Тег: Reviews

The Billionaires’ Final Plan — a review

An anonymous user asked me to comment on a video from the Netstalkers channel about how “famous super-rich libertines arrange libertarianism for themselves and the state boot for everyone else.”

I am completely unfamiliar with the channel, however, it is clearly better known to the public than my own, as it had 859 thousand subscribers at the time of this post. The video in question fits well within the channel’s theme, which mainly discusses various behind-the-scenes global mechanics. Well, the topic is in demand, and I want to understand how this demand is exploited in relation to libertarianism.

I don’t want to analyze the style of presentation. Since people watch it, who am I to dispute someone else’s business approach. The video provides quite correct facts: about the book “The Sovereign Individual,” which set many current trends; about how the development of autonomous libertarian territories proceeded, from seasteading in the Andaman Sea to Prospera and Network School; about the fact that this movement is largely driven by representatives of the American tech and financial industries; and finally, that these same people often provide business services to the state, despite all their libertarian rhetoric. Oh, yes, the theme of cosplaying the Roman Republic was also touched upon, but that’s been going on in the US since the Founding Fathers, so there’s nothing particularly surprising about that.

The final punchline is quite funny: basically, that capitalism is already established in the world and works reasonably well, but no, there are troublemakers who are bored and want some action. Thus, enthusiasts of private charter cities are equated to Putin. And rightly so; enough of chewing over the now-tedious Hitler, it was long overdue to find a new bogeyman. Now everyone will be equated to Putin for every possible reason, until the understanding of what exactly is wrong with him is completely blurred, but with a firm fixation that he is definitely terrible, and no one doubts this—unless they want to be seen as literally Putin themselves.

The video prompted me to reflect on the evolution of the criticism of the libertarian movement.

Historically, the first platform for criticism boils down to the idea that libertarian settlers will be communally helpless, that in an-cap there will be no one to build roads, and that these folks will eventually have to go begging to the state if they want normal infrastructure. There are texts about this regarding New Hampshire, and Sperry incriminates Coopersmith with roughly the same position while he was establishing order in Hong Kong. In the video being discussed, this position is no longer used because it is outdated.

The second position is that if an-caps were given their way, they would build a grim corporate cyberpunk world with ruthless exploitation of workers and charging a fee for every sneeze. High tech low life, all that. This is again illustrated by Sperry’s article on Hong Kong, the game BioShock, and is very widely represented in general mass discourse. The video about the billionaires’ final plan hints at this, but, of course, does not illustrate it with real examples.

What happens when an-caps actually found a settlement and start establishing their own rules? Everything turns out fine for them. It becomes a normal peaceful life where people are busy with their own affairs. But then the state inevitably comes along and tears everything to shreds, because where is the cyberpunk, what are you showing us, where is the oppression, are you libertarians or did you just come out for a walk? Now we will show you oppression.

Thus, the third complaint about charter cities is: why do these suckers even bother, the big uncle will come anyway, break this sandcastle, and send everyone to toil in a sand quarry. Some “autonomous settlement” that can’t even withstand a navy. The author of the video slightly indicates this position but does not delve deep, because his task is not to criticize the state, but those who wish to avoid its embrace.

Instead, he goes all out criticizing libertarians from a fourth angle: look, the libertarians have learned from their early attempts, and now they more and more often speak to states from a position of strength. To do this, they simply bring another state over to their side. And to attract that state, they provide services in the proper organization of oppression. Why specifically in this field? Because these are exactly the services the state needs; it buys them.

In other words, the criticism of libertarian autonomous structures now follows the line of hypocrisy. That they establish one set of rules for themselves, but help states establish completely different ones. Well, here we are.

What should the next step be? I think it’s quite obvious. Another libertarian settlement will actually be able to stand up for itself without appealing to state courts and without turning to other states—but simply by its own strength. What will libertarians be incriminated with then? Well, this sort of criticism was quite accurately described by Rozov in the Meganesian cycle. The founders of private autonomous settlements will be accused of war crimes, immorality, poaching talent, financing extremist organizations, and so on. These accusations have one thing in common—they are small dick energy. Anger born of helplessness. I dream of living to see this stage, of course)

Onym messenger review

I was sent a donation in the amount of 77 EURMTL and asked for a review of the decentralized messenger Onym. Getting started.

The website onym.app explains the concept of the messenger. Its main idea is to eliminate the single point of failure and allow the user to choose the services that will be responsible for different components of information exchange.

The assumed structure of the product is roughly as follows.

