just that. They will certainly not be the last. However the following weeks, months, and years play out, it is clear that SBF was but a small fish in an ocean-sized, dollarized pond. And as he quickly found out, there is always a bigger fish.

“At some point I might have more to say about a particular sparring partner, so to speak. But you know, glass houses. So for now, all I’ll say is: well played; you won.” [42]

– Sam Bankman-Fried, November 10, 2022

ENDNOTES:

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxnotes/2021/06/24/in-the-1930s-the-bahamas-became-a-tax-problem-for-treasury/

[2]https://fortune.com/2022/08/09/stablecoins-circle-tether-support-ethereum-merge-proof-of-stake

[3]https://ethereumprice.org/eth-2-deposits/

[4]https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebrity/inside-bahamas-crypto-festival-where-ftx-ceo-bankman-fried-welcomed-bill-clinton-and-katy-perry/

[5]https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/luna-foundation-now-holds-more-bitcoin-than-tesla

[6]https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/binance-remove-trading-pairs-ftx-114338983.html

[7]https://lfg.org/audit/LFG-Audit-2022-11-14.pdf&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1668725884650403&usg=AOvVaw22nNl-O_mnhcT8MxsEtEiX

[8]https://www.truthorfiction.com/does-citadel-own-robinhood/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1668980992263700&usg=AOvVaw31decanIMGsjR2r2ceb0sP

[9]https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-321

[10]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/treasury-secretary-janet-yellen-to-call-regulator-meeting-on-gamestop-volatility-seeks-ethics-waiver.html

[11] https://www.axios.com/2022/05/13/what-does-sam-bankman-fried-want-with-robinhood

[12]https://twitter.com/CoinbaseExch/status/1542270332299579396?s=20&t=3qAy3oJqtmMnLdfwk-JTJA

[13]https://www.circle.com/blog/circle-expands-international-offerings-with-new-bermuda-operations-and-digital-assets-business-license

[14]https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Q2-2022-Shareholder-Letter.pdf

[15]https://www.circle.com/en/usdc-yield#start

[16]https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1584077423280521216?s=20&t=UB_GcB9mjBRJtNS8sS4RJQ

[17]https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/binance-to-auto-convert-usdc-usdp-tusd-to-busd-binance-usd-e62f703604a94538a1f1bc803b2d579f

[18]https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/bny-mellon-launches-new-digital-asset-custody-platform-301645324.html

[19]https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/community/news/012521-announcing-pilot-program-participants.html

[20]https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosemariemiller/2022/10/27/core-scientific-unable-to-pay-bills-warns-of-bankruptcy/

[21]https://bitcoinke.io/2022/11/largest-bitcoin-outflow-on-binance/

[22]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sbf-ftx-stablecoin-second-great-055956820.html

[23]https://twitter.com/delete_shitcoin/status/1585918718088970241

[24]https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-launches-usdc-institutional-rewards-program-with-makerdao

[25]https://www.trustnodes.com/2022/10/31/etherean-nikolai-muchgian-dead-by-drowning

[26]https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/11/03/coinbase-ceo-says-usdc-will-become-de-facto-cbdc/

[27]https://twitter.com/carolinecapital/status/1589287457975304193

[28]https://www.binance.com/en/news/flash/7268278

[29]https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1589374530413215744

[30]https://odysee.com/@lbry:3f/secvslbrysummaryjudgementruling:a

[31]https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?contributor_employer=FTX

[32]https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/business/sam-bankman-fried-wealth-ftx-ctrp/index.html

[33]https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590709166515310593

[34]https://cointelegraph.com/news/white-house-says-prudent-regulation-of-cryptocurrencies-is-needed-hinting-at-situation-with-ftx

[35]https://cryptopotato.com/ftx-and-alameda-file-for-bankruptcy-sbf-resigns-as-ceo/

[36]https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/digital-dollar-wall-street-banks-new-york-fed-ftx-crash-2022-11?miRedirects=1&op=1

[37]https://www.businessinsider.com/blockfi-ftx-bankruptcy-crypto-lender-emergency-loan-pausing-withdrawals-2022-11?op=1

[38]https://www.circle.com/blog/apple-pay-is-now-available-on-circle

[39]https://news.yahoo.com/grayscale-bitcoin-trust-hits-record-132435240.html

[40]https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-11-18-2022/card/coinbase-vouches-for-grayscale-investments-products-yA5vzaPEIvaOr7Ffj2GE

[41]https://www.nytco.com/press/the-new-york-times-to-host-annual-dealbook-summit-on-nov-30/

[42]https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1590709197502812160

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Mark Goodwin

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December 7, 2022
Toward Free Education for All Children – Momentum Building to Expand the Right to Millions
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A school for Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, November 18, 2019. Credit: Human Rights Watch
- Opinion by Bede Sheppard (rzeszow, poland)
- Wednesday, December 07, 2022
- Inter Press Service
RZESZOW, Poland, Dec 07 (IPS) – Bede Sheppard is deputy children’s rights director at Human Rights WatchEducation is fundamental for children’s development and a powerful catalyst for improving their entire lives. International human rights law guarantees everyone a right to education. But it surprises many to learn that the international human rights framework only explicitly guarantees an immediate right to free primary education—even though we know that a child equipped with just a primary education is inadequately prepared to thrive in today’s world.

