pull down to refresh
depends on how you define winning. 2025 was the first year I got paid in bitcoin by an employer. I use lightning daily. I can send sats to anyone on earth who generates an address. I can buy a few more things with bitcoin than I could in years past. I'm paying for a few things regularly with sats now.
I'd be disingenuous if I said the dollar exchange rate didn't matter at all, but it matters about as much as it mattered 6 months ago when it was at $120k (a price I considered unbelievably low for 100 million magical internet money units).
I'm not much of a self-sovereignty maxi (using and holding bitcoin is about all I do in that realm), but I'm curious what your ideal scenario would be?
There's a lot of people in the world. It's hard to live without bumping up against them. And evidence I see is that most people want the comfort of the state or something -- few are the people who want to choose the harder path of self-sovereignty that is also the path of personal responsibility.
Another observation from my own life: it's very easy to get so caught up in the little details of doing something fully (being fully organic, fully righteous, fully sustainable, fully privacy-protecting, fully self-sovereign) that you end up optimizing for a bunch of really small details and miss the larger picture.
I suppose if you built up a nym that was not connected to your real-world identity, you could still have a track record and some hope that it doesn't dox you. But it's a good point.
On most metrics, it feels like this is true. The most obvious ones:
Movement: borders are more controlled than they were 30 or 50 years ago. Moving around the world leaves much more of a trail.
Money: cash is harder to use than it was even 20 years ago. Digital payments are highly surveilled.
Speech: this may be one metric where we've gained a little (and lost a lot). In my childhood, it was difficult to speak to a stranger halfway across the world. The pool of people I had access to was much smaller than it is now. Of course, our speech is surveilled and in many states these days, highly policed. Yet, maybe on this one there is some gain.
But then I see your parenthetical (in normieland), and I don't think I can say with a straight face that the normies have broader freedom of speech than they did in the past.
So, whether "we" (the normie we) were aware of it or not, we have traded away most of what matters. How to win it back? Is it even re-attainable?
The shelf is a really cool piece. I don't know that I'd be brave enough to do it like that, but I love the material.
I think I'm the only one posting in ~hyperlinks
Come on, people! Where are your funky, weird hyperlinks?
Real time is coolest, but maybe even making it something that requires a refresh gets the job done. If there was some visual reminder of where I'm at with the sats filter, it might help. Currently, I can't tell you what i've got it set to in my settings. And I'm maybe even a little fuzzy on how to get to the place that shows it.
On the other hand, clutter is bad. So, it's not like I'm advocating for more stuff. But some easy way to access the setting at which I'm filtering would be good.
No. I was working for a wallet in the early part of 2025.