there are 11 rollups listed on l2beat.com that each have more money deposited into them than the lightning network. out of these only two of the rollups can really be considered non-custodial at this point in time, but those two have capacity equivalent to 209,240 BTC and 96,572 BTC respectively, compared to lightning's 5,207 BTC. and a huge chunk of the BTC on lightning is held inside custodial wallet providers. so lightning isn't just losing against monero in usage, particularly non-custodial usage, it is also losing against rollups.
“It's hard not to follow the incentives, and there are incentives to short fiat.
To not follow the incentives you'd have to break your mind and become what the communists wanted people to become, an incentive non-following creature. Such a creature would end up taken advantage of, enslaved, abused and poor.
Shorting fiat also involves liquidation risk, so you're paying a price for it in the risk and the higher your leverage, the greater the risk.
Perhaps the idea that borrowing fiat to buy bitcoin is unethical is a psyop sowed by the powers that be to keep us from stacking more? Just a thought.
I tend to view it as a game. The goal is to maximize your score, which is the amount of sats stacked. If you don't play it well, others will and you'll be their victim.”
https://stacker.news/items/710100/r/halalmoney?commentId=710396
shorting a currency using borrowing is a completely normal defi operation, but it's usually done via collateral and not credit. I always liked the idea that extending credit is not really possible within the confines of a blockchain or smart contract platform. only collateralized lending protocols can exist. so if you are a person who uses a very broad definition of usury, it means that usury doesn't really fit into defi.
this is the exact same problem I had with bisq. it helps to reduce the number of times you have to interact with a CEX or KYC yourself, but it doesn't completely eliminate it. you may still have to do it at least once.
what I am still trying to wrap my head around is, on localmonero and even localbitcoins it was possible for a person to buy coins without already having them. there were always some sellers who would let you send maybe a hundred bux even if you had no account history or anything, and there was never a deposit or collateral.
someone told me that bisq and haveno can't have this because then people will just initiate orders they have no desire to fulfill, as a form of spam attack that locks the seller's coins for a time, and that this is insurmountable without making the security deposit mandatory. but if localbitcoins and localmonero ran fine for years without this being a breaking problem, why isn't it possible on bisq and haveno? and why can't there be some other way to prevent spam like forcing the user to submit shares to a mining pool to prove that they are earnest? proof of work was invented to prevent spam.
is it easy to obtain monero on haveno-reto if all I have is cash, or do I still need some kind of crypto money to put up as collateral in order to begin using the system?
hal finney wrote both the bitcoin whitepaper and the cryptonote whitepaper. they'll prove it someday when they remove him from the freezer.
I am so sick of running into people who deny that there is something wrong with having an alexa speaker in their home, because allegedly all smartphones constantly do the exact same thing.
smartphones are not listening all the time, unless you have siri or google assistant enabled, and only then it is listening for the trigger words. smartphones serve you ads based on how you interact with malicious apps like facebook. they will guess the things you are probably talking about with shocking accuracy because they are mind control and surveillance appliances. the apps don't need the microphone to do this, they just need to analyze interactions.
liquid is custodial. only liquid federation members have the ability to perform a peg-out operation, which burns L-BTC and sends real BTC back to the user. this is a permissioned process. nobody can unilaterally exit liquid. it is just as bad as a consortium chain like EOS, only people are letting it hold their bitcoins hostage.
you may say "but there are lots of important companies in the liquid federation." listen to yourself defending the consortium chain model. you're a filthy banker like the rest of them.
compare this with stage 1 rollups. any user can unilaterally exit funds from the currently most advanced type of rollup. you can remove your funds no matter what the node operator wants. the infrastructure can completely disappear and you can still get out.
samson mow is completely full of shit. the aqua wallet marketing materials contain lies. aqua wallet parks "your" funds on liquid and uses a DEX to swap them in and out of lightning. aqua is a custodial wallet.
how is it that so many people became okay with that? the whole point of bitcoin was so that you do not have to go through a financial institution i.e. a custodian. using it through a bank it defeats the entire purpose. you get none of its special benefits.
I bet my left nut that the person you responded to claims that they are ok with opening their own channels right now because fees happen to be low lately, and they are ok with running their own lightning node. the person will deny that fees are ever going to be high, even though they are supposed to be high by design in order to pay for security. the person doesn't understand that if everyone used lightning in a sovereign way the base layer would choke and the channel management transactions would become cost prohibitive. he will deny that bitcoin and lightning are sabotaged and the design pushes people into custodians.
I don't know where you became so confused along the way, but every custodial bitcoin scaling solution is banking. doesn't matter if it's a fedimint or a centralized sidechain stapled to a lightning dex. those are all custodial and they are banking. you are cheerleading for people to put bitcoins into a bank account where they can be stolen or frozen. grandma does in fact need her own channels, or it's not her money. you support banking.
IRC is better than discord because you have to pass an intelligence test to be able to participate. I don't want to see riffraff in there. however, self-custody bitcoin should not be gated behind an intelligence test. it should be accessible to everyone regardless of skill level. it is a bad thing that most bitcoin users go through a custodian, and that being actually sovereign on lightning requires both technical knowledge and an indeterminate number of layer 1 transactions. even if every bitcoin enthusiast in the world could become a computer expert, there is still not enough room on layer 1 for channel management transactions needed to keep all the users sovereign. it is better to pursue a different design that will make self-custody more accessible.
this simplex thing is not going to catch on.
not pictured, I had to open a random port on my firewall just to connect my phone to my desktop. yeah right
sticking with XMPP and omemo that is more than good enough for me
authoritarian collectivists belong in a plastic chipper
I liked mises, hayek, and hoppe way more than rothbard or ayn rand. why are they not nearly as popular?
>Onchain fees are 2-3 sats/vb at the moment
why do people keep making this dumb "but it's not raining today" argument? we've both seen the fee charts many many times. $50 UTXOs have become unspendable more often than solana downtime. if maxis get the adoption they feel entitled to, $50 UTXOs will become unspendable all the time. everyone will be forced into a custodial lightning wallet unless they are wealthy enough to be the custodian.
bitcoin UTXOs worth $50 or less have become unspendable more often than the solana network has crashed. we've gone over the limit several times. having lightning doesn't fix this for anyone except custodial wallet users.
quick! name three things that aren't bitcoin
almost nobody does this. it's too difficult, and even if you delude yourself into thinking it's easy there is not enough room on L1 for everyone to do it. there is a hard limit on how many people can do self-custody lightning.
yes and I don't like soapbox. the only microblogging frontend that I ever really loved was pleroma-fe
I use the fediverse every single day. pleroma-fe is a pleasure to use and it is better than every nostr client. I don't plan to stop using the fediverse. but it kind of sucks.
instances can block each other for any reason. this practice is so widespread that the fediverse is splintered into neighborhoods with very little overlap. the most censored neighborhood has the most public visibility. a person who is learning the fediverse for the first time is extremely likely to land on a mastodon instance with very heavy-handed moderation. they will not be able to see or interact with someone from a spicy pleroma instance just because their admin thinks everyone who disagrees with him is a neonazi. they pass around lists of "nazi" instances to defederate from some of which have been offline for three years or more and never even did anything wrong. I have even seen fediverse instances defederate over use of the word "stupid" because stupid is an ableist slur. if you somehow wind up in the less censored neighborhood you will see people use the n word every day just because that's the only place where they can. the fediverse is basically not even all one thing anymore.