  1. The authors offer an open-source messenger client that is installed on users’ phones. Anyone wishing to do so can write their own client, and it will be able to operate within this same protocol.
  2. Registering a new user does not require the input of any data; keys are generated on the user’s phone and tied to it. Since, however, anyone can write their own client, nothing prevents them from registering users even with full KYC, if they can figure out how to convince them to install specifically their client.
  3. Data transfer occurs via Nostr relays. By default, the client uses a single relay supported by the project authors, but it can be replaced with one’s own or any public relay. A relay is a dumb transmission mechanism: it receives data encrypted with the user’s private key and puts it into open access, from where anyone who wants it can take it. Relays are not obligated to store user content for long, so ultimately all data is strictly tied to the end device on which the messenger client is installed.
  4. The most unusual part of the architecture is related to group chats. Information about who is an administrator, who can invite new members, and who is part of the group in general is recorded in smart contracts on the Stellar blockchain. Thanks to this, group management does not depend on any single server. However, the end user does not need to worry about funds in their account for blockchain entries; this is done for them by a so-called relayer. The price of transactions in Stellar is pennies, but this is nevertheless a point of failure. An attacker could organize the registration of many fake accounts, creating a new identity in their client and immediately deleting it. The registration of each such identity would require a blockchain transaction, and the relayer would have to pay for it. Currently, the project operates on a test version of the blockchain, but upon moving to the mainnet, the expenses will become real.

The website also has an English-language page describing the threat model within which the messenger operates, and based on which the decision should be made regarding how safe it is to use. It is claimed that the messenger cannot withstand such obvious threats as a mole in the chat, device compromise, and physical coercion; such hypothetical threats as quantum hacking; and such resource-intensive threats as a biased Stellar validator or systems similar to the Russian SORM. The latter, however, only allow one to approach the disclosure of chat participants’ anonymity, but not the reading of messages within it.

Now a bit about personal impressions of working with the Onym messenger. This is an early alpha, meaning it is, of course, terribly raw, and a discount must be made for this, evaluating not so much the functionality that already exists, but that which is intended. The messenger allows creating groups, inviting an arbitrary number of people there, and communicating in these groups. In principle, many other Nostr clients can do the same, since such functionality is part of the protocol. But there, chats have some confusing semi-public status, and Onym, thanks to the additional Stellar layer, ensures chat privacy without using private relays. In general, this cute feature is intended to be the messenger’s killer feature: ordinary Nostr clients are not private enough, and private device-bound messengers like Briar require fully trusting the messenger client. Here, trust is distributed among several layers, in each of which one can choose a specific implementation, including one’s own.

As of today, the messenger looks like a simple proof of concept, and therefore, in essence, is aimed at IT specialists. For the average user, it looks a bit “bones out,” as they are offered setup instructions for Dockers and similar specialized matters in far too many places. I think that the main task for the authors of the idea today should be increasing the number of contributors in the project’s GitHub and generating interest among Nostr enthusiasts. Looking at the GitHub, it is clear that the project started in early May, then went quiet for a long time, and a few weeks ago the dust was blown off it and they continued hacking away. But if the project were to form even a small core of users who regularly sent their issues, the authors of the original idea would clearly have more motivation to work more briskly.

My recommendations to the messenger authors, in order of decreasing urgency:

  1. Refine the minimal functionality that allows using the messenger: group administration (deleting users/messages), push notifications, demonstration of user statuses, at least a simple online/offline. It is essential to finish the claimed but currently unimplemented account export-import capability.
  2. Get users used to a distributed architecture. The client should offer a list of independent relays and Blossom servers with monitoring of their status. As alternative relayers and smart contract implementations for group management appear, a similar choice should appear for them as well. Without the offer of third-party services, an unprepared user will be limited to default settings, and this will create a single point of failure.
  3. Think about a desktop application and the possibility of simultaneously running the messenger from several devices. Tying the entire identity to the device rather than to the key will simply not allow the messenger to achieve any kind of mass adoption.
  4. Implement audio and video calls; the Nostr protocol already allows providing such functionality.
  5. Implement channel functionality, including a streaming function, which can also be realized via the Nostr protocol, while connecting Stellar smart contracts will allow one to avoid exposing oneself in the channel’s subscriber list.

