Sports ball is a helluva drug.

AI is programming genes. Read that again.

Thank you for building a private, uncensored AI platform, @ErikVoorhees. youtu.be/dnP5W3gNYeA

I sometimes wonder why the likes of Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and Bernie Sanders never talk about how immoral it was for Zimbabweans to have all this money.

"The reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins hitch-hIking a ride... "...illness is readily resolved with early treatment that inhibits viral replication... Ivermectin... Hydroxychloriquine..." - DARPA 8/2021 rtw

As you probably know, there's a giant skull on display in the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. It was created in 2023 for GreenpeaceUSA's campaign against Bitcoin mining, and its job was to make the world see Bitcoin as an environmental villain. So how did it end up in a museum built by the people it was designed to shame? I was close to most of what happened next. But it took me until this year to see what the story was actually about. Early 2023 was the high-water mark of the environmental case against Bitcoin. Tesla had already stopped accepting Bitcoin payments, citing environmental concerns. Most press on mining was hostile. And GreenpeaceUSA's "Change the Code" campaign, funded with $5 million from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, had just unveiled its centrepiece: the Skull of Satoshi, a striking sculpture by the artist Ben Von Wong. Source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Troy Cross (who became not just a comrade in arms but a friend during this chapter of Bitcoin's history) saw a different way in. Troy's insight was and always had been to turn a public debate into a 1:1 conversation fast. He did that much better than was ever my nature, and he did it with Ben. It was Troy who invited Ben to talk to him: environmentalist to environmentalist, peer to peer. At last year's Bitcoin conference, Troy told me something I didn't know at the time: the conversation had lasted for four days. Troy made the case most of us would have made: how mining soaks up wasted renewable energy, how it can stabilise grids. And it worked, for hours at a time. Ben would shift. Then he'd check in with GreenpeaceUSA, and the campaign would pull him back to the script. At one point they brought in Alex de Vries, the central-bank employee whose since-debunked research the campaign was largely built on, to talk to Ben directly. Two steps forward, two steps back. Source: x.com/DSBatten/status/186725… Then Troy stopped. He told me later that the breakthrough came "when I stopped trying to spell out the case for Bitcoin and just said, 'OK, let me lay out all the reasons why I think you're opposed to it.'" Read that again. The turning point in the most public fight over Bitcoin's environmental story was a man offering to argue his opponent's case. I've coached founders and CEOs for twenty years, and I recognised the move the moment Troy described it. When a person is defending a position, their mind is occupied with protection, and almost nothing you say gets processed. Data bounces off a defended mind. When you lay out someone's case better than they've articulated it themselves, the defence has nothing left to push against - you've proven you understand them before asking to be understood (Aristotle noticed the same thing about character twenty-three centuries ago). Source: classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/r… And those first days of arguing weren't wasted. They showed Ben who he was dealing with: an environmentalist who knew the data cold and never once raised his voice. By the time Troy held up the mirror, Ben trusted the man holding it. The order matters. People accept evidence from a messenger they trust, inside a conversation that feels safe, and at no other time. What happened next was the tide turned. Ben adopted a new position around Bitcoin, not pro-Bitcoin, but definitely no longer anti-Bitcoin either. He was now in the middle ground of uncertainty, redefining the meaning of his own art and expressing hope of both sides engaging in dialog. His beautiful tweet where he announced this shift was not only public, it has remained his pinned post ever since: "I made the Skull believing that Bitcoin Mining was a simple black-and-white issue. I've spent my entire career trying to reduce real-world physical waste, and PoW felt intuitively wasteful. Of course, I was wrong. Few things in the world are black and white. Dumb me." The "Dumb me" included - his words, on his profile, by his choice, for three years now. Source: x.com/thevonwong/status/1639… He let better information redraw the picture in shades of gray, publicly, which takes more intellectual honesty than either defending one's original position or "switching teams". Then Ben did something nobody asked of him. He set up meetings between the campaign's director, Josh Archer, and four of us: Troy, Margot Paez, Trey Walsh and me. What was said in those rooms stays private, and that's how it should be. What I can share is that I found Josh genuinely interested. A few months later, he left the campaign. Then he left GreenpeaceUSA altogether. The campaign wound down. Not one node owner changed the code. In April last year, I reached out to Ben to ask whether we could procure the skull from him, so it could have a second life somewhere better than a warehouse. The reply never came. Six weeks later I found out why: Ripple, the company whose co-founder had funded the campaign, had already bought it under NDA, to unveil at the Bitcoin Conference and gift to the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. The sculpture commissioned to bury Bitcoin's reputation was donated to Bitcoin's museum by the campaign's own funder. You couldnt script it. At the Bitcoin Conference, Ben got back to me with a message: "I think you were right in some ways in that Bitcoin really has been the fastest greening technology out of all the other ones. And looking at how other technologies have gone backwards, Bitcoin hasn't ... yet, anyways." I asked whether I could share it publicly. He replied: "Sure thing go for it. Thanks for asking I appreciate the transparency." That "yet, anyways" at the end is what intellectual honesty sounds like in two words. Ben was prepared to give time, data and evidence the casting vote. Few things in the world are black and white - and Ben writes like a man who means it. The skull arrived in Nashville as it should have: unaltered - the same immutable monument Ben has built. What had changed was everything surrounding it: the art's meaning, the story around it, the zeitgeist, the artist himself. All that had changed because of the simple acts of one human talking to another human, repeated over time. And Troy's four days were one thread of many. Nobody appointed him to talk to Ben. Nobody appointed Margot, Trey or me to defend Bitcoin. No campaign manager set us weekly KPIs for number of GreenpeaceUSA ratios. Nobody coordinated the Bitcoiners who met every campaign post with their own data, day after day, in numbers no press office could match. The campaign ran on $5 million, a media plan and a famous brand. The defence ran on individuals with no budget, no leader and no title, each deciding alone to talk to another human being directly. Satoshi's whitepaper described electronic cash that needed no intermediaries. It turned out the defence of his network needed none either. That's what the skull means to me now. A network designed peer to peer was defended peer to peer.

