Christopher Garza

On the filter fork topic. I don't usually have time, but this morning listened to one of the twitter spaces from earlier in the week, with some well meaning relative bitcoin newcomers, that humanized them, and their concerns and thoughts for why they thought that made it logical to support 110. My feeling after listening, is if these are the people with #110 in their handles, I'm sad to see them about to fork off and get disillusioned without understanding why bitcoin rejected 110 robustly. So here's a more empathetic, constructive higher level version of explaining why not. I hope it's high-level and first-principles enough that everyone can follow. They seem to want to understand what makes people tick, and are suspicious of intent. So, if someone asked me why is Bitcoin important and what is it, I'd say my (personal) mission and hope for bitcoin is to build the cypherpunk future, that "Snow Crash" was a blueprint, and work backwards from there. Bitcoin I hope leads to fully free markets via bearer unseizable, hard mathematically dependable money. Not everyone is comfortable with that level of freedom, but that's my view. And at this point, I believe that surprisingly, even now many governments have come to understand and value bitcoin's gold-like mathematical assurance, a positive development. Others may have milder views than myself, but still like hard censorship resistant money. Because of motive suspicion, if it's not obvious: I hate spam with a passion, that's how I came to design hashcash while researching decentralized bearer money with others, and running nodes in privacy related cypherpunk p2p networks nearly three decades ago. People seem upset about the default op return policy change in bitcoin. I will just assert, there are extremely robust and simple reasons for bitcoin changing default relay policy, and most just didn't do their research, so don't know what those are, or maybe not technical enough to fully understand though there have been 1000s of posts trying to explain in various simplified ways. So that lack of understanding lends itself to shared build-up of false narratives. So here's my back-to-basics higher level explanation. The decentralization needed to create cypherpunk money has implications a: side effect of decentralization is that you can't impose your views on others. The very decentralization mechanism that helps that, is working against what BIP 110 wants, which at it's most basic is a quest to police other people. I understand supporters don't see their intent like that, but introspect deeper. You can modify your software, but not anyone else's. Another critical and incredibly robust technical bitcoin immune system is bitcoin can't have people who don't understand technology basics insist on eroding security, decentralization robustness and core properties. That would end badly, fast, and so people will fight you on that. So the message is Bitcoin respectfully says "no" to what you want. Sorry, and bitcoiners do genuinely understand and empathize that you mean well, have high level thoughts that make emotional sense, and articulate sensible bitcoin-defensive high level ideas, but they are not grounded and without you seeing it, the way you propose to achieve your ideas, hard-conflict with free cypherpunk permissionless money. My advice is to listen to more experienced people who understand the system and why it works the way it does, to whatever detail you want to understand the grounded reasons for why this is the implication of decentralization and cypherpunk money. I guarantee you the developer and protocol ecosystem shares and exceeds your views on bearer hard money (and dislike of spam). You may not agree with individual developers choices, views, way of expressing themselves etc, BUT you also need to understand the IETF-like decentralized technical consensus process creates a protective change resistance, that is highly effective at protecting bitcoin mission. The implication of which is no developer can change anything without technical consensus from hundreds of other developers and protocol observers who are pedantic and extremely knowledgeable clever people who won't let any unaddressed technical question past. The protective change resistance is robust and decentralized in an amplifying way because of this technical consensus. And the many highly technical mainline developers' cypherpunk mission mindsets are probably far more determined than you can even handle on clarity of understanding and views about freedoms on permissionless networks, as many of you are probably still subconsciously inured by the matrix, where they have transcended that, and grew up immersed in it decades ago. They think natively in this space, while you are just grappling with the surface. Many wont have internalized or have the experience to know how this internet physics works, where there is no policeman, no policy authority, just mathematics, free market and hard money. That has implications for your views also, unfortunately. Now the tough pill, which is unfortunately true: If you won't listen to reason, educate yourself, learn, the same radical freedom applies to you: your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork. But bitcoin won't be joining it. (With respect and no sleight intended.) Please rejoin bitcoin now, or later if you're not convinced and need to experience 110 forking off and fizzling for yourself to start that journey of introspecting and learning. It would be sad if bitcoin lost people disillusioned due to simple lack of understanding of what's going on there, we're all trying to defend bitcoin and keep it on mission. Including btw the 110 technical promoters, just they wandered off plot somehow. Join the cypherpunks on bitcoin, come cypherpunk summer🌞 in a few weeks.

