Red team blues - a story only made possible by misunderstanding Bitcoin

I am currently enjoying "Red team Blues" by Cory Doctorow (Funny side note: for a long time I thought his name was made up. It's not.)

Anyway, Red Team Blues describes a modern day whodunit investigation by the protagonist Martin Hench. In the story, a cryptographic backdoor is programmed into a fictional cryptocurrency called Trustcoin. This backdoor seems to fall into the wrong hands and Martin's job is to recover the cryptographic keys. Furthermore in the story, Trustcoin is explained to be better than Bitcoin because one can interact on this blockchain privately. This sounds a lot like the real-world usage of Cashu e-cash, Fedimint, Liquid, Monero or Beam just to name a few projects that either build on Bitcoin, or roll their own Blockchain. 

Without giving away any spoilers, about 2/5 into the story Martin and his client both think he's solved the mystery. He is then to be paid about $300 million. Several pages in the book are then used to describe how that much money can move hands. It is in worldwide real estates, numbered accounts, weird sounding LLCs on the Cayman Islands, and so on.

This book came out in 2023, so I would guess Cory should know that holding and moving $300 million in Bitcoin is trivially simple. Also, he could have known that building yet another privacy crypto project is nonsense because money tends to be winner-take-most. But I guess that would have made the story shorter and less interesting? Or maybe he, like most people, isn't understanding how truly useful and liquid Bitcoin and adjacent projects are yet? 

I guess only mis-understanding Bitcoin can make one a sceptic, and only misunderstanding it gives you the need to make a 'better' alternative. It so happens that this week I was listening to a podcast episode on Tetragrammaton where Rick Rubin is interviewing Jack Mallers. In it, he explains the how?, what? and why? of Bitcoin. If you want to understand Bitcoin better, give the episode a listen. Bonus: even the adverts on this podcast are a joy to listen to. I only wish more podcasts were made with such love for the craft. 

Are there any good blogging platforms left in 2025?

We don't do it because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy. - jest at the famous JFK quote.

I'm one of those stubborn bloggers persons who like to blog. Why? Because getting things off my chest is a liberating feeling. Or sometimes I have a "deep" insight that I feel the universe, or at least posterity, should be able to look back at. One of my blogs is mostly tech focussed, and sharing tips and tricks is as much a service to the Congregation (shout out to all my fellow fans of Alastair Reynolds' Ness-sisters) as to my future self. I can't remember the number of times that I had to look at my own blog posts to find the exact FFmpeg commands that I need. 

Everyone has their own reason(s) to blog. But the reason I kept at it is mainly because it is almost free. That it is (or can be) free is a coincidence of history as much as anything else. You see, since about 2003/2004 I've been blogging on platforms such as my own site hosted by my provider. But when I switched from Sun-web (or was it Surf-web?) to HCC-net, and then to XS4ALL, I felt tired of Ftping over my files and telling all my friends about a new domain name once again. I needed a static web address, or better yet, my own domain name. So Janromme.com was bought. 

I also needed a hosting solution that would just work. Blogger.com was big at the time, and appeared to be free as well. It wasn't until recently that I discovered that my beloved website was infested with banners for random advertisements. You see, I've been using Nextdns and add blockers for decades now, so I never realized the garbage that people who don't use these tools see on the internet, including on my own beloved website.

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". I've recently decided that I want to switch over from blogger.com to another hosted solution. Blogger's way to make money is to show my readers adverts. I don't want that any more. So I've been looking into different hosting providers like Montaigne, Ghost, Pica.page, njump.me, Picapods, Alto, Micro.blog, Blot.im and EX0Text.  

I accept that I will need to pay for hosting. But since I want to set this up and forget about it for another decade or two, it will have to be both ridiculously cheap and durable. I know that nothing lasts forever, but a service that is too cheap will go bankrupt or be acquired by another party that will stop its services. It would also be really nice if I could upload my posts as Markdown files. That way, switching over to another platform in 20 years time will be easier. 

