makeasnek

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion

Why not? It's a thing people can buy and sell on the open market just like stocks or futures or whatever. There are dozens of exchanges you can use all around the globe that publish their data openly, that is where average price and market cap comes from, just like a stock. Those coins being sold on exchanges and the prices they are being listed are are determined by real people (or companies or whoever) who own Bitcoin. They set the price they are willing to buy/sell at. The protocol doesn't sell any itself, there's not some massive reserve waiting to be sold.

If one exchange is fudging the price, that creates an arbitrage opportunity which is immediately exploited by trading bots. We are well past the point of the market price being found on exchanges somehow not being real, we passed that point like a decade ago. One can argue how real the reported trading volume is, but price per coin and therefore market cap? Nope.

A stock is a promise/asset, enforced by the legal system, saying you own part of a company. You can trade it with other people and use it to vote on shareholder resolutions. Bitcoin is a currency/asset whose ownership and system of rules is enforced by a decentralized protocol. You can trade it with other people and use it as a currency/use it to send value from one place to another. You could use stocks as a currency, of course, they're just kind of cumbersome to use for that purpose.

re the 2 billion: Massive buys and sells change the price just like with stocks or other assets. The market cap is not the real amount you would pay if you tried to buy (or sell) all the available supply because that number is uknowable. It's just the current value of one unit of the thing times the number of units in existence.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion

They handed over their own BTC over to the government. If you have the private keys, you control the coin. If you don't, no amount of money or guns can make that coin move thanks to math and physics. However, a $5 wrench rammed repeatedly into your head may make you divulge those private keys. Strength of encryption is rarely the weakest link in any modern cryptographic system. But that wrench used on anybody who doesn't know the keys? Useless. It's pretty powerful stuff in that regard.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion

If this sounds like a big number, keep in mind this is roughly 0.02% of the Bitcoin in circulation. The eventual total supply of BTC is 21 million BTC. Bitcoin's market cap is around 800 billion USD, which puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP. Next to switzerland, bigger than Norway, Sweden, Vietnam or Israel. (GDP isn't the same as market cap, just trying to give an example for scale).

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in How Do I Avoid Giving Home Address to Bank?

You can either:

• Shop at grocery stores that accept bitcoin. Farmers markets are often good places to find BTC vendors, or you may have a "BTC vendor day" in your area. If you look up "Bitcoin in Tulsa, Oklahoma" or wherever you live, there are plenty of sites with maps of vendors that support BTC.
• Use online sites like like bitrefill which let you buy gift cards with your Bitcoin, often with significant discounts. Pretty much any major retailer can be spent at this way
• Use a "bitcoin debit card" which is essentially a custodial bitcoin account you put BTC into and when you swipe your debit card, it automatically converts your BTC to fiat to pay the merchant. This of course requires KYC.
• Worth noting that most grocery stores in the US have coinstars, which you can use to buy and maybe also sell Bitcoin? Many others have Bitcoin atms. I believe these also require some degree of kyc, I haven't used them before.

makeasnek OP , 5 months ago to New Communities in BOINC on Lemmy !boinc@sopuli.xyz donate your computing power to science

Let's goooo!

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Privacy in How Do I Avoid Giving Home Address to Bank?

For many of these things, if you are genuinely homeless and have no stable address, there are ways to do it you just have to tell the bank/agency you are working with. However, lying to them is a different thing and for many of these institutions it would be a crime, so don't do that.

• IRS: You can specify a different mailing address, but I believe you must provide a home address and sign things under penalty of perjury. Ask a CPA. There may be some way to have a lawyer or CPA file for you and put their address on it instead.

• Voting: Depends on the state, ask your local voter registration office. Anti-stalking laws may help you here.

• DMV: Nope, they're not gonna let you get a license or tags without an address. Especially if you want a REALID which you can use to take planes.

• Bank: Banks are required to have your home address thanks to the PATRIOT act and other laws. But you don't have to have a bank account.

One great alternative to banks is Bitcoin. It doesn't require any ID or other personal information to use. You can't pay for everything with it, but you can pay for some things with it, and every time you do, you help build an economy that doesn't require you have six forms of ID to access it. If you start asking and looking, you'd be surprised how many places will accept it. 20% of Americans own some form of cryptocurrency, 50% of millennial males making >75k/year do. That number grows every year.

