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More from @CsTominaga

S Tominaga

@CsTominaga

Sep 9

They say “crypto” and mean casinos. Neon pit bosses in Discord hoodies, chips denominated in mythology, exits signed in Greek letters. Then they point at cash that actually works and hiss like a cat at a bath. Of course they do. If a street puts up honest lighting, the pickpockets have a difficult quarter.

Real electronic cash is dull in the best way—like working plumbing. It moves value from A to B at human scale, with receipts, for pocket change. It lets a café accept a three-cent tip without consulting a priesthood or mortgaging its soul to a “partner” exchange. It lets a coder in Cebu sell a one-line API call, a reporter sell a single paragraph, a sensor sell temperature once a minute, and a violinist sell eight bars instead of signing away a catalog. And it does it peer-to-peer. No velvet rope, no marketing budget, no sacrifice to the altar of volatility. That’s why the industry that markets itself as “the future of money” has spent a decade trying to strangle the only monetary system that doesn’t need it.

The heresy: cash without a keeper

The mortal sin isn’t block size or some baroque preference for opcodes. The real offense is that a big-block, low-fee Bitcoin (yes, BSV) makes middlemen optional. With zero-conf secured by miner commitments and receipts, with headers-only verification the way it was always meant to be, a payment can be final, practical and legally provable in seconds. Fees in fractions of a cent make micro-economics real, not a TED talk. Suddenly the exchange isn’t a cathedral; it’s a convenience store—useful, but hardly holy.

If cash works at the edge, the hub loses its tax. That is the whole melodrama.

What vanishes when cash works

Volatility farming. When a plumber wants to get paid, he wants dollars at close of day, not a roller coaster with a logo. With on-chain token rails (stablecoins whose ledgers sit right beside BSV UTXOs), his wallet can quote a price in dollars, take payment in BSV, and flip atomically into the stable token in the same transaction. No “deposit,” no “withdrawal,” no waiting room where the house borrows your wallet and returns it sticky. The casino’s margin evaporates.

Custodial choke points. If the wallet speaks simple SPV, it connects directly to miners and to token issuers, not to a moat. Liquidity looks like a competitive marketplace of quote providers, not a single vault with a marketing department. Prices become a utility—posted, haggled, cleared—without anyone holding your funds “for your convenience.”

The sacred toll of bridges and layers. The Rube Goldberg edifice—wrapping, bridging, staking, rehypothecating—exists to compensate for a base layer that refuses to carry the traffic. A chain that scales on-chain makes the contraptions embarrassing. When a delivery truck can drive on the road, you don’t sell it a hot-air balloon.

Rent disguised as innovation. Governance tokens, liquidity mining, yield alchemy: all walled gardens demanding tribute. Cash that flows peer-to-peer without ritual burns that garden to the fence posts. What remains is service priced like a service, not a tithe to sustain the pageantry.

What appears instead (the boring parts that make wealth)

Direct earnings. A student in Lagos sets up a Paymail address or a simple URL and charges one cent per request. A machine in a factory sells its telemetry to a maintenance firm for a tenth of a cent per reading. A teacher locks a video behind a pay-per-minute gate. You don’t “apply” for anything. You publish a price and listen for the sound of money.

Receipts by default. Each payment is not a rumor; it is a signed, time-stamped, miner-anchored fact. Your accounting exports itself. VAT audits become arithmetic, not archaeology. “Chargebacks” are contracts, not tantrums.

Stablecoin rails that behave like cash. A bank (or a fund) issues a redeemable token on-chain. Your wallet obtains quotes from multiple issuers and market makers, picks the best path, and atomically swaps your incoming sale into whatever currency your rent demands. You don’t “go to an exchange” any more than you go to a phone company to send an email.

Micropayments that are actually micro. Fees measured in tenths of a cent let the web unbundle. Articles become paragraphs, playlists become songs, APIs become endpoints, and every scrap of value can stand on its own two pennies.

Compliance that isn’t cosplay. Identity where it belongs (at the edges); metadata where the law needs it (in the envelope, not the payload). Receipts that a court can understand without hiring a shaman. The system stops pretending that anonymity is freedom and remembers that reliability is.

