Merchant-generated and backed credit notes are how we traded before 'money'. We go back to that.

The premise and etymology of 'money' gets us stuck thinking There Can Be Only One. When there's only One Money in a system, you have a massive single point of failure. It's an awful design. When Bitcoin's price changes, ideally (in your view) billions of people would be affected all at once.

Not so in a system where everyone holds credit with dozens of merchants. When one merchant goes under their own credit hyperinflates - and nobody else's. This whole idea we need to yolk all of society together under One Money so they can sink or float all at once has to go.

Massive decentralization is the way forward. It isn't difficult to run a traceless credit system. That's how the world worked and survived tyrants; when you 'break even' the ledger is smashed into a million pieces. Bitcoin is the opposite of 'traceless', it forces your transaction into a permanent ledger.

Pear Credit had the right approach (no blockchain, no permanent ledger, no transaction costs) but the project was announced by the Tether team in Nov 2022 and immediately memory holed. I am Jack's lack of surprise. cashu seemed to have hit on the same approach but couldn't help chaining itself to the block (or he's just rebranded to appeal to maxis, I can't figure out of it's still usable without the blockchain).

Handy! Thanks for sharing. Will be using this one.

Great job on https://nodeless.io BTW @utxo the webmaster 🧑‍💻 looks fantastic, neat API docs, too.

I can appreciate as a developer what I disagree with in principle (massively centralized, eternal immutable ledgers aka blockchains masquerading as decentralized and somehow freedom enhancing). To measure is to manage. ;-)

True, but if you want a short and sweet daily (10-15m) to work everything just once, I just followed this and #feelsgoodman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=velPc7_mFsk

This is Nostr. Bitcoin is a centralized, distributed database calling itself 'decentralized' when it's about as decentralized as Netflix or Facebook. Distributed nodes do not a thing decentralized make. As long as they constantly attempt to sync up to one authoritative global state, however determined, you got yourself a centralized database. In my view, all the Bitcoin ads flooding everyone's feed ended this akshully decentralized protocol (Nostr's) growth in popularity.

Ah yes, you need to replace the One False System with the One True System.

Bitcoin maxis are monopolists who forsee a mono-polar solution to all the issues of finance: The Almighty BTC. Everything else is a 'shitcoin', even physical options that, you know, can work offline and without electricity. Maxis hate decentralization, which literally means a plurality of solutions to choose from, not One True Coin to shill.

You can upload up to 10 hours of audio (or paste a YouTube URL) and ask natural language questions of it (e.g. what were the main takeaways?) at https://www.assemblyai.com/playground/v2/

Yeah, like the implementation of a digital surveillance grid ushered in as temporary emergency measures.

Every 3rd post is a Bitcoin ad. That's probably why Nostr failed and growth is now negative. https://stats.nostr.band/

Nostr is shrinking, not growing. It failed to reach critical mass because every 3rd post (generously) is a Bitcoin ad.

https://stats.nostr.band/

Look closely at the month-separated Retention of all users, 30 days after signup, %

LOL Bitcoin maxis HATE the idea of decentralized plurality of solutions to the problem of currency. Ask 'em. They're monopolists.

Did we find one with Bitcoin yet?