Pretty good article.
Summary:
  1. Saylor is not a fan of providing unlimited, "blank check" funding. Rather wants specific, per issue funding.
  2. Saylor highlights that Privacy vs Transparency are intertwined and too much privacy would negatively impact its market cap since it would cause less transparency
  3. Saylor may be tied to intelligence community and may be interested in adding Bitcoin Analytic features to his existing BI software.
I actually agree with his points on 1 and 2. I know that "funding devs" is a feel good thing to support, but it can be a slippery slope. If you start funding devs, he who writes the check will be able to influence development.
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Yeah I definitely agree on the first point as well. I see the analogy of "big pharma" funding medical research, or "big food" funding food research... they're going to get the results they want, not necessarily what the public wants. Point no. 2 is more debatable. We want base layer to be transparent and auditable. But also we don't want every address to be linked to a specific person/group/company/country and people being sent to jail purely on the basis of some Chainalasys/other on-chain surveillance report. Or coins being marked as "tainted." I'm not sure how compatible both of those goals are. No. 3 is like... IDK, should we care? I mean, he's a free man, he runs his own company, as far as I'm concerned, he can choose who he wants to work with, to what extent and for what purpose. Whether he makes the right or wrong decisions is his burden to carry, at the end of the day. Karma's either a bitch or the sweetest, most tender lover one can ever have. It's like, your choice man.
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I'm not sure how compatible both of those goals are.
Yeah, same. I think trying to introduce any privacy features on L1 is a mistake. Monero has the classic problem: confidential transactions + confidential balances means that its hard/impossible to audit supply. This rules out Monero from ever being considered for multi-decade storage.
The best outcome is to improve privacy on L2 - whether thats LN or something else - and keep L1 as is regarding privacy/transparency.
As an aside, using something like AQUA allows you to break chain analysis, since you can peg-in to Liquid from BTC, then pay a LN invoice from Liquid, so its very difficult to associate the flows.
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Very good point about Aqua
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For point 1, how do you think 'blank check' funding can be prevented?
Watched the clip from the Fosscon on the link. Is openssh is still considered to be a big security problem?
Not sure what to think of it all, he seems to be conscious of walking a line between practicality and acknowledging that the protocol should not be changed whimsically, which is a lot better than I can say for the days of Roger Verr and co. But still. Hmmm.
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Is he taking a step back? Or is the government leaning on him to make this happen?
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