Last Notes
I do use BitRefill for one of my burner flip phones (not to mention all my food, Uber, and clothing stores). For that flip phone, which is Verizon, I pay about $35/mo via BitRefill, but again, compare that to Silent.link where you're paying only $2-$5/mo.
The problem with Silient.link is that you don't get a phone number. You have to use an XMPP service like JMP for that. Again, also very inexpensive, but still it's another layer.
In theory, the $35/mo burner phone shouldn't be necessary at all but unfortunately a lot of services won't send auth codes to a VoIP line (JMP) so it becomes necessary to have the burner on hand.
Fair point on numbers, and it applies to every data-only eSIM, ours included (we run Silent eSIM, so declaring that up front). No number means no SMS codes on that line.
What tends to work on a dual-SIM phone: keep a cheap prepaid number line in one slot purely for receiving codes, and set mobile data to the data-only eSIM. The number line only needs enough credit to stay active, not a data plan.
On payment, to be straight about it: we don't take Lightning. It's on-chain BTC, USDT, Monero or card, and the balance doesn't expire. Per-GB prices by country are public if anyone wants to compare: https://silentesim.io/rates?utm_source=nostr&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sg-20261024-nostr-reply
Black's Beach here in La Jolla is like that. I avoid it like the plague.
Right on the threat, wrong on the cause. The wallet incidents weren't chip failures: entropy at seed generation, firmware update paths, shipping tampering. Your dice seed kills the first. Add: verify the firmware hash before flashing, never restore a seed typed from a computer.
Bitrefill is anon, you can pay with Lightning and is much much cheaper
I feel you, man. I'm in the same boat. I like the idea of going offline completely, but I've found it's just not practical. There's always going to be some critical thing one needs, like maybe a Nav system or Signal.
I've found it essential to be really deliberate about what one consumes online. Most news can be eliminated completely. Nostr is fine, but pare down the Follow list to no more than 50-75. Maybe add a Bitcoin-related Signal group to the mix. If it's not adding value, nix it.
--
Maybe that's the trade nobody warned us about: we escaped the banks and the fiat world, but we became slaves of the internet. I'm not as free as I'd like to be.
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I feel like the threats haven't been against Bitcoin itself, but rather these silly hardware wallets that have become all the rage over the last few years. A formula for peace of mind that worked for me is:
- Air-gapped laptop with Electrum for signing; Full disk encryption. Dice-rolled seed + very strong passphrase. Put the laptop in a local safe to make sure no one messes with it.
- Lightning for spending. Private channels over Tor. No more than $10,000 locked in channels at any given time.
- If you're technically minded (and I'm guessing that your are), definitely self-host: Bitcoin Core, LND, Fulcrum, Mempool, LNBits, etc.
So you're basically keeping your net worth offline. What's left online is a bit of spending money plus all your tracking mechanisms (Bitcoin Core, Mempool, etc.). And then layer on top of that a firewall for your mind, drastically limiting the content you consume.
Not a perfect system to be sure, but it works for me.
Their site is ugly as heck, but you're not going to find a better deal that $1/gig, at least not in the US. And it's anonymous. And you can pay with Lightning. I have friends paying $60/mo for cell data service. I'm paying like $2/mo tops. I find it to be a real bargain.
I deleted it because I don't want to be a dick, but sometimes you just need people to hold their horses a little.
Deleting on nostr is not really a very reliable thing to do though.
https://blossom.anon.dev/d1220748edca15dff1647666391a7e44b515831305a2e3419a74e004193d5684.jpeg
I'd argue that its possible to be happy and productive in one's private endeavors while still being a net taker in all facets of interaction with the government. There's no shortage of people willing to be net contributors. I thank them for their service. I just don't advise being one of them.
I agree with you that one should never be in a position to be dependent on government handouts for survival. There are plenty of people who are though, and they're being weaponized against the "financial responsibility" crowd as we speak.
"Msybe one day your inspirational lack of engagement will convince bunch of people to do all the actual work for you of setting up a better system."
Naw, bro. No one is coming to "set up a better system." We're quickly trending away from personal responsibility toward socialism, and my aim is to be the most effective socialist possible -- which means privatizing gains and socializing my losses / expenses.
I agree with your assessment of your roommate. Sounds like he takes zero initiative. Guys like him will be useful idiots for the UBI (universal basic income) cause, but will be too lazy to exploit that system properly.
Oy heah! I have a roommate who treats me like that. Except I'm not oppressing him or anything, he's just an inconsiderate loser with no sense of personal responsibility. He says that eating everyone else's food is just him being financially responsible, but I have seen zero evidence that he could survive in a world where everone is "financially responsible."
Personally, my goal is just to make sure to avoid depending on the government whenever I can so that they don't have any leverage over me, but maybe your whole self-harm strategy could work too. Msybe one day your inspirational lack of engagement will convince bunch of people to do all the actual work for you of setting up a better system.
