makeasnek

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

What if:

• Our government didn't have the ability to print money? What if going to war meant raising taxes?
• We took the control of the money supply out of their hands and instead used free and open source software to create money and move it around?
• Our economy wasn't predicated on a target 2-3% inflation rate? What if you were not incentivized to spend your money because it's just losing value every day you don't spend it? How might our consumption/production patterns change? How might that impact sustainability?
• The government couldn't move money from the 99% to the 1% every time a bank needed to be bailed out? What if they didn't print away all the value of money you earned? What if when the economy grew, the value of your money increased just as it would naturally if somebody wasn't printing away the difference?

How might the world look different?

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Good for who? Where does value move when your currency is reduced in value by an expansion in the supply? To regular people? No. Lower and middle class people are the ones who have the most cash, they have a higher ratio of cash to net worth than rich people who can put their money into assets. They have an emergency fund. They are saving up to become property owners.

Humanity survived and grew total economic output for millennia before inflationary paper currency came around. Inflationary paper currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm not saying we should go back to the gold standard, but that ended in 1971. That's pretty recent.

If you live in a hyperinflation environment, you will spend your money on anything because it's better than holding onto that money and see it become worthless. It might seem silly to own 12 blenders, but buying yet another blender is a better investment than simply sitting on your money for a month in Turkey. At least a blender can blend and maybe be re-sold at a later date. That effect still happens in mildly inflationary economies: we are incentivized to buy goods and services we don't need because the alternative is just slowly watching our money lose value. This is not a great incentive to have baked into our financial system when we live on a planet with finite resources.

On the other hand, if your money is expected to retain or gain value, somebody has to really convince you to part with it. Does that mean products are built to last? Built more repairable or sustainable? Perhaps. You will still buy things of course, everybody needs stuff, but at least the incentive is trending in the right direction instead of towards needless consumption.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

.onion

makeasnek , 4 months ago

We beat KOSA before, we can beat it again. Contacting your reps matters. Voting matters, especially in primaries and locals. So does being active politically in other ways.

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Do you have to pay comcast extra to stream netflix? No? Net neutrality still exists.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

A total breakdown in net neutrality could have very well had that result.

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Some have tried, they have all failed. Bitcoin is international. A 51% attack is so implausibly expensive that nobody really has the resources to pull it off. Even if you had enough money and energy to burn, there is the small problem of acquiring enough of the specialized hardware to do it (ASIC miners), and potentially the specs and fab to make that hardware. People will see it coming a mile away. Don't want to use ASICs? Enjoy at least a 100x increase in energy and equipment costs. And it gets more expensive every year. If you had that much money to put into destroying Bitcoin, it would be much better spent on an ad campaign telling people Bitcoin was bad than doing a 51% attack.

A 51% attack doesn't prove Bitcoin is broken, it proves the protocol is working exactly as expected. A 51% attack causes a temporary fork. This happens all the time organically when two miners find the next block at the same time, it's a natural part of the protocol. That's why for really large or important transactions on main chain, you wait a few blocks before considering them fully secured.

Bitcoin's value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There's a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it's actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that's bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it's a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you'd be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it's available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are "unbanked" and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.

Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That's to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it's 1910. You just don't see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it's not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.

That's not even getting into the secondary costs to the environment of running a society on an economy based on an inflationary currency which requires that currency be rapidly spent because it's getting constantly devalued. That's a great strategy to rapidly industrialize the world, but it's not a great strategy on a globe with limited resources. Tell me, if you knew your dollar would be worth 10% more next year, would you be more hesitant to spend it? Might you consume less if you knew saving money in your bank account would actually cause it's value to stay the same or increase over time? Might you focus your spending more on quality products that will last instead of just buying the cheapest thing because if it breaks, you can just buy a new one? This isn't just on a personal level, this same kind of calculus is used by big investment firms to build everything that won't last. Buildings, stadiums, entire cities, financed with money that is constantly losing value. Bitcoin's value relative to goods and services will fluctuate like any currency does, but the supply of the currency does not increase. There are 21 million which will ever be minted. Your 0.1BTC will always be 0.1BTC and will always represent 0.1/128M% of the total supply. If the Bitcoin economy grows, you share in that growth and the value it produces instead of seeing the difference printed away and given to whoever controls the money supply and whoever they want to give it to.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Um.. we very much had ransomware and viruses before crypto. Bank wires have been irreversible.. forever. Before crypto, ransomware also demanded gift cards and prepaid debit cards. 99% of the crime on earth is paid for using fiat currency, not Bitcoin.

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I think the best solution would be to properly tax carbon. That way Bitcoin miners would either become unprofitable or move to greener energy.

