In Sparrow, do you see the same exact address in your wallet?

Are you definitely connected, in Sparrow? That means the little slider in the bottom right needs to be either green or yellow, not gray.

Do you like this better than, say, Gemini? I did a comparison between Gemini and Google Translate, Gemini seemed better.

I just did a test of one chapter, in Gemini vs Google translate. I translated into German, which I have some understanding of.

Initial thoughts - Gemini is better. It keeps some of the phrases (like self-custody) in English, which is better (Google Translate does not).

It's amazing how much English is currently used in German - much more than 20 years ago. Sometimes it seems like a good chunk of the words are in English.

I will try this in DeepL as well.

There's a couple samples out there, most famously Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas M. Antonopoulos (https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/). It's still for sale on Amazon, but also available on github.

I will soon set up a "donate" option, as soon as I figure that out...

Could you put it on something (foam?) to make it less noisy? If your family finds out that you sabotaged it could cause serious repercussions.

I just got rid of a small, everyday annoyance. I put a piece of masking tape next to the spot on my laptop where my charger plugs in. This is to make it visually easier to find the spot, and plug into it, otherwise it's not visible unless I lift it up, and look from the side.

Now I can easily plug it in.

There's definitely a solid window of things that AI is great at, and where it can save you tons of time.

On the other hand, it can also be enormously frustrating when it hallucinates, and asserts very confidently that something is true, when it's absolutely not. Just recently I was looking for a feature in carrd.com, AI says it's there for sure, I'm looking for it for a long time. Then when I email support, it turns out that no, it's absolutely not possible. If AI would at least express some uncertainty! But no, it's always certain.

Overall, for my personal use cases, there's a ton of things that I've tried (coding tools using languages that I've never touched before) and been successful at, with the help of AI. And these are things that I wouldn't have even tried without AI.

But yeah...a mixed bag.

They can, sometimes. I made decent money on this one:

SQL Practice Problems: 57 beginning, intermediate, and advanced challenges for you to solve using a “learn-by-doing” approach.

(You may notice a certain similarity in subtitle to my bitcoin book (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F4SZSCH8)

But you're right, most of the time they don't.

What do you mean by that?

Yes. It's amazing how myopic you can get when you're immersed in something - it gets to the point that you can not understand, how other people can misunderstand what's so easy for you.

Feedback is critical.

The more convinced you are that bitcoin is the answer, the more you're willing to push through barriers, and self custody bitcoin.

But if you're a lot less convinced, it just seems like far too much work and risk.

I think we're far from a world where the majority of people who "own" bitcoin, have it in self custody.

Even people like me - I'm not dumb, and I'm good at research - can have issues with self-custody. Those people that say it's straightforward are either dreaming, or can't put themselves in other people's shoes.

That's why I wrote the book Bitcoin, Hands-On. It's a step by step guide to learning the most necessary technical basics of holding your own bitcoin, one easy exercise at a time.

If anyone wants to take a look at it without purchasing a copy, feel free to email me (feedback@bitcoinhandson.com) and I'll send you a pdf link.

There was also that post just in the past week or so, that was very good - I can't find it now, but it was about - just having POTENTIAL competition prevents monopoly. And the analogy was made with the amount of people doing self-custody bitcoin.

The more there are, the less government will be able to control it.

Yes, I'm thinking about maybe creating 2 versions - one self-taught, and the other a classroom taught version, with slide deck, etc.

Thinking also about open sourcing it - just putting up on github, as well as Amazon.

But there's no getting around it - you still have to market, and not just a little bit - a lot. Products that aren't marketed - even though they may be free - never get any traction. Nobody ever hears about them.

Or, as I just heard yesterday - if I kick the bucket, my wife needs to deal with it, and she'd have no idea how to deal with self-custody bitcoin.

Yeah, they're the ones that are (sometimes) kind of interested.

But also sometimes they're in the "why bother" camp.

I think the only thing I'll give up on is doing anything like an in-person workshop, especially putting a lot of work into trying to promote it.

I'll try to figure out some new ideas. One thing I'm thinking of is somehow open-sourcing it - putting it on github or something. I don't need to make a ton of money on it, I just need enough to motivate me to continue to work on it.

But of course, just putting something on github isn't much use, people also need to look for it there. 2 people so far have told me I need to post on Instagram. Hmm...

Ha! Love it.

I'm no Andreas Antonopoulous, but it's definitely making me think I need to try something different...