CoinsureNZ

Thank you for taking the time to read, if you enjoyed this and feel these words have value please repost/share. My reach on Nostr is small and I would love this to reach more people in a space where I think the message here resounds significantly more than centralized social media.

2024-08-30 18:30:01 UTC

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Good art makes people uncomfortable. It challenges and forces them to reconsider their assumptions in ways that speech and writing do not. Art that does not do this but instead only asks our fleeting attention as passive consumers is not art but meerly entertainment. If this is all the art we have loose the ability to aspire to a better world and are meerly well entertained worker drones in someone elses top down system.
Its tempting for those of us who want Bitcoin to succeed to dumb it down, to make fundamental compromises on things like self custody, prioritize convenience, package it as an ETF so that we can get more people on the Bitcoin train and "number can go up". But if how we conceptualize, design and explain our business and software is driven by this, by trying to make Bitcoin into a system rather than a tool we fail in our mission to use Bitcoin as performance art.
To push these people to think, to participate in creating something better than what we currently have, to be actors rather than passive consumers of someone elses instructions. Without this, rather than re-inventing the finacial system we will just recreate it with an orange coat of paint. An entertaining asset in the same technological dystopia we cirrently inhabit.
Bitcoin is performance art an object we can and should use to tell a different story, not just Digital Gold or Unstoppable Payments, but a vision of a world where our technologies serve us, are able to be molded by us and allow us to decide and shape the context of the world in which we inhabit. A world we dont have to, and we shouldn't compromise. For anything.
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2024-08-30 18:29:24 UTC

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Its power is that it tells a different story, and this story will spawn other technologies of the same spirit. Whether Nostr gets significantly more traction is no where near as important as that Bitcoin is the artistic inspiration for other fredom technologies. It provides an alternative, successful stpory of how we can work together to prevent regulatory compliance and profit generation for a small group of people being the thing that steers the course of our technological destiny.
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2024-08-30 18:28:38 UTC

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Becuase if people are not willing and able to step up and do so we loose control of the technoligies that allow the bottom up power I discussed before, the ability to tell our own stories. We create a world where technology fundamentally disempowers us into consumers, rather than actors, unable to solve our own problems, vassals of those who write the instruction manuals
Bitcoin isnt about following someone elses instructions. Its beautiful and powerful becuase like a guitar or a paintbrush it allows you to choose how you wish to project yourself through it. Not just money but a tool like the two I mentioned before that provide us a canvas to paint a different story, to push back against the narrative provided by govts or corporations.
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2024-08-30 18:27:58 UTC

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Technologies are how we shape our world, move away from what is natural. One of these views says that humans are the problem and the solution is to remove as much of their influence from the process as possible. The other says that humans are the solution, that our technologies are not just here to help us get things but to ensure our freedom from enslavement and give us agency in deciding the context in which we live and our society functions.
Our technologies decide who we are, we are what we do and today our technoloigies profoundly influence what we are capable of doing. But who decides what these technologies allow us to do? if what we seek is a set of instruction manuals then its a small group of technocrats and politicians that we become slaves of in our search for convenience and posssession.
It's ok to have a robot clean your floor, but what we look for from these technologies that allow us to coopperate, communicate and speak the language of money and value should be something fundamentally different. They shouldnt prioritize convenience or following someone elses instructions, but should instead users devoting the time and energy to understanding them, mastering them, and learning to write their own instructions.
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2024-08-30 18:25:40 UTC

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If this is the lens through which the majority of the world views technology, how does Bitcoin make sense? from this perspective legacy payment systems and fintech apps are faster, easier and more efficient. We have stocks, ETF's and many other vehicles to help preserve our wealth that don't require self custody. This things beat Bitcoin on all the important metrics if what you are looking for is a set of instructions.
Well without telling people a different story about technology then it doesnt make sense, beuase Bitcoin is based on a completely different philosophy of technology than what we are accustomed to, where we give up autonomy for convenience, where we desire everything to be an instruction manual.
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2024-08-30 18:23:05 UTC

