First they came for the custodial wallets

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Yes quite a few as other commenters have indicated. Another good one is !boinc@sopuli.xyz. BOINC is an open source platform for volunteer computing that also has hundreds of scientific papers and citations under its belt. There are BOINC projects for medical research, space research, math, you name it, there’s probably a BOINC project for it. Anybody can start a BOINC project and you choose which projects you contribute CPU/GPU time to. You can pick more than one at a time. You may recognize some of the people hosting BOINC projects: Large Hardon Collider, Max Planck Institute, University of Washington Institute for Protein Design, etc

With whirlpool going out of biz, what coinjoin is there for btc?

There’s plenty for anybody who want to research. Coinjoin is a technique.

Doesn’t work when mempool fees are high

LN is disconnected from mempool, that’s the entire point of an L2. Your transactions don’t go on chain or in the mempool. Main chain secures the transactions, lightning stores the transactions. The main chain only stores the start and end balance of a lightning channel, that’s it.

Most people are forced/nudged into using custodial wallets

Their choice, some people will always prefer custodial options no matter how easy non-custodial ones are. LN works fine non-custodially, that’s how I use it. You move money from L1 to L2 in a single tx. Now you have a lightning channel that can have functionally unlimited transactions in it between you and anybody else on lightning. Transactions confirm in a second for pennies in fees.

LN was not designed to be a privacy tool. Bitcoiners tried to shoe-in that it is also a privacy tool

Privacy continues to enhance, look at the Bolt12 upgrades for example. But I agree, and Bitcoin can’t hold a candle to Monero’s level of privacy.

If you are an American and care about privacy:

• Write your representatives. Your message can be as simple as “I care about privacy”. It’s important they know you are watching their votes.
• Participate in elections, particularly downballot elections. Congressional makeup at the federal and state level matters a lot more for these kinds of things than who is president. Many recent laws like “right to repair” etc have happened at the state level since you can bypass federal congressional gridlock.
• Participate in primaries. Most Americans do not vote, most voters do not vote in primaries. If you don’t like having to choose “the lesser of two evils”, primaries give you much much more choice to express your preferences. As a primary voter, you have an outsized influence on the electoral system and can help determine the options other people get to choose from.
• Donate to PACs and non-profits working to protect your right to privacy. The EFF is an awesome non-profit. One benefit of donating to PACs is that they keep an eye on races across the country and help find and fund candidates who will advanced privacy legislation.
• “Vote with your dollar” when you buy things. In many cases, your purchasing power outweighs the political power of your vote.

It is. Lightning transactions confirm in under a second, you can sell those instantly via an exchange. The price is not that unstable and already more stable than many national currencies. You can guarantee that they receive the same amount of BTC.

Bitcoin has collapsed like three times in the last like 7 years dawg.

If you bought 1 BTC 15 years ago, you still have 1 BTC. It has not collapsed. The price relative to USD has collapsed a few times, but the average trend is growth. Bitcoin does not guarantee any price relative to any other currency, because it can’t, all it can guarantee is a stable supply of currency. The USD, in that time period, has lost >20% of its purchasing power as well, so the USD also “crashed”.

It’s fair, I assume a lot of people are bots too, but I like lemmy because it’s mostly not bots :).

You can not send the BTC to just about anybody. Only to people with whom you have a channel open. If you want to send to anybody you need to hop through other channels using middlemen. That sounds very similar to the function of a bank.

You are right, if you want to send directly from your wallet to another user’s wallet with no middlemen, you need to have a channel open with that user, which you totally can and will save you on fees in the long-term if you transact with that person frequently. But I don’t do this because it’s un-necessary, you can also send funds to any other person on lightning via these middlemen. The middlemen don’t have custody of the funds, they can’t block/reverse/do anything with the transaction aside from just forward it along. You can choose who those “middlemen” are, they are usually selected based on the lowest expected fee. They route data around, if they are banks, then so are other Bitcoin nodes you connect to on main chain. But we don’t think of them as banks right? They just relay data around and they’re decentralized. You are right that they share a similar function of routing payments, the difference is in how they do that and who controls what parts of that process. Banks have immense power over your funds. Lightning nodes you route a payment through have none and anybody can run one.

I’m not a bot, I’m just an idiot.

It’s not instant it takes a long time until enough confirmations have been done. It’s not even clear how many confirmations are enough.