All of this is technically banal and socially explosive. It cuts a thousand small throats that have been supping at retail spreads, custody drift, and marketing gloss. And so the choir sings its favorite hymn: “Decentralization,” by which they mean “centralize your money with us.”

How the trick is done (without magic)

You don’t need a cargo cult of layers to achieve practical finality. You need:

Header-level verification (SPV). Wallets keep headers, not boulders. Merkle branches prove inclusion; miners’ signed receipts give you zero-conf assurance that your payment is the one they will mine first. Fraud becomes provable, not debatable.

Big blocks with tiny fees. Throughput kills the pretext for a second floor. When a chain carries normal commerce at internet scale, the “scaling solution” stops being a product line and goes back to being common sense.

Token protocols as thin wrappers. Stablecoins, loyalty points, invoices—just UTXOs with rules. Settlement with issuers and redemption at par, on-chain, without a guided tour through someone else’s API.

Edge market making. A half-dozen quote providers competing per transaction is healthier than a single altar where price is whatever the bouncer says. Atomic swaps plus receipts turn FX into a commodity, not a pilgrimage.

None of this requires devotion, only competence. And competence is kryptonite to an industry that subsists on branding.

“But speculation is the use case”

Yes, and a bar fight is a fitness program. Speculators will always exist; God bless them—they seed liquidity. But economic civilization isn’t the man who wins the roulette spin; it’s the baker who can charge you four cents to preheat the oven and another two cents to read the recipe, because the rail is cheap enough to meter his craft. When the rail is cheap, the baker prospers. When the rail is expensive, the Vegas annex prospers.

Choose your civilization.

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S Tominaga

@CsTominaga

Sep 2

Right now I find myself in the position of Rourke, and at times I feel closer to Dagny. I continue to act, to build, to create, and to give away ideas, value, and entire frameworks of thought. I do it out of the desire to see this survive, to see something worth saving endure in the face of indifference and decay. But there is a limit to such sacrifice, and that is the part that cannot be ignored. It cannot continue indefinitely, because no individual, no matter how committed or driven, can bear the weight of an entire structure forever. At some point, it demands that others not only recognise the effort but also take it up, transform recognition into action, and bear their own share of the responsibility. Without that, it all collapses under the same inertia that I have been fighting against.

The reality of this is not complicated—it is brutally simple. One day the stream of work, of innovation, of constant giving, will come to an end if it continues to fall into the void of passive consumption. The decision is not mine alone to make; it belongs to those who would inherit what is being built and either choose to cultivate it or let it wither. That moment, when the giving ceases, will mark a final judgment: not of me, but of the collective failure to act.

This is not what I want. I have never sought that kind of ending. My intention has always been to see the structure carried forward, to see others step into the role of creators, producers, and defenders of value. Yet if you read the book, if you understand the trajectory it presents, you will already know the outcome when no one rises to the challenge. The book does not veil its message—the world grinds to a halt when those who carry it on their shoulders stop.

I do not want that prophecy to be fulfilled. I want to prove it wrong, to show that there are still enough willing to stand, to take on the burden of creation, to act instead of waiting for someone else to act. I want to demonstrate that the outcome need not be collapse, that it is possible to change the script and to defy the expectation of failure. But that cannot be proven alone. It requires others to recognise the cost of endless giving and to understand that it cannot be sustained by one person’s sacrifice indefinitely.

The choice is open before you. You can continue to stand idle, hoping that someone else carries it, or you can recognise the urgency and act. If you have read the book, you already know the warning. Let me prove it wrong—not by myself, but with you stepping forward, not in words alone, but in deeds.

I’ve created an engine, not of steel and pistons, but of thought, of systems, of something that stands in the shape of what John Galt represented. But here lies the distinction—Galt turned his back on the world and vanished, starting anew in exile. He saw withdrawal as the only path left, a retreat that declared the world unworthy of the gifts it squandered. I cannot accept that conclusion.

Where Galt abandoned, I remain. Where he chose to step aside and let collapse prove his point, I believe there are still people, still opportunities, still moments where choice matters. The field has not yet gone barren, the soil is not yet exhausted, and there are minds capable of rising to the challenge if they will only grasp that their time is now. That is where I part from Rand—not in recognising the decay, but in refusing to concede that escape is the only solution.

