Why blame capitalism? Why not blame the unlimited wants of human desire?

And at a deeper level, it's driven by the fact that our desires are not individualistically determined. What we want depends on what our neighbors have. Thus, the wants become unlimited.

This explanation (that wants are socially determined) also pretty much explains the rest of the authors' complaints as wel.

Yes, it does because it makes consumption relatively more expensive than saving (relative to fiat.)

Lack of high paying jobs. There are a lot of service jobs in the area because it is a resort town and there are a lot of good jobs for skilled trades but not much else.

Not such a big deal for my wife and I but as the town grows I hope the job prospects improve for younger people (namely my kids) so they don't have to flee to the city. Remote work for the win.

Yes, I am selfish, I want my kids to stay in a small town with me forever and not experience the world. Haha

Bingo, untold resources have already been wasted trying to force Bitcoin as a payments system in the meat space, that's not where its product market fit is because there's not a real problem there to be solved.

Even the Bitcoin Bar, Pubkey, still does most of its transactions with cash or CC. There are some usability issues with multiple bartenders using a single node (which the architecture Lightning.Pub and ShockWallet solve actually) but that doesn't change the fact that customers, even hardcore bitcoiners, have 0 reason to pay in Bitcoin except to virtue signal. Even I use my Discover card when I'm in town.

Paying attention to this wrong thing has left gaps in other areas though of course, its entirely our fault that micro-services and things susceptible to chargebacks on the internet are not using Bitcoin/Lightning. There's people catching on to the fact that Bitcoin should be the native currency of AI, but even simpler than that, things like VPS/VPN/Mail Relay and things like that in a hostile internet environment are prime candidates... its just that the tooling for this still sucks horribly as we've collectively built everything but what is needed.

That moment when you have so many bugs that they start to cancel each other out.

Hi there,

for full transparency: Yes, we do.

For those who want some more detail: We block swaps originating from OFAC blacklisted addresses since quite some time already (see #340280), see also 4.17 in https://boltz.exchange/terms. The goal is simple: avoid our users having their swap funds frozen by entities like European or U.S. exchanges.

But precisely this happened over the past couple of days. Turns out ByBit Hack related funds are moving through different Bitcoin rails and caused funds to be flagged and frozen by different regulated exchanges. To counter this, we added the ByBit blacklist (https://dt074px2e9qbh.cloudfront.net/exploit-api.json) in addition to the OFAC blacklist. Goes without saying, that checks against these lists run locally on our server.

So... we are not blocking Bitcoin originating from coinjoins, but if you are participating in a coinjoin round with blacklisted ByBit Hack addresses, then we do. If you intend to use Boltz with coinjoined funds, it's a good idea to investigate about your coordinator a bit beforehand (see e.g. https://x.com/Ziya_Sadr/status/1904683659686215806).

We'd love to see dramatically improved fungibility on Bitcoin and are looking to implement Payjoins to do our (little) part. Particularly excited about the upcoming v3 multiparty version: https://payjoindevkit.org/2025/03/18/the-evolution-of-payjoin/#looking-to-the-future-payjoin-v3

The worst and lowest signal people think nothing good can come of it, so the opposite is all but guaranteed

Possible outcomes:

Order emerges from chaos so I'd expect some combination of all of these.

Yea double wired sucks if anything takes down lines (or power in many cases) in the area... Starlink is great for that reason alone, and the back-up plan is only $10/mo which you still may be able to register for even if your area isn't eligible for full residential scale service

Perhaps a high gain 5G antenna you can put on the roof would make cellular at least serviceable for backup? If you can get a pole high enough for line of sight it could make a big difference... but that's probably going to cost just as much as Starlink equipment and cell towers are often impacted by power outages too.

woot, I'm looking forward to that! I have some ideas regarding trust graph i wanted to test out.

By the way, I was meaning to ask: I know the number of items is around 900,000, but what's approximately the number of users, and just as importantly, what's the approximate size of the ItemAct table? i.e. What percent of all potential user-item pairs are populated by an action like a zap or downzap?

I discovered some collaborative filtering algorithms that look promising, but need to get a sense of their scalability in this context.

(I'm also not convinced yet they're the right way to go for SN, will provide a write up soon-ish)

My wife turned off my node by accident while I was away. She can't figure it out, so I'm cc's for 2 days!

I also stopped listening to it for a few years: if I need to want to learn about something, a. reading is faster; b. I better learn by doing than listening.

I would slightly disagree, not to say that ain't no problems but there are less issues with them. First off, you do need a password manager; no human can remember all the different passwords to all the resources you access. With that in place, you need to pick one that meets your criteria - namely, to support passkey and hopefully on all platforms you use (MacOS, Linux, Web, Windows, whatever). After that is settled and you have your password manager on your windows, your mac , your browser and iPhone, life gets easier since you store them in your smart password manager. The icky feeling I have is still you have to "trust" someone (your smart password manager provider) not to f-up (tall order one might think) and keep you safe. That is a risk not everyone is willing to take. So, in my humble opinion, passkeys are not inherently bad; it's the implementation you choose that is important and worth a lot of your time to plan properly and educate your users.

Oh this one will look good! A month ago I was struggling with even basic code reading (double text) so I embarked in a quest for the crystal clear text feeling that we need for programming and settled on this one:

It’s 144 Hz, looks cool, text is sharp and it can be found for 400$ too I think, so if even the one you found ends up being meh in text I’d suggest you 27” @ 4k

Now there are a lot of parameters when it comes to choosing a monitor but the bare minimum would be IPS, 1ms-4ms of response (no ghosting) and for me at least 120hz but it’s because I got used to it and everything else looks tacky/laggy

Editing videos, which use to be a thing I disliked doing, but these days it’s become refreshing also in between meetings, emails, curriculum, travel planning, end of month duties etc…

Oh how I’ve missed this place..

There is so much incentive is to push USD stablecoins on the world, and the demand is insatiable. We should focus on making the bridge to bitcoin as easy as possible because stablecoins are happening no matter how much we dislike them.

And to be honest with myself, I must acknowledge that access to USD has made my bitcoin journey immensely easier. I can't deny someone else the same advantage as long as it's still possible to buy bitcoin with fiat.

I've listened to the passkey pitch a few times and Im still not sold. This quote makes a great point. I've tested them with Bitwarden and they work but I am a long way from sold on them replacing passwords and being better than passwords and 2FA combined. If someone doesn't resuse passwords and uses 2FA passwords aren't really a problem IMO.

I guess you could say that passkeys make you use a tool but that's also the barrier to entry.

I agree that dollars are the best option among shitty fiat. It's the form it would take. These stable coins are borderless CBDCs.

I wonder what percentage of internet users use password managers

What do you think about specifying "lightning" wallet in that first sentence, so there's no confusion.

Then you hit them with the word lightning early and more than once.