> If you think people would be willing to sacrifice more in order to hold Blackrock’s sh*tcoin fork, than to own real Bitcoin… then I have fiat to sell you.

I wouldn't, you wouldn't, 99% of people on nostr wouldn't.

Normies would.

Pictures millions of normies. Holding Bitcoin in banks, in exchanges. Merchants who have to follow laws in their jurisdictions.

And law-abiding normies who see Bitcoin as a get rich quick scheme, or as a retirement fund.

When push comes to shove, do you really think all those brave normies (see: covid1984) will stand up for freedom AND risk their whole stash?

I admire your optimism.

I am not up to date with more recent efforts, and I have an intuition grounded in years of experience that tells me the lack of privacy and anonymity in L1 is going to negatively impact Bitcoin's use as freedom tech even when other layers do possess those properties.

Having said that, I applaud, support and commend any and all efforts to make Bitcoin more private and anonymous. I save in Bitcoin, as long as I have trustless a way in and out from whatever it is that I can spend privately with (Monero and Lightning at the moment), I am happy.

I am also fairly sure that this is not going to be solved with just tech. Many here eschew politics, I don't like it myself, but the fact is, our opponents organize against us using politics as a weapon, with the backing of the violence of the State once their surveillance becomes law.

Perhaps at some point the right answer is for us to organize politically and internationally as well. Or things will probably just keep sliding into tyranny.

I won't recommend onchain bitcoin to anyone because of the glaring lack of privacy and anonymity. It's too easy to fuck things up and be ensnared.

Lightning is a non-starter for someone in the position of receiving $2 or $5 (many small payments) while also not having liquidity.

Obviously it also doesn't scale, because either you're opening a new channel with each transaction, or expanding channel capacity (eithet one is an onchain tx, meaning it's neither private/anon or does it scale).

Next comes ecash. I'm not going to be personally liable for the money of everyone I orange pill by running a mint, and I'm not going to recommend a randomint that will one day surely rug them.

For the same reason, I won't recommend a custodial lightning solution either.

Liquid could kinda work, and at least it has confidential transactions.. but software (and hardware, afaik only Jade supports it) support is very lacking.

Lightning works great for people like us (with its many caveats, thr whole network is one giant hot wallet after all). I have channels with obnoxious amounts of usd worth of liquidity that I opened years ago

In case you guys haven't noticed, that's not most people.

Unfortunately I have observed that the vast majority (and that includes even most bitcoiners) don't care and/or don't understand the value of privacy and anonymity.

Bitcoiners at least understand the fiat scam, that's why we're bitcoiners. But most normies in most places don't.

Normies don't get the tech either. It's a bit like the internet, you have a small minority who has any idea how a computer works and how networking works and why you probably shouldn't be running closed-source apps on closed-source systems running in closed-source hardware.. but most people noy only don't care, they brag about not caring.

Until they're hacked (happened to a noob I know recently), and suddenly they understand why they shouldn't have made their entire digital world as secure as their stupid apple login, because now the "hacker" completely owns them. Then they come crying for help, after years of saying they "have nothing to hide". Well, now that person literally has nothing to hide, it was all pwnd 😁

Anyhow, the point is, I see bitcoin in a bit of a deadend right now unless you're a baller and can put in serious money into it regularly. It's totally unusable in a self-sovereign way for the vast majority of people and I don't see how this is going to change.

That's one half of it. The other half is, damn every single one of you who stubbornly failed to see why privacy WITH anonymity was important (not aimed at you nostr:nprofile1qqs0eac2gh86s9l24qfmnw52xawhz0f3d862yleaetpafygjmanaxlspp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqpzvs8wumn8ghj7ur4wfcxcetsv9njuetnqy28wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytn00p68ytnyv4mq0uduh3), and who're all so surprised now that the complete lack of priv/anon in bitcoin is being weaponized against it.

Yeah, no shit.

Why do you think they want the mass-surveillance?

To enforce tyrannical laws. DUH.

A totally transparent system gave them that ability ON FUCKING STEROIDS.

Now the chicken are coming home to roost.

And believe me, I take no pleasure in any of this. I'm just another guy trying to live in peace and doing my thing, but all the NGU fanatics and their arrogant ignorance could only result in what's coming.

Anyway, so I recommend #monero to people nowdays for transactions, and when/if they reach a certain point where saving makes sense, and they have by then enough capital, then it's time to talk about swapping xmr for non-kyc btc.

But mark my words, all of this is too much for normies. One day they want to sell those btc like normies (kyc cex) and their accounts will be frozen.

They literally don't understand what fully traceable means. 9 out of 10. It's incredible, I don't know what's between their ears.

Transparent chain. All traceable. By design. It'll get you into trouble, unless you fit in the officially approved Statist box (kyc purchases, all traceable, no "suspicious" transfers, FULL SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL).

It's... not hard to get.

I understand.

I am saying that the ideology that ends up killing millions of people every time is probably not the way to get there.

Aliens, man.

(/s)

Indeed!

Unfortunately that's most of them these days 😁

They didn't trace Monero, they traced people who deposited Monero in exchanges.

