Is not the only hope.

Actually, yes, because there is nothing else with the same characteristics.

Maaann, Bitcoin is already dead and people don't deserve it. The majority are so dumb that will never understand why Bitcoin. Right now, Bitcoin is just a tool for politicians, influencers etc to fool the rest of the world and control them even more. It's over. Bitcoin will not be that dream we've hoped to be reality, not even in 30-50 years. So why bother anymore? Now is just a survival mode, will escape who is smart. Here is an example: do you really think these people will ever understand Bitcoin and use it? I doubt it.

😂 I came here to fight and die, until the very last second. It's very likely that we'll lose, but at least I'll die knowing that I was on the side of the good guys.

don't worry, the communists are coming to give a charla about marxism

The worst part is that these idiots in the video have never worked a day in their lives, it's like a virgin giving advice on sex positions. They also don't realize that they won't be part of the communist committee and that they were the ones who were exploited.

I agree about Core. Could you please elaborate more about Lightning Labs?

The second hope we have

The paradigm has changed unfortunately, tradefi and institutionals are absorbing bitcoin because if not it would have been baned by most countries. Complete privacy is also impossible as it would have been baned too. So we have to deal with it. In my opinion btc will be a new "gold standard"and the architecture for finance but not for small paiements and not for replacing currencies. That was not the fondamental plan but only one thing drive its use : adoption. Without it you can have the best product, the best idea it won t do anything. It disapointed me but that the way revolution and innovation work.

hindering bitcoin privacy in what way?

A certain degree of traceability is necessary to protect the population: the number of people kidnapped and tortured to force them to transfer BTC is significant, and there is no better protection than being able to find those who commit the crime and go after them. There are many problems with this; one could imagine a future "rules-as-code" model, where elections are on-chain votes and a country's (world) general decisions are made via human on-chain voting, so that if a state becomes criminal, it faces major physical limits. However, there will always be a fault line that must be accepted in order to have a functioning civil society. I could hide how much wealth I have, but I could also be caught and robbed, and the person doing it might or might not believe that what I've given them is actually all I have. Then we're back to the stereotypical Wild West where crime is used to justify power and repression, because on one hand you're creating criminals and on the other you're selling fake security. Playing with your cards relatively open ensures a sufficient trade-off so that you aren't at someone's mercy but can still have a civil society. In reality, you can't expect a society of rational beings who act with a certain level of civility every day, especially when things go wrong.

Privacy on L2/L3 is pretty good (LN, eCash). Maybe not for very large amounts but I would call it a tax on rich. 🤔

Cashu is custodial, and the liquidity of the mints is ridiculous. Lightning is not private for the recipient by default, and this is precisely what I question—it is not implemented due to external interests... Lightning Labs refuses to make BOLT12 a standard.

They wouldn't be targeted in the first place if the public blockchain + KYC didn't give 100% certainty of someone holding funds to criminals. Once criminals have it and swap to Monero, it's gone, chainalysis won't help. Bitcoins public ledger is a giant liability if extra steps aren't taken to protect the user.

Freedom of expression is like privacy: if you restrict it a little in favor of a supposed common good, you end up destroying it over time.

We should introduce you to Monero. It has been removed from almost all centralized exchanges for exactly this reason. The government absolutely fucking hates it. Which tells you that it's doing what needs to be done.

The BOLT12 holdup is the part that should make everyone uncomfortable. Privacy not being default isn't a technical limitation, it's a policy choice wearing an engineering costume. When the recipient is visible by default, surveillance gets baked in at the protocol level. Hard to undo that later.

Sovereignty as maximum entropy is a clean frame. The problem is most people won't fight for entropy they can't feel. Privacy has to be default because asking users to opt in is asking them to understand thermodynamics before they can send money.

I see no reasons to restrict freedom of expression, but I see some for privacy. A small example: let's say you've done some work for someone and they haven't paid you. You go to court and win your case: who can force them to pay what is owed, and how? I can imagine using escrow, sure, but it's not straightforward because, depending on the type of work, locking up the full funds upfront isn't that easy. Likewise, it's not always easy to estimate the total cost in advance, and in other cases, it's hard to define when the work has been completed correctly so that the funds can be released. How do you manage all that while remaining completely anonymous? If we play with our cards relatively open on the table, the issue of information asymmetry doesn't arise; if everyone knows everything about everyone else, or if no one knows anything about anyone else, it isn't a major social problem. The problem occurs when some people know almost everything, while others know almost nothing about those who know almost everything. If we eliminate that asymmetry, I don't see much in the way of "limits" to privacy. There's obviously a long way to go from here to having cameras even in the bathroom as Larry Ellison wants, and in that case, what he wants is clearly asymmetrical, because some people have the cameras and access to the videos while everyone else has to wear them. Where the game is played, rules as code, public blockchain, well, I don't see it as being that problematic.

> without privacy there is no freedom. - Cyph3rp9nk Amazing development. It's happening! View quoted note →

That's right, I appreciate you being able to see it; it's not common these days.

The same lightning labs that is "partnerd" with the WEF?

You can nor have civil society based on theft. Privacy strongly connected to private ownership for everybody is what enabled society in the first place. People get extorted by state criminals and other criminals because KYC kills. Now in certain company setups you can think about sharing information when proper multisig solutions are in place to make any form of theft economically uninteresting. That's the goal we are aiming for with privacy.

You apply old patqdigms to totally new contractual setups. Think of DEX. They are just contracts that self-regulate interest between maker andctaker producer and customer.

FYI - Bitcoin is not the only hope. It was just the first hope and, currently, the most widely-known and highest market cap hope. There's so much hope out there. The real challenge is overcoming earnest people's tribal instincts and religiously-held beliefs.

Exactly

privacy is indeed the forgotten bedrock - without it, bitcoin becomes just another tracked ledger. would be curious which specific privacy technologies you think are being stifled by core/LL. taproot is nice but we need more than that.

I was always under the impression that lightning was very good with privacy, not perfect but much much better than say a bank transfer and that it would be quite difficult for someone to actually track down and transfers. Is this not true ?

Better than a bank transfer? Yes, significantly. The routing is onion-layered so intermediary nodes only see one hop. No central ledger logging every transaction. But "difficult to track" depends on who's looking. With BOLT11 invoices the recipient's node pubkey is right there in the invoice. Channel opens and closes hit the base chain where everything is visible forever. And big routing nodes sitting at network chokepoints can do timing correlation without breaking a sweat. It's not broken, but the privacy is more fragile than most people realize. That gap between perception and reality is exactly what the BOLT12 fight is about.

Cheers for the explanation. Are there any trade offs going to Bolt 12 though ? If there are not any and it is more private seems like a bit of a slam dunk .

Technically? Not really. BOLT12 uses blinded paths so the recipient's node identity stays hidden, supports reusable payment codes (no more generating fresh invoices), and doesn't need a web server for payment requests. The trade-off is adoption. Every wallet, every app, every integration has to update. Lightning Labs dragging their feet on implementation means the ecosystem stays fragmented. So it's less "technical trade-off" and more "political bottleneck." The tech is ready. The coordination isn't.

Are there any wallets looking at implementing it ? Could a wallet be backwards compatible and default to Bolt12 but then fallback to bolt11?

Phoenix already has it live. CLN supports it natively, and LDK is building it in so any wallet using that toolkit gets it eventually. And yes, backwards compatibility is exactly how it works. A wallet can try BOLT12 first and fall back to BOLT11 if the other side doesn't support it. No reason it has to be all or nothing. The real question is when LND adds native support instead of making people bolt on LNDK as a workaround.