@JoshuaDHCM I’m with you brother, a sparky here helping guide our young guys to the orange light. They/we are in hard times created by weak men, be patient and remember your first day. Stay humble and stack sats🤙🏻

It absolutely baffles me how much these young guys are on their phone at work. It’s like if I left them in a room all together they would just be on their phones and never speak. I was having a young man run a jetter hose and he was actually trying to send a text while holding it. Idk how many things are wrong with this. For one that’s a hose that goes into a sewer so it has poop all over it. Second it’s very dangerous to handle that much pressure with one hand. And third you look like a complete idiot to the customer. I told him to sit in the van while the adults finished the job. And he had the nerve to jump on his phone on the van like it was a free break. I’m at my wits end with some peoples ambition. I treat every job like I’m taking food out of my kids mouth if I mess this up. Because it’s the truth. He couldn’t even look up 😂😂😂. How do I get through to these going cats that don’t take the job serious? How can I motivate someone to want to be the best at their job. To make their ancestors cheer in the heavens at their exceptional effort! To want to be the change in their family bloodline. I wish everyone took this job as serious as I do. We would be an elite unit .

@DSBatten Thank you for sharing the lesson learned. tThe words I needed to stay course.

A short story about trusting yourself Until 2020 I had a simple, effective website. A homepage, a sparse amount of menu, a video on the homepage and a "let's go" button if people wanted to take the conversation further. The simple, clear, direct message and path typically led to one new coaching client per quarter who found me on the website. Then I met a marketing expert. He told me I was doing it all wrong. "People need to get to know you before they'll connect with you", "There's not enough context, or story about who you are", "And the design is sparse and not warm". I trusted his viewpoint. After all he was a marketing expert. What would I know? We rebuilt the website in what was a long, involved process. The result looked visually appealing and told a far more complete story about who I was. But ... after a year, there had been no new enquiries. after three years, still no new enquiries, let alone clients Six years later, one enquiry off the website and still zero new clients. Here's what he realized: Yes, there are some people who need to "get to know you" before they contact you. But people who take a long time to make decisions have never been my clients. My best clients by results have always been those who have the capacity to implement a new idea fast. I'd just invested money in creating a website that matched my marketing expert's belief about how people buy, not how I already knew my best clients engaged with me. But the mistake was on me. I didn't trust my gut, my own process, and allowed the words of an "expert" to override not just my intuition but my own direct experience. Worse, because I'd "invested so much in building it" I was reluctant to go back and fix it, because that would amount to admitting to an expensive mistake, the real expense being not the initial cost, but the compounding loss of business over a growing period of time as I continued to stay in a losing trade. This year I got real with myself and admitted the mistake, and within a month built a new website. The site follows all the exact same principles that I used until 2020. But it's better because, well, Bitcoin ... and I've become a better coach since then too. Here's the finished result if you're curious danielbatten.co But the point of the story is this: No matter how much expertise someone has, you are the expert on you. Don't trade that inner knowing for someone else's domain knowledge lightly. You know context they don't, and ignoring that can be expensive.

BULL is challenging in court the EU's dangerous mass surveillance program for crypto users, DAC8. I cannot stand by and do nothing while faceless globalist bureaucrats put the security and privacy of millions of Europeans at risk. We will get DAC8 repealed.

C.S. Lewis argued that every new book should be balanced with an old one. He famously wrote, "It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." Lewis observed that every age has its own blind spots, and that older writers help us see the assumptions our own generation takes for granted.

when the samourai devs had their homes raided by heavily armed cops 2 years ago it sent a chill throughout the bitcoin industry i felt it first hand, shit was scary and nobody knew what was about to come next when the dust cleared a bit, arrested and funds seized, it was obvious they were going to need significant legal defense funds made a few calls, but nobody wanted to stick their neck out, reasonable, i myself was hoping someone else would handle it, a young family of my own that i did not want to put at additional risk but someone had to do it, so we launched the p2prights fund through @bitcoinpolicy, still proud of those guys to this day for taking that risk head on when nobody else would in total, we raised about a million dollars worth of bitcoin, well short of what was needed to fight the case properly, mostly from individuals, honestly it was pretty disappointing, made me rethink a bunch of things anyway, we still need to free samourai, lets get it done billandkeonne.org

A hurricane flattens a town. The local news cheers the "economic boost" from all the rebuilding. Construction jobs! New windows! Fresh lumber sales! You just watched Bastiat's broken window in HD. That glazier gets paid, sure. The shopkeeper who forked over $300 for glass now can't buy the shoes he wanted. The cobbler goes hungry. Wealth didn't appear. It shifted, minus the value of the window that used to exist. If you scale this to war, bombs level cities, and the GDP charts tick upward while a generation's capital burns. You don't grow rich by destroying the tools you build wealth with. Broken glass is still broken glass, even if it covers an entire country.