I think cap and trade can be a good idea, the problem is getting all the countries in the world to sign onto it. Any country that doesn't ends up with a competitive advantage. But if you somehow got them to all agree, blockchain actually provides a perfect way to build a cap-and-trade system that every country can participate in, transparently, without having to trust one country or group of countries to run it honestly. That's the essential problem blockchain solves: administering systems trustlessly.

Bitcoin miners do by and large use green energy since it tends to be the cheapest (off-peak hours from over-provisioned grids). If electricity gets more expensive, it doesn't mean it becomes unprofitable to mine, that's only one side of the equation. The other side is how much people are willing to pay to get transactions added to the blockchain, which is a number, on average, that has increased year after year. Not that you ever need to make an on-chain transaction, with Bitcoin lightning you can do transactions off-chain while getting much of the security of on-chain transactions. You can move money internationally in under a second for pennies in fees. And it works just as easily as venmo. In fact, if you have cash app on your phone, you already have the ability to use the lightning network, though it's a custodial wallet (meaning you are trusting cash app not to take/lose your BTC).

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Do you know that Tether and Bitcoin are different things? Because it seems like you don't.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

sorts by controversial 🍿

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Stablecoins are a house of cards built around stably relating to another house of cards which is the entire inflationary fiat system. Every single asset and currency is speculated on via the open market. Bitcoin is no exception. If it is overvalued or undervalued, that creates market opportunities for people to exploit the difference. The market has decided it's worth a certain amount today, it will be another amount tomorrow. Not unique to Bitcoin. Every year people have said Bitcoin was "overvalued" and powered purely by hype, on average, the market has decided they were wrong the following year.

Any honestly-run stablecoin inherently has to collateralize their coin with something. They can buy BTC (and do), they can buy USD (and do), they can buy wheat futures (but I'm not sure they do). Ultimately, a diverse portfolio would probably be wisest. Yet you don't see anybody complaining that "USD is being pumped by Tether/USDC". Why? Because it's not a problem.

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

If everybody suddenly sold all their USD, EUR, or other currency, that currency's value relative to other currencies would also crash. That's not unique to Bitcoin.

People cash out their currency to buy goods and services, that's the whole point. You accept currency knowing you can spend it later. It's useless in and of itself. In order for them to spend it later, somebody has to be their "exit liquidity" and trade a good or service they have for that currency. You can call that a ponzi scheme if you want, or you can just call it currency, because that's how currency works.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

There will be 21 million coins minted. Ever. That is Bitcoin's fiscal policy. There are 62 million millionaires in the world. There isn't enough Bitcoin for every millionaire in the world to have an entire coin. An entire coin currently costs around $40,000. Y'all do the math.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

"will transition to decentralized", "most likely", because we can always trust people to give up their vast power and wealth voluntarily right?

Or you could use Bitcoin. Which has been decentralized and reliable for 15 years and doesn't suffer from inevitably increasing centralization like every proof-of-stake coin does. And doesn't have massive requirements to run a full node/validator, which inherently increases centralization. Scaling crypto requires adding layers on top of the base layer, not making the base layer so huge you need a server farm to run a full node. Lightning scaled Bitcoin to essentially an infinite number of transactions per second without increasing the chain size.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

PoS inevitably leads to centralization and requires an inflationary currency supply. That is the problem. Coins in transit can't stake. Which means the only coins that can stake are coins that already exist and are sitting on a staking node. You are paying those stakers with an inflationary supply. Which means you are minting new coins and handing them to users who already have the most coins. This leads to centralization of the supply over time, and therefore, control of network consensus. A few rich, powerful people end up controlling the whole system, just like our existing banking system. No thanks.

Most of those PoS chains also have massive chain sizes/system requirements compared to Bitcoin, which means they can't be or remain nearly as decentralized, neutral, and secure.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

IDGAF about Tether, IMO it will collapse one day, and the world will be better for it. It's a currency whose basis is "trust me bro".

makeasnek , 4 months ago

I'm saying that the transition to a Bitcoin-based economy will be a massive shake-up in global wealth distribution. Where each individual person ends up at the end of it is a factor of how soon they stop calling it a ponzi scheme and instead recognize its value as a currency. We have an opportunity to fix global wealth inequality, particularly the wealth inequality enforced through the dollar the the debt-cycle trap so many countries have fallen into. The dollar is a tool of US imperialism, it's traditional colonialism with a few extra steps. We extract trillions of dollars of value from other countries which rely on the dollar because we print currency which is essentially a tax on the entire world.

