Thanks for the dose of sanity. The Fed gets wayyy too much flak among bitcoiners and it makes us look naive. The vast majority of 'money supply' expansion is via the extension of credit by private banks worldwide. This dwarfs anything you'll find on FRED. If you want to blame the government for something, blame congress for fiscal largess. They spend without consequence, throw the funding problem over the wall to Treasury, who auctions off debt, some of which the Fed mops up. Follow Jeff Snider if you're curious about this stuff. I'm just repeating him.

"Spirituality" is a psyop for the weak.
Embrace the religion of your birth, and stop being a little bitch complaining about it, saying how you're better than it, blah, blah, blah... all so tiresome.

Ecclesiastes 7:10 "Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions."

This. Every UTXO is in fact an NFT. I believe the base layer design space has been pretty well-explored, so I suspect anonymity must be found on other layers, barring something bold like an OP_ZKP (which I'd fully support) Very bullish on ecash -- near perfect privacy and perhaps more importantly, ramping adoption to the less technically inclined.

These losers are so bored, they want to regulate things which don't even exist (and probably never will, in the case of general-purpose quantum computers. read what real physicists quietly write about this pipe dream) They're attempting this with nascent AI too. A pathetic struggle to remain relevant...

Interesting write-up. Stratum v2 would help alot, but the endgame is true privacy (zk txns on L1). The best defense against censorship long-term, is miners not being able to distinguish transactions.

Thanks, i'll look into submarine swaps on Boltz

Thinking of using Zeus to receive KYC sats before sending to cold storage. Does this make any sense? Would it be economical? Am i nuts?

Mining has always been centralized, though who's the biggest miner keeps rotating. 1:05 video showing the rotation in miner dominance: https://twitter.com/SDWouters/status/1780594555429290311 I predict it will continue to be centralized, if only b/c it's a tough business where scale makes sense.

I have been in your shoes. That was 13 years ago, and today she's fine. It sucked. She handled it better than I did! Don't read too much stuff on the internet. Get good doctors (trust your intuition), listen do them, and stay active. Oncologist said, the ones who wallowed don't make it, while the ones who carry on do. Put one foot in front of the next, one day at a time. It's all you can do.

"A single pool filtering transactions does not affect the censorship resistance of the Bitcoin network as a whole." Pools can leave money on the table! That's ok. Other pools will pick it up.

But most puzzling about this is: "This raises the question of why F2Pool, a pool with origins in Asia, is the first pool to filter transactions based on US OFAC sanctions." Agree, this makes no sense. More to the story?

Best protection is anonymity. But in your scenario, which I fear is too likely, anonymity is broken, and all KYC purchases are leaked. The only remaining option, then, is leaving for a safer jurisdiction where property rights are respected and enforced. A country that welcomes bitcoiners and protects them, in exchange for their spending their wealth there.
The main hitch in leaving, as I see it, will be selling any real estate / large assets you own, ahead of the major bitcoin price appreciation. Otherwise you may be forced to abandon those. I hope this dark scenario can be avoided, and it should, if the game theory of different countries plays out with all of them vying to retain and attract bitcoiners.

This is exactly the scenario why I don’t want multisig.

First, gov’t will go after Casa or whoever and take control of those keys.

Second, do you think someone threatening your life will take “sorry, multisig” for an answer? No, they’ll insist you ultimately control those coins somehow, which is in fact correct.

15 years in, there are an estimated 219mm Bitcoin users worldwide. 15 years after ARPANET adopted TCP/IP (1983), it was 1998, and there were 147mm internet users worldwide. We are roughly in 1998 today.