if a network uses proof of work it should be asic resistant. no worry about specialized hardware being made by a small number of manufacturers. you can get the hardware at any computer parts store. I have heard the story about asic friendly proof of work enabling a network to become a load balancer for the electrical grid but I don't completely buy it, and it depends on the state cooperating. it's difficult to hide an asic farm. I feel safer under the assumption that the network can still be healthy just in case the state is hostile. you get that with asic resistant proof of work.

I still have reservations about proof of work. it's always going to have a geographic centralization pressure. people who live in places with expensive electricity can't participate in network consensus without stealing the electricity. I can't do mining at my house at all for instance. even heating my home with mining equipment still costs me more than other types of heat.

on other consensus mechanisms all you need is a laptop with an SSD plugged in and some coins. that's very compelling and might very well be worth the tradeoffs under certain circumstances. at least I can participate.

both XMR and BCH have excellent adjustable blocksize algorithms. I've always believed that there is nothing wrong with some linear scaling as long as that's not all you're gonna do and as long as a full node can still run on reasonably up to date consumer grade hardware. this would have bought plenty of time until someone could come up with a way to have a L2 that doesn't just end up shoving everyone into custodians. whatever "centralization" would occur from bigger L1 blocks is nothing compared to the number of people being shoved into custodians because of payment channel garbage right now.

they lied and said that node requirements have to be artificially small so that people can have a non-mining node on a raspberry pi powered by potatoes at the top of the himalayas, and then they put all their nodes on AWS and GCP. it was always a giant lie.

it only took you a few minutes to figure it out. ecash is a scam. none of the incentives make any sense whatsoever and it's a way to sneak inflation into the bitcoin ecosystem.

they're all garbage. waiting for someone to fork pleroma-fe.

imagine being a maxi and saying monero is bad because it is hard to verify the total supply and it has some inflation. then you go around telling people to use ecash mints, which are also hard to verify the total supply and are vulnerable to inflation. maxis lie when they tell you what is important to them. all they care about is if you buy BTC after they do. they don't care about anything else and they never did.

people are saying that if you have a little bit of money, it belongs in an ecash mint that is completely centralized and ruggable. when you have a little bit more money, it belongs in a permissioned sidechain protected by a multisig. when you have a lot of money, it can be in self-custody protected by a decentralized network. but that's like saying poor people don't deserve decentralization. you realize under this scheme most people in the world are not protected from the dangers of fractional reserve banking, and there can be a lot of inflation that is hard to detect. the inflation will hurt rich people too. so what does that even accomplish?

HTLCs let you issue units of account against BTC on anything, not just lightning. it's all IOUs and it's not going to stop.

if you're talking about cashu sats then yeah that's what those are

https://m.primal.net/LlTe.mp4

there is a limit on how many people can maintain lightning channels at the same time. whenever the L1 is saturated, anyone else who wants to interact with lightning has to go through a custodian. it is nice when L1 fees are low but that is not currently the intended default state. L1 needs fees for its security budget. they are supposed to be high all the time according to core developers. when that happens, many users are priced out of owning their own channels and they end up in things like cashu mints or wallet of satoshi, where they can be rugged or debanked. the only way to make sure that more people are protected is by making self-custody more accessible, and for that to happen bitcoin needs more innovation. that's not happening right now, it's only scaling via custodians.

https://m.primal.net/LlHf.webm

>bitcoin will make alts obsolete

>alts are testbeds

10 years later

>we can't copy useful features from alts because we just can't okay

>shut up and eat your runestone memecoins

I was told a decade ago that bitcoin would copy everything that alts created and alts would become unnecessary. but now they are trying very hard to not do that. they can't do that without these BIPs getting activated and I don't think they will.

I'm morally against banning porn but I think it would be funny. porn is helping to prevent societal upheaval. the company who makes fleshlights has prevented more terrorist attacks than the department of homeland security.

I have to explicitly talk about exactly what I want the government or private businesses to do or not do. it makes everything take longer

I can't get anywhere if I use words like "socialism" and "capitalism" anymore. I have to stop using these words. discourse has degraded so much and there is so much brain rot that the other person will always change the definition of these words in an attempt to win an argument.

I live in the US and I've used it. just the frontend is a website that geoblocks the US. it doesn't have any heavy KYC or anything and it's trivial to get around. there is no way of knowing how many users are from the US.