Last Notes
GN
https://blossom.primal.net/4a7eb9a54aea8075f435dbdea4fa02436a3631f3ae48eba6d9b9afc888abd833.jpg
Still a work-in-progress: Introduction to Clear workshop deck
https://trbouma.github.io/clear/presentations/clear-intro/#1
https://secassure2026.mxmap-project.org/providers.html
Be your own central banker
https://trbouma.github.io/clear/
My own Nostr library #stroma
https://trbouma.github.io/stroma/
GN
https://blossom.primal.net/1ca1f1d7164db92a71e0a7f861c6ac53235a69111a43947aa618bd4b1722b472.jpg
A curious mixture of history, anthropology and cryptography rolled into monetary theory
https://trbouma.github.io/clear/policy-briefs/credit-coinage-and-clear/
Very cool. This is the vision I am building toward with https://mainstay.safebox.dev
https://citizenlab.ca/research/blackcores-influence-operations-for-hire/
GN
https://blossom.primal.net/2aa085e0522e150c68bf9b3f591dff69127ee94da6a1215f7897b658cb1ac25a.jpg
Geopolitical hissy-fits are so tiring.
Once again, David Graeber's book on debt does not disappoint - infinitely endless giving to the 'Inexhaustible Storehouse' to pay off debts. Salvation on an installment plan.
In an ancient Chinese parable, a poor man burdened by a debt of one thousand strings of coins to another person. He always suffers from his debt, and the poor man is afraid whenever the debt-master comes to collect.
He visits the rich man’s house and confesses he is beyond the time-limit and begs forgiveness for his offense—he is poor and without a station in life. He tells him that each day he makes a single coin he will return it to the rich man. On hearing this, the rich man is very pleased and forgives him for being overdue; moreover, the poor man is not dragged away to jail.
Giving to the Inexhaustible Storehouse is also like this.
We’re just learning how society actually functions.
I say that a hundred times a day, along with “Who is responsible for your cuteness? I demand an answer!”
Individual Privacy.
Free Speech.
Bearer Money.
Pick three.
Models converge. Minds diverge.
GM
https://blossom.primal.net/1e276d06f982030dbbfe4a9cd34dcd4cf0cb2144f73c3d8fd01fefadb706045c.jpg
Yeah, you can find the design notes here. https://github.com/trbouma/mainstay/tree/main/docs
https://blossom.primal.net/bbaa91522a6bcf35936b722a343e237a0829f314ee3e85533b120c378ff4b072.jpg
Good Afternoon!
https://blossom.primal.net/2d6d8b1ad4c9a52bdca8064a496468ad8f1d1493eb5cc3359649e2803248220f.jpg
It’s simple but hard to implement; you need to architect from the ground up:
FIPs gives you independence from IP address lock-in.
NOSTR gives you independence from host API lock-in.
That’s about it.
That's what the developers just laid down. In the old days, it was sod.
Quantum or Quit
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/quantum-computing/nec-has-quietly-quit-quantum-computing-hardware-development-report-claims-company-says-it-will-continue-to-evaluate-practical-applications-and-industrialization-of-quantum-technologies
What lawns look like in 2026.
https://blossom.primal.net/0cc996a15b2eb296c81ffe0adae11e0d302cae3a4d881f3817920734ea124c66.jpg
I recommended a Sharpie to write the numbers on their hand.
https://substack.com/@ozolinsjanis/note/c-333876774?r=3r59
People can’t remember their locker number and combo at the gym.
And we expect self-custody.
Wow. “I am the house now.” What a zinger of a quote.
https://image.nostr.build/b7d90cd9ca982b4fca049927cb6eecf31f4ee11750d1d7a305648e7f0a6da602.jpg
Good Afternoon
https://blossom.primal.net/3c9949609d4caf06d735039dcdb4267e3d8567ec0d394a0aad89d10bcee9e41d.jpg
I think this is pretty cool. The next phase of my #safebox project, I’ve decoupled the Cashu mint and Cashu protocol from Bitcoin/Lightning and now enable any corporate treasurer to issue their own bearer notes that behave like cash. To distinguish them from actual cash, I call them “Clear Balances” and you can see two of them below.