Children who participate in education from the pre-primary through to the secondary level have better health, better job prospects, and higher earnings as adults. And they are less vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, including child labor and child marriage.

All countries have made a political commitment through the United Nations “Sustainable Development Goals” to providing by 2030 both access to pre-primary education for all, and that all children complete free secondary school education. Yet the world appears on track to fail these targets, and children deserve more than yet another round of non-binding pledges.

For these reasons, Human Rights Watch believes that it’s time to take countries that made these commitments at their word, and expand the right to education under international law. It should explicitly recognize that all children should have a right to early childhood education, including at least one year of free pre-primary education, as well as a right to free secondary education.

We are not alone in this belief.

In 2019, the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education and the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education met with experts from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child to share their research, concluding that the legally binding human rights framework failed to adequately specify that the right to education should begin in early childhood, before primary school.

In December 2021, UNESCO—the UN education organization—concluded that in light of 21st century trends and challenges, the right to education should be reframed, and that recognizing early childhood education as a legal right at the international level “would allow the international community to hold governments accountable and ensure there is adequate investment.”

In 2022, these sparks began to catch fire.

In June, various international children’s rights and human rights experts called for the expansion of the right to education under international law, to recognize every child’s right to free pre-primary education and free secondary education.

In September, the Nobel Prize laureate and education champion Malala Yousafzai and the environmental youth activist Vanessa Nakate were among over a half-a-million people around the world who signed an open letter from the global civic movement Avaaz, calling on world leaders to create a new global treaty that protects children’s right to free education—from pre-primary through secondary school.

Argentina and Spain announced their commitments to support the idea at the UN’s Transforming Education summit in September. In October, the UN’s top independent education expert recommended that the right to early childhood education should be enshrined in a legally-binding human rights instrument.

And the year ended on a high note with education ministers and delegations gathered at the November World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education in Uzbekistan adopting the new “Tashkent Declaration,” in which they agreed to enhance legal frameworks to ensure the right to education “includes the right to at least one year of free and compulsory pre-primary quality education for all children.”

So what might happen in 2023? All concerned will turn to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to see whether member countries will agree to start the process to begin drafting such a treaty.

At least half of all countries already guarantee at least one year of free pre-primary education or free secondary education under their own domestic laws and policies. This includes low- and middle- income countries from around the world. That means that there’d be a large constituency of countries potentially willing to sign such a treaty when adopted.

Even when human rights feel under threat around the world, it’s vital for the human rights movement not to be on the defensive. Making the positive case for strengthening and advancing human rights standards has a critical role in shaping and improving the future.

Guaranteeing the best conditions for children to access a quality, inclusive, free education — and thereby to develop their personalities, talents, mental and physical abilities, and prepare them for a responsible life in a free society—is the kind of positive human rights agenda that all countries should rally around in 2023.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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December 7, 2022
Navigating The Different CoinJoin Implementations
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This is an opinion editorial by Thibaud Maréchal, a contributor to privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet project Wasabi Wallet.

“Divide and conquer” is a battle-tested military strategy to fracture a group of people by making them disagree and fight each other instead of joining together against a common enemy. Wasabi and Samourai, two popular bitcoin wallets with different CoinJoin implementations have been fighting for many years. JoinMarket, a third CoinJoin implementation, has also been involved in colorful debates with other privacy developers.
Learning about bitcoin privacy and CoinJoins has become quite hard with ongoing drama. Who to trust? How can one verify for themselves? It’s all very unclear. What does it bring for precoiners, casual bitcoiners and purists alike? Confusion, fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). The state of bitcoin privacy is embarrassing with all this perpetual drama scaring away new users. Precious time is wasted by developers, educators and regular users who would probably be better off doing anything but trying to keep up with the drama.

It is obvious that no one agrees on “how to do CoinJoins right,” let alone, how CoinJoins should be implemented to optimize user privacy and block space efficiency on the Bitcoin network? What are the tradeoffs between different implementations? Are some implementations outright flawed? How do CoinJoins “cross the chasm” from early adopters to mainstream users when billions of people will turn to bitcoin in the coming years?

Let’s now take a look at CoinJoins by asking fundamental questions and raising some assumptions to build some sort of mental models, which will be useful in evaluating different implementations in future articles.

Not All CoinJoins Are Made Equal

Blockspace efficiency should be considered to make sure CoinJoin transactions scale as Bitcoin gets used by more people across the world. This is rarely discussed as a top priority. Any CoinJoin design that ignores blockspace scarcity is unnecessarily spamming the block chain while accumulating technical debt, which will be difficult to pay back as more users CoinJoin in the future. Having a minimal footprint on the block chain is one goal that seems very reasonable to aim for: a small number of transactions to get to an acceptable level of anonymity sounds ideal.

