China’s ‘Re-Education Camps’ for Uyghurs & How Bitcoin Mining is Revitalizing Forgotten Towns.
Plus, understanding the complexities of the Lightning Network.
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Happy Sunday, friends!
I came across the term “wordless oneness,” which represents what I feel when writing.
Wordless oneness is when the chatter of the mind goes silent and you feel to be at quiet oneness with everything that surrounds you. Some call it “the zone,” or “focus,” or “the flow,” but either way it’s essential to producing meaningful work.
I think wordless oneness is a more accurate term because it’s the absence of the chatter of the mind and it feels like a vacation from myself.
What activities do you practice in your life that give you that wordless oneness? Might it be drawing? Dancing? Music? Whatever it is, the arts remind us that life is not just about paying bills. It’s about wonder and oneness.
Now, onto today’s newsletter…
China’s ‘Re-Education Camps’ for Uyghurs
China has a secretive system of internment camps in the Xinjiang region. Reports claim more than a million men and women have been detained in these camps; which China says exist for the "re-education" of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group.
But human rights groups maintain that what’s happening inside these camps is mass surveillance, detention, indoctrination, systemic rape, forced sterilisation, and torture.
Gulbahar Haitiwaji (an ethnic Uyghur) and Qelbinur Sidik (an ethnic Uzbek) are survivors from these detention camps. They arrived in the U.S. to testify before Congress and before a Texas state legislative hearing.
“Their testimony will focus on the human-rights crimes suffered by Uyghur, Uzbek and other Turkic women. They will highlight the urgent need for action to rescue survivors who are at risk of deportation to China and, to impose meaningful sanctions on tech companies that are responsible for building the ethnic-profiling surveillance regime, and to stop the flow of international investment to Chinese companies complicit in forced labor and the government’s high-tech tools of genocide.” — Uyghur Human Rights Project
There is a genocide happening against the Uyghur people today. No different than previous genocides… only this time, Big Tech is contributing to these atrocities without overtly shedding blood.
It’s refined warfare. Human rights violations scattered all around us yet hidden in plain sight. Will genocides silently grow in numbers with Big Tech scaling at unprecedented speeds?
PS. I’ve just bought Gulbahar Haitiwaji’s book How I Survived a Chinese "Reeducation" Camp to hear her side and hopefully learn ways to support the Uyghur people.
Follow the Money #3: Elizabeth Warren / How Bitcoin is Revitalizing Forgotten Communities
There has been a tonne of negative media coverage regarding Bitcoin's energy consumption and its environmental impact. This gets in the way of people being able to think about how we can – and perhaps should – transform the global financial landscape.
In this video, podcaster and filmmaker, Peter McCormack, travels to Texas and Oklahoma to uncover the truth about the Bitcoin mining industry. He explores the relationship between Bitcoin mining and the transition to a low-carbon grid. And, how:
Bitcoin miners use wasted energy to collaborate with energy grid operators in order to stabilize energy supplies (and help reduce the amount of money we pay for energy).
Due to the influx of Bitcoin mining companies in ghost-towns that have an abundance of energy, they are helping forgotten communities prosper once again.
And how Bitcoin mining isn’t detrimental to the environment like the mainstream media suggests.
This is an incredible short-film (41 minutes) that I highly recommend. And it is not too technical. If you’re new to bitcoin mining or the energy industry, you will be able to follow along.
Presentation: Leo Weese on The Lightning Network at Lightningcon Vietnam
Overall, the Lightning network is a great improvement over Bitcoin. That said, it still comes with a unique set of characteristics that make it challenging to understand and use Lightning.
In his presentation, Leo Weese (Technical Content Lead for Lightning Labs) gives us an overview of what some of these difficulties are, how they’re being solved, and how they could be solved in the future by specifically diving into:
Lightning invoices
Channels and their capacities
Pathfinding (how do you find your recipients?)
Why we still have to worry about underlying on-chain Bitcoin transactions (how they confirm and pay fees),
And, finally, branding (how this is communicated to stores/users/applications that want to integrate Lighting).
Leo has a gift at explaining anything Bitcoin or Lightning-related – and a surprising skill at not stuttering! So if you’ve got (almost) an hour, check out his presentation.
That’s it for now. Hope you all have a wonderful end to your weekend and are preparing for an amazing week ahead!
Speak soon,
Ayelen
PS. Where possible, try to enter into moments of wordless oneness. This will help you leave your ego which is always looking for what’s wrong, for ways to criticize you and diminish you – and well, isn’t that the source of all suffering?
I had no idea these detainment camps existed. Thank you for shedding light and educating us Ayelen!