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. 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.

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

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

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

OpenShot went terribly for me. Cool idea but did not work. Ate hours and hours of editing by failing to export. I tried everything, even opening Github issues to figure out where the problem was. Systematically re-cut and edited and moved every clip. Still couldn’t get it to export even though everything worked flawlessly in editing and previewing. Tried switching to latest, alpha, whatever, none of them could export. Absolute nightmare. Do not recommend. Eventually had to re-do everything in kdenlive.

[email protected] flatpak also needs a flatpak maintainer! Your work would help people contribute their spare computational power to scientific research. If you are passionate about fighting cancer, mapping the galaxy, etc this is an awesome way to contribute to that effort in a very force multiplying way.

Idk about nostalgic but north korea makes their own linux distro, that’s gotta rank high on the interesting list

The distro used by the one laptop per child project. Fascinating GUI

Lindows

Here’s a list if you want to find your rep https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/politics/20240313-congress-tiktok-ban-bill-vote-dg/index.html

There is an apt variant that can do this, but nobody uses it. BitTorrent isn’t great for lots of small files overhead wise.

IPFS is better for this than torrents. The question is always “how much should the client seed before they stop seeding and how longs should they attempt to seed before they give up”. I agree something like this should exist, I have no problem quickly re-donating any bandwidth I use.

It’s always the same bullshit when they want to take away your rights:

• “Protect the children”
• “Foreign influence” or “spies”
• “Misinformation”
• “Stop Terrorism”

Look, I get it, I wouldn’t give a shit if TikTok imploded tomorrow and went out of business. I don’t use it. Actually, I would cheer on TikTok’s implosion. It’s a cesspool. However:

“First they came for the xxx and I didn’t care because I didn’t use or like xxx”…“and then they came for me or the thing I liked or used there was nobody left to defend me”

True. Impossible to fully censor. Easy to “censor enough”, force out of app stores, and deem illegal while being cheered on by the left and right because they both somehow think it’s in their interests, having abandoned the idea of free speech somewhere along in their ideological trajectory. Just like with TikTok ban or the Digital Services Act.

They’ll start by saying lemmy is spreading “disinformation” or “foreign influence” or “harming children” or whatever their excuse of the day is. Then legislate lemmy apps out of the app stores and go after lemmy server operators or users.

Not saying lemmy couldn’t survive as a network, the point of the meme is the dangerous precedent set when people support things like a TikTok ban and say the government should be able to regulate speech or access to speech in that manner. The government shouldn’t be able to tell you what you can say or think, who you share those thoughts with, or what media you consume. It’s a human right to think and speak and be able to listen to others speak. And unfortunately, for different reasons, both the left and right are cheering on its erosion.

Not really, and miners have fantastic financial incentive to remain honest. It’s not altruism. In terms of the attack you are talking about (51% attack) Nobody can amass that much computing power and certainly not quietly, good luck acquiring enough ASICs to do it, let alone enough energy. You’d need your own fab for them which means designing your own ASICs (specialized devices for mining which are orders of magnitude more efficient than regular computers) or stealing designs for them. You’re already into the billions of dollars right there with having your own fab. You can’t buy even half of the processing power you’d need on the open market. A 51% attack is absolutely insanely expensive to do and logistically impossible at this point. And even if they could, the absolute best they can do is temporarily delay transactions or do a double-spend (spend the same BTC twice). They can’t spend money they don’t have the key for and they can’t print extra Bitcoin as all other nodes would reject those transactions as invalid. Doing a double-spend makes no sense because the only benefit of doing so is getting something else in exchange for that BTC. If I’m going to trade say… 1 billion dollars of oil for your BTC, I’m gonna wait for a few blocks of confirmation, even assuming I could transfer that much value that quickly. And whatever you trade has to be more valuable than the cost of a 51% attack which is probably north of a trillion dollars at this point depending on how you do the math. Plus, you know, the legal/extralegal/diplomatic/etc consequences of your actions depending on what you did the attack for.

The attack isn’t a one time thing, your delay only works if you keep attacking. The second you stop, the chain reverse to the “true main chain”. A 51% attack has never happened successfully against Bitcoin and never will at this point. Even at the nation-state scale, Bitcoin is tied in enough to international markets at this point that attacking it could easily cause an international bank run/financial collapse and massive diplomatic problems. And all you’d prove is that you wasted an inconceivably large amount of money to attack a system that picked back up right where it started a few minuted, hours, or days later. Because unless you intend to continue your attack and energy use forever, that’s exactly what would happen. Meanwhile, you’ve pissed off every voter, hedge fund, state retirement fund, business, bank, national treasury, international organization, charity, and legislator who has any sort of exposure to Bitcoin.

Some back of the napkin math for anybody interested https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/18salm9/the_economics_of_a_hypothetical_51_attack_on/

The government controls it and they use it to gradually decrease the portion of supply your hard-earned money represents. They aim for 2-3% inflation in a “good year”. That’s the nice countries, ask any Argentinean how they feel about who controls that money printer. Monetary inflation mostly impacts the poor and middle class who have more of their net wealth in cash whereas rich people have their money safely stored in assets like stocks or land. So the government controls the money printer.

Unless you use Bitcoin. Then the protocol (nobody) controls it. And it’s controlled to never make more than 21 million BTC. No person, even if they had a trillion dollars, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence, even if they had 1000 guys with AKs, no person could make Bitcoin print an extra BTC it wasn’t intended to print. Or spend money that they didn’t have the private key for. That’s a money printer I can trust. It’s faithfully done this for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or being hacked and has a market cap that places it in the top 20 countries by GDP all while experiencing continual growth and adoption. But it’s a fad right? That has no purpose? A scam? And on year 16 you’ll finally be proven right?

Who are they worried China is going to influence? Children, right? If it’s adults, that’s almost more insulting, they think we don’t deserve to be able to see all sides of an argument and are too stupid to discern fact from fiction. We may as well dispense with free expression entirely at that point because the government can just say “you’re too stupid to read this and we’re worried you’ll be influenced, so you can only read the books we’ve pre-approved for you”

It is every American’s right to think freely, to speak those thoughts to others, and to have others have the opportunity to hear those thoughts whether or not they are “good influences” according to govt. It is wild how easily people are willing to throw that right away for fears of “foreign influence”. What’s next, banning TV shows from foreign countries because they might “corrupt our culture”? Banning books with subversive topics because they will “give people bad ideas”?. This is how the road to fascism begins.

It can be you. It doesn’t have to be Big Corps or Government. It can be federated instances, it can be self-ownership of data, it can be E2E encrypted.