on nostr here)
Project 2025 wants to:
www.defeatproject2025.org breaks it down by topic, also highly suggest John Oliver’s segment on it
Project 2025 wants to:
www.defeatproject2025.org breaks it down by topic, also highly suggest John Oliver’s segment on it
L2 means “layer two”, in short, a way of conducting transactions “off-chain” while relying on the “base chain”/L1 for security. It helps keep chain bloat minimal.
There are various ways to do this with various trade-offs in terms of speed/privacy/cost/centralization/etc. Bitcoin’s main one is lightning (there’s also Ark), Eth has like a dozen of them most of which are super centralized but you’ve got Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Nova, etc. They all work a little differently.
Lightning’s concept is very simple: you make a “channel” on-chain by depositing funds into that smart contract which lives on-chain (1 transaction). The channel exists between you and one other party. The channel starts with a balance of 100/0 meaning all the BTC is yours (because you deposited the BTC). When you send BTC to the other party, you update the “balance” of that channel by both of you signing a thing saying it’s updated (now it’s 99/1). This happens off-chain. At any point, either of you can close the channel (on-chain) and claim any BTC that’s due to them according to the balance. In this example, you would get back 99 BTC and the other person would get 1. You can also transact with other parties by sending BTC “through” a chain of existing channels. And these transactions not only don’t require paying on-chain fees, they can also be confirmed in < 1 second because you don’t need to wait for the next block. You can have essentially infinite transactions back-and-forth in a channel, but one “side” of the channel cannot dip below 0. Almost all of this is abstracted away for the end user.
You can’t just keep increasing the block size. More block size = bigger blocks = more bandwidth and disk space to host a full node. It’s why the majority of Eth’s nodes are now hosted in one of like three corporate datacenter providers. Sure, disks keep getting bigger and more affordable but big pipes to move that much data haven’t kept up at the same pace. Bitcoin cash is now 16x Bitcoin’s original block size, and they are still calling for larger blocks to keep tx costs low. Eventually, with any block size, especially if you want to capture a good portion of humanity’s transactions, you will end up with massive competition for blockspace aka high fees.
Blockchain has a fundamental problem. If you put it on the ledger, all nodes have to store that forever. The more you put on the ledger, the bigger that ledger gets, the more resources you need to host it/participate, the more centralized your network becomes. Adding more block space is one solution, but comes at the cost of decentralization and doesn’t scale to all of humanity’s transactions let alone even just replacing SWIFT/IBAN. L2s are another solution, you get faster transfers and fees not directly coupled to chain space in exchange for slightly less trustworthiness (you may have to send a channel “back to chain” if a bad actor tries something, and you have to monitor that channel and chain to see if you need to do that, which is all handled automatically). With Bitcoin’s L2, I can send funds anywhere in under a second for pennies in fees. It actually works for buying coffee. In the space 1 transaction took on chain, I can now have billions of transactions. Not just between me and the person I opened the channel with, but between me and any other person who has coins on lightning. And you can run a lightning node on a raspberry pi or android phone. Lightning isn’t perfect, the inbound liquidity thing is annoying (though Ark and Fedimint proposals solve this in different ways), but it works really well and has been stable and usable for years. The inbound liquidity issue is being worked on as well through automated liquidity provisioning. Not perfect, but leagues ahead of Monero which has zero L2 and zero roadmap for an L2.
Tldr: Monero’s fees are low because there isn’t much competition for blockspace. And it’s slow. Because it’s all on L1. That space will run out as it scales, it’s up to Monero to decide how to solve that problem.
I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying but… Monero can’t sustain any circular economy of scale without a working L2. Blockspace is limited. Every transaction humanity makes shouldn’t be stored on chain for perpetuity. That’s silly, wasteful, and leads to centralization. An L2 solves that problem. Without an L2, as Monero’s use increases, so will fees, variable block size will hold that off for a while but not forever and not without sacrificing decentralization.
Monero has no L2 and not enough dev talent or funding to make it happen in the next few years. Its protocol is different enough from Bitcoin that pre-existing solutions like lightning can’t just be bolted onto it without significant development effort and privacy trade-offs. Meanwhile over on Bitcoin’s side, they continue to add more functionality to their chain with a massive dev pool in terms of talent and funding. And privacy does continue to improve, lightning and ark are both pretty opaque depending on how you measure it. So if Monero wants to be a significant player on par with Bitcoin and have a circular economy, it will need to step up to the plate in a major way, and it needs to do that before Bitcoin implements privacy upgrades that place it at feature parity with Monero, which is imo only a matter of time since those folks tend to be pretty pro privacy. Yes, there’s “ossification”, but protocol improvements are still happening, especially outside the bounds of the main chain protocol itself (in L2, mining protocols, etc).
It’s not the right of the business, it’s the right of US citizens to consume media and information from any source they please. The Govt has no right to say “You can’t read that newspaper” or “You can’t listen to that speaker”, so they have no right to say “You can’t get information through this app”. The first amendment isn’t just about the right to speak, it’s also about the right to listen and research especially the stuff the government doesn’t want you to know about.
