Bitcoin transactions happen at the “speed of light” (~27:00) REALITY CHECK: As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow. It’s in fact why many people do not accept it for purchases anymore.

Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in fees. Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.

Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.

The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.

Nobody controls the network (~28:25) REALITY CHECK: If someone were to own 50% or more of the network’s compute power, they could control the network.

Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.

Bitcoin’s hard limit is likely very dangerous for the network (~29:00): Once the hard limit is reached, it is unclear if people will keep pumping computing power at it. If the creation of new Bitcoin is no longer allowed, it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.

Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.

Bitcoin’s lack of rules allow for massive amounts of fraud and prevents effective taxation (~29:25): While the video paints a cute picture of financial freedom, the reality is that Bitcoin allows for fraud on a world scale and does not allow for sales tax because of the way that anyone can have a cryptocurrency wallet without disclosing their identity.

Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes. Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank. People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

How to contact your MEP https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Interesting thanks I’ll take a look!

We need decentralized, federated search. I remember YaCy from years ago was attempting this. Anybody know if there’s anybody actively working on this?

Very excited to see this, and to be able to follow BlueSky and Mastodon users from my nostr app

Same thing whenever you see articles about Bitcoin’s energy use. Or the energy usage of any tech service/product:

• For some reason blames the product or service people are using, not politicians for failing for decades to invest in renewable energy.
• No contextual information (how much does the remittance industry use? How much energy does SWIFT, IBAN, or printing paper money use)? How efficiently do these systems actually use energy?
• No mention of the many useful things it does with that energy or why it uses energy in the way it does. (Send money across the globe in under a second for under a penny in fees to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet) (low fees available on Bitcoin lightning)
• No mention that most of that energy comes from renewables or how being a “buyer of last resort” for energy actually helps build out renewable grids since grid operators can guarantee whatever energy capacity they provision will be bought. Doesn’t even look at energy mix and demand curves.

Just ragebait tailored to their readers who already have strong negative opinions about this asset class but not about bonds or stocks or other asset classes for some reason. Even though Bitcoin has kept all its promises for 15 years in a row, never been hacked, never experienced an hour of downtime, or bank holiday, and never had its value printed away by an ever increasing supply (supply is capped at 21 million coins).

I will always upvote Firefox 😎😎😎

Fees with lightning (Bitcoin) are often under a penny per transaction and transactions settle instantly. Usability has come a long way here.

Your defense is “some other dictatorship does it, so that doesn’t concern me?”. Saying things are OK because the CCP or Putin does them is a very slippery slope.

Yes, I too would love the US president to decide which social media platforms I am allowed to legally use and who I can legally communicate with. I’m so scared China is going to, checks notes, influence my opinion that I’m willing to sacrifice my free speech rights in the process. Regulate me harder, daddy! 😍

On the other hand, Snapchat absolutely should be liable for its recommendation algorithms’ actions.

Should they though? The algorithm can be as simple as “show me the user with the most liked posts”. Even the best design algorithm is going to make suggestions that users connect with sex offenders because the algorithm has no idea who is a sex offender. Unless snapchat has received an abuse report of some kind of actively monitors all accounts all the time, they have no way to know this user is dangerous. Even if they did monitor the accounts, they won’t know the user is dangerous until they do something dangerous. Even if they are doing something dangerous, it may not be obvious from their messages and photos that they are doing something dangerous. An online predator asking a 12 year old to meet them somewhere looks an awful lot like a family member asking the same thing assuming there’s not something sexually suggestive in the message. And requiring that level of monitoring is extremely expensive and invasive. It means only big companies with teams of lawyers can run online social media services. You can say goodbye to fediverse in that case, along with any expectation of privacy you or anybody else can have online. And then, well, hello turnkey fascism to the next politician who gets in power and wants to stifle dissent.

Kids being hurt is bad. We should work to build a society where it happens less often. We shouldn’t sacrifice free, private speech in exchange or relegate speech only to the biggest, most corporate, most surveilled platforms. Because kids will still get hurt, and we’ll just be here with that many fewer liberties. Let’s not forget that the US federal government has a list of known child sex offenders in the form of Epstein’s client list and yet none of them are in prison. I don’t believe that giving the government more control and surveillance over online speech is going to somehow solve this problem. In fact, it will make it harder to hold those rich, well-connected, child rapist fucks accountable because it will make dissent more dangerous to engage in.

It could be “bolted on” to the side, some people are working on that, but there are some very basic premises where they differ which make it difficult (such as an AP account being tied to an instance whereas a nostr account is not). It’s like asking “can email be intergrated with discord”. Well, yes, kinda, but it’s not going to be as smooth as if they used the same underlying protocol in the first place.

Glad you liked it :)

Nostr is the way. I think it’s going to end up with way more adoption than mastodon or bluesky. I wrote a post comparing nostr vs mastodon if anyone is curious. https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

It’s a shame that people like Elon are associated with the “free speech” movement. The right to free speech is something people fought and died for, and have risked their lives to protect decade on decade. It’s a gift previous generations have given to us. And now it’s almost seen as a dirty word. Which is exactly what those in power want.

Free speech and an unrestrained press protects all of us from government over-reach, it is a primary defense against the growth of fascism, it is the engine that drives the next stage of social and cultural evolution. Ideas considered abhorrent now may be commonplace in the future. Think of what people would had said if you had advocated for legal homosexuality in the 1950s, you’d be right if you’d think they’d use any exemption possible in free speech protections to try and throw you in jail, in fact they did, and people are calling for less free speech than we had then.

You are a human. It should be a universal human right to think whatever you want to think and say whatever you want to say, and the government has no place putting anything other than extremely clear and limited restrictions on it. Society is free to punish you, but it’s a power we cannot hand over to the government.

Heart disease is a major killer, this is excellent news! If you are effected by heart disease or know somebody who has been (or if you’re just enthusiastic about medicine), consider donating some of your computer’s idle time to DENIS@Home. You can set it to only run when your computer is idle, and it helps researchers who are working to refine electrical models of the heart. Fair warning: They don’t always have workunits available, I encourage you to check out the many other [email protected] projects if you are interested. World Community Grid is another great health one, as is SiDock.

Cloudflare MITMs a good portion of internet traffic. They can even see inside SSL tunnels for most websites you visit. It’s an absolute privacy nightmare.

No that’s not how it works. It stores learned information like “word x is more likely to follow word y than word a” or “people from country x are more likely to consume food a than b”. That is what is distributed when the AI model is shared. To learn that, it just reads books zillions of times and updates its table of likelihoods. Just like an artist might listen to a Lil Wayne album hundreds of times and each time they learn a little bit more about his rhyme style or how beats work or whatever. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s a layperson’s explanation of how it works. The book isn’t stored in there somewhere. The book’s contents aren’t transferred to other parties.

Amazing how every new generation of technology has a generation of users of the previous technology who do whatever they can do stop its advancement. This technology takes human creativity and output to a whole new level, it will advance medicine and science in ways that are difficult to even imagine, it will provide personalized educational tutoring to every student regardless of income, and these people are worried about the technicality of what the AI is trained on and often don’t even understand enough about AI to even make an argument about it. If people like this win, whatever country’s legal system they win in will not see the benefits that AI can bring. That society is shooting themselves in the foot.

Your favorite musician listened to music that inspired them when they made their songs. Listening to other people’s music taught them how to make music. They paid for the music (or somebody did via licensing fees or it was freely available for some other reason) when they listened to it in the first place. When they sold records, they didn’t have to pay the artist of every song they ever listened to. That would be ludicrous. An AI shouldn’t have to pay you because it read your book and millions like it to learn how to read and write.