As somebody who:
I also found this site confusing AF. It sounds cool and interesting, probably? I can't tell lol. Is it a network bridge operating at the level of a relay? Is it an app you can use to connect and post/read to/from both networks at once? What the hell is it?
Is there a system that can get information to someone, maintaining anonymity for the sender the whole way through? Like having an open drop box where you’d be able to put whatever documents you want into it.
Yes many journalistic organizations have secure drop-boxes for this purpose. You have to either trust that their drop-box doesn't record your IP address/other info OR use an anonymity system like Tor or I2P to make sure whatever they record doesn't reveal your identity.
How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home
Actually, tipping on social media posts are an excellent use for Bitcoin. I regularly tip on nostr, it works well, I wish lemmy had it too. Good luck enabling transactions that complete in under a second, globally, for less than a penny in fees, with any other system. And without requiring you to hire an absolute team of lawyers to setup accounts and manage liquidity and make deals with foreign banks to backstop that liquidity. Oh and don't forget about counterparty risks, chargebacks, currency conversion, and long settlement times! Bitcoin solves that all magically for basically free.
And it also shows that states can pay for things without the need to collect taxes for this, for example we saw this during COVID, when sizeable amounts of money were created to give an impulse to the economy and to the people who temporarily lost their income sources
And surely printing money doesn't cause inflation right. Value isn't free. If you have the same demand for a currency and increase it's supply by 10%, it's going to cost 10% more of that currency to buy any given item.
Good point about the article date, but it is coming up for a vote this week https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/council-to-greenlight-chat-control-take-action-now/
These laws are being passed by politicians who generally don't understand technology. What they will achieve is a reduction in privacy and liberty for every citizen in the EU and easier methods to clamp down on dissent. Just because it's not technically perfect or difficult to implement fully doesn't mean it's not a threat. It's one step closer totalitarianism, and what's stopping totalitarianism is everyday people, one step at a time, battling it back.
My memory isn't perfect, it would be nice to have a second set of eyes, and I could describe things to it aside from knowing the exact words. "What was that website I visited within the last six months where I played an online game that was like snake but different?" or "What was that cryptocurrency i was researching which was touting it had perfect forward secrecy?" "Who was I emailing about the football game" etc.
Still some of those, as with any social media platform. I have come across a few objectionable things, I just blocked and moved on. But you pick who you follow so you pick who shows up in your feeds. Each relay has their own moderation policies, so (like Lemmy), you can pick relays which suit your moderation preferences (which effect the "trending notes"/public square section). Most nostr apps by default upon install will ask you if you want to automatically filter out crypto/nsfw/foul language/etc. I picked at random and didn't enable many of the filters.
Okey, so relays can pass message to other relay? Didn’t know that, so thanks.
Relays currently don't talk to each other. But users are typically connected to multiple relays and publish simultaneously to multiple relays. Likewise, a user pulls in data (tweets etc) from multiple relays. My client is connected to ten. So to give you a more accurate answer to your question, to DM another user, you and that other user need to share a relay. If you are crossing networks (such as clearnet->tor), this means one of those relays needs to talk to both networks. If you want to follow a particular person but aren't normally connected to a relay they are on, your client can connect to a relay just to get content from that particular person. All of this is handled automatically, of course.
But then, why not use network like Yggdrasil? Which would be basically like Nostr, but can relay any TCP/IP packet for any app, instead of just Nostr notes.
Taking a cursory look at this, it sounds more like a general routing protocol not something that is specifically designed to relay message content or other formatted data (ie you build your apps on top of it, it's just a protocol for packet delivery). Nostr could conceivably run on any base routing protocol like Tor, I2P, or Yggdrasil though I don't know of any specific implementations either way. As long as the relay has a way to resolve addresses and send data to them over TCP it should be fine. Hadn't heard of Yggdrasil yet thanks for letting me know about that I'll do some more reading later.
It's done off-chain because on-chain would be expensive and slow. On-chain takes 10 min and $1.50-$15 in fees depending on the day. Lightning takes < 1 second for < 1 penny in fees.
Lightning transactions are secured by the base chain, so you're not at risk of losing any funds. The transaction data is "off-chain" because there's no reason for it to be "on-chain".