Lionir

Lionir , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

This video has seemingly no sources for its claims.

Here are some facts:

• Lyn Alden is part of "Ego Death Capital", a venture capital company around cryptocurrencies (https://egodeath.capital/team).
• Lyn Alden is the Board Director of Swan Bitcoin - a Bitcoin investment platform (https://www.swanbitcoin.com/alden/)
• Lyn Alden is not an economist (https://www.lynalden.com/about-lyn-alden/)

Here are some weird claims it makes:

• 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 cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.
• The value of Bitcoin has only increased over time (~27:50) REALITY CHECK: The log scale is playing tricks. A linear graph would show how volatile Bitcoin has truly been.
• 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.

Here are some things it omits:

• Bitcoin transaction fees (~28:15): Transaction fees that empower miners have also made it much less usable as a currency. The transactions fees for Bitcoin are so high that credit card fees are actually more reasonable.
• 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.
• 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.

Genuinely, this is Bitcoin propaganda.

Lionir , 5 days ago

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.

This is a fancy way to say that it is slower unless you pay higher 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.

The fees are fluctuating and can be much higher than you claim (https://decrypt.co/234446/bitcoin-fees-skyrocket-okx-exchange-burning-utxo)

While it is true you could pay lower fees if you send larger amounts, if we take your 5$ fee at face value, then any transaction below 147.35$ will have lower fees on a payment service like Stripe (3.4% for international transactions + 0.30$ per transaction).

The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.

I did not claim otherwise.

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.

Nobody currently does. However, it is my understanding that theu could fork the network and update it if they had 50%+1 of the network. It is not impossible.

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.

It is a problem because people do not want to pay higher fees.

Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes.

They can pay taxes but they don't have to. There is no system to know the identity and know the tax rate that should be applied using the raw bitcoin transaction method. This has to be applied using an external centralized service at best.

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.

This is not fraud and it is not what I'm talking about.

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 tax and identity layers have to be added on top. They are not built-in. While it is true a country can force things, it is not true they can force the bitcoin network to apply these rules. This is in fact one of the selling points of Bitcoin according to this video.

Lionir OP , 19 days ago

well the statistic you show does make it clear that little people expressed interest in moderation and/or trust & safety.

As for how I relate cisnormativity and the demographics of the board, I feel that people who may have no experience with harassment may not prioritize the construction of moderation tools.

On the technical side, I've expanded here in another comment here.

Lionir OP , 19 days ago

I can't tell what you're trying to say honestly.

Lionir OP , 19 days ago

Do you care to elaborate?

Lionir OP , 17 days ago

I've seen a lot of people specify (any) or a combination in those cases but it is theoretically true, yes. (I don't think that's true here though)

Lionir OP , 17 days ago

I know there are MSCs to make sure more data is e2ee like reactions.

As for anyone putting that in their platform pitch, it seems the closest was the representative of Gematik, the German Health service though most platform pitches are rather vague in details. You can read all of the candidates (do note that not all candidates were elected so do double check) https://matrix.org/governing-board/elections/2024/

Lionir OP , 17 days ago

Yeah, either that or [any]. I don't know why people would be offended.

Also, did you mean enby? I just realised you said nimby (not in my back yard) which is not quite the same thing lol

Lionir , 3 months ago

The DMA (Digital Markets Act) has clauses that force big companies that are considered "gatekeepers" to allow interoperability with other services.

Lionir , 3 months ago

They can, if they read the manual. Mods can’t, but instance admins can.

Yes. If you use arcane commands using the docs that are in a pull request that is not yet merged. This is not accessible to many instance admins and it is only "technically supported" which is the worst kind of support from my point of view.

Lionir , 3 months ago

It’s a basic curl command, that shouldn’t be “arcane” if you’re setting up a server.

This is the equivalent of saying that any instance admin needs to know how to use curl while most people have never used a commandline. Not only that but you need machine access to know the api key which I would wager instance admins do not necessarily have.

I think this is the result of not prioritising work that makes moderation possible by non-technically inclined people and it is genuinely a failure of the system.

The priorities of development on Lemmy are decided by developers and the people who are not are simply pushed away. Most community leaders and moderators are not developers. The mental gymnastics to justify this lack of tooling is tiring.

Lionir , 3 months ago

Images aren’t federated through ActivityPub so I don’t really see how deleting media is supposed to work.

Yes, they are. Every instance downloads everyone's images for a "cached" version that is currently never used. This is what makes this problem especially insidious and straight up dangerous in cases like CSAM.

Lionir , 3 months ago

In what way are those better? Don’t they still suffer from the privacy problems that come with federation?

Yes, the issue is that Lemmy does not even attempt to allow you to delete the image. There is no control for the user to do this. It's literally not possible.

Lionir , 3 months ago

How do I put this? If this is how you respond to criticism, and that's what you've clearly shown repeatedly to do, then you should not be in any leadership position.

You do not apologize even when you admit to be wrong, you blame others instead of taking responsibilities for anything that was said here. It's entirely a dismissive response. You might not have noticed but people do not feel valued at all when they speak to Lemmy's developers. Their input is dismissed, they are told to make issues that you do not care for and when they ask for something to be better prioritized, you effectively tell them to fuck off. You make people feel that their time and effort towards Lemmy is worthless.

