The wallet attaching to LND requires macaroons.

Would a solution based on keysend not be easier?

I agree The Mandibles is not playing in the top league of dystopian novels, but it still contains some nice ideas as well.

I liked the fact that in the end of the novel the border to Nevada was rather a propaganda line and not a death zone. Don't trust, verify. Do not believe the lie and do the work and verify for yourself if you can escape the prison land.

I guess from the dystopian novels describing the economic breakdown of a society Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand does the best job.

However you can observe threads from all the mentioned books in this article in world today: 1984 (surveillance), Brave New World (escapism), Fahrenheit 451 (censorship) etc.

I guess that open sourcing interfaces and data exchange formats will reduce vendor locking.

Further it may demonstrate incompetence (and corruption) within their software suppliers.

I just finished Crux by Ramez Naam.

I wonder how the endgame will look like here: Are the messenger app developers just pulling out of the EU as some bitcoin wallet developers did from the US recently? And everyone that still wants to use those apps will have to install them from source. In this case the minority that cares about privacy will opt out and the majority that doesn't care will use the backdoored apps anyway.

Bitcoin Development Philosophy by Kalle Rosenbaum

Home office is the norm now. No more daily commuting.

With that also eating habits improved a lot (low carb/carnivore).

Paying with my own LND node has become quite reliable. In 2024 I didn't have any payment failures anymore with amounts up to 300k.

In the field I had one payment delay with Phoenix on a Bitcoin event. I guess the channels got unbalanced when suddenly a lot of payments happened to one particular node.

I guess that with a higher Bitcoin price a lot of older channels are now big enough to handle these medium sized payments.

I paid once with lightning in a restaurant in Lugano last fall. The waiter exactly knew what to do and the payment went smoothly.

Lineage OS is good choice as it is supported to be installed on many devices. Getting a current device that supports a custom ROM is not always that simple.

As for hardware I guess Fairphone is an option as well. However the latest is not yet supported with Lineage OS.

Not all devices are easy to be de-googled.

Yes, there are a lot of good reading recommendations on this rubric and on stacker.news in general.

The book I'm currently reading was mentioned here as well: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy by Ben Collier.

You mean 🇺🇸 vs. 🇷🇺 ?

From the last week's recommentation list I picked up Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin.

Second Realm. It discusses possible developments beyond circular economies.

I guess he also never understood why anarchists like FOSS.

The word free is quite messed up in the English language. He rightly distinguishes between free as in free beer from free as in freedom, but free might also include free from governments and oppressive rulership.

In his mind big cooperation are evil but Western democracy are not. However big cooperation not really serving customers anymore are not possible without the latter (also called fascism). That is missing in his considerations.

There are no heroes in bitcoin.

Seeing and defending Saylor as savior is fiat mentality seeking for a duce.

He maneuvered himself into a position in which he has partly to play the fiat game aka. using words like compliance, governance etc. in order to not be immediately taken down. He is target of the fiat counterstrike. Expect even more weird things there.

Well, German railway is still using Windows 3.11 https://www.neowin.net/news/age-is-just-a-number-for-30-year-old-windows-311-still-powering-german-high-speed-trains/

At least the nuclear weapons of the US do not require floppy disk anymore since 2019: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-forces-dr-strangelove-era-messaging-system-finally-got-rid-of-its-floppy-disks/

The question is if they really have the standing power to execute it in the long run.

Years ago they tried similar things in Munich as well and they reverted it again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

OK, the Munich experiment was quite more ambitious.

Tidy First by Kent Beck. It is a book about the software development process. Interestingly it contains a chapter titled A Dollar Today > A Dollar Tomorrow. Yeah, software development outside Bitcoin has still quite fiat mindset. In a bitcoin standard a bitcoin tomorrow will have more purchasing power than a bitcoin today and we will hopefully get better software...