1·
4 months agodeleted by creator
- 3 Posts
- 67 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.
Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).
It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.
It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.
21·4 months agoTrump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but it is clear that he supports and is supported[1] by Project 2025’s many authors[2] including his own press secretary and many members of his cabinet. He has, for example, called Project 2025 “our agenda”[4] and is personally mentioned hundreds of times in the document. By the Heritage Foundation’s own count, Trump already implemented a majority of their recommendations during his last term [3] and 81% of Project 2025’s authors held official appointments in his administration[5].
2 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-project-2025-truth-social-rcna160774
You’ll also lose primary voters. I voted in the primaries, there were multiple candidates, Biden lost the primary in American Samoa. If you throw away my primary vote by swapping in another anointed candidate, why would I ever vote in your primaries again? What is even the point? It’s like the DNC learned nothing from the debacle of them trying to squeeze Bernie out of the race (thank you Wikileaks for revealing their corrupt BS and causing reforms to the primary process). They lost a lot of voters doing that.
I hate the RNC, but if they are the only party that will respect my primary vote, they are the primary I will vote in next election. Dems switching primaries like this may produce a more moderate republican candidate, which is bad news for dems, since they won’t just be able to run on “The RNC is run by crazy christian fascists who want to take all your rights away”.
You can’t outsmart supply and demand, period. No government ever has or ever will. Rent control doesn’t work, every economist agrees.
Rent control privileges existing tenants over new ones and doesn’t fix the supply problem. It incentivizes landlords to constructively evict tenants so they can re-rent at market rate instead of capped rate. Boneheaded policy which makes dems look bad. Voting for Biden but this is a dumb look.
This just makes me like AOC even more
SSL cert is expired
Copyright is a classic case of “The few benefit at the expense of the many”. Ideas, medicine, innovation, culture, these should all be shared as widely as possible as quickly as possible to all of humanity. Especially when we can copy those things for no production cost unlike the times of the printing press. But somebody realized they could paywall it and get rich instead.
Copyright is an antiquated idea whose time has come to arrive on the chopping block. Any politician who aims to curtail or abolish copyright gets my vote.
2·4 months agoPretty well established case law at this point. If it weren’t, you’d see Tor relay operators, small ISPs, etc being hauled into court constantly.
There are no protections for me if I unknowingly let some stranger use me as a host or router for CP or some pedo shit. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take. There need to be legal protections in place, like there are for ISPs.
There are, at least in the US. That’s why running a Tor node is legal and so is a coffee-shop sharing their wifi to customers. They are not legally liable for actions of users, they are just routers.
Each network has its own way of addressing this with pros and cons. Personally, idc, I don’t mind being a “router” in exchange for other computers “routing” to me. I don’t mind the idea of sharing my internet connection via wifi with my neighborhood, it should be a resource for all.
The cost of having open communication networks or free speech or privacy or any liberties is that people may use those liberties to do bad things, but I’d rather live in a world where we have liberties that sometimes get abused than in a world without liberties where those who control things get basically unlimited abuse of the same liberties we are not afforded.
Also it’s worth mentioning the “how to distribute content among peers” problem has mostly been solved and has for over a decade, just that nobody has built out the UX for it for a YouTube clone. Torrents exist, #freenet and #hyphanet exist, #ipfs exists, these are all excellent platforms for storing and distributing content without relying on expensive, centralized hosting. Instead, users share the burden of hosting. There’s a whole category of software that solves this problem in different ways (P2P). Unfortunately, every new generation of developers seems to want to re-invent the wheel instead of using time-tested tech that already exists but just needs a UX refresh or maybe some protocol improvements.
If you have a tube site and it says “to skip ads, install IPFS”, everybody would be using IPFS.
Nostr has. Over the last two months alone, their users have “zapped” (tipped/donated) other users around 950K (nearly 1 mil!) USD worth via lightning and that number continues to grow. And it doesn’t just make it easy to pay content creators, but to also put a portion of your “zaps” towards the relay you use or development of the software if you want. If you have a nostr account, you can easily tie it to a lightning address to send/receive tips, nostr doesn’t take a fee. Relays can also portion out a bit of their zaps for the people who publish the most engaging content on their relay. The possibilities are quite extensive. And because it’s over lightning, zaps happen instantly and for pennies or less in fees. Though, you can use nostr without zaps at all.