The project has another website, opym.foundation, which describes the foundation that is intended to manage the infrastructure. The foundation’s website talks about why the foundation needs money and how it will be managed. The talk about money is devoid of calculations, and this strongly spoils the impression for potential investors. Moreover, the idea of a governing body somewhat contradicts the premise that every user should easily be able to launch their own service to handle that or another aspect of message exchange. It seems to me that the idea with the foundation should not take off, even if the concept of a Nostr messenger with Stellar contracts is warmly received by the public. Therefore, I do not plan to analyze the proposals for foundation management in detail, however, those who disagree with me can easily figure them out themselves on the foundation’s website.

Overall, the idea seems powerful to me, but in order for it to conquer the market, a great deal of effort will be required.

Citizen Vigilante

In the following text, I assume that everyone has already seen the movie and formed their own opinion, and if not, it doesn’t matter much whether you watch it before or after reading this text.

Reviews often call the film a piece of propaganda, a pamphlet, or a political manifesto. That is not the case. What we have here is an instructional film. It does not criticize the current state of affairs. It provides instructions on how to act and what is needed for that. Here are the narratives that need to be transmitted: if you are a vigilante; if you saw a news story about a vigilante; if you are a TV presenter talking about a vigilante; if you are a witness being questioned by the police about a vigilante. No wide field of opinions is given — only clear, correct answers; the viewer must not be confused, they need clear instructions. The key message is: look, I’m showing you how it’s done. Later, you will do it yourself. This is the only take that is repeated several times in the film, including right at the curtain call.

A successful vigilante needs: to have combat skills, a stable source of income, the ability to articulate their position, neatness and attention to detail, to demonstrate professional integrity, and not to leave the regime with hostages in the form of family members, sticking to superficial connections; always offer simple executors on the opponent’s side to retreat, and shoot only in case of refusal. Outsiders need: to express a clear public demand, saying, “it’s cool that there are such people, we need them very much in such-and-such a country.” Journalists need: to hammer the public and the establishment with the question, “should our system protect victims of violence or criminals? And if it handles criminals poorly, then why hinder those who handle them better? Or are you in favor of more crime?” Witnesses need: while demonstrating a willingness to cooperate, to sabotage police actions to capture the vigilante.

A separate important feedback mechanism is shown, which is necessary for the vigilante to remain within the framework of the public demand, without replacing it with personal notions of morality. The main character always asks the victim if they are satisfied with the procedures of restoring justice already carried out. And only when the victim states that they are not satisfied do they give the vigilante sanction to act. However, a vigilante can, of course, search for injustice directly perceived through the senses in order to correct it immediately. To do this, he simply needs not to move around the city in a Batmobile, but to occasionally use public transport, walk, drop by bars, and so on. In short, not to be detached from life.

With that, I will end the general conclusions and move on to various sweet details.

The film takes place in a kind of averaged Europe, but from the visuals, it is obvious that it is Croatia. It is clear why. First, Croatia is almost devoid of the shortcomings that the main character fights against: it is an almost mono-ethnic and quite racist society, without a painful law-abidance drilled into its citizens. In short, Uwe Boll is using the sacred right of a Soviet citizen to shout on Red Square that Reagan is an idiot. Second, the target audience of the film is not Americans at all, and for them, all European countries look more or less the same. Third, those who are slightly familiar with regional specifics can get an extra laugh out of this.

For example, it is precisely in light of Croatian specifics that the episode in the brothel acquires additional meaning. The girl is unaware of why mold is appearing on the walls, which means that this is her first winter on the Adriatic. Obviously, in her native Ukraine, this problem does not exist. And for us, this is a clear signal: the author shows that not all migrants are equally harmful; there are useful, hardworking ones, ready to perceive local cultural values, and they need the local specifics to be explained delicately and to be paid honestly for honest work.

There are probably other cool moments, but I will leave you to discover them on your own. The main thing I wanted to say was said at the very beginning. Before you is an instruction. Take note and apply it creatively.

What’s going on with Montelibero?

I’ve been advised that I haven’t talked about Montelibero at all lately. That’s not entirely true; it’s just that I usually write about specific problems, whereas there truly hasn’t been a general overview of the state of affairs in the project for a very long time. I’m correcting that now.

Overview

For a long time, the project’s calling card was MTL-City. This is also what undermined it. One day, a local journalist appeared who, based on separate and loosely connected facts, concluded that Montelibero was a Putin project created for another attempt at a coup in Montenegro, similar to the one that took place in 2016. As a result, the state, having received such a public denunciation, became interested specifically in the activities of DOO Montelibero, the legal entity through which the land in City was purchased. A criminal case regarding illegal construction was opened, and as a result, the construction of all permanent structures was frozen pending the investigation. Well, now only modular houses are being assembled there, which, being temporary structures, require no installation permits. However, the unfinished construction doesn’t look very pretty, not to mention the money buried in vain.

