What's the difference between "de-platformed" and "silenced at will"?
Better life hack: Use the Privacy Redirect browser extension. You can make every YouTube video load in Invidious, even the ones embedded on other web sites. 😎
nostr:note1lt4g3frkm2rjv93dskxzfvry7cr5rpm5knmvx06wlaqfjp7e2afqecq5z7Just checked and it works for me.
My thinking on the ETFs are: They're not made for me or people like me, but people who are unable to self custody for whatever reason. The way I'd like to take the ETF discourse is like: Yes, you should self custody but if you can't yet what's the least harmful set of training wheels you can put on?
I've thought about this for a bit, and I think the most important aspect is that you get a ETF with direct withdrawal on chain: So that when you do learn to self custody, you can do so without selling and re-buying your stack, and potentially giving away 20-30% of it as capital gains tax. You can also withdraw in an emergency to "run the bank".
I think odds are pretty good that if we get one ETF to add direct deposit/withdrawal all of them will have to. ETFs list on the same stock exchanges and are very competitive, they just can't afford to be behind their competitors in features.
Main difference is that Grayscale is a closed-end fund, meaning it's hard to sell shares of them if you should want to. ETF stands for exchange-traded fund, so it's listed on one or more stock exchanges and trades more or less instantly. This leads to more liquidity and less deviation from the underlying Bitcoin price.
I just opened one for 10k sats. But really it depends how the on chain fees look like at the time. Check https://mempool.space/ for the next block fee rate at any given time.
Thanks Jeff! I've been thinking on and off about how to transition into retirement after I have enough of a stack to do so. I had some other ideas but just waiting until the bottom is in to calculate your withdrawal rate feels simple and robust. 👍
I'm also a bit interested in Bitcoin Money Market Funds idea as well as a way to hedge volatility, we'll see how that develops.
Pura Vida Matt 🤙
One more thing - Please do not show every notification from a thread you where tagged in. This just lets people troll you with hell threads. My notifications on Snort are unusable.
I've two pieces of feedback:
- It's annoying when you go into replies in the feed, and then back, the position in the feed is not kept. This makes it annoying to read through the feed.
- Have you considered adding web of trust the way Coracle does it? I honestly find it hard to use any other web client these days as comments are otherwise full of airdrop spam.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair
One problem that people face is that they box themselves into narrative corners and echo chambers.
"Not your keys not your coins" is a good one-sentence explainer to tell people to be careful about custodians, especially in such a nascent industry. It's powerful and memorable. Couldn't be said better.
But then some people take that to mean nobody should ever use any custodial service under any circumstances ever. You got $200 in a custodial Lightning app because it's faster and easier than alternatives? You've failed the purity test. You're in a developing country and want to save $100 worth of bitcoin? Better do it on-chain, otherwise it's not yours!
But then some of the same people resist a block size increase to keep the network decentralized (a good thing, imo) and also say that bitcoin will fix the world (I think it can).
But while all reasonable statements on their own, the issue is that statements 1, 2, and 3 don't add up when taken to their extreme. It has been written about since the time of Nakamoto and Finney on Bitcoin Talk forums that Bitcoin would need to scale in layers.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg34211
So any statement about "Not your keys not your coins" has to be paired with an alternative solution, or a spectrum of alternatives. What if someone can't fit into the one of the only tens of millions of on-chain transactions per month? What if $35 fees is high for the $200 in bitcoin they want to save?
Is holding your bitcoin on an 11-of-15 multisig (Liquid) okay, in exchange for lower fees, faster block times, better privacy, and some additional features? Depending on the amount, I would say yes. It has trade-offs, though, which have to be made clear.
What about a Chaumian mint? What if an app lets a community in South Africa set up a 5-of-9 multisig run by well-known people in the community who would face consequences if they break trust? And the same app can let a smaller community in Guatemala set up a 4-of-7 multisig? And a bigger multi-country 6-of-11 multisig can be set up as well? It's private, interacts with Lightning as seamlessly as Wallet of Satoshi, and can make in-person payments even when the internet is out briefly. Plus, it can be customized via open source add-on modules by the community running the specific mint so that it can also store private data for users, monitor reserves, monitor health of the multisig keys, run applications like Chat GPT payable in bitcoin per usage, run private DMs and group chats, run apps that show you local merchants that accept bitcoin, etc. And what if a user could, within the same app, seamlessly spread their funds out among a handful of different mints that they know pretty well to avoid having all of their eggs in one basket, and then pull into self-custody when above a certain amount?
Maybe there will be more softforks in the future. More flexible scripting to allow more share-ability of UTXOs, for example. But those require consensus, and they tend to come with some trade-offs or code risks, and so they take time.
Bitcoin is an engineering marvel. But it's not magic. It has limitations, and it has a spectrum of solutions for those limitations at any given time. The best solutions solve multiple problems at once: they add scalability, they add speed, they reduce fees, they add privacy, and they add flexibility/programmability all at once, while still being more distributed than trusting some centralized KYC entity.
Bitcoin is peer-to-peer open source money. But it's not infinitely scalable on the base chain. If it were greatly scaled up on the base chain to fit everyone, then only institutions would be able to run nodes and it would be greatly centralized and thus useless. So the solution, known from the start of the Bitcoin Talk forums, is to build additional peer-to-peer open source layers on top of it, allowing for a range of transaction sizes, a range of speeds, a range of privacy, and a range of programmability, all to serve different users' needs, and without compromising the decentralization and security of the base chain. That's the type of statement that needs to be provided along with "not your keys not your coins" for the full context to make sense.