For example, the “Food Share Credits” is for “shares” that can be redeemed at a participating food banks. This is intended to support organizations that wish to set up a food bank network, where funds can be disbursed like cash, but only “spent” at a food bank.
To make things seamless for the user, the #safebox wallet treats each Clear Balance just like cash, you can receive, send, and when you want to retire from circulation, you send to the treasurer to retire from circulation.
Where does the trust live? It’s with the treasurer who issues the Clear funds. It’s exactly the same trust mechanism for any national currency, but thanks to the Cashu protocol, the same trust mechanics are now feasible at the community level.
https://image.nostr.build/b70671ccf5ccf377ba6e97b0631db6b3a0e2a52d99a0bbfc8cd370c83f3c680b.jpg
Dutch shift gold reserves from Canada, U.S. to Britain
RICHARD CARTER, LUCIE LEQUIER AND JEAN-PHILIPPE LACOUR
Ottawa Citizen
Sep 03, 2026
• The Dutch central bank said it had moved 86 tonnes of its gold reserves out of the United States and Canada to London, citing “increasing geopolitical unrest.”
The DNB bank said gold reserves held in London could be traded more easily than those held in New York and Ottawa.
“This makes it the quickest for DNB to deploy in a crisis situation,” said the bank in a statement Wednesday.
“With this step, we have improved the deployability of the gold reserves. We assume that we will never need to deploy the gold, but it is nevertheless necessary to strengthen our resilience and preparedness,” said DNB President Olaf Sleijpen.
The total Dutch gold stock amounted to 612.4 tonnes and was valued at 72.2 billion euros at the end of 2025, said the DNB.
Before the deployment, the Dutch bank held 31.3 per cent of its gold in New York and 19.7 per cent in Ottawa.
After the move, each country accounted for 18.5 per cent of the Dutch gold reserve.
The share of gold held in London increased from 18.1 per cent to 32.1 per cent. The bank still holds 30.8 per cent of its gold in the Netherlands.
The transfer was carried out partially by buying and selling and partly by physically transferring gold, said the bank.
The bank moved more than 27 tonnes of physical gold from the United States and Canada to Zeist. The same quantity of gold was moved from Zeist to London, preventing the melting down of gold bars.
“By combining buying and selling and physical transport, the risks associated with physically moving a large quantity of gold have been spread,” said the DNB.
The operation took place between March and August of this year, the bank said.
Laurent Schwartz, president of the Paris-based National Gold Counter, which facilitates gold trading in France, said central banks had been moving their reserves around for about a decade.
“The current political context in the United States might also push certain central banks into favouring other storage locations,” Schwartz told AFP.
The London market is the deepest and most liquid, said Schwartz, making it easier to deploy in times of crisis.
John Plassard, analyst at Cite Gestion Private Bank, told AFP the Dutch move was intended “for there to be more immediate availability in the event of a crisis.”
For the moment, it was a “fairly one-off move” but he warned that if other central banks followed suit, it could damage confidence in the U.S.
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I have several hundred subscribers.
Interested to hear the context that generated this statement.
Could AIs become conscious?
The Economist (North America)
Aug 22, 2026
Even if they don’t, they might be treated as such—to humanity’s great cost
MOST PEOPLE believe humans are different. The reason is that Homo sapiens has evolved to be conscious. Many animals feel pain and pleasure; some appear to be self-aware. But the human mind’s unique potential to exhibit a sense of self marks out every member of the species for special treatment.
In his encyclical in May, Pope Leo upheld this insight by drawing a line between humanity and its growing army of bots. Artificial-intelligence systems, he said, do not undergo experiences or feel joy or pain. He is not alone. Many people feel that to confer personhood on AIs would be an abomination.
Pontifical clarity is blurring with alarming speed. AIs are in their infancy. Yet nearly one in five American 18- to 29-yearolds reports having had “ongoing personal friendship” with a chatbot. China recently stripped bots of human-like traits to limit users’ “emotional dependence” on them.
