Guys, I’ve been in/around Bitcoin since it was 26 cents. I’ve probably had and lost more bitcoin than you’ll ever see. Crypto (bitcoin is not the same as crypto) is not the way: Bitcoin has been solid longer than these other experiments and, in some cases, scam-coins have been around. I acknowledge I don’t know everything (or close to it - my wife can confirm!), and in terms of miners - I am one of the OG’s who actually got one of the Butterfly Labs rigs. And I sold it to a dude in Switzerland for more than I paid for it. I’m not looking to get rich from mining. I have extra capacity on my solar I want to use to contribute to the BTC network and gamble with the chance I might get lucky and win a mining reward. If you have something constructive to say, I’d love to hear it.
Discussion
Just for info, I was mining bitcoin with CPUs before that fedcoin even had a price on it. Most of my profit at the time was daytrading stocks with bots, so I also lost and won quite a bit more than the average.
Please don't contribute to BTC.
It is singlehandedly killing the reason why crypto currencies were created and turning them into nothing more than speculative stocks that are regulated and monitored by governments. People are being hurt and chased because they don't understand yet that privacy is critical, we have the responsibility to drive them into a better option.
Learn more about Monero.
I'm curious...Why not mine BTC? I've heard good things about Monero, but what is the case against BTC?
Because you are facing chinese farms with dedicated ASIC miners, basically less probability than winning the lottery with a tiny hardware setup.
It is more efficient to use Nicehash to automatically mine whatever virtual coin is more profitable that day and then convert the gains into your favorite currency. This is a better usage for your GPU.
Gupax pays a bit of monero every single day and only uses the CPU.
You guys just 18 block reorg. I don't think its worth mining into something easily manipuable. Also for mining you want specialized equipment to help secure the network. You can dig a hole with a fork, but a shovel is specialized for it. Having ASICs isn't a bad thing, costs of ASICs make it difficult for someone try to attack the network that way. Along with maintaining said force. There's projects like Bitaxe and other Bitcoin mining companies make equipment for home mining plebs to protect the network as well.
Monero is under constant attack since the beginning, just gets tougher each time. Only chinese farms can buy ASIC, it is stupid to say that it isn't a bad thing when you basically NEVER mine the cryptocurrency.
I mean, why am I explaining you this?
You've never done a direct P2P cryptocurrency transaction. How would you possibly understand that we are talking about crypto and not stocks or forex.
There is a whole world of reasons why mining should be in the hands of normal people, mostly to enable them to transact values without depending on the "good will" of anyone else.
Learn about forex, it seems to be more of what you are looking.
Dude I literally make a living on Mining and building miners. Look a Proto rigs, you have people repurposing mining chips and making Bitaxes like nostr:nprofile1qqstrcgctzz2d52thl8r3xwt205pswkauep0yexsla83w3fhrcrpxnqprpmhxue69uhhqun9d45h2mfwwpexjmtpdshxuet5xp62jx (even though we have differences) there are so many miner manufacturers in this space.
I literally live only off Bitcoin (Not crypto) I don't use dollars and the instances dollars are needed I just borrow against a small portion of my coins to cover it. I also am networking with folks that accept Bitcoin payments for their products on here.
Also learn Game theory and understand the incentives of Bitcoin mining. nostr:nprofile1qqsw8cgev4y590aqgkrvdpyftas7tzw8ukzecag8gedhz3p7xtamras4z5eyn is a great person to share resources in Bitcoin mining. He works at a mining pool called Braiins that's an OG and are pioneers in the space.
Also Moneto isn't a good form of currency due to the way it has been built. Its a lot harder to secure the network when the barrier to entry is just some AMD CPUs and a lot of time and free electricity. Besides the infinite supply only makes it worse for people to save and spend. Moneto is only good buy drugs and other illicit things. (Not knocking you do you)
I do respect your opinion because you are someone on the ropes. To clarify, a few coins being issued per year isn't "infinite", same way as gold isn't devaluing because it is "infinite".
Bitcoin was only used for drugs and illicit things. It isn't anymore because that business moved to Monero a long time ago.
Criminals also use turbo V8 engines in their cars to outpace the authorities, it just means that they are ahead of others in getting benefit from technology.
You keep seeing that people get arrested from using your favorite coin, because it has no privacy. Why are you against privacy? Or just ignoring it?
These are fundamental blocks to build freedom. Why should we make it easy for any government to know how many precious metals are in your wallet or to whom you are giving them?
So infinite supply is bad because it devalues currency. Same with gold if we get an asteroid with enough gold to give to everyone every three months it makes gold worth less and less as a currency.
I don't have an issue with people using their currency to buy whatever they want. But Monetos only good use is to buy illegal stuff now. It devalues everytime there's an issuance of coins.
Also Bitcoin has privacy it all depends on the persons OPSEC. You can't tell me who's coin is whose just by seeing the blockchain. You cant tell me who's who on the lightning network. Same principles on liquid etc. I care about privacy that's why I support grapheneOS, QubesOS, TailsOS, I2P, etc. I also support expansion of protocols like Nostr and using more decentralized options.
Making the blockchain clear for people to audit the supply is important to make sure everyone is playing by the rules. If not it can cause bad issues for the future. Monetos obscurity makes it harder to audit, but good for hiding. But who's to say someone isn't duping transactions while making the supply look the same.
Well, sorry to read you are being fooled.