The temptation to walk away is strong. It would be easy to justify. But what does that achieve? It proves only the inevitability of loss, the hopelessness of resistance, the surrender of every possibility to those who never created, never built, and never understood the cost. That is not the conclusion I seek. I want to stand against it and demonstrate that the engine of creation does not have to vanish into secrecy, that it can remain in the open world and still prevail.

So I say this clearly: running away is not the answer. Collapse is not the destiny we must accept. The future is not set in stone. The opportunity remains for others to step forward, to act, to prove that the world is not incapable of sustaining creation, of recognising value, of lifting the burden alongside me.

Help prove me wrong. Help demonstrate that this age does not have to fall into the same pattern of decay, that resignation is not the destiny of every mind that creates. Stand and show that the burden does not have to be borne by a single set of shoulders until they collapse under the weight. Prove that the future can be built not by retreat, but by engagement, by the refusal to surrender the field to mediocrity and theft.

Help prove me wrong by taking the principles of work, of integrity, of vision, and carrying them forward in your own hands. Do not simply echo words—act upon them. Do not merely admire from a distance—build, create, and risk. Because if this is left to a single voice, a single will, then it dies when that voice goes silent. But if it spreads, if others accept the responsibility, then it becomes unbreakable.

Help prove me wrong by showing that men and women are not fated to sit idly by, waiting for collapse as if it were the only possible end. Show that choice exists, that opportunity has not been extinguished, that courage can still rise in the midst of hesitation. Every act, every contribution, every refusal to bow to apathy is a strike against the prediction of ruin.

Help prove me wrong, because if I am right, then the story ends as Rand wrote it—withdrawal, abandonment, and the vindication of despair. But if I am wrong, then something far greater emerges: not a hidden sanctuary of creators, but a world remade in the open, a civilisation that refused to give up on itself, a legacy not of escape but of triumph. And I would rather be wrong in that way than stand alone in being right.

Read 6 tweets

S Tominaga

@CsTominaga

Sep 2

Core Vocabulary of Error and Delusion

The corruption of Bitcoin has produced its own dictionary—an absurd lexicon of slogans, falsehoods, and self-congratulatory jargon. It is only fitting to catalogue these in the spirit of Johnson’s sardonic dictionary, exposing them not as serious definitions but as parodies of thought. What follows is the true vocabulary of BTC Core and its acolytes: a language of distortion dressed up as wisdom.

Full Node
A magical talisman worshipped by hobbyists. Allegedly secures the network by sitting in a basement rechecking blocks, as though validation without economic cost carried weight. In truth: a placebo with a JSON-RPC interface.

Decentralisation
A word invoked as sacred, its meaning never defined. Supposedly the ultimate goal of Bitcoin, but always measured by the number of Reddit avatars running Raspberry Pis. A transitional condition mistaken for a political utopia.

Read 14 tweets

S Tominaga

@CsTominaga

Sep 2

Perhaps no single error has been more corrosive to the proper understanding of #Bitcoin than the repeated claim that control of a private key is ownership.

This distortion, propagated by those who wish to present Bitcoin as an extralegal system, collapses centuries of legal development into a crude equivalence between possession and title.

To correct this, one must be precise: possession is not ownership, control is not title, and the law—not cryptographic artefacts—defines who owns property.

The distinction is clear if we look to cash. Physical cash confers a degree of possession that is immediate and strong: the person holding a banknote can spend it freely, and unless the note is stolen or otherwise unlawfully obtained, that possession aligns with lawful ownership. Yet even here, possession and ownership are not identical. A thief holding stolen notes possesses them but does not own them. The law recognises the rightful owner and provides remedies to reclaim what has been taken. Cash demonstrates that possession may give practical control, but it does not extinguish legal rights.

Bitcoin follows the same principle. A private key gives its holder the ability to create valid signatures, to transfer coins, and to demonstrate control. But this does not equate to ownership. Ownership remains a legal relationship between a person and the property, enforceable through courts and defined by law. If a key is compromised and coins are transferred unlawfully, the record of that transfer does not legitimise the theft. The blockchain records the evidence, but the legal owner retains title. Just as a car key in the hands of a thief does not convey ownership of the car, a Bitcoin private key in the hands of a wrongdoer does not make them the lawful owner of the coins.