I guess this graph (I've got permission to use this picture, the original version is hosted here) illustrates my point nicely: the cheaper and easier the hosting is, the more likely it is that a blog will be actively used and will stand the test of time.

So I am currently in the market for a new blogging platform. The minimum requirements are in no particular order:

• Custom domain name support 
• RSS support (I've got no clue how many people read my blog through RSS, and that is a liberating feeling).
• File hosting included (for pictures and video's)
• Close to free (I am willing to pay $50 per year) but that's only about $4 per month. Only Picapod comes close to this pricing. Blot was $4 when I signed up, but for new customers it's already pricing at $6 at the time of writing. 
• Easy posting/uploading. The way I use Blogger is by sending an email to [mysecretaddress]@blogger.com and the email with pictures included is just posted at my blog.  Blot is quite easy too. I just save a markdown file in my Dropbox folder, and voilà, it becomes a new blog post. 
• Easy to set up and forget. This is where Pica falls flat on it's face: you are renting a VPS, which requires attention.
• Cheap to maintain for the builders. After all, if the company or person quits tomorrow, I'm bereft of a good hosting solution once again.
• I want to be the customer, not the product, so no inserted advertisements. 

If you have any tips, mail me or comment on HN.

update: shout out to sirodoht and treetalker for pointing me to mataroa. Mataroa seems to cost just $9 per year, has everything I listed above, except for the file hosting part, and is probably my new blog platform soon™️

All Clothing Is Handmade | Ruth Kitchin Tillman

I've been annoyed for a while now about the low quality of a lot of the clothing I see in stores these days. 

I know "fast fashion" has an "upside" namely, it's relatively cheap. Why the price of raw cotton doesn't reflect the huge impact on the environment and the need for lots of drinking-quality water, is beyond my current understanding. I guess the countries and companies involved rather have the income now and the bad outcome for the environment is only an afterthought, I guess?

Anyways, because cheap cotton and linnen exists and because cheap labor is also abundant, we now have fast fashion. And fast fashion gets out of fashion fast, too. So we throw it away. 

This ends up in land fills or the cotton is recycled into cleaning cloths, at an extra expense of more water and energy. 

This is a long story to get to my point: I prefer slow fashion. I try to buy stuff that I will still wear ten or 15 years from now. You can do this too. Extra points if you manage to buy that high quality clothing for cheap in a second hand store 😊. 

The fact that some clothing from certain countries has a low-quality feel to it, has more to do with choices and less with the quality of the workers involved. This article wonderfully explains the economic reasons for some low quality production: https://ruthtillman.com/post/all-clothing-is-handmade/ 

stupiddovenests

TIL of the existence of a subreddit, devoted entirely to "stupid dove nests".  

If you are looking for so good, wholesome, Christian, clean and belly bunching humour, then check it out 😂  

The sad truth about metabolism: why nothing works

For those of you who want to be a "new me" starting 2025 I have one word: don't. 

It's not that I don't want you to be happy and healthy and succeed in life and so on, it's just that these "new years resolutions" rarely work to bring real change, but they do bring real disappointment, and I want to spare you that pain.

It always feels good to have a scientific underpinning for a held belief, so let me help you out with this article: https://greyenlightenment.com/2024/12/14/cico-vs-the-condom-the-sad-truth-about-metabolism/

The short version is this: the amount of energy (calories) that you burn is, like IQ, mostly, set in stone. You can burn more calories by doing more exercise but afterwards you'll feel hungry and immediately eat something to get the lost calories back. I am not saying you shouldn't walk or play badminton or whatever, those things are healthy in themselves, but don't help in weight loss.  The only way to lose weight is to eat less calories, AKA, starving yourself. This doesn't work well of course, because, who likes to starve? 

Anyways, big things are coming in 2025. See you around 👍 

My dystopian week

This is a cross-post to our brother/sister platform, so you can either read this post on janromme.com or on seriousaboutech.com. 

Last week the well-known software engineer and investor Marc Andreessen (of Mosaic/Netscape fame) went on a long interview at with Joe Rogan in which he explained, to I imagine the shock of millions of listeners, the existence of a pressure mechanism barely controlled by rule-of law namely: debanking.