There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D

Bitcoin is still capitalism, it can't fix capitalism's flaws, but it can move us towards a world where the flaws of fiat currency and currency imperialism are fixed. It can move us to a world where the government isn't constantly printing away the value of your hard-earned money, where governments must increase taxes to fund wars. That world looks very different.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

The whole idea behind IOG is to build the Cardano to the point it can become an independent, self-sustaining and self-developing thing.

So weird how proof-of-work currencies like Bitcoin were able to do that without making a centralized governance structure which promised to hand over the keys later.

yes TWO mining pools control more than half of the Bitcoins block production

Mining pools have been getting more distributed the last few years thanks to some network upgrades. Pools relay the results of mining, they don't do the actual mining, they have no hashpower. In the past, pools have tried to censor transactions, and seen their pool get abandoned by the entire network. They couldn't censor them of course, they could only temporarily delay them. Pools have no power. They can't double-spend or 51% attack because nearly all of the BTC they acquire flows right back to miners. They can't afford the cost of a 51% attack more than any other entity or nation-state. They can't spend money which isn't theirs, even if they could do a 51% attack. If you look at hashpower instead of pools, you will see it's much more decentralized.

Actually, in Cardano, the rich don’t really get richer because every single holder no matter how small gets rewards proportional to their holdings (if they stake or delegate, which is risk free and no locking unlike Ethereum and Solana garbage PoS).

The rewards proportion isn't why the "rich get richer". The rich get richer because coins in transit can't stake. This means the only coins that can stake are existing coins, sitting in wallets, doing nothing but staking. You are printing an inflationary currency supply, making new coins, and giving those coins to those who are already sitting on the most coins. The more coins you have, the greater portion of your coins will be sitting instead of moving, because why not, it's free money right? For doing nothing. It's why supply inflation/currency devaluation hurts the middle class more than anybody else. They have an emergency fund, they have a savings account, they are saving up for a down payment. They have more cash on hand than rich people or poor people. Rich people have assets. Poor people don't have enough money to be effected. The proportionality doesn't matter here. What matters is the direction of the new coin flow: towards those who are already sitting on coins.

In a fixed supply, your coins may gain value over time due to deflationary pressure. Every coin is effected the same way. In cardano and other inflationary currencies, you've added an additional layer where you are printing coins and handing them to those with the most coins already. Not only does this give them more coins, it reduces the value of the coins held by people whose coins recently transited.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

The previous poster is alleging BTC is being "pumped" by tether because tether is collateralizing their coin by buying BTC. I'm pointing out that they also buy USD yet nobody is complaining that USD is being pumped.

If you buy a stablecoin, the hope is that the stablecoin is tied to an actual dollar (or whatever it is supposed to represent). This means if you buy $1 in tether, tether should buy $1 USD on the open market, put it in a vault, and wait until somebody else comes back to sell that dollar back to Tether. But you can buy other stuff too, other assets, which when you start managing large amounts of money is important for risk management. Plus they can make some returns that way. Some stablecoins pass the returns on to people who hold the stablecoin. Generally, these stablecoins are collapses waiting to happen for these and many other reasons.

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

On main chain. Via lightning you can support all the capacity of Visa/Mastercard/banks and then some. Main chain provides the security for lightning, lightning provides the transaction storage space and infrastructure.

The lightning infrastructure, if you graph it, looks very similar to existing global payment networks. The difference is that transactions settle instantly because they are protected by the underlying blockchain and they are automated with no middlemen to delay things. No complicated currency conversions, no banks negotiating liquidity in blocks manually and having to buy/sell other assets to stay in balance, no bank holidays, less fees. Which means you can take your money from person-to-person faster, which reduces friction in the economy. Which is exactly what a good currency should be.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

I'm not saying it doesn't impact the price, I'm saying it doesn't matter. Bitcoin's current price looks like a steal to me if it's going to be the underlying currency for the global economy.

All currency is speculated on. The market finds the right price. Then it corrects. The price goes up and down. That's how markets work. The USD is guaranteed to lose value and buying power over time due to an inflationary supply. That's not even throwing in the US's declining role as a global currency hegemon and the reduced demand it causes.

Bitcoin? It could go up or down relative to other currencies or goods, but my portion of the supply relative to the whole will always be the same. That's why I buy bitcoin.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the pools send the block that needs to get mined to it’s participants? If that’s the case, imagine if those 2 top pools decide to do sus stuff or if they get compromized by malware. This could create some trouble until miners migrate. Again, correct me if I’m wrong. Having 2 such large mining pools is not cool and there is no hiding from that fact.