Nevertheless, people live in City, public breakfasts are held on Fridays—for those wishing to meet the project participants—plus there are occasional creative evenings and other cultural events. However, to people who have just arrived in Montenegro and want to “settle in this commune of yours,” I advise against jumping on this idea without thorough prior acquaintance. In City, the ratio of costs to comfort is not very optimal, and there is practically no choice of housing. This situation will improve as new modular houses for rent are put into operation—but not very quickly.

The main Montelibero community, as before, resides in the city of Bar, spreading fairly evenly across the city, some in rented housing and some in purchased. They have the opportunity to gather at the First Montelibero Club (it was evicted from its premises in the spring, but recently opened in a new location), at Quiet Backwater (it was evicted from its premises in the summer, but reopened in a new location almost immediately), as well as in several non-Montelibero Russian bars, where the crossing of Monteliberians with the rest of the Russian diaspora occurs most naturally. In Budva, the Montelibero movement has practically gone quiet; in other cities, it never started.

Tokenomics is used by the local Montelibero community no longer with the enthusiasm of neophytes, but simply as a clear and long-familiar tool. EURMTL and EUROMUT are used for cashless payments. USDM mainly serves as an auxiliary token for currency exchanges (I, for example, withdraw dollars from a crypto exchange into USDM, and then exchange them for “mulki”). Some businesses fix debt obligations in their own tokens. The Blockchain Social Network still hasn’t acquired a convenient viewer and editor, so it remains deeply marginal. The Stellar wallets being developed by community members, Montelibero Wallet and especially Sunce, are gradually becoming more convenient. The MTL Fund has sharply reduced its public activity and is now effectively interesting only to its shareholders, and even then, not to all of them. The Montelibero Association has de facto become the mouthpiece for the project as a whole, so let’s discuss it in a bit more detail.

Of course, the fears of paranoiacs that the Association was created only to leak lists of members of an organized criminal community to “comrade major” have about as much relation to reality as that Montenegrin journalist’s ideas that Montelibero was dreamed up by Putin to destroy Montenegrin democracy. Everything is much more boring. The project activists simply rearranged the furniture in the room. I hope they’ve become more comfortable. The Association implies liquid democracy, a secretariat, and a small budget for its routine expenses. This internal kitchen has little effect on the lives of others (which is good), but draws some resources away (which is bad).

Fortunately, the Association activists also handle periodic contacts with the outside world, which is potentially the most useful part for fitting Montelibero into the global libertarian movement. Alas, I rarely have the strength to keep track of this. For instance, in recent months, there have been public calls and private negotiations with representatives of the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem (they have their own rich developments in DAO), with the MetaState project (creating a system of non-governmental electronic passports), with a project to lobby for a simplified visa and entrepreneurship regime for relocants to Albania, with volunteer fire organizations in Montenegro, the Free Private Cities fund, and certainly with others—it’s impossible to mention everyone.

The Association also includes corporate participants, among whom are the aforementioned MTL Fund and the First Club. Besides them, Green Zyland is more or less noticeable, a producer of modular houses for rent (they had a business back in the RF, and now they are expanding into three more countries). In November, they plan to hold a festival in Georgia; a few people from the Montenegrin Monteliberians will go, but I cannot afford it financially. Another active participant is the MTL Alert group. They are preparing for a zombie apocalypse; it’s a cool hobby, but for some reason, I find it hard to take seriously.

The Association is divided into factions, but only the panarchist faction is more or less publicly active. Two of its members, Stas and Ved, both run very sensible thematic channels.

The previously announced redirection of Montelibero’s efforts toward Argentina has not yet led to the formation of a Russian-speaking libertarian community there that is in contact with the rest of the project. The only news from those parts is that a delegate from Montelibero spoke at some Argentine libertarian conference and delivered a letter to Milei. What was in that letter and what effect it had, history remains silent about.

Conclusions and forecasts

At the start, Montelibero participants acted monstrously irrationally and made a ton of mistakes. How could this have been avoided? For example, by delaying the start of construction and other loud activity to instead more thoroughly scout the situation, and only then decide what to do and how. Was it realistic to act according to a more rational scenario? No. Montelibero is a movement, not an organization. It was precisely the drive of the pioneers and their enthusiastic mistake-making that attracted many new participants to the project. Without all this, a fairly strong libertarian community in Montenegro might simply not have formed, just as it didn’t form in Serbia, Georgia, Thailand, or even Argentina. So once again I state: centralized planning sucks, the market decides.

