I often find myself in discussion with either hardcore Monero fans, or hardcore Bitcoin Lightning fans. As a fan of both technologies, I see that people locked in an echo chamber often get things wrong. A prominent bitcoiner that I otherwise like bullshitting about Monero on a mainstream podcast made me feel “shared embarrassment”. I […]
Sometimes we’re up, sometimes we’re down. Hierarchical structures have winners and losers, as do all elections and other contests. One way not to be a loser is to win. It’s just that the ratio of winners to losers is pretty low – and there has to be a more rational strategy. That may be the […]
So, you are a libertarian, you are sure that most statist solutions are a failure. How do you benefit from this belief? Belief without skin in the game can be a good (but more often annoying) topic for discussions over drinks, but you are not going to win friends and influence people. Isn’t it a […]
Oh no, another list of “10 things…”. This one started as a set of Twitter/Mastodon posts about things to try to improve your privacy and be conscious of what you are doing. These are not the usual things to do for privacy. In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, people went on strike. The giant holding the […]
When there was a battle of “ideologies” going on around me during high school – the Nazis (yay central Slovakia!), the metalheads and the punks, the hippies and the normies, I was immersed in cyberpunk literature myself (William Gibson, Neal Stephenson) and cypherpunk philosophy. Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction that deals with dystopian […]
What is the motivation to accept Bitcoin payments in your business and why are many companies and businesses enthusiastic about doing so? If I see an establishment with a Bitcoin sticker on the door while traveling, I often curiously step inside to see what the place is all about. A Visa or American Express sticker […]
Lightning network enables fast and inexpensive Bitcoin payments. I wrote about how to use it in my book Cryptocurrencies – hack your way to a better life (my e-shop, Amazon). In this article, I want to put all parts of the statement in the first sentence to the test – whether it enables the payments (do […]
I’m assuming you’ve never heard of the law of cryptocurrency isomorphism, because I just made that name up. But it’s been around for a long time, since the first decentralized exchanges (DEX) appeared. When I was selling my books at an event, I tried to get people to pay me in cryptocurrencies. Mainly because it’s […]
It is natural for people to dream of getting rich quickly. Even more so when they see the ‘crypto bros’ around them who have moved to Dubai, drinking coffee with sheikhs, driving a lambo or even buying their own castle. However, trying to replicate other people’s way of getting rich runs into a few practical […]
I’ve had several conversations with people about how their favourite cryptocurrency will overtake Bitcoin. And I have often perceived some of the projects’ features as good myself. But before we break down the various arguments and why they are unlikely to lead to success, let’s talk about two technologies that preceded crypto. The first technology […]