So you are just saying that they should make their business the way you want them to and serve the customers that you wish they would rather than what they want to build?

The Bitcoin Company provides me a very valuable service and I appreciate them and really hope they don’t switch to merchant POS systems because that’s not something I need.

Plus, the overwhelming majority of merchants just turn it back into fiat, using bitcoin for payments, and fiat as their money.

IMO the opposite is far more valuable, using Bitcoin as money, and only using fiat for its payment network, until we get to the point where that isn’t necessary. Which occurs when everyone realizes they should save in Bitcoin.

I guess we can just agree to disagree. No disrespect.

I just don’t understand what the criticism is, honestly. The Bitcoin Company helps bitcoiners live without a bank account by letting them buy VISA cards. But he seems to call this “supporting Visa,” rather than helping bitcoiners be bank & dollar free but still use the dollar payment networks.

The original complaint just seems irrelevant to the issue he claimed it was about. I just think his framing is completely backward.

Even as a software company, you can build solutions to help merchants to accept directly bitcoin and not visa fiat cards.

That Opago was just an example of how others are doing it right: direct bitcoin acceptance for merchants.

We're going to have the entire interior of our home painted before we sell. I've contacted 4 companies/contractors. Only one showed up. The others no-showed or ghosted. Sign of the times, man.

They are audited continuously by independed hackers reverse engineering all their products. Sometimes they find something leaking private data and Apple is so much backlashed, so they are very motivated to not lie.

Only if you ignore the unsolved and persistent MAJOR, high risk,problem: It doesn't actually work. No AI model is accurate enough to avoid disaster: there will be countless stories of AI telling your boss something you didn't want said, or making purchases you didn't want, telling you to add glue to pasta sauce. These problems aren't going away, and the only way to stop such risks is to make AI a less useful assistant, which is what a standard computer is.

personalized ai assistants who offload tons of computing interface complexity. Normies will eat this up. Techies will too. It will save tons of time. There’s no going back after this. Star trek computer is where we are headed.

This makes me sad, it feels like open source tech is way behind now. AI is going to change computing and people are going to forget about the days when we didn’t have it. It will look like old and obscure tech, even more than it already is.

The opensource ai crowd needs to pick up the pace or open source computing is fucked and it will become less relevant than ever.

I guess I could use on-device models, but linux is not even close to having system-wide integration of local models that can access many different systems and integrate them. We need whole new kinds of apis and system interfaces for this. I suspect it’s at least 20+ years away. Apple is way ahead of the curve here.

I'm agnostic about Apple and Google, but the thing that strikes me is this.

You ask Google, do you share my data. They say hell yeah. Do you profile me. Hell yeah we do.

Apple has never admitted anything until they were caught out. Did you give China access to stay in their market. That's commercially sensitive. Do you use device information to profile us. Silence!

They're just bad in different ways. Google is blatant. Apple is devious.

Saying that a device made by an ad company is less concerned with privacy than a company that's been beating the privacy drum for more than a decade? There are many things to criticize Apple for, but this isn't one of them.

I want to use apple more now, thats the problem. If I can do the same kind of things I am doing with openai but in a way that preserves my privacy and doesn’t send all my personal data to them, that is too good not to use.

I’m sad because they are doing everything right in ways that would make me want to use it over my linux box.

Open source AI will discuss content that closed source Apple, Google, Altman would never touch. That could be the difference maker.

There are two points here

- I don't know about other blockchains but Bitcoin is public by design . Because on Bitcoin network , most of the transactions would be between big wealth funds , nation states , corporations etc .. the fees will make it impractical for me to transact on Bitcoin network . These big transactions must be in public eye .. that is a feature NOT a down side .

- as regards to tax , KYC or not , Bitcoin is an asset . We must pay the taxes as per the legal requirements just the way we pay taxes when we sell real estate or stocks . I am sure you are not promoting tax evasion. Are you ?

Yes I agree with this. And WHY do these elites influence government? Because it has power.

So the less power government has, the less these leeches will push to take control.

Yeah and that force outside the “raw market” is government

😂 yea just take a screenshot of a record breaking time period that lasted a few days. Totally ignore the benefits of lightning and liquid. Nice low quality bait retard. Meanwhile your shitcoin can’t even keep up with M2. HFSP.

None of what you explain here is about controlling Bitcoin, it's about controlling *people.* This is very well understood, but the point in the current system is that they can control people BY controlling the system (ie. censorship transactions, freezing bank accounts, confiscating unlimited resources through counterfeiting, unilaterally exerting control over anything and anyone's entire economic foundation).

In each of the scenarios you gave, you are indicating that they have to attack the people directly, because these options listed above specifically are not available to them. Obviously they can always break out a stick and a hammer and enforce their rule, but this doesn't scale very well, which is exactly why they work so hard to control the systems of transactions and the fundamental creation of money, its 1000x easier to appear as if you've done no harm, if you can swap direct violence, to indirect fraud. Bitcoin doesn't solve violence directly, but it does absolutely change the *economics* of violence and the ability to impose unjust and tyrannical laws on the people. It's very much like copyright and file sharing. Sure they can play a never ending game of whack-a-mole and make people not want to share files, but if they can't stop the technology itself, on a long enough timeline they've lost the war.

Your examples suggest that what I have explained is correct and that those limits absolutely remain in place, because you have only come up with things the govt can do *within* those limits - which is my point. Govt cannot inflate #Bitcoin, they cannot edit its history, they cannot freeze accounts, they cannot stop transactions, they cannot turn off the network... all they can do is *attack people,* which will mean the trillions in economic theft they they've had the luxury of doing as a massive, quiet, backdoor fraud; into one that can only stay afloat with guns and whips, and the people will slowly hate them all the more for it. This is exactly how revolutions get started. There is zero chance that they keep stealing the amount that they do if it has to be taxed directly from the people.

The govt spends ~60% of the total US working population's income. Good luck getting them to directly tax that.