makeasnek

makeasnek , 3 months ago to Privacy in Does ProtonVPN no longer offer the option to pay in crypto?

There are ways to achieve significant privacy using Bitcoin, the protocol itself is pseudonymous, lightning in many ways enhances privacy. But you need to know what you are doing and there are many gotchas.

makeasnek , 3 months ago to Memes in Thank you American software

How come every thread I see about this topic, there is nobody who is concerned about letting the federal government dictate which apps you can and cannot use to communicate with other people? This is some 1984 shit.

makeasnek , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Privacy in Spain orders Sam Altman's Worldcoin to shut down eyeball-scanning orbs due to privacy concerns

It did. With Bitcoin, anybody with a cell phone and halfway reliable internet access can send money globally in under a second for pennies in fees (with Bitcoin lightning). They can be their own bank without trusting any single third party. It doesn't matter if their country has secure banking infrastructure and it doesn't matter what their credit score is. There are countries on this planet where women aren't allowed to open bank accounts. Bitcoin doesn't give AF.

It has promoted and maintained the exact same fiscal policy for 15 years without a single hour of downtime or hack: a limited supply and a guarantee of your ability to transfer your coin to somebody else. No bank holidays, nobody devaluing your currency by increasing the supply. No having your savings robbed by an unstable central bank. It gives anybody in the world access to a currency that is already as stable or more stable than most national currencies. And it gives any country in the world an option aside from using USD and, inherently, losing some degree of autonomy in the process. There's a reason Ecuador and Argentina went in on it so hard.

People underestimate how big Bitcoin really is. It's market cap is 850 billion USD, that's the size of Sweden's GDP and puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. On average, it has a trend of consistent growth year after year as adoption continues to increase. It is uncensorable, the US could decide to ban Bitcoin tomorrow, a gamma ray from space could blast half of the earth out of existence, and the next block would come regardless and the network would continue to function.

It does all this for around 1% of global electricity usage, mainly from renewables and is powering a new green revolution by being a "buyer of last resort" for power grids. This makes electricity cheaper for all other users of the grid as it's able to buy power when nobody else wants it, enabling power generation facilities to not lose money during times of low demand. This also makes it easier for grids to add renewable capacity. Bitcoin is a form of energy storage in that sense. Miners don't buy power during times of peak demand for price reasons, so it doesn't take power that anybody else would be using.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Memes in More Power = More Bill

And more scientific research accomplished if you donate your CPU cycles with !boinc !

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Fediverse in Open source meets open science - announcing the Open Science Network initiative

Y'all should know about BOINC. It's one of the world's largest distributed computing networks used for "volunteer computing" where people donate computing time to scientific research. It's federated/permissionless/open and anybody can create a BOINC project. !boinc

Also check out #DeSci, lots of people working on interesting incentive mechanisms to fix scientific publishing. There's a whole bunch of projects listed here http://desci.world/

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Memes in Can confirm, it does feel good

Yep have done this for years. Cut a corner off a sponge each time it enters its next life phase so you can easily identity the phase it's in by the way it looks.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Memes in Can confirm, it does feel good

Hot take: there is no food safety reason to replace a sponge if it's still good at removing food from dishes. If you remove the food source, and the soap removes whatever is living on the dish, whatever is left over will die due to lack of nutrients and water. It's why in food safety courses you are taught that dishes have to dry completely. Even a sponge which has been used once will be depositing "new" pathogens onto the dish. Stuff is gonna live in the sponge. The sponge doesn't kill pathogens. Removal, soap, and desiccation do. The sponge's job is almost purely mechanical.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Fediverse in You Can Now Self Host A Bluesky Instance

Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

• Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
• On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
• On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can't stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated "public squares" according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn't blocked you).
• On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it's not, so this doesn't happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it's clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
• Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Privacy in What are your thoughts on USB storage drives that have keypad encryption?

Hardware signing devices have lots of utility because they keep the key from ever being on the machine (which is more likely to be compomised). Think ledger or trezor for your Bitcoin. Hardware encryption devices are just really expensive and black-box ways to avoid Veracrypt.

If your encryption algorithm is secure, you have no use for automatic lock-out. If it's not, automatic lockout won't do much against an attacker with physical access to the device. Unless they are dumb enough to trigger the lockout AND the internal memory wipes itself sufficiently well AND/OR the attacker doesn't have the resources to reverse engineer the device.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Privacy in Backdoors that let cops decrypt messages violate human rights, EU court says

Elections matter. Elections decide who gets to appoint judges (or you can directly elect judges depending on the court system). Being politically active in other ways matters too. Apathy doesn't work.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Privacy in Nitter is over - It's been a fun ride

Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

• Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
• On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
• On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can't stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated "public squares" according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn't blocked you).
• On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it's not, so this doesn't happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it's clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
• Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Technology in OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion

It can. Lightning transactions are as easy and lightweight to process as e-mail. They measure in the bytes or kb in size, no mining is required.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Technology in OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion

Except it's not. Lightning is incredibly decentralized, you can run a full lightning node on a raspberry pi. I have one running on my phone. Look up a graph of lightning network, looks just like any other decentralized system. Nodes you route through never have custody of your funds, unlike a bank.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Technology in Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption

Ethereum uses proof-of-stake, there is no "mining" in a traditional sense, so its power consumption is more akin to e-mail than mining crypto. But proof-of-stake leads to centralization over time, which is antithetical to what Bitcoin people want.

makeasnek , 4 months ago to Technology in OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion

It's been letting people be their own bank for 15 years. You can send transactions across the globe for pennies in fees which confirm instantly using Bitcoin lightning. The supply has remained capped at 21 million. It's doing exactly what it said it would do without a single hack or hour of downtime 24/7, 365.