Voorhees is extremely based and a very cool guy...he has consistently "put his money where his mouth is" and has been a major positive for the Bitcoin world as a whole.

His non-Bitcoin stuff is mostly limited to his stewardship of the Shapeshift platform. Of course, I won't bother trying to convince anyone here why such a platform is a good thing (as many folks on SN are wary of even acknowledging anything other than Bitcoin as being legitimate whatsoever), but the truth is, it's an entirely decentralized and trustless, automated service which people can use to swap between a huge number of different crypto assets. So, if nothing else, it is an additional funnel that can be used for people to turn their increasingly worthless shitcoins into good, solid Bitcoin.

Plus, he ran Satoshi Dice back in the day, haha. Seriously though, he's consistently had very good takes on so many subjects and is one of an increasingly small (depressingly so) handful of people who are both highly visible/popular in the cyrpto space but not afraid to speak his mind on topics many would often shy away from. When the government/IRS tried coming after him for Shapeshift, he spent years working to re-tool it into a fully decentralized (truly) platform that can remain operational in it's form because there's literally no one for them to go after. Frankly, that's just something that I personally feel almost obliged to support ideologically.

Oh yeah, and one last reason I can give for Erik being rad (before this starts to veer into some kind of a 'glazing' post or read that way) is that when he finished transitioning Shapeshift into a decentralized DAO, he created a shitcoin for it and gave away airdrops to people who were users of Shapeshift. I happened to be one of those users, and I received a very generous airdrop allocation, essentially for doing nothing but using the site to convert ETH that I had been mining on spare gaming PCs into Bitcoin to stack and save...I took all of the "FOX" tokens (the Shapeshift shitcoins) and sold them and bought more Bitcoin with the profits. If you ask me, that's a win-win-win.

It has to do with how active you are for tipping sats/donating to the pool.

This article, to me anyway, is emblematic of the kind of issue that we are seeing increasingly across various forms of media in our society -- a widening divide between the critics (journalists) and the audience/viewers of said media. I think a lot of this stems from the disconnect that many average people feel they have with the sort of folks who tend to work as critics or as part of establishment media in general; and oftentimes for good reason.

While there is certainly something to be said about how utterly cringeworthy it can be to hear some folks constantly whining about 'wokeness' and ranting from their soapboxes for the particular side they support in the "culture wars", there is more than a kernel of truth to the idea that there are certain narratives which these aforementioned members of the establishment/legacy media class tend to push and emphasize in their work.

There are plenty of examples which support this, available for anyone who isn't already convinced that this is happening to verify for themselves: simply take a visit to a website like Metacritic or, more notoriously, Rotten Tomatoes, and take a look at the striking disparity frequently observed between the "critics' score" on a film and the "audience score" for the same film. It had gotten so bad on Rotten Tomatoes that they wound up changing the way their whole site worked, so as to try and divert attention away from this phenomenon...obviously, it didn't work.

If I had to try and distill the reasons behind this kind of thing happening into a single issue/point, to me, this is merely another of many similar reactionary responses from the general public against those who they consider to be elitists, snobs. The sort of people who don't even bother to try and hide their obvious biases when writing a review about a movie or TV show, and worse still, find several ways to funnel their reviews through a political or sociocultural lens. In doing so, they turn what was supposed to be a piece on the actual merits of the underlying film or TV series itself (the writing, the actors' performances, the production quality, directing, etc.) into what comes across little more than an opportunity for the author to publish yet another piece about topics like diversity, racial/gender/sexual matters or other political topics that most people are tired of hearing about...of course, those who complain are typically labeled as trolls, incels, etc.

It's all rather exhausting tbh.

That said, there's actually quite a lot of good TV series that have come out in the last couple of years. Many of them wind up flying under the radar, of course a few of them do manage to become critical favorites (and lesser few still are actually as good as the gushing critics' adoration would suggest), but with the sheer volume of material being released every season, there's bound to be several that you've missed. I know it's happened to me, and I watch a lot of film/TV.

