I find nostr basically unusable and I find very little good content there. There’s no way to find good content because you can’t sort popular posts to the top in any clients I’m aware of.

Yeah that’s level 1. Then you can use TOR to hide your IP if you’re being super careful, and add autodelete rules to your channels.

Discord voluntarily (not even under subpoena) gave all their logs to the lawyers who sued the protesters at Charlottesville.

Lightning is very vulnerable to attack though, because of its architecture. It leads to centralized large nodes run by companies that can be easily targeted.

I have had small critters chew their way into my pack when I left food in it, and seen others have the same happen to their tents when they kept food in them. It’s always best to separate food and smelly items and put them in a bag hung over a branch away from critters.

They have no obligation not to be misleading in their “advisories”…. They often try to scare people into thinking the law is much more strict than it actually is in many areas.

Also, it would be great if you could go together and learn from someone experienced. Some things are hard to learn except from another person.

For example, you don’t want to keep your pack in your tent. Many beginners think they should, but it’s much better not to. You should leave it outside with a rain cover. Don’t keep food in your tent. Etc.

You should really do a number of weekend trips before attempting to go out for a whole week. Two weeks is much harder still.

You will learn many things about your gear, what you need, how heavy it is, and change a lot. You also need to learn about dealing with food, stoves, hygiene (cleaning your dishes and stuff, washing, etc.), first aid for yourself and dealing with hiking issues with your feet (moleskin, bandages, how to handle ankle sprains (bandana), how to handle rashes, cuts, burns, etc.).

And you also need to learn how to handle RAIN. Having the gear, keeping dry, how to pack to keep stuff dry, how to set up camp for rain, and how to cook in the rain.

Most of these things you can learn with only a bit of research, but you need to experience them to really learn. I wouldn’t set off for 1-2 weeks until you have these things down pat.

Oh, also compass and map use.

What’s happening is that there is zero adoption by brick and mortar businesses. Thus, the use of LN is limited to enthusiasts and a few online businesses, and when the channels and hubs consolidate, and small nodes go away, there’s no additional growth.

Making a lightning network work is not enough to make it successful as a medium of exchange. Someone needs to go out there and push it and make it worthwhile for shops and businesses to actually accept it.

NOBODY is doing this at all. Literally no one, to the best of my knowledge. This is why it’s not growing.

Earth Abides and Moby Dick

I like lightning now. It works very well for me almost all the time now.

However, I’m afraid this was always going to happen, because there was always going to be a substantial risk with a hot wallet server.

For those of you who don’t know, there is basically no way to run a LN server without having your keys on the server. There are complicated architectures like Phoenix runs, but they basically wrote their own node to do it and it’s not easy. If your server gets hacked, it can be drained.

I’m really not sure what can be done to make this better (although I’m not an expert on the minutiae of LN coding). Ultimately, I expect there will be a better L2 on bitcoin more like Stacks or some kind of rollup. That will let us transact cheaply and the same way as on optimism or similar networks.

When you spend on-chain from Phoenix, it’s splicing out, which means it’s taking bitcoin out of your lightning channel and sending it on-chain. This will always reduce your channel size.

Basically, if you want to maintain at least the same channel size, you have to always send from Phoenix with lightning, and use other services to convert to on-chain.

It does seem bleak. I think you’re right about everything in the OP.

Fact is, you have to change culture with kids before they reach adulthood, and the institutions that prevented the things you describe are gone. The leftists won the culture war by destroying those institutions.

Just as an example, parents and schools don’t expect celibacy before marriage, and society doesn’t enforce it. Schools don’t have wholesome dances, but twerk fests with all black music. There’s literally no more music ever played or promoted by adults in our society derived from white culture that’s fit for actual pair dancing. And once in college, there are no more dorm supervisors, no sex segregation, no hard rules on heavy drinking or anything that leads to all the moral malaise you describe.

All of this began to fall apart in the 1960s and it was essentially complete by the mid-1990s.

You should watch this.

I’ve been an evangelist for bitcoin and other related things for many years, so I do wear gear like that. However, I only do it in safe areas. Where I live I know it’s safe. I will be more careful when traveling and in specific cities where I know there is organized crime or have been incidents in the past.

It sounds to me like you are looking too hard for things to be incredibly meaningful to you.

Instead, you need to rediscover the simple pleasures of experience. The enjoyment in things that you are presently dismissing as “unimportant”.

“What matters” to us depends entirely on our attitude and point of view. If you’re looking for something that “matters” at some ultimate metaphysical level, you’re going to see all of life as unimportant.

However, if you step back and try to experience the simple things as enjoyable again, you’ll suddenly see that you’ve been dismissing a nearly infinite supply of enjoyable experiences as meaningless.

Taking a walk, smelling the leaves, having a coffee, sex, seeing a beautiful innocent child, climbing a wall, hiking up a mountain, feeling an old book, …. All of these things really are enough. Don’t look past everything; look into everything.

It’s not too hard to do it right.

I usually drink about three espressos in the morning and maybe three or four more the rest of the day. When I was young (under 30) I would feel horrible if I missed coffee for a morning and get headaches, but now I don’t. I also don’t stay awake if I drink it at night. I think I’ve blown out my caffeine receptors. But I love coffee. Heh

Well they did get sued for slowing down older model iPhones on purpose. They were forced to stop it.