Note that this is not my idea, it’s actually a very old idea I believe due to Maxwell.

If we want ecash to have any hope of working out, we need anonymous mints, but anonymous mints are likely to get stolen. Instead, we need anonymous mints that are operated by one of N well-known and trusted parties. Mint operator(s) should take N public keys known to be from N well-known and trusted persons in the bitcoin space, then create ring sig(s) across those N to reveal that they are one of those N parties, but not which one.

Given many long-timers at one point or another had public donation addresses or some other key that is known to be theirs, this should actually be relatively doable, just don’t put too much money in the mint :)

Fair enough. I guess I just hope we can get to a place where folks like Mutiny don’t have to ever consider leaving the US. And that means playing the game, both political lobbying (usually not money, to be clear, mostly just outreach, but also direct ad buys, etc) and using the courts to push back on overreach. I’m sadly not sure what other approach exists given the state will use force to get their way.

Didn’t you get mad at me for telling people to care about regulators and voting and now you’re talking about how people should vote for trump? Seems like we’ve been making the same point :)

Yes, yes it was.

Want people to adopt silent payments? Tie their support to human readable names and watch users demand the UX improvements :)

Also CPU/memory - people would regularly fail IVD on various early RPis cause they’d corrupt memory when they got hot.

Man, not sure why someone would work on cryptocurrency at all in the Netherlands with these words. nostr:note12l82q3dvj0rm528ukyfqzauzv0ytsdfu9a9kkk2kv6kp9rqyhkkslktlly

What assumption that I made is unrealistic, or even not-highly-likely? I mean centralized parties are already declining to offer services for non custodial use (see Phoenix).

Why

I don’t buy for a second you’ll be able to do that in the long term if we don’t fix these issues. Sure the massive problems we have now aren’t materially trickling down to breaking the system yet, but are we building a Bitcoin for today or a Bitcoin for a decade or two from now?

Then I’m definitely done caring about bitcoin. I mean sure some people just want the 21M cap and they’ll be happy, but those of us who wanted to be able to send value to others without being censorable….

And yet it hasn’t fixed mining centralization in a decade?

Bitcoiners need to wake up. Things are not going great for Orange Coin, at least if you care about more than price.

I’m quite skeptical that solution scales, but I’m really happy people are still trying to make it a reality, and if it does get big, I’ll be ecstatic!

If lightning doesn’t have noncustodial mobile, people will just use custodial mobile. I’m all for pleb routing nodes, in fact the only way to get noncustodial mobile at all may be if they exist, but we’ve seen time and time and time again that the vast majority of people will always only install an app.

These next few years are as existential for bitcoin as the Blocksize Wars.

Back then it was about who got to decide what bitcoin was, now it’s about what bitcoin is.

https://bluematt.bitcoin.ninja/2024/05/11/bitcoins-precarious-position/

The shitty thing is lightning labs could have easily built this as a separate dollar-specific network that is KYC’d, but they didn’t. Still wouldn’t have been great for lightning but wouldn’t have been as bad. In fact it would have been less work for them to do this! nostr:note10lknnp2u2cktvgyye9qgmvyzelwqjph3l556w9av236g4g3crjxs6nnf3t

I’d definitely love to see it built and adopted!

Most of these require some form of software engineering, but at least the Sv2 adoption train is purely a social thing. Maybe also JoinMaket adoption?