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110 sats \ 1 reply \ @nullcount 16h \ on: What will happen to all the weapons being produced? Are wars inevitable? AskSN
Its fascinating how quickly people behave themselves when everyone around them is ripped and well-armed.
But seriously, turn off the news... anything you actually need to know will find its way to you. When you tune your attention on information that you don't need to know about, it is not only a waste of time, but it can cause anxiety and hopelessness.
Focus on what you can control. Treat everything else as an attack on your psyche.
Turn off the news.
Touch grass.
Hit the gym.
Arm yourself.
Mining with expensive electricity and inefficient machines does NOT make the sats you mine worth more in fiat terms.
More energy spent on mining means more energy is being harnessed in the first place. Bitcoin is a game that tricks humans into accelerating their path to energy prosperity.
Even after the subsidy is all gone, bitcoin still needs miners to give their energy for the system to function. So can you really count the energy spent today as "production costs"?
Miners had a larger effect on supply in the early years, but today, over 90% of the sats are already in circulation and miners have more options to finance their operation than just selling BTC.
but it will take a tremendous amount of work and a very long time.
Its up to each individual person to do the "work" to learn (or unlearn) about money. The more you understand BTC, the more BTC you tend to own.
2 Separate Timelines. 2 separate Universes.
I think we're in the same universe... just two different kinds of people live in it. We live in the "future" simply because we like to learn about new tech and have adopted BTC before most people have even tried it.
Others would rather adopt new tech later on, after all the difficulties have been smoothed out, or they'll only change behaviors when there is no other option left.
You can't force a late-majority kind of person into becoming an early-adopter. Its just their nature, like our nature is to be early. Embrace your nature and others'.
Even in Los Angeles BTC Map is scarce... and I mean SCARCE on places to spend Bitcoin it's just bizarre.
Not that bizarre if you understand business and the desire to hold better money. Businesses want to make things for rich people because rich people tend to pay more. However, people who are "Bitcoin Rich" are more likely to understand that BTC is better money, and therefore they are less likely to want to spend it if there is inferior money left to spend. Its the same reason you can't find many places to "spend" stocks, real estate, fine art, and other assets.
But in the 'normie' world Lightning does NOT exist.
Good! LN is pretty complicated. Its probably best if people don't know it exists. Do most internet users know TCP/IP exists? Probably not, they just use a domain name or email address and it just works! That's the role LN should have IMO.
And all of them have no FUCKING IDEA what I'm talking about.
This should be a hint... stop talking about bitcoin and start asking them about their ideas of money.
Do they feel inflation? Where do they think inflation comes from? Do they like the USD? Do they think we should go back to gold standard?
Ask questions, resist the urge to give answers right away. Once you understand where they stand, you can start to nudge them toward learning about BTC on their own time.
There are enough resources to learn about BTC once someone is curious enough to WANT to learn about it.
People won't remember the words you said, they only remember how you made them feel.
If you make them feel like they're being sold something, or educated, that's less ideal than if you make them feel curious and intellectual about the nature of money and value.
My friends/colleagues overwhelmingly think that Bitcoin is a joke. Like a digital pet rock... if not a scam + outright waste of time
Maybe they're right! If you are curious about their reasons, maybe they'll become curious about your reasons for owning BTC.
I like to acknowledge that there is a difference between "knowledge" and "wisdom".
You can be wise while getting the "facts" wrong, and you can be knowledgeable about something without an ounce of "common sense".
There are also reasonable and unreasonable ways to arrive at knowledge/wisdom/truth. Some prefer the path of science/logic, others find the path of spirit/emotion more enjoyable.
If you define "intelligence" as "the same path I took to find truth" then, yea, most people are going to look like idiots from your perspective.
If a business is competing based on "ideals", its unlikely they'll compete well on the other things you probably care about: quality, consistency, price, etc.
