0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Line2Wire 7 Apr \ on: Resolvr's Newest Release: Keystache - A Place to Stash Your Nostr Keys builders
Interesting, but no "coming soon" for Linux?
140 sats \ 1 reply \ @Line2Wire 29 Mar \ parent \ on: Buying non-KYC bitcoins peer-to-peer #1: Peach bitcoin
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175 sats \ 3 replies \ @Line2Wire 29 Mar \ parent \ on: Buying non-KYC bitcoins peer-to-peer #1: Peach bitcoin
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This is something we knew was coming, but it's not specific in any way to Lightning.
Any centralised structure serving as a ramp exchanging Bitcoin and fiat will come to a series of realisations:
- Bitcoin, where pseudonymity is key, is not compatible with the legacy financial system, where KYC is deemed necessary.
- Bitcoin, which offers a public, transparent ledger of all transactions (of which Lightning does not have the liquidity to compete with at this time), is not compatible with the PII-linking that fiat demands.
- Centralised exchanges are the targets themselves, ripe for regulatory pressure and capture. Lightning is not. Lightning is a protocol. A protocol is language. Language cannot be viably regulated.
- Centralised exchanges which contain PII, rely on centralised, often third-party security, many times out-sourced.
Their business cannot be sustained under the centralised model that the fiat system nurtured, while attempting to provide services to individuals invested in a unique decentralised counterpart of said system.
Think about what happens when that PII is linked to BTC funds in a world where BTC continues to go up and fiat which the majority of people hold goes down, along with an ever-decreasing level of trust in government and an ever-increasing level of stress.
These, and others realisations, in my opinion, will amount to a series of incidents, of which we've already begun to see in the vein of CEX rugpulls over the years, regulatory burdening which Coinbase is beginning to feel, along with Chainalysis and LinkingLion, and now we begin to see with countries making it known they definitely plan to have their hand over any centralised exchange offering a custodial wallet service.
I don't think it's all doom and gloom though, but I do believe there's a harsher fighting period ahead as we disjoin money from state, and as this happens and the general economy goes downhill in fiatland, a lot of people who bought into the KYC nonsense may very well become targets themselves - All it takes is a data breach, internal or external, against that SQL DB that so securely holds all the info mentioned above, and a $5 wrench.
I think BTC will win out, but there will be a period where fiat gasps for air - And that's the most concerning period of all.
In summary, yes, any centralised exchange and its users specifically will become targets, be it in the eyes of government, or in the eyes of thieves and crackers - At least for a period.
The big mistake was creating Bitcoin businesses BASED ON fiat rules.
Businesses that are fully bitcoin-only will outlive and outperform.
That's generally how NiceHash works yes - You use different algorithms to mine shitcoins, either with CPU or GPU depending on what power-usage/yield ratio you're expecting and can receive reward for hashrate in BTC.
However, it has some KYC requirements for certain amounts/functionality.
As long as tick tock, next block happens, Bitcoin is a success.
Bitcoin"s core value proposition is in that mechanism.
The price means nothing, as long as it's not zero. The higher the price, the more liquidity it can handle, and the more people can use it. But limited usage can be extremely useful too - Look at Tor.
I think the concept of a token is currently viewed as extremely negative due to historic attempted applications of "tokens" when it comes to digital currencies. Tokens tend to equal rugpull because they are representiative of something, in control by a centralised entity.
This is fair I think, and we should all look at it with suspicion and scrutinise it, but not let it mislead us from a potential, fairly good solution to scaling sats - Not stating you are, just stating.
Personally, I'm extremely suspicious of anything fedimint ecash. It seems backwards when we have a decentralised layer 1 that just works, it just has "high" fees and "high" confirmation times - Two things anyone would think we could find a perfectly plausible solution to whilst retaining the Layer 1's amazing properties.
Alas, years later, we have Nostr apps, Alby and even SN introducting and normalising fully-custodial solutions. Anyone not looking to give up custody, needs technical-know-how and infrastructrue to run their own LN nodes.
I run my own LN Node and will for the foreseeable future. I will likely always choose the self-hostable self-custody option.
But I've come to realise most people won't. And I think that comes with a lot of risk.
And so, the gears have shift from "How do we fix this pretty much entirely?" to "How do we improve this just enough to mitigate risk and balance custody?".
I'm starting to be of the mind that a federated network mostly run by community, accessible to be run by the community (LET ME RUN MY OWN, in essence, just like we do with Bitcoin nodes to help enforce honesty on others inc. miners), BASED ON the online/offline statuses of self-custody wallets actually strikes a fairly good balance.
Risk solely increases based on offline time.
As long as the self-custody wallets presented by apps have the option to withdraw directly to the timechain, somehow, someway.
What you want is a Paynym which is much not secure and private than a public domain name.
Aside from that, unless your domain name points to a constantly changing BTC address, you'll be creating a lot of future pain when it comes to UTXO management, and potentially doxing yourself.
I enjoy these kinds of toxic experiments, BUT.. I do wonder.. What if you identified the issues they likely currently have (taxes, payment processing fees, lack of immediate finality in settlements, etc) and proposed how Bitcoin solves these problems for them?
Get them to download a Lightning app, and as an experiment, buy a a couple items in the menu as you walk them through it with the PointofSale App.