You’re thinking of main chain (which takes 10 minutes for the next block), though I would take a zero-conf transaction in any situation that isn’t moving more money than a day’s labor. A single confirmation means it made it into the next block which should be plenty for 99% of situations. If you’re selling your house, maybe a wait a 2-3 blocks to be sure. Lightning is instant and uses main chain for security but does settlement/transaction data off-chain.

Lightning network is literally a traditional bank transaction mechanism on top of bitcoin.

It’s not, you don’t need a bank to use it. Banks don’t settle instantly, banks have chargebacks, banks required six forms of ID, banks can’t reach some places, banks may discriminate. Lightning is Bitcoin. You lock up BTC in a lightning channel, you can then send that BTC to anybody via lightning, and when you close your channel, you get the appropriate amount of BTC back. You can run a lightning node on a phone, a “routing” node on a raspberry pi, it’s just as decentralized and trustless as the main chain is. You can open a channel directly w the person you’re transacting with or you can forward the transaction through other channels/nodes, all trustlessly, all instantly, all automatically. Nobody ever has custody of the funds aside from you and your intended recipient. There’s no central custodian (like a bank) you have to trust.

If you are arguing for using lightning transactions, what is the point of bitcoin in the first place?

Main chain and lightning have different use cases. Use main chain for long-term storage of funds or large transactions. Use lightning for everyday spending. Main chain secures lightning transactions. Main chain is layer one, lightning is layer two, it’s possible there will be more layers, just like SMTP is built on TCP which is built on Ethernet or whatever.

fees are huge and will only increase in the future.

Main chain fees are around $1.50 for the next block, which is still cheaper than a bank wire or other equivalent payment methods in many situations. You’re right though, they are expected to increase as adoption increases, but lightning has scaled that available blockspace several orders of magnitude. Lightning fees are <1% in almost all instances and aren’t expected to increase since they are not tied directly to main chain fees and no mining is required. A lightning transaction uses about as much CPU power as sending an e-mail. A single main chain transaction can open a lightning channel. You can have billions of transactions inside a lightning channel.

For perspective, there are two ways we pay taxes currently: direct taxation via tax collection and indirect taxation via the inflation of the currency supply (govt prints money and uses it, your money becomes worth less about 2-3% year in good years). That second tax is optional, there are ways to not use your national currency and therefore not pay the inflationary tax. That second tax is also insidious because people don’t realize it’s happening. If you have to raise actual taxes, suddenly you get revolts and removed from power. Which is why most wars are funded with inflationary spending, not tax increases. People will gladly pay extra tax for popular wars, but not unpopular ones.

Imagine how the world might look different if inflationary spending wasn’t a particularly powerful taxation tool because not much value was wrapped up in national currencies. Imagine if going to war meant raising actual taxes. Might we have a world where there is less war because war is now harder to fund?

You can downvote this because you’re mad that blockchain exists, for those who don’t know the actual real life use case: Bitcoin has been around for 15 years, it is a blockchain. It has a real life use case.

I can send money, with my android phone, from my couch, in my underwear, to anybody else on planet earth who also has a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection. The transaction is not only sent, but actually settles, in under a second with Bitcoin lightning. And I pay pennies in fees. No going to the bank, no bank holidays, no paying wire fees or making sure their bank can talk to my bank. It’s just simple and instant and it works. It doesn’t matter if they are a dissident or if their country doesn’t allow women to own bank accounts, the transaction goes through anyways. In many countries, their app can also instantly convert that BTC into the currency of their choice and deposit it to their bank account. That’s assuming they have access to stable banking infrastructure, which billions of people do not.

Bitcoin has delivered on its promise of being a currency with a capped supply (21 million coins) and transaction system consistently for 15 years without a single hack, without a single hour of downtime, without a single hiccup. It just works.

You can argue that Bitcoin isn’t better than <insert local currency and transmission system>. You can argue that there are “better” solutions. But it has a clear use case. I use it on a daily basis and it has a fifteen year trend of continued growth whether you are looking at total market cap (bigger than Sweden’s GDP), number of nodes, number of transactions, whatever.

