paul keating

paul@primal.net

#bitcoin Building Primal

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The decision to break free starts with the realization that we are contained in a circle and the decision that we are ready to stop running in circles.

I met Laura during the first month of getting a stable income in Costa Rica. It was the first time that I had a mission while talking to a girl.

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I believe strongly that it's impossible to truly understand life until you create it on your own. Might not be true for everybody, but I believe I'm hardwired this way.

I believe strongly that it's impossible to truly understand life until you create it on your own. Might not be true for everybody, but I believe I'm hardwired this way.

I believe strongly that it's impossible to truly understand life until you create it on your own. Might not be true for everybody, but I believe I'm hardwired this way.

I believe strongly that it's impossible to truly understand life until you create it on your own. Might not be true for everybody, but I believe I'm hardwired this way.

I believe strongly that it's impossible to truly understand life until you create it on your own. Might not be true for everybody, but I believe I'm hardwired this way.

I believe strongly that it's impossible to truly understand life until you create it on your own. Might not be true for everybody, but I believe I'm hardwired this way.

Your votes in the booth matter far LESS than your daily votes with your time, energy, and money.

Whether tapping into our habits and getting us hooked to their platforms, or repeated marketing using the “8 touches” method to get us to buy, the social media ecosystem is programming our subconscious and therefore our lives.

The age of enshittification is upon us and this is our opportunity.

The age of enshittification is upon us and this is our opportunity.

The age of enshittification is upon us and this is our opportunity.

The age of enshittification is upon us and this is our opportunity.

The age of enshittification is upon us and this is our opportunity.

The age of enshittification is upon us and this is our opportunity.

In an era of infinite choices and rampant ambiguity, the ability to adjudicate – to swiftly and correctly decide what is true or what action to take – becomes valuable. Value will accrue to those who can tune out frenzy and ascertain the reality, or to those who build the tools that enable others to do the same at scale. “Discernment” here implies both the judgment of truth and the quality of decisiveness. The rise of AI has supercharged content creation and data analysis, but humans and institutions still face verification bottlenecks (AI said it, but is it true?) and decision paralysis (AI can produce infinite sets of opportunities/ideas). I bet that in an age of infinite information and optionality, the economic return on the 'final decision' will skyrocket because the cost of being wrong is higher than ever.

Truth is heavily decontextualized. News, statistics, and general entertainment increasingly arrives as decontextualized fragments of a whole; urgency and speed of delivery is rewarded (monetarily, see TMZ) while comprehension and accuracy becomes less common and more unevenly distributed. When grabbing and holding attention trumps substance and clarity, we can feel informed while becoming less able to explain causes, tradeoffs, or history. A worldview can be formed, strictly composed of soundbites. 

When people keep what they produce, they produce more. When they can save without fear of confiscation, they save. When they can invest knowing their capital is secure, they invest. Savings become capital. Capital increases productivity. Productivity generates wealth. Wealth compounds across generations.

Also, pay attention to what you are calling "self-love." A bottle of wine is not self-love. Hours spent watching Netflix is generally not self-love. Copious amounts of chocolate is not self-love. Retail therapy is not self-love. By the way, if you want to get any satisfaction out of spending money, spend it on the people close to you, not on yourself. You can spend $1000 on yourself or $10 on your friend and you might find that the $10 spent on someone else bought you more happiness. Learn to love others and you will find a more profound sense of love for yourself.

For liberty-minded individuals, Nostr deserves attention not merely as an alternative to Twitter but as a working implementation of principles too often dismissed as theoretical. When government agencies coordinate weekly with platform executives to remove dissenting voices, when financial institutions debank political opponents, when regulatory bodies threaten billion-dollar fines for hosting disfavored content, the need for infrastructure that makes such coordination impossible becomes urgent.

We voluntarily use fiat currencies and banks. We voluntarily download apps onto our cell phones and spend countless hours watching meaningless content, ruining our minds.

We can point our finger outward, but if we want to find the real culprit and the only one who can do something about it, we must point the finger at ourselves.

Become aware, take responsibility, and take action.

Which brings me nicely to a key battleground in my mind. If this is just a creative outlet, why post on every platform available? I don’t need to try and maximise reach. This is what has tripped me up before, and scooped up too many resources. I know the companies that control Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X et al, are censoring, open to the highest advertising bidder, in lock-step with authoritarian globalists, and very much practicing: “freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach”. So if this is just a creative itch, why not go all-in on Nostr? F#ck all the others off. Build on a protocol, not a rented piece of digital real estate, and think super long-term. This would be the low time preference option. Audience size is of no interest to me if I am able to fill my creative cup. Revenue is of no interest to me right now if this is simply to scratch a creative itch. I smirk as I write this. What if you just used RSS feeds, with Fountain on the back-end, and Nostr, for all your publishing and promotion? Feels naughty. Feels cutting edge. Feels free. Feels like the “F*ck you Elon and Zuck” move. I do not comply. I will not feed your attention focused surveillance capitalism platforms, I opt out, and choose to follow freedom tech, truth, and a vision that once existed for a totally decentralised internet.

We failed to realize and solve for the fact that our physical money was terribly unfit for cyberspace, and now we are all paying for it—with our attention, among other things. One could even argue that the use of attention as currency is—at least in part—to blame for the loss of nuanced discourse and the increase in polarization, be it political or otherwise.[^fn-polarization]

In an ever increasingly digital and global world, the logical case is for bitcoin to pass gold in market cap.

Dignity stems from the ability to have agency over your own life. How much agency can you have over your life if a very select few individuals can decide on a whim to devalue the money you store the fruits of your labor in?

