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122 sats \ 3 replies \ @south_korea_ln 2h \ on: Stacker Saloon
I sometimes wonder if the way I viscerally dislike the Bitcoin treasury company shenanigans and am convinced they are scams is in anyway related to how no-coiners feel about bitcoin due to a lack of understanding...
It's a bit obscure and I can't tell for sure if those MBS' held are only FNMA/FMAC/GNMA, but looking at little more detailed data from NYFed information, i see only F/GNMA in there, so that would mean it's only residential securities from HUD.
Apparently, there's been a FOMC policy since May 2024 that:
directed the Open Market Trading Desk at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (the Desk) to lower the cap on monthly Treasury redemptions to $25 billion and keep the cap on monthly agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS) redemptions unchanged at $35 billion.
So that explains the way that graph moves: it's simply capped at 35B a month. But that also means that these aren't MTM in any way, and the value of these MSBs are as fictional as the ones from 2008? Ugh?
Not at all. My business has garnered much less attention and interest from both customers and investors than I had anticipated. Unexpected technical and security issues popped up. I had to scrap my plans to roadtrip New Zealand during the first half of the year. Got 3 fiat jobs in the meantime to pay my bills; first didn't offer enough hours, got fired from the second (without me even realizing my performance wasn't adequate), and laid off from the third (mostly due to being sick throughout the month of May).
This was enough to make my innate anxiety and depression raise their ugly heads, so even when I had the chance to work on my business & my writing, I wasn't nearly as productive as I could have been.
Anyway. I'm still fucking grateful for all of it, because it is on the edge of our abilities and comfort zone where we can innovate, expand and grow the most.
For now I'm back at my parents' place for the summer (as planned) and can focus the next 1-3 months building my stuff. The original plan was to head over to South and Central America in the fall. But that depends on whether or not I can actually start making an income with my own stuff. If not, I might have to stay in Estonia and start looking for a fiat job, once again.
Here's something relevant:
SN is winning as a great bitcoin integrated community experience. It is winning as a site that hosts diverse topics (at least much more than it used to) and is winning as a place to have overwhelmingly thoughtful and positive discourse online, which is rare these days.
It is losing in ease of use and losing in the ability to attract and retain users. Love SN, just calling it like I see it.
I do think that SN is a bit top heavy, in the sense that its activity is mostly sustained by a handful of frequent posters. I think onboarding new users needs to be easier. I wrote about trying my experience as a new user here: #1004728
There's also a risk analysis here: https://www.bitcoinlayers.org/layers/spark
There's been a lot of work going into that review repository over the last 2 (3? - time flies) years and it's become my go-to to find out how things work at a high level and what risks are identified with
<insert project getting hyped on the tweeter>schizophrenia > cancer
At least with cancer, their mind is (mostly) unaffected. Serious schizophrenia is a nightmare.
While they make a number of good points, I'm not sure I agree that air gapping is as unhelpful as they say.
The hard point BitBox points out is that you are always relying on a potentially compromised device to assist with psbt creation, or transaction broadcasting, or even just knowing what coins you have.
The risk is not so much in storing your keys as it is in using them to sign. This is one reason why the language of "hardware signers" is better than the language of "hardware wallets".
170 sats \ 56 replies \ @Undisciplined 8h \ parent \ on: Did your first half of 2025 go as expected? AskSN
I’m hoping to be able to focus on bitcoin projects full time, or at least enough to not need a separate full time job.
It feels close sometimes and that’s always exhilarating.
There's a lot of data there. I didn't realize how big a role Arbitrum plays in the stablecoin game.
They do have smaller average transaction size than eth, but still...
I would like to know your thoughts on this.
I won't argue with you that LLMs aren't going to evolve into AGI/ASI; I'd find that highly unlikely. I am not even sure how desirable that outcome would be in the first place. So yes, it feels like it's a
VC money burning shitshow
but now I wonder: besides AGI/ASI, are there things that we can do with all this not-AGI stuff that can be useful? And I have a feeling we can (but I'm not sold.)
This past month I have solved 2 issues for myself that were annoying tf out of me for years:
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Clickbait. I hate it. So now I auto-leech an article fed to me and let an LLM summarize it for me. I ignore the title and just read the summary. If I like the summary I will take the trouble to read more. If not, I will ignore it and move on. Saves me a lot of frustration. What I do need is a way to filter the really bad feeds better, like zerohedge because it kinda promotes scammers, which I will not leave to an LLM, but just pre-emptively filter out all promoted articles programatically.
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Videos. I hate these even more. Because even at 2x speed where you can't understand what they are mumbling, this shit just takes too much time. So this past week I have transposed around 40 vids that were recommended here on SN using this process, minus the training part. Listened to the one recommended by @plebpoet/@ek, read some parts of others, discarded everything that smelled like bs. My NLP chip is anyway idle otherwise, might as well use it for something useful, like saving my time.
And that is in the end how I think that we (rational human beings that are disconnected from the VC's tit) should approach this. Silver bullets don't exist, and even if I were wrong about that, if there were one, it was probably not something like an LLM. Instead, let's just create value. For ourselves, and for each other. Without some effing subscription. Let them waste money on building new datacenters too. When the bubble bursts, we'll have ourselves extremely cheap compute that can be used for real solutions.
PS: If you want to present
facts, link something that proves the fact, please.Even though your words are only in your head, you have the means to validate the movement of bitcoins in a given wallet on the blockchain. Is that ownership?
Could you elaborate this thought? What is the basis of ownership other than the sole right to make decisions about something's use and transfer of ownership?
you changed from one socialism to another
Is there any non-socialism though? I think there's only gradations of how "socialism" manifests, but it's not a distinct thing. It'd be interesting to find jurisdictions that are anti-social and see what problems they avoid, and what problems they have.
I should have kept track of everything that went into those back and forths.
I think some of it had to do with site navigation and some had to do with connecting wallets or nostr profiles.
It would be a good exercise to walk a smart non-bitcoiner through the setup process and note all the points of friction.
174 sats \ 51 replies \ @Undisciplined 8h \ parent \ on: Did your first half of 2025 go as expected? AskSN
I’ve been talking to the Predyx team about possibly joining them. That’s the one I’m most excited about, but it’s not trivial to find an arrangement that works for everyone.
A big problem with self-custody is that there always remains one thing (like the backup) that gives full and immediate access to all your coins. This piece of information must be kept secure, but should also be easy to recover.
It's hard to keep the backup secure, and as long as users at home have immediate access to all their funds, that can make them targets for the $5-dollar-wrench-attack.
A few options that try to fix this:
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Encrypting the backup --> not a good idea, as then you need a backup for your backup password. Makes inheritance hard, and basically creates a 2of2 scheme, where you lose either backup or password, your backup is useless. (The BitBox01 had an encrypted mSD).
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Multisig --> still quite technical for normies and needs multiple signing devices and backup locations. Powerful, but UX should improve. Backup complexity (preserve xpubs etc) is quite high).
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Bitcoin script solutions --> I have high hopes that we will see more "intelligent" bitcoin wallets soon, e.g. degrading multisig, timelocked backups, or other "not-instant" recovery paths that preserve full user sovereignty.
Not having instant access to your full stash should be normalized, so thieves can no longer assume that a "friendly visit" at home will pay off.