What is an acceptable level of anonymity?

What does anonymity even mean in the context of bitcoin privacy?

How are particular CoinJoin designs dealing with blockspace scarcity?

Reclaim Your Privacy

Anonymity in bitcoin would mean that there are no outstanding or unusual features that would make a given transaction remarkable from other transactions on the ledger. That, of course, is not by design on the Bitcoin network, which is a pseudonymous system where coins (UTXOs, which stands for Unspent Transaction Output in technical terms) are by default not fungible due to having unique transaction histories.

CoinJoins add a level of anonymity to the bitcoin network by breaking links between transaction inputs and outputs primarily making resulting UTXOs indistinguishable from each other. There are other heuristics that chain analysis companies use to watch the bitcoin network, such as common input ownership, self-spending, round amounts or timing analysis to name a few, which may or may not be obscured by CoinJoins.

CoinJoins help bitcoiners reclaim their privacy but are not the solution to everything. If privacy is understood as the choice to share information about oneself, great privacy can be achieved through CoinJoins but picking the right implementation is essential.

What is my privacy goal using CoinJoins?

Which heuristics does a CoinJoin implementation protect me against?

What are the risks that I want to avoid?

Number Of Participants

Existing CoinJoin implementations have very different ways of improving privacy. Irrespective of each CoinJoin implementation design, the anonymity set (one measure for the level of anonymity) seems to be the most traditional way to evaluate how much privacy one gets from a CoinJoin. There are other ways that will be discussed in other articles. The assumptions are that either a high anonymity set is achieved with a large CoinJoin transaction or that it is achieved over multiple smaller CoinJoin transactions. These two parameters are both important, but is there one that is more important than the other?

In terms of blockspace efficiency, the assumption would be that achieving a large anonymity set with a single very large transaction that has many participants is better than multiple very small transactions with a few participants.

Is one single large CoinJoin or multiple small CoinJoins better for privacy?

How can that be verified truthfully and rigorously? How small is too small for a CoinJoin?

What is the right metric to evaluate how much privacy you can get from a CoinJoin?

What is the most blockspace efficient when it comes to the size and number of CoinJoins to reclaim your privacy?

Is it realistic to expect coins to participate in multiple CoinJoins over time as more people start using CoinJoins? How many CoinJoin rounds is enough or too much?

In simple terms, CoinJoins allow bitcoiners to reclaim their privacy by giving them plausible deniability. Plausibility is a measure of probability. How likely is it that your bitcoins were spent or simply moved to another address you still control? How likely is it that one input is linked to a given output?

Obviously, the smaller the probabilities across many options, the better plausible deniability you get as a hodler. Plausible deniability is hard to preserve because errors are easy to make. Change outputs are often problematic for bitcoiners who care about privacy and are often a source of contentious discussions and criticism. Why is change output such a controversial topic in CoinJoins?

Change Output

It’s all about deterministic links. If bitcoin transactions had a spectrum of privacy, on one end would be a transaction with absolute plausible deniability, meaning 0% chance of knowing the link between inputs and outputs. This is also referred to as randomness or entropy in a CoinJoin. The assumption is that the more random or higher the entropy, the better. On the other end would be a transaction with 100% deterministic links between its only input and single output.

Unintuitively, a high entropy doesn’t necessarily mean that a transaction provides good privacy. A transaction with three inputs and three outputs of equal amounts technically has 100% entropy, meaning there is no way to distinguish each output from each other; and yet, there is a 33.33% chance that each input is linked to a particular output. High entropy does not necessarily mean good plausible deniability.

Change almost always has a very high deterministic link to its previous transaction. In other words, there is little doubt that a change output is not tied to the previous transaction that spent it. That can be a considerable privacy issue if a given change output were to be co-spent with other anonymous inputs following CoinJoins (though exceptions may apply in certain cases). This is usually referred to as UTXO consolidation and can be fatal to your privacy if done naïvely.

Change outputs can de-anonymize outputs that have gained some plausible deniability from CoinJoins if spent together. Errors are commonplace for bitcoiners and sometimes the realization comes too late, undoing years of diligent privacy enhancements in one single spend. How to get rid of this change output problem?

Existing CoinJoin implementations have three ways of dealing with change outputs: isolate the change into another wallet that is not CoinJoining, include the change output in the same wallet that is CoinJoining or get rid of the change output by not having change outputs at all. The latter seems to be the most advisable in terms of privacy and blockspace efficiency but further digging is required to validate or reject this assumption.

Is a high entropy score enough to qualify a CoinJoin as good for your privacy?

Is it better to isolate change outputs in another wallet or should it be removed entirely?

Is a change output always bad for your privacy?

Coin Denominations

Getting rid of change outputs in CoinJoins requires that coin denominations be variable in a CoinJoin. In other words, the inputs registered in a given CoinJoin cannot have a fixed size like 0.1 BTC, otherwise it becomes impossible (or at least very hard) to consume inputs without creating change outputs as most UTXOs don’t have round numbers (i.e. 0.19572394 BTC where 0.09572394 BTC would be the change in a 0.1 BTC fixed coin denomination CoinJoin).

