One day, when my 15-year-old Hyundai stops working, I’m going to get a Toyota.

That doesn't answer the question though. Who get's access?

Sound money for whom?

Bitcoin fees are currently only a dollar, but niche programmers are suggesting to change the fundamental nature of bitcoin and increase its attack surface to make it more scalable… for people who don’t necessarily know or understand the trade offs of that scaling.

Scaling is an important discussion, but everything is a trade off. I like many of the scaling discussions, but rushing them is another matter.

It costs me $100 to buy a 1oz gold coin by mail, or to send signed documents internationally in a few days. Verification is expensive.

The idea that global monetary verification should be super cheap inherently comes with security trade offs.

All ideas should be evaluated carefully and come to major consensus. Otherwise change proposers risk a fork war.

Bitcoin fees are currently only a dollar, but niche programmers are suggesting to change the fundamental nature of bitcoin and increase its attack surface to make it more scalable… for people who don’t necessarily know or understand the trade offs of that scaling.

Scaling is an important discussion, but everything is a trade off. I like many of the scaling discussions, but rushing them is another matter.

It costs me $100 to buy a 1oz gold coin by mail, or to send signed documents internationally in a few days. Verification is expensive.

The idea that global monetary verification should be super cheap inherently comes with security trade offs.

All ideas should be evaluated carefully and come to major consensus. Otherwise change proposers risk a fork war.

I couldn’t have written a better list of reason why not to use Tether :

- Tether stablecoins respect the OFAC / SDN lists.

- Tether has a highly trained internal investigation team that relies on a wide variety of tools, to monitor primary (core platform at tether.to) and secondary markets (blockchains and exchanges).

- Tether’s collaboration with Chainalysis helps our teams to have the best in class software and training for a proactive monitoring activity.

- Tether collaborated, since inception, with 124 law enforcement agencies across 40+ different countries.

- Tether blocked more than $1.3 billion since inception, mostly related to scams, hacks, ML. Approximately $1.6 million is related to terrorist finance.

- Tether collaborated, on a voluntary basis, in 198 requests from law enforcement to block wallets in the last 12 months (90 with US law enforcement), 339 in the last 3 years (158 with US law enforcement).

- Tether blocked more than $639 million working with US law enforcement.

- Tether onboarded the FBI and USSS for reissuances.

- Tether collaborates with Israel’s NBCTF and Ukraine law enforcement.

- Tether cooperates directly with law enforcement agencies, while other stablecoins, although they claim to be “more compliant” they require a judge order, allowing hackers, scammers and criminals a long time to move funds around.

Before the 1990s most computing was done on mainframes that were expensive and difficult to access, because that was simply the state of hardware.

Then we had a couple decades of software running on personal computing hardware because networking hardware sucked.

Now with broadband we're back to running software on servers because cloud computing has made it cost efficient, and software companies can have far greater control over the user experience.

The looming question in my mind: can we swing the pendulum back in the other direction by focusing on development of p2p apps and infrastructure?

probably true but Signal is open-source. But we need to keep an eye on them.

NSA : Thanks for sponsoring open source tools

Not sure what you are talking about. Gold has inflation and it has been that way for thousands of years and it is much larger mcap and more trusted with value than Bitcoin.

Even Bitcoin has inflation right now.

Using xmrbtc price charts is only a single metric and is price discovery in action. Here are a few examples that show the market choosing Monero over time:

Both taxes and money-printing redistribute capital, but the difference is that money-printing does it less transparently.

With money-printing, the effect works behind the scenes in ways that are harder to quantify. That's why when a government can't find a solution between hard spending choices, they print money. It's the easier method.

People know their personal tax rate, they will riot if their taxes are too high, and they know exactly who is responsible for tax levels.

But inflation is a more complex beast. It comes with a lag, for starters, since it takes time for printed money to work its way through the system. And when it comes, propaganda built on grains of truth is effective at making it unclear to people who is responsible. "It's the greedy corporations that are responsible for raising prices, not the fact that we increased the money supply 40% over the past two years!"

And so money-printing effects people not directly based on their income, their need, or other things, but based on their level of awareness of what's happening. It rewards people who are aware of it, and are borrowing the devalued currency, owning scarcer assets, and denominating contracts in harder currency. It harms people who are not aware of it, who are earning wages in and keeping their savings in cash or bonds. Many of them are led to believe that CPI is the target to beat, which is a false low target. The real target is the money supply growth rate.

And capital gains taxes, if the cost basis is unadjusted for the rate of money supply growth, further recoup some of that value from the various harder assets that aware people try to protect themselves with.

A lot of MMT advocates act as though they found some grand formula. But really what they have re-identified is nothing new: it's that the less transparent that government spending is, the bigger it can be before people will complain. People will complain about taxes right away, but currency debasement is the sneakier method for which the consequences come with a lag. So it sidesteps hard decisions this year, and leads to bigger issues a year or two from now, when someone else can be blamed and the whole ordeal can be obfuscated.

And it's not new, despite how some MMT advocates would spin it. Currency debasement has been occurring since the adoption of coinage. And even MMT-scale currency debasement has been occurring since World War I. It is turned to so frequently because its lack of transparency allows it to occur at times and magnitudes when more transparent taxes would not.

FWIW there have been a number of thoughts over the years in this general area. I came up with SNICKER in 2017, there's a draft BIP on my gist (AdamISZ), not sure why it was never assigned a number. I actually even implemented it in Joinmarket and the code is still there. SNICKER was the simplest way you could do a coinjoin non-interactively (post encrypted proposals, encrypted to an onchain address pubkey; works better with taproot but can work anyway), this way proposer puts the encrypted blob on a bulletin board half-signed and the receiver can decrypt and broadcast it if they choose. Realistically only 2 party so a very limited model but imho still interesting.

Earlier than that people had ideas around SIGHASH_SINGLE|ACP ... but then always gave up on that because of the index/positioning limitations of *SINGLE.

Somewhat later in 2018 a group of us in London brainstormed around ideas like "stuff floats in the mempool and gets coordinated, perhaps with miner involvement" but it hasn't got anywhere yet. In that same meeting we came up with payjoin (well that was my name; others called in P2endpoint, which is a slightly different idea), not actually novel but just tried to pin down more exactly how it could work. that is also in Joinmarket btw, as well as btcpayserver. Nowadays Dan Gould has worked on a different aspect/version of that idea, which is great. But I still like SNICKER's pure non-interactivity.

When it comes to your thoughts around covenants, I agree. I tried to make case in the last Adopting Bitcoin that we need to understand that that extra bit of power in scripting is going to be needed to make actual steps forward in scalability and privacy, in other words it's not because we want evm style smart contracting, it's because we want bitcoin to actually work as money, and that means it needs both scale and privacy, which will come from offchain contracting (though a little onchain contracting, coinjoin style, will imo always be needed too, for larger entities).

So yeah being able to constrain spending destinations as a way to reduce the coordination requirement of a coinjoin is quite a neat thought, i don't remember offhand if anyone has pursued that yet; it's probably not simple!

Lastly I'd say nothingmuch has been having some of the most interesting ideas about coinjoin coordination recently, but not sure if he's active here nowadays.

If you think that a person, group, or entity is using bitcoin in a stupid on unoptimized manner, the only real recourse you have is to price them out with better usecases.