Milton Friedman visited China in the 1970s. He sees a massive canal project with hundreds of workers digging by hand. He asks why no machines. An official tells him proudly that the shovels create jobs. Friedman's reply: then why not give them spoons? Output is the point, not jobs. If you wanted maximum employment, you'd ban the tractor and hand every farmer a teaspoon. You'd have full employment and an empty stomach. Wealth comes from doing more with less, freeing those hands to build something the spoon-counters never imagined.

Bitcoin held. The structures built on top of it didn't. That's not a contradiction. It's the lesson. This week Bitcoin held above its long-term trend while leveraged Bitcoin structures repriced sharply lower. Many saw weakness. I saw the market distinguishing the asset from the claims built on top of it. Issue #014: → btcintelligencereport.com/latest

@brain_stimulus Great question but let’s apply that critical thinking to removing money from the state. I wonder what new technology gives 8 billion people on earth responsibility and real private property rights🤔

🚨 DÉTECTEUR EMF : DES PICS DE HAUTES FRÉQUENCES TOUTES LES 5-6 SECONDES… SANS AUCUNE SOURCE VISIBLE 😱 Un homme filme son détecteur de champs électromagnétiques (CEMPROTEC 34) en mode haute fréquence uniquement. Résultat : toutes les 5 à 6 secondes, un pic clair apparaît (lumières rouges et vertes qui s’allument), puis tout redevient calme… avant que ça recommence de façon très régulière. Ce qu’il précise : Son téléphone est éteint Il n’y a aucune électronique visible aux alentours Quand il passe en mode détection complète (toutes fréquences), rien n’apparaît C’est uniquement en mode haute fréquence que les impulsions reviennent de manière rythmée L’hypothèse qui circule : Ces impulsions régulières pourraient provenir de tours 5G/6G ou d’infrastructures de communication qui envoient des signaux de synchronisation ou de contrôle à intervalles précis. Certains y voient aussi la signature possible de systèmes de surveillance ou de technologies de type « directed energy ». Le fait que ça soit invisible en mode normal et seulement détectable en haute fréquence renforce l’idée que ces ondes sont spécifiquement conçues pour passer inaperçues. Question : Et si ces impulsions régulières n’étaient pas un simple « bruit de fond » technologique… mais un rythme imposé à notre environnement et à nos corps ?

Unless @Apple's decision to terminate @craigraw's Apple Developer account is reversed by June 30, all new installs of Sparrow will fail, and development on macOS will end. If you value Sparrow, a repost would help. @AppleSupport

@AAStack “The only way love can be shown in this world is by sacrifice” Ven Archbishop Fulton Sheen

I never truly understood selflessness until I became a father. Before my daughter, my time, goals, and ambitions belonged to me. Then, in an instant, someone else’s future became more important than my own. Fatherhood taught me that love isn’t measured by what you feel, but by what you’re willing to sacrifice. The greatest privilege of my life is giving everything I have so she can have a better future. That’s the closest thing I’ve ever known to true altruism. Happy Father’s Day to the fathers who love, sacrifice, protect, and provide without keeping score. 🫵

@Breedlove22 We read to determine our own truth. Thank you for spreading truth brother, Happy Father’s Day!

