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.

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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.

Pretty 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.

• https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
• https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/eff-tor-legal-faq/

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

For perspective, there are two ways we pay taxes currently: direct taxation via tax collection and indirect taxation via the inflation of the currency supply (govt prints money and uses it, your money becomes worth less about 2-3% year in good years). That second tax is optional, there are ways to not use your national currency and therefore not pay the inflationary tax. That second tax is also insidious because people don’t realize it’s happening. If you have to raise actual taxes, suddenly you get revolts and removed from power. Which is why most wars are funded with inflationary spending, not tax increases. People will gladly pay extra tax for popular wars, but not unpopular ones.

Imagine how the world might look different if inflationary spending wasn’t a particularly powerful taxation tool because not much value was wrapped up in national currencies. Imagine if going to war meant raising actual taxes. Might we have a world where there is less war because war is now harder to fund?

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Cenorship-resistant protocols like ActivityPub (Lemmy, Mastodon), Nostr, Tor, I2P, and freenet solve this.

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. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. 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.

Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.

Don’t disclose all their big donors

Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

Many orgs don’t disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you’re seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to… give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.

The article states that “Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.”, yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/

“Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez”

Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that’s ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn’t have somebody “far right” or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn’t be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they’re actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.

It’s organized by the human rights foundation, which is an intl non-profit organization headquartered in New York. The freedom forum is not only hosted in but also donated to by the City of Oslo. It’s all about resisting dictators and autocracy. Ask wikipedia if you doubt

They want to ban porn in the entire country, it’s all a part of #project2025. They also want to ban abortions. And being gay in public. And completely break the separation of church and state. Don’t sit this election out. https://defeatproject2025.org/

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Tariffs and moving away from free trade makes us all poorer. We need EVs to be cheap and abundant now more than ever. People complain it’s “uncompetitive” when china subsidizes the shit out of their EV industry, but the US did the exact same thing with “build back better”, and the EU got pissed about it. Just as the US has been doing for decades with agriculture and the defense industry.

I agree subsidies are contrary to the best methods of free trade but until we can force countries to stop (and stop doing it ourselves), they are a part of life. Let china win the EV race, we all get cheap abundant EVs, and America can win the space race and we’ll all get cheap satellite services, and Europe can win idk whatever it is they’re working on over there and we’ll all get a bunch of cheap copies of that.