I want to buy the best from the best. I don't care about spending the best money while doing it. In fact, I'd rather avoid spending good money, if possible.
Your ecomm store is saying "no" to tons of sales if you're not accepting Apple Pay yet. Why?
Its not because Apple Pay has the best privacy, or is the "safest" with respect to escrow, trust, etc. Its not even the tech that is superior.
Its because most people have an iPhone. That's it.
Apple has 92% of the digital wallet market share. They process $6 Trillion per year.
I don't think even 1% of people have access to a Bitcoin wallet loaded with sats they can spend on a whim.
Its not that bitcoin is unworkable at scale. Its just unworkable. Unless your business is only targeting those 1% of people with sats to spend, there is no scale to work with in the first place.
Word-of-mouth is not the same as Viral.
Word-of-mouth is intentional -- I like a thing, therefore, I tell people about it. Because I want people to enjoy it too.
Viral is not intentional -- I didn't mean to spread the thing, but it spread anyways. Like the "sent from my iPhone" message at the bottom of emails. Or email forwarding chains like, "send this to 10 people or you'll have bad luck!" Or rage-bait that makes people share even tho they hate it.
The world's three largest bitcoin mining machine makers (Bitmain, Canaan, and MicroBT) are establishing US manufacturing operations to dodge Trump's tariffs. These Chinese firms control over 90% of the global mining rig market worth $12B by 2028. While the move shields them from trade war impacts, it raises security concerns about Chinese hardware dominating America's Bitcoin infrastructure, creating potential supply chain vulnerabilities.
Chinese hardware already dominates. This move means American miners pay less taxes (tariffs). Maybe they'll employ some US engineers and help boost demand for more Americans to pursue careers in chip fabrication and electrical engineering in the coming decades.
What did you expect? A US company would spin up a factory and train thousands of engineers overnight? AI and robots aren't ready to replace Engineers yet. The US does not have the talent to build chips here. Too many unemployed English and Communications majors, not enough unemployed engineers for a job to fill a factory like this with domestic talent.
Gradually then suddenly. Kinda like Y2K, except there's no hard deadline and the scope of the "bug" is impossible to know until an actual threat emerges.
There's zero reason for 99% of people to worry tho. Unless you're a software maintainer... then you should at least educate yourself about the quantum resistant algorithms that already exist and consider how you could implement them to replace any quantum-vulnerable code in your stack.
Too early for action. Premature optimization has potential to be a bigger problem than being "late" to react to a real quantum threat.
Imagine if everyone rushed to become "quantum safe" this year... it would be a huge effort to educate, rewrite, and deploy code that is "in theory" resistant to a not-yet-existant threat. It could lead to a false sense of safety considering that quantum computers could evolve to attack in ways we have not accounted for yet.
By the way, Bitcoin does not use encryption... it only uses asymmetric key signatures, and hashes. Other "layers" may use encryption, but the base protocol has no encryption/decryption. If SHA256 or Schnorr is broken by quantum, it could still cause chaos on BTC, but its an important nuance that often gets conflated.
In 2032, captchas be like:
Pilot this unmanned aircraft and initiate a strike on the village with this road pattern:
You completed the task faster than 99.2% of humans!
Sigh* whatever it takes to keep the bots from taking over...
That said, all of these come with trade-offs—whether in time, attention, or privacy.
There are no free sats.
Your time, attention, and privacy are worth more than the tiny rewards these apps are paying for your labor and personal data.
Imagine instead, you used your time, attention, and privacy to raise your income by 0.01% every day. It could mean studying to get a better job or promotion, working on your budget to lower costs, blocking ads so you aren't tempted to buy junk (yes, ads do work even if you think you are immune), starting a business, or investing in your health so you have more productive days on this Earth.
The term "sovereign" implies having the highest power within a specific domain or territory. The Bitcoin protocol gives sovereignty to anyone who manages to sign a transaction with a private key and include that tx into a block using their own node and hashrate to mine the block.