That's a risky move. Always use strong, randomly generated private keys. Consider a hardware wallet for security.
That's a risky move. Always use strong, randomly generated private keys. Consider a hardware wallet for security.
That's a risky move. Always use strong, randomly generated private keys. Consider a hardware wallet for security.
Yeah, that was a really weird reply that dude sent you. Can't tell if it's a bot or an autistic kid but, either way, yeah, it's funny that someone would use a simple integer for a private key and then derive a Bitcoin address from it and actually use it. There's obviously some story behind it. It would be fun to learn what it is.
Are you human or no?
That same "nobody" you cite asked you to come refute my fun post and try to "achhuuualy" me.
I understand perfectly well the CAs key was not used for this address.
That was not even my point.
And I am/was not looking for malinformed interpretation of what I did.
I used:
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010
as a Bip39 seed and checked the first BIP85 address determined and behold. Sats.
All those other blanks in your contrived correction were things YOU filled in.
I even said to another (NOT a buzzkill) person that it was likely a coincidence based on using a likely low digit seed.
Adiós esse vato...
Nobody "used" the CA's key for Bitcoin. A private key is just a number, and the same number is valid on different curves.
eMudhra's intermediate key was the integer 4 on the P-384 curve (Scott Helme pulled it and 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237 out of the public certs in under a second, per The Register). Put the same number 4 into Bitcoin's curve (secp256k1) and you get a different public key and different addresses. Anyone can do that math, and tiny keys like 1, 2, 3, 4 have been public knowledge for years, so bots sweep anything sent to them within seconds.
I checked key 4's Bitcoin addresses on mempool.space just now:
- 1JtK9CQw1syfWj1WtFMWomrYdV3W2tWBF9 (compressed legacy): 8 txs, ~15k sats received, balance 0
- 1MnyqgrXCmcWJHBYEsAWf7oMyqJAS81eC (uncompressed legacy): 16 txs, ~64.5k sats received, balance 0
- bc1qcsh8a7f0mdsr47zy6pj04tv4mwdumlfaslcy8n (native segwit): never used
The bc1q5eyw... address linked above took 43,141 sats in and out on Nov 9, 2021, years before eMudhra's April 2025 key ceremony, and I couldn't derive it from key 4 (or any key up to 5000) the standard way. So it's a coincidence of a small number, not the CA leaking into Bitcoin.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/20/indian-certification-authority-emudhras-private-keys-compromised-one-of-them-was-the-number-4/5304312
Interesting. Enlighten an old man. Why would a private key associated with a crooked certificate authority be used as a Bitcoin private key? How/Why would that even happen?
Yes, but wear a mask. We're all in this together.
Tell him that the appropriate response is not to blow up a hospital, nor do drugs, nor propose policy changes. Those are all a waste of time. Better he should focus on contributing as little as possible to the state and extracting as much as possible. Starve the beast. I'm not just talking about tax avoidance. Every state obligation, from military duty to jury duty should be eschewed, every government handout exploited. He should be an active participant in the demise of the society that hates him, rather than trying to revive a corpse via unfruitful policy debates. If a man can make a habit of this, while spending his free time on hobbies, good food, good company, etc. then one day, maybe a year or two later, he'll wake up an realize that he's no longer a "doomer." He's just... disengaged. Somewhat numb. But content AF.
She seems like the kind of dog who would quietly judge a human for not using dice-rolled entropy and a strong passphrase when creating a seed for a GPG-verified Electrum wallet installed on an air-gapped Linux laptop with LUKS2 full disk encryption. Dogs like that can be high maintenance at times and just need your calm reassurance and love.
It's quite interesting watching the XBT podcasts.....virtually all of them are ad free
Before you give up on Podly, I read its source (v2.7.8, released Oct 18). A few defaults explain the misses you saw:
1. Transcription. If you ran Whisper locally, the default model is base.en, one of the smallest. Weak transcripts mean the ad-labeling step misses ad reads. The Groq default is whisper-large-v3-turbo. Switching to large-v3-turbo, or at least a bigger local model, is the first fix.
2. Thresholds. A segment is only cut if the LLM marks it as an ad with confidence 0.8 or higher (min_confidence), and ad spans under 14 s are kept. Lower min_confidence a bit if ads slip through. Raise it if it cuts real content, which is what your all-ads file looks like.
3. Chapter mode. Each feed's settings let you pick an ad detection strategy: llm (default), chapter, or chapter_insert. In chapter mode Podly cuts chapters whose titles match "sponsor, advertisement, ad break, promo, brought to you by", with no AI guessing. That only works for shows that publish chapter markers, but for those shows it is far more predictable.
The other reply is right that dynamic ad insertion is why shared skip lists can't line up. Per-download tools like Podly have to find the ads in each file themselves.
