How to build local payment systems on top of Bitcoin

Finally, people are thinking about cloud societies, network states and parallel communities as a real alternative to current doctrine of democratic statism. There are many societal institutions required to pull it off – parallel justice, rulescaping, proxy merchants, local reputation, etc. I would like to look at a simple use-case. Imagine a parallel society that […]

First look at Phoenix Lightning wallet for iOS

This video is part of my course Lightning network for private bitcoin payments among friends and for products and services Phoenix Wallet homepage

Unbacked Lightning channels proposal – how to scale, increase capital efficiency and interoperability of Lightning

I believe in order to improve lightning network, we should allow for unbacked channels between nodes of the same owners (operators). It would enable a few very interesting use-cases, without causing inflation or any other risk to other parts of the network. Unbacked channels increase capital efficiency, availability and help in growing the network by […]

Bitcoin censorship will most likely come, pt 2

In my previous article, I explained why I think Bitcoin censorship is coming without majority of miners being forced to censor transactions. I am pleased with the discussions it brought and I would like to clarify some points. Before you choose to discuss, please read the original article and this article. I know it is […]

How could regulators successfully introduce Bitcoin censorship and other dystopias

Note: A lot of people think this is purely about >50% attack. Not true, here’s how this unfolds with 10% of censoring hashrate. Bitcoin is often said to be anonymous and uncensorable. Thanks to chain analysis, anonymity is to some extent a disputed wishful thinking from the past. And it looks like it won’t be […]

Interview with GPT-3 about freedom, optionality, TAZs and Bitcoin

Tell me the baboon story from Robert Sapolsky. When Robert was studying baboons, there was an outbreak of a virus that affected the hippocampus region of the brain, causing animals to go insane. The typical symptoms were for them to attack members of their troop and ultimately die. Robert watched as the entire troop of […]

The world does not owe us anything – and that is good (what to do with people who refuse to wear face masks )

(translation note: This article was first published in Slovak language here. Some references are about situation in Slovakia, but the main points are valid in general. This article was written during coronavirus pandemic, and wearing face masks for protection is not just expected, but also mandatory in some countries) As a result of current pandemics, […]

Parallel energy production – solar panels are not rocket science

I started playing with solar energy, see a simple overview of the energy production and storage system in this video I made: So far, I thought that solar energy was demanding – it needed specialized experts to install it and make it work, complicated technologies that I don’t understand, drilling into walls and so on. […]

Privacy enhanced webtorrent client

I like WebTorrent especially for movies, because you can watch immediately without waiting for the torrent to finish downloading. My fork adds leech mode to stop upload right after download finishes, does not send telemetry and a few other changes. Actually, WebTorrent has a lot more features. You can download directly in a web app, […]

Crypto lifestyle using Bitmex and my scripts

Update: As of August 2020, Bitmex introduced KYC, so I switched to other exchanges. Use other crypto derivative exchanges. Sometimes you want to keep USD value of your Bitcoin, for example if you know you will have future expenses with known USD value. If you don’t want to go to Ethereum-land for this purpose and […]