This is like deplatforming. When you are kicked off Twitter or Instagram, you are deplatformed. When the bank cancels your bank account and tells you in a letter, phone call or email that you have x days to take your money and leave, that's called debanking. 

David Marcus worked at Meta (Facebook and Instagram are well-known companies of Meta) to set up their cross-border payments platform Diem/Libra, and were targetted by what I would call Law-fare (it's a wordplay on warfare). Many others chimed in to relate similar harrowing stories of how they had to keep cash under a mattress because not only did they lose their bank account, but also would no other bank start a banking relation with them. 

You could be excused for thinking these things only happen to rich and powerful people with similar adversaries somewhere far away in that parody of a country, the United States. 

Let me tell you about my past week now. 

Since we adopted the "Black Friday" craze here, I wrote a comparison of mobile phone subscription plans and set my mind to becoming a customer at an MVNO called Ben. After filling out some form for number porting and such like, I received an email that I am rejected as a customer. The reason is that one or multiple of these 3 companies has deemed my "not creditworthy enough": Preventel, Experian and Focum. 

I always pay my bills and have no outstanding debts anywhere, so this is an obvious mistake. 

But I didn't have the time, energy or even the impulse to challenge these 3 companies (that I never heard of before that day) so I just went to the next telecom provider on that list that was 33 cents more expensive. 

But that was not all…

Some elderly friends of mine, who live down the street, complained about their slow iPads. So I told them I would help them order new iPads. They both wanted the iPads Air M2, which, I think, is a good choice because the iPad A17 is now old tech and the iPad Pro M4 is expensive overkill for almost anybody.  

I had my laptop with me, so I proposed we order both devices and fitting cases from my laptop. 

One day later, one of these ladies is in the supermarket, and she discovers to her horror that her debit card is blocked. I don't know if/how she paid at that instance, but she right away went to her bank to complain. The explanation for her being blocked was that with her bank account, a payment was detected by CrowdStrike to have originated from a "laptop that also does crypto transactions". 

The fact that she had to authenticate and confirm these transactions and the fact that we just ordered something on Amazon, and the fact that this, according to the bank, "suspicious" transaction was not blocked, but the next one was, is mind-boggling to me.

I am happy to confirm that after complaining at the bank, her bank account was unfrozen again. When this happens to you for the first time, this adage: The money in your bank account is not yours, not money and not there rings in your ears. 

How easy would it be for an well-meaning but misguided algorithm, AI or a semi government organization to debank or block whole swats of people that it, or they, deem 'unwanted'? Our societal reliance on these choke points makes us fragile. This is one of the reasons why the Human Rights Foundation and others are so sceptical of Central Bank Digital Currencies, the latest efforts to do away with cash all together. I know my individual actions, trying to pay with cash wherever i can for example, will in no way turn this tide. So why bother trying?  

 

We live in 1984-esk times. End Times. And a worldwide time is coming in which "nobody can buy or sell without having the mark of the beast". So things will get weirder before they get better. 

On that happy note: until next time 👍 

Bijbelse Geschiedenis van Rome

Lieve vrienden, 

Afgelopen week heb ik samen met ongeveer 1500 personen (dat is een schatting op basis van 600 Zoom connecties waarbij er 2/3 personen achter een beeldscherm zitten) kunnen genieten van een tour door het oude Rome.

Deze stad groeit uit tot de hoofdstad van een wereldrijk, maar heeft een klein begin, ingeklemd tussen de grote jongens als de Etrusken, Grieken en Feniciërs.

Via deze linkjes kun je deze tour downloaden en zelf nog eens op je gemakje terugkijken:

Video deel 1

Video Deel 2

En wie rustig de plaatjes nog eens wil terugkijken kan ze hier downloaden (inclusief enkele aantekeningen van mijzelf).

De aantekeningen.

Wie graag een donatie wil geven (hoeft niet, mag wel) kan dat nog doen via deze link.

Bedankt voor het meedoen, en wellicht tot een volgende keer 😊 

Groetjes

Jan