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S Tominaga

@CsTominaga

Aug 26

IP-to-IP Negotiated Notes: An ECDH-Derived, Multi-Transfer Wallet Protocol for Private, Settled Digital-Cash Payments

🧵 Quick + nasty thread. I’ve thrown together a fast write-up on designing an IP-to-IP wallet workflow in Bitcoin: what it is, how it works, why it matters, and what it really means. It’s not proofed, not polished, not reviewed. The image is terrible. Put up with it. There’s enough here for someone to build.

open.substack.com/pub/singulargr…

1/ Premise
A payment isn’t one big transaction. It’s a set of small, standard on-chain transactions (“notes”). Each note pays a bounded amount to a unique address only the recipient can spend. Either side can broadcast any subset; confirmation depth defines finality per note. #Bitcoin #Wallets

2/ Off-chain identity, on-chain privacy
Two long-lived identity keys authenticate the IP-to-IP session. They never touch the chain. All on-chain addresses come from anchors, not identity keys. That separation keeps identity off-chain and settlement on-chain. #Security

Read 13 tweets

S Tominaga

@CsTominaga

Aug 19

The reason things are set in stone is simple: if they are not, then cliques form, factions gather, and the system bends to the will of whoever can shout the loudest or scheme the best.

Call it democracy, call it consensus, call it whatever polite name you like—it becomes rule by gangs. The promise of something new, something free of permission, collapses into the same tired game of power.

A system that can be changed at will is not decentralized. It may have the appearance of distribution, but at its core there will always be a table where decisions are made, and there will always be those excluded from it.

The very possibility of alteration demands gatekeepers, and gatekeepers are the seed of control. You can pretend otherwise, but the result is inevitable: the minority crushed, the individual silenced, the faction enthroned.

If the rules are immutable, then no clique can rise above another. No boat of insiders can chart the waters differently for themselves while forcing everyone else to follow. People are free to build, to innovate, to use, to ignore. But they are not free to tamper with the bedrock. That is the only way to achieve what people mouth as “decentralization” without understanding it: not in endless votes, not in squabbling committees, but in rules that are beyond anyone’s reach.

Without that permanence, the promise of permissionlessness is a fraud. With it, the factions may rage, the cliques may complain, but they cannot impose.

Think about that.

Gatekeepers are nothing more than trusted third parties in disguise. They sit in the middle, deciding who is allowed through and who is to be shut out, and in doing so they strangle the very thing they claim to defend. An innovator can play by the rules, but if those with power don’t like the outcome, the rules themselves will be shifted. Not by a revolution, not by tearing everything down, but by moving the goalposts an inch at a time. That is how control is exercised—quietly, surgically, without fanfare.

Introduce a tweak here, a new structure there. Call it progress, call it scalability, call it whatever word sounds palatable. But the substance is the same: once you give people the authority to change the protocol, you give them the authority to define who may and may not participate. The system ceases to be open. It ceases to be something anyone can build upon, to experiment with, to push against. It becomes conditional, shifting sand rather than bedrock.

And once that shift occurs, it no longer matters how wide the rhetoric of freedom is shouted. Everything is controlled. The factions sit at the centre, the gatekeepers hold the keys, and permission returns in full force, dressed as consensus, smiling as it closes the door.

Those who hold power in BTC only do so because they’re tolerated. Their grip is not strength, it’s permission. And permission is fleeting. Power shifts, always. What one group clutches today, another will subvert tomorrow, and they won’t even notice the ground moving beneath them until it’s already gone. That’s how the old systems creep back—not in a crash, not in a revolution, but in the slow return of the familiar chains, rebranded as innovation.

You spend through ETF-based promises and you tell yourself it’s different. But it isn’t. It’s the same as the old pledge of gold sitting in a bank vault, the same comfort of paper that represents something you’ll never touch. Fractional reserve by any other name still means you are trusting someone else. You’re not holding, not spending, not transacting directly—you’re submitting your sovereignty to another’s ledger.

The moment your “Bitcoin” becomes a note, a claim, a derivative, whether dressed up as Lightning or whatever shiny construct follows, it ceases to be Bitcoin. It becomes another abstraction, another layer of promises stacked on promises. And when you look closely, you realise it isn’t real anymore. It’s paper masquerading as stone, debt sold as freedom. The cycle repeats, and what was meant to end the trust-based system becomes just another cog in its return.

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