My 5 sats: Positions should be sized to how secure custody you have. I have most of my savings in cold storage, but around $150 in self custodial lightning, and I'm considering having around $10 in Cashu for simpler zapping.
Generally where NYKNYC comes from is a well intentioned effort to steer people away from leaving significant money on exchanges. This is not an acceptable trade off IMO, many have been burned by doing this in the bear markets. And people coming into Bitcoin are used to interacting with finance through an institution and generally need to be educated not to do that.
Yes it's probably a bit too nerdy still. But there is a normie friendly version of this sort of OTC trade. Which is just that you receive sats, and then exchange them at your local FX store for cash. I have it on good authority Bitcoin is already widely used like this, although it's still a distant second to Tether.
Guess what everyone, Coracle is getting a redesign! nostr:nprofile1qqs8hhhhhc3dmrje73squpz255ape7t448w86f7ltqemca7m0p99spgpzamhxue69uhky6t5vdhkjmn9wgh8xmmrd9skctcpzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgcwaehxw309anxjmr5v4ezumn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tchfhljx has put together some 🔥 mockups for me, but before falling down that rabbit hole I wanted to run it by my users and the #nostrdesign community. You can find the Figma below, along with some screenshots as well.
The goal for the re-design is to:
- Make using Coracle friendlier and more intuitive
- Make it look like it wasn't designed by an engineer
- Solve some complex UX issues, like custom feeds, nested modals, forms, etc.
Some questions I currently have:
- Is there too much uppercase text?
- Are the menus intuitive?
- Is it pretty? Is there anything you hate?
https://www.figma.com/file/dr0lpdEvs5536OrRZvjTrL/Coracle
Looks pretty! But I think the sidebars in pic 2 and 3 seem like they take a bit too much space. Maybe if they where narrower, or just one sidebar with a tree?
You can always use Lightning remittance to get funds, and then exchange it for local fiat out of band over RoboSats, Bisq or other p2p methods of exchange.
Having an exchange is more convenient for sure, but DEXes are universally available and don't obey capital controls. Important as most of the hyper-inflating fiats try to close the escapes.
It's the shitcoin market index. 😄
Did Bitcoin mining change forever yesterday 🤔
Hey nostr:npub1zmc6qyqdfnllhnzzxr5wpepfpnzcf8q6m3jdveflmgruqvd3qa9sjv7f60 l, @npub1lh273a4wpkup00stw8dzqjvvrqrfdrv2v3v4t8pynuezlfe5vjnsnaa9nk, and @npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr, I watched the announcement yesterday but came away with a lot of unanswered questions that I'll detail below. I would legitimately love to hear the answers to these if at all possible!
How is Ocean non-custodial for the average miner?
On the stream it was mentioned that payout thresholds are 0.0108 BTC (but nostr:npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr was unsure), a number that would take a pleb miner with an S9 ~470d to reach.
Until he reaches that payout point, all of his mined sats seem to be entirely custodied by Ocean.
How does Ocean decentralize mining today?
I was so excited by the teases and pre-announcements for Ocean as it sounded like exactly what I wanted in a Bitcoin pool. Unfortunately, it sounds like all of the decentralization possible is yet to be release, including StratumV2 and any ability for miners to submit block templates themselves.
Did I miss anything that makes Ocean more decentralized than other pools today?
Why is Ocean not open source?
If Ocean is as revolutionary and decentralizing as it's being made out to be, wouldn't the best thing for Bitcoin be that all pools switch over time to the same mode?
If so, why isn't Ocean open-sourcing any of it's protocol or code? In the announcement it seemed that nostr:npub1wnlu28xrq9gv77dkevck6ws4euej4v568rlvn66gf2c428tdrptqq3n3wr was bragging that no competitor would be able to "reproduce" their lead dev's code, thus keeping their competitive edge.
There was no mention to my knowledge of open source, but it's possible I missed it!
What guarantee do miners have that you won't censor transactions?
As miners cannot submit their own block templates right now and the source is not open code, miners have to rely on manually checking a visual block template on your site to find censorship.
nostr:npub1lh273a4wpkup00stw8dzqjvvrqrfdrv2v3v4t8pynuezlfe5vjnsnaa9nk has a history of censoring what he viewed as "spam," and there was a lot of time spent in the conference talking about how bad Ordinals are and how bad pools are that mine them.
What guarantees or promises do miners have that you won't censor transactions you don't like?
How will Ocean handle regulatory pressure to enact KYC?
In the event that regulators of the Feds come knocking and want you to implement KYC (as seems to be the case with other pools), what will you do?
What will Ocean's fee model be after the 0% period?
There was a lot of talk about how most pools subsidize larger miners and charge exhorbitant fees to smaller miners during the conference. One thing that wasn't ever mentioned was what Ocean's fee policy will be after the 2mo 0% fee period.
Could you explain how the fee model will work?
Conclusion
That's enough questions for now, I think, but I look forward to getting answers to these! We have a desperate need for decentralized mining in Bitcoin and a massive gap today.
I look forward to hearing back 🙂
I'd recommend listening to the latest nostr:nprofile1qqspnlha0uuujmf07ahc0amz0tnez3dujuwc4v3jq5q9jwd94yfmctcpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wghxyee0qywhwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctv9uxrvvvv pod, they went over the business model / fee rate in some depth.