I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.

I would love to see something like this, where I can contribute to an open source project while also contributing to all their dependencies. Maybe such a thing exists and I just haven’t heard of it yet.

Look, I love privacy and I agree Bitcoin needs more of it. Many developers/OSS projects would have trouble using XMR, the off-ramps are few and far between. Bitcoin’s privacy continues to get better and you can achieve significant degrees of anonymity with techniques like coinjoin etc. Lightning is pretty opaque, all the data on chain is who you opened your lightning channel with, not ANY of the transaction data between you and any other party (and remember, a single lightning channel can route payments to any other lightning user). And you can run a lightning node/wallet on an android. Long-term Bitcoin could absorb Monero’s entire market cap by simply copying its privacy features into a future protocol upgrade, which I hope it does as it has with experimental protocol changes first tried on other blockchains. And the Bitcoin community seems very pro-privacy.

Monero has no functional L2 and only has “low fees” because it doesn’t have the tx volume to get higher fees. Bitcoin has had a functional L2 for 5+ years now. Lightning fees are usually a penny or two per transaction, if sending large amounts, an on-chain tx is still only like $1.50 most of the time. Settlement on Monero takes minutes instead of less than a second on lightning, not that it matters for this particular use case. It doesn’t have nearly the network of developers, users, or other people in the ecosystem backing it. Monero also has larger variable-sized blocks. Larger block sizes = more hardware requirements to run a node = more centralization. Bitcoin already had that debate and every other debate and chose decentralization at every turn. Monero chose bigger blocks just like Bitcoin cash did. Bigger block is not a scalable solution while remaining decentralized. No thanks. All of humanity’s transactions shouldn’t be stored on the blockchain for eternity, that is incredibly inefficient and needless. Nano has similar problems with design, no way to compensate those who run the infrastructure for the network, and pretty much nobody using it, and probably a massive pre-mine.

There are some fundamental problems to blockchain, digital currency, or decentralized ledgers. If you want a decentralized ledger, space is your biggest limitation. If you want more space, you get more centralization. Every other coin chose more space for “lower fees” or “faster transactions”, Bitcoin chose decentralization at every possible turn (at the cost of having less space) and will continue to do so. For me, that is bar none the most important factor. And now it also has “fast transactions” and “low fees” thanks to L2s.

Love hearing from devs that donations are coming into their projects, thank you for sharing that! Contributing time and expertise is just as important thank you for your contributions 🫡🫡🫡

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.

Qubes is so cool. The most under-rated Linux distro imo. Not my daily driver but a very cool concept.

I’ll start, I donate to a few regularly via Github sponsors. I like that it’s recurring. I also donate one-off to ones as I come across them, but generally donate regularly to software I use regularly, particularly if I somehow am using that software to make money. I really like the idea of a portion of my donation going to upstream libraries, though tbh I’m not confident if Github sponsors does that or not.

I mostly donate w Bitcoin, except Github sponsors since they don’t take it. I also donate to a few orgs like EFF and OpenSats which are OSS-adjacent or help OSS tools I like exist. When I see apps I like have published a new release and they announce it on nostr, I usually send them a bit via zap as well, but most apps I use aren’t on nostr.

!boinc@sopuli.xyz 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.

Bitcoin transactions happen at the “speed of light” (~27:00) REALITY CHECK: As Bitcoin has grown, transactions have become slow. It’s in fact why many people do not accept it for purchases anymore.

Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in fees. Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.

Bitcoin cannot be diluted (~27:25) REALITY CHECK: Bitcoin is always being diluted until it reaches its hard limit.

The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.

Nobody controls the network (~28:25) REALITY CHECK: If someone were to own 50% or more of the network’s compute power, they could control the network.

Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.

Bitcoin’s hard limit is likely very dangerous for the network (~29:00): Once the hard limit is reached, it is unclear if people will keep pumping computing power at it. If the creation of new Bitcoin is no longer allowed, it is possible that transaction fees will need to be raised to compensate miners.

Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.

Bitcoin’s lack of rules allow for massive amounts of fraud and prevents effective taxation (~29:25): While the video paints a cute picture of financial freedom, the reality is that Bitcoin allows for fraud on a world scale and does not allow for sales tax because of the way that anyone can have a cryptocurrency wallet without disclosing their identity.

Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes. Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank. People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is one of the most successful open source projects to have ever been created, and it gets downvoted to hell anywhere it gets brought up. 15 years of growth in network size, usage, and capability. Surviving attacks and attempted bans from nation-states. Not a single hour of downtime, not a single hack, reliably transferring money across the globe to anybody with a cell phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in seconds to minutes for pennies to dollars in fees. 100% open source and decentralized, uncorruptible, open to whoever wants to use it, the way currency should be. It’s got a market cap bigger than Sweden’s GDP and is already more reliable and widely accepted than most national currencies. Nobody can make it print money it isn’t meant to print or move money it isn’t supposed to move.

The solution is apps and protocols that put the privacy in the hands of the user, not the hands of another entity which must be “regulated” by legislative bodies that have been subject to regulatory capture. Decentralize and distribute power. Use P2P/decentralized platforms like lemmy, mastodon, nostr, freenet, etc.

I wrote an article about how using lightning works and some common misconceptions if you are interested: https://lemmy.ml/post/16397590

What if your relay goes down, are your locked coins committed into the blockchain?

Essentially yes. Basically you have a on-chain tx which opens a lightning channel. All your “transactions” occur off-chain and update that channel. The “state” of that channel is stored by you and your relay. All of this happens automatically, of course. You start a channel with 50 BTC with another user and over time the “balance” of that channel changes. When you start it, you are “putting 50 BTC into lightning” so all 50 BTC belong to you. Once you’ve sent some to another user, now 49 belong to you and 1 to them and you can receive up to 1 BTC since you have 1 BTC of space free. And you can continually update that forever, off-chain, for next to nothing in fees. When you close the channel, the BTC returns to you on-chain in the appropriate amount. So if your “relay”/lightning node/etc whatever goes down you can always close out the channel for the cost of an on-chain tx.

Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.

Don’t disclose all their big donors

Peter Thiel is also one of the big donors.

Many orgs don’t disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you’re seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to… give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.

The article states that “Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.”, yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/

“Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez”

Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.

Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that’s ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn’t have somebody “far right” or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn’t be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they’re actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.

It’s organized by the human rights foundation, which is an intl non-profit organization headquartered in New York. The freedom forum is not only hosted in but also donated to by the City of Oslo. It’s all about resisting dictators and autocracy. Ask wikipedia if you doubt

Eth has been centralized ever since their pre-mine sold the majority of the coins on the network before anybody had a chance to mine them. And then they moved away from proof-of-work to proof-of-ownership where you need 16 whole ETH to even solo stake. And now you need multiple TB of SSD space to even run a full node. A brought us the ICO craze which moved crypto from “A weird, interesting idea” to “an unholy mess of pump-and-dump scams” in the mind of the average person. Ethereum gets more and more centralized every year. And to solve the problem of gas fees they have like 100 different L2s each of which don’t talk to each other and have their own problems. Last I checked, polygon, which is one of their top L2s, has the entire network being secured by 15 validators. Yikes.

Contrast that with Bitcoin. You can run a full node on a laptop from 10 years ago. With lightning, you can send a transaction across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees without even touching the chain. And it uses a decentralized network of nodes to route your transaction, you can run your own node on a Raspberry i. In that same lightning channel, you can make a functionally infinite amount of transactions back and forth between you and any other parties. The chain secures lightning transactions like the existence of a court secures contracts. Unless anything goes unexpectedly bad (and I know of no instance of anybody actually needing to do this in the wild), you never need to go to the chain to enforce the contract. And if you enforce the contract (which happens automatically, by the way), your funds will never end up in the wrong hands.

Sure, I haven’t heard of hamachi. It’s ok to have multiple tools that do the same thing

My guess is that this works similar to a Tor hidden service, where you can’t even access the open port without a key of some kind and then you can only access that specific port. It’s not the same as having a port open on your IPv4 address since from the router’s perspective it’s only an outgoing connection. Somebody portscanning you wouldn’t find that port open. Though I could be wrong.

In a time of rising political instability and distrust of institutions, institutions will turn more and more to censorship and surveillance. We need decentralized, censorship resistant networks to fight back. #nostr is one such network, so is #tor, #freenet, #i2p, etc. And yes, #lemmy #mastodon and #activitypub too.

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I’d love to see more nuclear power generation. Nuclear power is the densest form of power on earth, it’s safer than even renewables and doesn’t have the huge e-waste or energy storage problems that come with it. It’s very, very safe even compared to windmills depending on where you draw the box. I have never met anybody who actually understands nuclear power safety or waste disposal who is against it. At best, they say “renewables are currently cheaper so let’s focus there” but they’re not like “Nuclear is bad”.

In the ground, very deep, forever, for not nearly as much money as you might think. It takes up very, very little space. It’s not green liquid that can spill, it’s pieces of glass.