For those unfamiliar with nostr, it’s a decentralized social media software much like ActivityPub/mastodon, the main use right now is as a twitter/instagram clone but there’s also a reddit-style section being built up as well. Moderation abilities from the perspective of the instance/relay are identical. But one bonus if that if your relay goes down, you don’t lose your identity, since your identity and relay are separate. And if you change apps or relays (you are typically connected to multiple relays), all your content moves with you seamlessly. And the payment/zap infrastructure is all decentralized, relays don’t ever custody or manage the payments. If you tip a content creator, it goes directly from you to them. The lightning network has basically limitless transaction capacity. If you have cash app, it supports lightning, so you can already send zaps (you will need different apps to receive zaps though because cash app doesn’t support the LNURL standard). Strike natively supports it. And because it’s lightning, it works in every country automatically.
Long-term, if I am a content creator, which “fedi”-type system is going to be attractive to me? One where users can send me tips and mircopayments or one where they can’t? This is why I think nostr is going to win out long-term over AP/Mastodon. Mastodon could add this kind of functionality but I don’t get the impression they’re open to it. People may not want to commit to yet another $5/month subscription to a YouTuber’s patreon or nebula or whatever, but they are happy to tip 1-10c after watching a video. So there’s a psychological beauty to micropayments as well. As some random person I have made like 7c on tips this month, but I’ve also given out plenty to other people.
Source about nostr fees: https://lemmy.ml/post/17824358
Foreigners have easier ways to influence elections than donating to crypto PACs specifically, some of which are bipartisan. Like, you know, donating directly to a candidate or a PAC which only funds a single candidate.
Crypto PACs are also funded by multi-billion dollar crypto businesses that are directly involved in or invested in crypto: Cash app, Venmo, basically every major tech company, Coinbase, strike payments, Kraken, your favorite hedge fund, etc. Oh, and regular idiots like me. Keep in mind that parts of the “big tech” lean dem and gladly fund dem or dem-adjacent initiatives. Though, like everywhere, some also lean right. Anytime I see a dem say something positive about crypto, I always send $5 their way. It’s rare enough that it’s sustainable at this point in time. And if they are particularly negative about it, I send money to their opponent in the primary :).
Some dems are already receiving funding from crypto PACs so, yes, that money is available for the taking if Dem candidates want it.
You’re probably right on timeline, Dems aren’t having any epiphany about this in this election cycle.
Trump already seems pretty good at avoiding accountability moving around large amounts of money. Using crypto, from his perspective, is probably a lot more complicated. But he is receiving some big donations both via crypto and from pro-crypto donors. That’s money dems could have accessed if they wanted to, but didn’t.
I think when Dems can cut through the FUD and clickbait headlines and see that moving value globally is not free (in terms of energy or human capital), see that the <1% of global energy use by Bitcoin is actually rather efficient, and that mining can be used to stabilize power grids, bring down electrical rates for consumers, and fund the expansion of renewable energy, they’ll be just fine with it. As the linked podcast argues, Bitcoin very much aligns with many progressive ideals.
That, or they’ll just listen to their donors and chase money like good politicians. As long as crypto PAC money keeps flooding into campaigns, it’ll be available to any politician who wants to take it. Do you know any political party which is immune to PAC money? Because I don’t.
But, only time will tell of course.
Love when competition swoops in to save the day.
Glad somebody else sees this. I am a straight (D) voter down the whole ticket, I vote in primaries, I’m fine with paying taxes, and I also care a lot about crypto legislation. I vote on policy, not party. My key vote determiners are:
- Respect of basic human rights, electoral process, etc
- Bitcoin (which is part of #1 to me: the freedom to transact and engage in the economy)
- Basically everything else.
Right now, the Ds have a hard lock on #1 so I won’t be able to bring myself to vote for an R candidate for years until they do a serious purge of the MAGA lunacy. But once they come through their existential crisis and a new party is born? If Rs are doing #1 and are the only ones who will protect my right to use cryptocurrency? The only ones who will oppose a CBDC (central bank digital currency)? Imma start voting for them.
Roughly 25% of Americans own cryptocurrency, that numbers grows every year. When you own crypto, you start caring about government overreach in that area. Just like when you become a homeowner, you suddenly start caring about zoning and what’s going on in your backyard. Crypto has PACs now, they’re becoming a factor in elections, last primary season a single PAC spent $100 mil.
You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound.
Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.