McAffee and I were on the run at about the same time. I knew what he was up to when he posted that he would be offline for a few days as that was a message I had sent to my family when I knew I would be at sea for a while.

I also posted a similar message to his about not being suicidal. People who want to enjoy life to the fullest do not embrace death.

I doubt he killed himself. My initial thought was...he paid off his jailers to fake his death while granting the extradition. This would make both parties happy, him and the US government as well as those he paid off. If I run across him in one of my remote world adventures I will not be surprised.

Whether true or not, that is the perception of the presidency. Certainly with the Lightning Network anonymity will be much easier.

As it is, the way I get cash into Panama due to banks not liking me is pretty much what they are fighting. I send BTC to a guy, he gives me cash. There's a whole underground system growing around this due to Panama's lack of support for Bitcoin. Such that it will likely be much more convenient to not touch banks in Panama. The 70% unbanked in Panama are about to be wealthy Bitcoin holders due to banks being scared of dealing with Bitcoin users.


And I always have to throw out my big theory about Panama banks. The banks don't care about having customers since they're just big fronts for money laundering operations by the bank owners. They make it very difficult to get an account and they close your account for no reason at any time. With no customer service.

It's smart, if it weren't for Bitcoin we may have pursued opening a bank just to fund Ocean Builders since we have millions of dollars in Singapore and the US that we can't get into Panama.

On the idea that Bitcoin may be adopted in Panama...

The only current use of Bitcoin in Panama is the very expensive Bitcoin ATMs that charge about 10% both ways. All other usage is through a small community of us, mainly Ocean Builders selling to a wide swath of people that want to buy bitcoin for cash (since we can't get a bank account...supposedly due to my involvement).

The one congressman that proposed a Bitcoin law is in the opposing minority party who may just be doing it for political points or as a jab at the administration.

They tried to pass a "Crypto" law at one point, when the minister that was proposing the law finally talked to local Bitcoin users they were all up in arms because the law was shit. The law was fairly standard/cut and paste from other country's laws with no real innovation until the last few paragraphs where it talked about taking 5% of every "international transaction" and giving that money to the elderly. When the minister had a phone conference with local crypto users they kept asking questions about details in the law and after a while the minister had to end the call as it became obvious that he had not read the thing himself.

Had this congressman wanted to talk to the local crypto community I would know about it. And he hasn't.

When we called the cruise ship we purchased the "Satoshi" our government contact (assistant to the president) gave us a lot of push back telling us not to make anything public about it being a "Crypto cruise ship". For all Panama media and anything government facing I had to say the name Satoshi means "knowledge" in Japanese and that the focus of the cruise ship was for digital nomads and startups. We could not mention cryptocurrency.

The idea that they would change their stance from "don't talk about crypto" in December to "let's make Bitcoin legal tender" in June is impossible.

Their reasoning for being so scared of crypto is because of their reputation as a money laundering nation. They're trying to clean up that image and adding Bitcoin, which would make money laundering easier, does not do well for that image. They've been trying to suck up to the big boys internationally. They'll be sold to China before they adopt Bitcoin.

They have elections every 5 years and their last elections were 2 years ago. So the earliest we could see Bitcoin as a currency in Panama would be in at least 3 years when the current party is defeated. Maybe a young party like in El Salvador will take over.

This.

Inheritance goes along with our primal instinct/desire to secure the future existence of your offspring. This is common throughout most living creatures unless the species can survive without the protection of those that bring them into the world (ie Bacteria).

To that end, it may be best to offer the tools of success rather than just straight wealth. Our basic instincts also desiring that our children also breed and have the ability to support their offspring.

There is also the desire that our children keep certain values that we hold dear as a way of a sort of "immortality" through our offspring. Toward this, it may be better to link inheritance to some sort of achievements which you desire for your child to reach (graduations, career, marriage, children, home ownership, etc.).

I agree that just giving money to kids is dangerous. If you look at most of the super wealthy, the children end up being worthless while the grandchildren usually pick up the traits of the wealthy person. Maybe that's due to the wealthy person never being there for their children because they're too busy becoming wealthy such that the children resent them but then after the wealthy person is finished making money they have more time for their grandchildren which they can teach their life lessons.

Someone bought the dip.

Congratulations Bitcoin on implementing Taproot.

Here is a Taproot song to celebrate.

I started my deep dive into Lightning Network so I will definitely have questions. I've used WoS already to at least play around with sending LN transactions as a hot wallet.
I just started looking at running a node. I watched a video on Umbrel and it seems pretty well set up. My question would be, would I be able to do some sort of custodial wallet for my friends and family that I want to help out? Like let them point to my server and they have some sort of channel on their phone wallet. In a way that they don't have access to my funds but they can use my node at no cost.

Very cool. Which would mean it's an uncensorable chat system...

I think it's time I set up a Lightning Node. I've just been using custodial stuff but the time has come.

My former maid just asked my wife about Bitcoin since she's from El Salvador. I need to figure out the best way for her to get paid over the LN and send it to her family without being too complicated. Strike is not available here in Panama yet.