Most everything negative you’ve heard about Bitcoin is either hyperbolic or about other crypto. FTX wasn’t Bitcoin. Crypto coins collapsing or people being rugged? Not Bitcoin. For more information, FAQs, and myth-busting, check out http://bitcoin.rocks

Yes absolutely, because any time the government can increase surveillance and control, they will. The Pirate Party is one of the few political forces in the EU fighting hard against this. Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the biggest threat to individual liberty and privacy we see in our lifetimes. In a time of global instability, these threats to our freedoms continue to compound from all over the political spectrum. People are more willing to accept some loss in freedom in the promise it will protect them from the “other side” gaining too much power or from worsening economic or other environmental conditions.

Bitcoin is a solution for those who want privacy, money, and autonomy to work hand in hand. Bitcoin offers much more robust privacy than a bank account and the degree of privacy it offers continues to improve. It’s not controlled by a central bank, entity, or board of directors who can mess with the supply or have any kind of special access to your financial information. You don’t need six forms of ID to use it, in fact, you don’t even need one! It’s truly autonomous money that separates the role of the state from the role of money.

With Bitcoin, I can send money to anybody anywhere on planet earth with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees (using Bitcoin lightning). And I can send that money to anybody even if they have an unstable banking system, no banking system at all (billions of people), or their banking system excludes them due to their gender, sexuality, or status as a political dissident. Venmo can’t do that, Paypal can’t do that, my bank can’t do that, Taler can’t do that. It has a clear fiscal policy of a 21 million coin cap. It has faced attacks and attempted bans from nation states and world powers, yet it has reliably performed this function of sending money around for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, without a single hack, without a single bank holiday or failure or any kind. It has a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP. It is more widely adopted than most national currencies. It can’t be controlled, debased, or inflated by any corrupt central bank. It actually has use and value. You may not use it, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t get immense use out of it.

Monero is king when it comes to privacy coins though. So from a privacy perspective, that’s worth looking into as well. Long-term I think Bitcoin will eat Monero for lunch since it can easily adopt the privacy technologies Monero has and the Bitcoin community is very pro privacy. Monero also lacks an L2 like lightning which means transactions are slower and more expensive and eventually fees will get ridiculous if adoption reaches parity with Bitcoin. Depending on your use case, that may or may not matter.

Project 2025 wants to:

• Outlaw pornography
• Outlaw abortion
• Outlaw homosexuality
• Eliminate all major checks on presidential power. Say goodbye to the system of checks and balances
• Replace many federal workers with those who are loyal only to the president

www.defeatproject2025.org breaks it down by topic, also highly suggest John Oliver’s segment on it

This is a good overview of how silent payment work, thank you for posting it. I learned some new things!

but L2s are often centralized and cannot withstand governmental pressure

This is true on other networks but not true of Bitcoin (lightning). Lightning is even more decentralized than L1 is, you can run a lightning node on an android phone.

it is more about culture and a lack of demand from the Bitcoin community.

Absolutely agree with this, but the culture has been changing. Auditability of supply of coin has been the major hurdle privacy wise, but even with keeping that there are some major changes that can be made to improve privacy. It’s a common topic at Bitcoin conferences now, everybody knows this is the direction Bitcoin needs to move in (and has been moving in).

As far as Bitcoin goes, there’s also coinjoin. Lightning transactions are pretty opaque since they don’t occur on L1. If I have a lightning node (which I run on an android phone), and you have a lightning node, and we make a tx between each other, nobody knows it. Even for a multi-hop transaction, nobody aside from those hops knows about it. Setting up a lightning channel requires an L1 transaction, but you can make a lightning channel with anybody and then send funds to anybody, it’s not a 1:1 relationship. In other words, if I want to send you money via lightning, as long as I have an existing lightning channel with somebody else, I can do it.

Bitcoin’s privacy continues to get better, it’s a common refrain at Bitcoin conferences that privacy needs to be focused on more. Monero is still king here but it’s losing ground in this area. Bolt12 is a new thing being implemented that helps with privacy as well.

L2 means “layer two”, in short, a way of conducting transactions “off-chain” while relying on the “base chain”/L1 for security. It helps keep chain bloat minimal.

There are various ways to do this with various trade-offs in terms of speed/privacy/cost/centralization/etc. Bitcoin’s main one is lightning (there’s also Ark), Eth has like a dozen of them most of which are super centralized but you’ve got Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Nova, etc. They all work a little differently.

