StackoshiNakamoto

Daily discussion thread

saloon

When are we gonna have substacks? I have so many topics I want to write about and post about, that are not really relevant to everyone but for a specific category would be great to share.

bitcoin

A lot of people use credit cards because they want 1.5% cash back or reward points and miles. But what they don't understand is that merchants are forced to increase the price of their goods sometimes upwards of 7%-15% just to make up for all the credit card processing merchant fees. Merchants are not volunteer charity organizations who are going to happily "eat" the processing fee on behalf of the customer. Merchants all know that card companies suck, but customers "demand" the store accepts their card because they really want that 1.5% cash back.

So they will raise the price of the items by 7%, give 7% to the credit card company. Then the credit card company gives you 1.5% as cash back, and keeps the 5.5% as their own for being the middleman. The customer is excited and jumps in joy for effectively paying 5.5% more than they really needed to and thinking that they got rewarded. The customer is an idiot.

The evil part of this scam is that once credit cards are widely accepted and prices are locked to the credit card price, then everyone who is NOT taking advantage of the credit card suffers the most. So it forces EVERYONE to use credit cards because otherwise they would be paying 7% more WITHOUT getting the 1.5% back. It's like a infectious cancer spreading across businesses and hurting non-card customers the most. They are not getting the rewards but paying the full fee-included prices of items.

Some merchants try to give some relief to customers who pay by cash or debit by offering cheaper prices. You see this on gas station signs everywhere. Pay by cash price vs pay by card price.

Merchants are suffering far more than the 5%+ processing fee seems like at first glance. If it costs $90 in supplies, employees, building space, oven electricity, etc. to bake a cake and they sell it for $100, then they made $10 in profit. But the 5% fee is on the FULL PRICE OF THE CAKE which is 5% of $100 and that is $5. So literally HALF of their profit goes to the greedy card companies. If you bought a steak, and someone came by and cut the steak and half, and told you that this half is going to the card company just as a convenience fee, you would say that's horribly unfair and extreme.

But really, merchants should be thrilled about an alternative system like Lightning and customers should also WAKE UP to the stupid scam, and see that they are getting charged WAY MORE and then getting excited for receiving a tiny reward back. Everyone using cards is contributing to waste, overpricing of items, and a billion-dollar useless middleman industry, and all of that could be eliminated. Think of the savings to everyday families and merchants. Hell, it's even a green initiative.

Some people unfortunately side with the card companies and like this scammy system, and why shouldn't they? If they are on the "winning-side" of the equation, getting great deals like "free" first-class airplane tickets. Well, actually, that "free" ticket was paid for by all the other stupid people on worse rewards cards and all that merchant processing fee money collected by the credit card companies. Sure, YOU won, getting that ticket, but at the expense of everyone else. It's stupid, and it creates a game that is completely unnecessary.

Up until now, we haven't had much option for convenience. Paying online or safely without cash or debit was pretty much limited to credit cards. But Bitcoin & Lightning Network changed all of that. It's time to move on, and away from credit cards.

When we eliminate the middle man, both the merchant and the customer wins. The merchant can charge the original price, and the customer is effectively getting a 7% CASH BACK REWARD which is an insane amount that no card company offers. But the customers don't understand that.

One thing that will help is spread this knowledge to customers. But also, merchants who accept Bitcoin Lightning should always offer a huge cash back discount on their products for paying with Lightning. And not just a lower price, but an actual reward redeemable at checkout. This is to help the consumer compare apples-to-apples. They will see, oh, I can get a 7% cash back reward for paying by Lightning, or a 1.5% cash back reward for using my credit card. Hmmm, I think I'll choose Lightning!

And eventually, the option will DRIVE OUT THE SCAMMERS who operate this gigantic billion dollar middle-man credit card companies. We all win. LFG.

Credit cards are a scam

What would happen if we just divided the US into the Democratic States of America (DSA) and Republic States of America (RSA) with each having it's own Congress, Supreme Court, President, and Military? 

The democrats can enjoy their pedophiles, baby murder, and socialist prison camps in peace, while the republicans can enjoy their racism, wife-beatings, and school shootings in peace. Everybody wins!

Each state would be designated a member of either the DSA or RSA and can always apply to join the other side. Citizens of the states would only pay federal taxes to the country the state belongs in.

Issues that cross the DSA and RSA border would be considered an international dispute.

