Thought experiment: How can we 10X the number of bitcoin nodes running in a distributed, trustless way? Turnkey software solutions make it easy for people to set up a node but the hardware is often overpriced and overhyped, while the software provides a central point of capture (What do you do if your Raspbery Pi Node Software Provider goes rogue and auto-updates all their users to an evil fork?) So I’m toying with the idea of mad market devices with the bitcoin software burned into the hardware in a write-once way. Nodes can’t be upgraded remotely since it’s basically an ASIC for a particular version of the consensus model. But how can you trust the hardware to truly be write-once and/or not have a backdoor? How can you allow updates for auxiliary software like Tor and Electrum? Thoughts? Or is it just a solution in search of a problem?

😂😂😂 View quoted note →

This was my first time actually hearing RFK Jr. speak. His voice was jarring at first because I had never heard it before, but after only a couple’s minutes of listening, his voice fell away as I continued to listen to his words. I went on to watch several more clips from the hearings, and I’ll go on to watch more after I post this, but I have to say: I want to hear more that RFKJR has to say, even if I’ll likely disagree strongly with some of it.

I’m tempted to redirect my incoming weekly DCA sats (or a percentage of them) to the Bitcoin Defense Fund for a while, because this Craig Wr*ght circus has gone on far too long. It’s bad enough that I’m embarrassed of his behavior from well over a thousand miles away while having nothing to do with him besides also being a member of the Homo sapiens species, but the whole situation is bad for open source software in general. https://bitcoindefense.org/bitcoin-legal-defense-fund-statement-on-uk-appellate-court-ruling/

I was briefly super worried about future quantum computing advancements allowing anyone to spend anyone else’s bitcoins by breaking elliptic curve cryptography, but then I learned that when output addresses are hashed, the public key corresponding to the spender’s private key isn’t known, so they can’t be spent. So in the worst case scenario everyone with active bitcoin could move it into hashed addresses with public keys never revealed. I THINK this means avoiding address reuse keeps you safe, but I’m not sure how the public keys work for Hierarchical Deterministic wallets work. Can anyone confirm? We still need quantum resistant cryptography, preferably with a soft fork if that’s possible, to make Bitcoin fulfill Saylor’s claim of teleporting a billion dollars of value a thousand years into the future.

I’m going to start by saying I assume I’m ignorant, naive, making bad assumptions, or just being dumb. I’m probably wrong and I hope I am. Can someone explain how the the #fedimint decentralization model is supposed to resist coercion or threats of violence? Because I don’t get it Apologies if this comes across as a straw man, but my understanding of it is that in the fedimint paradigm: 1. It will only be safe to join a fedimint that’s local (and therefore subject to “Proof of fist” if they try to rug you) 2. It will only be safe to join a fedimint run by people you know personally 3. Fedimints an are envisioned to serve as tools for onboarding and scaling small rural communities, especially in the global south. Now let’s say there’s a remote town of 500 people, and 5 people run the mint for that town. Everyone in the town who uses the mint (which is almost everyone) knows who those 5 people are and more or less where they live and that they hold the keys for most of the community’s BTC. This is necessary for proof of fist and the threat of social censure in the case of bad behavior. What stops some warlord or bandit group or dictator from just showing up with AK47s, coercing the names of the mint runners from the first few people they encountered, and then kicking down their doors and demanding the bitcoin at gunpoint? If it were rural America, then the citizens would have the guns to defend themselves, but that isn’t the case in most places. If it was in America, then the citizens would have some confidence that the government wouldn’t use outright violent coercion to discover the names of the mint runners or seize the mint’s bitcoin. There would be some rule of law in place. But again, most people don’t have such assurances or rights. So that’s my question/ skepticism: How does fedimint work to protect people’s (that is, a community’s) bitcoin in places where property rights and rule of law are more suggestions than anything else? I want it to work, I just see it being pretty fragile against violent coercion IF IT’S LOCAL and IF the mint runners are PERSONALLY KNOWN to the mint users. This is something I’ve heard very little discussion of. I hope there’s a good answer because my understanding is that fedimint was conceptualized by people focused on the global south, so they should have some idea of the challenges faced, but I just don’t understand how a mint is supposed to be resistant to violence when the runners are easily identified and located.

