Sjors Provoost @sjors@m.sprovoost.nl

If you enjoy the Bitcoin, Explained podcast, you may want to check out my new book! It covers softfork activation mechanisms, what's cool about SegWit and Taproot, how nodes bootstrap to the network and find their peers, what an address really is, how AssumeUTXO can make initial block download suck less, how UtreeXO could compress the entire UTXO set into a kilobyte of merkle forest, how Guix makes reproduceable builds great again, and more.

More details and preview at: https://btcwip.com

I was thinking that the act of falsely reporting tweets in order to get an account taken down, is probably something in the legal category of vandalism, destruction of property or even hacking (manipulating a computer system in order to make it do things that cause harm).

Perhaps that's enough ground to subpoena Twitter for contact details of whoever did this.

Though that all sounds like too much work. Also, suing for damages under Dutch law is futile, and touching the US legal system is meh.

2. Someone got butt hurt by something I said, went through all my recent tweets and just reported everything they thought would stand a chance.

However, to get to this tweet would have taken a LOT of scrolling.

Perhaps they used search terms to find it more quickly.

The list of people I've not been super nice to is rather long though, which makes it tricky to hone in on any particular suspect.

I have roughly two theories of what happened:

1. Russian intelligence / troll army is looking to take down anything negative of Putin (or that harms the Tsar's opsec).

If that's the case, it's an impressive move. Rather than just having a bot army report all my tweets, they found something the algorithm and many clueless moderators* would actually think is harassment.

* = I suspect the appeal process is mostly automated too, the first appeal was denied in about a minute

One of the more sneaky things the bird site does, is to lock you of your account, but keep that a secret to the outside world.

People can still see my profile, reply to my tweets and even send me DM's. But I can't open them, can't reply to them and need to use alternative channels to even inform them what's going on.

"all" I need to do is remove the tweet though, then they'll stop the extortion. Very nice high pressure technique.

Bird site link to the thread: https://twitter.com/provoost/status/1533068807232794625

My bird site account was locked in the middle of the night, seemingly out of the blue, for something I said deep inside a thread two weeks ago.

The thread consists of me analysing video stills of Putin, particularly the lightning, which strongly suggests he is not in his normal office.

I attached the entire thing, including the "offending" tweet. I find it totally implausible that Twitter itself feels the victim of "targeted harassment". Yet they denied the (first) appeal. So what's going on?

Here's a new chapter PDF that you can buy with Lightning. It covers the mysterious Attack of the Fake Nodes in the summer of 2021. The mainstream media never talked about this! 🙂
https://shop.purpledunes.com/product/btcwip-chapter-8-fake-nodes/

And they're digging in. Are they trying to clean up negative press due to their stock crashing?

And now, several weeks later, they decide to lock my account over this one:

The link was still there though, not blocked, but less easy to find.

#StayInformed

The bird site just blocked a link to this, with no way to appeal it, because their Algorithm is Glorious:
https://www.rbth.com/travel/332445-top-5-most-interesting-bunkers-in-russia/amp

Why Amazon wants a Shrubbery.
https://sprovoost.nl/2022/06/01/amazon-and-the-dystopian-future-of-book-censorship/

I wrote a blog post explaining my current Bitcoin Core + c-lightning + BTCPay + WooCommerce (+ Tor) setup.

Plus a little rant. And of course some shameless book promotion.
https://sprovoost.nl/2022/05/27/how-to-sell-a-pdf⚡/

Nice quick update on the bird site "deal" progress by Patrick Boyle https://youtu.be/_SfXoCj4TLk

I started dropping individual chapters in printer friendly PDFs. They're €0.99 a piece now (you're still welcome to compile it yourself from the source code).

Payment with ⚡ only. No personal details required, even email is optional. Eat that, fiat!

The first three chapters are:
1. Addresses (was already free to preview, but in regular book format)
7. Eclipse Attacks*
9. Guix (reproducible builds)*

* = shop also links to a free blog version

https://shop.purpledunes.com/product-category/chapters/

The shop now takes dirty fiat too.

G'day 'Strayans. Due to distribution related shitfuckery, I started an experiment where I'll ship the book directly to ya from the Melbourne printer.

Well obviously I won't do it myself, I just chuck your address into IngramSpark's manual ordering system (yeah, there's no API).

Powered by @BTCPayServer, maybe fiat later if Stripe doesn't pre-emptively cancel me.

All this for a mere AU$34.99 and with free shipping! No more slow imports from the UK and Murica.
https://shop.purpledunes.com/product/bitcoin-a-work-in-progress/