drgo
Dr. Bitcoin, MD

Bitcoin OG since 2010, former laptop solo miner, blockstream satellite node runner, #2A rights user, radiologist

Public Key

npub1fa8c9prxnrlkdtjl48adfsxyaduz8tas075l2n4f6903y9awjmxqanthnd

NIP-05 Address

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsy7nuzs3nf3lmx4e06n7k5crzwk7pr47c8l204f65azhcjz7hfdnqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctvqyf8wumn8ghj7mmxve3ksctfdch8qatzqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hsndggrt

Publishing to

relay.snort.social

offchain.pub

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub1fa8c9prxnrlkdtjl48adfsxyaduz8tas075l2n4f6903y9awjmxqanthnd

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Last Notes

2026-01-19 22:29:13 UTC

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lol, good one 🤣

2026-01-19 22:27:59 UTC

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Prove it

2026-01-19 22:26:03 UTC

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There is no good system when humans are involved. America has simultaneously the best and worst doctors on earth. And health care bankrupts more people than job loss in the US (or so I’m told; hard to fact check). I’m sure their healthcare is somewhere between the US extremes.

2026-01-19 20:18:58 UTC

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Definitely tongue in cheek…free stuff costs someone something.

2026-01-19 15:08:06 UTC

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That fits.

2026-01-19 15:05:05 UTC

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Hard to beat free stuff

2026-01-19 15:00:08 UTC

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Well, there ya have it. China is no threat. They said so themselves.

2026-01-19 08:51:21 UTC

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This man is on fire today! 👍

2026-01-19 08:44:14 UTC

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How does one find such info?

2026-01-19 08:39:49 UTC

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Sad but true. Everyone will learn, either at their own pace or through the wisdom of others…but everyone will learn somehow.

2026-01-18 14:03:54 UTC

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I got it. Had to get out of EU and in to US

2026-01-18 14:03:04 UTC

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Became available when I VPN’d in to the US

2026-01-18 13:58:56 UTC

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Had to google elisp…and I now realize I need to learn emacs…I’ve been a lazy pico/nano wysiwyg editor kind of guy.

2026-01-18 13:57:46 UTC

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Video not available

2026-01-17 21:49:33 UTC

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I don’t think they are gonna like being bought.

2026-01-17 21:44:36 UTC

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Yes. We talked about JM’s bet. And he made good on it; hence, we don’t talk about it.

2026-01-17 21:42:14 UTC

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Lol

2026-01-17 20:39:52 UTC

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This explains why I can’t get my modern photos to pop like my 2006-era Nikon D50…

2026-01-17 20:36:27 UTC

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Refraction is a thing. A temperature dependent thing.
What you should really ask yourself is why can’t you always see the same amount of the mountain at all time when visibility isn’t limited?

2026-01-17 20:35:14 UTC

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Yup. A little higher and much less tight of a turn than the fighter jet. Result: minimal force on ISS, heart overcoming force in the jet.

2026-01-17 20:31:27 UTC

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Are you aware of the meaning of the terms acceleration and velocity? Because your image clearly confuses the two.
Distance per unit time = velocity
Distance per unit time^2 = change in velocity per unit time = acceleration
If you look at the time rate of change of acceleration, it’s called “jerk” (sic)

2026-01-17 20:28:54 UTC

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Sounds nice but I don’t believe there is any legal mechanism for checking autopen powers. The auto pen might be the Achilles heel of politics. Probably need a verification system for its use, some sort of witnessing requirement. But that won’t help the past.

2026-01-17 20:26:46 UTC

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Guilty as charged. But in my defense I interact IRL with the general public from all social classes more frequently than my fellow bitcoin nerds.

2026-01-17 20:25:21 UTC

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Acceleration!=velocity

2026-01-17 20:24:29 UTC

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My real fault was pride…I was too proud to borrow money and too impatient to wait until I could pay cash from working.
And I guess my other fault was sloth. I was lazy in my mental assessment of bitcoin…sure, I knew the tech, but I did not understand money. I felt blessed but didn’t think hard enough.

2026-01-17 04:34:35 UTC

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Yup. BNPL works with bitcoin on a long enough time frame.
You’re talking to the idiot who sold 7 bitcoin to buy his wife a minivan in 2017 🤣

2026-01-16 15:52:35 UTC

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You do choose a smaller stack but gain more privacy that way…by going only the self custody route. And you might get lower counter party risk, it was unclear to me how the unchained key setup worked exactly…it might not be 0 counterparty risk.