Change outputs can be dangerous for your privacy, remember? Having multiple sizes for inputs and outputs in a CoinJoin seems to be a bad idea as it brings us closer to deterministic links between inputs and outputs, right? Well, yes and no. It depends. If a CoinJoin has a small number of participants (meaning few inputs and few outputs), then different denominations are a bad idea. But what if a large number of inputs and outputs are included in a given CoinJoin?

In a large CoinJoin, multiple denominations can bring a high level of plausible deniability to each resulting output without creating change outputs and requiring additional transactions, which is a highly efficient use of blockspace. It seems that many boxes could be ticked at this point.

Is it better to have fixed or variable coin denominations in a CoinJoin?

How big should a CoinJoin be for variable denominations to make sense?

Are variable coin denominations the best way to get rid of change output in CoinJoins?

It goes without saying that CoinJoin rounds interconnectivity should not be tolerable in any circumstances regardless of whether coin denominations are different or if the CoinJoin is a large or small transaction, right? Well, here again, there is an important nuance to understand.

Coinjoin Rounds Interconnectivity

It is claimed that registering inputs from past shared CoinJoins into new CoinJoins is ill-advised in all cases. Participants from mutually shared past CoinJoins do not seem to benefit from mixing together in other CoinJoins. It seems harmful to privacy, and is often criticized.

What if a CoinJoin is large and some registered inputs come from multiple other CoinJoins, each being also downstream from multiple other CoinJoins? In such a case, participants remixing together are still improving their privacy despite coming from a shared past CoinJoin. If each CoinJoin is large enough, the participants are not required to remix multiple times, though they can if they want to further increase their anonymity sets.

If many large intertwined CoinJoins are involved, the resulting anonymity set should provide plenty of plausible deniability, despite sharing past CoinJoins as origin of funds.

Is CoinJoin rounds interconnectivity, which is sharing mutual past CoinJoins, a bad thing on its own?

How large should a CoinJoin be for remixing with other past inputs to be considered safe?

Personal Full Node

Should you run your own bitcoin full node when participating in CoinJoins? On the surface, it seems like a great idea, and it usually is. Some CoinJoin implementations allow that, while others outright require it. Others won’t allow you to even use your own full node. Is that to condemn absolutely? If you’ve read until now, you should know that the answer is nuanced and opens up a deep rabbit hole to be explored later.

Running your own full node comes with usability tradeoffs, and may not add much privacy protection if not all users do it. Running your own node may even give you a false sense of security and privacy if few CoinJoin participants do it, which can be deeply harmful. If Tor is used as an anonymous way to CoinJoin (and we’ll leave it as that for now), then using a trusted full node to broadcast the CoinJoin transaction can be fine as the default. Lots of nuances, and of course, don’t trust, verify.

There are some essential questions to ask so as to not fall in the trap of privacy virtue signaling.

Does the CoinJoin implementation allow to run full nodes, require them by default or don’t allow them?

If personal full nodes are not mandatory, what are the privacy shields in place? i.e. Tor, block filters, etc…

If I run my own full node, but expect most users to use a default trusted node to CoinJoin, how does that affect my privacy? Can the coordinator de-anonymize me?

With privacy concerns, it is always important to understand what you’re trying to protect, and against whom. Running a full node and using it with your own wallet is the right way to use bitcoin as it allows you to verify your wallet balance and broadcast transactions to the network without trusting anyone. But when it comes to CoinJoins, there is usually a coordinator in charge. What does the coordinator do and how is it selected? Read on.

The Coordinator

The CoinJoin coordinator is in charge of having every participant register their inputs and outputs, and sign the collaborative transaction before broadcasting it. Most CoinJoin implementations default on a central coordinator, which is a single point of failure. Up until now, this has been an accepted tradeoff in most bitcoin communities. Can a central CoinJoin coordinator fail? Absolutely. Other implementations allow anyone to be a coordinator for each different CoinJoin, though there are other sets of trade offs here that will be discussed later.

Coinjoins being non-custodial, no loss of funds could occur if any coordinator would fail. The coordinator should never know more than what everyone knows publicly on the bitcoin network. Why? If a coordinator knows more than what is publicly available, a CoinJoin coordinator becomes a honeypot with highly sensitive data that can be exploited against bitcoiners trusting the service.

You should never trust a CoinJoin coordinator. If a CoinJoin coordinator cannot be evil, good. If it can be evil, it will be eventually, out of errors, omissions, coercion or outright dishonesty.

An example of sensitive user data would be XPUBs, which undeniably leak all the information about a wallet, its addresses, including past, current and future bitcoin transactions. Another example would be the ratio between users running their own full nodes and users trusting the coordinator’s full node to broadcast CoinJoins, as it could de-anonymize users running their own nodes, and therefore deterministically know the links between their inputs and outputs. This is yet another nuanced topic, which would require further investigation and discussion.

Does the coordinator know more than what is publicly available on the bitcoin network?