Separate apps more focused on privacy will always be better than RCS/SMS/whatever the mainstream option is.
It’s a shame the US govt has to try to do unconstitutional things. And that we have to keep fighting them back to preserve our basic liberties and freedoms. It’s a blessing the ACLU does it for us.
All of them. Make “banning advertising” an election platform, I’ll vote for you. Ban billboards and other forms of commercial advertising everywhere. Advertising works, nobody denies that. If you see enough ads, on average, your mind will be changed. By allowing advertising to exist, we are sanctioning widespread mind control. It sounds crazy when you say it that way, but it’s true. Advertising does not benefit the average person, it makes them buy stuff they have no native desire for. Advertising only benefits advertising agencies and their clients.
Let word-of-mouth and genuine desire for a good or service drive purchases of that good or service, not advertising, and you’ll end up with a more efficient economy where our consumer choices better invest in our shared prosperity and future.
OpenShot went terribly for me. Cool idea but did not work. Ate hours and hours of editing by failing to export. I tried everything, even opening Github issues to figure out where the problem was. Systematically re-cut and edited and moved every clip. Still couldn’t get it to export even though everything worked flawlessly in editing and previewing. Tried switching to latest, alpha, whatever, none of them could export. Absolute nightmare. Do not recommend. Eventually had to re-do everything in kdenlive.
!boinc@sopuli.xyz flatpak also needs a flatpak maintainer! Your work would help people contribute their spare computational power to scientific research. If you are passionate about fighting cancer, mapping the galaxy, etc this is an awesome way to contribute to that effort in a very force multiplying way.
Bitcoin transactions happen at the “speed of light” (~27:00) REALITY CHECK: As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow. It’s in fact why many people do not accept it for purchases anymore.
Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in fees. Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.
Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.
The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.
Nobody controls the network (~28:25) REALITY CHECK: If someone were to own 50% or more of the network’s compute power, they could control the network.
Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.
Bitcoin’s hard limit is likely very dangerous for the network (~29:00): Once the hard limit is reached, it is unclear if people will keep pumping computing power at it. If the creation of new Bitcoin is no longer allowed, it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.
Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.
Bitcoin’s lack of rules allow for massive amounts of fraud and prevents effective taxation (~29:25): While the video paints a cute picture of financial freedom, the reality is that Bitcoin allows for fraud on a world scale and does not allow for sales tax because of the way that anyone can have a cryptocurrency wallet without disclosing their identity.
Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes. Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank. People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.
The solution is apps and protocols that put the privacy in the hands of the user, not the hands of another entity which must be “regulated” by legislative bodies that have been subject to regulatory capture. Decentralize and distribute power. Use P2P/decentralized platforms like lemmy, mastodon, nostr, freenet, etc.
In a time of rising political instability and distrust of institutions, institutions will turn more and more to censorship and surveillance. We need decentralized, censorship resistant networks to fight back. #nostr is one such network, so is #tor, #freenet, #i2p, etc. And yes, #lemmy #mastodon and #activitypub too.
There are many open source wiki softwares: zim, dokuwiki, etc.
It’s done off-chain because on-chain would be expensive and slow. On-chain takes 10 min and $1.50-$15 in fees depending on the day. Lightning takes < 1 second for < 1 penny in fees.
Lightning transactions are secured by the base chain, so you’re not at risk of losing any funds. The transaction data is “off-chain” because there’s no reason for it to be “on-chain”.
As somebody who:
I also found this site confusing AF. It sounds cool and interesting, probably? I can’t tell lol. Is it a network bridge operating at the level of a relay? Is it an app you can use to connect and post/read to/from both networks at once? What the hell is it?
Many of the BOINC projects these days don’t have screensavers unfortunately. But World Community Grid and Rosetta@home have decent ones.
How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home
Yes absolutely, because any time the government can increase surveillance and control, they will. The Pirate Party is one of the few political forces in the EU fighting hard against this. Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the biggest threat to individual liberty and privacy we see in our lifetimes. In a time of global instability, these threats to our freedoms continue to compound from all over the political spectrum. People are more willing to accept some loss in freedom in the promise it will protect them from the “other side” gaining too much power or from worsening economic or other environmental conditions.
Bitcoin is a solution for those who want privacy, money, and autonomy to work hand in hand. Bitcoin offers much more robust privacy than a bank account and the degree of privacy it offers continues to improve. It’s not controlled by a central bank, entity, or board of directors who can mess with the supply or have any kind of special access to your financial information. You don’t need six forms of ID to use it, in fact, you don’t even need one! It’s truly autonomous money that separates the role of the state from the role of money.
With Bitcoin, I can send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (using Bitcoin lightning). And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that, Taler can’t do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.
Monero is king when it comes to privacy coins though. So from a privacy perspective, that’s worth looking into as well. Long-term I think Bitcoin will eat Monero for lunch since it can easily adopt the privacy technologies Monero has and the Bitcoin community is very pro privacy. Monero also lacks an L2 like lightning which means transactions are slower and more expensive and eventually fees will get ridiculous if adoption reaches parity with Bitcoin. Depending on your use case, that may or may not matter.