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24 Oct, 6 tweets, 1 min read
1/ The assault against open-source software that emerged recently will not be resolved by self-hosting alone.

One of the authorities’ obvious next steps, after GitHub has “harmonised” its platform, is to demand licenses to host any software and maybe even licenses to produce it.
2/ These new rules will be implemented in the name of “ensuring new technology fits with the values of society” and “guaranteeing that everyone has a democratic stake in how technology affects our lives.”
3/ The urgency of the regulations will be accelerated by two things:

(i) Bitcoin’s threat to the increasingly fragile and controlled fiat monetary system.

(ii) The emergence of decentralised, self-hosted communication apps that circumvent the censorship and encryption bans.
4/ Self-hosting git repos will be an integral part of the solution to these measures, but it won’t be enough.

People that care about Bitcoin will need to be mentally prepared to not comply, to reject the rules, and put themselves at risk. Bitcoin will depend on it.
5/ And if you think this is all crazy talk, just think about it for a sec. If the US or the UK or China or wherever can demand that unlicensed financial services can not be provided to their citizens, they can demand the same for software services.
6/ The horrific machinery of deputised state control manifested in KYC and AML was never going to be limited to just money. That was just the proving ground.

In all likelihood, next it’s coming to communications (chat apps and social media), bitcoin, and open-source software.

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More from @nwoodfine

Neil Woodfine Profile picture
6 Jan
1/ "What happens when the internet gets switched off?" Despite the best hopes of many salty nocoiners, a surprising number of great engineers have been thinking about how to keep bitcoin running in offline environments.
2/ Bitcoin is as much a hardware revolution as it is a software revolution. If your private keys are on someone else's device, the bitcoin are not yours. If your full node is in the cloud, it's not you verifying transactions.
3/ And if you're totally dependent on someone else's network hardware for access to the bitcoin network, then you're at risk of being cut off when things go wrong. Some reasons you might want to transact "offline" include...
Read 51 tweets
Neil Woodfine Profile picture
4 Oct 19
1/ This is an idea I’m still working with, so comments and corrections welcome: S2F is only an *outcome* of something more fundamental, hence some people taking offence at the metric being used to explain bitcoin’s value.
2/ For instance, you theoretically could have a good in low demand with a high S2F ratio, and its high S2F ratio would be a *product of* its low demand. The sale value of the good would be so low that only a few small manufacturers would bother producing it.
3/ Now let’s imagine that same good, for whatever reason, suddenly sees a surge in demand. New manufacturers would rush in, supply would increase, and S2F would rapidly decrease. It was always cheap to make, just few people originally wanted it compared to the existing stock.
Read 18 tweets
Neil Woodfine Profile picture
1 Oct 19
1/ To expand on this further, the idea of money "storing" value is just a metaphor, and often leads to the illusion confusion. People don't really agree or believe or imagine that money "has" value. Instead, individuals simply seek to obtain money as a means to further ends.
2/ They accept money as an intermediary good which they can subsequently exchange for something else. Each individual is constantly making a series value judgements on which goods to accept in exchange for the goods they produce themselves, on a path to satisfying their own ends.
3/ This will of course take into account how many people are demanding various intermediary goods at that instant—which goods are most "saleable"—but will also take into account other factors, including properties that might cause goods to be more or less demanded in the future.
Read 18 tweets
Neil Woodfine Profile picture
25 May 19
1/ Bitcoin deals with money. Separating money from the state. Managing people’s life savings. People’s livelihoods depend on it. The path of civilisation is altered by the money its built on.

Dangerous, risky stuff. A lot is on the line.
2/ In addition to this, the vast majority of the industry surrounding bitcoin is comprised of scammers and their “agnostic” enablers. Fraudsters and charlatans that knowingly exploit the lack of understanding in this new technology to profit handsomely at others’ expense.
3/ Bitcoin industry culture is therefore *necessarily* one of extreme skepticism, cynicism, rigorous review, and forthright language. Regardless of whether you’re discussing bitcoin development, business, or economics, no one is safe.
Read 13 tweets
Neil Woodfine Profile picture
1 Feb 19
1/ Our parents were led to forget—no, outright reject—the ideological underpinnings that make the UK a nice place to live. Based on discussions with friends and family, apathy rules. Authorities have almost zero opposition, free to do as they please. “If youre not doing wrong...”
2/Nothing is real and relativism has completely taken hold. No one understands rights like private property or free speech, they’re not codified anywhere. There is no constitution or ethical framework to refer back to. That would be too rigid, “too ideological”.
3/ Instead, it’s considered better to make case by case judgement calls on how things make you feel. Stripped of formal philosophy, religion, and ideology, the majority are reduced to drones, intellectually inert and led by emotion. Virtue before logic. Great news for the media.
Read 11 tweets
Neil Woodfine Profile picture
4 Jan 19
1/ @Medium promotes articles from token sale scams to their front page and editor's picks, helping a group of scumbags make money at their readers' expense. That gets a pass. As long as the narrative is full of virtue, that's all that matters.
2/ Any articles about actual freedom? "You're scum get f ck d." The prevailing Silicon Valley worldview hates bitcoin and hates freedom. They want to set the agenda, they want to set the tone. They want to define "good" and then make everyone else live by it.
3/ Their mission is to shepherd (socially engineer) their users into a world view of big government, endless welfare, surveillance-solves-everything, disarmed and detoothed, man vs woman, black vs white, young vs old, arbitrary ambiguous “hate” as the ultimate sin.
Read 9 tweets

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