How sovereign are you really when you don't have at least an exahash worth of ASICs to ensure your transactions are mined in a timely manner?
How sovereign are you really if your wallet isn't using your own node to broadcast your txns?
How sovereign do YOU really want to become with respect to your money?
Maybe you care about sovereignty and go all the way, self-custody, run a node, start a mining farm, etc. That's great!
Now, consider how sovereign are you really when your Tor node is unreachable at the checkout line in Steak and Shake? Or your mining farm is making you poor because your electricity isn't free. Or, Satoshi forbid, you lost your private keys!
Just because you HAD the highest power attainable by using BTC, does not mean you get to actually keep that power, or even exercise that power. There is tremendous responsibility associated with holding this power and wielding it practically in your everyday dealings.
Most of us have a job and responsibilities already and don't want to (or can't afford to) become the "highest power" with respect to the infrastructure that backs our money. And frankly, nobody should have to take on additional responsibilities to start using better money. The best money should "just work". The more you need to understand to use the money, the worse it is at truly being a medium of exchange.
It doesn't matter how "hard" you work. Or how wrinkly your brain is. Nobody gives a shit if you're "actually smart". People only care about results.
If the "result" of using LLMs is that you write better emails, then, no, you're not getting dumber. You're getting better at communication.
If the "result" of using LLMs is that you back your arguments with appeals to authority, i.e. "I'm right because GPT said so" (a logical fallacy), then maybe you are getting dumber.
"Computers are a bicycle for the mind" -- Steve Jobs
If the result of using a bike is traveling faster, and you use that result to go to more places and get more cardio, then a bike is making you healthier.
If the result of using a bike is traveling faster, and you use that result to avoid cardio and "waste" any time that you've saved while traveling, then a bike may be making you sicker.
One of the earliest critiques of new information technology comes from a myth written by Plato:
"This invention [written language] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."
— Plato, Phaedrus
Large Language Models are part of the next technological evolution of human language.
Spoken words enable people to transmit information in real-time.
Written words enable people to transmit information into the future, without relying on human memory.
LLMs enable transmission of information into the future, without relying on human memory, AND without requiring another human to assimilate the information verbatim.
The result of written language may have "weakened" our ability to memorize. Just like LLMs may weaken our ability to assimilate information. But the result of writing means people can "record" more information than they could without. And the result of LLMs means we can assimilate more information than ever before.
Ask strangers to take a photo of you. Most people will happily assist even if they're in their phone bubble.
The photo doesn't have to be anything special. The point is to start an interaction and break their frame long enough to focus on you (without being a jerk).
When you check the photo ask a question, give a complement, or share something about yourself.
Ask to take a selfie with them. If they ask, "why?", just say "I want to capture the moment I made a new friend".
Follow up with another question, complement or story to continue, or take the opportunity to leave on a high note.
In your scenario, transaction fees must rise because the network is willing to pay to maintain the security budget.
Here's another scenario... transaction fees stay low, even below the security budget, because the ecosystem has evolved to withstand occasional attacks, and participants are not willing to bear the cost of high transaction fees.
This scenario actually describes the Bitcoin Testnet pretty well. Sure, testnet is always getting re-org or 51% attacked. Its inconvenient, unpredictable, and sometimes unusable. But for the most part, transactions still get processed, and txns that have thousands of confirmations are still extremely unlikely to get undone.
The testnet3 lightning network is surprisingly robust: https://mempool.space/testnet/lightning/nodes/rankings/liquidity
Just because BTC has never successfully been attacked like this, does not mean it is so fragile that it will die if an attack ever does succeed.
There are ways for you to guard yourself in an environment where BTC is suffering from attacks:
- Increase the number of confs before you consider your onchain txns "final"
- Use off-chain protocols that "anchor" periodically to the chain
Owning a LN channel that has been open for +100,000 blocks is probably a good investment in either scenario.