Finding myself in the unpleasant predicament of needing to sell some of my stack over the next month or two for survival, and knowing that those sats could have been the down payment on a house a couple years from now.

Painful.

Gonna piss some people off with this, but this is an excellent take on Bitcoin from someone who is pro-bitcoin, but not blinded by it. Learn to create value and teach your descendants to do the same, or they will absolutely lose all the bitcoin they inherit. https://youtu.be/0Fg30bxX9BA?si=NvmGwGcJnCmk6B47

Ah, now I think I get it. Built-in regulatory oversight is a hard no from me.

I still think the basic concept of stablecoin <-> bitcoin conversion is a good idea, but if it comes with the baggage of custodians or universally tracked funds, then hell no.

Ok, I must be missing something. Read the press release. What they are describing sounds exactly like the "killer app" that people have been talking about driving mass scale adoption for years.

An open standard, that allows a receiver to receive the type of currency (stable-coins or bitcoin) that they wish to receive, without requiring all of the additional hassle of currency conversion, and all running on top of the bitcoin network. This is a major win for bitcoin far as I can tell.

It is an in-between step, certainly. There is some risk that it will overstay its welcome. But so long as this UMA standard is a protocol without an overseer, this strikes me as a very good thing. Bitcoin gets the stablecoin support that has kept Eth and other junk alive; they will die even faster. Slightly longer term, all of our fiat jobs will pay us and we will immediately receive it in bitcoin.

So is it not an open standard that could be individually implemented? If it is, why the opposition?

The more aspects of the supply chain we can get into the bitcoin ecosystem, and the sooner, the better.

My greatest bitcoin fear: In 2035, I can by as many goods and services with my BTC as it can currently buy me today, but a simple loaf of bread takes the average person 16 hours of labor to earn.

Perhaps I can help add some insight.

To the first question: Bitcoiners believe that BTC is the best monetary asset that a person can own. We believe it safeguards against theft, inflation, and taxation, and also that it's adoption will provide for a vastly improved future for all humanity. If you believed that you had found something that offered that potential, wouldn't you spend time and effort trying to spread the word of such a breakthrough?

To the second, there are always tradeoffs with any technology. To guarantee a fixed supply, it is necessary for every transaction to be on the public ledger. Monero can't guarantee that, for example. That doesn't mean there aren't methods to enhance privacy. Coinjoins, atomic swaps and similar can obfuscate ownership, and of course the balance of a lightning channel is hidden to all but the participants.

As for the Nostr Bitcoin connection: Nostr decentralizes social networking, and removes the potential for a ruling class. Bitcoin does the same for money. The underlying belief system is identical.

Have thought for some time that the best way to accomplish this is with a servant/master system. Servant pubkey is the main that you use regularly. Servant identifies a master pubkey, with the note that does so including a small snippet of signed text from the master. The master would ideally be a cold-storage derivation that sees nearly no use.

The master would only have one primary purpose, that being account replacement. It can send a note that identifies an account as burned, and identifies the replacement. Said note should be signable as airgapped. Clients would then swap over to the replacement and otherwise maintain continuity of messages.

This whole thing has me asking a few key questions.

1. Is there a way to use Tapscript to run something like TornadoCash?

2. What percentage of bitcoiners are willing to accept martyrdom on their principles?

3. Are PMCs / mercenaries willing to accept BTC for anti-gov defensive operations?

4. Why are bitcoiners on average so against the use of kinetic force to defend their right to property, when we're willing to use overwhelming electric force all the time to do the same?

Absolutely massive, I'm well aware. Thus the problem. X is a difficult place to go when you're after useful info what with the algo manipulation. It's also broad and deep enough that you can find a few sane voices on every topic imaginable. The only news element I can reliably find useful info for on Nostr is bitcoin news. I hope this changes, but for now if I want a broad enough spread of views on a topic to form a useful opinion X is somewhat necessary.

Anyone else think it odd how many people facing charges or lawsuits have had their lawyers fail to properly check a box on a legal form, and then the defendant and their lawyer say they actually did fill it out right?

Cryptographic proof is more necessary than ever.

Final Empire, and yeah. Exceptional storytelling, and one of the few writers to take on the daunting task of secondary universe creation successfully.

I barely use Twitter; barely use social media at all. Biggest reason I still hop on there is news. Anyone got a good list of direct or x-post of the major players of non-bitcoin news and current events? If it's comprehensive enough I'd drop X completely.

Tried it out, maybe 9 years ago now. It's been around in some form for much longer than that. Actually surprised it still exists.

Was broke at the time, and so a game that effectively demanded external capital or to play it as a job wasn't desirable. I remember the gameplay was viable but unnoteworthy, though I'm way out of date for that now.

There's clearly a market for what it offers since it still exists. Whether it's a good game, that's personal preference. Being a play to earn game from before the term existed might be the biggest boon it has.

Hope that's useful.

PSA: DO NOT use Boltz on LNBits

First, the lightning invoice that was created expired 5m after creation. So it was impossible to pay in the first place.

Then, when a day later I told the boltz system to recover the funds, it used a preset transaction fee of 1000 sats. 6 sats/vbyte. No RBF.

In practice, I now have 1.4M sats that will remain pending until it is cleared from the mempool, and I will probably never recover. STAY clear.

There's a transition period between buying on Swan (which I do personally because the fees are minimal) and withdrawing to self-custody. Consequence of fiat chargeback risk

How exactly does a higher fee make lightning less viable? Lightning channels opening and closing are dependent on fees, but the channels themselves are completely immune to on-chain fee fluctuations. If anything, what's happening on-chain is even more reason to embrace lightning development.

The sooner we barely need to acknowledge the chain to do 99%+ of transactions, the less the scalability tradeoff of on-chain activity is limiting. And as long as there exists the necessary record trail to the chain to prove the bitcoin is real and not fake (which lightning does perfectly) everyone knows that the money is real, even if most people never transact on-chain.

Glad you think so. Only downside is that bootstrapping such a system would be incredibly difficult. I (or whoever wanted to take the lead on building it) would need to be able to effectively reach out and get a pretty large number of very public professionals to both get on board and publicly announce they are doing so.

Perhaps including in the client queries a short list of the signatures/ids of already grabbed notes, notifying the relay of what it doesn't need to update?

Remember to appreciate the little things