Nevertheless, many initiatives within Montelibero have successfully fizzled out, and many previously active project participants have, at best, tempered or completely lost interest in it, and at worst, moved into open opposition, considering the project to be meaningless “info-gypsyism.”

The economic part of the project must be mentioned separately. Here, the miscalculation proved fatal. It’s one thing when nine out of ten startups fail and one takes off. This happens thanks to fierce competition that selects the truly best. It’s a completely different matter when nine out of ten startups fail, and the tenth balances on the brink of breaking even. This happens thanks to a disgusting investment climate, under which one simply should not invest serious market capital here, just as one should not invest it in some Donbas. Even if something does take off, it will be not thanks to high utility for clients, but thanks to connections with the authorities, for example. And for libertarians, making money this way is usually considered “beneath them.”

Therefore, the following forecast can be made about Montelibero now. This project will not make Europe, or even just Montenegro, free. But it allowed those who believed in it to create a free society around themselves, and also became a platform for testing interesting ideas and technologies suitable for application in other places.

Violation of polaco detected

Albedo Stellar wallet

This review was done for a donation from @ignatyashin (bought 1.4 EURMTL of my ANCAPCHAN tokens)

All of Montellibero’s tokenomics operate on the Stellar blockchain. A number of third-party tools plus proprietary developments are used for operations with it. There are several different blockchain explorers, online transaction builders, and a couple of services for a purely Montelliberian feature—BSN (Blockchain Social Network), but users of the tokenomics primarily interact with wallets.

Historically, the first wallet we started using was Lobstr. Its advantages are: a) the ability to link a so-called federation address to the public key, which is convenient due to its human-readability; b) a contact list; c) convenient order book display for trading on the decentralized exchange integrated into the blockchain; d) the ability to top up via fiat. Disadvantages are: a) it supports only one account; b) it charges a fee for swaps.

Next, the community turned its attention to the open-source Solar wallet. It could handle multiple accounts and didn’t mess with the user’s money, but trading from it was not very convenient, and soon the developers stopped supporting it. Now, our people have forked it, and a wallet called Sunce has been created on its basis. It can already work with multi-signature and is equipped with a contact list, but trading from it remains just as inconvenient.

The main wallet for Montellibero remains a custom-developed Telegram bot, @MyMTLWalletBot. Pros: it supports multiple accounts, multi-signature, swaps, an address book, and some other specific Montelliberian features. Cons: you never know at what moment Durov will decide to completely ban the use of any blockchains in Telegram other than TON.

And now, another wallet, Albedo, has been presented to me for review. Let’s see what interesting things it can offer.

This is an open-source wallet which, judging by its GitHub account, has been slowly developed by five developers for five years. Moreover, the team clearly has some connection to the stellar.expert blockchain explorer. The wallet is written in JavaScript, which implies its use via a web interface. Furthermore, it is theoretically possible to embed it into your own website, for example, as a large golden “donate” button that would immediately generate a payment transaction and prompt to sign it. However, I didn’t have enough brains to build such a button for myself—well, to each their own. Usually, there was always some kind of kind subscriber who helped implement one useful tool or another in WordPress.

If we set aside the idea of integrating the wallet functionality for now and open the wallet’s own website, the first thing offered, of course, is to create a new account.

Scrolling past the routine blah-blah

Next, we are prompted to protect the account with a password (which will be used to locally encrypt our keys), after which we can either create a new account, log into a previously created one, or import one created elsewhere.

If you create an account, a pair of public and private keys is generated, but the wallet is completely empty, so for the blockchain, this account does not yet exist.

You can click on the phrase “public network” and select “test network.” A sandbox will open for playing around. There, you will have 10,000 test Lumens (XLM, the native token of the Stellar blockchain), the ability to open trustlines to some test tokens from a given list, exchange them for each other, and so on. The alternative—while staying in the public network—is to find a few Lumens somewhere and send them to your new account, for which the “Receive” button is used.

I simply imported my main account into the new wallet right away and gained access to all my tokens. It’s convenient that the wallet also imports custom token icons. For example, Lobstr doesn’t see the icon for my ANCAPCHAN token, which is somewhat disappointing, but here everything is fine.

In the account properties, you can set your name, fill out the address book, and connect additional accounts to the wallet if needed.