I don't see any reason why it would be necessary to consolidate so much power over so many people under one structure. I think the only people who would want that are the ones who want power. Nobody should have that much power.

No civil war. A tumultuous marriage is no better for the kids than a divorce. If you had to choose between a fight to the death, or just to go separate ways, I think the choice is clear.

What if we peacefully split the U.S. into two countries?

Poverty, Government, Natural Law and Bitcoin
Essay by Tim, 2022 Aug 10

99% of political issues are rooted in money - people care about housing costs, education costs, gas costs, etc. etc. etc. and politicians are always trying to promise ways to make things better financially for voters. Ultimately, then, people see poverty as the main issue.

When people argue between socialism and democracy, both sides argue the point of which side will take better care of people precisely because of financial issues.

In many ways, economic socialism is socialism. And economic democracy (capitalism) is democracy. But what if nobody was poor? Then I would expect most people to prefer freedom. The problem is, people are actually trying to solve the poverty issue. And both systems have major problems. Socialism starts off well but leads to lack of production, and ultimately starvation for everyone. Democracy allows for great production, but ultimately all the gains tend to cluster into the hands of fewer and fewer, with a huge wealth gap causing turmoil.

Both systems are actually suffering from natural laws. Socialism suffers from the natural law that people have skills and talents that offer much greater benefit to society as a whole when they are motivated and rewarded for sharing those skills. When you take away rewards, people don't produce. Democracy suffers from the natural law that people have skills and talents that offer much greater benefit to society but over time those with the highest skills and highest intelligence dominate those who lack it, suffocating people and creating a wealth gap.

Most governments today are a mixture of both systems. That is, generally capitalistic but with safety nets such as welfare.

But even today's mixed systems don't address a fundamental issue of capability. Humans, like every other creature on the planet, are highly competitive. We have evolved, just like all other living things, to be able to compete for resources. In any area of life, be it art, science, mathematics, business, politics, and so on - an extremely tiny minority of people are capable of dominating that field and thus, and rightly so, are given the greatest amount of responsibility and with it, often, the greatest reward and the greatest decision-making powers. Furthermore, the ability to out-compete each other happens in ways that are not readily clear to most people. That is, the art of deception, of deceit, and subterfuge. Of political strategy and tactics. The careful planning and building of power and control. These activities also, like a game, have people who are fantastic at it. And such people ultimately run the entire system, regardless of the mode of government. These fantastic tacticians of life don't care what the system is, they will dominate it. They will be the rulers and dictators in a socialistic world. They will be empire billionaires in a capitalistic world. They will always win, and there will always be losers.

Democracy, and the concept of everyone being able to vote, is intended to be one of the safeguards against this type of natural law. By ensuring that "even stupid people are allowed to vote" we intend to protect their rights. But, it really does very little. When stupid people vote, they don't know what they are voting for, or that they are being scammed by the politicians on TV. They have no clue. So, in conjunction, we need education. And yes, education in places like the US is absolutely in horrendous shape. But ultimately, whether it's voting or whether it's maintaining high education, all these factors can be manipulated by those who dominate in natural law.

What I believe the world needs is a law that is as powerful and as great as natural law itself, because man-enforced machinery is subject to corruption and abuse. We need something that is as unbending and unrelenting and impossible to bend as natural law. It would need to be a kind of extension of natural law. Something that no one could abuse, no matter how much power or intelligence they gained. Even if they had an IQ of a billion. 

For all of human history, we have not had anything that really resembled this, although we've made strides. But in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto gave mankind something called Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is the first human-made extension of natural law. Bitcoin has no owner, controller, or head-of-state. Bitcoin is a commodity, but one that cannot be mined more than it is programmed. Its rules cannot be broken or bent by the participants. The only way scammers of high IQ can try to abuse others is by tricking people AWAY from Bitcoin (e.g. Ethereum). They cannot scam people in Bitcoin (assuming the people are using Bitcoin correctly). 

Bitcoin gives the average person the equivalent firepower of all the countries in the world combined. It gives the average person access to a new natural law, that for the first time in human history, gives a person unconfiscatable property. That is, no matter the IQ, or the political power gained, or the business capability or intelligence capability of any amount, that superior intelligence cannot extract that person's Bitcoin. It is locked, secured, and forever preserved. And that is a nightmare for smart people who depend on domination. It creates the greatest amount of fairness in an unfair world - far more than socialism or democracy could ever hope to achieve.