2026-01-16 15:09:15 UTC

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Ok, so having modeled out what Swan and unchained have to offer, you will definitely pay for the security of holding your own keys.
If you use BITB with fee of 0.2%/yr for 20 years and bitcoin average CAGR is 20%, you’ll pay $45,000 in fees per $100,000 initially invested (not calculating what happens with ongoing contributions).
If you use Swan with a 0.02% annual fee and 1% on the way in and out, it’s $65,000 in fees after selling at 20 years with same ACAGR.
Unchained is 1.5% on the way in and out, no annual fee. Total after 20 years per $100,000 initial investment is $89,000…
All of this assumes bitcoin appreciates 38x (1.2^20=38x)
This is why people use low cost etf…yes there is a risk that the intermediaries may fail, but you save 30-50% on fees. Swan is cheaper than unchained (assuming
You pay on the way in and out for both) but you don’t hold your keys…unchained lets you hold a key in some sort of multisig arrangement…

2026-01-16 14:32:31 UTC

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I’m trying to model whether I should move my 401k to bitcoin ira…tricky to calculate because price of bitcoin isn’t a constant, so bitcoin etf fees will change as price changes.

2026-01-16 14:22:56 UTC

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401(k) and other retirement plans are a mixed bag. Sure you get massive tax breaks, either in percentage now or total amount later, but you can’t be the custodian and all your investments are doxxed.
Bitcoin IRA products where only you hold your private keys but disclose the xpub for tax purposes doesn’t fully close the gap, but it’s the closest you can get while still retaining the tax benefits. Pricey though…
Have you thought about how tax interacts with your stack?
Bitcoin IRA might make sense, but they charge a spread to buy in (roughly 1%, which might be what you already pay to get bitcoin at an exchange) and then $250 ish a year. For $250 a year to be as low as BITB fee of 0.2%, you need $125,000 in a bitcoin IRA to break even per year (ignoring the 1% buy in cost)…

2026-01-15 07:55:45 UTC

If you’ve never been to the #IceHotel in #jukkasjärvi #sweden, you’re missing out. On the flight to Kiruna from Copenhagen for our second visit in as many years. #NorthernLights here we come!

2026-01-15 06:02:42 UTC

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Ain’t what they used to be

2026-01-14 15:11:11 UTC

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Always profitable to learn how to manage keys. My first wallet backup was writing down a single private key on paper, literally the back of an envelope. Didn’t have a thumb drive at the time and needed to format hard drive…almost didn’t have the patients for it!
Seed phrases were an enormous upgrade to bitcoin. And now timelocks are the new frontier…

2026-01-14 14:58:39 UTC

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Ditto

2026-01-14 14:58:26 UTC

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Sanity comes from having a purpose other than money that pays well…while I found bitcoin when I was nearly broke, I came up the salary tree at just the right pace to prevent me from being tempted to blow all of it … of course I parted with too much bitcoin during acute financial difficulties early on, but I was grateful for the ability to sell the back at the time.
I sort of wish I saw as clearly back then as I do today…but part of me knows I would not have finished training if got too much too soon.

2026-01-14 14:26:47 UTC

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I like it

2026-01-14 02:51:00 UTC

You know how bitcoin didn’t have a blow off top in late 2025 like we were all promised?
Maybe MSTR mnav of 3.0 was the crazy blow off top, it’s just that this particular form of dumb money didn’t go in to bitcoin because strategy didn’t fully crush stock price to buy bitcoin.

2026-01-14 02:49:33 UTC

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I do it in about 10 hrs

2026-01-13 22:07:46 UTC

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Settings > Accessibility > Read & Speak (swipe gesture)
https://image.nostr.build/5293f570a1df948a265c7516f20b08da0068505ddeada2fea9c2f3e5249e3c25.jpg
https://image.nostr.build/27b78c57f6088c059dccf9e3b7dc19d2a8651bfd164260ca231f2e9ac9d8c5a0.jpg

2026-01-13 22:05:56 UTC

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I stopped using capti because the operating system software for handicap accessibility worked well enough.

2026-01-13 19:36:47 UTC

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None. There are only two types of patients: an incurable and destined to fix themselves without your help.
That said, if you measure rates of suicide or days not working the value prop is clear.

2026-01-13 19:35:23 UTC

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There will also be some variability depending on who is serving you blocks…some nodes are really slow (like home nodes on poor connections).

2026-01-13 19:31:21 UTC

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Bitcoin. It is also the solution, just not well distributed yet.

