"a sufficient purity test" lol

i can't tell if this is a troll or not so i guess that means it's a good troll

I think you are deeply confused on some level.

it's a 1 step process:

Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Don't pay attention to all the cope. There happen to be a lot of noisy bitcoiner cultists who can't accept a different custody model. Same energy as the bitcoin haters who haven't put in the work to understand the thing they hate.

Thanks for asking a great question!

After thinking about it for a day or two I think it is exceedingly unlikely the government will overtly seize the bitcoin backing the ETFs. At least not right away. First they will deputize Blackrock and whoever else into issuing paper bitcoin instruments. Due to the absolute size of these wallets this will have a serious negative impact on the spot price of real bitcoin. At least for a while. Just like fiat currency manipulation, this will drive a black market price for bitcoin that exceeds the official sanctioned price. This scenario could continue for an extended period. The long game is the same, however. Eventually the USA will need a bitcoin treasury and these honeypots are simply too big to ignore. We all need to prepare accordingly, especially the ETF share owners.

They are buying price exposure. It's a start. Some fraction of those folks will get curious and buy real bitcoin and withdraw to self custody. Our job is not to look down on these folks, it is to educate them. When you notice one of these people asking the right questions you should feed their curiosity. Guide them to the rabbit hole.

The ETFs are a natural vehicle for orange pilling people. You just need to apply the right strategy. It's safe to assume ETF purchasers are primarily interested in price appreciation. Use this knowledge. The SEC prohibited in-kind redemption for the bitcoin ETFs. So ETF owners are forced to convert into dollars when they sell. This is a taxable event, which is not a coincidence. The Wall Street alliance made sure to change the rules so the gov can get their pound of flesh. Use this fact to drive home the importance of self-custody.

Once they understand the tax benefits of self custody you can start to explain the macro game theory. Speculative attacks on the dollar will continue to ramp up and the government will get more desperate as the dollar continues to depeg from everything and inflate to the stratosphere. The feds will start closing onramps and forcing more and more people into captured vehicles like the ETFs. At first they will justify it with tax collection. Eventually the ETFs will get rugged. Feds will seize the underlying bitcoin and hand out receipts that can be devalued at will. Exactly like they did 100 years ago with EO 6102.

Our job is to blackpill as many ETF owners as possible. Convince them to buy real bitcoin while they still can. Otherwise they'll get caught with their pants down when the tide goes out. How embarrassing!

Perfection is impossible. Aim for improvement.

If you need truly private communications you should not use email. The benefit of protonmail is that google doesn't get to passively scan the body of all your email correspondence to feed their data and ai models. Unless you are corresponding with a gmail account. Which you probably are.

Seriously, if you need better privacy you need to get off email.

This is such a powerful idea. It has captured my imagination for some time now.

Imagine a world where miners don't need mining pool accounts. In this system you hash block headers and get a steady stream of ecash in return. This ecash is not backed by bitcoin yet. It's kind of like proto-bitcoin. Let's call them hashtokens because who doesn't like a weed pun. When the pool finds a block these hashtokens can be redeemed for sats via the medium of your choosing: lightning, ecash, or an on-chain UTXO.

This model is ideal for pleb miners with low hashrate who would need to mine for a very long time to qualify for a payout from a traditional pool. In addition, everything the pool does is transparent and auditable thanks to the ecash proof of liabilities report published with each block. This is a dramatic departure from the opaque and sketchy mining pools that dominate the industry today. My sincere hope is that this new model can bring them to heel.

Now imagine you're not a miner but you are a privacy minded bitcoiner. You can buy these hashtokens from the miners directly and exchange them with the mining pool for a coinbase output with no KYC and no UTXO history. Truly clean corn. Would you be willing to pay a premium? My guess is yes. KYC-free exchanges regularly cost 1-5% more than spot bitcoin price.

