Republicans are the only one pushing these garbage laws

This is what happens when people sleep on elections, especially primaries, and when they vote for candidates based on bathroom use policy and other culture war nonsense instead of actual issues.

You think "the government should sell all the land" until you live in a state like Texas where nearly all land has been privatized. There aren't big open natural spaces you can visit, even parks feel like they're part of a disney resort instead of the real deal.

I live in a state with a lot of federal land. Had the state been allowed to, it would have privatized and sold much of that land for clearcutting, sprawl and other "economically productive" uses that prioritize the near-term over the future. But they couldn't because the federal govt owned the land. Nature is easy to access and abundant. It's wonderful.

And I'm not just talking about big sprawling national parks and forests, but local and county level parks as well. Land use here has been quite restrictive and while housing costs a bit more a result, everybody I know and care about is 15 minutes or less from usable green space.

Ask any foreigner who visits the states and they will tell you how much they marvel at our national parks system. The government gets a lot wrong, keeping land which doesn't need to be used out of the hands of the market isn't one of those things. Markets solve some things efficiently, and other conditions lead to inevitable "market failures" including tragedy of the commons. If we let the market control all this land, it would be ruined for future generations.

Agree with your frustrations very much. Our last big chance for merchant adoption, where we actually got quite a bit, ended because of this and because of high fees and slow confirmation times. Lightning has fixed this, but all those businesses stopped taking Bitcoin because it's didn't make sense for them to keep accepting it.

FWIW I've adopted a "Bitcoin first" policy in my personal life and business. Before I buy anything, i try to find a vendor who accepts BTC and if they are within reason price-wise, I always pick them. Every vendor I ever interact with, I always ask if they take it, and I tip them generously if they do. But it's a struggle finding vendors who take it.

Another aspect of this is the way taxation works. For many people, if they are spending Bitcoin, they are paying a significant premium on that product and a taxation headache. They bought $10 worth of BTC, it was worth $12 the next day, and now they have to pay the item price plus $2 in capital gains, and track all that. It's a nightmare on the vendor end too if they don't do instant conversion to fiat. I'm hopeful this particular problem will get fixed soonish.

Interesting I'd never heard of this wallet concept before, definitely something that is useful for onboarding new people

The cashu stuff is definitely something I want to read up more on and get a better understanding of. He's developing a lot of kick-ass stuff.

Good point! I'll take a look at the issues list

This is what I was initially wanting to do, but getting the money side of it to work out is complicated. Not many businesses want to pay somebody to do this, even if they otherwise wanted to accept Bitcoin. And what they would be willing to pay, even if I was working 8 hours a day, won't make rent happen. At least if we're talking about small to medium sized businesses and merchants. I could be completely wrong about that of course, but that's my read on it. And unlike, for example, coding a new killer app, there's no chance that I am working for cheap now in the hopes of it making bigger money down the line.

Larger businesses might pay more, but then you're getting into long-term support contracts, complying with various standards, integrating with their ERP system, and getting a lot more complicated than "here's BTCPay server configured with what you need" or something along those lines.

You ever tried zeus? Never had a routing issue w it, use it daily, default settings.

Lightning liquidity and the difference between regular BTC and lightning has been by far the hardest thing to explain to people for me.

After the holidays are over, making the second hire at our company whose wage will be paid entirely in BTC and making sure all our infrastructure and accounting is on point to make that a reality.

This is not a "flaw" of mine personally, but I think often about how what is a flaw from one person's perspective is a benefit from another's. One place I frequently see this pop up is language barriers for people in relationships whether romantic or professional. It would be easy to assume that if you have a poor grasp of a language, it would be a detriment, but many people who have done the hard work required to form a relationship with somebody where there is a language barrier will tell you, in fact, that the barrier is a blessing of sorts. Without the normal nuance of connotation, word choice, and assumptions, you instead are forced to discuss things very explicitly and clearly, much more so than you would in normal conversations. This strengthen's your relationship and understanding with that person. Topics which may be normally difficult to discuss or ask about explicitly become easy to do so because it's understood that you are asking because you legitimately do not know the answer due to the person's other culture or upbringing.

Right around the time Japan announced billions in frozen Russian assets would be given to Ukraine.

The reason for me to open a channel would be to reduce fees when using this site. Even a small $50 channel would take a long long long time to be worth it. I have other channels open that I use for all my other transactions. Maybe I'll consider making a larger channel in the future if some of my other channels close for whatever reason.

It's all about where you draw the box, but yes, the general conclusion is correct. Other contenders might be AWS, Google, BOINC, and Folding@home.

"A FLOP is not a FLOP" is a common statement in academic computing. Not all computing problems are neatly measured by FLOPs, and your performance (and the energy or number of math solves required to answer a question) are going to vary across hardware.

Poor ventilation standards is the main reason. You mostly get sick not from yourself just existing, but as a result of being around other humans and animals. At one point in human history, we figured out that re-using drinking water was a bad idea. Now many of us take clean drinking water for granted. Setting up infrastructure so everybody could have clean, safe drinking water all the time was expensive, and it wasn't a one-time expense, it's an ongoing expense. But it was worth it. Nobody I know has gotten typhoid or cholera, and that's a blessing. Unfortunately much of the world still lacks access to clean drinking water.

John Snow is the researcher widely attributed to being the first one to identify re-used water as a source of sickness, he was a pioneer in epidemiology. Vox has an interesting video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ86D_DtyWg

We also learned the same thing about re-using cutlery and plates.

We have let to learn that lesson for air, even though breathing in the wrong breath of air can literally kill you. In some spaces we have learned this lesson (hospitals have excellent ventilation standards), but in most we haven't. Increasing ventilation standards would mean we all get sick less often because we would get exposed to less airborne viruses like flu. Not only does this mean less sickness, but less opportunities for those viruses to replicate, mutate, and potentially become more deadly or immune evasive. Flu is a major underlying aggravating factor that leads to heart attacks due to the stress is places on the body . Which is why the flu shot is the #1 thing you can do (aside from diet and exercise) to prevent a heat attack. CDC estimates flu kills around 28,000 people in the US every year. In prior flu pandemics, of course, like 1918, flu has wiped out 50 million people.

John Snow project is one project advocating for better ventilation standards in public areas like schools. If you're curious about their work, check out http://johnsnowproject.org

If you're interested in contributing some spare CPU or GPU cycles to this kind of research, consider joining BOINC projects (Rosetta@home, SiDock, World Community Grid) and/or Folding@home. Anybody can contribute and it's a great way to give back while heating your home!

I'm using the embedded node (LND) in the zeus app, trying to make a channel between that and this node referenced at the bottom of the site:

I've been able to connect to other lightning nodes and establish channels with them

I tried opening a channel in Zeus w approx $50USD, but was told the channel was too small :(

lololol. Yes. And when we run out of transaction space again, what then? Oh right, bigger blocks, of course! Until running a node is so resource intensive that only governments and big corps can run them, like Eth, where >50% of nodes are hosted in one of like two corporate datacenters because of the insane hardware requirements. Bigger blocks along fix literally nothing. Get out of here with that.

I want the protocol to evolve, I welcome change, I don't welcome rehashing the same idiocy all over again, or anybody else who wants to do that.