I’m going to start by saying I assume I’m ignorant, naive, making bad assumptions, or just being dumb. I’m probably wrong and I hope I am. Can someone explain how the the #fedimint decentralization model is supposed to resist coercion or threats of violence? Because I don’t get it Apologies if this comes across as a straw man, but my understanding of it is that in the fedimint paradigm: 1. It will only be safe to join a fedimint that’s local (and therefore subject to “Proof of fist” if they try to rug you) 2. It will only be safe to join a fedimint run by people you know personally 3. Fedimints an are envisioned to serve as tools for onboarding and scaling small rural communities, especially in the global south. Now let’s say there’s a remote town of 500 people, and 5 people run the mint for that town. Everyone in the town who uses the mint (which is almost everyone) knows who those 5 people are and more or less where they live and that they hold the keys for most of the community’s BTC. This is necessary for proof of fist and the threat of social censure in the case of bad behavior. What stops some warlord or bandit group or dictator from just showing up with AK47s, coercing the names of the mint runners from the first few people they encountered, and then kicking down their doors and demanding the bitcoin at gunpoint? If it were rural America, then the citizens would have the guns to defend themselves, but that isn’t the case in most places. If it was in America, then the citizens would have some confidence that the government wouldn’t use outright violent coercion to discover the names of the mint runners or seize the mint’s bitcoin. There would be some rule of law in place. But again, most people don’t have such assurances or rights. So that’s my question/ skepticism: How does fedimint work to protect people’s (that is, a community’s) bitcoin in places where property rights and rule of law are more suggestions than anything else? I want it to work, I just see it being pretty fragile against violent coercion IF IT’S LOCAL and IF the mint runners are PERSONALLY KNOWN to the mint users. This is something I’ve heard very little discussion of. I hope there’s a good answer because my understanding is that fedimint was conceptualized by people focused on the global south, so they should have some idea of the challenges faced, but I just don’t understand how a mint is supposed to be resistant to violence when the runners are easily identified and located.

😂😂😂 View quoted note →

Option 1: Crushing alternatives maliciously Option 2: bad pattern recognition heuristics zeroed in on letter and word combinations (S(impl)EX-CHAT) Why ascribe to malice what can be fully explained by incompetence?😂 View quoted note →

My two sats: neither is fully right. Tell your son “spend and replace” is the way. I hypothesize Bitcoiners as a group become more productive when we transfer value amongst ourselves using bitcoin, the monetary superconductor. Tell your daughter to get the desired medium of exchange in writing beforehand to avoid being bait and switched with Monopoly money.😂 View quoted note →

😂😂😂 View quoted note →

“Inflation is a memory leak in our civilization process” Has anyone explored this metaphor before? It certainly isn’t for every audience, but I think anyone who knows what a memory leak is will find this a meaningful, memorable comparison that hints at both the danger and severity of the problem of left unchecked.

Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism

Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism – Eliezer S. Yudkowsky

I grew up a strait-laced, mild mannered rule follower. I even believed in asking permission rather than seeking forgiveness. As I’ve gotten older, I find I’m becoming more of a rebel as I see the consequences of following the rules, mainly ceding power that shouldn’t be ceded, and losing freedoms that shouldn’t be lost. I recently made the decision to jump ship over Apple’s handling of zap payments and move to android. I was actually browsing phones in the store today, although I didn’t buy one (yet). So it comes as quite an unwelcome surprise to hear that Google is about to try / is trying the same bullshit on their side of the fence in their own App Store. It all comes down to enforcement but it certainly sounds the same to me. I say that as background to explain my current headspace. I don’t have any interest in following rules that suit only the rulers. Fuck that. Like he said, Android is open. They can’t enforce shit (if we sideload). It just pisses me off that so many people are going to get frozen out of using zaps (like me currently) because of arbitrary platform rules. It also seems like a slippery slope. We’re already on nostr because we don’t like the control on other platforms, and now they want to control us here? Fuck that. View quoted note →