• Bitcoin has been faithfully relaying transactions for 15 years 24/7 365 without a single hour of downtime or hack. It has a clear fiscal policy it has kept to. The bitcoin ledger, where transactions are stored, is the most secure document in the world and is completely decentralized and politically neutral. No government can force it to do anything it isn't designed to do.
• All you need to access it is a mobile phone and an internet connection.
• With Bitcoin lightning, international transactions confirm in under a second with fees 100-1000% less than credit cards, often times under a single cent per transaction.
• In every major metropolitan area, there are places you can exchange Bitcoin in person for other currencies. You can also do it online. Some of those places require ID, others don't.
• Your funds are yours and yours alone. No bank or other entity can lock them up or take them from you. Likewise, there is a limited supply of Bitcoin, so nobody can print more Bitcoin and make yours worth less in the process like is done with every major fiat currency.
• Bitcoin's adoption on average continues to grow year after year no matter how you measure it: liquidity, amount locked in lightning, number of nodes, whatever.
• For most major retailers online and off, you can buy their gift cards with Bitcoin at exchange sites
• And it does all this for less than 1% of global energy usage, often times from renewables.

For a custodial wallet (somebody else holds the funds for you, much like a bank) I suggest Strike. You can easily buy/sell BTC/USD and move between your bank account. Note most custodial wallets require some form of ID and if their company goes under, it takes your funds with it. "Not your keys, not your coins".

For a non-custodial wallet, I highly suggest Phoenix which uses lightning (a layer on top of bitcoin). No ID is required. The downside of self-custody/non-custodial wallets is that when you send your first funds to it, you will need to "swap in" and "make a channel", which incurs a fee for using the BTC layer one blockchain, which is $1-$10 depending on which day you do it. After that, you can use lightning which has the crazy low fees mentioned above. If you don't want to use lightning and your transactions are usually larger and/or rare, you can use a classic non-lightning wallet. All this may sound a bit complicated, but it's because you're already used to all the complication that comes with navigating the banking system. After you've setup your wallet, it will become equally intuitive to you, it's just a matter of dipping your toes in.___-

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in NSA Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says

There was some shady stuff on behalf of the DNC but he legitimately lost. He didn't get the votes. Because his voters didn't vote in the primaries. A number of reforms have been made to the primary system since then, a bunch of the people who oversaw that primary got fired, and many states are now moving towards ranked choice voting which will eliminate the need for primaries entirely. If half the people who complain about how voting is useless actually participated in the primary process, our political landscape would look a lot different. I used to be one of those people, I get it, the whole damned thing is a bit of a racket, but it doesn't change that voting takes 5 minutes and has a concrete impact on who runs the government.

Edit: And that's the presidential race. You can make much more of a difference, and the rules are much less wonky, in local and state elections. Hell, many of those positions are entirely uncontested.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in NSA Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says

The reason you only get to vote for the "lesser of two evils" is because you don't participate in primaries (assuming you are talking about the US system here). If MAGA can get a psycho like Trump to be their party nominee, you can get your kind of psycho nominated as well.

Primaries are where you actually get a chance to express what kind of candidate you want. Hell, you can even run for office! Generals are where you hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils because otherwise it's an automatic vote for the worst of the two evils.

I agree voting seems pointless sometimes. But it's still important. But it's a lever of power you have access to and nobody can take it away from you no. And you can spend the 364 other days of the year impacting politics in other ways.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in NSA Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says

You can do both. You always get the same shitty options to vote for because most people don't vote, and even fewer of them vote in primaries or participate in the political process in other ways.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Memes in How I like my pi

!boinc is the final level. Using your Pi to cure cancer and identity asteroids

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Privacy in NSA Buys Americans’ Internet Data Without Warrants, Letter Says

Elections have consequences. Vote in generals and vote in primaries. Tell your reps (and potential reps) that you care about privacy.

makeasnek OP , 8 months ago to Memes in 🇪🇺 How the EU Feels about

It can be you. It doesn't have to be Big Corps or Government. It can be federated instances, it can be self-ownership of data, it can be E2E encrypted.