Do users leak sensitive data to the coordinator, such as their XPUB or whether or not they run their own full nodes?

Does the coordinator claim that users should trust them using legal defense mechanisms? (i.e. warrant canaries, regulatory arbitrage, etc…)

Fees

Bottom line, who pays for what in CoinJoins? These bitcoin transactions can be expensive and sometimes fee structures are unclear for bitcoiners. It’s hard to know how much good privacy will cost you or even if you are getting any privacy out of it. Some CoinJoin implementations allow a single input to buy its privacy from other inputs who only participate for free to increase their own anonymity set. Getting paid to CoinJoin? With patience, yes.

Some models rely on shared fees where only some UTXOs pay fees while others don’t. Other models rely on inviting an ever growing number of new clear inputs (not mixed yet) to fund the existing CoinJoins for remixing inputs that do not have high enough anonymity levels. Some models seem unsustainable over the long term while others are naïve, or way too expensive for most users.

And what fees are we talking about? Well usually, inputs participating in CoinJoins pay both a coordinator fee or taker fee, (the service fee to get some level of anonymity) and the bitcoin network fees. In particular CoinJoin models, these fees get waived in certain circumstances. The economics of CoinJoins is a deep rabbit hole which requires further investigation for a much deeper understanding.

Who pays for what in a CoinJoin? What are all the fees?

What are the incentives of the CoinJoin coordinator?

Are all CoinJoin rounds paid for or is there any free remix?

Having read thus far, the hope is that bitcoiners shopping around for CoinJoins would not necessarily have all of the answers, but the right questions to ask. A mental model or framework to evaluate different CoinJoin implementations can be quite helpful for anyone who is considering using CoinJoins to reclaim their privacy on bitcoin. Sorting through the noise of social media requires intellectual honesty and the right evaluation system rigorously applied.

This is a guest post by Thibaud Maréchal. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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December 7, 2022
COP15: We are Losing Nature Biodiversity at the Fastest Rate in Human History
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COP15 will focus on protecting nature and halting biodiversity loss around the world. The Government of Canada’s priority is to ensure the COP15 is a success for nature. There is an urgent need for international partners to halt and reverse the alarming loss of biodiversity worldwide. Credit: Government of Canada
- Opinion by Amy Fraenkel, Marco Lambertini (bonn / gland)
- Wednesday, December 07, 2022
- Inter Press Service
- The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an international meeting bringing together governments from around the world, will set out new goals and develop an action plan for nature over the next decade. The conference will be held in Montréal, Quebec, the seat of the UN CBD Secretariat, from December 7 – 19, 2022.
BONN / GLAND, Dec 07 (IPS) – While climate change dominates the environmental headlines, quieter, startling changes are taking place in nature across the planet – whether in forests, oceans, deserts, rural landscapes, cities and other places where nature is found.

We are losing nature – biodiversity – at the fastest rate in human history. Around a million species of plants and animals are heading towards extinction. As human activities destroy and degrade more natural places, nature is becoming more and more fragmented.

Nature provides freshwater, supports food systems and underpins major industries such as forestry, agriculture, and fisheries. Yet our efforts to protect our precious biodiversity have been flawed and woefully inadequate.

Conservation of nature over the past decades has largely involved the creation of numerous dots of protected areas, which have undoubtedly helped to slow the loss of biodiversity.

But there are also limits to this approach. Many protected areas are not effectively or equitably managed, some types of ecosystems are underrepresented, and – perhaps most importantly – protected areas are carved out like islands in the middle of otherwise modified, industrial, agricultural and urbanized landscapes.

In many countries, the majority of wild species of animals live outside of protected areas. Just 9% of the world’s migratory bird species are adequately covered by protected areas across all stages of their annual cycle. Nature simply cannot survive let alone thrive in this deeply compromised and compartmentalized way.

This December, thousands of representatives of government, scientists, and other stakeholders will descend on Montreal, Canada (December 7-19) for the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP15), where they will try to agree on commitments to address this growing crisis.

By all accounts, the negotiations have yet to live up to what is desperately needed to correct our current path. If we are to successfully address the biodiversity crisis, we must adopt an approach that can meet conservation goals and also provide food, water, security and livelihoods for a global population of 10 billion people by 2050.

A key to achieving this lies in what is known as ecological connectivity – which simply put, is about ensuring that our landscapes, seascapes, and river basins allow the movement of species and the flow of natural processes.

Ecological connectivity is essential to ensure the health and productivity of ecosystems, the survival of wild animals and plant species, and genetic diversity.

It contributes to climate resilience and adaptation, productive lands and effective restoration. And it is indispensable for the thousands of migratory species of wild animals which need to seasonally move from one habitat to another.

One of the most talked about ideas in the Montreal negotiations that is gaining significant political traction is the so-called “30 by 30” target, which calls for a minimum of thirty percent of the earth’s lands, freshwater and oceans to be protected or conserved in some form by the year 2030.

But this numerical target will be far from ambitious unless connectivity is placed at the center of its implementation, and the role and rights of indigenous peoples and local communities are recognized.