Bitcoin private sends are not private at all. The chain is transparent, doesn't take a genious to correlate the transaction based on the amount.

You can NEVER have PRIVACY on L1 Bitcoin as it exists now. You can have PSEUDOANONYMITY at best, and it's always a losing game, because anything and everything you do is not just transparent, but eternally transparent.

Monero, on the other hand, gives anyone and everyone who uses it PRIVACY and ANONYMITY at the blockchain level.

The lack of privacy in the bitcoin L1 affects your privacy in intricate ways in layer twos, in much the same way that mass surveillance online is a thing because IP (the protocol) does not encrypt neither payload nor packet headers.

One follows from the other, and only people who are not very technical, not very bright, or highly cultist/dogmatic (or a combination of those) can fail to see such an obvious point.

#monero does indeed fix this particular problem. But you see, except for a few nutjobs that make wild claims and take it too seriously, most monero users understand that the amazing privacy and anonymity which you need unless you like mass-surveillance (spoiler: monero users don't, that's why we use it) come with tradeoffs, because as anyone with a basic grasp of economics knows, THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS, ONLY TRADEOFFS.

And so most Monero users are bitcoin hodlers too, and in fact LITERALLY 100% of the bitcoiners I know from 2016 and earlier find all of this pretty obvious.

For some reason the new crops take Bitcoin as some kind of religion or some shit, and are unresponsive to rational persuation.

Consequently, and since experience reliably tells me you will not change your mind, don't even bother replying. This is more for the passerby readers whose minds have not calcified into religious dogma yet.

It truly is very simple. Monero & Bitcoin are tools anyone can use, and if you use Bitcoin, you probably should be using Monero too.

Communism really isn't about community though. Communal community isn't. It's about the abolition of private property above anything else.

The reason it never gets past the totalitarian shithole phase is because after some humans hoarded all the power and disempowered everyone else, guess what, they don't want to let go of it.

Communism always leads to violence, unless it's small scale and voluntary opt-in. Think about it, how are the commies gonna abolish private property? By expropriating everyone's stuff.

Do people generally want to lose all their possessions and accumulated capital? No they don't, and for very good reasons.

So they must be forced to do so, and predictably violence follows.

It is no surprise then that Communism tops the charts for genocide and mass-murder by a very large margin.

Naaaaah.

They just don't want to work, be responsible, or feel envy for people who do better than them (which is stupid in any scenario, but commies are not known for being particularly bright).

They still want the things work and effort bring though. Leveling up? Nah. Upgrading their mindset? Nope. Working smarter? Hell no.

Complain envy and crab mentality? ding ding ding

Thanks for sharing.

Just as true and to the point today as when it was written.

This is the "democracy" we live under, where bureaucrats in Brussels proactively control and regulate every aspect of the masses' existence, limiting the possibilities of what's legally allowed not due to an evolving understand and discussion in society, but because in their top-down Socialistic hubris, they truly think they know better than everyone else.

And thus, financial privacy was eviscerated in Europe, without the knowledge or the consent of the peoples of Europe.

When will enough be enough? Why do we continue to llet them speak for us, when they are so consistently against freedom?

Worse, lately they really fancy themselves regulators of the whole WORLD. Their hubris knows no frontiers.

Sounds good in theory, but then what you'll get is other States or billionaire-funded NGOs flooding your territory and subverting it from within.

Do you let anyone in your house? Do you not have a right to your privacy in your own space?

A country is not so different. Have you traveled much? In most of the planet what you take for granted at home is not how things work elsewhere.

You let everyone in and you get that same crap, because a place, a culture, is the result of the people who live there as well and primarilu.

Then, suddenly and "unexpectedly", people are getting stabbed and shot left and right and ran over by peace cars all over the place.

If you doubt some places and some cultures are better than others, I'm happy to send you some sats so you can go experience enrichment in the flesh 😉

They didn't invent it, but there is an old video where some commie suggests calling anyone who challenges Communism a racist, sexist etc (basically the thought-killing slur du jour, nowdays it's far-right™) in order to deflect and turn the conversation around and never actually get to the part where their vile ideology is challenged.

This is awesome!

There will always be a ruling class.

Incidentally, it is not unreasonable to believe that O.G bitcoiners might become the next ruling class.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1hp1auc/micar_and_the_monero_ecosystem/

#monero #privacy #eussr #europe #freedom #financialprivacy

Doublespeak at its finest.

The lying bitch who can't be trusted, talking about misinformation, trust, and actual fascism (government+corps tag teaming to fuck the plebs).

No wonder they want to control all information, it's so easy to expose them when they don't 😁

They have been, for awhile.

Most of the world just doesn't want to see it. Perhaps that's changing now.

I love heavy bags as much as the next guy, but indeed, the whole point was peer to peer digital cash.

Custodial bitcoin IOUs is not my idea of peer to peer. That might be useful for something else, but not for this.

Well, anyway. It's easy to see what works as peer to peer digital cash: authoritarian states ban it reliably.

The answer is MORE Socialism!

(/s)