I highly agree with this comment. From a philosophical perspective it reminds me the discussion 10-15 years ago about ACTA: https://stallman.org/articles/acta-freedom.html

I remember 3-4 years ago I saw a report from a Bitcoin company stating the proportion of bad actors doing transactions is not significant. Unfortunately I can't remember the source of the document, so instead let me quote ChatGPT: "According to a 2021 report by Chainalysis, illicit activities accounted for only 0.15% of all cryptocurrency transactions that year, totaling approximately $14 billion". 0.15% is not significant. Condemning everyone for terrorism by imposing some form of bureaucracy doesn't work.

We should worry more about fraudulent activities inside government institutions (like... USAID) which impact everyone. Today politicians may want KYC for terrorism, yesterday the trend was spying on everyone for children. In El Salvador it seems they didn't need KYC or another form of bureaucracy to arrest criminals.

I expected corruption with money from USAID in Latin American countries after it was sent. I am surprised to see that it was used for a totally different purpose even at its origin.

I see, thanks

Did someone successfully installed it on Nixos? The version there is quite old.

很好的

500 sats sent. How is China so far? Is what we hear about surveillance is true?

Sorry I shouldn't have said I don't care. Let me rephrase: given a typical use case of Phoenix, e.g. transacting with merchants (who use typically specific software like Btc Pay server), the privacy aspect will get better with Bolt12 and (IMHO good enough). I see other use cases like sending or receiving money to close peers, using Phoenix, as more rare so not a significant issue. For this use-case though, namely transacting with friends or close peers, I see more something like ecash making sense given that privacy is the default and it has very low fees.

What you describe looks to me like Signal, they log every time we receive a message from someone, in terms of privacy it doesn't look critical to me given that Acinq doesn't know the origin. The main privacy issue I see (and didn't know before) is for transactions between Phoenix users mentioned above.

So bottom line, privacy as a sender or recipient are getting better on Phoenix, and the only drawback is when 2 people using Phoenix send sats to each other, Acinq knows it. In my case I don't care as when I buy or receive something it has nothing to do with Acinq. So I am or will benefit of better privacy than Monero with Bolt12. As far as I know, an external observer can see the recipient and sender of transactions on Monero.

I see your point, but can't agree as at the protocol level there is fungibility. There is no difference between the numbers in inputs and outputs. People may interpret these numbers as rare satoshis but these are rules not related to Bitcoin. A higher miner fee environment is a better argument IMHO. But then we will have tools using payjoin, Ark, etc to batch payments and add privacy on top of Bitcoin.

If on-chain, you feel traceability is an issue for your utxos, then use coinjoins. From my perspective at the protocol level it is fungible. A value in can later be converted as a value out. When people play with Bitcoin to search for "rare" coins, there are just adding new rules which are not on Bitcoin but exist in their world. Similarly even if banknotes have identifiers and hence can be traced this doesn't undermine it's fungibility, since in the real world nobody care in most cases. Fungibility issues may be raised among Monero people, but IMHO it is a weak argument. As a criticism UX of Lightning is more convincing (still LN UX gradually improves over time).

Do you have one or two books that inspired your bullshit detector that you would recommend?

For me it is easy but requires dedication: No Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube accounts. I have been doing this since 2020. I try to avoid political news also. I follow just a couple of people on Nostr. I just know what happens around me... Recently the Chinese new year. Nice decorations. Ski season is coming for me also. So no reason to be upset anymore. I just follow exchange rates for some currencies because this directly affects me so can't ignore it. But I save in Bitcoin so if politicians decide to devalue the currencies I use, in the short run I may be upset, in the long run I'll live with it.

Fair enough. The government agency didn't want to disclose how they tracked them anyway if I remember correctly. For bitcoins though, I think it is still to be proven, I don't think there is any known case with Wasabi or Samurai where the police could track individuals.

Regarding the absolute "SHIT UX" I don't really agree, it is still not 100% good for everything, but it works very well for all use cases I had where I buy something. I use Phoenix to buy things (drinks recently) so this may explain my divergence of opinion with you. If you use Blixt, I agree the UX is not great but this is for people who want to dive deeper into LN in my opinion. Try Phoenix only for a (far) better UX. About "Something that onchain bitcoin just simply DOES NOT HAVE. All bitcoins DO NOT resemble all other bitcoins", however I would totally disagree. Do you refer to exchanges which would for example refuse bitcoins coming from terrorists? If this is the case, this is not a fungibility issue but an issue with the exchange. If you have bitcoins supposedly from terrorists I am ok to buy some from you to show you it is fungible.

I almost cried in the last scene of the movie. Loved it too.

About point 5, I use Blixt and have the same problem. What I would recommend you to do is to open a channel to a node directly connected with Robosats, or (this is what I do) use Blink to receive, then send to yourself to your Blixt node. This works well and you don't lose a lot in fees. Wallet of Satoshi and Coinos failed with Robosats in my case. Lifpay worked but I don't use a Bolt card and fees are higher there, so don't recommend it (unless you use a Bolt card). With Zeus now you can buy inbound liquidity also, maybe it would work well with Robosats, but didn't test.

I totally agree. With Specter even the order of the keys doesn't matter during recovery, very easy to use. There is also Liana, which makes it simple. The first time I received bitcoins it was by email, I had to check the address manually to make sure there was no mistake. It was error prone, not anymore.

I have seen many conversations about hardware wallets, it always ends up IMHO as use what you are confortable with. If you are poor, then try to save money with Wallet of Satoshi or Blink. Good custodial wallet,s compatible with games such as Tetro Tiles where you can easily stack $0.1 per day. If you are middle-class, use whatever hardware wallet is available in your location. Any hardware wallet which is not connected to the Internet is good enough, the rest is marketing. If you are rich and a public person I would go with a third-party like Casa to help in case of kidnapping or physical attacks.

That being said, I personally use Seedsigner in stateless mode so the evil maid attack mentioned doesn't work. And although I am not entirely sure, I think not saving data on the SD card was the default setting as it always says we can remove the SD card at runtime. I guess NVK didn't really try it. All the fud also around ledger most of the time is just another marketing trick, as I never registered for their custodial service. It just asks by default. So bottom line, use any hardware wallet you are confortable with, someone will always argue something else but you will be most likely ok with any choice you made.

Maybe he "confessed" as explained in the podcast

I remember a discussion on Stacker News with @supertestnet where he argued that privacy on Monero is not at all obvious, and that on Lightning you can get equivalent privacy. One of his examples against Monero and its supposed privacy was this news: https://cointelegraph.com/news/monero-transactions-japanese-authorities-arrest-18-scammers

So my question: Given we have privacy tools on Bitcoin and particularly on the Lightning network, and given the discussion mentioned above, what are your use-cases for Monero or your reasons to favor Monero?

To be honest I am not at all qualified to discuss about Monero or privacy on Lightning, as I don't know enough about it, so I will stay neutral.