Currently, connectivity is captured in the draft target in two small words: “well-connected”. These same words were part of previous global biodiversity targets which by all accounts have failed us.

To succeed, connectivity must be a litmus test for all area-based conservation measures at the national level. The choice of which areas to protect and conserve needs to be guided by whether they contribute to connectivity – along with appropriate environmental and social safeguards.

Likewise, urban growth, infrastructure development and other human activities must be planned in ways that achieve social and economic needs while preserving connectivity. And governments need to measure and report their progress in implementing this commitment on connectivity.

There is one other essential element for achieving ecological connectivity: governments need to cooperate across national borders to protect and conserve shared natural areas and species.

In 2021, the UN General Assembly adopted a remarkable resolution urging all member states to increase international cooperation to improve connectivity of transboundary habitats, avoid their fragmentation and protect species that rely on connected ecosystems.

Yet alarmingly, the draft to be negotiated in Montreal does not, as yet, include any such commitment for governments to work together to implement the transboundary aspects of the framework.

The good news is we have the knowledge and ability to turn the current trends around, and to achieve a sustainable relationship with nature. There is enormous momentum on achieving connectivity by governments, companies, the financial sector, civil society, indigenous peoples and local communities.

For instance, the government of Canada is launching a CAD $60 million program for ecological corridors, a company in Sabah Borneo is completing a 14 kilometer reforested wildlife corridor within its plantation.

Local community citizen scientists in Nepal have found that a corridor they restored is now abuzz with wildlife. It is time to work together to connect nature at a scale that will deliver what we all need – a healthy planet.

Amy Fraenkel is Executive Secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS); and Marco Lambertini is Director General, WWF International.

IPS UN Bureau

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© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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December 7, 2022
Bitcoin Is A Humanistic Alternative To Technological Salvation

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This is an opinion editorial by Nozomi Hayase Ph.D., who has a background in psychology and human development.

The 2008 financial meltdown, with subsequent bank bailouts and a cycle of austerity, led to the weakening of the public’s trust in governments and institutions. Bitcoin emerged as a response to this global crisis of legitimacy.

Now, more than a decade later, the economic damage created by the pandemic has triggered a further breakdown of the system. As the Federal Reserve’s infinite money printing creates high inflation, Bitcoin steadily increases its popularity as a safe haven.

At the same time, as the old economy is being destroyed, the leading global institutions have stepped forward to reboot the entire system. The key organization, the World Economic Forum (WEF), with the theme of “The Great Reset,” prepares for the rollout of the central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

CBDC Versus Bitcoin

Agustin Carstens, head of the Bank for International Settlements, explains CBDCs as programmable money that gives issuers the power to control every transaction. Using these powers, issuers can restrict what ordinary people are allowed to spend money on.

In response to central banks creating their own digital currencies, the original cypherpunk and cryptographer, Adam Back tweeted:

Link to embedded Tweet here.

Now, Bitcoin and CBDCs, two different types of digital currency with contrasting features, race toward a global adoption. The crux of this competition involves different visions of the world. The outcome of this race will determine the future of humanity.

Shift Of Authority

The crisis of legitimacy triggered by the financial panic of 2008 signaled the demise of the Western liberal democracy. This has begun to create a shift in the locus of authority in our society.

The idea of democracy that inspired the birth of the United States was based on a humanistic worldview. In the past, authority was placed in the gods, and the sacred text. People sought answers from the external. They turned to religion, the Bible and Popes for their decisions.

Image source

A move towards democracy brought a shift in values. It placed authority in human hands, putting emphasis on the individual. People who were seeking behavioral norms outside of themselves began to rely on their personal experience.

Threat To Democracy

Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli public intellectual and historian, talks about how, in this crisis of democracy, a threat to the humanistic worldview is now emerging from laboratories and research departments in places like Silicon Valley.

Harrai, who is a lead advisor to Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum (WEF), points out ways in which science is challenging the story of humanism.

Image source

He explains that scientists are saying there is no such thing as free will and that freedom is just another myth, an empty term that humans have invented. He defines feelings as biochemical processes of calculation and contends that there is no reason to consider them the highest authority in the world.

Techno-Religion

Harari, who has been praised by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and celebrated by tech workers in Silicon Valley, explains how in this twilight of democracy, authority is now once again moving away from humans. This time, he states it is not some gods above the clouds that control human destiny, but algorithms, and data in the clouds of the Amazon and big tech giants.

He describes a new revolution happening around this shift of authority. It is led by a “techno-religion”, the ideology that technology provides salvation. He explains that this techno-religion is a data religion within which “data and information becomes a supreme source of authority and of meaning in the world.” It makes us believe that technology knows more about us than we do ourselves. It tells us, “Don’t listen to feeling or gut intuition. Just turn to data.”

Acting as a spokesperson for this new sect of techno religion, Harari predicts a coming of a future without humanity. He states that humans like you and I will disappear and that the earth will be dominated by very different kinds of beings or entities. Under the new authority of algorithms, Harari describes how human beings are viewed as no longer spiritual souls, but become “hackable animals.”

