I was banned for calling out the mod's bullshit in the daily thread. Shortly after the FTX blowup there were a lot of threads discussing self custody and one of the mods had pinned their comments to the top and locked the threads. I thought this was an abuse of power and said as much, and was banned for "instigating drama". Reddit mods are the worst.

What's to stop someone from making a second account and throwing a couple thousand sats at their own post to win?

Honorable mention for BMW trying to lock features like seat warmers behind a monthly subscription. Fuck them all.

Dude had access to $4.1m in crypto on his phone?

Something's fucky.

Honestly I do find a lot of Bitcoin media to be a bit too right-wing on some issues. There are a lot of podcasts that I started out liking but later unsubscribed from because of their views on some non-Bitcoin things. Just because I disagree with them on certain political (or politicized) stuff, doesn't mean that Bitcoin is bad or they are wrong about it.

I only skimmed the article, but seems like he's trying to make us out as some sort of hivemind with monolithic beliefs. Like every podcaster speaks for every person in the Bitcoin community. Like they say shit and we all just believe it and adopt their views. In my opinion anyone who reads this bullshit he wrote and buys it is the imbecile he is referring to.

https://mullvad.net/en/. Someone from nostr recommended it to me. Operates out of Sweden.

I've mostly just used Bitrefill to buy gift cards for online purchases while I'm at home. I've done it for Amazon, REI, and most recently paid for my Southwest flight for the Thanksgiving holiday by buying a gift card for the exact amount of the purchase when I'm ready to pay.

For a little while I was trying to use Bitrefill to pay for food purchases when out of the house, but it was too much of a hassle. I mostly pay for stuff like that with cash now. Also I prefer to go to smaller local businesses when I'm eating out rather than big corporate chains.

I recently paid for my VPN with Bitcoin. Unfortunately they do not accept LN payments yet though. I like that I was able to do this without giving them any personal information at all.

Other than that I've made a few donations with Bitcoin to worthy causes.

I've been trying to find a local business that accepts Bitcoin, but have not had any luck. If I could find a taco shop that was convenient that accepts Bitcoin I would go there all the time.

Also almost all spending is followed by an immediate purchase of more Bitcoin so my stack never goes down.

Do claims that Chivo uses paper Bitcoin have any merit?

What about Chivo running on Algorand?

I haven't had any major problems. I've felt like Strike has always acted in an ethical manner. When the FTX crash happened and suddenly there was a huge spread on the BTC you bought, they tried to inform everyone of a way to work around it. Later they gave everyone effected by the bad spread some cash back too.

I've been buying BTC from Strike exclusively for over a year now. I love that I can deposit USD, buy BTC, and withdraw it immediately. There are no fees for buying, only a tiny spread of about 0.1-0.3%. Withdrawals are free too, and I can send BTC over lightning if I want.

They probably had a good reason to deny you. They are not obligated to give you any reason, and if they think you are a fraudster or scammer then it's more ethical for them to not tip you off on how you screwed up with your fraud. Sorry you didn't get approved, but you didn't even get to use it, so how can you say it sucks?

Just point to the Bitcoin symbol tattooed on your forehead, and if you haven't gotten your tattoo yet then you're not a true maxi.

Sure with I lived somewhere where electricity wasn't $0.35/kwh...

Just kidding. It's worth it for the amazing weather year round.

Actually it's Taro that is going to enable other assets and stablecoins to be used on LN. Taro does utilize Taproot, but I'm pretty sure Taproot does not enable this functionality on its own.

I'm looking at WoS disclosure statement trying to figure out how they are charging you 8000 sats.

By my math you would have to deposit 2.5m sats to reach that with the 0.3% fee. That's assuming you are funding the wallet with an on-chain transaction. If you are sending to the wallet via lightning it should be much much lower. They do not appear to have any surcharge for LN transactions, so fees should be very low unless you are sending huge amounts.

There's also a 4.9% tax for funding with AUD. Are they acting as a fiat on-ramp here? That was entirely unexpected.

Honestly I'm finding the short length of this disclosure statement very disturbing. There is no mention of any responsibility to users for being the custodian of their funds. If they decided to shut down and walk away with everyone's funds I'm not sure there would be any legal recourse. Not that I think they would do that, but I thought we were trying to minimize the requirement of trust in financial transactions with Bitcoin, and this seems to be entirely trust based.

I always felt like Muun was a bad option because the way they handle LN transactions I feel defeats the purpose of LN. However right now I'm thinking it looks like a great option if you want to do LN and don't have your own node. I never used LN before I got my own node, so I never really looked into this stuff much.

I just buy them like an idiot ig.

One reason I like nostr is to get away from social media that serves up content based on algos. Twitter is actually okay when you sort your posts only by latest instead of "top" posts. Then you see only what your follows are posting and come to the end of the content rather than being constantly served up an endless stream. However the people I follow may not be doing that and there is probably some spillover from the algo into my feed because of it. Also Musk treating Twitter as his own little playground is problematic for me.

Right now there is a constant stream of posts on nostr and it's easy to get sucked in for hours. At least it's just a raw feed, though, and not some carefully calculated system to drive "engagement" and sell ads.

Sounds fine if you know your neighbors, maybe in a suburb where your wifi only reaches the houses next to you. In many places though people don't really know who they are living next to. In a large apartment complex you could have 100s of people within reach of your wifi and have no idea what they might get up to if they have steady access to someone else's connection.

My goal is somewhere between being a productive router and just having a decently connected lightning node for personal use. I would ideally like to be able to stack some sats by routing, but so far I am down about 50k and only make a few hundred a week, so the road to break even is long.

I have gotten the vast majority of my channels from LN+. It's a great way to get matching inbound liquidity for your outbound. The quality of the peers can vary wildly though. Some will not honor the commitment they made to keep the channel open for X months and close channels early. I had one guy close our channel literally the day we opened it and did not respond to inquiries as to why. I've ended up in swaps with people that only have a few channels and never grow. Sometimes I get connected with nodes with terrible uptime.

What I'm trying to say is it's a crapshoot. I wouldn't even consider it a marketplace, because that implies you get to shop around and pick your product. You either just join a swap offer or make your own, and whoever you match with you are expected to open channels and honor the time commitment. You can restrict the swap to nodes with X amount of channels and X node capacity at least. As you get bigger and qualify for swaps with larger nodes the quality of peers should increase.

Overall I found it very useful for diving into LN and getting a feel for things. After I got myself established in the network it made more sense to be more targeted in how I open channels. Using analytics like LNDg or https://lnnodeinsight.com/ gave me suggestions on opening more productive channels and filling a need within the network.

As for Magma, I have sold one channel there and it has had zero activity. I get the feeling that Magma is for larger operators who can provide really well connected liquidity sources, and the customers are going to be merchants who really need and can use incoming liquidity. It's probably not great for a smaller hobbyist. I might be wrong though, my experience is limited.

No, not a relay. I guess I'm not technically "running nostr", just using a client and sending/receiving messages and I use the same computer to access my Umbrel node which runs on a separate Raspberry Pi. I don't think I could compromise my node unless I did something really stupid like running a shady executable. I like to think I'm pretty smart about avoiding stuff like that, but maybe there's something I'm not thinking of.