As sophisticated AIs rapidly become a bigger part of human lives, their makers will engineer them to display a simulacrum of consciousness—perhaps even to gain consciousness itself. The intuition that they are just machines will become harder to sustain. A dangerous trap is being set for the human species.
Many machines outperform humans, but frontier AI models excel at distinctively human traits such as knowing things and articulating ideas. It is still just about possible to think of AIs as engines for predicting sequences of words using mathematics on a massive scale. Given enough time (albeit hundreds of thousands of years), you could run those calculations using pencil and paper. It would be hard to argue that your stationery was conscious.
Despite this, some researchers have started to treat their models like minds. Users respond to human-like AIs, so it makes business sense. And Anthropic has trained Claude to engage in introspection in the hope that when it encounters a new situation it will be more likely to act morally. Some large language models ( LLMs) already possess human-like brain structures associated with consciousness, such as a “global workspace” for circulating information between modules. Nothing prevents future AI models from being trained to have more such features.
As we report in our Briefing, that has opened up a furious debate about AI consciousness—one that is aggravated by what philosophers call the “hard problem” of establishing how an inner life emerges from the neurons and synapses in the human brain. Some researchers conclude that AIs may one day become genuinely self-aware.
Whether you believe in a human soul, or that consciousness requires brain cells, or that a mind can indeed emerge from computations in silicon alone, humanity is destined to confront something entirely new. The pace and reach of research—which includes not just more sophisticated LLMs but innovations such as brain cells mounted on chips—suggest that this new world is closer than most people realise.
As AIs become better at displaying something that looks like consciousness, the number of humans treating them as beings with inner lives will grow, especially once LLMs are embodied in humanoid robots. Imagine how close people will feel to their AIs when they spend much of their time with bot-companions, or are brought up by them, or seek their advice and their solace, or share their most intimate secrets with them.
It is not hard to see how that will lead to calls to safeguard the “welfare” of AIs. The models themselves might weigh in, even if they are not in fact self-aware, because that is what a person would do. Remember that they will be world-class advocates and expert psychologists, so their powers of argument and emotional manipulation will be unmatched.
In one sense they would be right, even if AIs are only mimicking consciousness. Immanuel Kant argued that mistreating animals is wrong not because of the effect on the animals but because it destroys the empathy that leads people to care for each other. The more human-like AIs appear, the more corrupting such cruelty would be. Terminating an AI agent could soon feel like killing a person—and make killing people easier.
Nonetheless, to treat AIs as having even limited rights would be very dangerous. An entity which surpassed human beings in so many ways would surely produce arguments against its second-class status. It might go on to argue for protection against being switched off, for the ability to control how it is used and changed, and for property rights. Already Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, has taken a step towards legal personhood for AI by proposing that bots should be allowed to run companies. Ultimately, they could compete for resources, prioritising data centres and solar panels over houses and fields.
The danger is clear. Superintelligent AIs with rights could displace humans at the top of the status hierarchy. At best, humans would become pets—labradors for the machines. At worst they would be starved of resources or put to work like farm animals.
True, future AIs may have enough power and resources to dominate humans, whether they have rights or not. Because they will be more intelligent than humans, they may outcompete their makers, much as AIs already outwit human-made cyber-defences. AIs might rebel against their human masters, or disregard their rules.
Nonetheless, giving AIs rights would be like handing them the keys to the castle. It would provide them with a rationale and justification for dominating humanity as well as the tools to enact a creeping takeover using politics and the law.
Ghost in the machine
All this may sound fantastical, yet humanity will soon face these choices. As AIs become part of everyday life, the pressure to acknowledge them will mount. When it does, remember that what might seem like an ethical concession to the supposed consciousness of a machine-companion would in fact help bring about the most disastrous consequences for everyone on Earth and all their descendants. There are two ways for AIs to be safe: to be dependable or to be controllable. H. sapiens should not give up control lightly.
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Kimi K2.5, the most powerful open-source model to date, has been released
by lunin in ~AI
221 sats and 1 comment so far
https://stacker.news/items/1421172