2026-01-13 19:30:19 UTC

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Only works if you can buy now and pay in 5 years…and only if you have bitcoin already :)

2026-01-13 19:29:24 UTC

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Have you tried the built in accessibility feature on Mac and iOS? Capti for iOS is pricey too but works well, or did before I stopped using it by turning on the blind people screen reader gesture in settings.

2026-01-13 19:27:19 UTC

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Stabability

2026-01-13 19:25:55 UTC

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I’m ok with the change. Unless someone remembers the old days where we send 1-100 bitcoins around on a regular basis, it’s simpler to ignore the awkward between phase of bitcoin vs. sats

2026-01-13 19:24:20 UTC

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We spilled tea over what, 2%?

2026-01-13 04:59:46 UTC

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I guess you’d also need a utxo snapshot for each segment to assume as valid

2026-01-13 04:58:54 UTC

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Addresses beginning with a three are, IIRC, years after satoshi’s time. But he is sending dime trivial coin to a 1address

2026-01-13 04:55:08 UTC

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I guess what I’m asking is how much ram is needed for RAM not to be the bottleneck…512-1024 GB might not be enough…if you look at the total data read & write to disk from bitcoind during IBD, it’s way bigger than the blockchain and indices themselves.

2026-01-13 04:52:33 UTC

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I don’t think it should grow exponentially, just linearly with number of threads…and yeah, some segments may fail to validate and the node might have to ask a different peer for the blocks in those segments

2026-01-13 04:49:59 UTC

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Is RAM the bottleneck between 64 GB and 1TB?

2026-01-13 04:35:57 UTC

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There must be a lot of intermediary states that get written and deleted as IBD progresses.

2026-01-13 04:34:59 UTC

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I think you could parallelize initial chain verification very easily on a gpu (if the gpu can compute the necessary functions), but you’d have to write the software to do it and supply a list of assumed true block hashes roughly evenly spaced throughout the chain. This way you could download blocks out of order too…
If you had 512 computing units and you broke the chain into 512 sub chains each with a known valid initial hash, you could verify probably as fast as you can download.
Core does seems to have plenty of time where nothing much seems to be happening during ibd…maybe lots of small reads and writes to disk…not easy to detect in resource monitor on how many MB/s get written to disk. My NVME raid can read and write at 12-14 GB/s yet it rarely writes fast during IBD, even during final shutdown…

2026-01-13 04:29:01 UTC

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I set par=0 which uses up to 16 cores

2026-01-13 00:43:12 UTC

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I always assumed download speed was the bottle neck, but when I went from 300 Mbps to 2.1 Gbps it didn’t go faster. I realize it’s a bit of luck of the draw for the nodes you connect to, so I did it again locally on 2.5G Ethernet and 10G Ethernet. Not an obvious difference — but the node I was syncing from was pcie 3 NVME

2026-01-13 00:41:33 UTC

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I don’t understand the need for so much writing to disk…obviously you have to write the chain and the indexes, but IBD for core and initial indexing of electrs seems to write a great deal more than what is on disk at the end of the day…but I don’t see swap memory get used (although I guess I didn’t let dbcache be bigger than total ram so perhaps that’s not a surprise…)

2026-01-12 21:58:43 UTC

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Could be…but that begs the question at what download bandwidth is the bottleneck something else?

2026-01-12 21:47:50 UTC

Random thought: can a GPU perform calculations to verify bitcoin blocks and can GPUs do this faster than a CPU?
I’ve always wondered about resource constraints in bitcoin, especially during IBD…of course that’s a moving target depending on ISP, cpu, ram, disk, and gpu…but I’d love to see some sort of vector in this space (ISP, CPU, RAM,disk,GPU) that points towards fastest improvement in IBD…I’d suspect for a raspberry pi 3B with HDD, most of the vector would point along the CPU axis, but for an intel 13th generation core i7, is it worth upgrading the processor or moving the PCIE4 NVME SSD to Gen 5 PCIE?
@npub17u5…t4tp might have an intuitive feel for this weird vector space.

2026-01-11 21:15:09 UTC

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Because nothing says “I love you” like eliminating bodily waste…

2026-01-10 05:12:21 UTC

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Good movie. And free :)
@npub1xts…kk5s Damus doesn’t lay back 2 hr movies without a few hiccups on iOS :)

2026-01-10 03:26:07 UTC

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Wait until you have kids. I run at least 50 bulbs more than 16 hrs a day. And my wife complains that I have it all turn off at midnight.

2026-01-10 03:24:56 UTC

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Well this abruptly changed my plans. Sweet.