I'm happy to give some recommendations for good series in this thread if anyone wants any. A couple of entertaining series that I watched recently were "Sugar" (with Colin Farrell) and "The Gentlemen" (the Guy Ritchie series - which was much better than I'd anticipated it to be).

Heh, that reminds me I have a bunch of stupid minds tokens as well, lol.

...why are you posting this?

The last time there was a commit made to this github repot was 8 YEARS AGO.

There are plenty of places one can go abroad (if you live in the states, that is) where you can live and enjoy a much higher quality of life than you would in the US, for far less money and bullshit to deal with.

However, the US government, corrupt as they are, will still "make you" pay taxes. Utterly absurd, should be criminal. Remember, the income tax was supposed to be a "temporary measure", lol.

If you wanna get out from under that boot, you have to renounce your citizenship which is a whole mess in and of itself, and you also have to pay a fine/fee to do so. They find a way to get their cut, no matter what.

If you're going to post this kind of thing, at least do it under your username, don't be such a pussy.

Dark mode. I'm inherently distrustful of anyone who willingly chooses to use light mode for any website where the option for dark mode is available* instead...there's a strong correlation with psychopathy and light mode users.

None of the people listed IMHO

To extend on what Nuttall said below, I think it would be cool if we were able to create/submit different themes to customize the colors/display of the site...even if it were something super simple such as being able to customize the colors of the various main components (as a developer I can see how this would be pretty simple to integrate) would be nice. It's minor, but, I think it would be a welcome feature.

I would also like to see an optional alternative version of viewing the "front page", so to speak. Something that was perhaps more inclusive of using images sourced from metadata on the URLs submitted (if there's an underlying URL of something linked to from the post). Perhaps I'll have to whip something up in Figma to show you what I mean.

Unfortunately if you are an American, unless you renounce your citizenship (which is almost certainly more trouble than it's worth), you are required to pay taxes regardless of whether or not you are living in the US. Even if you are paying taxes as someone living in and running a company in another country, you're still required to be paying taxes to the US.

AFAIK, the US is one of, if not the only country, with such rules. It's ridiculous.

EUR is "competition" in name only to USD, they are ultimately controlled by the same parties.

I think most people are interested in BRICS not necessarily because of some currency they may or may not create, but because of the shift towards a more multi-polar world in terms of global power/influence, compared to the one we live in now.

Honestly, despite what some people are telling you in here, brave gave you the best advice here. Go with Alby to start, IMHO (or WoS if you are on mobile). Non-custodial lightning is a pain in the ass. Fortunately, transactions are cheap and fast so you can quite literally keep a small amount in whatever wallet you wind up choosing, and either send it to an exchange to convert it to mainnet BTC or do whatever you want with it. Hell, even CashApp has lightning support built in, you can always use that as well if you wanted.

Again, this advice is considered heresy by a lot of people here, however, if you want the easiest way to get started and aren't looking to get into hosting your own node and setting up channels, it's really the only option that doesn't result in massive stress.

I don't know if anyone needs this info or not, but I figured since you mentioned a Lightning-powered SMS service in the OP, just to let you know, there is an alternative that is up and working, that I have personally used a bunch of times without issue - it's quite good and the prices are very reasonable, it's a great way to verify via SMS for some of those annoying websites which want to require your phone number, and to remain 'anonymous' (or as much as we want to trick ourselves into thinking this). Their website is https://sms4sats.com - costs 3k sats for the basic service, but they have other stuff on there (such as renting a number to use for longer time periods).

Sure, but let's not pretend many people are actually using Bitcoin for on-chain payments. I would much prefer that people were, but it's not the case. In fact, many people on this very site have told me that they want the network to be more expensive for people to transact on. Or they say to "go use lightning" if you want cheaper transactions.

Am I wrong or somehow misunderstanding how Bitcoin works, in thinking that even if ordinals were to go away completely, Bitcoin would still be dealing with these same problems of congestion and expensive transactions when met with an increase of people transacting on-chain?