This kind of new rebalancing of power is first of its kind in the world. 

Of course, there is a learning curve to Bitcoin. And of course, you can't take out the educational component. And education is truly lacking. Furthermore, you can see how badly people are easily fooled in the "cryptocurrency" craze, which is precisely the kind of swindling tactics that high IQ people use to trick unsuspecting average people.

Eventually Bitcoin will win. But in the meantime, how many people need to fall? How many people need to starve to death in places around the world? How many more billionaires do we need telling us what to do, what to eat, and what to think? How much more suffering do we need to entertain before all is balanced? As the scams and rugpulls fall, people will continue moving into Bitcoin.

Bitcoin increases intelligence. So, over time, it should also mean that all people will eventually be using Bitcoin because intelligent people will use Bitcoin and spread Bitcoin. There will always be less-capable people, but for the bottom 5% of the population, there are usually some generous caretakers who, if they haven't themselves been ravaged by the high IQ people scheming and politicizing, they are usually fully capable of caring for others. And the rest of the people are protected by a "domination cap" created by Bitcoin. And the high IQ people continue to race to fight for every last Bitcoin, but they cannot win the game completely - because Bitcoin won't allow it. As they fight to earn all the Bitcoin, they actually give value to the Bitcoin owned by all the average IQ people. They inadvertently help the poorest. The poorest need to do nothing more than hold on to their coins and not sell them. Of course, even that seems to be easier said than done. But it's at least possible. It's much more possible to do that, than say, go to university, get a degree in political science and law, and become an expert who can look through all the schemes and tactics of all the best politicians. That's not reasonable at all. Holding Bitcoin is reasonable.

There's no reason for people to wait for Bitcoin's Natural Law to take hold of human society. It benefits everyone as it is accelerated, through education and knowledge and spreading the word. It's verified, every time another scam falls. It's unbreakable. The sooner it spreads and the better. But what does it mean to spread? I think it means that the message of Natural Law needs to be told and understood. It's not hard to understand that the best people dominate which is good, but sometimes dominate out of control and in areas of life where we don't want them to dominate. And that systems of governance don't fix any of those problems, because it is precisely their tactical intelligence that creates the problem. And the message of Bitcoin's counter to Natural Law with its own Natural Law, is precisely the perfect defense against that problem. And because it's a perfect defense, the individual must hold it and not anything else, and not let go of it for any reason unless absolutely necessary - such as survival food, medical expenses, etc. This understanding will spread Bitcoin in direct benefit to them, and as Bitcoin spreads, it becomes protection for all the others who came before and joined Bitcoin already. It's a growing umbrella of protection. It's unstoppable.

So let's spread the knowledge, and keep educating people as much as possible. Bitcoin doesn't need a marketing department. Bitcoin is far, far greater in purpose and scope than what most people see today. They only see Bitcoin's relationship to money, and not humanity itself. Bitcoin is about enlightenment. It is about lifting the consciousness of all people to what we know about human behavior, psychology, drive, and evolutionary tactics. When knowledge increases, Bitcoin popularizes. And that is all Bitcoin needs, and should need. Because Bitcoin is precisely about being against blind trust - open source, verifiable transactions, and a community that relies on verified facts and truth. It doesn't need to be "sold" as if it intends on making a trade. When people choose Bitcoin, they are not paying with anything. Nobody's first step with Bitcoin should be "buying Bitcoin". That should be the last step. Getting Bitcoin doesn't mean that something you have will then be taken away. Because Bitcoin is Truth. Bitcoin is Natural Law. Bitcoin is knowledge. And the more people understand Natural Law in relation to Bitcoin, the more we lift human civilization to the next phase of peace and prosperity. One that isn't full of unrestrained political or economic imbalances that are crushing to everyone's ability to live together. The planet needs a Bitcoin Law restraint on imbalance, more than anything, to be saved. Life on earth itself depends on Bitcoin.


Poverty, Government, Natural Law and Bitcoin

It’s time to lowercase bitcoin

saltydog

Cheapest way to swap on-chain to Lightning? Deposit to Cash App, Withdraw via LN

cointastical

I would love to see this list updated with the most recent fees charged by these exchanges for on-chain/off-chain swaps, just to compare.