I've love to see more pools, but I just don't think its as big of an issue as it's often made out to be, since they don't actually control the hashpower. The blocks they send to participants are immediately verifiable as real or not, miners don't have to take a pool's word for it and will often have full nodes monitoring the blockchain to make sure any given pool doesn't go over 51% hashpower.

Pools really can't do sus stuff. There are a few things pools could do or try to do:

• Censor transactions by refusing to include them in blocks. They are financially incentivized not to do this, since not including a tx in the block means selecting the next least valuable tx in terms of fees. The immediate damage from this is basically nil, the next block will probably be made by a different pool and the tx will go through. So transactions can't get censored, only delayed. But people will notice, and that pool will lose all its hashpower and its means of making money, which is exactly what happened when this scenario happened before. Bitcoin has faced, and beaten back, this exact attack before.

• Conspire to perform a 51% attack. They don't just need 51% between each other, they need enough hashpower to roll back previous blocks, which means maintaining 51% for several blocks in a row. One of the primary reasons 51% attacks are not viable is that you need to give that Bitcoin to somebody, get something of value in return, and then un-spend it. They need to transfer you that equivalent amount of value before it gets unspent. Nobody transferring hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of value is going to be happy with a one block confirmation. Or even a three block confirmation. Even if they were, what items can you actually transfer that quickly? It's just not viable as an attack method, there is no money to be gained. Pool operators are fallible at the rest of us, if there was a viable way to do a 51% attack, somebody would have done it by now. But it's not.

What do you mean, coins in transit can’t stake? I have 10 coins (wallet staked), you have 0 coins (wallet staked), I send you 5 coins (atomic operation)

If a block moves a coin from a to b, that coin can't also the coin that stakes that block. Granted, I am showing some ignorance of Cardano here, but that's how other PoS systems work. And there is usually a "cooldown" of a couple blocks to prevent that coin from staking for a while for security reasons.

I didn't know about cardano's capped supply, you've taught me a few things in this thread. Until the system is actually decentralized and the cardano devs give away the master keys and let the network truly run on its own, I have little interest in it. And based on some cursory reading, centralization of relays and growing chain size are much more of a concern than with Bitcoin. Best of luck to you.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

This may be true for Cardano, but not for Bitcoin. As more BTC gets mined, your percentage of the total supply goes down

This is so terribly incorrect. Bitcoin has a fixed supply. Those miners are selling those coins on the open market and they are running out as you say. 1 BTC is the same portion of the total final supply it was a year ago or 10 years ago.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Quantum computing is not a threat at all tbh. Computers that can crack public key encryption are "20 years away" and require some fundemental shifts in our ability to control physics. And that's the lab production version, not one available on the open market.

Quantum-resistant algorithms already exist and continue to be refined. Things will get migrated long before they become a realistic threat.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

BTC's protocol has gotten steady, incremental improvements for 15 years without a single hour of downtime. Lightning was deployed a few years ago and continues to grow each year and get easier to use and deploy. Migration to quantum-resistant algorithms is in the interest of all parties who use the system including miners, banks, hedge funds, developers, users, etc. It's a very easy problem compared to other questions they faced around blocksize, taproot, etc.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

I'm just using the lemmy.ml web interface, which does.

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

This requires multiple transactions on the blockchain

It literally requires one to open and one to close, so like $1 most of the time in fees. If you have a custodial wallet, it requires zero. You can keep a channel open forever. Within that channel, you can have essentially infinite transactions between you and any other party and you can use the channel to route payments to anybody on lightning network. All those transactions settle within a second and have fees measured in pennies. A channel doesn't need to be opened for every baby being born, babies don't use money. Seriously though, there are additional improvements coming down the pipe (like channel factories) which enable you to use one on-chain tx to make hundreds of channels. People do not understand the scale lightning works at.

The amount that both sides put in “escrow” is the max payment imbalance that a channel can accept

All of this is abstracted away for you as a user, you don't have to worry about it, especially for custodial wallets. Most people earn and spend roughly the same amount each month, so liquidity isn't anything they ever need to think about. There are also automated ways to rent inbound liquidity which are incredibly cheap, that can be done with self-custody wallets.

Say, you want to use a channel to buy a car for $20k, then you need a channel that both you and the other guy have put in $20k in bitcoin.

Wrong. If you want to buy a car for $20k, you have to put $20k into lightning. The other guy doesn't have to put in anything aside from the $1 in on-chain tx fees to be on the lightning network in the first place, which he doesn't even pay if he has a custodial wallet. Then you send that 20k to the guy with the car. Now you can receive up to 20k in payments in that channel. Not that you would spend $20k via lightning, if you are buying a car and moving that much money, use main chain.

If some calamity happens, these funds are lost in nirvana.

