Tootfinder

Prem ghinde thinks that Alan is killing bitcoin.
Alan is paid in government money, and saves in bitcoin. He's an imaginary straw man.
Alan doesn't plan to spend his bitcoin though. Just stack it until he sells it. And this doesn't build the bitcoin network.
Without transitions, when the block rewards run out, there will be no money for miners. Miners will need fees, which means transactions.
Since he's paying in bank money, he's funding bankers instead of miners. He's encouraging retail to accept bank money instead of miners and lightning liquidity providers.
Unlike Alan, Prem lives on the bitcoin standard. All in. Spending sats because he has no bank money to spend. It can be done, he insists. Today. Mostly by using gift vouchers bought with bitcoin.
He's sad that people here are buying drinks from the hotel with bank cards instead of lightning.
Stop watching the price, he says, it's only a measure of government money's collapse. Change your yardstick. Account in bitcoin. Dollars aren't even money, they are currency. If you must measure, do it against gold.
Since moving to el Salvador he had learned Spanish, until he even dreams in Spanish. Try to dream in bitcoin.
Every transaction is a vote, so stop voting for bank money.
I think the main trouble with this is that tax event in every purchase, and the fact my employer won't set a wage in bitcoin even if they would convert to bitcoin to pay me.
#bitcoin #bitfest

A panel on bitcoin treasury companies.
Because investment law makes it hard for institutions to buy bitcoin in their funds. You can't own BTC in you tax free ISA. So some companies that do hold bitcoin, notably microstrategy, became proxy investments. If you can't hold BTC you could maybe own a company that owns BTC instead.
Microstrategy started because it's ceo realized it's dollar treasury was being debased by dollar printing. So tried buying BTC instead, with fantastic success.
Copycat companies proliferated. They boomed and then busted. One panelist calls that a grift. A way to memeticly pump share price.
A line can be drawn between profitable companies just storing their profit in bitcoin Vs those raising debt to buy without having a profitable business.
Imagine a world transiting from using seashells for money to using gold coins. A company gathers seashells from investors to buy gold coins, which will do better than sea shells. Trouble is the next step where the company pays back it's investors with... More seashells.
If you own shares in the company, you do not own bitcoin. You'll just get more old fashioned bank money.
Still. It's worked as marketing, more people being convinced BTC has value.
If you do buy a treasury company, check it's bitcoin not "digital assets" including shitcoins.
#bitfest #bitcoin #bitcoinTreasuryCompanies

Day two introduced again by Mad bitcoins .
Then the history of art on bitcoin includes satoshi and his original logo, ASCII art in the Blockchain, Cassius coins with scratch off keys, these pictured images of fake satoshi and 200 logos.
Exploded from there, trading cards, the rare Pepe's.
What makes it bitcoin art?
Symbology. The logo. Religious symbology. Is it a cult?
Memes. Memes catch and go in a fashion which is unpredictable and fits the whole history to a timeline.
Art builds culture and heros proliferate bitcoin culture for all.
Art traditionally goes up in value but none of it seems to outpace bitcoin itself.
Some is for sale in the gallery but it'll unlikely be a better but then 30 percent discount bitcoin today 😆
#bitfest #art #bitcoin

Rob Gaskell of Sundial is presenting on a layer two protocol designed to enable bitcoin to generate yield.
Most bitcoin is still, in long term hodl. Not helping anyone.
Sure, you could lend your bitcoin for interest but that would count as a tax event and also involve losing custody.
What if a programmable sidechain to help with scaling, allow borrowing and lending and products retail and institutions like?
His solution is called Sundial and doesn't need new protocol changes or forks.
Hard to say what it actually does though? Presumably something like liquidity in sidechains? Didn't really seem to get what he actually is building. 🤷
#bitfest #bitcoin

Britain is broken, in various ways. Could adopting bitcoin help it bounce back?
Renegade Investor thinks so.
Central banks printing money causes government debt and artificially low interest rates. Their monetary policy is political and done for bankers not for people.
Bitcoin monitory policy is fixed.
Lockdown during pandemic was funded by money printing, and caused a big inflation pump and government debt increase. It caused the current cost of living crisis.
Lockdown could have been impossible under a bitcoin standard.
In pounds the cost of living has gone up lots over the last decade. But in bitcoin it's gone down massively.
He thinks wealth redistribution is taking money from productive people and giving it to those who aren't increasing the country wealth. Here I disagree entirely. Wealth is reality being taken from the workers and given to the capital owners. We are redistributing wealth towards the rich currently. Taking the wealth created by workers to give to idle owners.
I also wonder, would limited government power be good? Did the lockdown save lives? Would it do do under a worse pandemic? Limited government power may be double edged.
Not sure why he thinks immigration is funded by government, rather than immigrants increasing the country wealth. Seems to think bitcoin could reduce immigration, which I find unbelievable and undesirable.
This talk I disagree with quite a lot.
#bitcoin #bitfest #britain