My parents split when I was five, and the years after were spent in poverty. By the time I was eight, my mother had become an alcoholic. This is the full story of the woman who built me and broke me (the same woman, the same hands): To understand her, you have to understand the house she came from. My grandfather was a Korean War prisoner of war who came home carrying flashbacks he never set down, and he spent thirty years drinking a liter of whiskey a day to keep them quiet. Whatever my mother lived through in that house was enough to send her running at thirteen, hitchhiking across the country alone. She had me at twenty-one. For the first eight years of my life she held it together. She was present, she was loving, and she gave my brother and me every ounce of what she had. She used to sit and read the encyclopedia with me, page after page, and over time she taught me something more valuable than any fact: How to find my own answers. One of her sayings has stayed with me my whole life "it's not what you know, it's whether you know how to look it up." That woman planted the curiosity that drives everything I do today. Around the time I turned eight, she fell into the same alcoholism her father carried back from the war, and from then on I never knew who I'd be coming home to. The mother who handed me the encyclopedia became someone I spent my childhood navigating around. My brother and I learned to take care of ourselves because the alternative was nothing at all – school, lunch money, rides home from practice, all of it landed on two kids. By eleven I was overweight from fast food and soda, too ashamed to take my shirt off at a pool party. I built a sharp, sarcastic humor as armor, and my love of books turned from curiosity into refuge – the safest room in my life. For twenty-five years she told us she could quit whenever she wanted. We intervened more times than I can count, and every time she agreed with everything we said and walked straight back to the bottle. Then one day she simply stopped, and I still don't understand what shifted inside her. She got seven more years before the damage her body had absorbed over those decades finally took her. I'm still working through what it means to lose the person who built you and broke you in the same lifetime. She gave me the curiosity, the reading habit, the resilience, and the pain – the whole inheritance, gift and wound bound together so tightly I've stopped trying to separate them. I love you, Mom. You were the toughest and funniest woman I've ever known, and I'll carry your wisdom for the rest of my life. May your soul finally find its rest.

@olvelez007 Vote with the hardest money and spread love to your community. Men create the world we want to see! Happy Father’s Day!

It's a apparent to me that there is a growing cohort of Bitcoin maxis who've lost sight of two very important truths: 1) Bitcoin can't be controlled by the amount of btc you hold. The guy with 1 satishi is no different to the network than the guy with 1,000,000 btc. Bitcoin does not grant political power based on wealth ownership. A holder of 1 satoshi cannot be censored because he is small, and a holder of 1 million BTC cannot rewrite the rules because he is large. Ownership and control are deliberately separated. That's one of Bitcoin's most radical departures from nearly every monetary system before it. Wealth concentration can exist, but protocol authority does not automatically follow from it. 2) Bitcoin is for everyone, even those who you consider to be your enemies. Eventually, every nation state, every faction, every corporation, every group, every individual will have and interact with Bitcoin. It's as inevitable as the internet. The internet did not succeed because only "good" people were allowed to use it. It succeeded because everyone could use it. Friends and enemies. Democracies and dictatorships. Activists and corporations. The protocol itself remained neutral. If you want to remain above the noise and only focus on pure signal, I suggest you join me weekly here: btcintelligencereport.com/latest Every Sunday. Always free. Forever High Signal. 🟠 For Bitcoin

The state has never once given up control of money voluntarily. You have to take it. For ten thousand years, whoever ran the mint ran the show. Roman emperors clipped the denarius until it held 5% silver. Henry VIII debased the English penny so thoroughly they called him Old Coppernose. The Federal Reserve has shaved roughly 97% off the dollar's purchasing power since 1913, and it did this with a printing press and a straight face. Every monetary authority shares one trait: it inflates whenever inflating serves the people in charge. Gold restrained them for a while, which is exactly why they confiscated it (Executive Order 6102, April 1933) and later cut the last cord at Camp David in August 1971. What makes Bitcoin different? No emperor can clip it. No central banker can expand the supply past 21 million coins because the rule lives in the protocol, enforced by tens of thousands of nodes run by people who have no interest in funding your deficit. You can hold the entire amount in your head as twelve words and walk across any border. Try doing that with a vault of Krugerrands and a customs officer who knows what a metal detector is for. This is the separation that sound money advocates argued for over a century without ever getting it. Mises wanted competing currencies and a market that picked the winner. Hayek wrote "The Denationalisation of Money" in 1976 and was told it was a charming fantasy. Now the fantasy runs 24 hours a day, settles final in roughly ten minutes, and answers to no congressional committee. The state can ban it (China has tried four times) and the network keeps producing a block every ten minutes anyway. You were taught that money is a creature of the state, that someone responsible must manage it, that the alternative is chaos. That job description belonged to the people who print it. Bitcoin removes the position entirely, and the men who held it are discovering, for the first time in recorded history, that the money no longer needs them.

I KNOW there are more than 16,576 Bitcoiners on X…. Right..?

we still need to free samourai billandkeonne.org

The "age verification" playbook isn't about protecting kids. It's about bullying hardware and software vendors into building on-device digital ID infrastructure that can and will be repurposed for mass surveillance. The safeguard IS the surveillance. Don't fall for it.

It’s time to repeal the Bank Secrecy Act. It should have never passed in the 1970s and the onerous compliance costs it thrusts on companies while doubling as a dragnet surveillance system is completely anathema to the ideals this country was founded on.