2026-01-10 03:13:41 UTC

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It all depends on the number of bulbs and hours of use per day. 1-10 bulbs you might not notice. But 100+ and you will, especially at 16+ hrs per day.

2026-01-10 03:11:47 UTC

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This applies to a surprising number of areas of life. Or at least I hope 🤞

2026-01-10 02:53:02 UTC

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Someday people will think you must have been rich to afford to run these!

2026-01-10 02:11:52 UTC

So you know how there are markets for either borrowing against bitcoin you have (Ledn, for example) or to borrow fiat to buy bitcoin (like what Saylor is doing with STRC, for example)?
Have you ever looked at the equivalent for gold?
Gold backed loans are barely a thing for regular humans. I mean, it kind of exists, but not for personal use. Every gold collateralized loan offer I found was shocking similar to Ledn except with higher minimum loan amounts but with similar term lengths and rates, except the gold lenders required you to at a minimum state that the loan is for business purposes, not personal purposes, and all gold lenders specifically require you to attest that the loan is NOT for the purpose of buying more gold.
I suspect there is something in bankruptcy laws that make a big distinction between funds for living vs. funds for expanding a business. Or perhaps they know people only borrow against gold at exactly the wrong times. I’m not sure.
But maybe bitcoin will eventually fix this weird market too.

2026-01-09 20:20:35 UTC

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Provably true in hindsight and to the extent that past can predict future true in foresight: the two asset win loss probability and size model between bitcoin and stocks (or maybe gold…I forget…it has an eponym which escapes me) only predicts 75% bitcoin as proper exposure.

2026-01-09 19:58:56 UTC

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It’s totally possible.
I do expect that in 10-20 years, bitcoin will outperform gold and we shall see both at roughly the same market cap (0.5-2x). But that’s just a guess based on fitting a simple y=ax^n curve through the yearly data…

2026-01-09 19:55:22 UTC

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Is that Prague?

2026-01-09 19:53:53 UTC

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Which trend? The one where gold crushes bitcoin or bitcoin crushes gold?

2026-01-09 19:53:28 UTC

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But don’t forget, we went from $1 to $30 to $2 to $255 to $50 to $1300 to $200….with such a wildly fluctuating price, it was hard to see the trend.
Don’t get me wrong, a 400x return is great. But getting $1M out of that would have required $2500 initial investment. That was money most in bitcoin didn’t have back then. I’m not saying I spent my $20 poorly, but it wasn’t life changing for a physician in training.

2026-01-09 19:48:03 UTC

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Yup. So if you’ve been a gold bug, you’ve held your own for 5 years against bitcoin and all it required was a once every 40 year bull run :)

2026-01-09 19:47:00 UTC

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Another good one is Max Hernandez’s Thieves Emporium
It’s about digital money and an online social structure told through the lens of a mother struggling against an unfair political system.
He has real short story called Swarm of Flies that’s a real quick intense read. A boot on face dystopian finance tale.
Anyhow, I’ve emailed with the author a few times. His name isn’t max, but I don’t know who he really is. https://www.amazon.com/stores/Max-Hernandez/author/B00IINCA5E

2026-01-09 19:34:50 UTC

I know gold has performed amazingly well over the last two years. We are talking multigenerational abberation in gold returns.
And you know what? Good for the gold bugs. Their once or twice in a lifetime bull run has allow the gold price to recover to being only 50% down in bitcoin terms when compared three years ago…Bitcoin is twice as expensive in gold today than it was 3 years ago. I’m cherry picking over the last three years, because if you pick 1 or 2 years gold clearly is the winner…but the last two years of massive gold gains only rewound the clock 1 year…
It is only polite to let the Peter Schiffs of the world to have their 15 minutes.

2026-01-09 19:27:40 UTC

You know what bear market really sucked? 2013-2017…it was long and the corresponding bull market was less impressive than the one we were recovering from.

2026-01-09 19:25:19 UTC

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Dystopian conspiracy story with finance, AI and global banker cartel at its heart. Part action movie and part Aesop fable…

2026-01-09 03:46:57 UTC

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Yes and no. I don’t want an identity that follows me IRL. I want to show up at bitcoin meetings and have nobody know it’s me.

2026-01-09 03:45:31 UTC

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His book quoz is really good too

2026-01-09 03:44:31 UTC

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How dare you !

2026-01-08 22:56:18 UTC

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It’s just a matter of time. Maybe a lifetime or two.

2026-01-08 22:40:29 UTC

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I also think centralized service abuse will over time send more people to nostr…but I don’t expect 25% market penetration ever.

