24 years married today. For more than half my life, I've been a husband. Something I want to say to the younger ones reading this, because nobody said it to me and I got lucky rather than clever. So here goes…the person you marry is the biggest decision you’ll ever make. It's bigger than that job you want, the house, the degree or the city you move to. Everything else sits downwind of it. Life is going to fuck you over. Not might. Absolutely will. You fall on hard times. Someone you love gets ill. A business dies on you. One day the phone rings and your life has a before and an after. And when the thing happens, the person next to you either carries some of it or piles more on. I’ve watched good mates go through hard years with someone who made it worse. The redundancy turned into a row about the redundancy. Then months of barely speaking. Before you know it, a solicitor’s letter arrives, the house is sold, and the kid is doing weekends at his dad’s flat. One bad thing became 10, because there was nobody in that house on his side. I got the other version of it. The day I got the call to say my brother had hung himself. I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for my wife. So, what's the lesson? Stop giving a shit about stuff that fades. Looks go, money comes and goes, and the banter wears thin somewhere around year 4. Watch what someone does when things go wrong. Marry your best mate. The one you’d want in the room on the worst day of your life. 24 years have passed, and I’d do it again tomorrow! ✌️

The Rehearsal Take of “Under Pressure” There is a version of “Under Pressure” recorded in a half-lit room during rehearsals for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992. Annie Lennox in a houndstooth cap and leather vest. David Bowie in a bright blue jacket with a red ribbon. Brian May and John Deacon somewhere in the frame. George Michael visible in the background, singing along. No perfect lighting. No carefully planned camera angles. Just the song, the voices, and the unfiltered reactions of the people standing closest to it. The official concert performance carries scale, history, and the weight of a global tribute. The rehearsal shows something else: the moment before everything is locked into place. In the rehearsal, Annie Lennox does not deliver a finished interpretation of the song. She goes at it. She leans her whole body into the microphone. The voice is sharp, urgent, almost confrontational. And the camera catches what matters — Bowie’s face, May’s face — as they register what is happening in real time. They are not nodding politely. They look briefly stunned, the way musicians look when someone next to them suddenly raises the temperature of the room. In a completed concert, everyone already knows their role. The arrangement is set. The emotional peaks have been rehearsed into reliability. The audience sees the result. In the rehearsal, the viewer gets to watch the process. Annie is not offering a polished reading of a Queen and Bowie classic. She is testing how much force the song can take. Bowie, who co-wrote it and had already lived with it for a decade, has to meet her there. He does not pull back. He adjusts. The duet becomes a live negotiation rather than a recreation. The space itself contributes to the feeling. The room still looks temporary. People stand around in ordinary clothes. Marshall stacks sit in the background like furniture. The stakes remain high — this is still a tribute to Freddie Mercury — but the performance has not yet been framed as history. It is simply musicians trying to get the song right in the same room. “Under Pressure” was always about tension: the pressure of modern life, the need for compassion, the thin line between control and collapse. When Annie pushes her voice past the point of politeness, that tension becomes physical. You hear both the strain and the power at the same time. Bowie’s cooler, more angular delivery suddenly has something to push against. The contrast that made the original recording electric is recreated in the room, not as nostalgia, but as chemistry happening again. There is also the quiet presence of George Michael in the background. He is not center stage. He is simply there, singing along, another extraordinary voice choosing not to compete for the moment. In the finished concert he would take on other songs. Here he remains part of the atmosphere. The rehearsal does not need to resolve every possible storyline. It only needs to capture the one that is actually unfolding. The unfinished space removes the safety of spectacle. Without the full production, what remains is whether the voices and the song can hold the room. In this case, they do more than hold it. They raise the temperature until even the people who wrote and played the original material look briefly surprised. The concert has scale and historical weight. The rehearsal has the moment when Annie Lennox made David Bowie and Brian May truly stop and listen. One is a finished performance. The other is the process still in motion.

TLDR: Be reasonable in realizing and accepting not all participants are going to be extremists. I'm not crazy about the framing of "orthodox" vs "reformed" (and at the very least under this religious framing the word "prophet" might have been a better substitute for "oracle" when describing how Satoshi should not be viewed). Nonetheless, this is largely on point. Bitcoin is not going to remain a niche network utilized by only a tiny group of cypherpunks precisely because it is valuable to a much larger market and its permission-less nature ensures that group can use it. We must accept that Bitcoin is for anyone and live with that reality and its implication that people will use it any way that suits them, even if that clashes with how we would use it.

Hey, @grok, How much time and energy do you estimate it took Satoshi to mine his approximately 1.1 million bitcoins and how much time and energy do you estimate it would take to mine 1.1 million bitcoins starting today?

There’s a lot of law-abiding institutions out there. But laws change, people err, and sometimes someone in one of them breaks the law. Bitcoin is a math-abiding institution. Math doesn’t change, it doesn’t err, and its operations are absolute.