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The industrial revolution was a shift from individuals using technology to serve themselves or their community to specialisation as parts on an assembly line, disconnected from each other. A revolution in our ability to produce, but at the cost of our interconnectedness and autonomy.
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2024-08-30 18:22:23 UTC

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But these examples stand at odds with the prevailing narrative about technology. Humans embrace of technology is what separates us from all the other animals and allows us to change the context in which we live, but a few hundred years ago something changed in our technological culture.
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2024-08-30 18:21:40 UTC

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in 2014 a group of hackers decided to solve this. They started The Artifical Open Pancreas Project. Using a technical exploit they discovered they could administer external commands to certain insulin pumps. They created open source code, a component list and set of instructions and made them freely available on the internet.
As a consequence any type 1 diabetic with a few hundred dollars could automate the treatment of their condition. The performance art of the AOPP provided not only a lifechanging tool, but an example that individuals using the open source ethos can solve their own problems, and there is little that can be done to stop them.

2024-08-30 18:20:28 UTC

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J. Stark was inspired by this, created the FGC9, which is being used by rebels in Myanmar to resist dictatorship. The performance art of the Liberator ignited the imagination of others who used the story of how technology could not be controlled to give them agency against opression.
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2024-08-30 18:19:45 UTC

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Cody Wilson released the Liberator in 2013. The first 3D printed gun, it wasnt a particularly effective firearm. But Cody himself said that wasnt the point, instead an attention grabbing specitcle that ignited the conversation about the power of code and the internet vs govt control
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2024-08-30 18:19:10 UTC

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But how does software or Bitcoin connect to this, telling stories, performance art? here are two examples, the Liberator pistol and The Artificial Open Pancreas Project.

2024-08-30 18:18:32 UTC

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But of course we draw different meanings and tell different stories based on the same events. One person might see this as an reason for invading Afghanistan and tightening borders, another as proof that god has allowed a small group of men doing his will to triumph over mighty adversaries.
These stories affect the actions we take and have real effects on the world, with radically different consequences. Arts real power is that it allows us to harness the power to paint our own powerful stories that can effect the world, to exert bottom up power and shape the world we live in.
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2024-08-30 18:17:23 UTC

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The facts is we cant help but tell ourselves stories, they are how we turn chaos into order and make sense of the world around us. It gives us a sense of meaning and control over our lives, its a form of existential problem solving.
So when a significant event happens what we look for is a story to make sense of it. Lets take 9/11, we are looking for something like "This evil man Osama and the ideology he pushes are responsible for this, we need to punish him".
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2024-08-30 18:16:32 UTC

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A famous study was conducted in the 1940s where people where shown a video of symetrical shapes moving along a flat surface and asked to explain what they saw. Only one person described that, everyone else replied with vivid narratives, assigning motives and personalities behind the shapes movements.
https://youtu.be/VTNmLt7QX8E?feature=shared

2024-08-30 18:12:37 UTC

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Story telling is an information sharing technology thats common to every culture and as old as history can track. Its such a strong feature of human civilisation because its so effective. People remember information when communicated as a story up to 22 times more than plain facts.
This is party because stories engage our imagination and emotions, but also because just like in the visual or auditory worlds we look for patterns, and stories are how we communicate patterns in events and information. We use stories to make sense of our world and share it with others.

2024-08-30 18:11:22 UTC

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Activists and artists popularise a narrative and if its sticky enough it catches on and influences the spirit of the people. Theres many examples of things that we’re frowned upon or illegal 10-20 years ago that are now accepted and legal primarily because of activists and artists pushing a narrative.

2024-08-30 18:11:00 UTC

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But the inverse is true, the masses also exert bottom up power that influences govts and corps. Through voting, selective disobediance, and even revolution they push back and also shape the direction of society. Their influence comes from activists and artists.

2024-08-30 18:10:27 UTC

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The elites exert top down power on society. Govts and corporations use laws, regulation and tech/apps essential to our day to day lives to exert influence and steer the direction of society. Their inspiration comes from experts, thinktanks and lobyists.
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2024-08-30 18:09:45 UTC

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It should be no surprise then that art and artists have long been associated with social change and in particular the resistance movement against oppressive regimes.
Thats because art provides an important social function.

