Bitcoin is very similar to gold. China and Russia may like to buy up all the gold, but there is only so much in existence. They have to stack bars for the long game, and are doing so. Meanwhile the west think a big STICK mentality will keep them on top. Those days are numbered, and when they figure out their doom, they are suddenly going to want to buy up gold, and guess what... people stacking it are not going to give it up without a fight. The difference is that bitcoin is easier to carry than gold.

I’m saying that vitalik and other large stakers now actually own the house, and you just own the photo of it.

Tying Bitcoin’s security to real world energy expenditure is what makes it robust and decentralized. PoS is an inherently insecure and fragile system. Governments can co-opt or shut down PoS chains quite easily. Not to mention they run on perverse incentives where the largest holders get to determine what transactions are valid and reward themselves with more coins. PoS or likely works well for scaling layers but base layer needs to be preserved as PoW.

Last month, Amethyst's Image proxy processed

~22,000,000 requests with ~4.76 TB of data transferred for $932.90 US dollars.

That is being used ONLY for profile pictures 😱

It is true that I am not LGBT. It is true however, than many of my close family are. It's also true, that I was highly politically active in Canada twenty years ago for legalizing same-sex marriage. I debated Michael Coren about it on TV. I also volunteered for years at the Pride Remembrance Run in Toronto at the beginning of Pride Week.

It may not be my lived experience personally, but as someone who has previously been politically active in pro-LGBT politics, I have certainly been under attack and experienced the bigotry. You really don't have to convince me.

I totally understand how unfair it is to have to fight for your rights and fight to exist. There's nothing fair about it.

But if you give up on trying to change people's minds, you're just ceding the playing field to the people who are willing to change people's minds against your own interests.

I have no card on US politics, I am an EU citizen. A default of US or a any collapse of the usd or any other currency is bad for the lives of many. The problem is that the faith and credit of the issuers, Fed, ECB etc is broken due to bad decisions and/or corruption namely by debasing the currency because they can. Also the current model of constant inflation is broken like Jeff Booth explains. This is what bitcoin fixes. It changes the economic model and removes the need to thrust the issuer.

What I would say to this, is you should want to make people who oppose your lifestyle to empathize with you. You should want to change their mind, and persuade them. Forcing them further into your outgroup is counterproductive for you and society.

This is why campaigns like "Love is Love" was so powerful at moving public sentiment in the first two decades of the 21st century. It spoke to a relatable sense of fundamental fairness.

Trying to draw a dividing line between yourself and your enemies, may at some level be ethically justifiable, given someone may not respect your rights. However, game theory would suggest, using approaches that makes said someone change their mind and respect your rights is the more strategic path.

We need more websites that accept LN/BTC why isnt there an Bitcoin Ebay? Maybe it could be built on Nostr.

The weird thing I notice about some of the people who state they are most opposed to identity politics, is how ironically -- and seemingly unknowingly -- they are enmeshed in extreme forms of it.

If your personal identity is tied to a belief system of any kind, and you consider attacks on that belief system to be a personal attack. And, you tend to constrain your personal relationships to people who share that belief system, you are simply part of identity politics. That is what identity politics is.

It doesn't really matter what the belief system is: if it's progressive or "woke" politics. Or right-wing populist politics. Or even if it's categories like bitcoiner vs nocoiner -- if your personal behavior, and community behaviors fit the definition I laid out in the second paragraph, then you are participating in identity politics.

And yes, identity politics is pretty bad for anything resembling a functioning pluralistic society.

Sure. Even though we can say that a celebrity put some work that is recognized by others as valuable, so in the same regard my signature is worthless, the same as a fake signature. Either way you point is correct, air also has an infinite ammout of value and its free. Again I'm not saying energy/work equals high value. For money you have to have a known set of good properties. Diamonds also require a lot of work, but they are not good as money, it lacks other properties. PoW/energy is just one, it anchors bitcoin to the real physical world.

What about the work required to become a celebrity that their signature is worth something?

I'm not saying that just putting work/energy into something makes it valuable. Bitcoin and gold are valuable for many other reasons, I'm referring to money as this are important properties. To have an unforgeable cost is just one of them. In POS the cost is zero.

this platform is slow, full of crypto garbage, and has a terrible interface

Thanks. When eco-conscious people say BTC is horrible because of PoW - that’s the answer… “you don’t have to have wealthy to do PoW, but you need to be for PoS.” We “big city liberals” will understand that. It’s something we can tell our friends that sounds reasonable. And then follow up with “BTC uses less energy than video games”.

To summarize, a cost is security of the blockchain

#[3]​ that def sucks bud, let’s book a time and I’ll help you get it up and running 👌 unfortunately even though Nostream runs inside containers it still requires you to have a recent official Docker installed

I had to pause everything due to me moving to another city but that’s over and I am slowly getting back to full speed!

PoW gives bitcoin an unforgeable cost. This means that for bitcoins to be created an earned by miners they have to spend electricity. So there is a real cost to create and earn bitcoin that cannot be faked. Current currencies don't have a cost, they can be created at the press of a button from thin air. Gold also has a cost, it has to be mined, work, time, machines, can't be created from nothing. Now POS to create you need 32 eth that can be faked, if you can print money from nothing you can buy 32 with no cost. For Bitcoin you can also buy with money but we are talking about the production, you can buy bitcoin miners with fake money but you still need to spend electricity, a lot of it. Same with gold you still have to put the work. So to mine bitcoin or gold you have to keep putting real energy/work, for POS you buy 32 eth and it's done, you keep earning without any work. This bitcoin and gold costs also forces the miners to sell to pay for operarion costs, that makes bitcoin more distributed among everyone. In POS you don't have costs so you don't have to sell, so the richer get richer and power concentrates in the rich, in POS the interest is paid by the users, so users get less eth and nodes get more without the need to sell.

If you want to participate in Proof of Stake, you have to stake the token that you own. So, this would be buying the token, ETH for example, and then staking it, which essentially means locking it up so you can't use it.

🙏 it’s been years in Nostr-time but it will be worth it!

Well, you need to obtain the capability to stake somehow, you need to token.