Warning For Humanity

Some saw what was coming and warned about the potential machine takeover of the world and the elimination of human beings.

Image source

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks publisher and one of the notable Cypherpunks, was aware of this trend from early on. He called on those who are technologically capable to take up strong cryptography as a non-violent weapon to defend individual liberty.

Assange warned us: “The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans.”

As central planners try to deploy CBDCs to push their techno-religious movement, a breakthrough in computer science has brought us an alternative vision of the future of humanity.

Value Of Individual Freedom

Bitcoin, in its 14 years of existence, has provided a response to the crisis of Western liberal democracy, allowing us to truly embody humanistic values.

There was an inherent weakness in the system of representative democracy. The mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto recognized that this system was not adequate by itself to secure the value of freedom and the place of individuals as supreme authority in the system.

Those who gained control over the production of money have created an economic system that works to their advantage. Concentration of economic power in a few hands turned democracy into a system of control. With sophisticated methods of persuasion, through use of propaganda and PR under the guise of democracy, the population was subjected to manipulation of their feelings.

By challenging the monopoly of money, Bitcoin — cypherpunks’ holy grail — has enabled economic liberty. With the principle of “don’t trust, verify”, this technology places the source of legitimacy with individuals, for the first time in history.

Rather than residing in the clouds of tech giants, authority is now descending into the human heart.

Revival Of Humanism

Image source

The birth of Bitcoin has helped creativity and freedom of expression to flourish, creating the resurgence of the arts. It now inspires a new renaissance of humanism.

Before the Renaissance, history was seen as being shaped by divine forces. With the advent of the Renaissance, beginning in the 14th century in Italy, this view shifted.

The Renaissance placed human beings at the center of life. A man was regarded as a partner in the creation of Gods, to actively engage in shaping the course of their own lives.

Just as the Renaissance placed emphasis on the individual, now, the Bitcoin Renaissance 2.0 creates sovereign individuals, enabling human beings to truly come alive.

A Path Of Salvation Via Proof-Of-Work

People from all nations, with different backgrounds, started to align themselves with humanistic ideals that exist at the core of Bitcoin. Through meetups and conferences, they are now finding one another. They begin to speak the same language and share values.

Transcending their cultural differences, they have become Bitcoiners. They are bearers of humanity, beginning to claim the source of authority in human imagination.

This is now creating a humanistic movement, generating a force strong enough to counter the techno revolution.

Between Bitcoin and CBDCs, we are now presented with a choice.

Worshipers of machine intelligence offer a promise of salvation, through which we once again are made to rely on authority outside of us, this time, on external algorithms.

Bitcoin presents an alternative model of salvation via proof-of-work, where we no longer need to trust authorities outside of ourselves. Through each individual voluntarily participating in a network of consensus, each of us can engage in validating our own truth.

While a path of technological salvation moves a society toward the post-human era, Bitcoin, pro-human technology inspires each individual to create a new world of humanism.

El Salvador (“The Savior”)

El Salvador, the country that first declared bitcoin legal tender, has become a center of this Renaissance 2.0. They are leading the way.

Using Bitcoin as a tool, the President Nayib Bukele began to stand up against the central banks and their financial imperialism.

Link to embedded Tweet here.

As the leaders of G7 members are trying to launch centrally controlled digital slave coins, Bukele engages in efforts to increase Bitcoin adoption to open up a path of self-determination.

Image source

This is attracting creative minds and talents from all over the world.

Link to embedded Tweet here.

Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex, the world’s leading digital asset exchange is working to provide a platform for financial freedom. Along with his efforts to expand Bitcoin adoption, he aims to maximize decentralization by developing Keet. io, peer-to-peer Chat Apps that are built without any central server.

Link to embedded Tweet here.

Link to embedded Tweet here.

Image source

Can El Salvador, under Bukele’s leadership and his policy of economic liberty, engage people in proof-of-work — to organize a network toward the salvation of humanity?

Positive changes are already happening. Bitcoin Renaissance 2.0 inspires new ideas, bringing in investors and capital to help people build alternatives to big data and centralized cloud products, to enable freedom.

Securing The Future Of Humanity

We human beings share our destiny. The life of all species is intertwined. Our choices and actions affect one another.

With the accelerated speed of technological advancement, as we are being quietly transported into a virtual reality, are we leaving behind our own body and our soul? Without human beings who can feel, what would happen to the earth, ecosphere, trees, rivers, and all of animals?

We Bitcoiners are custodians for this planet. By practicing self-custody and running full nodes which maintain the ecosystem, we preserve the autonomy of individuals. We can work toward securing the future of humanity.

Link to embedded Tweet here.

A network of messiahs created through technologically-empowered men and women coming together starts to form a formidable defense against the transhumanism agendas.

Bitcoin presents a humanistic alternative to technological salvation.

Hyperbitconization has just begun. The dawn of new humanity is near. With hearts that beat every 10 minutes, we human beings can claim our freedom and responsibility to steward mother earth and all of her creation.