Seems like this has brought to the forefront of people's attention, the issues with scaling L1 bitcoin or providing a better alternative to lightning for onboarding the people we expect to be using Bitcoin for a true future economy. I think a lot of the effort that's been spent attacking ordinals and the people engaging in it (especially when you can encode data into the public keys themselves on-chain, encoded as multi-sig outputs - https://github.com/mikeinspace/stamps/blob/main/BitcoinStamps.md - which would take up even more space than Ordinals, btw) would be better spent focusing on building viable scaling solutions for bitcoin so that this isn't even an issue anymore.

Some of the people building out alternatives to lightning network are coming up with very interesting stuff, like Chainway who are creating a true trustless, programmable scaling layer by way of a ZK rollup - https://medium.com/@chainway_xyz/a-sovereign-zk-rollup-on-bitcoin-full-bitcoin-security-without-a-soft-fork-ca0389a0b658 - they are just one several such projects to keep an eye on, IMHO.

Wouldn't surprise me if some of his stuff was presented at Ethereum conferences by the Ethereum foundation or whomever, after all, Vitalik did use the guy's name in the protocol for Ethereum (wei represents the smallest unit of ETH used for gas/sending transactions, "gwei" represents 1,000 wei, etc.)

Ah yes, advocating for violence...really love to see it!

Imbecile.

Yup. NOSTR will continue to be little more than a niche hobbyist type thing, unless/until they are able to find a way to more seamlessly incorporate the use of key management. It should be entirely behind the scenes, so that users don't even have to know it's something being utilized until it is absolutely necessary.

Otherwise, forget about it. Just look at how few people use things which are objectively useful like PGP for e-mail/communication, to sign with their actual keys. But then look at how many people use supposedly secure e-mail services like protonmail, mailfence, etc.

This is the direction NOSTR needs to go in, if it wants to be successful. There simply are not enough people within the Bitcoin & related nerd communities to sustain it otherwise.

This issue is bringing to the forefront of everyone's attention, the very real problems with scaling that Bitcoin faces. I realize that this is an unpopular thing to bring up, especially around these parts, but it's an objectively true fact -- whether or not the mempool/block space is being used by actual transactions (which was supposed to be the point of Bitcoin, at least that's what I thought -- before it turned into becoming "digital gold" that no one ever does anything with, and you're just supposed to hold it and never spend any, ever), would we not still be at the same point we're currently at, inevitably, from people presumably attempting to open up lightning channels to use lightning as a layer 2?

Either way it seems that it is an inevitability that a better solution for either scaling the mainnet/layer 1 bitcoin network will need to be developed, and/or we will have to come up with an alternative, better solution for layer 2 transactions/additional layer 2s for transactions which aren't hindered by the (IMHO) broken approach lightning takes.

So, whether or not people here at SN or elsewhere in the Bitcoin community want to acknowledge this, they should be focusing on trying to fix the scaling issues with bitcoin and stop trying to act like blockchain hall monitors who keep the mempool free of monkey jpegs they dislike. This has already proven to be a fool's errand, and I'd think that anyone looking at this from a more rational perspective as you seem to be yourself, would realize that you're not going to be able to stop people from engaging in this kind of shit. That's just what happens on a permissionless, decentralized system, and the idea that anyone is going to be able enforce this or that miners will choose to forego the very lucrative additional sats they are earning in fees, is out of their mind.

What's the issue, exactly? Isn't this Bitcoin working as it's intended to? If people want to pay higher fees, they will pay higher fees...that's how it's supposed to work by design, I thought.

Who cares if you don't like their NFTs or any of the other shit, they're paying to put it on the chain, of what concern is it to you? Do you have this kind of attitude towards how people spend their money in their personal lives, outside of bitcoin?

Is there some kind of a code one needs to follow, in order to not be deemed a "unwelcome in bitcoin"? I thought bitcoin was supposed to be against this kind of mentality, that bitcoin is for everyone. When did this change and why?

This would be unbelievably massive, and I hope that it happens. Replit is a great platform, I love it, and you are correct in your prediction that this would drive an insane amount of growth to LN apps in particular.