makeasnek

You are saying Taler is good because it "doesn't enable tax evasion". I am saying that's a bad metric.

"Enable tax evasion" = "Not let the government have 100% viewability of every financial transaction you ever made"? You mean, like cash, a system of payment we have used for over 100 years? We should get rid of that because it "enables tax evasion"?

No thanks, I'd rather live in a world where I can give my friend $5 for buy me some snacks at the store without the government having to get involved. I'd rather not have, at a time when we are experiencing democratic backsliding, my least favorite political party, who happens to be in charge at the moment, be able to see the entirety of the inflows and outflows of the resistance organizations fighting their fascist policies. I'd rather be able to get an abortion and not wonder if my bank is going to snitch on me.

You know who really evades taxes? Those rich fucks who lobby and pay off (or are!) politicians to give them tax loopholes. Or the people in the panama papers. But those aren't the tax evaders we're talking about, now are they? Because they'll never be held accountable to these laws, even though they were doxed publicly as violating them.

These kinds of financial surveillance powers will only be used against plebs, dissidents, and people who the people in power don't like.

Wow very interesting thank you! I like that it can be run side-by-side from the same profile to test it out. If search was fixed I would have never migrated so much of my e-mail to gmail.

Yes this exists. Multi-sig is also worth mentioning though it doesn't solve this problem in the way you're asking but it does eliminate the risk of total loss of security if a single key is compromised.

I have used Thunderbird for years. HOWEVER:

• I don't know why Thunderbird can't get a reliable, functional search ability. It's such garbage. I constantly have to delete my entire search index and start from scratch, it is immensely frustrating.
• The problems connecting to gmail are also so frustrating. Yes, they are Google's fault but if you make an e-mail client you maybe need to add a workaround for the world's most popular e-mail provider. It's totally fixable because you can apply those fixes manually.

If you can do a P2P transaction like that, you need either a central server or a blockchain or equivalent to prevent double-spends. There is no other way. Satoshi's innovation for Bitcoin was developing a system (blockchain) that can do this without a central server.

and technology which they can't censor or control (lemmy/mastodon/ap, nostr, bluesky, freenet, hyphanet, matrix, tor, i2p, etc)

Well, yes, exactly. That’s the problem. There have been innumerable innovations and improvements in the field over those 15 years, but Bitcoin ossified early and so it’s got none of them.

Except it's got L2s, it's got more smart contract abilties, it's adding zk rollups, etc. It's not like it hasn't improved over that timespan. The stability of the core protocol and widespread consensus required to upgrade it (and the slow speed at which this occurs) is a benefit for something that is meant to be money. It's maybe less beneficial for the world's most cutting edge smart contract platform, for example.

You’ve got a very inaccurate and skewed view of this. Most significantly, it’s not “proof of ownership,” it’s “proof of stake.” Proof of ownership and proof of stake are distinct technologies that operate in different manners. Ethereum is not proof of ownership.

They call it proof of stake, but it's proof of ownership. It's proving you own coins. That's it. Edit: I think you thought I was talking about proof of authority?

There is a magical threshold at 66%, if you’ve got more than that you can prevent “finality” from happening which will in turn cause some disruption to the chain. But most significantly, it doesn’t prevent blocks from continuing to be processed and doesn’t allow stakers to forge blocks. It’s a highly theoretical attack since no stakers or staking pools are anywhere remotely close to that sort of dominance, and even if they did do that there’d still be mechanisms by which they could be slashed.

I will need to look into this more so thank you for bringing this to my attention. Centralization of nodes renders much of this inconsequential imo but still worth looking into for my own knowledge.

Lightning has been an entirely predictable disappointment. The problem is that Bitcoin was not designed to support something like Lightning

You're right, it was not designed to support an idea that didn't exist when it was designed. But upgrades to improve lightning have been proposed and made it into protocol and more updates (convenants) are coming down the pipe. Lightning works, it works really well, I use it on a daily basis, the network continues to grow. It works for small transactions and large ones. It takes under a second. Cash app supports it, Coinbase added support for it this year. It's as decentralized as base chain is, unlike many of Eth's L2s. The only caveat to lightning for self-custody wallets is solving the "inbound liquidity" problem for onboarding new issues, which is an annoying UX thing but not actually a huge problem imo. Nonetheless, convenants will help solve this and there are other proposals (Ark and Fedimint) which solve this problem in different ways with different trade-offs. It has come a long ways in the past 5 years, I tried it when it first came out and it was a major pain to use, almost all of those pain points have been solved.