With the way you've acted, you have pushed back people from making issues, from contributing in code or otherwise, from wanting to host Lemmy and wanting to be associated with the project. Sincerely, all I can hope at this point is for Lemmy to be forked by better people or to be forgotten about.

Lionir , 3 months ago

To put so much demands on so few people, entitled to their free labor while contributing nothing back, is a terrible thing to do to a person.

I don't know how you managed to do this in one thread but I'll leave these two contradictions here:

• Lemmy devs claim to both "work full time" on the project because of donations and NLNet grants so sublinks could never reach parity in a reasonable timeframe
• Lemmy devs claim that Lemmy is all a labour of love and that asking for a change in leadership and priorities is just "entitled"

Like, I'm not going to deny that entitlement in open source is a thing - it is a thing and it is awful.

However, people are giving you their time, effort and money - you keep dismissing that and doubling down on erasing this work.

I mean, unless you want to tell me how I'm acting entitled to your work despite spending countless hours trying to support my community, spending hours sorting through issues that Lemmy has to label them, spending countless hours advocating for people to make issues and for change in the Lemmy project.

And after all that, trying to have any input on prioritising moderation was met with : (paraphrasing) "I will not change my priorities", "I think you're exagerating moderation issues, they work fine" and plain out refusing to acknowledge lolicon pornography as CSAM, refusing to acknowledge my request to put moderators in Lemmy's matrix channels despite obvious problems during weekend.

Seriously, I kinda expected better from you. I have no trust in Lemmy's leadership and your response here just examplifies that.

Lionir , 3 months ago

But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?

When you accept donations and grants for Lemmy's development and when you work with other people, I think it is normal and good to think about priorities in a more collaborative fashion. I cannot write rust code and many other people cannot do that. When their issues are left ignored, dismissed and repeatedly told that they have no input towards Lemmy's direction - people tend to not want to work with you because they feel that their work is pointless.

Why make an issue if developers admit to not reading them and not changing priorities? Why help towards a collective goal if everyone is just working on their own personal thing? As someone who is not good at writing code - it just feels like shit. My work felt entirely pointless because there was no way for my effort to amount to anything I wanted. Only people who can write code can actually influence the Lemmy project.

I understand feeling burned out but I tried contributing, I tried making things better and all I was met with was "I will not change my priorities" or "I do not think it is valuable to try to bring direction in the Lemmy project" or straight up dismissal or silence. If what you wanted all this time was for you to work on your own thing with no outside input, well, all I can say is you've done good work to make that happen.

I don't think there's anything left for me to tell you.

Lionir , 3 months ago

I think this is a pretty clear example of what I mean when I say that my work was never valued.

I did do work that was non-code - I labeled tons of issues, closed duplicates and those which had already been fixed.

I did try to write code contributions (here and here). One of which was rejected based on purely aesthetic preferences and whose follow-up PR was made dormant forever afterwards.

I tried to help and contribute in the ways I could - apparently this work is just "negativity and complaints".

Lionir , 3 months ago

Community managers - sometimes just talking about your issue with someone will help tremendously in figuring out how to put it and they often can just do it for you. That said, Lemmy devs do not value work being put in the issue tracker - they have admitted to not reading it. People who cannot contribute code are just entirely ignored and have no power in the project's direction.

Lionir , 3 months ago

It's like this on beehaw as well!

Lionir , 3 months ago

The codebase is remarkably not fun to work with according to everyone I've talked to. The language (rust) is also not common for web services so many have no experience with it. These things made people want to start from scratch.

Lionir , 3 months ago

If you can point me to any comments like these, I'd love to remove them fwiw.

Lionir , 3 months ago

I mean, I essentially proposed to do this myself in private conversations with Dessalines but there was no willingness for a shared roadmap so it felt pretty pointless.

Lionir , 3 months ago

Bad faith or not - Fascists are not accepted.

Lionir , 4 months ago

For everyone complaining about 404media needing an account for the posts, they explain their reasoning here : https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/

Lionir , 4 months ago

For most of its history, journalism has been locked behind a paywall. I think it's a bit disingeneous to claim that this principle is against the idea of journalism. Journalism and especially good journalism is expensive - under a capitalist system, it's entirely normal to ask for your work to be valued through monetary means.

That said, I'm most annoyed because no one is actually talking about Stract, just about how 404media decided to lock the article.

Lionir , 4 months ago

I will say I'm pretty glad to see a search engine which actually is not just a meta search engine. I wish Kagi would attempt this rather than partnerning with Brave.

One thing I find odd though is why these engines trying to make their own index don't do the adversarial strategy that Brave Search has done : while using other indexes, collect what people actually click on and use it in your own index. I will note that I do not support Brave.

Lionir , 4 months ago

Stract and SearXNG are two entirely different projects. SearXNG is just using other search engines to power itself - it's known as a meta search engine. Stract has its own index that does not use other search engines to power itself.

Lionir , 11 months ago

Sad to hear that's been happening on Blahaj. Full and unambiguous support from me! 🐝

Lionir , 11 months ago

Right, that's what I imagined. If there's anything I can help with or if you just want to vent, feel free to DM at any time on Matrix