2024-08-30 18:08:05 UTC

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If you ask me art is simply a means of communication like speech or writing. But it has some advantages over those two. “A picture paints a thousand words”, art can communicate a message in a much fuller and emotionally powerful way. It can hint at things, but leave the audience to answer what the actual message, so is great for communicating a vision for the future
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2024-08-30 18:06:35 UTC

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How can software be art? Its just a tool right? We’ll we should probably look at how you define what art is, notoriously a hard thing to do.
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2024-08-30 18:05:48 UTC

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However this is completely at odds with what got me interested in Bitcoin. I became a software engineer attending the 2018 Building on Bitcoin conference. There, BTCpay server and Wasabi were introduced. I realised you didn’t need to be a genius working on Bitcoin core, that competent developers with vision could create software that could paint a different vision of money. Software could be art.
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2024-08-30 18:04:50 UTC

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Thats because for the majority of the wealth holders in the world, both institutional and individuals capital appreciation and regulatory compliance is more important than sovereignity. Holding their assets in the legacy system is preferable to the burden of education and responsibility of having to learn how to hold and be responsible for their own keys.

2024-08-30 18:04:21 UTC

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Around 9 months ago the ETFs launched, and since then around 1 million Bitcoin has flowed into them. Some say this is a good dynamic, it helps to push Bitcoin towards greater adoption and price. I disagree. Without self custody Bitcoin is just another easily manipulable finacial instrument in the legacy system. But theres a reason why theyve become such a rapid success.
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2024-08-30 18:03:55 UTC

GM Nostr. Ive just posted the written version of my Baltic Honey Badger talk "Bitcoin as Performance art" at the link below.
https://medium.com/@CoinsureNZ/bitcoin-as-performance-art-4122e93a2a9e
In this thread I will summarize the contents- not only relevant to Bitcoin but also Nostr. Why we are here and what we want to accomplish with our technologies. LFG....👇
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2024-08-28 08:33:25 UTC

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just downloaded it yesterday but believe this is possible in Gossip?

2024-08-27 22:03:30 UTC

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accurate take in my experience

2023-12-16 05:24:52 UTC

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#nevent1q…th2c

2023-11-24 15:43:12 UTC

Haven't seen anyone discussing what the impact of WOS quite likely completely banning US users will be on Nostr zaps. Seems something worth some consideration with regards to the future utility and design of the feature.

2023-08-17 03:17:43 UTC

I will be speaking about jurisdictional arbitrage with a focus on the LATAM area at the Bitcoin Freedom Festival in Uvita, Costa Rica, 18-20 January 2024
https://www.bitcoinfreedomfestival.com/post/coinsure-nz-confirms-as-speaker

2023-03-25 22:35:33 UTC

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Or read the written version here https://medium.com/@CoinsureNZ/bitcoin-psychopaths-vs-bitcoin-sociopaths-a-quasi-transcript-f48b01400e20

2023-03-25 22:34:48 UTC

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Check out the talk "Bitcoin Psychopaths vs Bitcoin Sociopaths" here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlhg1KGbZ04&t=7

2023-03-25 22:32:22 UTC

Awesome to have my talk at Bitcoin Honeybadger referenced in this great article by
@lopp
covering amongst other things how Bitcoin the lifestyle brand has the potential to impede the functionality of Bitcoin the technology
https://blog.lopp.net/history-of-bitcoin-maximalism/

2023-03-02 22:56:59 UTC

This pod with #[0] was a real pleasure to do, great conversation and I highly reccomend checking out the rest of his episodes. Thanks #[0] note1w0nld5kkds9dv3tgq30qt0gaeqxzf0glgyth6cykeqclp5hqqpesq84sha

2023-03-01 21:10:58 UTC

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Gracias

2023-02-19 17:29:50 UTC

#[0] Verifying My Public Key: "CoinsureNZ"