Same like any other bank, they go bust. Their customers want their dollars back, but their debtors are not repaying those same dollars.

I think the world is transitioning from the industrial age to digital age, a process that involves a lot of creative destruction. Part of the destruction side of things is that a lot of people are, and will continue to, have their delusions shattered. If you love these people, you should tell them the truth about why. In turn many will hate you for it and think you are toxic regardless. So you might as well own it.

Also being surprised that ETH is considered a security is just absurd. They set up a company that sold tokens to raise cash to build their tech. That is literally what investment is, which makes those tokens a security.

I think they should just liquidate FTX and give whatever comes out of that to the creditors and customers and call it a day.

The reasoning of having to "save" financial companies mostly comes from the traditional finance industry where companies are the financial infrastructure. And so when those companies fail because of contagion they need to be saved, because they are too big to fail. The beautiful thing of bitcoin is that the infrastructure is external to any company, and so any and every company can be left to fail and liquidate.

Although there is sadly collateral damage in the short term, in the long term it is a very effective way of getting rid of the bad actors. A big part of why the traditional finance industry is so rotten is because there is not really a good way of doing this, which creates moral hazard.

The Taylor rule in economics says that if you want to fight inflation with interest rates, then the interest rate needs to be higher than the rate of inflation. For the ECB that would mean that interest rates would have to be raised to 15-20%, instantly bankrupting the entire EU. I don't think they actually have any sort of serious plan to deal with this and are just waiting it out, hoping the inflation will go away on it's own.

Correct, the web is the internet of information and bitcoin is the internet of money. Calling bitcoin or some other project "web 3" is like calling the web "email 2". It just doesn't make sense and it's just VC's playing buzzword bingo.

Implementation is not the same as specification. Bugs happen, and they are never specified. Chain splits are a risk and have happened in the past. When it happens either there is a hardfork into two coins, or one of the two chains is abandoned. Neither is a positive outcome, and bitcoin will be (seen as) damaged either way.

Bitcoin is open source, and open source is decentralized. If you are not happy with Bitcoin Core feel free to fork the code or start your own implementation.

Feel free to run an alternative implementation, you are absolutely right on bitcoin being permissionless and FOSS.

However, as you mentioned, a chainsplit is a risk and the outcome can be messy. When things get messy, it is safer to be on the side of the majority. So Bitcoin Core may not be your implementation, but a bug in Bitcoin Core could very well be your problem.

In an ideal world, yes. But in practice building a good Lightning wallet is at least as hard as building a good chat app. Meaning that Signal probably just doesn't have the resources to implement a full Lightning wallet, and it wouldn't have a good UX. We are not talking about Facebook here, Signal doesn't have a hundred spare devs that they can throw at this.

Personally I think that Signal should aim to have the best chat app there is (which IMHO is the case). Then when it comes to related functionality, such as enabling p2p payments, Signal should integrate with wallets that are the best payments apps there are. The standard to do that would be LN-URL.

I think they should implement LN-URL. Right now if I go to my Phoenix wallet click on receive, and then share with a Signal contact it just dumps the URL plaintext into a chat message. What should happen is that Signal picks up on that as an LN URL and let the contact open that in their own Lightning wallet. I am not sure what the added benefit is for Signal to implement a fully fledged Lightning wallet.

The only chokepoint where this can be enforced would be the Google and Apple stores. At the very least imho more wallet makers should distribute through F-Droid, at least as a backup measure. Also in general this is yet another attack on open source. It is very clear that the people in power are at their core authoritarians.

Not your straw, not your milkshake.

You started with 0 BTC and ended with 0 BTC, so the real answer is that you earned nothing lol

When it comes down to it, it is very hard, if not impossible, to compete with (practically) free. Annually about $3 trillion is paid by merchants to the financial industry in transaction fees. So if Lightning can be made to work for merchants, they would be fools to not take a serious look into accepting that as a payment method.

Using electricity is not a crime, scamming people is. Shitcoiners are not our friends or allies as they have done a lot of damage to bitcoins reputation by pretending that their scams are the same as bitcoin.

Not an expert at all on CBDC (yawn), but I honestly don't understand why bitcoiners are so intimidated by a CBDC? It seems to me that it is just another closed network with dumb money. The main difference with the existing banking system is that it is run by a central bank rather than commercial banks. Other than that it would inherit all the Orwellian/authoritarian/kleptocratic properties from the existing system. None of that should be a threat to bitcoin.

It does seem a threat to physical cash, and that is scary. But even that is an opportunity to bitcoin.

A resource that I found useful would be Privacy tools and if you have the technical skills self hosting apps is powerful. A good thing to get started with is obviously a bitcoin node :-) a good second would be something like a private Nextcloud on a VPS so you don't have to rely on Google/Apple cloud.

My experience so far has been that there is not a singular thing you can turn on for privacy. It's more of an awareness of how we are exploited and mass surveilled by big tech/government in a digital society. There are always things to improve for anyone that cares about privacy, and many things come down to trade offs.

I think of the government more like a family... you know, like the mafia.

I agree with the need to have an offsite backup, but only having this backup still leaves a realistic possibility of data loss. You will typically leave it unattended at the bank for years and only try to access it when you lose access to your wallet. At that point there is a possibility that you find out that the backup can be corrupted (if it is on an usb drive) or is otherwise inaccessible.

Generally the best practice for backups of personal data is the "3-2-1 rule" where you have:

That way if either your onsite or offsite backup is corrupted or inaccessible the other backup copy is still likely to be valid and accessible. So basically I would say to both keep a backup at home and one offsite in a safe at a bank.

If for some reason you don't feel safe using a seed plate you can also use an encrypted usb drive or multisig, but there are caveats there. Your seed should -never- touch a system that is online, so you need to use something like TailsOS to make the encrypted usb. Also a very real risk is that you lock yourself out of the backup, so you should only use these if you are comfortable working with them (keep it simple stupid).

Also practice restoring your wallets from backups on a regular basis to make sure it works as expected.

In general I feel that making safe and secure backups of your seed phrase is the most challenging part of using bitcoin, so please let me know if I am missing something.

Have they tried recommending world peace?

Seriously, what have they achieved recently? Not sure why anyone cares about their opinions, feels like another outdated institution that takes a lot of tax money to do nothing.

Just noticed OP explicitly mentions Lightning, in that case it would be phone.