Lightning’s concept is very simple: you make a “channel” on-chain by depositing funds into that smart contract which lives on-chain (1 transaction). The channel exists between you and one other party. The channel starts with a balance of 100/0 meaning all the BTC is yours (because you deposited the BTC). When you send BTC to the other party, you update the “balance” of that channel by both of you signing a thing saying it’s updated (now it’s 99/1). This happens off-chain. At any point, either of you can close the channel (on-chain) and claim any BTC that’s due to them according to the balance. In this example, you would get back 99 BTC and the other person would get 1. You can also transact with other parties by sending BTC “through” a chain of existing channels. And these transactions not only don’t require paying on-chain fees, they can also be confirmed in < 1 second because you don’t need to wait for the next block. You can have essentially infinite transactions back-and-forth in a channel, but one “side” of the channel cannot dip below 0. Almost all of this is abstracted away for the end user.

You can’t just keep increasing the block size. More block size = bigger blocks = more bandwidth and disk space to host a full node. It’s why the majority of Eth’s nodes are now hosted in one of like three corporate datacenter providers. Sure, disks keep getting bigger and more affordable but big pipes to move that much data haven’t kept up at the same pace. Bitcoin cash is now 16x Bitcoin’s original block size, and they are still calling for larger blocks to keep tx costs low. Eventually, with any block size, especially if you want to capture a good portion of humanity’s transactions, you will end up with massive competition for blockspace aka high fees.

Blockchain has a fundamental problem. If you put it on the ledger, all nodes have to store that forever. The more you put on the ledger, the bigger that ledger gets, the more resources you need to host it/participate, the more centralized your network becomes. Adding more block space is one solution, but comes at the cost of decentralization and doesn’t scale to all of humanity’s transactions let alone even just replacing SWIFT/IBAN. L2s are another solution, you get faster transfers and fees not directly coupled to chain space in exchange for slightly less trustworthiness (you may have to send a channel “back to chain” if a bad actor tries something, and you have to monitor that channel and chain to see if you need to do that, which is all handled automatically). With Bitcoin’s L2, I can send funds anywhere in under a second for pennies in fees. It actually works for buying coffee. In the space 1 transaction took on chain, I can now have billions of transactions. Not just between me and the person I opened the channel with, but between me and any other person who has coins on lightning. And you can run a lightning node on a raspberry pi or android phone. Lightning isn’t perfect, the inbound liquidity thing is annoying (though Ark and Fedimint proposals solve this in different ways), but it works really well and has been stable and usable for years. The inbound liquidity issue is being worked on as well through automated liquidity provisioning. Not perfect, but leagues ahead of Monero which has zero L2 and zero roadmap for an L2.

Tldr: Monero’s fees are low because there isn’t much competition for blockspace. And it’s slow. Because it’s all on L1. That space will run out as it scales, it’s up to Monero to decide how to solve that problem.

I agree with the thrust of what you’re saying but… Monero can’t sustain any circular economy of scale without a working L2. Blockspace is limited. Every transaction humanity makes shouldn’t be stored on chain for perpetuity. That’s silly, wasteful, and leads to centralization. An L2 solves that problem. Without an L2, as Monero’s use increases, so will fees, variable block size will hold that off for a while but not forever and not without sacrificing decentralization.

Monero has no L2 and not enough dev talent or funding to make it happen in the next few years. Its protocol is different enough from Bitcoin that pre-existing solutions like lightning can’t just be bolted onto it without significant development effort and privacy trade-offs. Meanwhile over on Bitcoin’s side, they continue to add more functionality to their chain with a massive dev pool in terms of talent and funding. And privacy does continue to improve, lightning and ark are both pretty opaque depending on how you measure it. So if Monero wants to be a significant player on par with Bitcoin and have a circular economy, it will need to step up to the plate in a major way, and it needs to do that before Bitcoin implements privacy upgrades that place it at feature parity with Monero, which is imo only a matter of time since those folks tend to be pretty pro privacy. Yes, there’s “ossification”, but protocol improvements are still happening, especially outside the bounds of the main chain protocol itself (in L2, mining protocols, etc).

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.

Honestly this applies to a lot of people in civic service. Not rich politicians, but the people trying to run your local or state government. Often the races are uncontested, because they literally can’t find even one other person who wants the job. Some of them are incompetent or pursue these jobs for power-seeking reasons, but many of them have their hearts in the right place and want to give back to their community, often while fighting ridiculous red tape at one end while contending with threats and harassment from citizens at the other. And the pay is often terrible. My local city council positions would qualify you for food stamps/EBT.