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Happy Sat-urday Stackers,
How do we turn a culture of consumers into producers? If you think about popular video games where people do things like drive semitrucks, cook food, build factories, and manage civilizations, people want to produce but in particular circumstances. The diff between video games and real life might point to strategies for increasing production:
  1. trivial to start
  2. private, low cost failures
  3. public successes
  4. built-in measuring and feedback
  5. fair competition
  6. well structured and escalating goals
If we can add these features to life, might people play more life rather than video games, produce more rather than consume? I'd argue most technology (bitcoin included) trends toward doing just that.
Have a beautiful, random weekend, stackers!
Upcoming AMAs
  • Foundation Devices, makers of the Passport Bitcoin hardware wallet, will be doing an AMA Monday October 24th at 11a CT. Come ask Foundation anything!
  • The team from Geyser, a global bitcoin crowdfunding platform for builders and creators, will be doing an AMA Wednesday October 26th at 10a CT. Geyser has helped 25 projects raise over 5 BTC cumulatively and recently raised and distributed 3 BTC for Geyser Grants. Come ask Geyser anything!
  • Kollider, a trading-focused exchange leveraging Lightning to provide the "fastest and easiest way to trade," will be doing an AMA Friday October 28th at 10a CT. Kollider also recently released a synthetic fiat wallet. Come ask Kollider anything!
Top Posts
  1. hodlonaut won! Craig Wright, who claims he is Satoshi Nakamoto, sued hodlonaut for saying otherwise and lost. In the judgement, hodlonaut is acquited, Craig Wright is ordered to pay hodlonaut's case costs (~$400k), and the judge reinforces the "prevailing opinion that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto." This is just the latest of Craig Wright's legal failures, also recently losing to Peter McCormick.
  2. Impervious launched! Impervious is "the world's first bitcoin lightning-native web browser" that features connecting your node (like the Alby browser extension), but also has built-in P2P encrypted messaging, video calls, and collaborative docs. The long teased browser is FOSS, but the ToS has some users concerned about future privacy.
  3. DHH, the usually controversial founder of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and Hey, pens Why we're leaving the cloud. "Renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth," he writes. Beyond the high cost, $500k/year for Hey alone, he cites re-decentralizing the internet as a motivation. DHH notably and recently became an allie to Bitcoin amidst the Canadian trucker protests too.
  4. Lose internet and all other reasonable forms of communication, but need to send a bitcoin transaction? @nerd2ninja suggests sending it on a pigeon. Might I also painfully suggest that if you're in a rush (e.g. sending a lightning penalty tx) you put a clock on the pigeon - time will fly! (I'm sorry.)
  5. @iguano switched from Muun to Phoenix citing Muun's operational opaqueness in Why I switched from Muun wallet to Phoenix wallet. As many know, Muun appears to operate like a lightning wallet given that it receives payments via lightning invoices, but it is in fact a submarine swapping on-chain wallet. @iguano's complaints extend beyond this and include the lack of LNURL support and his wallet's unexpected and significant on-chain footprint.
Top AMAs
  1. Peter Todd, early Bitcoin Core contributor and founder of OpenTimestamps, did an AMA. We learn about Todd's arguments for tail emission, how a pleb dev can help core, his biggest fears about bitcoin, reducing bitcoin's block size, and much more! Topped only by Lyn Alden's AMA, Todd's AMA has 127 replies.
  2. Justin Moon, cofounder of Fedi, did an AMA. We learn what human centric design means, Justin's recommendations for programming on Bitcoin, the superiority of TabConf over everything else, his favorite non-bitcoin open source project, and more!
  3. Michael, founder of Boltz, a privacy-first account-free exchange, did an AMA. We learn about boltz' timeline for supporting Taproot, the advantages of swapping on boltz vs deezy.io, LND vs CLN, why they have withdrawal minimums, and more!
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Yeehaw, Keyan A guy who works on Stacker News
The SHEER AMOUNT of effort we can put into building fake simulated civilizations — Civilization games and their many clones—shows, I think, how important concepts are like building, production, and cultivation actually are to a human being.
Think about some of the laziest guys you know... are they really "lazy" as they're farming ungodly amounts of XP in whatever game they play online these days? As they're "grinding" and leveling up their character?
This is something I think is really important to tap into. I DON'T mean "gamification." Those games, if anything, are "workified," gamification isn't the point.
I think people actually do WANT to build, create, store, and pass on things of value. They just need access to the means, which a lot of them haven't had until now. But now they all do, worldwide.
So yes, "a civilization of producers, not consumers" — right there with you.
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