More bitcoin economies means less fiat economics

Let's not pretend we're all on the same side.

Female education was among the priorities of the last real Islamic Caliphate, also known as the Ottoman Empire:

I bought some wood from Jeff. He already accepts and understands Bitcoin so it's easier for me.

BIG NEWS!! Inam Falteni, long time participant in our Surf Program at @the_surfer_kids, was selected for the South African Junior Squad. The team will compete in the Junior World Surfing Games later this year. He was selected as a non-travelling reserve, meaning he will be part of squad training, but won't attend the tournament unless another team member can't make it. This is a major validation of the hard work we've put into developing the competitve side of our surf program.

Saving in Bitcoin is not a crime. Yet, the South African National Treasury is drafting regulations that would potentially make it one. These vague rules could: - Ban self-custody of crypto assets. - Force the sale of private assets to the state. - Outlaw peer-to-peer transactions. - Give the Minister arbitrary power to set illegal thresholds without a parliamentary vote. This is not regulation. It's expropriation. Big shout out to @PRDG_ZA for organizing the fight. See what they're doing: propertyrightsdefense.org/ 🔗 KNOW THE THREAT: Official Draft: treasury.gov.za/public com… Submit Objection: ag.bitcoinzar.co.za We are fighting for the right to control our own wealth. #BitcoinEkasi #FinancialInclusion

"Open box BEFORE eating pizza"

"Ottomanism" is misperceived today as a chauvinist ideology. In fact, Ottomanism was a 19th-century pluralist project to unite all Ottomans—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—under a framework of equal rights. Read in my new @MBNEnglish @AlhurraNews piece: alhurra.com/en/22041

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-hu…

🎉 We Did It ! 100 Amazing Users! 🎉 What started as an idea to bring Bitcoin and the Lightning Network to rural communities is officially growing. 100 people are now onboarding into a more inclusive financial future-no internet required.🚀⚡ #Rurbit #Bitcoin #LightningNetwork

What has happened at the #2026WorldCup over the last 48 hours: • Swiss footballer Embolo's visa was put under review and he was only able to join his team days later. • Iraqi national team player Aymen Hussein was held for questioning for nearly 7 hours upon entering the United States. • The Iranian national team spent days dealing with visa procedures at the U.S. Consulate in Türkiye. The U.S. only allowed them entry on match days. Fifteen members of the delegation were denied visas. • Omar Abdulkadir Artan, named CAF's Best African Referee of 2025, was denied a visa. Despite travelling to the U.S. with a diplomatic passport, he was refused entry and sent back. FIFA announced that he will not be able to officiate at the tournament. • The South African national team arrived in the United States much later than planned because part of the delegation was not granted visas. • Members of the Senegal national team staff were forced to remove their shoes and subjected to lengthy searches, sparking accusations of racism. • The Uzbekistan national team was searched with bomb-sniffing dogs and the footage went viral in international media. • Some Scottish supporters, despite being eligible to enter the U.S. visa-free under the ESTA programme, had their travel authorisations revoked just days before departure. • Many supporters who had already bought tickets and booked accommodation had their visa applications rejected, resulting in financial losses.

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are. For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland). Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates). Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something. These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅 Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers. Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth. What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc. Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing. To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was. I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away. THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth. At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in. Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity. This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes. When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand. Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current. This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside. So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

If you're not trying to bring more people to self-custody their bitcoin securely, you can't be part of my gang, sorry.

Somali referee Omar Artan, who was set to referee at the World Cup, was denied entry to the United States. He received a diplomatic passport from the Somali embassy but was turned away upon his arrival. Omar Artan was elected Best African Referee in 2025.

Weekly Brief 2026/23 South Africa stacked three Bitcoin checkout wins: Lift Airlines flight bookings, OzowPay integration, and a bitcoin-only online store paying suppliers in BTC. In Mexico, AureoBitcoin linked Lightning to bank accounts — pesos in seconds. blink.sv/blog/weekly-brief-2…

US seems adamant to convey the message that it's not suited to host anything of global relevance any more.

We had a takedown request from Munich court for a nos_tr post accessed via njump. Being that the event is pulled locally from relays by the event ID passed in the url, I dont think we will comply. It's like blaming a browser for the website you accessed. Happy to go the distance.

In 2016 there was a Z-Cash presentation at the Bitcoin Munich meetup that I attended. It was an interesting research project that hardly anybody knew or used at the time, but I remember there were concerns about inflation bugs voiced by bitcoin community members already back then. 10 years later, and not much has changed. Only that the theoretical concerns of those bitcoiners from 2016 were proven right.

When open source?

The Ottoman Empire had a lower tax burden than the Byzantine Empire. Greeks paid about 50% less tax under the Ottoman Empire than they did under the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines adopted the Ottoman tax system to ensure that the peasants would not rebel in parts of Macedonia.