The magic in this model is that it provides a way to deliver the privacy premium from peer-to-peer exchanges and mixing services directly to small miners, opening new privacy markets and driving hashrate higher which strengthens the whole bitcoin network. Over a long enough timeframe we might even be able to take down the antpool cartel. Probably not but a nym can dream, right?

Same. I think representing hashrate shares with ecash will accelerate pleb mining, unlock entirely new privacy techniques, and disrupt the mining pool cartel. Read more here.

Rene largely works on routing and pathfinding. Not sure why anyone would think ecash helps with this. Maybe trust-based LN channels using ecash could absorb some of the pressure during high fee events...? This is not a well known technique and I'm not aware of anyone working on it. Very cool idea though.

In any case vagueposting with no followup is kind of a nothingburger. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe we'll learn more later but nothing to do here until Pickhardt decides to elaborate.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

NP! I hope you get a bitaxe and it turns into a fulfilling hobby...or maybe more than a hobby. ;-)

BitAxe is great! It's fully open source hardware and software. Two guys from my local BitDevs meetup made it happen. Skot9000 started the project and designed the hardware. Johnny9 backwards engineered the firmware.

It's super easy to set up. You plug it in and connect to the wifi network displayed on the screen. Configure it with your wifi credentials and reboot the bitaxe. Open a browser on your local network and browse to the IP displayed on the screen. Configure your mining pool credentials, save. You might need to reboot it again. Congrats! You are hashing.

The thing that sets this project apart from similar efforts is the hash efficiency. A nerdminer does CPU mining on an ESP32. BitAxe uses an individual ASIC chip from an S19, I think. So you are getting industrial strength hash efficiency in an adorable desk toy format. It's like a cool knick knack that puts out 500 GH/s. I put mine on a shelf with a bunch of bitcoin books and a laptop full node. When it is quiet I can hear it 'breathe' as the fan alternates speeds to maintain target temp on the chip.

In general, mining profitability will almost always be lower than just buying BTC on the spot market. This starts to change if you operate at a very large scale or have access to free or subsidized hardware or electricity. BitAxe is at the extreme end of unprofitability. Due to the high relative cost of the hardware you might have to mine continuously for a century to break even.

Skot is working on a hex board that will fit 6 ASIC chips. It will definitely help with cost efficiency. If you are interested in this stuff definitely check out the Open Source Miners United initiative.

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these editors really do be trippin'

Ecash mints are useful for their privacy properties and the fact that they don't require a consensus change. They will still need to use geographical arbitrage or network privacy techniques such as tor to remain operational in the face of state sponsored attacks. This is still an easier path than achieving consensus on a soft fork. My ecash bullishness remains unperturbed.

One of the frustrating aspects of discussing these options is the constant attempts to play different solutions off of each other. We don't need to focus on a single solution. We can try all solutions at once. Please stop implying that all scaling solutions are rival. They are nonrival.

Just gonna point out that LUD-04, the LNURL authentication protocol is beautifully simple and free of corporate influence. Also, the user generates their own private keys. I don't understand why anyone would use an auth method where a 3rd party generates the private keys. shudder

Better article: https://9to5mac.com/2024/04/15/musk-charge-new-x-users-fee/

Key information:

Bald-faced lie:

Musk is not stupid enough to believe this. He understands proof of work and why it was invented (spam prevention). He's lying to condition everyone into giving up their payment info as a part of the signup process. If he was actually interested in controlling bots he could easily integrate proof of work spam prevention and/or a lightning based microtransaction fee to post or like. But he won't do that because it runs counter to his actual motivation.

For those paying attention, this is another step down the road of Musk's grand plan to build the WeChat of the west. He is turning Twitter into a dystopian financial surveillance and social control tool. You need CC processors as intermediaries to make this system work. It can't be built on bitcoin. Musk is an enemy of bitcoin. Don't forget it.

Agreed that is an insane amount of square footage. I would never live in a house that size.

This is a Google Play feature that won't work on GrapheneOS. It's an Apple find-my alternative. Bluetooth also needs to be configured and enabled by the OS to make it work that way.