Fellow hacker with some real talk about preparedness. The talk is probably not what you expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihrGNGesfI

It's from a couple years ago, but as relevant as ever.

Straw man argument. Nobody has claimed visa/mc is private. Try steel manning instead.

You have to read what I wrote. Bitcoin is pseudonymous.

The fact of the matter is that you can't back up your claim that companies are able to identify who made that transaction. They can ocassionally tie a transaction to a person, but as soon as the money moves, they don't know it it's still that person's money.

At this point we're just talking past each other, so I guess I'll just end with: have a nice day. 👋

I'm not always a beacon of optimism.

I'd say it's an occupational hazard, from working in infosec and being paid to find all the ways things can go horribly wrong, but the truth is that I got there because I already had that skill.

Your claims about tracking bitcoin don't hold water.

Bitcoin currently has about the same amount of anonymity as cash. Just like cash can be tracked by serial numbers, bitcoin can be tied to accounts that nobody knows who owns them.

Prove me wrong by telling me the name of the person who made this transaction: https://mempool.space/tx/aa394e99f4406cbd23b91dba331cd8c57f1ac572447791ad46f0361b20998c92

I agree with the need, and the local, grassroots (aka decentralized) approach. I also appreciate that you didn't say people wouldn't pay sales tax at a black market, but that they don't have to. Good choice of words!

I'm not so sure shorting local governments from tax revenue is going to win them over to make BTC legal tender. Maybe there's something here though. Things frequently aren't legalized until the laws prohibiting them are irrelevant (e.g. abortion in America), so maybe it's similar here.

Perhaps a point of leverage would be something along the lines of this:

"Hey, I sold 1M sats worth of goods this month, and I'd be happy to pay you the 90K sats for the sales tax."

Let them decide if it's worth it to them to accept bitcoin or perhaps even encourage its use. If they're willing to listen, explain the costs of trying to find a buyer, never getting market rate, having the additional burden of tracking cost/value at different times, etc. Turning sats into fiat takes effort.

This would make it clear to them that just accepting bitcoin payments for sales tax would benefit them, and reduce the burden on people, thus helping them win over the hearts and minds of their constituents.

I'm curious to hear from people who have tried these types of approaches. How did it go? What objections did you hear? What local officials were you able to gain as allies?

Zeotgeist: moving forward

Ok, not a Carpenter movie, but I feel like I still stuck to a theme. 😂

Why less now?

I tried Discord and didn't like the mixing of voice and text chat. Or maybe it was just that the user culture was to always use voice chat, which I'm not interested in unless it's the **only** thing I'm doing. It's too distracting for me to multitask.

At any rate, Discord, Slack, GChat, and all those others are in the past for me now. I use Matrix and Jitsi and I'm much happier with then. I find them not only functionally superior, but they also have e2ee, are open source, and the servers are not run by profittering gluttons.

Fun fact: Your Signal messages are saved sever side forever, even if you have self-deleting messages turned on. You used to be able to see them load up and then disappear on the desktop clients that hadn't been synced in a while. People complained (b/c WTF?) and Signal's "solution" was to have it work the same way under the hood but just hide the "deleted" messages with a loading screen so it wasn't as obvious. Fun, right?

Having said that, no, I don't think it's ever pointless to delete your chat history. It can only help, and even if it's on a service that keeps another copy lying around, deleting it still removes at least one copy of your data.

If we say there's no point in fixing issue A because issue B exists then everything will always stay broken. It's better to fix what we can and avoid using non-private services for private things going forward.

My bias: I did secutiry audits for large companies and got to see their architechures. No, I won't say who or leak any details about how their systens work, but I can tell you that it's not always kept server side forever. Yes, even in America.

If they're cheap enough, you could afford to lose some to vandals, weather, or the like.

Having them not be hackable still seems worthwhile though, since a worm could be absolutely amazing on a mesh network. Which can be great if you're the one who writes it. Probably not so good if you're on the receiving end. 😂

I find myself thinking about a college class I took over 20 years ago. It was about starting a business. Just the basics like:

- sole proprietor vs LLC vs corporation

- competitive advantage

- building moats

- etc.

Another way to look at it is that is was teaching the fundamentals.

So here I am now, in my 40s thinking about this class and #sustainability.

Should I offer #dehydrated food or food #dehydration service? What is the value there? Is it my #skills or that I've invested in the equipment?

What about #CAD modeling, or #3DPrinting? Or maybe #meshtastic nodes? Or running #servers in some form or another?

What do I bring to the table that would cause someone to want to pay me instead of just doing these things themselves?

I think the answer is no. I don't want to offer any of these skills to the general public. I breathe #OpenSource #hardware and #software, which spits in the face of the idea of building moats.

I need to be growing and preserving enough food for me and my family before I'm going to be motivated to do so for others.

And as for modeling, printing or running servers, I don't want to do the salesperson thing. Trying to find people who want the products & services, crafting a message to convince them that I'm competent, that it's worth the money, and all the things that I'm neither good at nor enjoy. It's just not worth it to me.

So I'll be keeping my skills to myself for the time being. If I cross paths with some extrovert who likes what I'm doing and wants to partner with me so there can be more of it in the world, I'd consider it. But I'm not going to try to go find that person. Instead, I'm going to just keep on #building, rambling to strangers on the internet, and doing the things I want to do. ✌️🤙

Yes. Probably want a battery, charge controller, battery discharge protection curcuit and optionally an MPPT circuit too.

As you may guessed, I'm working on ansolar meshtasic node myself. Mine will not be as cheap, but it's all modular, so people can mix & match

I just set up an MQTT server this morning. Noshtastic is probably not far behind. Hehe

What privacy erosion happened in 2015 that is bigger than this one?

Ditto for Discord.

GitLab

Huh. 🤔

I haven't kept up with whatever Microsoft is doing, but my only thought is possibly it's using the TPM in some way to accomplish this?

IIRC, that's what all their FDE is based on, which is great for attackers who steal the whole computer and not just the hard drive.

I have many thoughts on FDE, something you have/know, and hardware security. 😁 They are generally independent of any operating system or implementation.

The National Institute of Health has been captured by big meditation, trying to steal the income from hard working American drug companies.

Look what they allow on their site! Read that abstract.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10355843/

NIH has played us for absolute fools! /s

Now kick back and relax. You've got your off-grid encrypted comms. Take the day off.