Noon, unless I'm at my parents for dinner. They always have the after-dinner espresso ready.
I've heard good things about Blixt! I use lnd; I should give a try soon.
It's a bit of work to manage your own lightning node. You have to open liquidity channels which is going to take some time to learn about and manage.
Phoenix Wallet is an ok compromise. Non-custodial but they manage the channels for you, probably for a fee.
If just looking to test things, I wouldn't overthink it for now. Wallet of Satoshi works.
Pretty sure their lightning service is custodial though.
It takes me about 2 days to sync a Bitcoin node. Can't speak for Monero. Opening a bank account isn't equivilent to being able to audit the entire history of the money supply though. I could download a wallet faster than I can open a bank account.
It's the standard argument that economists make about why inflation is a good thing. Wouldn't want food prices to drop and benefit the people bcause that would lower corproate revenues, result in job loss, and lower a nation's GDP. We must have two percent "inflation", enough to keep people working for most of their lives, but not high enough for them to complain about it.
Creating an abundance of money can create scarcity elsewhere (too much money chasing too few goods). Wealthy people and big corps are the ones that will overwhelming receive new money (via credit creation) and they won't need to buy extra food with it. They'll purchase hard assets. Real estate, stocks, etc. Stuff that is not tracked in the CPI buckets.
If the population decreases, I don't think we're going to see the number of monetary units go down for any significant amount of time. The collateral values will decrease and the system blows up. The only option is to keep the collateral prices elevated with more and more debt creation.
Money supply management is often exhaggerated too. Far too much power is attributed to the US Fed. They have some control on short-term moves but the eurodollar/offshore banking system accounts for a massive amount of dollar creation which is outside the purview of the Fed. They admitted long ago that they don't even know how to track the money supply anymore.
I wouldn't suggest abandoning the existing system in a disorderly fashion, but there will always be someone who thinks they can manage it just perfectly. If Bitcoin continues to grow in adoption, money flows out of the existing system and into a completely different one.
It doesn't seem like bandwidth and storage space are an issue though. After 14yrs we're at like 500GB, we run our nodes through TOR which feels like it's getting slower by the minute, and remote areas of the world are gaining high-speed satellite connectons. Keeping blocks small was a key argument in the blocksize war in 2017.
Interesting point about sats to USD ratio and losing precision. With an unlimited supply (in theory), there will always be more USD than sats. Although a sat is the smallest unit on-chain, the Lightning Network sitting on layer 2 isn't bound by that and is divisible further into millionths of a sat. You'd be SOL if you want to transfer a millisat on-chain but you can still transact with it and stack millisats until you have a whole sat.
I think the measurement argument is interesting though. When we measure things, it's in fixed units. An inch is an inch, a pound is a pound. Why do we we need a fluctuating money supply to measure the value of a good or service?
A lot of traditional economists do agree with you.
It wouldn't work well if you map the existing monetary system onto a deflationary one. The existing system is based on debt creation to keep going, which needs collateral prices that support the debt to increase. If you just dropped this system onto Bitcoin, collateral prices would collapse everything would blow up.
It's difficult to imagine a different system from within the current one. Jeff Booth has a really good book on this, The Price of Tomorrow. A very slow transition from one system to the other would be best for everyone.
It's a fun quote though, lol. Market price is always at the margin, but lost coins does reduce the available supply. It's not an issue right now since there's plenty of supply on exchanges for people to buy.
"Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone."
- Satoshi Nakamoto
There would be a lot of friction to do it with fiat currency. I presume that would mean Visa cards which not everyone would have, there would be fees associated with that too, and Visa's have a 90 chargeback policy. Maybe Paypal is easier but even less will have access to that. The biggest point though is that bitcoin/lightning doesn't require permission from anyone to use, and no one can be censored from using it 😎 paypal would probably suspend all of us for suspicious activity.
We're also just a bunch of bitcoiners too, lol.
It's not baked into nostr though. Someone can make clients that use whatever currency they want.
If by spend you mean to point out that Bitcoin is not a currency that is accepted everywhere, that's fine. By cashing out (whether at an off-ramp or whatever), these hoarders are distributing supply for others to gobble up. I think most people would find it very difficult to hold on to billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and not be tempted to enjoy it.
This was a decent thread on the topic.
https://twitter.com/n3ocortex/status/1356673243734822912?t=ES59rEl_uAyVfDK3Vq3Kjw&s=19
About hoarding coins and never spending them while the issuance of new coins deflate?
It's an open protocol, we can see whether old coin are being spent (and they are). And to Toxic Positivity's point about millionaires just sitting on them, I would expect they will spend them if they come to realize that it will lose all it's value, otherwise it's a lose-lose situation for them. If they don't then there is even less supply than 21 million which will increase the value of coinsacrually in circulation, if there's demand for it. We already have pretty solid reason to believe a few million Bitcoin are gone forever, so available supply is less already.
I totally get the skepticism, especially when Bitcoiners act like there's no possible way Bitcoin could fail. It could totally fail, but it's a really well designed system of incentives.
Crypto we can agree on, it's all trash.
Most of the arguments in this thread are criticisms of the community, not of the underlying fundamentals of Bitcoin. There will always be scammers and snake oil salesmen around when there's money to be made.
There are tons of resources (articles, books, podcasts, etc) that aim to educate people on why Bitcoin is important, why it has superior properties of money compared to other forms, how it benefits those under authoritarian regimes, and so on.
Price is the most boring aspect but it also probably gets the most attention, at least in Western countries. Just gotta hope people take the time to learn about it, even if they initially came in for greedy reasons.
It sounds like your beef is with influencers then.
It's only devastating if your were a short-term speculator that was hoping to get rich quick. I'm not overly sympathetic to those people.
Ah, finally I can select text 😎
They were, but a lot of them got greedy with shitcoins which predictably unraveled.
No, not surprising.
"Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee."
Fav tv show of all time!
It sounds like he's confusing NIP-05 and relays.