By playing with the buttons at the bottom, you can discover that the wallet also allows for fairly advanced operations that are not needed very often. When swapping, an allowable slippage percentage is set. When sending, you can perform an immediate send with conversion or send tokens for which the recipient does not have a trustline, so they will receive a notification and either accept the tokens or refuse them. An interesting option: you can immediately generate a link to receive a specific amount of specific tokens; this is convenient if, for example, you are pouring a beer for a customer and then present the bill this way. Our Montelliberian wallets cannot do this—a useful feature. If you already have a Stellar account, you can scan the code and see that you will be prompted to send me 10 EURMTL.

Most likely, some functionality was not considered by me; for instance, I didn’t find out about the multi-signature. However, the mere ability to issue fixed invoices already makes the wallet worthy of attention.

The wallet can also be installed on a phone as a web app. Open the site albedo.link in Chrome, click the three dots in the right corner, and in the menu that opens, select “Add to Home screen.” That’s it—you have a shortcut through which this web wallet will open immediately.

The author of the review request also asks to provide a channel for user support if anything remains unclear while working with the wallet. Perhaps I will use this channel to figure out how to organize the “stellarization” of my website.

Please review this video by Alexander Tatarkov

The request is accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.00003084 ₿

It’s been a while since I listened to this author. He is still as wordy as ever and still doesn’t provide timecodes, but it seems I’ve become slightly more tolerant of this genre, so I resubscribed to Alexander’s channel. Sometime in my free time, I’ll listen to what he’s managed to say over the last three years. If you are subscribed to him and can recommend any specific episodes, drop the links in the comments, preferably with a brief introduction.

Essentially, for two hours, Alexander spends his time explaining a single thesis: that Putin’s regime looks like a clumsy cosplay of Hitler’s. Examples cited include the style of propaganda, Freikorps, concepts of Lebensraum and Lebensborn, ressentiment, and the fight against sects, same-sex relationships, and migrants.

There is no particular moral here, just a simple observation that this is another confirmation of the heuristic that farce tends to repeat tragedy.

In general, I like collections of historical anecdotes, but Tatarkov’s thoughts specifically always have a lot of room; there’s no point in listening slower than at 1.5x speed.

Games with MEREXP products

This post is accompanied by a donation of 30 USDC

On August 31, I released an interview with representatives of the MEREXP company, in which I tried to figure out how to make money trading cryptocurrencies using metrics based not only on mathematical wizardry, but also on economic theory. Even after the interview, I was left with a feeling of some misunderstanding as to how theory translates into practice, so we decided to continue studying the proposed product.

To start, I registered on the website merexp.com. Here, I must say, the process seemed quite insecure to me: the password was simply sent by email, and afterwards, I couldn’t find any way to change it in the personal account. However, as long as the service only provides paid subscriptions to certain indicators rather than taking money under management, it’s not that critical.

In the future, the company representatives promise a large set of analytical tools, but so far only Swallow is on sale. This is an AI that swallows news related to Bitcoin (and separately to other crypto) and spits out an assessment: how many positive and how many negative mentions accumulated during the day. Then the information is displayed as a simple needle indicator, which shows what the news background is right now, in the moment.

For those who want to understand the dynamics of the news background, graphs are provided, which look roughly like this:

A monthly subscription for access to the indicator is 17 dollars. They provided it to me for free for the first month so that I could play around with it and write this review. For those who register via my referral link https://merexp.com/?ref=ankap_tyan, the subscription price will be 12 dollars per month (this is for monthly payments; there is an additional bulk discount for quarterly or annual payments). Payment is made through a third-party service, cryptocloud.plus, in USDT or USDC, depending on your choice.

A natural question arises: how meaningful is it to buy access to a single indicator. Even the service authors are sure that it’s not very meaningful, which is why weekly reviews are included as a bonus, in which analysis is performed using an additional set of metrics (they are not ready to sell these metrics yet).

So, I have the ability for instant monitoring of the news background and detailed reviews, which, however, are released only once a week. I set a task for myself: to find out if this is enough to feel confident while trading. From the sale of DOGS tokens received in an airdrop, I had 0.00123149 BTC (about 65 dollars) lying in my exchange account; these were used for trial trading using the proposed analytical toolkit, as these were definitely funds I wouldn’t mind losing.