I'm checking out Sphynx.chat which @jack just tweeted about.

It appears to be a way to chat over LN. I know they were working on that technology but I did not realise that it was implemented.

Does anyone know much about the tech behind it? Is it truly all living on the LN or is it reliant upon the Sphynx server?

Anarcho communists want decentralisation but while anarcho capitalists throw in the idea that we'll all be cooperatively free market property protecting volunteers, they believe that everyone will be unselfish, freely trading, sharing society with no need for property...because everyone cooperates and stuff.

Both are flawed in their reliance upon people agreeing to the final terms of life with no rulers. But at least they are on the right path with the no rulers part.

If your societal system does not take into account that some people will want to do X while you think they should do Y, then your system does not work for everyone.

I can see the IMF's position on El Salvador and I agree that it is a higher risk for them.

When they announced that, I thought...why don't we just raise $1 billion among Bitcoin folk and loan El Salvador the money to put toward infrastructure to be paid back in the future.

But if Bitcoin is accepted nationwide and widely used...then...good luck getting any more tax dollars from anyone since they'll just be earning untraceable, anonymous currency. Their tax revenue is going to crash and they won't be able to pay anyone anything.

I do like the idea that they are accepting Bitcoin for residency. That could possibly become their main source of revenue and replace all taxation as people want to join their thriving economy.

Bitcoin ends governments and it makes sense that the IMF would not want to invest in a country that will have a much smaller government in the future.

I spend about an hour a day at the gym on the elliptical watching development meetings for this very thing.

A protocol to run smart contracts, tokens, DeFi, etc. on the Lightning Network.

I search for it with a search for Bitcoin RGB on Youtube.

I am learning quite a bit. One interesting part of it is single use seals and client side activation.

Just today I saw that they can do a decentralised DNS quite easily on this setup.

It's still in development though so that's why it's just developer meetings at the moment.

No token. No billions to the first movers. Just plain functionality added on top of Bitcoin. The developers plan on being compensated by providing technical support to those that want to implement it and need some help.

True, I know from my few projects that the vast majority will not be actually doing anything. Much less...moving to El Salvador. They will be sitting back clicking "Like" and hoping that it is successful so that it will affect their home town in a positive way. Or as a means of being able to say "See, it works there!".

Few people actually do anything. And those people will be able to research before going there on how to best protect themselves from the crime.

And like I said...it's great that El Salvador is considered a crime ridden shithole. That's great for the "Before" picture.

The high crime rates are great for a before and after comparisons for Bukele and pre-bitcoin.

"As a result of his Territorial Control Plan, El Salvador's homicide rate fell 52 homicides per 100,000 people in 2018, the highest in the world at the time, to only 3.7 homicides per 100,000 people in January 2020."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayib_Bukele

Which would put it lower than Panama (2018).

The city, Colon, I spoke of is 26.2 murders per 100k.
https://www.newsroompanama.com/news/colon-murder-capital-of-the-isthmus

It will be good to see all of those crime numbers go down as people become prosperous in less risky professions.

Meh, Panama is also considered "not safe" but I've been here 2 years with no problems.

It does require some vigilance and personal responsibility which a lot of people talk about but don't actually understand.

I lived in between two towns whose main economy is drugs. I didn't bother them, they didn't bother me. I had big dogs in my fenced yard to not make it easy for them and followed some simple rules like...hire a local maid that is trustworthy (you will go through a few). Don't go to the wrong places at night. Don't complain about their super loud music to police.

Here in Panama I lived near Colon which is the murder capital of Panama. I know not to go into that city after dark.

Worst that happened to us as a group was the well known local thief broke into a friend's house and stole his laptop and cell phones. He followed the standard procedure of paying the "middle man" $100 to retrieve his shit. The thief's sister is the DA so it's pointless to rely on the government to do anything about it.

Here in Panama we're currently trying to arrange a Bitcoin convention to invite all LATAM countries to come and talk about adopting bitcoin as the new currency of Latin America.

My take is that it will take much longer in these countries, including possibly years to wait until electing some better politicians and the bills will be watered down thanks to US pressure but some semblance of what El Salvador has done will be done across all of Central and South America.

In the meantime...I would not be surprised if small countries in other parts of the world start popping up doing the same.

All national leaders are keeping an eye on El Salvador right now with a "let's see how it goes there first" type of interest.

I predict that the US will be the last holdout on this. All of the US will become like Detroit. Start to reconsider if you want to live like that in your future.

There has been a more recent discussion about BlockFi.

Saylor proposes that no Bitcoin hodler will ever need to sell. They can just get a loan at 4% annual interest on their bitcoin holdings which is better than inflation while you still have your underlying bitcoins for when you pay off the fiat loan (which is likely worth a lot more).

Makes sense. Still risky though. He says to only take a loan and put it into something that will likely gain in value more than the interest rate.

El Salvador to the US:

Have fun staying poor.