21 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xIlmari 6h \ on: Venezuela bans crypto mining to protect power grid bitcoin
Let me guess,
Government: *subsidies electricity for the people, keeping prices artificially low*
People: *spin up miners to take advantage of cheap electricity*
Government: *surprised Pikachu face*
Actually, I input the BOM file from their GitHub to DigiKey and it adds up to $42 for all components without the ASIC. PCBs are cheap and machines solder for you. Even if you splurge on a Noctua fan, the BOM will come out to maybe $70. You don't have to design anything because all the manufacturing files are open source.
I think it's way too expensive. The BM1366 chip costs like $15, so I don't understand why a whole unit costs like 10x that.
You cannot fight the system by its rules. It's too corrupted and has sets the rules to be its own.
We cannot rely on companies to find a solution to the state's overreach because companies are legal entities within the system and prone to shutdown. We cannot rely on solutions with a central "coordinator" or whatever else you call that. I call it "single point of failure" or simply "target".
Bitcoin has no company behind it, no face to it, no single point of failure. It's unassailable as far as the corrupt system is concerned. Same with Lightning. We need more such solutions, for mixers, wallets, ecash etc.
Do not lose sight of another threat. Google is trying to monopolize the very Web itself through sneaky garbage like Manifest V3 being forced into Chromium. And most of us run PWAs in Chromium-based browsers.
Wikipedia has always had a very cool rule - "Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point". I find it a very good general life rule - don't be a dick (and trash some common property) for no reason.
This stunt definitely deserves the "shit in the jacuzzi" description. He achieved nothing that couldn't be pointed out by a post that describes the vulnerability. Other than showing everyone that he's a dick.
I don't think it's a matter of responsibility. It's a matter of UX and introducing friction to zapping.
For bitcoin to fundamentally change internet applications, I believe the applications themselves must be not-custodians.
I agree in principle, but in my opinion, LN UX is not yet there yet, to support such a change.
If you want to push this on principle, at the expense of losing a userbase, or having the zap signal be of lower quality, it's your perogative as the site owner.
This introduces a lot of friction to zapping UX and I dare say it will kill micro-zapping, if not zapping in general.
This means that people who intend to withdraw sats (instead of just stacking cowboy tokens), perhaps even earn a living out of SN, will need to run a 24/7 online lightning node, or else they would be missing out on zaps.
Not to mention that zaps failing would be annoying for the sender too.
Not everyone can afford to open a channel straight to SN just to guarantee that they can control the fee. And having fees introduces friction to zapping.
And I can't speak for others, but I'm very happy with my wallet and don't intend to change it for another. I'll just stop zapping (after I withdraw my sats while they are still sats).
For an external-to-external zap, does it mean that the recipient's wallet needs to be online when a zap happens? Mobile wallets can't be online 100% of time.
Also, does that mean that every zap, even 1 sat, will now be subject to an unknown LN fee?
Does it also mean that the UX of zapping will involve leaving the SN app to get to the wallet app and confirm the payment?
I see, good to know.
But still, while roaming was mandated to be free and easy within the EU, the carriers were allowed to have a limit to their "leniency", like 180 days, after which they could disable a SIM as having permanently moved to another country, and not simply roaming? Or is that outdated info on my part too? I can't find the details.
I personally think that the TC case is pretty clear cut, so either I'm misunderstanding something (in which case, I'm happy to be corrected) or it's insanely difficult to establish the technicalities in court with the judge and jury being all normies.
The TC guys wrote some software. That should be free speech-protected activity. If it isn't then God help us all, because it means we're already living in a dystopia.
They deployed it to the Ethereum Virtual Machine. You could argue that this constitutes "enablement" (or whatever the legalese term is) but the court must understand that this is FOSS, and anyone can do it.
So perhaps Ethereum itself should be prosecuted for allowing this in the first place? Perhaps a muddied issue, but I still wouldn't call this "providing a service".
That's it, technically speaking. You can already "launder" money with it. You can invoke the contract from command line, you can use any generic Ethereum blockchain explorer that allows you to invoke any deployed contract.
So they wrote and operated a website which made it easier for a wider audience to use. But again, the court must understand that a) the website is not a prerequisite to using the service, b) anyone can host a copy of it (since it's FOSS) and c) indeed, there are copies running out there, both on the clearnet and as Tor onion services.
Okay, so maybe the case is a bit more muddied, but what's clear to me:
- the shutdown of the website is not technically preventing anyone from using the service
- prosecuting the developers is not preventing anyone from using the service
- the legal system is completely broken and unable to handle intricacies of FOSS
Running your own website and email server is "trivial" *.
sudo apt-get install sendmail apache2
Indeed, in the last century, a lot of people were doing that. Why are email addresses the way they are? It's because
user@example.com really identifies the user account user on a machine identified as example.com.If your computer had port 25 internet-accessible and was hosted under the domain
mycomputer.com then after installing sendmail you would be able to receive mail at nullcount@mycomputer.com, delivered straight to /home/nullcount/mbox file.And a website? Just dump your files into
/var/www and Apache will do the rest.I'd say that's significantly easier than setting up a Bitcoin+LN stack.
*) So what happened that we don't do it anymore? Well, Internet kinda exploded in popularity, and with it came malicious actors. Spam is now a thing, and competition can denial-of-service your piddly webserver with ease, potentially taking you out of business.
So we recognized the effects of scale and started centralizing hosting of email with dedicated service providers who can handle the spam volume, develop better filters, and hire people to keep the lights on. We moved websites to CDNs which give us virtually limitless bandwidth and (D)DoS protection.
But Bitcoin is different. There are no benefits from centralizing. In fact, the opposite is true - the network is more secure with more nodes being run, so it is in every user's best interest to run their own node(s).
Unlike spam and denial-of-service which have almost zero cost, attacking Bitcoin carries a very high cost, thanks to proof-of-work.
Lightning and eCash mints are a slightly different animals, in that there needs to be some expertise involved in running it, and it's almost a business-like venture to do so.
But there are, or will be, more-or-less turn-key solutions like Umbrel, or my own Sov-Stack. There will be fewer Lightning nodes than Bitcoin nodes, and even fewer mints, but I don't see that as a problem.