Calamity doesn't happen, funds don't get lost. Custodial wallets literally never encounter this, it's all handled by your custodian. Non-custodial wallets also rarely encounter this, all the incentives are lined up to make "force closes" (which is what I assume you are referring to) rare. And of those force closes, the only risk is that your counterparty publishes an old version of the channel. You have like five days to correct and publish your more recent version to claim your funds. And if they tried to cheat you out of your funds, you get your funds and they pay a penalty. Given that watchtowers are basically automated, this never happens. Your funds from one of your channels might be stuck on-chain for a few days at worst, this is not a nightmare scenario. Banks and traditional payment processors have random holds all the time, especially when dealing with anything international. The difference is, the funds in lightning are always yours because you have the key. There is no scenario where when properly used, you lose funds in lightning.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Expensive is relative. It's expensive to send a $5 transaction and pay $1 in fees. However, you can move a million dollars in value and pay that same $1 in fees. That $1 in fees can also open a lightning channel which can contain essentially infinite transactions within it. For small transactions, Lightning transactions settle in under a second for fees measured in pennies.

Compared to a bank wire, western union, or other remittance services, $1 is an absolute steal.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Solana is incredibly centralized compared to BTC. The higher the TPS on your base layer the harder it is to meet the hardware requirements to run a full node. Scaling in layers is the solution.

Eth's L2s are a confusing mess. They offer a variety of degrees of security and decentralization, some of them, like Polygon, are a network run with only 15 validators, yikes! And many of them are secured by a single bridge. There have been plenty of notable bridge hacks, it is not fun when your currency gets depegged.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Its sole purpose is to be a global currency you can send from A to B effortlessly and without relying on trusted intermediaries. It has done that for 15 years, every day, every hour, without a single hour of downtime or hack.

Even if these statistics are perfect, it's nonsense framing to not put them in context. How does that electrical compare to the electrical burden caused by SWIFT? Western Union? etc. https://endthefud.org has a number of great sources for that

makeasnek , 5 months ago

A hardware wallet is a great option, so is cold storage which you can do with a cheap $50 laptop. Most important is keeping backups. Think about how you will access your coins when your laptop or hardware wallet dies. Think about ways to prevent loss due to natural disaster. Multi-sig and shamirs secret sharing scheme are two ways to store coins in such a way that you won't lose them if your house burns down without having to trust a single party to custody them.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

Yes, if you have your 12-word seed, that's all you need.

Note: If you have a self-custody Bitcoin lightning wallet, you also need to backup your wallet "state". You also need to let your wallet access the internet every once and a while to monitor channel states to prevent theft of funds by somebody closing a channel and broadcasting an old state. Lightning is not designed for long-term storage, so don't use it for that purpose. Every wallet handles backup differently. Phoenix makes this automatic, it's awesome. Or you can just consider your lightning wallet your everyday spending money, not keep big amounts in it, not worry about backing it up. That's what I do. I figure the $25 I have on my phone is the least of my concerns if my house burns down.

Multi-sig is a type of wallet where in order to spend money from it, multiple other wallets need to sign off on the transaction. These wallets can be your friends/family, your bank, or other trusted custodian. You can set a threshold: 2 of 3 wallets, all wallets (bad idea! You lose all your funds if you lose a single wallet). It's a great way to custody funds long-term safely while eliminating single points of failure.

Shamir's secret sharing scheme can split your seed phrase into multiple parts. You can give those parts to other people, the key can't be re-assembled without the requisite number of parts (threshold) which is set by you. If somebody's part gets lost or stolen, no problem, nobody can do anything unless they have enough parts.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

If you want low fees for buying and selling BTC, strike is awesome, supports more countries, and supports Bitcoin lighting which makes tx fees crazy low for sending money to other people or your other wallets. Coinbase doesn't, so getting BTC off coinbase is expensive as you have to pay main chain fees. Those can be $1-$12 depending on the day.

BISQ is also great, self-custody, and decentralized for making trades, but more complex. Look into it if you trade regularly.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

This is a great idea until you forget whatever trick you used to encode the words onto that page, which becomes more and more likely the longer you store it and don't look at it. Have fun trying all the combinations for the 250 words you put on the page, if you can even recognize the page in your pile of papers since there's I'm assuming you don't have "SEED PHRASE" plastered across it in big letters.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

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 (edited 5 months ago)

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 (edited 5 months ago)

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

True. There are some pretty good effort estimates out there, idk what they are, but there are definitely some lost keys.

makeasnek OP , 5 months ago

Let's goooo!

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

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

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 , 5 months ago

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

makeasnek , 5 months ago

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

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

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.