Just as info, graphene is an awful choice. Likely in some years will finally be obvious that forcing people into using Google hardware was an intentional bad decision. Even last week they were happily promoting the usage of Tor, which a few days later was exposed as government controlled and monitored.
The moment you use your wallet, the monitoring starts and they know your balance too. Nobody realistically uses that fedcoin for payments due to high commissions, they use lightning which is basically a different currency altogether with lack of privacy too: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/state-of-bitcoin-lightning-network-privacy
So you might as well just use proper technology from the start.
GrapheneOS isn't tied specifically to Pixels. They're working with other manufacturers. You can ask nostr:nprofile1qqstnr0dfn4w5grepk7t8sc5qp5jqzwnf3lejf7zs6p44xdhfqd9cgsppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9ulj6hdh for more details on it.
Also tor and the internet was made by DARPA, regardless its still protocols that we use and must work on supporting and defending them.
Also no one knows which wallet is mine. Also Bitcoin is still being used for P2P transactions. Lightning helps support the network for micro payments.
Can you tell me how much I just paid on lightning and to who? If you can't then my point is proven. Nothing is fully private, but it can be more difficult to identify whose who. Lightning makes it near impossible for someone to guess who is who.
They are fooling you with vague promises. Tor wasn't made by DARPA, it was made specifically for usage by intelligence units and to this day most of the servers are under their control. They make sure that VPN remains monitored. Here is a case from yesterday: https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-jailed-u-s-tor-operator-persecuted-by-fbi-after-refusing-decrypt-requests/20576
> "Can you tell me how much I just paid on lightning and to who?"
I'm not the government nor have interest in tracking you. That point is moot because normal people don't have the same budget nor the same interest as governments. It is the same thing as claiming that your phone number is private because I can't readily tell to whom it belongs.
Has anyone ever explained you this, or is it the first time?
I've been having a conversation but you seem too well informed on the topic, it becomes very strange that you're not aware of the importance for privacy and still insist on awfully insecure options.
Therefore I'll just remove myself from the conversation.
Close, Onion routing research was by the Naval Research Lab. The NSA also made Linux's mandatory access control modules, and Ghidra (fantastic). And yes, we're making an own device.
The person you're replying to places themselves in a fantasy world where everyone became idiots except a super hacker intel agency pulling the strings. Notice the gymnastics into conclusions. They take me posting a beta app (tech news) as an endorsement. The reach!
You can see replies get ignored any time I or someone else shows replies to them (btw, we posted ages ago Tor isn't a great solution people are over-reliant towards and they ignored that too).
https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/1945623621457600929
Please feel free to tell your friends to find any Pixel vulnerabilities then show everyone. I encourage it! Every hacker in the world can't be covering these supposed gaping security holes up (like every space agency in the globe has covered up the Earth being flat, lmao). You can make money finding this stuff, it's called vulnerability research, we get paid bounties for it when we find them on Android and Pixels.
Also FYI, that Tor forum link is an exploitative call to appeal by some individual who seeks attention online. They spun a trivial legal case to be about something else for attention. They posted on Tor Reddit (on my page) too. Google that OPs Reddit user with speech marks... They have a pretty messy online footprint. HN caught on quickly about how suspicious this is but obviously Redditors kinda don't know how to read.
I posted some of their legal documents. Their legal case is ACTUALLY about violating their bond when he was charged for hacking a company. He shouldn't have been operating Tor nodes past the incident because the terms stated he shouldn't have been using computers not authorised by his parole officer. You have to be a real dumbass to do that...
Obviously, they were monitored because he was on bond for a cyber crime. Nothing to do with Tor at all, it's a person making a sob story because they failed to game the feds.
The biased narrator of the story (his wife) never posted evidence of the excuses on why the bond was violated beyond words once questioned, even in the Tor thread.
Not read into the lightning talk. I'm not a maxi.
I greatly appreciate your reply and helping me educate myself better. I am used to TOR because that's what I've used most. But have been running I2P as of late. GrapheneOS is my main and I try my best to find any issues on it so I can help support not just monetarily but also some elbow grease to keep it going as a community project.
Do you have any alternatives to TOR or I2P that you recommend to research?
Don't worry about the lightning part. It was just for them. 😅
Keep being amazing and I appreciate all the work you do at Graphene. ⚡🤝
I like I2P, there's the official app, a lot of people I know seem to use InviZible though on Android.
Other alternatives to them are small and far between. There is Lokinet but it's tied to some other cryptocurrency for some reason. Any network where you participate in will obviously have participant nodes who are operated with a malicious intent. Splitting connections apart like onion routing does and encryption is the best you can do. It's also more susceptible to this problem the less participants there are.
I appreciate you sharing that with me! I'm going to look into using invisible now. I've seen the lokinet and was turned off by the cryptocurrency part.
Well I'll do my best to teach others on how to use TOR and how to support it by running nodes and using it more as their net.
Also I just did a P2P transaction by Zapping you. 🤠
Ahah, my bad. You are indeed someone who did mining.
I'm just tired of all the newbies in this domain just for the "money goes up" narrative. I get it that nobody wants to be poor, just wish they wouldn't confuse financial mechanisms to get there with the reason why cryptos are used.
Just be the change you want to see. Also don't assume who's who, it makes you look like a dumbass. I agree with you that people need to stop caring about number go up.
I'm a new cypherpunk and I try to educate others on these things to help improve peoples sovereignty and freedoms the best I can.