As Jeff Booth says the price of goods falls to the marginal cost of production. So that $100 bill is falling to $0.094 in purchasing power eventually.
Don’t forget the meat space infrastructure like #meshtastic and ham radio
Bitcoin is military grade money.
In this example the eCash is publicly known to be locked to Martti’s npub? Is it possible to make these similar to silent payments [1]?
There are paid relays and other filtered relays out there. WoT can work as long as you’re not trusting Reply-guy types.
We’re lucky that Nostr is an open protocol and anybody is welcome to build their own clients and relays on top to filter out the spam. It’s easy to criticize but most of the devs are building and running this infrastructure in their spare time for free so we should be thankful it works at all honestly.
I’m not expecting anything. I’m saying we learn from each attack and the more notice we get the better.
The situation nostr:npub1utx00neqgqln72j22kej3ux7803c2k986henvvha4thuwfkper4s7r50e8 describes is strictly better than a scenario where nobody ever telegraphs the attacks in advance. It’s a common practice in cybersecurity called “red teaming” and helpful if well intentioned people attack before malicious ones do.
Wonder if we could use OpenTimestamps and on-chain keys as a second factor for Nostr authentication. For example you could sign a message attesting to your ownership of an npub with a key to one of your UTXOs and stamp it and then publish it on Nostr in your profile.
Use case: suppose your nsec becomes compromised and you want to inform your web of trust to swap out your npub for a new one. We need an independent and decentralized way to differentiate the correct npub from an attacker’s.
Seems better than NIP-05 which is DNS based.
If it can’t withstand deliberate attack then it won’t last in its current form and we might as well learn where it breaks before building critical systems on it.
Physical surveillance over wifi is an IEEE standard: 802.11 bf - WiFi sensing [1].
With gait analysis [2] you can determine who is in the area and with enough photos or videos of that person you can reconstruct an accurate video of them.
You can also reconstruct audio just from video and possibly even via 802.11bf or similar eventually [3].
The surveillance stack is deep.
1. https://www.nist.gov/publications/ieee-80211bf-enabling-widespread-adoption-wi-fi-sensing
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18806-4
3. https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804
#privacy #wifi
Time to introduce him to pi-hole [1] so he can block ads across all devices on the network. You can run it in Docker on any device; doesn’t have to be a R-Pi.
As for the windows… hopefully he’ll pick up Linux.
This is a great introduction to #ecash and #cashu straight from the source. Well worth a listen!
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Switching to a meat and produce only diet (ie. avoiding most packaged things) and not drinking calories goes a long way. Add in at least 3k of walking or running each day and life is so much better.
One useful metric for valuing a system or network is how much effort is required to defend it. In free markets there’s a selective pressure for stability and durability.
For example for a company to maintain or increase its value it must maintain demand for its products or services while competing against other providers but also fighting internal problems like bureaucracy, incompetence, corruption, etc.
A fiat currency is similar in that it must avoid depreciation relative to other currencies (competitors) as well as fraud (bank corruption, inflation, etc.). The sheer amount of people it takes to keep fiat rails working despite all the incentives for them to cheat combined with lack of transparency by design make it incredibly hard to defend.
Compare that with bitcoin that was designed to be transparent and incorruptible from the beginning. There’s an asymmetry between attacking and defending it so that corrupting the system is orders of magnitude harder than defending. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives.
Thanks for the rec! Going on the list to read right after finishing “Understanding Cryptography: A Textbook for Students and Practitioners”
The Fed lowering interest rates = fiat mining difficulty went down
If you worry about governments playing games with the fiat price of Bitcoin then it helps to realize those games are unsustainable and typically mean you get to stack sats cheaper in the short term.
Price controls just don’t work and have failed countless times in dramatic fashion. Focus on P2P exchange of Bitcoin among your friends and family and local merchants and the fiat price will eventually correct itself.
For anyone into taking notes try adding them to a vector database so you can query them with natural language rather than stuffing SEO keywords and labels into them for searchability.
You can use local models via something like Ollama [1] to generate the embeddings and store them in a DB. I’ve been playing around with Qdrant [2] running in Docker and found it easy to setup.
Talk to your friends and family about the history of banks and why we needed Bitcoin in the first place.
There are so many self custody solutions out there that we don’t need banks to help anymore. You can even run a cashu mint and be an uncle Jim for your tech challenged family members. Don’t be lulled by the familiar siren song of “yield.”
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I think you underestimate how difficult it would be to kill bitcoin at this point. Nobody can take your properly secured self custodied bitcoin and there are too many people who plan to use it as money at this point. Sure there’s an unfortunate number of coins locked up in exchanges but there’s enough circulating in the wild to work out just fine.
Suppose they try to take over mining and effectively censor transactions. The network can implement workarounds like swapping out SHA256 to brick the ASICs and reset hash rate until it can figure out a long term solution. It could even, and I hate writing this, make a PoS layer 2 as a temporary solution until mining can decentralize again so that the people who actually want bitcoin to thrive can transact again.
Then suppose they make possession punishable by extreme measures. There are so many ways to embed Bitcoin transactions securely and covertly that it’s impossible to enforce. And on top of that, suppose your country does ban it. They have no control over the rest of the world who just might value a neutral reserve currency and continue to stack sats.
Bitcoin was designed from the beginning to resist attack and while it may not be perfect there is no second best.
Researchers found that they can use LLMs to induce false memories [1]. They showed participants a video of a crime and then had them interact with an LLM tasked with asking misleading questions that manipulate their recollection of events.
I’m sure lawyers are yawning at this but it’s significant because now it can be done at scale and with precision.
1. “Conversational AI powered by large language models amplifies false memories in witness interviews” - https://arxiv.org/html/2408.04681v1