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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xIlmari 18 Oct \ on: Why stablecoins and stablechannels are dumb bitcoin
Try running a business where your costs (wages, materials) and perhaps income as well is both in Bitcoin and fiat. Once a Bitcoin drawdown causes you to not have enough money to pay wages or your suppliers and you have to close down, you'll change your mind. Stablesats are effectively a futures contract and a very useful business tool to solve such problems.
So zapping will now require me to tab out to a different app to approve a spend?
So zapping will now incur lightning fees?
If the recipient is offline (say a mobile wallet), the zap will fail?
Why are some wallets send only (like Blink)? I like Blink as an intermediary because it obfuscates my identity (I don't reveal my main LND node, which I may want to associate with a different identity).
Boomers are going to start dying of old age over the coming decades. Their children, predominantly Millenials, are about to inherit their massive hoards.
The simplest solution to spam is requiring the sender to pay the recipient money, e.g. by sending a zap or an ecash token along the message.
But we've all grown so entitled to free technology, I can understand why it's a hard pill to swallow.
Ah, the age-old question of "if you can print money in any quantity, why even levy taxes at all?"
The answer is, that would completely destroy the value of the fiat money, people would see it as the garbage that it is and stop using it altogether. But when noone uses a money, then printing it brings no economic benefit.
So they need to keep the inflation low enough that people tolerate it, and for that, they provide at least some of the financing through taxation.
I don't think there's anywhere close to that amount of Bitcoin available for sale. There's maybe 5000 available on spot order books worldwide. There may be more on exchanges (although we know that a lot of Bitcoin has left exchanges) waiting to be put up for sale, but either way, anyone trying to buy anything close to this amount would be putting a massive upwards pressure on price.
People should be allowed to what they want with their own money.
And what they do may seem (to you) stupid, inefficient and wasteful, but it's still their free choice and you have to accept it.
Crypto will exist, people will continue to be stupid and there's nothing you can do to change it.
Getting angry and upset because someone is wrong on the internet only ruins your own life and the durability of your keyboard.
What you should do instead is see how you can insulate your own life from the consequences of their mistakes.
Murderers, terrorists and pedophiles should be justly tried based on the available evidence and punished.
But I would defend their basic human right to private communication and keeping information secret.
If that means some crimes will go unpunished, that's a price I am willing to pay. A justice system cannot prevent 100% of crimes anyway, at least not without completely enslaving the population.
Freak accidents happen. Either of the main candidates can fall out of the race still and be replaced by a surprise winner. A third-party candidate may steal it. Elections may be cancelled. Also, humans are bad at estimating chances/risks in general, especially for low-probability events.
I'm slightly confused. Is it a fully standalone non-custodial wallet like Zeus embedded or Blixt? Or is it a remote-control app for an Alby Hub instance?
The fundamental part of Lightning is the protocol used between any two peers - trustless, out-of-band transactions, with delayed (possibly indefinitely) settlement.
Two peers with an open channel is all there ever needs to exist.
The "network" part just allows these pairs to form a connected graph, allowing routing and therefore payments between otherwise unconnected nodes.
What the question describes is essentialy what how the network would operate if, say, ACINQ and Phoenix nodes on people's phones was the only thing in existence, forming a singular hub-and-spoke architecture. Phoenix nodes ("clients") are restricted to form channels only with ACINQ's central node ("server").
Considering a generalized version of the puzzle, "If m! x n! = X! then m x n = ?"
(X, 1) and (X, 0) will always be valid "degenerate" solutions (producing answers "X" and "0", respectively). Let's ignore them onward.
Interestingly, for X=10 we have the pair (7, 6) which works only due to the fact that 6! = 8 x 9 x 10. In other words, 6! can be restructured to form the "tail" of a different factorial.
My intuition is that it happens because of 6! containing relatively many prime factors, allowing them to be rearranged to form the "tail".
This made me wonder how often that happens in general (for different X), with the intuition being, it's extremely rare.
So I had ChatGPT write me a program to check this as far as possible (read: until I think I understood the pattern and got fed up waiting for 8! to pop up):
6! = 5! x 3! 10! = 7! x 6! 24! = 23! x 4! 120! = 119! x 5! 720! = 719! x 6! 5040! = 5039! x 7!
It seems that "n" always has to be small, which makes sense because we need to tightly control the prime factors involved in the completion of the tail.
But that also means that, from a certain point, the only solutions seem to be of form m = X - 1, n! = X. (In fact, X=10 is the only example that breaks this rule, making it, in my eyes, the only "interesting" solution.)
It's not a rigorous proof, of course, that this is the only asymptotic solution form, but at least a strong heuristic. Also it helped build a wandwavy proof that there are infintely many X for which a non-degenerate solution exist.
111 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xIlmari 22 Sep \ parent \ on: What's the most underrated life skill? ideasfromtheedge
Is it remnants of opression by the Brits over centuries or a totally "internal" cultural thing?
I worked with a bunch of people from India in a corporate setting. But even though we were all peers, the Indians always behaved subserviently, never pushing back when it it was needed (even if they had the expertise). This made me very angry, because it lead to many stupid mistakes because someone didn't speak up in time.
I kept quiet because I feared it would come accross as racist but sometimes I felt like screaming "stop behaving like you're still slaves of the white man".
"No, the DNS redirection will not affect your connection speed or browsing experience for legitimate websites," the Commission promised in its FAQ.
Toxicly implying that there can exist something like an "illegitimate website", which is really their codeword for "the thought police don't like it".
What's even more sad to me is that people are so brainwashed that the government is always right that there isn't an immediate outrage with torches and pitchforks.
People are being denied a basic freedom to consume content OF THEIR FREE CHOICE and don't push back immediately? smh
Sad to see you go, those were sole interesting ideas you floated about.
I hope you decide to open source as much of the self-custodial financial services R&D that you developed in hope that someone will pick up the torch someday.
Is it, though?
If the technicalities involved in "registering" and maintaining your account are a filter that keeps the most moronic X users out of Nostr, that's a feature.
You can put several dozen of these chips on a single board. It's called a "hashboard". You can stack multiple hashboards on top of another. It's called a "miner". :-D
Clustering Bitaxes is just reinventing mining in a capital-inefficient manner.
Don't get too hung up on it. There is no global census, the world population is only an estimation. And the Bitcoin community can't even make a consensus on how big Satoshi's stash was, much less how many other bitcoins are really lost and removed from circulation.
Government "education program" is deliberately designed to produce financially-illiterate drones.
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. โHenry Ford (possibly misattributed)
The system only still holds together because the vast majority of people do not understand that they live inside a fraud. Fiat has a network effect too - it makes the brainwashed drones correct or oust other drones that start appearing anomalous, talking about freedom technologies and generally question everything that's "supposed to" be believed.
Any insight how this productivity on the graph is measured? Nominal GDP is, of course measured in a fraudulent unit. "Real" GDP is not much better either, because people cannot agree what the actual inflation, that you should adjust by, is. Besides, it's still measured in a fraudulent unit.
Either way, I'm not surprised. Germany is a pristine modern example of how socialism can turn around a perfectly good economy and run it into the ground. (Slightly older examples are all over the South America.)
And don't get me wrong, I think the EU (and ECSC before it) was successful in rebuilding a continent ravaged by war (and later to uplift some post-Soviet states) through a weird combo of free markets, free trade but also targetted welfare. It has succeeded on a scale that few international programs do, but it has since outlived its usefulness.