So the temporary placeholder name "Your Party" is made permanent. None of the options on the shortlist were good. Most of them just as grammatically inconvenient as the dumb placeholder name. The people who decide on the short-list, who can be a member, whose votes counts and what the options are, have quite a lot of power. Zara Sultana boycotted day one over who sets the rules and who can be involved. If Your Party have a governing body with power to override conference they end up like the Labour party and just are easily taken over and usurped by a cabal of thatcherite neoliberal capitalists. They did allow the dual membership system and a wider governance, so Zara won on who gets to be a member and who gets to be in charge. Which is probably good. Coz as the terrible name shows, if you put the idiots in charge you'll get idiocy not good collective decision making. For now the membership appear to have won, and I hear are they are all very excited and fierce and canny and not likely to let the old guard just set up another dictatorship from the top. They currently have half the membership count of the greens, less than a quarter that claimed by Reform. Lets hope they can get some attention towards something other than how billionaires think the country should be run and focus on the people. Here's hoping they can inflate that number by draining the Labour party and Reform members who just want change really rather than actually liking anything said by Farage. #yourParty #ukpol

Huh, I see that Zip Car UK is closing down, which would be a right pain if I hadn't bought a car last year. That's a lot of parking spaces about to be freed up I suppose. And a lot of easy-rental cars lying around the city disappearing. Guess they just weren't making enough money? #zipCar #uk

conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in. Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves. Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south. I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems. There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done. Can it work? I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry. I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here. Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries. And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system. I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it and welcome new followers. I mostly don't talk about bitcoin very much because money isn't really very interesting and I'm fast from expert on it. #bitfest #bitcoin

Finally, Martin from BTC Prague wonders how to empower bitcoiners in the UK. He's inspired by many UK scientists and artists and creators. But he thinks it's declining. Socialism and regulation reducing freedom. His home country had a peaceful velvet revolution, ending communism in the 80s. And it now has a law that there is no capital gains tax on long term held bitcoin! The UK, he thinks, needs to build new strong bitcoin based money to have it's own peaceful revolution. #bitfest #bitcoin #uk