People who have suffered under authoritarian regimes tend to value crypto and decentralization more than anyone. The average person born and raised in Europe or North America with stable governments and functioning financial systems always questions why we even need this technology in the first place. I got into crypto in 2021 after the Taliban regime took power and froze all the banks in Afghanistan, including my dad's life savings. To this day, thousands of people have their assets seized or made inaccessible. My dad and my entire family now rely on stablecoins for savings. I can't even open a bank account in most countries due to my nationality - my passport is essentially a financial barrier. Across the world, there are millions of people who wish they had alternatives and learned too late that centralized systems can lock you out overnight. For many of you, crypto is another option. For us, it's the only one.

Went down the rabbit hole today and turns out normies are getting wrecked every single day, losing a shit ton of money in the dumbest ways possible. Copy-paste errors. Lookalike addresses planted in your history so you send to a scammer by accident. Sending on the wrong network. Clicking a fake airdrop link. Signing something they didn't understand. Half a second of not paying attention, and it's gone forever. Crypto natives kind of shrug this off as the cost of self-custody. But for regular people coming in from TikTok and IG, nobody's teaching them this stuff. They find out the hard way. Part of me wants to go down the education route. TikTok, IG, and wherever else normies hang out, teaching people how to actually protect their assets before they learn the lesson with their own money. Not rushing into anything, but this might have opened a door I didn't expect. If you've lost funds to something like this, I'd like to hear your story.

One of the biggest things that holds me back from buying a new phone online is not being able to actually hold the device before buying it. Especially when you're switching to a completely different OS. You can watch a hundred reviews, but you still don't really know how the phone feels in your hand. That's what had been stopped me from buying the @nothing 4A Pro for a while. I went back to the website recently and noticed they have this 3D mode where you can actually interact with the phone and get a much better sense of what it looks like from different angles. Obviously it's not the same as holding it, but it's way better than looking at a few product renders and hoping you'll like it. I genuinely don't understand why more companies don't do this. Anyway, I'm sold @getpeid. Ordering one. Now let's see if the actual phone lives up to the website 😂

Facebook has to be the most underrated social platform for emerging markets. I've been helping a fintech in an emerging market, and more than 90% of their traffic is coming from Facebook. App downloads and conversion rates are also extremely strong. Most businesses in those regions spend a significant amount of their ad budget on Facebook and I can totally see why.

Also bought my dad a Xiaomi 17T Pro because my sister had one and he liked it, so here we are. Next up, my younger sister just graduated high school, so now I have to figure out what to get her. We are officially in the family bull market 😂

My brother has been a Samsung user all his life, so I just bought him the S26 Ultra and I’m honestly surprised by how light it is. My iPhone 14 Pro Max feels like a fucking brick in comparison 😂 I switched to iPhone from Samsung years ago, but looks like they’ve been shipping some really good products over the past few years.

After the Bybit exploit last year, I wrote this thread breaking down bug bounties across different centralized exchanges, and Bitget had one of the worst ones out there. This isn't to say a bigger bounty would've prevented any of these exploits, but the size and structure of a bounty is definitely an indication of how seriously an exchange takes security and how well it aligns incentives with security researchers. At the time, Bitget was offering a whopping $3K for finding a critical vulnerability in their exchange. They've since increased it to $20K, which is obviously better, but it's still a pretty terrible incentive for a critical vulnerability in an exchange holding billions of dollars in user funds. While there is a note saying rewards for core system vulnerabilities with significant financial impact can reach up to $1M at Bitget's sole discretion. But that's usually a white hat's biggest fear. You find a critical vulnerability, responsibly disclose it, and then the exchange gets to decide what they think it's worth and nine times out of ten cheap ass exchanges and companies like bitget lowball tf out of whitehats. Incentive alignment is extremely important for white hats and even grey hats, and this is a TERRIBLY structured bounty. If you want to see how to set up a proper bug bounty, take @krakenfx's example. That is a sign of a team that takes security seriously. kraken.com/features/security…

TikTok has to be the most pro-censorship platform out there. A couple of months ago, the EU was pushing a ridiculous anti-privacy law called Chat Control. I made a video criticizing it and TikTok flagged it as a violation??? X has its flaws, but at least you can criticize shit like this without getting a strike.

Come join and tell me how much money you've lost in crypto. nitter.net/i/broadcasts/1PKqrNkjP…

I think I might make all the money back on @EthenaPay invite codes. A few more codes left and will be soon distributing them to the folks I’ve promised tonight.

Another salty post, so forgive me, but I have to say that for all the trash people talk about EVM and its UX/approval flaws, Solana is no different, and in some ways, even worse. 󠁯•󠁏 Addresses are case-sensitive 󠁯•󠁏 Addresses aren't fixed-length - they can be 43 or 44 characters 󠁯•󠁏 Addresses have no checksum Maybe it's a skill issue, but there's a pretty serious risk of people losing money simply because of transfer errors. I thought it was just me, but that thread is full of people who've lost money over similar issues.

Hopefully this doesn't come off as salty just because I lost money, but can't Binance run a check for a valid address before releasing funds? I mean, they already run 12 checks on withdrawals. Could they not also do a simple verification to see if the address actually exists on-chain, and fail the transaction if it doesn't? cc: @cz_binance for this feature request. Maybe also throw in a notification if a single character gets removed from the address somehow, because I genuinely have no idea how the “J” disappeared lol. I probably just fat-fingered the delete key, but if a tiny UX feature can prevent a $20K mistake, seems worth it.

Sent another $0.3 USDC to make it a proper 20k at least 🤷‍♂️ fml

This is actually a very interesting dynamic. I personally get a massage from this masseur named Wandi almost every week, and I haven't changed because he consistently does an incredible job and provides a great service. And this isn't unique to spas. You see the same thing with barbers, hairdressers, personal trainers, nail technicians, tattoo artists, and pretty much any service business where you interact with the same person repeatedly. Over time, the relationship between the customer and the employee becomes incredibly valuable. They know your preferences, understand what you like, and you've built a level of trust with them. That's why these businesses can have a weird retention problem. The customer may be loyal to the person providing the service rather than the business itself. It's actually very similar to B2B Sales. If a salesperson leaves a company after spending years building relationships with customers and prospects, a lot of that relationship can leave with them. The business might own the brand, the location, and the customer database, but the employee can own a huge part of the actual relationship. That's what makes employee retention so important in relationship-driven businesses. Also, before anyone asks, me and Wandi are strictly professional.

4.5% cashback on @EthenaPay’s Pro plan is criminal. It will be interesting to see if they can maintain this for a longer period of time and if @avax continues to support it.

The next batch of @EthenaPay Codes has arrived. Reach out to me If you still haven't received one.

Every day I’m thankful I got paid at EF in $ETH, especially when it was below $1,900. Back then it felt like a discount. Now we reap the fucking rewards. 🫡