Few

No one is talking about this new form of addiction.

Are you beginning to see why the #RightToCompute is important?

Damn how bad are those Vineyard wind economics for the project owner anyways... 😅

🚨ANTHROPIC’S AI RULES COULD CRUSH OPEN-SOURCE RIVALS David Sacks and Jason say Anthropic is pushing regulation that could limit how many AI models users can access. “It’s not enough to win in the free market. They want the government to restrict the competition.”

Thank you to @NHBankers for inviting me to speak at their annual membership meeting on blockchain tokenization and digital assets. New Hampshire banks are getting ready for the future and that's good for our state's economy and our citizens' prosperity.

Anthropic

Fingers crossed that @elonmusk will pay off our national debt.

Congratulations to Vaire Computing Senior Scientist Dr Frank @MikePFrank for his third reversible computing patent, issued for work done at Sandia National Labs prior to joining @VaireHQ 👏

Cypherpunks just got the bat signal.

This single tweet cost California hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, revenue, and jobs:

John thinks Elon has a trillion one-dollar bills in his house, and if only he'd spend it on philanthropy, we'd solve lots of problems. In fact, what Elon has is lots of capital, which is used to improve the general standard of living. Liquidating that capital so everyone can get a one-time check for $50 would be destructive and idiotic. John has also managed to think, despite all the evidence everywhere he looks, that social problems are a matter of not enough money spent, that homelessness (for example) is a simple matter of people not having physical houses, and all we have to do is hand them some houses. The more you like mankind, the more capital accumulation you should want, because that is the only way real incomes are increased for everyone, as opposed to the loot-and-redistribute model that eats the seed corn. ("Why do we have all this seed corn! I could feed so many people with it," poor John would be saying.)