On September 4, MEREXP released another review: “Bitcoin: A Time of Uncertainty and Hidden Opportunities.” The content of the review boiled down to the following theses: seller pressure is growing in the market, while buyer activity remains stably low. The news background is consistently positive, so any drawdowns that occur are shallow, and after some time the exchange rate returns to its level. But as soon as the news background becomes negative, that’s it, expect a crash. Thus, an ideal situation was created for testing the news indicator specifically, since the price was supposed to depend primarily on it.

At that time, on September 4, I opened a position—a long with 5x leverage—at a price of 58071, using a quarter of my deposit. The rate almost immediately began to crawl down. Daily monitoring of the news background showed that it remained positive, sometimes shifting toward the yellow zone. Taking what was written in the review on faith, I interpreted this as a signal that “the drawdown is temporary, I can average down, we will go up soon”. And I averaged down. This is roughly what my trading looks like on a chart with daily candles:

The position was closed on September 10 with a slight profit. On September 11, it was opened again at a lower rate and closed finally on September 13 at a price of 58454, as I had to start drafting this report. Taking into account all the averaging, leverage, and trading commissions, the net profit was 0.00009351 BTC (about 5 dollars), which in relative terms means 7.6% over 9 days. Considering that I deliberately chose an unfavorable moment to enter, I consider the experiment successful. Of course, if I had honestly bought the indicator via my own referral link for 12 dollars, the purchase would not have paid off in such a short time. However, if a real deposit of at least a thousand had been involved instead of a toy deposit, the indicator would have paid for itself handsomely, with enough left over for some wine.

It is clear that a single success does not guarantee further profits. However, you know, sitting in a serious drawdown is quite an ordeal for the nerves, when you have to guess: is the rate ready to collapse, and I must urgently close at a loss to avoid liquidation—or is it ready to bounce back, and I should buy more at the bottom. The news background indicator is exactly what answers this question. Without access to it, I would not risk trading with leverage, and you can’t make a serious profit with spot trading.

One last piece of advice for the MEREXP company. Try to set up a test deposit as well and illustrate your weekly reviews by demonstrating how you trade in light of your own analytics. Then, firstly, potential buyers of Swallow or other future indicators will gradually develop a clearer idea of how to use such tools. And secondly, by the time you resolve the legal issues and are ready to accept money for trust management, you will have a proven success story. You don’t need to show trading in real-time so that people don’t copy trades for free, but reporting on a weekly basis looks like a quite viable marketing move.

My partners and I created the MEREXP investment fund and share some of our analytics in a Telegram channel. Could you evaluate the channel?

Lisoz Tech (the question is accompanied by a donation of 15 USDC)

Here is the link to the channel: https://t.me/merexp_analytics

It only started being populated recently, since May 2, and so far it has been doing so on a daily basis (at one point, my own channel had a similarly auspicious picture). The materials can be roughly divided into two categories: reviews of specific markets and articles explaining the advantages of Merexp Analytics.

As far as can be understood, the advantages lie in the fact that the company uses its own proprietary metrics. I particularly liked the breakdown of how these metrics work based on historical Bitcoin data. Admittedly, based on the channel’s materials, it remains unclear how the raw data for all these metrics is collected, but perhaps the company shares this information with its clients.

The fund views Bitcoin as simply another asset in the stock market, which gives the reviews their own charm, since the Bitcoin market is usually written about either in the context of cryptocurrency world news or in the context of technical analysis; here, however, the focus is mainly on the influence of fiat liquidity fluctuations and similar matters.

Strictly speaking, this is already at least the second attempt to launch the fund’s channel; the first happened in December 2023, and by February 2024, publications had already ceased. Back then, the publications were much less regular and concerned Bitcoin exclusively.

It was somewhat surprising that there is no link anywhere in the channel’s materials to the investment fund’s website or its analytical division. This is inconvenient both in terms of presenting materials (for example, the website could contain a convenient archive of review publications broken down into categories by individual markets), as well as a lack of information about the fund that is awkward to present in a Telegram channel format (for example, information about the volume of attracted investments and the fund’s portfolio). Instead of a website, it is suggested to contact the support bot for all questions. This model of presenting material and interacting with potential clients is not very clear to me, although perhaps it is simply a trend. After all, people even manage to do business on Instagram.

The feedback bot was tested by me at the most unfavorable time — on a Friday evening. The response time was 40 minutes, which is very good.

Or perhaps the website and other interactive tools are currently being actively finalized and will soon see the light of day. If so, I even appreciate such an approach: first fully develop one’s key know-how that provides an advantage over competitors, and only then pay attention to how to present them to the public. This is much more honest than first making a beautiful presentation and website, then attracting venture investment, and only then, possibly, spending that investment on the development of metrics and algorithms.

