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M - N - UFC! Come on you Loons! Minnesota United FC v Real Salt Lake tonight. ⚽️

Four people smiling in a selfie outside Allianz Field stadium with a large UNITED sign behind them, two wearing MNUFC jerseys.
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First visit to Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm for 2023! Delicious and great vibes. 🍕🤩

Exterior wall of Pleasant Grove Pizza Farm with a red wooden sign, hanging flower baskets, and rustic wooden bench decor on a sunny day. Two kids playing cornhole on a grass lawn between rustic red farm buildings on a sunny day. Group picnic on grass with four open pizza boxes showing cheese, pepperoni, and specialty pizzas, a child in a yellow bucket hat reaching for a slice.
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Pool is open for the summer! 💦

Children playing on green floats in a sunny backyard inground pool with a gray water slide beside a dark blue two-story house near a lake.
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At the Hook and Ladder with friends for Summer Breeze Yacht Rock Fest featuring The Lonesome Losers. 🎶

Six-piece band performing on a glittery stage under a tent with a circular logo backdrop, featuring a female vocalist and guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, and drummer. Six friends smiling and laughing together at an outdoor music venue under a tent with string lights Two people smiling and posing together outdoors at a music festival venue, man in straw hat and floral shirt, woman in floral dress
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I now have a Bluesky Social account (thanks Maique for the invite!) and with micro.blog syndication anything I post on my blog will appear there too. Curious to explore Bluesky and see what it does well.

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Lightning Ideas

Having finally gotten first-hand experience with Bitcoin Lightning, a workable and functioning micropayments option, it opens up a variety of interesting and fun use cases.

  1. Create a circular economy at home. Set your kids up with Bitcoin Lightning wallets and create bounties for projects and milestones they earn Satoshis for. Earn your allowance in Bitcoin. You are the bank to offramp back to USD as they want.
  2. Send Satoshis as Antispam. AI is going to make spam detection ever more difficult. You could Satoshis to an address and then reference the receipt in an SMTP header that the recipient could use to validate the email. More Satoshis could be more priority? Even works for newsletters since a few thousand Satoshis is about $1.
  3. Little Free Library Support. There are many Little Free Libraries in our neighborhood. Since “things” can have a lightning wallet, put a QR code on the library so people can send some Satoshis to support the library as an optional Thank You.
  4. Lightning as Creator Support. Send tips to creators you appreciate, potentially triggered on events. When a newsletter is received send 3,000 sats. When this RSS feed has a new item send 1,000 sats. Many Lightning wallets are adding support for automated sends under a user set threshold to remove friction for micropayments.
  5. Subscriptions with Privacy. Lightning invoices can be paid by any wallet, and the payment is immediate. Instead of subscribing to a service and needing an address and credit card details just get what you need and present an invoice to immediately pay. Fast, easier, and private.
  6. Buy a fridge with a year of electricity. Since “things” can have wallets, create one for each fridge. The fridge meters it’s electrical usage, uses a lookup to determine cost, and the fridge manufacturer sends Satoshis via Lightning to offset the first year of electricity.
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Board Search Criteria

A friend shared this Board Search Criteria used by Constellation Software and highlighted in their 2017 President’s Letter. I thought these dimensions were interesting and a good model. Recreated the primary points of the table below.

THE ROLE

  • Thought Partner: Thought partner for senior leadership.
  • Long-term Orientation: Unfazed by short term pressure. Focused on CSI’s long-term issues.
  • Timeframe: Able to serve on the board for 20+ years.
  • Investment in CSI: Willing to make a significant equity investment in CSI, above and beyond board comp.

THE CANDIDATE

  • High Quality Business: Understands what constitutes a high quality business.
  • Autonomy: Appreciates the motivational power of autonomy, decentralisation.
  • Cultural Fit: Respects and gets along with the current senior CSI management as well as the board.
  • Ownership: Believes in the motivational power of equity ownership.
  • High Impact / Low Ego: Will intervene when necessary, contribute meaningfully, but not dominate discourse.
  • Out of Kitchen: Can resist the urge to get into the kitchen when there’s a chef already in there.

EXPERIENCE

  • Builder: Helped build or maintain (as a director, manager or major shareholder) a large organisation (>1000 employees) over an extended period, while providing a superior return to owners (ideally including employee owners).
  • Decentralized: Experience with a decentralised company (nice, not necessary).
  • Capital Allocation: Experience in a capital allocation role (nice, not necessary).
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"Bison & Bitcoin"

I recently threw the term “Bison & Bitcoin” out with some friends. I love bison. 🦬 The name kept bouncing back to me and I thought that would be a fun newsletter. Generative AI is an amazing brainstorming partner, so for kicks I asked GPT-4 to elaborate and DALL-E to make a cover image. 😂

Prompt: Create a description for a newsletter called “Bison & Bitcoin”. The newsletter has primary themes of innovation, sustainability, and self-reliance, and highlights the shared properties of resilience and strength that Bison and Bitcoin share.

“Bison & Bitcoin” is a remarkable newsletter that transcends traditional boundaries, blending the worlds of ecology and finance through the lens of innovation, sustainability, and self-reliance. It’s an exploration of the innate resilience and strength shared by the American Bison, an enduring symbol of the wilderness, and Bitcoin, the pioneering force in cryptocurrency.

This newsletter is published bi-weekly, each edition shedding light on the enduring strength and adaptability of these two entities. For the Bison, readers get to delve into the animal’s natural history, their journey from near-extinction to resurgence, and the significance of their role in promoting sustainable ecosystems. This deep dive into the life of Bison underscores themes of resilience, offering inspiring insights into nature’s ability to recover and thrive.

Simultaneously, the Bitcoin section dissects the resilience of this digital currency amidst the volatile economic landscape. It explores the trajectory of Bitcoin’s development, its role in driving financial innovation, and how it embodies self-reliance in the increasingly digital economy. It takes readers through market trends, tech advancements, regulatory changes, and how Bitcoin continues to thrive despite these challenges.

By drawing intriguing parallels between Bison and Bitcoin, the newsletter encourages readers to perceive resilience and strength in a new light, and apply these principles in their own lives for a sustainable future. Ultimately, “Bison & Bitcoin” is not just a newsletter; it’s a bi-weekly exploration of resilience in the natural and financial worlds, providing compelling content that provokes thought and inspires action.

Painted bison standing in a prairie landscape with a stream and mesa, surrounded by stacked gold Bitcoin coins, labeled Summer 2023
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Did 10 stair repeats on our walk tonight. 320 steps. Also breaking in new boots for our hiking trip this summer. 🥾 Tammy joined me and Mazie decided to run them many, many times. 😅

Two people climbing a long concrete outdoor staircase surrounded by lush green trees, viewed from the bottom of the stairs.
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Ordered one of these orange Bitcoin Miami 2023 Special Edition Worlds Smallest Bitcoin Hobby ATM. I was blown away by this project at the show. It will be fun to be able to share how fast and fun Bitcoin Lightning is! 🤩⚡️🟠

Orange 3D-printed Bitcoin Lightning ATM device glowing from within, labeled Bitcoin Miami 2023, sitting on a wood table.