This is a guest post by Nozomi Hayase. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

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December 6, 2022
Volunteerism: Path to Achieve UNs Agenda 2030
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Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator
- Opinion by Simone Galimberti (kathmandu, nepal)
- Tuesday, December 06, 2022
- Inter Press Service
KATHMANDU, Nepal, Dec 06 (IPS) – The International Volunteer Day, a worldwide event commemorated every year on the 5th of December, comes at the end of a long line of special commemorations, each of them relevant and paramount to achieve the UN’s Agenda 2030.

The commemorations included the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25, World AIDS Day on December 1, the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery on December 2 and the International Day of Persons with Disabilities December 3.

After many years of work in the volunteering sector, I feel it is high time for some sort of evaluation of where we are in terms of promoting and fostering what I call the BIG V, a terminology that I feel better express the potential and dynamism of volunteerism.

Focusing on the potential of the BIG V is probably the best place to start such review.

On the one hand, all the achievements carried out by the country in the last two decades could not have been possible without the thousands and thousands of citizens involved and engaged, with passion, drive and zero economic interests, in trying to make the country better and more inclusive.

Achim Steiner, UNDP AdministratorWho am I talking about? Who are these persons? Think of those who selflessly and silently and far from social media do something for the place where you live.

These are the persons who are always at hand and ready to help when there is an urgent need within the community. These are the persons who take the lead in liaising with local authorities and try to find small but essential solutions in our daily lives.

I am not fantasizing them, these are real persons though perhaps their number is shrinking especially in the urban areas. I am also talking about activism, a form of volunteerism, where simple citizens and members of tiny NGOs are pushing for a just and noble cause, be it a better public health, a stronger education system, the preservation of the soil or the defense of the rights of those who are the most vulnerable.

So, considering this vast multitude of engaged and active citizens, we would not be surprised if a country like Nepal has a huge potential in terms of leveraging its social capital, the element that provides the foundations above which civic engagement, of which volunteerism is one of the greatest expressions, thrives on.

From this perspective, there is no doubt that whole country should really be proud of their volunteers, even if many of such unsung heroes, do not even bother to define themselves in a such way because what they know is that actions, at the end, are the ones that count.

On the other hand, if there are plenty of volunteers everywhere, we also need to pay attention at the dynamics unfolding within the society especially the ones affecting youths. One hour on social media is one hour taken away from studies, sports but also it is an hour stolen away from a possible volunteering action.

This is a problem because we must be clear that volunteerism is not just good for the society but it’s also good for ourselves. The reason is simple: volunteerism helps becoming better persons, more emphatic and altruistic, qualities that are now proven to be also indispensable for a successful career.

In a way volunteerism is path to personal leadership and mastery because we can learn so much from it. It is a school of humbleness that teaches to value the small things that we often take too much for granted and also helps us appreciate the work of others, especially those who are not in close to us, those are different from us.

In short volunteerism can really bring us together and enhance national cohesion and cohesiveness. That’s why it is so important that the Nepal puts a whole of nation effort to really elevate volunteerism and perhaps we should start with rebranding it, making it easier to talk about it and easier for the youths to connect with.

That’s why the term BIG V could be a better way to spread the message and convince more people to get involved. It is also essential that we work at system level and the new Federal Government should at the earliest discuss and review the draft national volunteering policy that is taking dust since more than two years.

On this regard, it is extremely encouraging that some of the Provincial Governments like Gandaki have already a volunteering policy in place.

Yet approving a document is going to be meaningless if there is no political will to act upon it. The point is that the BIG V should really become a priority, that essential factor that can support and help locally elected officials to perform their duties.

Think about it: federalism is built on the premise that citizens will be more active and engaged and volunteering, in all its diverse ways and forms, can be the indispensable ingredient to help achieve a better form of governing, one centered on the citizenry.

Around the world, mayors have been leveraging the power of volunteerism, harnessing the commitments of their citizens to supplement and strengthen the implementation of local publicly funded interventions.

We need a strong coordination system to promote and implement volunteering efforts, an issue that the draft national policy already partially covers. On this point, it is essential to ensure the creation of adequate “’volunteering supporting structures” at federal, provincial and local levels, that can really help mainstream volunteerism across all the areas of national governance.

It might be a coincidence that this special commemoration falls after so many other equally important special “days” but perhaps it was all intentional because volunteerism is the platform and the means through which the humanity can solve some of its most obstinate and hard challenges, including climate change.

The latter is an issue that, without the activism of millions of youths across the world, would not have come to commend the public and the leaders’ attention.

In short volunteerism is a force of good and Nepal needs it. But we can’t keep take it for granted. We need to highlight it, we need to truly make an effort to make it easier for persons of all ages and groups, to give their time and skills and help the society become a better, more inclusive and sustainable place to live.

The Author is the co-founder of ENGAGE and of the ‘Good Leadership, Good for You & Good for the Society.’

IPS UN Bureau

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© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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An Ineffective Mexico, in the Face of Maritime Pollution Monday, December 05, 2022

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December 6, 2022