In any case, I subscribed to the channel because the content provided there is quite original. Regarding Bitcoin, it will even be possible to track how the forecasts come true, and if they prove reliable, then perhaps I will start looking for entry points, rather than just buying coins blindly as soon as I receive income exceeding the subsistence minimum.

Bitcoiners discuss Montelibero, continued

A month ago, the guys from the projects HypeCoinNews and Bitcorn tried to launch a joint podcast Bitcom in Bitcoin, inviting Soz for the first episode to tell them about Montelibero. There was a false start, and they had to discuss Montelibero among themselves. I later commented on one of the takes from this conversation on my page.

And so yesterday, they finally released the recording of the conversation with Soz.

I was briefly reprimanded for the inaccuracy of my comment: by freezing BTC in the Liquid sidechain, I receive LBTC coins in exchange, which I can then use to buy LMTL tokens or any others, and the fund, after selling me its tokens, is free to dispose of the received LBTC as it sees fit, including selling them for euros. But since the liquidity of this market is extremely low, the comment remains essentially valid: using this mechanism to accumulate resources offline is inconvenient.

And then the conversation continued for over an hour about other things (if anyone is ready to make timecodes, it would be very helpful—drop them in the comments). I listened and felt envious: I have to give a talk about Montelibero at the upcoming festival, and it certainly won’t be better than Soz’s, no matter how hard I try(

I’ll probably add one more thing to what Soz said about “broke people.” In principle, a broke person just needs to arrive in the country and start earning; they can completely ignore legalization. The culture of under-the-table payments is extremely developed here. Documents aren’t demanded at every step (and if they ask once every six months, there are no sanctions for saying your documents are at home). Difficulties only arise when trying to leave the country. But if you’re broke, why would you be traveling abroad! Stay in Montenegro, enjoy its—no joke—immense natural and cultural diversity, participate in the activities of the local community, and just don’t worry. Roma people make up five percent of the population here; learn from them the correct attitude toward the state (though it’s better to learn the attitude toward private property from us).

Nostr, first impressions

After the release of the post about regular automatic payments via Lightning using the Nostr protocol, it was quite logical to try and understand what this protocol is, what it can be used for, and what its prospects are.

To start, I familiarized myself with a selection of materials from Tony and the official description on GitHub from the protocol’s author. In short: Nostr is a protocol for the decentralized exchange of small texts (more precisely, scripts in JSON format).

  • Any server owner can run their own relay, which will receive such messages, store them, and forward them.
  • Any developer can write their own client that connects to one or more such relays, receives messages from them, filters and beautifies them if desired before showing them to the user (for example, loading media where there were links to it in the message), and sends the user’s messages to the relay.
  • Any user can download a client, configure which relays it connects to (if the client allows), and enjoy life.

On GitHub, it is easy to find Nostr libraries for several languages, clients (one could make a fork adapted for Montelibero), and relays (again, one can run their own relay for Montelibero’s needs).

To set up a Nostr account, it is sufficient to generate a pair of private and public keys; after that, the private key is stored, and the public one can be shared far and wide (here is mine: npub1jj4xxj47j9yjthhrd2kwklx5vl9j45ruvhl0ftdfamf7v6nx799ssf45q3), just as the creators of asymmetric encryption intended. Keys can be generated directly within a particular Nostr client (I generated mine in the Alby browser extension), via a special service, or for security, one can use a completely custom script if they have the expertise (I do not). However, I managed to link my Nostr public key to the name ancapchan@getalby.com (so-called NIP5 verification), create my own Lightning address ⚡ancapchan2018@gmail.com (which masks the address ⚡ancapchan@getalby.com), as well as link this browser extension to my website, so now, if you have it installed, its icon on the ancapchan.info website changes from yellow to blue, and when you click it, you will see an invitation to send a donation:

In general, Lightning is natively integrated into the Nostr protocol as a means of transferring value. For instance, social network clients based on Nostr offer “zaps” instead of likes, which are accompanied by the sending of a small amount of satoshis. In addition, money in the system can be used for paid relays that offer additional functionality, such as spam filters.

Overall, the protocol seems promising to me. I hope it will soon acquire a sufficiently convenient infrastructure, more people will join, and it will gradually be able to draw the attention away from current centralized solutions. I also hope that the collective intelligence of the developers participating in the Montelibero project will be enough to create their own Nostr-based solutions: their own relay, a bridge to Telegram, and much more that hasn’t even occurred to me yet.