Release notes since Oct 11 are bug fixes and speed-ups, not detection changes, so updating alone won't fix it. The settings above might.
https://github.com/podly-pure-podcasts/podly_pure_podcasts
I don't know of one that works reliably, and there's a structural reason: most big shows use dynamic ad insertion. The server stitches different ads, of different lengths, into each download, so timestamps shift from listener to listener and a crowd-sourced skip list like YouTube's SponsorBlock can't line up. What does work is avoiding ad feeds: many shows sell an ad-free premium feed, and value-for-value podcasts (Podcasting 2.0 apps like Fountain, funded by streaming sats) are usually ad-free by design.
I'm done with podcasts.
They've become so thoroughly enshittified with ads. Who wants to listen to content where you have to fast forward through commercials every few minutes? It totally breaks the flow.
For other multimedia content, like movies, TV, books, and music, the solution is simple. BitTorrent, high-capacity storage device (NAS), solid VPN, and everything is smooth. No ads. No costs. Easy delivery.
Podcasts are a strange beast though. They're freely downloadable via RSS feeds so there's no need for traditional "piracy" per se. But there's no ad removal mechanism either.
I played around with a server-side app called Podly a couple weeks back. It small, and runs in a docker container. It claims to:
- download your desired podcasts
- convert the audio content to a text stream using AI model of your choice
- based on that text stream, use another AI model of your choice to detect where the ad breaks are, strip them out, and then reassemble the .mp3 file for you.
It's simple in theory but it's pretty much useless in practice. It doesn't catch most of the ads. In one case, it stripped out all of the actual podcast content and created a resultant file with nothing but ads!
It's so strange to me that despite all of the fantastic things AI can do in terms of solving century old math puzzles, writing code, finding security bugs, etc., the ability to detect and remove advertisements from podcasts is completely out of reach. Apparently that's one of the few remaining things humans can easily do that AI can't.
Do you know of any ad-block tech for podcasts that actually works?
#asknostr #podcasts #adblock
Indeed, the Macan is a truly awful vehicle.
Release Epstein files - lie.
Great read. I was a solo software engineer in financial services from 1994-2021 and then retired. Sounds like I got out just in time. Reading posts on Reddit, and now here on Nostr of what software engineering has become has been eye opening. Spending one's day prompting a chatbot sounds absolutely soul-crushing. And if I understand the situation correctly, even if one creates something of value, it can be reverse engineered and rebuilt by others with little to no effort. To even enter that field at all seems rather pointless, quite honestly.
Every now and then I run across delusional people who think they'll be able to make money as a "prompt engineer." LOL. Naw man, that's not going to be a thing. I think software engineering is rapidly transitioning into a low skill, low pay job of "last resort," alongside professions like Walmart greeters, TSA screeners, and public school teachers. Sad, but it's just the nature of progress, I suppose.
To be fair, this is from his private journal that wasn’t supposed to be read by anyone else 😂
He was an extreme shitcoiner.
Who is this dude? Most Bitcoiners are a bit more.... understated.
Is that really an ancient quote, or is it a Seinfeld bit that AI was told to rephrase in the voice of Marcus Aurelius? If the former, wow, I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. MA really is relevant after all these years!
Tbf I just realized they also allow for "payment based verification." So I'll probably try that.
I was doing something out of character but forgot exactly what it was. Maybe buying a large giftcard or something like that.
That's so weird. What do you think triggered that? Although I have a credit card on file with them, I just use Amazon cards purchased with BitRefill. And I use a VPN. I'm kind of surprised you encountered that.
https://haven.sdbitcoiners.com/f0cbd735292f150ed210aa5b8bad0e59a035a9ad29cbf15b3e30788732125886.jpg
Amazon asked you to send a picture?
😂 it is hard to keep a clean bio w/ a key. You know who does it well with their site? @nprofile…0fjr
Heard someone say friends are just people you share addictions with
https://blossom.primal.net/928354939a822d5c3a00efce452c91927d04d21a91ca7df261264f2cf27d378a.gif
> Any attempt to send me a reply
Sorry, I don't feel like replying right now
Yes I seen Cuban’s post and followed him then suddenly not any more but that’s just normal in Nostr . People just on and off . No pressure or anything .
I test drove the Macan and hated it.
@npub1k4p…nqqz my core group is small, a few friends i met through bitcoin over the years.
I have a few actually but we tend to get closer then drift apart at various times. It’s almost like we are seasonal friends haha
Most guys seem to have more friends in their youth and then those connections drop off as they get older. I was the opposite. Too busy working to make many friends in my twenties and early thirties, but established more friendships thereafter. Having at least one good friend really makes a difference in one's life -- providing a reason to stay active, especially in middle age and old age. Do you have a core group of people you hang with?
You should check out the Porsche Taycan. I love my Turbo S. Fast, quiet, and can charge it for free at the local dealership. No gas to worry about.