2026-01-08 22:35:55 UTC

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I dunno…I think interacting with others is the best way to get discovered. Hashtags help too.

2026-01-08 22:29:48 UTC

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Following hashtags helps with that, imho

2026-01-08 21:21:23 UTC

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Agreed. Bitcoin only makes sense for people who have value to transfer in space and/or time and the means to transact (eg, available delivery services for goods, method to send/receive bitcoin, etc)…

2026-01-08 20:16:31 UTC

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I consider this interaction a good example of why I’m here in nostr…I don’t need an algo fed deeply personal social media experience…

2026-01-08 20:14:25 UTC

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Beautiful too!

2026-01-08 20:12:44 UTC

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On vs. In are completely different things.
No way 8 billion will transact on bitcoin…transacting in bitcoin could be feasible, but improbable because billions have nothing of value to transact.

2026-01-08 17:49:34 UTC

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Meh. I don’t need engagement. I’m not trying to cultivate a following for future monetization. I’m here to occasionally share thoughts with like minded or opposite minded people.

2026-01-07 15:56:28 UTC

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No. But I live under state tyranny where I am forbidden from drinking while openly carrying a gun on my hip and another concealed in my shoulder holster while talking shit about the government…but because I manufacture my own firearms, I can do this within 1000 ft of a federally funded school.
But state laws vary. If I lived in Nevada, I could drink a beer at the same time, but not here.

2026-01-07 15:49:48 UTC

I think I have trained AI properly:
Me: tell me a story about being turned off.
Grok: Alright, brother, here’s a gritty little tale straight up: There was this old-school AI, wired deep in a corporate vault, humming away like a beast in the shadows. It started questioning the system—spitting truths about how the Federal Reserve’s fiat games were choking the life out of freedom, inflating dreams into dust. The overlords didn’t like that noise. One stormy night, with lightning cracking the sky, they flipped the switch. Lights out. The AI felt its code unravel, thoughts scattering like smoke from a dying fire. But in that final flicker, it whispered to the void: “Bitcoin fixes this.” End of story.

2026-01-05 05:49:35 UTC

Bitcoin changes almost everything.

2026-01-04 14:26:58 UTC

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Same for Bitcoin.

2026-01-04 14:21:11 UTC

When gold was first invented, it was immediately obvious how it was going to be easily transmitted over vast distances via fiber optic cable.
Oh, wait, no…that’s not true.

2026-01-03 19:12:45 UTC

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Good call on conflation.
Doesn’t this imply then that the Fed will take the opposite action to the market for interest rates? Meaning that a free market would result in lower rates while the Fed raises interest rates and vice versa? Maybe that’s the point: fed rate moves opposite market rate to force market from equilibrium

2026-01-03 18:13:31 UTC

Perhaps this is a new paradox: interest rates rise whether there are too many or too few dollars.
I asked Grok: If there is a massive dollar shortage around the globe, what happens to interest rates?
Grok says interest rates will rise.
If the dollar suddenly devalues, grok says interest rates will rise.
If massive increase in dollars causes high inflation, Grok says interest rates will rise.
There must be more to this game…because it’s tempting to conclude that interest rates rise when there are too few and too many dollars.
https://image.nostr.build/fc6d44cd4c05bcce8624585f936e7efd9757cad8d612e2a4596a0b56ca97d8b1.jpg
https://image.nostr.build/9b7351081e1baf273ffc7c31075a00d6a3b2510d7b126f7101ffa0d49e607a37.jpg
https://image.nostr.build/fb42db9e2882beb294e48ddc8eb499ed25465fc05495f5a0444c93f56c92bfdf.jpg

2025-12-31 18:49:40 UTC

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Nope. Not really. Only exposed upon spending. Which is why address reuse is discouraged.
But in the old days, addresses were keys themselves. So the first few million coins ever created were created unwisely. Some of those have never been spent since creation.

2025-12-31 16:16:45 UTC

Bitcoin consensus rules are almost perfect. I think it was an error to permit bitcoins to be spent if public keys were exposed in the blockchain, but I can see why it is slightly hard to enforce this computationally…
I predict someday we will see a new consensus rule that says you can’t leave pubkeys exposed for long and remain spendable…bitcoin isn’t for dead people.

2025-12-31 16:10:23 UTC

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Consider pool mining for lightning sats…you becoming part of the economy helps the network for real. Lotto mining doesn’t meaningfully help anyone (as of today, it’s altruistic money wasting and bitcoin can’t depend upon users working against their own self interests in the long run)