I think it's quite likely they break the law in many jurisdictions. And if not, I think it's very likely that mint operation will be outlawed in the near future. It's not like financial legislation tend towards permissiveness.

Cashu might be wise to adopt the assumption, right or wrong, that mint operation will be cracked down on. If it chooses to exist at the mercy of lawmakers, it is doomed. That's why I think the future of Cashu, should it survive, is pseudonymous mints, possibly running as Tor onion services. This path will be riddled with rug pulls, but over time, trustworthy mints will emerge, not merely by the Lindy effect, but also through relentless user vigilance and by the application of proof-of-liabilities schemes.

Thinking mints break the law doesn't mean you think they should shut down or that you agree with the law.

So NixOS has a board. The board created a constitutional committee, and gave it a mandate to create a constitution. The constitution creates a steering committee, and that committee created a moderator team and mandated it with moderating the forum. The moderator team demanded that the steering committee resign because they felt like they meddled too much in the affairs of the moderator team. When the steering committee refused to resign, the whole moderator team did instead.

I mean ok but … this is an open source project maintaining a Linux distro! Why do they need governance the scale of a small nation?? It's like it's designed to generate drama. These kinds of structures only attract people who enjoy navigating them.

Paywalled for me, the article (somehow without the graphic) can be read here: https://archive.is/XD1IW

So disappointing that CoinDesk would make an embarrassing mistake like that. I've written the reporter and I hope he will correct it even if the article is a bit old. This debate certainly doesn't need misinformation.

What a relief. This is not the first vote, and it will not be the last. They will vote again, and again, until something passes. Hopefully they can't garner more support for the current proposal. The best we can hope for is that what finally passes will be severely watered down.

The authoritarian trend in Europe is very scary.

Not many will move from using inscriptions (Taproot input scripts) to OP_RETURN (an output type). But some that are storing arbitrary data that aren't inscriptions (JPEGs etc), but are using fake public keys creating unprovably-unspendable outputs that permanently bloat the UTXO set, will hopefully switch to OP_RETURN.

They are already quite unpopular, since they plan to plow up the ocean floor to mine for minerals. Now they're building a bitcoin reserve, and bitcoin is already very unpopular in Norway.

This crazy nasty-ass company just doesn't give a shit about what people think.

Coremunists

Not to be confused with Sovryn, which is some sort of platform for trading and lending that aspires to be decentralized.

In my mind there's definitely a parallel to bitcoin self custody. Use LibreOffice, and nobody can take it away from you. Your file is on your own system, and nobody knows it's there. You open the file and edit it, and it's nobody's business but yours. There is no tracking, no censorship. Even if your internet provider cuts you off, you can still work on your files.

I realize this is all rather absurdly banal, but this is one of the thousands of faces of digital self-sovereignty.

This seems like an extremely odd thing to say. Can you link to where they said this?

I read all that, but I didn't see anyone swear to never fix consensus-level bugs.

You said "there are only consensus level fixes". Are there any particular consensus-level fix that you would like to see?

This is of course what it means to any reasonable reader, but some people will read this "like the devil reads the bible", and look for reasons for outrage.

I would say it's been both effected and affected.

I use Duolingo as well, which has come under fire recently for adopting a lot of AI (even to the point of letting employees go) – so I guess I have. I enjoy an LLM in addition, since it's a way to exercise more conversationally without bothering another human with my clumsy talk.

I use various AIs through Kagi Assistant, often as a sparring partner to discuss ideas I have. I've used it as a legal advisor to get an overview of a field and my options, before involving an actual legal advisor that charges money. I use it as a conversational partner to practice Spanish. When someone I know was about to go through a medical procedure, I used to to learn more about how that procedure worked, how to prepare, what to expect etc.

I use it for coding as well, but very targeted, often focusing on single functions. Since I mostly work alone, I like to use it for code review, although it's frequently a bit too sycophantic.

It's interesting that he's on the board of OpenSats, while routinely ranting about bitcoin development being over-funded and there being "too much money sloshing around" (paraphrase).

I listen because he has interesting guests on, but he himself is pretty insufferable.

He has not made any relevant comment recently, this is just a meme. He has used to claim that bitcoin is not usable for payments (going so far as to claim that Bitcoin Core developers cause babies to die). His proponents will still hold that bitcoin is not usable for payments, and when Lightning Network is pointed out, they will typically say that Lightning is not actually bitcoin.

If it becomes easier to broadcast transactions with larger OP_RETURN outputs, and more people do that, blocks become smaller. This is because each byte of OP_RETURN "costs" 4 vBytes, since it doesn't get the witness discount.

It's not clear that OP_RETURN outputs would take off in any meaningful way, but if we imagine a scenario where it totally did and blocks were chock full of only OP_RETURN data, those blocks would be 1MB large, and barely impact the UTXO set, while contributing a lot to fee pressure.