The conference also has a cinema room, showing bitcoin based films. Not mine, but I'm here for "finding home" by avi burra. Who did q&a after.
A short Travelog about a visit a cypherpunk in Prague for BTC Prague. Which was a much bigger bitcoin conference.
Lots of shots of a beautiful European city, and brief interviews with the people there. Many at restaurants where meals are paid for with bitcoin.
I guess they have a circular economy there of some sort.
Conclusion seems to be that fixing the money is important but building community is even more importanter.
#bitfest #film #bitcoin

Mandleduck from zbd has a presentation on the history of gaming in bitcoin.
Original bitcoin nodes had a half built poker game built in, though removed later.
SatoshiDice was an early betting game, just betting on random numbers from the hash nonce.
7 years ago Mandleduck made saru tobi, an iOS game with bitcoin rewards which was initially accepted but the decision reverted by apple. 1 cent transactions on chain was never going to scale anyway.
Collectable gaming cards on chain were a fashion for a while.
The early things failed in 2018 when transaction fees spiked, and fees became more than gaming rewards could be. Most games moved to ETH, till it to became expensive.
Lightning network is more suitable than on chain transactions but solana and dedicated chains still rule really.
Still today gamers mostly reject bitcoin as a scam and of course app stores don't allow payments outside their own system. So things remain tricky.
#bitcoin #bitfest

Finally, Martin from BTC Prague wonders how to empower bitcoiners in the UK.
He's inspired by many UK scientists and artists and creators.
But he thinks it's declining. Socialism and regulation reducing freedom.
His home country had a peaceful velvet revolution, ending communism in the 80s.
And it now has a law that there is no capital gains tax on long term held bitcoin!
The UK, he thinks, needs to build new strong bitcoin based money to have it's own peaceful revolution.
#bitfest #bitcoin #uk

The conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in.
Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves.
Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south.
I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems.
There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done.
Can it work?
I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry.
I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here.
Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries.
And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system.
I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it.
#bitfest #bitcoin

Despite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy.
I'm at bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money.
It could hardly be worse.
The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren't all in are trying to buy more at the discount.
After an introduction by Mad Bitcoins, Joe Bryan explains the problem with government money.
He imagines an island on which two types of money are tried, with a dividing wall between them.
When economic problems hit, government can just print more money on the fiat side. Everyone now using money which is worth less. Distorting prices, inflating asset prices, making the rich (who hold assets) richer and the poor (who have to pay inflated prices) poorer. Driving wealth inequality.
On the hard money side, government must tax properly. Take in more from the rich rather than inflating to take it from the poor. Reducing wealth inequality.
On the government money side, the wealthy monitize houses, stocks, resources. Saving in money is impossible, its inflated away. So they save in assets and hording resources. Capital is misallocated. The youth can't afford houses. Poverty traps are caused. The only way out is printing more for benefits. Making it all worse. More economic crises, more printing. More government debt.
Eventually, the wall is broken. Government money people can save in the hard money instead. It reduces the value of government money further. More printing. More inflation.
Eventually, war. Funded by printed money.
The dollar is the best of a bad bunch all other government money is falling in value even faster.
I wonder, is bitcoin really this better money though? It's limited, hard, and can't be printed without energy investment.
I'm still unsure that fixing money fixes the world.
--
Note: "crypto" is mostly more like government money than bitcoin. It can be printed indefinitely by it's makers, does not cost it's makers to print. Crypto is usually just a scam people to get more bitcoin. Bitcoin is not crypto.
#bitfest #bitcoin

One room at the conference center is dedicated to an art gallery, showing pictures and images inspired by satoshi and bitcoin. Some are impressive and colourful, but some I find myself ideology opposed to their point of view.
Bitcoiners as a group tend libertarian and capitalist. Is there common cause between them and me, a more anarchist and socialist tending individual?
I think we can agree that the government money system is broken, disagree about the aims of a replacement system, and disagree on the actual effects of a bitcoin based system.
Some say bitcoin is money for enemies. We do need to transact with people without having to agree with them.
#bitfest #bitcoin #art

Kitchen Mishap takes us through some bitcoin visualisations.
Max keiser promoted KM to buy, and he learned from antonopolis book. So he started trying to graph it since software for money is scary if there's bugs you can lose lots of other people's money.
He spirals blocks around the years, rendering views of the whole chain.
#bitfest #bitcoin #dataVis