Incorrect - The expectation of an executable file like Windows forces users to get off the internet is precisely one of the things Linux FIXED - It is a point of education, as it's a massive security breach, but the status-quo of software downloading on windows made such actions normalised.
How does Linux fix this? Repo-based package-management using a GUI AppStore a la KDE Discover and Gnome Software. It's how grandmas download facebook on their phones, and it's exactly Linux's strength, it just needs a push on that front.
Not even that.
There is no actual Bitcoin.
It's an IOU, a representation of FICTIONAL Bitcoin. Bitocin is only bitcoin when you work with sats and you can freely transact on the timechain that secures and verifies said sats.
Also, do all ETF providers disclose their holdings? If not, might not be long until we get fractional reserve on that.
I don't think this a very helpful comment given the context.
If we were comparing something like CEXs, then yeah, sure
However, more DEXs is never a bad thing, regardless of feature parity.
From a very quick overview, it seems like a nice, mobile, DEX UX. Bisq is desktop only and Robosats is HTML. I'm not aware of other mobile DEXs to compare it to.
Closest on mobile would be Robosats as a PWA.
228 sats \ 1 reply \ @Line2Wire 30 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: On how to effectively end [bitcoin] bitcoin
Again, it'll largely depend on why they got into Bitcoin in the first place, and if their reasoning changed, whether they took the appropriate precautions or not.
Example, and this obviously generalist, if you see Bitcoin as a tool you'll use it as a tool.
If you see it as a specupative asset ripe for trading, you'll not worry about KYC and will likely be looking to fiat-out in the end, for better or worse.
Also brings up the interesting question of how many bitcoiners might be lying to themselves.
Bitcoin has done more for many countries in less than a decade than fiat has, mostly regardless of price - And I only say mostly because if price continued to be low, the utility of it wouldn't have propagated as fast.
It's successfully withstood nation-wide attacks. It's helped thousands lift themselves from extreme poverty and escape countries without losing life-savings kind of wealth. And has offered alternative routes around CBDCs. Price increases are THE bonus. They're part of the mechanics of Bitcoin no doubt, but a bonus nonetheless.
Unconfiscatabe wealth was its reasoning for being created.
It's already happening, and it's ridiculous.
It needs to end.
This goes against the Bitcoin ethos and for all the bitcoin maximalism out there, I fail to see how that is reasonable.
I go on Nostr and see
"bio: Bitcoin maximalist! Live or die on this hill!"
"Ln address: @getalby.com"
Hum...
Now don't get me wrong, I know you xan keep only what you immediately spend on a custodial wallet but
a) it sets a precadent. On fact, it already has.
b) if they have their own node, might as well use it, no reason not to.
202 sats \ 3 replies \ @Line2Wire 30 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: On how to effectively end [bitcoin] bitcoin
You do realise, many people purchase via DEXs right? I've never done a single CEX and/or KYC purchase and have been in the Bitcoin game for many years.
What you'd see, a clear division between who cared for their privacy from the get-go, who saw the issues with CEXs before they became apparent, and who heeded warnings from other like-minded bitcoiners, hold their sats. The rest would be reported due to linking their fiat identity.
I've been warning about this for years, linking one's fiat identity and believing in bitcoin as a unit of account do not go hand in hand.
I'd go a step further.
If able to, enter a discussion on why they should accept. How it benefits them. They should be the ones to initiate this kind of question.
Also, offer help on getting started. If you or your friends are able to, offer to spin up a
BTCPay server and test-drive with them.
In summary, show them the value proposition and what can be achieved with sovereignty.
I recommend:
https://daretodream-film.com
Can be bought for sats via Lightning.
Anyways, that's my two cents on why I think "scaling" Bitcoin isn't a goal, at least in the way most people are looking for near zero cost unlimited TX at infinite speed "scaling". It doesn't make sense to me unless you're willing to sacrifice the security Bitcoin provides as well as defy logic of this resource-limited world we live in.
It's this last sentence that's very telling to me.
No one is really considering scaling Bitcoin on the base layer. Improvements? Refinements? Sure. It's programmable after all. But to the point of continuously allowing 8+ billion people to transact globally? No one. Even Satoshi himself said this wouldn't be achievable, and we'd need extra layers.
Heck, even covenants, the biggest L1 improvement right now that's being pushed DUE TO the recent L1 high fees are touting and offering benefits to Lightning itself as a selling point.
The other side of this is that this post seems like something someone with too much stake in fiat would say, except it's Bitcoin, which is a crazy notion because we all know - "Stack sats, stay humble", so maybe I'm just wildly misinterpreting this part, or there's something seriously wrong here - Bitcoin is for everyone, and this is why while the supply is fixed, it can be virtually infinitely divisible.
Newcomers will get on-boarded straight to L2. The sats they buy will be at the price they deserve, and they'll be able to move those sats at the speed of light with low fees, until, perhaps, applications improve to the point where users are on-boarded at L3.
Layers will get added on top, and those layers will themselves be abstracted by applications, until Bitcoin is scaled for global use by everyone, at low fees, at the speed of light, for virtually every use-case known and necessary to society, in a way that protects said user's rights - Dare I say, as close to perfect as it can be!
And do you know why we can aspire and work towards such a crazy notion? Because for the first time, we have programmable money. 15 years later and this still seems lost to so many.