Free speech is not optional; it is not optional because we need to be able to speak freely so that we might have a chance to think freely. There is no proper

Using Bitcoin for payments brings a level of personal responsibility and life to every purchase decision that is not typical of a society living on credit. In a Bitcoin-driven world, we believe these levels of personal responsibility and vitality as it relates to spending decisions will lead to a much more innovative world because when the choice is part with your Bitcoin or hold it, whatever you are looking to purchase must be useful to outweigh the cost of holding your Sats. 

The emotions you feel when spending Bitcoin are real because of the cash-like properties Bitcoin possesses. At the same time, every purchase you make forces you to accept the opportunity cost that whatever you are choosing to purchase is worth you parting with your precious Bitcoin. This is not the same scenario when discussing credit swipes because the dollar depreciates over time, AND using credit is a deferral of payment to the future. Bitcoin is programmed to appreciate over time and settles near instantaneously with no chargebacks. 

The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all.

Social media companies can still exist in a world of signed data, but they will have to offer a real value proposition to their users in order to retain them. This means that they'll be more likely to serve their users rather than extract as much value as possible from them.

On Nostr, clients can be more aligned with users, since they can only capture user attention to the extent that their functionality is what's valuable to the user, not the data they have access to.

The open web never promised comfort, but it provided possibility. Walled gardens gave us comfort at the expense of sovereignty. The antidote is agency: keep the power of algorithms while returning judgment to the user, keep the power of aggregation while returning ownership to the author, and keep the power of competing enterprises while remaining decentralized.

In the end, being curious, asking questions, and being open to learn are three mentalities that will most likely change your life for the better.

In the end, being curious, asking questions, and being open to learn are three mentalities that will most likely change your life for the better.

Paul & I found out we were pregnant on the way to the airport in Costa Rica

What's even more beautiful is that the content can be monetized on Nostr. However, there's no need for a podcast episode token or "soul token" for people to speculate on because Nostr has integrated bitcoin as its native payment token. Instead of trying to complicate things by ignoring the double coincidence of wants problems by creating an infinite amount of speculative tokens just give the people what they want (and unknowingly need); bitcoin. It's simple, really. Unfortunately for those in crypto it's not as flashy, exciting, or exploitive as being able to monetize via degenerate tokenization.

All of these "solutions" have failed to understand the root of the problem they're trying to solve; an incentive aligned value for value exchange that makes sense for the creator and the consumer and is anchored to the logical first principles of economic reality. Creating a token for everything turns everyone into degenerate speculators who are forced to adopt extremely high time preference behavior by attempting to time the market of individual markets they're speculating on.

Passwords are the relic of a pre-sovereign internet.

And that’s exactly what this community gives me: hope. We’re building something bigger than ourselves. As I always say: Bitcoin and Nostr are more than tech. They’re a movement, a rebellion, a revolution. And I’m grateful — exhausted, sleep-deprived, but full of energy — to be part of it.

In Fountain 1.3 we’ve completely rebuilt our Nostr database for speed and stability. Browsing the feeds, comments, profiles, and reactions should feel noticeably snappier.

American Big Tech corporations -- and governments at every level -- show no signs of wanting to build that version of the internet. This has kept me from investing time in building sizeable audiences online. Just as I don't want to be the product that they sell to advertisers I've never wanted to be the agent that makes others into that product. It never felt right to me.

Nostr is a more organic social media. There's no central algorithm that may or may decide to pick up your content. It's just people interacting on a protocol. Be the engagement that you want to see.

Every time I get one of these messages I stop what I’m doing and write a lengthy, heartfelt response. Why? Because Bitcoin is a revolutionary, once-in-a-species discovery that can change your life and change the world for the better. I can’t imagine a better use of my time than to share a few lessons I’ve learned along with some words of encouragement.

A deeply feminine woman desires a man that has a clear mind. A man that she can trust to lead her in the physical world, a man she can fully soften around, a man that offers her the gift of safety to she can relax into her feminine more. A man’s financial stability is often a clear indicator of the strength, resilience and power of his mind. It reflects his inner masculine maturity and proves he can set a vision, move through resistance, and create structure. The trials and tribulations a man undergoes in order to acquire wealth is what makes him into the man able to navigate a relationship, build a family and be the masculine container for the feminine to thrive. And truly when the feminine thrives, the world thrives.

So now with the Nostr protocol I can invite followership with a clear conscience. And I can signal my approval for the work of other creators not by providing a data point for an advertising algorithm but by simply zapping (paying) them directly. This makes enormous sense. It isn't about the signals we provide, it's about the value for other people that we recognize and reward.

I've been looking for something like this protocol since I read George Gilder's book, "Life After Google" a number of years ago. It took @Neal recommending it for me to find it. Thank you Neal!

I would rather die for life than remain dead hiding from myself.

I was tired of cycling through medications for skin fungus (that no doctor confirmed I actually had) and seeing no results, so I finally pushed for a biopsy. The diagnosis: EDP - a chronic, incurable skin condition. My doctor told me nothing caused it, and nothing could cure it. It was just something I would have to live with. But I couldn't accept that. I spoke with my (based) parents and they pushed me to make a radical shift in my diet. I cut out dairy, seed oils, and gluten completely. I want to clarify - high quality dairy is not inherently bad - but in my research, I found that there could be a link between EDP and dairy, so I removed it to see how my body would respond. I focused on real, nutrient-dense foods: high-quality eggs and grass-fed steak everyday. I eliminated all industrial cooking oils from my kitchen and started cooking exclusively with grass-fed butter and beef tallow.

You do not become more than human by cutting yourself off from the primal. You do not ascend by amputating the instincts that carried your lineage through famine, war, and storm. You elevate to a higher form of humanity not by erasing the primal, but by integrating it with discipline, with conscience, with purpose. True mastery is not found in a rejection of your urges, but in the union of your parts: when your instincts serve your vision, and your vision does not shame your instincts.