Short panel on merchant adoption.
Hipster burgers here in Manchester takes bitcoin. The owner says people are generally more curious than dismissive.
Gresham's law implies that people spend their worst money first. They want rid of it. When you give merchants your bank money you give them the worst money. Be kinder to merchants!
Ben from lnbits, the first merchant point of sales lightning devices, says merchants are interested because they want to have a broad portfolio. Accepting bitcoin is the easiest way to get it, without "know your customers" banking rules.
#bitfest #bitcoin

Geyser is a crowdfunding system.
Lots of history of patrons raising funds from the public for art works or public infrastructure.
Kickstarter and the like on the internet made this much easier. But it's all bank money which is conservative and restrictive. Not global. High fees and middle men.
So doing it freely with bitcoin makes some sense. Censorship resistance and global scope.
Geyser has been running and funding projects for a while. Non custodial and money goes to creators only if target reached in time, otherwise returned.
All open source in smart contracts on chain.
#bitfest #bitcoin #crowdfunding

Bit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin.
Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors.
She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works.
The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined.
But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist.
When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero.
#bitfest #bitcoin

Thomas voegtlin talks about nostr spam. It's very censorship resistance means spam can't be stopped by moderators.
One way to stop spam is require proof of work before your client accepts a message. A large difficult hash.
But big hashing machines are more available to spammers than people.
Can't use likes or zaps cuz they can be faked with sybil attacks.
Instead: notaries and proveably burned satoshis.
Your public messages are classified as ham rather than spam if you burn enough money.
Nostr event types to prove it are suggested. Including burning to upvote others messages
Don't think I like deliberately burning the money, and seems to me a web of trust might work without doing that? Pay to post also peanizes there poor.
But it isn't really burned here, it's shaed out to miners to continue a subsidy when the block rewards run out. So paying miners and these notaries rather than really burning. Okay. Maybe better, but still makes messages mostly for the rich?
#bitfest #bitcoin #nostr

Daniel prince from Once Bitten podcast on usury and banking.
Usury is lending money, charging interest.
Aristotle thought money was for use not for interest. He thought usury unnatural.
Many religious quotes saying not to extract interest.
"Money is power" but this is not gold or paper money. It's credit. Infinite money with interest. Which breaks everything.
Imagine a mortgage. Prices of homes inflated by available interest. You have to give a deposit but the bank creates ten times that in new money! Who gets rich here? Banks are printing money. That inflates prices and dilutes money purchase power.
Not just mortgages. Business loans, repair loans, global scale of all of this.
Not only did they create that money, the charge interest on the money they created! And if you don't pay, they take the house.
One judge found this all illegal, but was soon overruled and found mysteriously dead.
What can you do eh? Only opt out. Don't take loans. Use a money that stores value instead of losing it.
#bitfest #bitcoin #banking

A panel of people from a few different countries.
The UK, where the event is, and the US currently have money which perhaps is good enough that the people there don't see much need to replace the money. Running global reserve currency helps exploit other poorer countries. The problems are fairly invisible.
But in other countries, poorer countries with even worse money, countries more exploited by debasement of the global reserve currencies, the problems with government money are more evident. They see the need for an alternative more strongly.
Adoption is important though. Money is only money if it's widely accepted. So given the choice of more users or higher price, the panel would all pick more users.
#bitfest #bitcoin

Of course it's not only the money which is broken.
The music industry is also very crappy. Major pop stars rake in billions while most artists starve. There's only three record companies left, acting as gate keepers determining which sings get the payola to get radio play and Spotify basically gave up paying small artists in order to give Joe Rogan hundreds of millions of dollars.
Terrible situation.
So can bitcoin and lightning fix this?
Thus the after party here in Manchester.
Musicians and rappers at the event embrace V4V, value for value. Busking on the internet. Payment links on screen and on the live stream as they play.
Ainsley Costello tells us that her first song on fountain.fm made her a million sats, way more than any Spotify stream could make even if they still paid small artists.
She played us that song and then a whole range of artists took to the stage, live streamed over nostr, with donations coming in from all over the world.
All of them were talented and entertaining, but in particular Green Sands were tight and energetic and rocking, Edwin Williamson was deep and baritone and country, Roger 9000 really pumped the crowd with his bitcoin based songs and great tiny digital guitar and The Crypto raptor gets a special mention.
It was a really fun party, with musicians who all believe there is a better way than the terrible music industry.
Fast change overs and short sets means there were like ten acts in four hours among a friendly crowd in a dirty dive bar who all shared this common cause.
Full act list, all of whom are with checking out.
Ainsley Costello
The crypto raptor
Andy prince
Green sands
Edwin Williamson
Nathan abbot
G o l d
Longy
Roger 9000
Fable
#bitfest #music #v4v #bitcoin