Ironically there’s thirty times more Bitcoin being transacted on the Ethereum network in the form of WBTC than there is Bitcoin being transacted in Lightning.

This is a good point. This WBTC is being used for DeFi etc, it's not being used as a currency for transactions. And that's fine, maybe that's Eth's place, certainly there isn't much interest in using BTCs main chain for more complex smart contracts due to concern about bloat. There are proposals (BitVM etc) and some working implementations with "shared security" from main chain with the smart contracts being hosted in some sidechain/L2/etc. But it's a dizzying array, we'll see how that shakes out. I don't know about Eth's long-term future as a decentralized platform when centralization continues to increase and a conspiracy, hack, or government pressure on Hetzner and Amazon could impact over half the nodes on the network.

Nobody's gonna make you, unlike a CBDC.

Bitcoin's protocol has not meaningfully changed in 15 years. In terms of stability, in the crypto space, you literally cannot beat that. It will continue doing its thing so long as a few computers in the world still run the protocol. Those In those 15 years it has never been hacked, never had an hour of down time, took no bank holidays, and has fought off competition from other cryptocurrencies and attempted bans from nation states and world powers. And the supply has remained capped at 21 million coins as promised.

Ethereum is centralized AF. The majority of the supply was sold during the pre-mine, and now that "proof of ownership" runs the network, the risk of a 51% attack is significant. And in PoS systems, you get centralization of wealth over time since you are printing new currency and handing it over to people simply for already owning some, the "work" they have to do to stake is minimal. Unlike in PoW systems, once a 51% attack happens, it can happen indefinitely there there is no imposed cost after the start of the attack. Bitcoin has no pre-mine and has been issued fairly and transparently. The majority of Eth's nodes are hosted in one of like three corporate datacenters because the hardware required to run a full node has gotten ridiculous. You can say it's "secure enough" or "decentralized enough", but not that it's "more secure" or "more decentralized" than Bitcoin, because it simply isn't. Their L2s are an absolute mess, some of them are incredibly centralized, Polygon last I checked had 15 nodes controlling the entire network. Meanwhile, you can run a full Bitcoin node on a laptop from 10 years ago and a lightning node on an Android phone. All while still being able to settle a transaction in under a second for a penny in fees with lightning.

Once you start to look at all these coins aside from Bitcoin, all of them, of the ones that aren't outright scams, have traded decentralization (and therefore security) for transaction speed. Now that Bitcoin lightning is out and mature, transaction speed and chain capacity is no longer the limiting factor. Those other coins have no reason to exist.

Monero is cool, its main pitch is privacy. Bitcoin's privacy continues to get better, I expect that trend to continue. Bitcoin has a conference like every month, there is a massive pool of dev talent and funding. Lightning was released 5+ years ago, Monero doesn't even have an L2 and without an L2 it cannot scale, and there's not even an L2 in the developer roadmap. You can't put everything on chain forever, and the bigger the chain gets, the more centralized it becomes, period. With no L2, transactions are slow and fees will increase as blockspace competition increases. Lightning can make transactions in under a second for pennies in fees since fees are not tied directly to blockspace.

Stablecoins are the worst of crypto and central banking combined.

• They are centralized, even more centralized than central banks since they are run by a single company not an board appointed by an elected government
• They can rug you at any time
• They only have value because they are "pegged" to a certain currency and the "backing" must exist to maintain that peg.
• Their source of the backing is often "trust me bro"
• Even if the backing was solid, market shocks and other problems can reduce the value of that backing, leading to them being insolvent and the stablecoin losing its value. And guess what, it wasn't insured!
• They are often poorly regulated or unregulated entirely, so you have no reason to trust their claims and probably can't seek any real remedy if they are lies
• They are, at best, pegging their value to a currency which is designed to lose 2-3% of its value per year due to inflation

Several of them have already collapsed spectacularly. More will in time. Avoid stablecoins.

Can you imagine, if we gave people rights?! Like free speech? Or the right to not have their house raided by the government without cause? My god they'd probably abuse those too! We should take them all away just to be safe :p